GREEN WALLS AND PLATINUM BLONDE HAIR

February 9, 2007

Yesterday I decided I don’t really like the color of my kitchen anymore so I went to the paint store and bought a gallon of white paint to cover up the green. I had gone with a vintage Coke bottle green, for a 40s feeling paying homage to the decade our house was built. But I have a lot going on in the kitchen like bright red granite counters (when they came to install them the counter guy said, “Picked out your own colors?”) and black and white checkerboard backsplash and I thought it might be time tone it down a little.

I didn’t discuss this with Jeff because frankly, he doesn’t give a damn about such things. I once kissed him goodbye in the morning as a brunette and greeted him at the door a platinum blonde and he didn’t even notice.

I like change and I like color. My motto is “If it’s time to repaint you should move. If you can’t move then for God’s sake, change the color.” I find it appalling and mystifying that some people repaint walls or houses the same color. I once had a turquoise and pink kitchen (“Not worried about resale, I see,” my father said). When I lived in an apartment and couldn’t repaint or wallpaper on a regular basis I used to rearrange the furniture about once a week. Jeff never commented.

We have lived in this house ten years and the kitchen has been repainted or re-wallpapered five times (counting yesterday) and Jeff has never blinked. Not even when I painted the kitchen tomato soup red on the top half and sunflower yellow on the bottom half. (“Certainly wakes you up,” my father-in-law said about that one.) I have lost count of how many colors the front door has been. At one time, I considered repainting it for each holiday. Jeff doesn’t mind that either.

So it was with genuine surprise that when he came home yesterday, he not only noticed the kitchen was not green anymore, he expressed disappointment. “Umm, shouldn’t we discuss these things before you do this?”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I liked the green,” he said.

“I thought you had no opinion.”

“I told you just a few weeks ago when you were saying you weren’t sure you liked it, that I liked the kitchen green.”

“I thought you said that the same way you say, ‘Those pants are fine, they don’t make your butt look big’ when we’re trying to get ready to go out. I thought you just meant, ‘Please don’t make me look at paint chips.’ Never in my wildest dreams did I think when you said “I like the kitchen green” did you actually mean ‘I like the kitchen green’.”

“So you’ll repaint it green tomorrow?” he asked hopefully.

Maybe I threw him off by painting it white. I don’t believe I’ve every painted a wall white in my life before. My dining room is robin’s egg blue, our bedroom is tropical-ocean blue, and our sunroom is burnt orange. I once painted our bedroom melon orange on the top and eggplant purple on the bottom. It was great. But I don’t believe I’ve ever painted a room white and I don’t believe Jeff has ever expressed an opinion on the color of our walls. I guess after 25 years people can change. Go figure.

Okay, I should get going. I have to turn the walls back to green by dinnertime. Hmmm, maybe he’d agree to a fire-engine red, or a slate gray, or sunshine yellow, or a classic gingham blue….