"the obvious starting point" / rewriting from Leona's perspective

Wrote on plane to Hong Kong, having fun with it, setting up my Angel Clare's dairy

PREFACE (parenths as placeholder, don't think I need what's within?)


(When I think of 87 DePauw, of my year onscreen, of my year without love, of the year which ended my privacy, ended my childhood—that era we define by what is lost—I think of the splotch. Token of lost times, of unseen griefs, token of unseen tokens,)

The unpainted splotch was the shape of a Midwestern state—half of its borders were regular, taped-off and measured; the others held to the snaking lines of unseen rivers. Something—a tipped pail, a throbbing hand, the call of the lunchtime taco truck—had stopped a painter’s work on a morning or an afternoon or an evening in 1980, the year before I was born, the year my mother’s trusted advisor Gloria, having decided to reform various addictions through a career of interior decoration, had instructed that our house—really, a complex of stucco buildings rounding a lima-bean shaped pool—be painted a throaty, nail-biting salmon. The pink of bridesmaid’s dresses, Florida nursing homes, the curling insides of shells that schoolboys, trapped in biology classes, snicker over—thinking of vaginas—it was a hue my father called a “caricature of itself” but one which my mother defended. When the time came to repaint, she gave the workmen a chip only a shade less harrowing, “apricot infused with rose,” she called it, what women describe as a “healthy glow” when they can think of nothing kinder.
And it was then, in the 2001 repaint, that the splotch was lost to history, a shape whose borders no next generation would trace, standing, as I had so often, in the runnel of damp ground between two high walls—a space too thin for adults to squeeze into, as it had been perhaps too thin for the painter, who probably simply hadn't bothered to squeeze.
On the backside of our garage, the splotch faced the too-high brick wall of the neighbor’s house, an imitation Tudor. Built to recall the architecture of an era when voting rights came by the acreage, it came complete with a historically accurate high brick wall. The garage was my father’s own hideaway—remastered as a music studio, complete with an orchestra-sized collection of recording tables besotted with unnavigable knobs.
Between them ran a crevasse of moldering land where no sun came. This runnel of earth was my hideaway, smelling of wet-lawn and rubber hose, of car-exhaust and sunscreen left out to fester sourly. Being cool on hot days, it recalled a heavy sadness I had felt existed everywhere but had not found anywhere else. It was ruin--picturesque, sublime, a landscape of poverty crouching in wealth.
I was a child who indulged in cliché fantasies. Hiding with a hand on the splotch, I fantasized my parents—dollsized and frantic—calling my name, overturning sofas, parting the dresses hung in my closets to find a blank back wall with no girl lurking, and finally in desperation coming out to the porch to cry into their hands, having given up at just the moment I emerged beaming from a place they hadn’t even known existed, that its painters had not even known existed.
I do not know what I actually did in the hideout—but I know what I felt here.
It was before the repaint. I was nineteen and it was the winter—the days overcast and grey, no light coming in off the sea—and I had felt like my life was over. The lawns were soggy: a bout of El Nino and a computerized sprinkler system that could not, my father said, be overrun. Mush of earth and mush of the heart. Toeing around felled lawn toys (a “Super-soaker” nerf gun lost by a neighboring child, a wiffle ball battened down into the grass) and not yet knowing what I was doing, I walked straight to the splotch, feeling as I did how my heart lurched.
Two years away—college, roommates, a boy who had, I was coming to realize, “dumped” me, and who, I was further coming to realize, I had loved—had changed everything about the house I had grown up in. Carpets, once violet, had been relaid with eye-smacking white, over which the suck-mouthed vacuums of a hired maid service traced geometric tessellations, recalling to me those patterns inscribed on televised outfields. I had a feeling in the house that nothing could be touched. The most recent occupant of my childhood bedroom-cum-guestroom had been Gideon, my father’s oldest friend, a cokehead undergoing reform who at brunch had called me “little lady” as if he had not known my name. I slept on the couch, which had been re-smocked in floral the last summer, the summer I had spent studying in London, telling twenty-something Brits that though I had been raised in cultureless Los Angeles, it was a place to which I hoped never to return.
Despite all of the modifications, here was the splotch—decidedly un pink: slate blue grey of pebbles pulled from a shoe, of shadows stretching over sidewalks, of nets, stockings, dried glue. I traced, with a finger, its shape. And as I did, through a kind of xxxxxiopry, I understood what it had meant to me.
I had been a child accustomed to gifts—dresses of velvet with sleeves that puffed, a dollhouse the size of a sofa whose every room was lit by miniature electric lamps, a set of beanbag chairs that faced each other as if for conversation. Upon matriculation to Harvard: leather-bound notebooks, a fountain pen, two suitcases of ostrich leather too heavy to carry down the stairs.
Hidden from the commandeering eye of Gloria, from redecorations, redoings, from my mother when she had not looked for me, from my father whose music filtered through the garage wall though he would not come—the splotch was the one thing that was mine.

I walk in and Celia is on the phone, my father is on a stool pulled up to the kitchen’s island, reading the funnies, and my younger brother, Jareth, is sprawled out on the living room sofa clicking through channels without lingering. The set is old, and between channels, you trudge through a soft black pause, seconds seeming minutes, before the figures resolve--fathers return to bedsides to bestow advice, lovers return to barstools to leave eachother, children return to schooldesks to give eachother saddened eyes. In the black of one such click Jareth sees my reflection and says, typical, “What’s up sis,” like some line from one of the shows he’s watching....