Safety Dance

Abstract

Safety Dance David McGlynn (bio) We’d lived in our house for two years but had never liked the colors. Every wall was a variation of taupe or biscuit or beige, so aggressively neutral that I’d wondered what moral lapses the previous owners had been trying to hide. Whenever we knocked a hole in the drywall—which happened often and only sometimes by accident—I’d shine a flashlight into the opening, half expecting to find a mummified limb, a stash of videocassettes. Our new neighbors had been less than forthcoming about the families who’d preceded us. A long marriage had ended in divorce, plastic patio furniture and children’s toys heaped in the yard. The couple who’d followed had stayed only a short time. In several places, the ugly paint was streaky and thin, proof that the painter had been in a hurry. At the start of the pandemic, I began painting my way around the house. I started with the upstairs bathroom, an easy two-day job, and when it became clear that I wouldn’t be returning to campus or my sons to their school, I did the kitchen and the den, stripping and sanding the built-in bookshelves and painting them white. Then I moved on to the hallway and the deck off the back. A year passed. We were still at home. I decided to tackle the foyer—a small room, but a tall one. The walls beside the staircase and above the front door rose twenty feet, to the ceiling of the second floor. Three huge slabs of [End Page 67] beige that the afternoon sun reduced to the color of chicken broth. It called to mind a detective’s office in a noir mystery. It set me on edge. I took my time with the prep, taping down plastic sheeting to protect the carpets and hardwood. I clawed out the nails and plastered in the holes. I borrowed a multiposition Gorilla ladder from my father-in-law to reach the upper walls. The ladder had two sliding rails and a knobby articulating hinge at the center, which allowed it to be bent into a stepladder that could stand on uneven surfaces. It would come in handy when I painted the stairs. First, though, I needed to tape off the ceiling. I extended the ladder to its full height, twenty-six feet, locked down the joints and center hinge, and leaned it against the wall. “Make sure someone holds that for you,” my wife warned me. “What do I look like?” I asked her. One eyebrow arched, slightly. “I’ll be careful,” I promised. “This isn’t my first time.” The summer before I started college, I spent all of August and half of September scraping and painting the stucco exterior of my father’s house—a 1930’s Southern California bungalow he and my stepmom bought on the cheap the year before. Temperatures were in the nineties, the Santa Anas were blowing, the buckwheat in the hills was as dry as matchsticks, and my tools were rudimentary: a three-inch scraper, a roller, a few brushes. Even my buckets were recycled ice-cream containers from Smart & Final. I worked alone in the powerhouse heat, vowing with every dip of my brush that I’d never paint another house as long as I lived. I dreamed of fogged-in medieval cities, mahogany libraries with arched ceilings and ivied windows, even though I was bound for a brutalist university campus that had only existed since the mid-sixties. When my dad came home from work, all I did was piss and moan about how hard I had it. “It’s a good thing you plan to make a living with your head and not your hands,” he told me. The ironic thing about making a living with your head, at least in my case, is that it doesn’t pay much. Over the years, I’ve had to become better with my hands simply because I could so rarely afford to hire professional tradesmen. With some help from YouTube, I’d taught myself to plumb toilets, refinish hardwood, rewire outlets. Our first...