Rainbow Factory Quality Control

Chapter 8: Housekeeping

Home always enjoyed watching Wally paint. The young puppet would set up his easel on the front lawn beside the marigolds, opening and slamming the door several times more than necessary as he ran in and out because he kept forgetting things. After a while Home would just leave the door propped open so the kid could pass in and out freely with cups of water or a new color of paint. Sometimes his favorite brushes would roll under the couch or chair and need to be retrieved along with the occasional snack. Sometimes a pad of paper would already have had numerous sketches or scribbles across every page due to late night ramblings or sudden spurts of inspiration. On occasion Wally would return from Howdys with an already stretched canvas on a thin wooden frame, and this would be an Extra Special project reserved for more in depth tests of skill or a gift for a friend.

That part was fun, but Homes favorite part of Wally's little creative process was the quiet.

After all of the materials had been gathered, snacks set up or consumed, little blue button up cardigan removed, folded and set aside. The young Puppet would sit in front of the blank canvas and grow still for a moment, arms relaxed, fingers rolling the brush between them. It was like watching a cat get ready to pounce. The space on the canvas would feel daunting and immense, almost scary in a way. A field of white and nothingness, a void that needed some kind of anchor point to prevent one from becoming lost. And then gradually, one hand would lift the pallet, the other dip the brush in either water or the colors on the pallet, and Wally would begin to define something within the white space. Home, grateful for the point of reference, would watch the little one work.

The subject of the painting seldom mattered. Home was more interested in watching Wally as he worked. His expression was one of quiet concentration, quietly absorbed in the little world of his own making in his own head. It was like a form of meditation, where all outside thoughts were just noise to be silenced. All that mattered was the slow and steady process of colors smeared on white, lines becoming shapes and taking on new definitions. Home disliked it when the neighbors would see Wally outside painting and come over to watch. Watching was fine, but then they would start to talk, and that broke Wally's meditative flow. Worse yet they would ask questions. "What is this supposed to be?" or "I've never seen blue marigolds, why did you do that?" and soon there would be another abandoned half-finished canvas taking up space in a closet somewhere.

Home liked it when Wally was able to finish something. There was such a sense of pride radiating off the little one. His smile would get bigger and his shoulders just a little more square, and there would be peace. Whatever Wally had to say or express was left there on the canvas. The easy part was breaking off a part of your soul to smear on the paper, the hardest was getting others to see it the same way you did. There could be hundreds of pictures of blue marigolds, and each one meant something different. Wally could tell them apart, and Home for the most could tell too. Home knew when Wally tried a new way to shade or add texture to his pictures, and praised him for each one.

Once Wally came out of his painters trance of course.

But as the young Puppet grew, the easel wasn't brought out as much. Gifts by the neighbors of pads of paper and colored pencils accumulated in the corners of Wally's room untouched and unused. Or if they were, it would only be one or two sheets with random grocery lists or numbers and figures where Wally tried to keep track of his own finances. Sometimes bus schedules that would take him away from the neighborhood to the larger cities where he could find work. Sometimes Wally would come back from a long day scrubbing floors or flipping burgers and empty out a pocket of receipt paper with little faded scribbles on them. And Home would want to study them to see where the imaginative young Puppet he knew had gone. Wally would sweep them into the trash shortly after.

One by one, the blue marigolds would be added to the burn barrel as Wally cleared the closets and made room for clothes or other distractions. The colors began to bleed from his wardrobe. Gone was the blue cardigan and brightly striped pants, they were replaced by black uniform slacks and grey or black shirts as was fitting for all of the odd jobs he did, as if the employees were meant to be part of the background shadows and appear only when summoned. Wally defiantly kept his pompadour, as it was the only form of self expression it seemed he was allowed to maintain. He also stopped talking to Home. He found the rattling of shutters or opening of doors not as charming as it had been when he was a kid. Home tried to oblige as much as they could, but moody teens were going to be moody young adults. And Home found itself growing quiet during the hours that Wally was present.