CW: Domestic Violence

Chapter One: Avocado 

Learn to love avocado. The color, not the fruit. In all its 1970s Toughskins’ glory, circa rust, chocolate brown and the classic burnt sienna. Learn to love avocado shag carpeting in the primary bedroom and the nook doubling as an office. Learn to love avocado linoleum in the kitchen, hallway and bath, overlaid with a psychedelic geometric pattern in shades of chartreuse. Learn to love the avocado refrigerator and stove, glowing fluorescent atop the floor in a sea of vomit green. Learn to love the avocado kitchen sink, too small to wash the mauve spaghetti pot that will become part of your weekly meal plan. Learn to love the avocado kitchen counters, the ones on which you, in your fantasy life, gracefully place the imaginary evening martinis with blue-cheese stuffed olives to greet your beloved after a hard day at the office – if only to provide a respite from the avocado overdose. Dream. 

Chapter Two: Rust 

Choose the premium park. Not the nasty Rusty Ridge that denies your application because your hearty farm-dog has grown much larger than he was in the photo mailed from Minnesota. Choose the Vista Estates on West 19th Street, the most picturesque setting in all of Boulder, despite the austere dwellings. A glorious park located on the edge of the fields where wild horses run freely on a sprawling ranch at the base of the foothills, visible from the bedroom window. Marvel as rainbow-bright hot air balloons rise above the horizon, carrying lovers to a magical view of the sunset over the mountains to the west. Taste the sweetness of the wild, red strawberries growing in the ditch between the back of the trailer and the country road skimming the park. Know that you are lucky, oh so lucky, to have escaped the banality of suburbia in exchange for this tin-can adventure. Soar. 

Chapter Three: Cream 

Buy eyelet cream curtains from the Sears, a soft choice against the ever-present avocado. A charming dressing for the cheap windows, powerless against the howling Colorado winds and endless powder. Create a flimsy screen of privacy from the neighbor, not an arm’s length to the east. Wallpaper the bedroom nook with a bright white roll, disrupting the faux walnut paneling that runs halfway up the wall from the groovy avocado shag. The floral pattern against a mellow background is a better match for the curtains, but those rolls had not been on sale. Bike back to the mall for the fifth time to buy another roll after you wreck the first three rolls with crooked installations, lousy with gaping air bubbles. Watch your very first dog Chubby cower in the corner and prepare to die in the time it takes you to bike to the store and back, all in your first month of independence, on the eve of your first day of graduate school. Mourn. 

Chapter Four: Black-and-White 

Settle down with an All-American charmer of a boyfriend who, despite his recent diploma from an elite liberal arts institution, cannot muster the energy to drag himself to work anywhere other than a minimum-wage job selling sneakers at the Footlocker. As a former Division III offensive lineman, the polyester referee’s uniform topped with the traditional black-and-white stripes suits one unprepared for life off the gridiron. Marry him a year later (a sleazy life insurance salesman by then) standing above the tree line on a warm June day, the union blessed by a hippie named Gail. Know that your traditional parents are content enough to conceal their quiet sobs during the unorthodox ceremony while the priestess invokes the goddesses of the moon, the stars and poetry for inspiration. Rejoice. 

Chapter Five: Teal 

Buy your first car. A tiny two-seat Subaru Justy so that you don’t have to bike the five miles to the mall for essential accessories. Choose the sparkly teal model to provide an upbeat contrast to the dismal trailer with its mauve accents. Parked in front of the tin-can mansion, the Justy will make you feel proud in your first consumer-driven attempt at happiness. Forego such luxuries as air conditioning, a radio, and automatic transmission. You can always open the windows and sing Seeger tunes acapella instead. Plead for your life every time that tiny two-cylinder engine chugs its way up and over the Continental Divide as it cruises west along I-70, heading away from the trailer park into Summit County for weekend excursions. Never learn to master the manual transmission and occasionally get stranded in the mountains when the offensive lineman drinks too much to drive. Pray. 

Chapter Six: Yellow 

Savor such culinary delicacies as macaroni and cheese – not the kind in the bright blue box with sunny yellow writing, a sure sign of love in suburbia. The store brand in the flimsy white cardboard box with black staccato lettering – the one on special at seven for a dollar. Cherish Hamburger Helper, the magic elixir that makes the cheapest grade of ground meat slightly more palatable than sawdust and gristle. Eat these two meals until the sweet Midwestern woman who becomes your mother-in-law unearths an ancient black-and-cream speckled roasting pan and an avocado Crockpot from her Kansas storm cellar the next time she visits her deadbeat son. Under her tutelage, learn to prepare some of the meals he savored as a child on the plains. Listen to him gripe and complain because your cooking does not taste like the homespun meals of his youth prepared by his dear doctorate-bearing mother on the farm. Weep. 

Chapter Seven: Mauve 

Work and work and work. And then work some more. Teach accelerated French at the university, watching your students spend more on a weekend ski trip to Aspen than you make in a year. Read, read, read. And then read some more. Edit the endnotes to Hexter’s guide to Fitzgerald’s translation of the Odyssey. Write, write, write, never mind the perpetual stress-induced writer’s block. Manage contracts and insurance policies at Regal Homes, helping others secure their very own tin-can mansion dreams. Study, study, study. And then study some more. Work weekends at the Ann Taylor for a bit of levity and access to clothes otherwise unaffordable. Publish, publish, publish, lest you perish. Work until you fall asleep at your makeshift avocado desk with your head in a book. Cook, cook, cook. Watch the deadbeat 

settle into the mauve Pier 1 futon with a brew in hand, utterly spent after his six-hour shift at the mall. Clean, clean, clean. Work until you land in the hospital, suffering from exhaustion. Sleep. 

Chapter Eight: Gold 

Ignore all the signs from the universe. The dead dog. The crooked, bubbling wallpaper falling off the walls. The drunken rages. Your sobbing parents. The father-in-law who asserts that some women deserve to be hit. The mother-in-law who jokes that her deadbeat son, now your husband for life, will leave you standing by the side of the road when he tires of you. And of your unwillingness to take a punch. His shiny gold wedding band lost at the bottom of the Caribbean. Pretend that this initial foray into wedded bliss is rosy, that life as a married woman is grand and that your future as wife is bright. Cry yourself to sleep, pining for your mother, your father, your brothers, and all the comforts of that bland and boring predictability that you abandoned in a leafy suburban enclave outside Chicago. Wail.