Misty Watercolor Memories
how my life crashed, and re-crashed, into a childhood Kentucky hero.
The litmus for wealth in 1990’s Louisville, Kentucky was not, as you might imagine, which sports car you drove, your child’s private school education, or the ease with which you broke glassware, but rather the niche and somewhat elusive family portrait by local watercolor artist Mimi LaMer. Mimi, a sanguine figurine with a tower of jet black curls perched atop an otherwise tiny head, worked from the humble painting studio she’d crafted from an old farmhouse in the fields of LaGrange, Kentucky. She wore paint-covered overalls and sneakers that were two sizes too big (no one questioned this choice; if an artist needed to slide around, we were all happy to let her slide) and looked strikingly; beautifully, like Bernadette Peters. Wealthy Louisville families would sometimes make the humble pilgrimage to Mimi’s LaGrange studio, returning with their disposable cameras and sun hats as if they’d just arrived home from a South African whaling excursion. More often than not, Mimi would travel to them, Nokia film camera around her neck and giant McDonald’s Diet Coke in hand. The families would sit for her and she would photograph them in their white linens and denims, from which she’d later paint a 3x5 foot towering portrait intended to be hung, it was generally understood, above a mantle. The paintings were uncanny; true-to-life renderings of these families without angle or irony. My understanding at the time was that Mimi was the only artist in the tristate area and as such, was to be treated with the reverence and fear required to pet a giraffe. Mimi was also an Evangelical Christian and amateur baritone who would frequently grace the stage of our megachurch with musical numbers she’d subtly choreographed: heart clutching, a painfully slow taking of a knee, the occasional smattering of American Sign Language. She and my mother had become friends after meeting during one such performance and she became one of the only people I have any memory of visiting our house. My parents mostly kept to themselves and other than a few band members from the church band, didn’t typically socialize with other adults. So when Mimi entered the mix, I was thrilled.
My brother Ryan and I fell in love with her and the fantastical life she led on her dairy farm. We’d spend weekends with her, making mud pies and singing to the fields of sleeping cows “THE HILLLLS ARE ALIIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MUUSSIICCC!” She taught me how to sprinkle rock salt on a watercolor to produce a crystallizing effect that mimicked snow. We ate McDonald’s egg and cheese muffins for breakfast while walking barefoot through the front lawn looking for anything we deemed beautiful enough to paint. She collected antique perfume bottles and had a clawfoot bathtub. I was in total awe of her. Her parents, Silly Willy and Eunice Bernice LeFou (I refuse to explain this) who lived in the farmhouse adjacent, owned a small frame store in the town center that had lost all its employees on the somewhat selfish notion that they could no longer pay them. And so Mimi would often bring us to assist Silly Willy, which often involved drinking cans of Dr. Pepper while putting price stickers on frames. One fateful afternoon we’d arrived and stopped immediately in horror upon seeing him. Dried blood speckled his forehead, one of eyes was purple and swollen, and he was wrapped chin to crown in a roll of toilet paper. My brother, the only member of our immediate family consistently concerned with etiquette, attempted to maintain eye contact while whispering “What happened up there.” Silly Willy grinned and tapped his mummy head wrap.
“Nicked the top of my noggin on an old rusty hook in the barn so I reattached it with this. Good as new!”
“Oh my gosh, DAD!” Mimi ran to a small first aid kit on the wall and fished out some gauze and alcohol wipes. Ryan and I looked on in terror.
“Don’t fiddle with it Patricia, I’ve got it under wraps.” I winced at both the pun and the disappointing realization that Mimi’s real name was Patricia. Silly Willy had waved off her triage attempts and fished out two cans of Dr. Pepper from his tiny beer fridge. He handed one to each of us with a giant-knuckled hand covered in dried blood. We uttered a terrified “thank you” and spent the rest of the afternoon with our eyes glued to the flap of skull Silly Willy had “reattached” after scalping himself on a meat hook. When we arrived back to Mimi’s, Eunice Bernice set us to the task of peeling green beans from her garden. She was a muscly woman with shock-white cropped hair and the most impressive collection of themed t-shirts I’ve yet to encounter: Daffy Duck eating an ice cream cone, a bouquet of roses, Jesus reading to a group of modern day children. As Ryan and I peeled beans in the also themed (ducks!) kitchen, Doris and Mimi talked in the hushed code adults use when they have gossip to relay but are too tired to relocate.
“Well, I think it’s unfortunate for all of us if that’s how she feels.”
“Honey, I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding.”
“But I heard from reliable sources.”
“has always been a troubled person”
“Probably jealous”
“Needs help”
It took me a full bowl of beans to realize they were talking about my mom. When Mimi drove us back home the following morning, she hugged us goodbye a bit longer than usual - was she crying? - said a terse hello to my parents, and drove off. We didn’t go to LaGrange again after that. In fact, I didn’t hear from Mimi for years. I asked my mom in the car one day what had happened and she replied with a tight mouth: “Honey, she just isn’t able to be our friend anymore.” I knew not to press any further. As I moved into my teen years, I’d sometimes end up at a wealthy classmate’s house for a sleepover or study date and see a Mimi portrait above the mantle. My classmate and their family would be smiling back at me, frozen in time above a mantle of ceramics and tchotchkes from their expensive travels.
I’d once asked how much a Mimi painting cost, which my friend quickly shut down as “tacky.” She’d sighed, taken a bite of her scalding, name brand pizza roll, and steam-choked:
“Fifteen hundred dollars.” As I would have no frame of reference for money above crude waitress tips until my thirties, I was floored. She might as well have told me Mimi was paid in bricks of Mayan gold. How was she not rich? I guess she only did a few paintings a year but still. My mind was spinning. Eager to recover from my tacky faux pas, I said, too loudly:
“Well, she’s painted me.” It was true, she had painted me. From a photo she’d taken on her farm, she’d painted me with Ryan and our Mom as a Christmas gift one year. My parents had proudly hung it in our small living room above a play wood table my mother had draped with a lace duster. In it, my mother sits cross-legged with a three year old Ryan nestled sweetly in her lap. Seated next to her, I smile straight to camera, my little six year old fists buried in the sleeves of my pink sweater. When Mimi delivered the portrait, she’d told me with a devilish grin that she’d painted my face from another photograph, then brandished the original from the pocket of her overalls. In it, my mother sits cross-legged holding Ryan, just like the painting, and I sit beside her. But instead of looking to camera, I am looking at my mother, tongue jutted straight out, nose scrunched. I didn’t understand why she’d changed it and my mom, from the other room, yelled “because it isn’t nice, Jennifer Leigh!” I said Ryan was the only one of us concerned with etiquette but it did occur to me then that a 3x5 foot painting of your six year old blowing a raspberry at you wasn’t received in most circles as a tableau of sophistication. The painting remained in three more of our living rooms as we’d bounced between houses within Louisville, then one day disappeared. In the bustle of my my parents’ moving Ryan and themselves to Poland, many of the things we’d known as children were sold or stored or given away, so I assumed it was collecting dust in my grandparents’ basement.
Years later, in my freshman year college dorm room, my Nokia flip phone buzzed on the nightstand. It was well past midnight and I’d passed out from an exhausting day of changing the world through the timeless power of movement theatre, so I answered the unknown caller in a husky whisper.
“Hello?”
A small voice, one I recognized, replied.
“Jennifer? Hi, it’s me, it’s Mimi.” My chest tightened and I tiptoed past my sleeping roommate into the hallway.
“Hi…is everything okay?”
She paused then let out what sounded like a muffled whimper, as if crying into a towel.
“Not really. I’m at a shelter in Ohio.” She went on to tell me how the man she’d married had abused her to the point that she’d escaped to this shelter with the help of some church friends. I bristled at the word “friend,” knowing my family and I were not included among them. I struggled for the right words.
“I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
“No,” she whimpered, “ it’s a blessing just to hear your voice.” I paced the hallway in my socked feet and nightgown I’d fashioned from a giant t-shirt that read I Can’t, I Have Rehearsal.
“I’m so sorry this is happening. Who gave you my number, did you talk to my mom?”
The sound of muted voices in the background.
“I have to go darlin, take care of yourself. I’m praying for you always” and she hung up.
About two weeks later I’d fall in love with my first girlfriend, a rosy-cheeked femme from Illinois named Megan who turned my entire life upside down and confirmed what I’d already suspected to be true, which was that I was a rip-roaring homosexual with a tangible secular essence. After I’d come out to my parents in a Steak ‘N Shake, word had spread quickly in Louisville. I was mostly left alone by the folks back home, as they believed my studying theater at a liberal arts school had already snatched me from the blameless hand of god and delivered me straight into the throes of an evil gay matrix (thirteen Paula Poundstone clones chanting Ginsberg poems with hands aloft, if memory serves). To them, I was already too far gone for winning back. I’d closed the door on myself.
For a few years. And then, my senior year, an email.
The headlines were: my rebellion against God, how my lust for women was akin to physically abusing myself, the devastation my family was suffering because of my sin. It was from Mimi. I blinked at the screen and tried to steady my breath. I fired off a a few rageful responses and it went about how you might imagine. She quoted scripture, I quoted turns of phrase I’d heard on NPR like “dangerous rhetoric” and “untether yourself.” We ended the exchange with mutually passive aggressive sign-offs about how we were praying for each other (“I’m praying for you” is like “fuck me” in Christian parlance; it can produce wildly different outcomes depending on context) and left it at that.
That was the last time I spoke to Mimi. A recent visit to her website explained how her relationship with the Lord informed her artwork and how she hoped to rekindle people’s sense of wonder through the paintings Jesus led her to create. Countless Mimi originals still hang above Louisville mantels, my former classmates frozen in time in GAP denim and vacation sun.
Above my West Village mantle today is a framed poster from a Kieslowski film featuring a nipple touching a vinyl like a record stylus. It’s fucking huge.