You can’t even have your own favorite color around Alice. She’s too insecure to let you like royal blue or emerald green. She just can’t let it rest and accept that you don’t like pastels. She refuses to believe that you don’t endorse her choices by makin’ them your own. She takes it so personal. Once she got so upset. She screamed and hollered like a maniac, “What’s wrong with peach . . . or mint or beige . . . women should wear soft delicate colors . . . men like colors like that on women . . . feminine colors . . . like this,” she said. She stood up. I looked at my sister . . . all 200 pounds of her in pale yellow. I said, “I see what you mean.” Then I put on my scarlet red sweater and went outside.