Margot Demus
Soft Matter: A Collection of Essays
Excerpt
A sub-field of condensed matter physics, soft matter science entails the study of materials—gels or foams, blood or paint, the interior of metalloids—and how their atoms shapeshift when exposed to various temperatures.
O
I came across this area of physics, its definition, while perusing a tattered high school textbook, AP Physics 1B, last summer. Thereafter, I’ve been on a quest to make parallels between the delicate nature of soft matter materials like those mentioned above, and the delicate, not docile, nature of Black women—using myself as a muse in these first chapters. So here I am, positing that perhaps injuries sustained from trauma in relationships, forms of systemic oppression like institutional racism, acts of silencing like white feminism, but also intergenerational traditions, are the temperatures, if you will, that work to shape my identity as a Black woman.
O
CHAPTER THREE: SEA BREEZE AS A SHADE
I am always thankful to be able to retreat to my family’s bungalow during the summers. However, upon my entry, I acknowledged, as I always do, what I loathe about the Sag Harbor home that belongs to my Aunt Linda, my father’s older sister. She and her husband have lived in the village, in a home that rests on flat terrain five minutes from the beach, for nearly four decades. They purchased their plot of land, like many of their Black colleagues who are also attorneys, in the ’80s. After the home’s construction, my aunt, uncle, and their two children officially began summering there in ’85. But what I detest about the bungalow, plus many other homes in the village, is the distinct color scheme. I asked her once, when I was around ten years old, why everyone’s walls, every room, including the ones in our home, were “only white.” White living rooms. White kitchens. White bathrooms. White pantries. White foyers. But what prompted the question back then had to have come from an eerie aura that I felt, that I still feel, spewing from the whiteness on the walls.
There is an interminable sense of insincerity and coldness that emits from the white paint. It is as if the coats want to swallow your body whole, nosh then chew it up, limb by limb. Yes, rooms seal in, enclose our belongings and bodies, but the color of one’s walls in their home, I suppose, should create a sense of security, too. However, I more so feel exposed, needing to be extremely cautious, inside of our and others’ homes in Sag Harbor village. My aunt informed me, though, during that conversation back then, that colors have gradations. Therefore, what I was seeing was not the same shade of white paint in the corridors of people’s houses, but instead different hues of the color itself. Ivory. Cream. Eggshell. Foam. Lace. I remember asking her what was the shade that enveloped our living room where we were sitting, since we had begun to craft a white color palette of our own.
She took her plump index finger, a siren-red polish laid on its nail, and dragged it through the air, making a circular motion. She then pursed her lips and let me know that the paint chip was called “Sea Breeze.” And this particular shade of white—now imagining caressing a slab of wall of this tint with my chestnut-colored backs of my hands—is the color one might see when they gaze at the moon. It is only when I first glance at it that the shade appears to be pleasant. It is a mixture of a pearl’s pink and white hue, then ivory, adding in a hint of cream. The shade’s texture looks smooth, buttery from a distance. The streaks of paint probably melted into one another as they were run up and down my aunt’s bungalow’s walls with a paint roller decades ago, coated over more intimately with just a brush upon completion of the job. Sea Breeze, as a paint mixture, is weather and stain resistant. Therefore, it is part of either the semi-gloss or glossy paint family, since these two groups, as opposed to, say, matte paints, boast of shades that resist discoloration, fingerprints, and peeling. Considering that Sea Breeze always glistens, like a freshly waxed floor, I am confident that it is considered glossy.
The composition of all paints is made up of a binder, like acrylic; a solvent, like water, as well as a pigment similar to yellow zinc in Sea Breeze; and an additive, like limestone particles, to thicken the mixture. But Sea Breeze’s sheen, that glossy texture, is high enough to absorb similar chemical bonds within excess dirt that meets its coat. The sheen then exposes the incompatibles on the paint’s surface, non-white pigments, for instance, which can be wiped off with white vinegar or baking soda and water. Sea Breeze, as a shade, resists being weathered by nightly drafts and temperate heat during the day or being eroded due to clumps of sand tracked inside or red wine spilled by clumsy hands. Weather and stain resistant, the two reasons, my aunt claimed, she and many others who summer in the village committed to having Sea Breeze color almost all the walls in their homes.
I had begun to think about the soirée that would take place in the Grimes’s estate, which sits near the beach. And I remembered that their walls speak only of this shade of white paint, Sea Breeze, too. While planning my outfit, the tone of voice I would use, the attitude that I would display for the dinner party, all of which I felt needed to adhere to a set of Hamptons social mores, I thought about an irony between how Sea Breeze binds with elements around it and the village’s residents. And it became even more clear during the run-in with the elders at dawn, with those melodramatic formalities, the forced laughter, Judge Pettler’s irritatingly classist speech. How ironic it is, I thought, as I searched for a white cashmere sweater and jeans, that the composition of this white paint within these homes in the village welcomes, absorbs, what is chemically similar to the compounds in its mixture, resists what isn’t; and here I was, Black, like everyone else who vacationed there, pathetically trying to fit into the crowd. I thought I was of the same ilk as the judge, the doctors, Misses and Misters, because I am affiliated with a specific last name. But I felt as though I was a smudge on a surface, having to prove that I was worthy of being part of the Sag Harbor Black bourgeoisie. I decided, then, to play with this irony throughout that evening at the Grimes’s dinner party. Why not lean away from, rather than continuing to lean into, the subtle forms of elitism I’ve observed, while being trapped among the whiteness on the walls, at events throughout the years?
About the Author
Margot Demus, originally from Louisville, Kentucky, now residing in Midtown Manhattan, is a Black feminist scholar; her prose centers on the tenets of Black Feminist Theory itself. Her concentration in the Columbia MFA program is creative Nonfiction.