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Rubik's
Julie Marie Wade
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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other
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Writing this, I have completed the magic cube that eluded me all my youth.
White
□ I didn’t know I was. On the first form that asked, I wrote “tan or maybe beige” in the blank beside OTHER. I misspelled “beige” as “bayjh.”
□ From “alabaster” to “porcelain” to “peaches and cream complexions,” there was so much to learn about euphemisms in our literature and biases in our world.
□ The first time I read Joan Didion’s famous essay from her famous book, I had no idea the title was a nod to a Beatles album of the same name. I also had no idea who the Beatles were. (Yes, I grew up under a boulder disguised as a brick house.)
□ My parents never owned a Polaroid camera, but I loved when the school librarian took our pictures and wrote something memorable along the spacious border. Tiny occasion poems!
□ “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion writes, but I’ve always thought it was the other way—that we live in order to tell stories.
□ I used so much Liquid Paper in eleventh grade that my teacher confiscated the bottle. “Have you ever considered just crossing out your mistakes or—radical thought—letting them stand as they are?”
□ I had not. This was Catholic school, where we were taught to confess our sins to Jesus (sometimes via priest, sometimes on our own) so He could blot them out. Jesus was supernatural Liquid Paper.
□ I love how in Key West the picket fences are often painted rainbow colors now (in response to the rainbow crosswalk bans) or how a smaller picket fence epitomizing Pride will be draped over a section of the main picket fence, which is still painted the traditional color.
□ As objective correlatives go, pickets are presumed to point toward pleasantness, which is not the same as happiness, or toward conformity, which is not the same as safety. It has taken me years to recognize the difference.
Yellow
□ Pencils in boxes. Pencils in cases. Pencils in a holder (retired coffee mug) on my home desk and arranged in tidy rows inside my school desk. Always a sharpener nearby. A perennial welt on the fourth finger of my right hand from writing too hard and too fast.
□ Over her bed my cousin Blythe had a huge inflatable pencil dangling from two wires. She said we were not allowed to touch it, then jumped up and touched it, then dared me to jump. The moment I did her mother flung open the door, like she could chemically sense disobedience from across the hall. I was promptly declared a “bad influence.”
□ I come from a land of orchards, the nation’s greatest producer of apples. This is the color no one pictures as the “apple of their eye,” despite its enticing sobriquet—the Golden Delicious.
□ No buses for my school, not the way I saw in films—those massive Ticonderogas on wheels!—which I always assumed was the point. Pencils point toward classrooms, and buses steer toward schools. The surprise of it, our first field trip, that West Seattle Christian had a bus with its name in bold letters printed on the side, but instead of a pencil, a Bic ballpoint motorized! It was as strange a sight as black snow or a purple pumpkin. How could a school bus be blue?
□ Our pillowcases and our pillows, my father’s ribbed sleeveless undershirts, some of the t-shirt kind, too, and all our sheets, for twin and queen alike. Tinged. Something that happened with age, with sweat, with the transition from first use to second (rags). When I went as a ghost for Halloween, I was haunted by sepia. It should have been the apparition’s name.
□ We were a margarine family, never a butter family, big tubs on the table and sticks in the fridge. From an early age, I learned to favor simulacra over The Real Thing.
□ Tetherball—I was always in contention for queen. Other girls would line up to play me, though battle was a better word. Erica and Angela were also good, also tall. I sensed a correlation. My parents installed a tetherball in the backyard so I could practice, but alone, pummeling the solitary egg yolk on the long string, I found I did not enjoy my competition.
□ Cowardice is coded this way. I don’t know why. Not terror, which is heavy and dark by comparison, and not anxiety, which is skittish and light, what my grandmother called “a case of nerves.” She drank milk to calm hers, and later, jugs of Carlo Rossi wine. Maybe I was never Dorothy after all, with her gingham wonder and sparkling shoes, but the lion who cried whenever he intended to roar.
□ Around the edges of my fingernails during those early teen years I wasn’t eating, when I scraped the contents of plates into the trash or tossed them over the fence. Summer was hardest, bodies on display and barbecues never-ending. This was the era of the French bikini, squeezing lemons onto our bellies to darken them, lemons into our hair to lighten it. Contradictions abound. But even when I painted my nails the Barbiest pink, I still couldn’t conceal their jaundice.
Red
□ I come from a land of orchards, the nation’s greatest producer of apples. This is the color everyone pictures as the “apple of their eye”—iconic, Platonic, and Biblical, of course, but never my favorite fruit.
□ It was an apple that lodged in Gregor Samsa’s back, bright as blood, I imagined, bright as a gash that could not be sutured. I loved this story in high school. I hated this story in high school. I wondered if Gregor’s metamorphosis could be read—one interpretation at least—as a young man coming out to a family that found homosexuality disgusting, the homosexual dirty like vermin. “Whatever you do, don’t write that in your essay exam,” my friend Jasmine warned.
□ I didn’t write it anywhere, or tell anyone again, even when we studied The Metamorphosis in college. I saved my musing for 30 years, and now I’m writing it here. I think a fair allegory is that Gregor Samsa was queer, and though I may think this because I am queer, we both had reason to fear contempt and even violence in response to who we are.
□ When I am running and the men sitting on benches along the boardwalk can’t resist calling out to me, “Hey, Speedy, hey, Sweetie, what’s your name?” or when—worse—they jump up and run beside me for a few strides, laughing and asking “What’s your hurry, pretty lady?” before they fall behind, I am not seeing it, but I am feeling it, a burn that surges through my chest and my legs, that holds my eyes in place on the road ahead, my elbows pumping such that their points become spears.
□ Hester Prynne, too. Blamed, branded, the stigma of her sin stitched onto her dress. It didn’t have to be an A, or the A might have stood for other things. In our sex education textbook published by Ave Maria Press, we learned being gay wasn’t a sin but “acting on it” was. What if the “A” stood for acting—on any desire, ever?
□ Pink peppermint discs, the cinnamon kind, just before the dissolution of their swirls.
□ “Blood on the moon,” poetic for “total lunar eclipse,” meaning when the earth passes between the sun and the moon like a child climbing into their parents’ bed, squeezing in between them, changing the tone of the whole night.
□ Taillights. A brake slammed too late, ahead and behind. Sirens flashing in the rearview. My accidental booking at the elder resort—whiplashed in our twenties, laughing because and laughing despite, logs in the fireplace, steps up to the four-poster bed. (We needed them.) Clock radio alarm set to 4 AM by the room’s previous occupant. Icy Hot Smart Relief commercial with the targeted pain spot that glows inside the joint.
□ Velvet Santa suits and my own velvet pant suit—foreshadowing (perhaps) a future lesbian life. Perching for a picture on a crate by the Mall Santa’s feet, the closest proximity I would permit. Even then, I did not want a man, even a jolly old elf, to touch me.
Orange
□ The quintessential tabby called Punkin or Marmalade, with a soft peachy belly and creamsicle stripes. A hand could get lost in all that warm fluff! The cat I visited at the pet store each weekend, asking to hold her, nuzzling her fur, until one day she was no longer there.
□ Tigger, to whom I have been likened all my life. “Someone get that girl a Pogo stick!” But no, I was part Pogo already, long before “gotta bounce” meant “gotta leave.” I stayed and just kept bouncing in place.
□ Refractory rhyme, meaning in fact unrhymable. Contradictions abound. My favorite of the loner words, a fellow only child.
□ John McPhee’s classic work of reportage, its title pluralized, widely assigned in graduate school to those aspiring to write nonfiction. I loved how McPhee intended to write a simple article, short and straightforward about the industry associated with the fruit. But he became too tantalized by his discoveries not to share them, and so the article morphed into a long-form essay, which morphed again into a book. I was there with him, savoring my time in the groves he made of his pages—foreshadowing (perhaps) a future Florida life.
□ If you are born in 1979, the 1970s are with you for a long time. This is the color of that decade and the next: first kitchen linoleum, Tang in plastic refrigerator pitchers, the shag carpet in every playroom I wasn’t invited into, a beanbag chair I cut open to see what secrets it contained, the prettiest bottle of something undrinkable on my parents’ basement bar, and the leaves, both collected from the yard and purchased at the store, that we stuffed inside our annual Horn of Plenty.
□ Where I lived, they were too pale and pithy to live up to their name, lackluster as juice or snack. My mother refused to slice them into triangles, where you could take a bit and then use the rind to cover up your teeth, flash a toothless smile at a recess nemesis. Of course I wanted to play with my food, just as all the boys did. Instead, half of lunchtime peeling the white strings and then eating them, those endless wan segments, one by one.
□ Macaroni and cheese, made from a box and blinding as a traffic cone. This might have given us pause before eating but inexplicably didn’t. Instead, we added off-brand hot dogs (nothing Nathan about them) cut into pieces and sometimes used heavy cream to thicken the powder that coated the pile of gluey elbows in the pan.
□ Plastic jack-o-lanterns, of course, for collecting candy while trick-or-treating, and fields trips to the pumpkin patch, where everyone tried to seize the largest gourd. I was allergic, but only if I ate it. How I loved carving, the pleasure of pathetic fallacy realized, and the deep intimacy of running my hands along the ribbed walls, of scooping out the seeds.
□ Reading Walden, I came across a line I have always loved and promptly committed to memory: “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
Blue
□ The sadness that chisels quietly, each chipped tooth behind a sanguine smile.
□ Backdrops to yearbook photos and church directory photos, loudly unrolled and wobbly on their unfolded legs—before which those hostage hours with my mother’s hot curlers or her curling iron, the spongy overnight rollers worn with a net, and even sometimes the salon-style hair dryer, set up in the living room to arch over a chair. The beauty she hoped to coax out of me before my pose was struck, then preserved, in front of that simulacrum sky.
□ A shade seen in certain personifications of ice or breath, raindrops in picture books or the Old North Wind blowing. The twi that makes light softer at the far edge of day, after the sun finishes its dramatic performance and the understudy steps on stage to run lines. Also, the color of whispers and empty rooms.
□ “For boys,” supposedly, or at least the color of their receiving blankets, and how I did in fact prefer pink while not believing I should have to. Later, how smug I felt telling my parents that pink was originally for boys, though not for reasons I liked—the stronger, more decisive color—so I left that part out, and my father, who was born during World War II before the gendered color flip was quite complete, refused to believe me. Later, when I told him about the Greek men and their teenage boys, he called for my mother: “Is she too old to have her mouth washed out with soap?”
□ Thinking of the trans flag, which is bordered this way, with pink interior stripes alongside, acknowledging the binary genders, then with the wide swath of white down the middle for undefined genders, the transitioning and intersexed among us. How I only go to my creepy dermatologist (he does not wear gloves) because his radiant receptionist flies this flag over a communal desk of many pronouns.
□ The ink in “erasable pens” (contradictions abound), which I tried only briefly. No more Liquid Paper, but still the impulse to correct, revise, begin again. When erasing with standard fervor, the ink in these pens only faded, so to make it disappear completely, I often tore a hole in the page.
□ Violets are not, despite the most insipid and widespread verse in our language.
□ Once in this moon is when I stepped with a man into Jared’s in pursuit of my engagement ring. I knew already the mistake I had promised to make and would soon be breaking, but the symbolism was too great—we had just seen The Lord of the Rings at the cinema inside the mall! When I tried to write this scene in a poem for class, my teacher eschewed, “Too much! No one will ever believe it.”
□ The 1990 Honda Accord with plush seats and all-time most steerable wheel—oh, the ease of those turns! At every intersection, a volta. The last time I saw my parents, they were still driving that car. We passed under a bridge at the outskirts of my first city, my first life. No, this is not a metaphor. They didn’t know I had a car. My partner and I bought it together, paid too much of course, but it was ours. The new steering wheel was much tighter. I drove right through the light when I saw them, no slowing down, no blinker. I kept driving right toward my sequel.
Green
□ Which is to say callow, which everyone has been, or “wet behind the ears,” which for me meant decades of sloshing. Not so much anymore, though now the bittersweet switch to resisting desiccation. Body, stay lubricated! Mind, stay lubricated! How to advance into dexterity—those fabled 10,000 hours, then more—without wilting from lack of fresh rain. Thankfully, there’s always a poem for that in my Notes app: “Water pours into the basin,/ cold and clear./ Make it new.” Best motto for now.
□ I come from a land of orchards, the nation’s greatest producer of apples. This is the color of my favorite apple, more tart than it is sweet, and the best kind for filling a pie.
□ Per Dickon, beloved Secret Garden boy whom I always believed to be my gay fraternal: “wick,” as in still alive inside, despite the outward appearance of death or decay. Wick, as our hearts were then, in perpetual pend, waiting till we could strike a match and gleam.
□ Of gables and fried tomatoes, of course, but not the eggs or the ham that accompanied them.
□ We were a grass family, not an Astroturf family, nuclear and never blended. (Who could speak of Astroturf without invoking The Bradys?) Sundays with the push mower, later the electric mower. Raking and edging. An elaborate sprinkler system installed underground. After I left, my parents replaced the lawn with turf. Absence has not made their hearts keen. Now “everything is immaculate, not a blade out of place!”—the freedom that comes when nothing grows.
□ Kermit taught us it wasn’t easy bein’ green, but he meant blending in with his surroundings, the way a frog blends in with the leaves. That amphibian life sounded lucky to me, longing for camouflage as a budding sleuth: binoculars, periscope, fingerprint-dusting kit to investigate after the suspects left the scene. All my SpyTech equipment, collected one birthday at a time—and where did I choose to store it? In a neon-bright, glow-in-the-dark duffel bag oozing like ectoplasm from under my bed!
□ The felt on the pool table, how fiercely it reminded us of our own inexperience—taunted really—until we sat on it, stretched out long on it in our skimpiest clothes, and photographed each other in all our clumsy-sexy wannabe glory. When our mothers took the rolls to Bartell Drugs, we swooped in to pay with our meager allowances. “Nothing to see here!” became our motto then.
□ Opal at church, who tended all the ferns in the sanctuary, preferring to talk to plants over people. I needed something for my school service credit, and fern care didn’t seem too hard. “It’s more than misting and trimming,” she snapped. “You have to listen to them. Who in the world could become this effusive, this resplendent—” stroking their fronds—"without feeling heard?” Who indeed.
□ Here in South Florida, all the earth-friendly advisors recommend native groundcover like frogfruit and sunshine mimosa. Grass is “water-heavy” and “high-maintenance” by comparison, they are quick to remind. But sometimes still when I close my eyes, I’m standing barefoot on the soft front lawn in Fauntleroy, always thick and somehow always cold, camellia blossoms scattered around, metal wickets, too, all the rainbowed (they didn’t mean Pride there) croquet balls, and a little patch of clover the grown-ups have yet to find.
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I love "hermit crab" essays, and I've been experimenting with increasingly challenging "shells" over recent years, inspired in large part by the students I teach and the creativity they bring to our lyric essay and hybrid forms classes. Childhood games hold a lot of potential for this kind of writing since their rules are familiar to almost everyone, but there's also a sweet satisfaction that comes from bending those rules toward literary ends. One of my new book projects is tentatively titled Fun and Games, where I hope to probe some serious subjects from within deceptively playful shells. For instance, I've used hopscotch as a way to explore the complexities of our healthcare system and musical chairs to write elegies, with each disappearing chair marking the absence of someone from my life. In 2024, on a visit to Knoxville, Tennessee, I came across the "World's Largest Rubik's Cube," and I haven't been able to get that three-dimensional puzzle out of my mind. What would a hermit crab essay in the form of a Rubik's cube look like? What subject matter would emerge as I wrote into the nine sides of each of those six colors? The only restriction I imposed on myself was that the color in question could not be explicitly named in the section to which it belongs. The order of colors is random—white, yellow, red, orange, blue, green—and I was as surprised as anyone by the memories and associations that bubbled up.
Julie Marie Wade is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Florida International University in Miami. Her newest collections are the memoir Other People’s Mothers (University Press of Florida, 2025) and Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla for the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry and winner of the 2026 Silver Medal in Poetry at the Florida Book Awards. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats.
