The pink took. It was not sweet or giving, as pink should be. The color was fixed to our walls in Albion, the place we moved to after camping out in our cousins’ yard. The house my mother found was big and old. White plaster crumbled through the pink walls like whitecaps on a Pepto-Bismol sea. I stared into those breaks night after night. The festering plaster took hold of me; I was a knuckleheaded girl with more time than options, so I stared and stared into those frothy white holes and waited.
Everyone loved Cher. My oldest sister, Lisa, and meanest cousin, Tess, sang her gypsy songs while sashaying under trees. They were girls becoming women, their bodies pained with growth. They had no choice but to dance under dappled leaves, to soak themselves in the black-magic salve of Cher. And though my own body was far from womanhood, I needed her too, that buck-skinned woman looking out to me from the top of a lopsided pile of my mother’s music. Cher was radiant astride her palomino and cool even in the desert heat. At night, she’d leap from her album cover and come for me on that very same horse, entering my room through an opening in the crumbling walls.
First came the gallop, hooves sounding with heartbeat swish and rhythm. Then her. Glowing, shining, a sword of light, a stream of hair following crescent moon eyes as she scooped me up from the bed I shared with two or three sisters and my mother. She’d shake me gently, call me “little bird.” And off we’d fly. To the dusty mountain pass of her album cover, to the blinding glitter of Hollywood, or to anyplace else that ginger-soft horse would take us.