The Color Turquoise

50 Holbrook Road sat tucked between a neatly paved cul-de-sac and spare forest. The idealistic ranch home, painted yellow and ornamented with blooming hydrangeas, sported bright turquoise front steps, a color Aunt Marriane loved, especially when it embellished a hipster mosaic tile or blank facade. In fact, Aunt Marriane was turquoise. Despite a petite frame, everything about her was bright and loud – her big, bushy, and beautiful curly hair framing a tanned face and genuine smile. She was unapologetically turquoise in the subtle coolness through which she gave firm hugs and scolded me as her own – but that just meant I was her own and had a bit of turquoise for myself. 

50 Holbrook Road had three bathrooms, but Aunt Marriane’s was my favorite. You entered the wooden doorway and stood in a cramped en-suite overlooking the backyard. To the left was the shower, adorned with Tuscan beige tiles. Aunt Marriane was a woman of chosen luxuries, and so we would wash our hair with Pantene and lotion our elbows with Khiel’s and L’Occitane, pretending to etch away smile lines and eye bags with Biafine, Aunt Marriane’s elixir of choice. The smell of Pantene brings me to summer night showers, washing away naked toddler bellies and sunscreen-rich skin down the shower’s brass drain. The cool breeze of dusk would blow into the bathroom and turn our damp limbs into one goosebump, but the chill was always appreciated. I can’t use Pantene without thinking of Aunt Marriane. I use rosemary-mint shampoo now. 

50 Holbrook Road sounded like Crosby, Stills, and Nash and tasted like Sunday bagel spreads. It was always a little colder than my home, but it embraced me as if it were mine with a unique warmness, so I knew it as such. There is an subtle intimacy to understanding a place so closely: knowing where the cups in the kitchen are or where to find towels and sheets when an impromptu sleepover will ensue. Aunt Marriane forged this environment within the spaces she created – one that was addicting and infectious. I always wanted to be at 50 Holbrook Road, and I always wanted to be with Aunt Marriane; the two were one and the same – this was my second home. 

***

In 2019 the house started to change, Aunt Marriane morphing alongside it. I was sat down by my parents and told that “Mare” had aggressive leukemia. It was an early summer day – warm, humid, and sticky, but I remember being cooled by a youthful naivety – cancer was a foreign aggressor, one that attacked those always one step removed, that would be easily surmountable due to my aunt’s strength. I was somehow, at the time, able to continue through the summer oblivious to the inevitable changes that were to come, changes that were first evident in the house itself. I noticed the addition of a comfortable reclining chair for the rare days Aunt Marriane was allowed home from the hospital so the couch did not exacerbate her existing bed sores. The air in the house felt thinner, and I could never shake the smell of Mount Sinai from the furniture and sterile surfaces. Pill bottles lined the countertops and knit hats the coffee tables; knitting was just about all she could do as cycles of treatments and chemotherapy blended into each other, poisoning her body. 

I began visiting 50 Holebrook less and less, instead opting for biweekly hospital visits. My initial familiarity with the space dissipated, as her presence from it did the same. Aunt Marriane was my greatest tether to the home; she hung my school photos next to her own daughter’s and reminded me that “her house was mine”, insisting that I keep spare clothes in the laundry room. Without Aunt Marriane, my intuitive presence at the home grew inorganic. I felt, then, like I had to ask to come over, even if just for a swim or short visit. 

I never believed that Aunt Marriane would die. When her thick, curly head of hair was replaced with a prickly grey scalp, my faith in her health never wavered. When her eyes and skin turned a jaundiced shade of yellow, or the plastic tube sprouting out of her throat splotchy and infected, my faith in her life remained intact. I knew, however, that her time was coming to an end when my uncle began rearranging the kitchen. Aunt Marriane would never allow the cups in the drawers beside the toaster – or the pans in the cabinet above; she was too short to reach them there and the only one in the house with any kitchen sense. 50 Holbrook Road was preparing itself for her departure. 

In the end, Aunt Marriane’s fight made everyone else strong around her. This strength no longer lies in her home, which has been sold and painted a muted and millennial shade of grey, but it is woven through the small moments of my life that bring me back to memories with Aunt Marriane. She sighs through summer showers and breathes when I lotion my knees; she cries when I sing her favorite songs, and always lives through the color turquoise.