A Day Repainting My Daughter's Room, in a Color I Didn't Choose

Saturday. No job today. The wall in our daughter's room has been flaking by the window since last year, and my wife has said "a painter whose own house is peeling" twice now, laughing both times, right both times. I have painted other people's houses for eighteen years.

6:40. To the building supply shop at the end of the alley as the owner was rolling up his shutter. Mận rode behind me hugging the color chart he lends out, flipping pages as we went, paper rustling at the back of my neck. She is nine. At the shop she put a finger on a taro purple with grey in it, as dark as grape juice left out overnight.

I said it at once: "Nine square meters, and you want a dark color. It'll swallow the room."

"I'm the one who lives in it, not you."

That was so plainly true that I shut up. In my head I kept arguing. Thirty houses I've painted, and dark is the color the owner phones to complain about first, two coats won't cover it, it takes three, one crooked stroke and you see it. I listened to that voice run and realized it was not the voice of someone talking to his daughter. It was the voice of someone guarding his craft.

The tinting machine shook the can for nearly two minutes. I stood watching it shudder, listened to the iron clamp rattle, smelled the paint just after the lid came off: a faint sourness at the front of the nose, a smell I have breathed all my life and never once noticed was sour. Once it's tinted you can't swap it. The owner said that when he saw me standing there too long. I don't know whether I meant to swap it.

8:15. Sanding. Sandpaper wrapped around a wooden block, pulled from top to bottom. My hands have done this on their own for years while my head went elsewhere. Today I heard it: a long rasp on the downstroke, shorter in the corners. White dust settled in a thin layer on my arm hair.

Mận stood in the doorway wearing her mother's face mask, huge on her.

"You're slower than usual."

"I'm looking at the flaky part."

"Why does it flake, Dad?"

I looked at the grey plaster showing under the old paint. "I don't know."

It sounded strange in my mouth, in my own house. Eighteen years, and when a wall flakes you scrape, skim, repaint. I had never once asked why it flaked. I stood there a while longer with the sanding block in my hand, and I didn't ask.

11:20. First coat. Mận asked to hold the roller. I gave it to her. Five minutes later I took it back.

"You're rolling it patchy, let me."

She handed it over without arguing, backed out, and sat on the doorstep with her arms around her knees. A purple dot on the back of her hand.

I rolled in one long pass from top to bottom, dead even. That patch looked good, truly. Then I glanced across at where she had been: pitted, overlapping, white showing through in places.

So it's better. So what?

So nobody complains.

Who? Apart from the three of us, who ever comes into this room?

My wife brought up three bowls of rice with tomato omelet. I ate with Mận's face in my head, the way she looked handing back the roller. I could not tell you what the omelet tasted like.

14:00. I closed the can, peeled the paper tape off the door frame, and handed Mận the smallest roller. "Do the bit under the window, where the bed hides it."

She rolled. I crouched beside her. Paint dripped onto the cloth on the floor, and at seven drops I realized I was counting so I wouldn't have to open my mouth. Fine. Keep it shut. Her roller wandered, and paint crept up onto the tape. I left it. Her patch was ugly. It is still there, on a wall in my house.

I once read someone writing about the urge to correct your parents when they never asked you to. I nodded. Holding a roller is a different matter. There was another piece about taking Dad to renew his papers and letting him stand at the counter, and I nodded at that too. I suspect the writer had an afternoon like mine once.

17:30. Sun slanting through the window, both coats dry. The real color doesn't match the chart: greyer than it looked this morning, exactly the darkening I warned about. I stood in the middle of the room and pressed my palm to the wall, still a little cold.

I don't think it's pretty. To be honest, not yet. And I don't know whether Mận will think it's pretty in a while, or whether she only needs to know it's the one she chose.

My wife stood in the doorway, a scarf over her hair still dusty with sanding powder. She studied the wall for a long time and said, "Yes. Dark."

I turned, ready to score a point.

"But to me it looks like a ripe plum."

Mận burst out laughing, because her name means plum, and nobody had thought of it all day. I laughed two beats late.

19:10. Washing brushes under the tap behind the house. Purple water ran over the drain cover, thinned, then went clear. Mận crouched next to me.

"Why are your hands still purple when you keep washing?"

"Paint gets stuck under the nails. A few days to go."

"Dad, next time I pick the color, don't say it's wrong. Just say you don't like it."

"Okay."

I answered too fast, the way I answer a customer. Those two phrases are different, and my head has known that for years. It is only my mouth that hasn't caught up.

Before bed. Purple still in the creases of my fingers. Mận carried her pillow into our room and said the wall still smelled of paint. I shifted over to one side of the bed.

This article was created with AI assistance.