Monet’s “Water Lillies”
My co-author in Paris, weeping in front of the huge panels at the L’Orangerie
My feelings about my co-author are profound. I knew her as a “larger than life” mom of the extremely popular and untouchably cool kids in my junior high and high school. My co-author was beautiful, smart, cultured, talented, funny and vibrantly alive. No wonder her children were the most popular — everywhere they went.
I didn’t know my co-author’s story, until I read the initial manuscripts of Paperdolls in 1991. I can’t imagine the Scott’s pain. The entire family. I wish I had been able to warn them about Hank. I wish I’d done more than standing up at Loraine and Hank’s wedding breakfast and spewing out the caustic joke about “hating the groom.”1
I still cry when I read what my incredible co-author wrote about the pain erupting from her soul in Paris, at the L’Orangerie:
One afternoon in Paris, I found myself alone in the L’Orangerie, alone in the rooms which display only the huge panels of Monet’s “Water Lillies.” I sat surrounded by them, in the center of the room, encircled by mauves and soft violets, blues and grays, all that amazing light. I wept. For the first time since February 14, I wept. Something broke inside me, some iron clot too deep to seek its own awareness.2
Only the strong can cry.3
See Paperdolls & Cowboy Boots, page 13
Carol Scott, Paperdolls & Cowboy Boots, page 69