The Colors

From A Summer Life by Gary Soto

GRANDFATHER'S FAVORITE COLOR was the green of dollar bills. On summer

evenings he watered his lawn, the jet of water cooling his thumb from eight hours of
stapling wooden crates at Sun Maid Raisin. He knew that his house, pink as it was, was
worth money. He knew that if he kept the rose bushes throwing out buds of sweet
flowers, the value of the house would increase. The fruit trees would grow and thicken
with branches to feed his family and neighbor.

Grandmother was also fond of green, but preferred the silver shine of coins that made
her eyebrows jump up and down. She showed me a nickel slug from the county fair
stamped: MILK IS GOOD. She could not read or write in Spanish or English and
thought the coin was worth more than a brown child realized. I wanted to say that it was
nothing. It could sparkle in the sun or make a nice necklace, but it was no rare coin. I
drank my purple Kool-Aid, crunched spines of air trapped in the ice cubes, and made
my eyebrows jump up and down like hers.

Yellow was her favorite color. Yellow roses floated in a bowl on the windowsill. The
yellow sunshine clock hummed on the wall, and her yellow refrigerator, the first on the
block, blended well with the floor, a speckled affair with some yellow but mostly black.
From a top shelf of the hallway closet, she took down a shoe box of papers, including a
single stock certificate from a sewing machine company. I looked closely at the
yellowed paper and noted “one share” and the date “1939.” It was now 1961, and even
though I was young, nine at the time, I guessed that the stock was worth the memory of
hope but little else.

“When you marry, honey, I will give this to you,” she said, shaking the paper at me.
“You'll be a rich man.”

My eyebrows jumped up and down, and I went outside to the backyard to play with my
favorite color, mud. At my grandparents’ house there were no toys, no pets, no TV in
English, so when I stayed there I had to come up with things to do. I tried rolling
summer-warmed oranges around the yard in a sort of bowling game in which I tried to
knock over sparrows that had come in search of worms. But after twenty minutes of this
I was bored. I did chin-ups on the clothesline pole, but that was sweaty work that bored
me even more.

So I fashioned mud into two forts and a great wall on which I stuck flags of straw-like
weeds. When the mud dried hard as a turtle, I pounded the hell out of the forts and wall,
imagining that a Chinese war had come. I made bomb sounds and moaned for the
dying. My thumb pressed a red ant, and I said, “Too bad.”

Mud was a good color, and the purple of plums made my mouth water. Peaches did
the same, and the arbor of greenish grapes that I spied in the neighbor's yard. Their
German Shepherd, ears erect, spied me too, so I couldn't climb the fence and help
myself. But looking was almost like eating, and noon was near.

The brown of frijoles was our favorite color as steam wavered in our faces.
Grandfather, who came home for lunch, left his shoes near the door, smothered his
beans with a river of chile and scooped them with big rips of tortilla. I ate with a fork and
a tortilla, savoring little mouthfuls of beans with a trickle of chile. The clear color of water
washed it all down, and the striped candy cane leftover from Christmas sweetened the
day. Grandfather, patting his stomach, smiled at me and turned on the radio to the
Spanish station. For dessert, there was dark coffee and a powdered donut on a white
plate. Grandmother sipped coffee and tore jelly-red sweetness from a footprint-sized
Danish.

While Grandfather played a game of solitaire, I fooled with the toothpicks in the
wooden, pig-shaped holder, the only thing that resembled a toy in the house or yard. I
swept the crumbs from the table and pinched the donut crumbs from grandfather's
plate. Grandmother did the dishes, ever mindful of the sweep of the sunshine clock.
“Viejo,” she said, “it's time.”

I walked Grandfather to the front yard, where he stopped and said to me, “A pink
house is worth a lot of money, m'ijo.” We both stood admiring the house, trimmed with
flowers and a wrought-iron gate, a plastic flamingo standing one-legged in front of a
geranium. This was home, the color of his life. We started up the block, me taking two
steps for every one of his, and he said no one's lawn was as green as his. When we
looked back, when Grandfather said I should go because it was time to work,
Grandmother was at the front window beating the dusty windowsills with a dish towel,
waving goodbye until later.