On Vanity
My grandmother has decided to redo her bathroom. This decision by a sixty-eight year old woman to remodel and redecorate a perfectly serviceable bathroom has my mother anxious and concerned. It’s perfectly fine for a forty-two year old woman to redecorate after the end of her marriage, even expected, she’ll tell me, when I point out the blatant double standard, but when Nana does it we’ve got to be vigilant. ‘Vigilant’ is my mother’s word of the month. She tells me to be ‘vigilant’ coming home from work, tells me she is more ‘vigilant’ about men after my dad’s, um, indiscretions, vows to be more ‘vigilant’ with her money. No more luxurious grey flannel eye-pillows from the spa, she tells me in a fit of remorse. My mother’s vigilance about my grandmother, then, fits perfectly within a pattern of behavior that’s developed over the past year and manifested itself in words and speech over the last month or so.
She is, of course, worried that my grandmother will get taken advantage of by some malicious, conniving wanna-be contractor, the kind who claim on the job experience instead of training and certification. (My mother and grandmother share a love of home renovation shows, especially those that involve burly men in spackle-covered overalls and not much else. Is it any wonder my grandmother wants a new vanity to be installed?) Personally, I don’t think we have anything to worry about. I can’t tell you the number of times my grandmother’s wit has been unleashed on the unsuspecting photographs in trashy gossip magazines. I’ve never heard her claim that movie stars were more glamorous when she was my age, but I am sure she thinks it. She has a particular dislike for bottle blondes with trite red lipstick. It almost certainly stems from her teenage crush on JFK. I make a mental note to leave a magazine open to the photos of celebrities —sublebrities, Nana calls them— on New Year’s Eve. She’s sure to get a kick out of those.
The bathroom in question could use a little sprucing, on that my grandmother has a point. It practically screams ‘Grandmother’s Bathroom: or, War of the Roses,’ but without any of the irony or suggestions of Kathleen Turner. She last decorated it when stencilling was in vogue. Its faded, base paint was originally cream. You’d be wrong to think smoking took place in the closed space even though the walls seem to hold the lingering memory of illicit tobacco. Nana never smoked, never allowed anyone who did into her house in fact. She’s justly proud of this point. (Come to think of it, I guess it is ironic that her walls turned that colour.) Pink roses parade around the top of the room, offset by forest green vines that trail around the sides of the doors, onto the vanity that now stands as a symbol of her need for renovating, justification to my mother that the money will be well-spent. She knows the vanity that will be at the centre of the new bathroom. It has one of those modern, sloping sinks, and the faucet is like a water fountain. She visits this vanity at Rona almost daily, since Rona is down the street from her house. She gets a coffee at Rona, to my mother’s infinite coffee-snob chagrin, and has her daily date with the vanity, running her fingers over the edge of the sink, gently tugging open the doors, as if she expected to buy the floor model and wanted to prevent more wear on the hinges.
The vanity will hold the bathroom’s theme together, Nana tells me, on the day that I walk with her to visit it. Its clean lines suggest calm serenity, she enthuses, and I will use accents of pale turquoise to hint at calm tropical waters. She has what she calls ‘wall art’ picked out already: one large photograph of a lotus flower and its seed pod, framed in white, and a smaller sketch of a woman reclining on a beach chair. I prefer the sketch to the photograph. I like thinking about someone seeing this woman lounging at the beach and taking the time to pencil her curves. When I tell my grandmother this, in the slightly awkward way that I manage when I am brazen enough to be artistically descriptive, she gently tells me that she is the woman in the sketch. It’s over fifty years old, she reveals, and I’ve kept it all these years. We were visiting the shore that summer, she explains, as if I’ll intuit that some boy thought he could capture her feisty spirit in a sketch and through that act of pencil on paper manage to get a date. Now that I’m old, she says with no hint of sadness, I want to be surrounded by beauty.
