Teal

There is a burnt orange scent on the air. She says that it simply smells like a coffee house, roasting beans and burnt dust from the heating ducts set to full power against the sub-freezing temperatures outside the shop door. To me, it smells like coffee and heat; I smell the winter air let in through the door, hastily closed by a man in a large coat. It smells enough like 7:30 in the morning that I can imagine two women talking loudly in the plush armchairs by the bay windows facing the sidewalk outside. I don’t visit this coffee shop for its shelves of overvalued merchandise, or the meandering smell of unground shade-grown beans, or even the flamboyant Cirque-du-Soliel art style of the Starbucks shop. The man in the large coat, the two women, they are a small piece of constant bustle, a crowd of faces that merge into the ethereal murals and new wave music. This place doesn’t just smell like a coffee house; it smells burnt orange. Perhaps a little more brown than burnt orange. I step forward to the counter, ordering an oatmeal-raisin cookie and a Tazo™ Passion iced tea. The man at the register checks with me about the ice, cracking a joke about moving to Alaska when I insist. As I reach for my wallet I see a Dave Mathew’s Busted Stuff for sale. The one with “Big Eyed Fish” and “Where are You Going.” I heard “Big Eyed Fish” the first time I came here; I was tapping my foot to the beat and smiling as the words rolled through my ears—she asked if I like Dave Mathews, too. I said I do now. It’s like New Orleans on a disc, like-

“Hey, are you going to buy that? There’s a line.”

I look up, dropping my smile. He smells purple, but it might not be his fault. I pay the five dollars and twenty one cents in cash; my credit card is inseparable from the horrendous photograph on my Washington State Drivers License: my brown hair sticks up at strange angles, ever infected with a mysterious static charge, and my smile crooks oddly around my teeth beneath embarrassingly obvious acne spots on my lip. The card now correctly labels me seventeen years old, but still declares my grey eyes blue, something I have neglected to change; I had already returned to the local and error-prone chapter of the department of motor vehicles on three occasions prior to noticing this particular error, one of those to rectify the misprint “female.”

Iced tea feels good on a cold day. The ice doesn’t melt at twenty nine degrees, as it does at eighty or even forty degrees. Out here, in the crisp and dry winter, I think of teal. The black asphalt of the parking lot shimmers underneath frost, the blue sky is spotted with white tumbles of cirrus, and parked cars fill the spectrum from SUV silver to sedan red. It is a Saturday, but it feels Tuesday. Teal and Tuesday—it rhymes today. My tea is deep, reddened pink around translucent bergs. As advertised—it looks like passion, tastes like a full-lipped kiss and fingers brushing through thick, fine hair. I like the feel of cold air rising from my plastic cup and tickling my upper lip, raw from my morning shave. I have always liked the cold. I smile; my cheeks feel bloodless, probably splotched like my hands, yellowed pallor dotted with bright red. My pale hands blend unnaturally well with my olive-green sweatshirt. I can taste green olives every time I glance at my sleeves. She took me to a pizzeria that allows green olives as a topping. I can picture the restaurant, smell the pizza and the wooden wall panels, hear clinking silverware. Her hair was down. Her hair is usually up. I think I said it looked better down. Someone put “Where are You Going” on the Jukebox halfway through. As we left, she taught me a swing step in the foyer. My hands were embarrassingly sweaty, but she didn’t mention it. One-two-rockstep-one-two-rockstep-turn-two-stepstep. I check myself and hurry my pace as I catch the bemused look of a passerby. She makes a far better dance partner than my iced tea. Her brownish eyes are easy and laughing, or at least are whenever I glance up from my fumbling feet. Then she starts to smells a little bit green, the green of a pine tree swaying in the wind, and her hair flaps like a crow’s wing. She kept her hair down until we left the foyer, though it must have gotten in the way of her eyes. Was that because I mentioned it? But the pizzeria is an hour’s walk west of me. I keep walking east down the sidewalk toward Bucklin Hill intersection, and in approximately forty five minutes, home.

Everything is dusted with frost outside my window. The evergreen trees forsake their names, donning a chitinous winter coating of ice. Today is Sunday, day of reflection. I feel a hint of Wednesday, too. Wednesdays have that weird sort of momentum; even a miserable Wednesday can feel like a good day, by the end. I am dressed in black, from tie, to starched cuffs, to pants hemmed several inches shorter than the standard thirty inch Calvin Kleins. I feel a bit overdressed, even though I can’t think of a concert I went to in anything but black. My wardrobe skips from High School Casual to High School Concert wear—Mr. Woods insists on all-black. I can’t even think of a time I played trombone at home in anything but Concert Black. I get lost in music when I’m out of uniform. Too many colors, and I can’t match the little flocks of notes on the page. My black uniform is like a grounding wire, jettisoning excess charge as I listen and blow; surrounded by my ilk, I am grounded in one key and storyline. The bright flares of the music are clearly drawn against a black background that seeps from my sleeves into my ears and mouth. A glance at the clock tells me I have been staring at the frost for five minutes. It felt like ten. The frost-dulled leaves are not as lush as usual—neither is the grass. I can hear the grass crunching, smell the Teal of a Northwest Winter and the scent of freshly wetted leaves as the grass thaws under my numbed, bare feet. I forgot my socks.

I can already hear Edward Elgar’s Serenade for Strings as I fumble through a neatly ordered sock drawer. Black. Patterned. Ribbed. No. Black. Plain. Non-Ribbed. Dress. I ease the drawer closed and don the socks slowly. I despise wrinkles. She thinks I worry too much. I glance outside at the frosted grass as I hear tires crunching along the curve of my driveway. I think the mass of a Corolla is approximately sixteen-hundred and thirty kilograms. She can probably go up to eight meters per second around the bend without sliding. She shouldn’t. I grab a black wool jacket. Eighty-nine dollars at Men’s Warehouse. She is walking up the porch. It sounds like the brown boots. She sounds at ease. She could sound more excited. Why doesn’t she sound more excited? I suppose the boots are heavy. Elgar’s wife died six months after he finished the Serenade for her; he never wrote another piece. Focus. I pull on my jacket and carefully don my cheap Target dress shoes, looping the bows as symmetrically as I can. Twenty one dollars and five cents. Focus. The doorbell rings.

Perhaps I should have bought tickets to Tchaikovsky instead. Tchaikovsky’s wife did not die after Tchaikovsky finished Serenade in C, though he did not write it out of unadulterated love and devotion to his wife, either. I enjoy Serenade in C. My hand is sweating on the arm of the chair. Her hand is five inches away on her thigh, an elegantly arched shadow outlined by the smooth teal fabric of her dress. It doesn’t seem like winter, her dress; it just looks beautiful. I sometimes wonder why teal doesn’t work backwards and look like winter smells. I guess it only goes one way. What if this only goes one way? What if three weeks of Christmas vacation is enough time to ruin everything, for a suitor in something other than New Balance tennis shoes and a solid-colored tee-shirt to talk about something other than the magic of imaginary numbers and the fine aspects of Quenya syntax? Perhaps he laughs more loudly at her jokes, was unafraid to kiss her for the first time when their faces bent close by chance long enough for the world to breathe deeply like a yogi practicing diaphramic meditation patterns before returning to its usual ten point five degrees of rotation every hour. I am not sure why I was so frightened, but I am frightened now. I take my eyes from her hand, move my hand nervously to my own lap to wipe the sweat from my palm, return it to the arm of the chair and listen to the Serenade. It is beautiful. Chordal tones …. No. Why can’t I just listen? It smells strange in here. The seats give off a queer musty tone, and the finely dressed business men and dapper elderly couples only add to the visual strength of that dustiness. This room is a faded burgundy, a red-wine curtain worn from years in the sun. Vinegar. The music deserves so much more than this, it is love both sweetly innocent and hungrily passionate. This music needs air, Teal air, Blue air, some air other than faded, dulled, suffocating burgun—