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Violette Aubergine

or Lana Turner and the Purple Leotard

By Marie WilsonPublished 3 years ago Updated 11 months ago 10 min read
3
photo: Aaron Schwartz

The magazine clipping of Lana Turner crackled and curled like a strip of bacon, her shapely gams sizzling in the flames. My uniform, on the other hand, just smouldered - kind of like Lana in the film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice.

I poked the melting blob with a stick. For the past year I’d been wearing that blob while conducting exercise classes. Only then, it was a bright polyester leotard of psychedelic purple, Jimi Hendrix' favourite colour.

When Jimi died a few years ago, it became even more popular than while he lived.

Hendrix

My boyfriend, Danny, preferred to call the shade "statutory grape"; I denounced his quip as off-colour; he claimed it was just a little black humour. Danny could be adorable sometimes.

By Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Figure Fabulous, the exercise salon where I worked up until a week ago, resides in a strip mall in South Vancouver. Its interior looks like a Belle Époque bordello - a riot of purple in every shade. By contrast, our little apartment on Broadway near Granville was beige with offwhite trim.

“I’m on Broadway,” I wrote my dad when Danny and I moved in together. But I suspected he wouldn’t find my joke funny. Dad always said that the reason my mother left was to become a star of stage and screen. And there’s nothing funny about that.

Dad’s in paint. Well, not in it - it’s his business. And from an early age, I learned to read by sounding out the fanciful names of paint colours in his sample books and fan decks. I love books of all kinds now but whenever possible I like to dip into the colourful poetry of a fan deck.

By Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

Dad brought home colour swatches and stir sticks for me to play with when I was a kid. But after Mom ran off, he no longer brought anything home from work except his defeated old self.

Woman with Unbrella. Toulouse-LaTrec. Painted in the Mauve Decade

La Belle Époque was also known as the Mauve Decade because of the popularity of that shade among artists and fashion plates in the 1890s. This purple passion actually began in 1856 when a teenager serendipitously invented the first synthetic dye.

A brilliant purple, the dye was christened “mauve”, and became all the rage. But because it faded so easily, mauve is the word we now use for pale lilac.

By the time I was ten, memories of Mom were fading fast. When I saw a new release that year called Madame X, I decided Lana Turner was my mom. Abused by a slimy playboy and banished to wander lonely streets, Lana/Madame X only pined for her child: me. I cut out a magazine picture of the movie star and kept it in my treasure box.

Lana Turner in Madame X (1966)

Danny and I used to have coffee at the Black Cat Café, just down the street. Then he’d head upstairs to the business college where he took classes, and I’d catch a bus to go open the salon. I used to imagine that Danny's classroom was the sort of dull place Laura fled from in The Glass Menagerie. I guess I was wrong about that.

Laura was among the monologues I’d been working on with an idea to audition for the two theatres in town. I didn’t know how to go from high school ham to real actress though, so I started reading books about acting. Plus, I’d seen movies where young nobodies became bona fide thespians: A Star is Born, The Actress, Stage Door. They all travel to New York or L.A. for their big break. I thought Toronto held promise.

Judy Garland in A Star is Born (1954)

Danny thought my aspirations were stupid. I wanted to show him he was wrong so I devoted myself to perfecting my skills in secret. Every evening, when the last patron had gone home, I’d draw the salon curtains and turn the lights down. Then, in the dimmed amethyst blush, I’d become Esther from The Bell Jar, or Mary Queen of Scots, or Laura.

Scents of sweat and perfume lingered in the air until the vibrant aroma of fresh oranges took over. You see, I tell Esther’s story while peeling an orange - a bit of “stage business” to help my performance come alive.

photo: Aaron Schwartz

I also used a Method technique, wherein you substitute someone from your own life for someone in the play, to make it more real. For Jim, the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie, Danny was my sub because he could make my heart sing, just as Jim elevated Laura with his kiss. Also like Jim, Danny could easily break the horn off a little glass unicorn and think nothing of it.

And it was that side of Danny that also made him the perfect substitute for Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart’s archenemy. Whenever I’d say Mary’s line: “In myself, I know you to be an eater of dust,” I’d picture Danny standing before me, only he’d be about twelve inches tall - and eating dust.

Still, Mary was the most difficult for me to inhabit. I couldn't have her peel an orange as she spoke, and I was stumped on how to embody her passion.

Mary

One afternoon, my manager told me to go home because it was a slow day at the salon. I ran to catch the bus, hoping to meet up with Danny on his break.

Pushing open the door of the Black Cat, I spotted him in a booth across the room. I was aware of a lightning quick movement by his side, an impression of someone rapidly exiting the booth, a blurred ochre flash.

Just as rapidly, Danny rose to greet me and steer me outside. I glanced back at the flash and saw marigold hot pants, bursting at the seams, vanish into the Ladies Room.

Outside, Danny lit a cigarette and talked fast about nothing. My eyes followed a wisp of smoke up to his chestnut hair, then further up to the neon sign of a black cat, perpetually winking at me.

A lot of fruits lend their names to the purples - mulberry, beautyberry, plum. Eggplant is also a shade of purple named for a fruit. The colour is more commonly known by its French name: aubergine, which I think would make a great stage name, coupled with some other shade of purple, perhaps orchid or phlox.

Plum is also an adjective meaning prize, as in “plum role”, which is exactly what I auditioned for a few weeks ago, my first professional audition. The dusty theatre floor around my feet got littered with fragrant peel. Then, upon uttering Esther's final line, I thanked the director and made a swift exit.

Walking down the street, the naked citrus got juiced in my fist - all my pent up nervousness dripped through my fingers. If I'd had some bubbly on hand I could've made a mimosa or two. I could've used a mimosa - or four.

Photo by MW

I didn’t get the part. And I went back to measuring thighs and other body parts, then recording the results on individual lavender charts: pounds and inches lost and gained, the ups and downs of these women’s lives.

“Make sure that eighth of an inch is legible.”

“Yes, Mrs. Norris.”

“The last time I tried to read my chart the numbers were all scribbles.”

Monica Norris. Angular. Severe. Rich. She’d brought her stepdaughter in for the salon tour. Coifed and polished, Tiffany Norris wore designer jeans and a constantly amused smirk. She looked like someone I knew or had seen in a dream but I didn’t know who. I also didn’t know what she found so amusing.

At tour’s end, I moved in to close the deal. But my sales patter just bounced off the phlox walls, for Tiffany, it turned out, was underage for signing a contract. “And,” she apprised me in upper crust tones, “I’m not that interested in belonging to an exercise parlour.”

As I watched Tiffany's derriere wiggle across the parking lot I thought she really could’ve used a membership. But it was her smirk, more than her proportions, that had brought out my inner cat. And then it hit me - like a bolt of marigold out of the blue: hot pants at the Black Cat Cafe.

photo: Aaron Schwartz

“Can I help it if her mom belongs to your salon?” Danny protested that evening. “Tiff and I are classmates, that’s all.”

“Well, if that’s all, then what was Tiff doing smirking around the salon today with no intention of joining? Who does she think I am? And who do you think I am?”

Suddenly, I had an image of the two of them, lounging in the Black Cat, smoking cigarettes and roaring with laughter at the girl in the statutory grape leotard. The thought cut into me like the sharp blade of Mary Stuart’s fate. This all made Danny furious and he left the next morning without so much as a goodbye.

Bruise should be a colour name but it would never fly in a fan deck - no one wants to paint their room such a painful shade. But my heart was feeling the intense deep-purple-blue of a fresh bruise. I told my manager that I had a splitting headache - after all, you don’t get to go home for emotional contusion.

On the bus ride home I rehearsed apologies: “I’m sorry I mistrusted you, Danny. I have an abandonment complex that causes irrational jealousy. I love you.”

Back before the synthetic variety was invented, purple dye came from a species of sea snail and was so rare and costly that only the very wealthy could afford to wear purple. Hence, its status as the colour of royalty.

When I opened our apartment door, brim-full with sorries, Danny sprung up from the couch like a jack-in-the-box. Fumbling with his undone shirt buttons, he rushed toward me. Behind him on our love seat: Tiffany Smirk, smoothing her dress.

Regret and desperation played in Danny’s poison-green eyes. But Mary Stuart doesn’t suffer cheating playboys gladly and her words left my mouth with assurance: “God’s spies that watch the fall of the great and little, they will find you out.” I backed him into the room, a fury mounting. “I will wait for that, wait longer than a life, till men and the times unscroll you, study the tricks you play...”

He opened his lying maw to speak but I struck like lightning: “My heart beats blood such as yours has never known!” As he fell onto the couch next to his cowering statutory grape, I turned on my heels and departed.

Heliotrope is a bright violet colour named for a flower. The word is from the Greek: "helio" meaning sun, and "trope" meaning turn, because heliotrope flowers are said to track the sun’s motion across the sky.

I gave notice at the salon. For the next two weeks, my nighttime crash pad was a beautyberry exercise mat, rolled out onto the orchid carpet. While my ex was in filing class one day I went home to get a few things.

On my last night at Figure Fabulous I made lavender confetti of Monica Norris’s measurement chart.

At dawn I torched Lana Turner and the purple leotard in a campfire at Locarno Beach.

And that afternoon I boarded a train to the metropolis of my dreams.

No more two-bit, two-theatre towns for me. And no more eaters of dust.

I had begun to track my own lucky star across the heavens.

Lady in Violet by Szinyei Merse 1874

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About the Creator

Marie Wilson

Harper Collins published my novel "The Gorgeous Girls". My feature film screenplay "Sideshow Bandit" has won several awards at film festivals. I have a new feature film screenplay called "A Girl Like I" and it's looking for a producer.

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