Free Beach Colors by Shelley Noble Page A

blouses. All black.
    The kid had nailed it, she looked like a bird of prey.
    She was sure there must be some hand-me-downs or forgotten clothes in one of the closets. The Sullivans never threw anything useful away. So what if they might be a little out of date, a little faded.
    It didn’t matter. No one in the business knew where she was and no one at the shore cared that she wasn’t dressed in the latest style.
    She hit pay dirt in the bottom drawer of the dresser. There was a pair of shorts, not high-fashion, but still in wearable condition. Two pairs of stone-washed jeans and a pair of cutoffs. How about that, she did have cutoffs. A faded bikini that would do in a pinch. And three T-shirts with advertising across the fronts.
    She went back to the closet. Rummaged in the corners where she remembered seeing a red Windbreaker and rehung it front and center.
    She got down on her hands and knees and crawled into the closet, groped along the floor until she came up with a pair of pink flip-flops which she threw out into the middle of the floor. Her hand hesitated over a paint-splattered pair of sneakers, then she tossed those out, too.
    She was backing out of the closet when her elbow caught the edge of a large brown portfolio. It had been pushed to the very back corner and forgotten.
    She dragged it out and carried it to her bed.
    It was her first portfolio, dusty and a little frayed at the edges. She sat down on the spread and just looked at it, half curious, half hesitant to look inside. Carefully she untied the black ribbon that held it closed and opened the flap. She tipped it toward the bed and a sheaf of sketch papers slid out.
    On the top was a primitive self-portrait. She picked it up and shook her head. It did resemble her in a Grandma Moses sort of way, except the hair was a deep chestnut, long and totally straight instead of red and curly. In the corner was one of her early signatures.
    She put it aside and looked at the next. This was a seascape. The jetty was depicted in muddy grays on the left of the canvas. Little people dotted the bright yellow beach that spread across the bottom of the canvas.
    The next was another seascape, this time in a storm. The beach glowed almost white as if lightning had just lit the sky. Whitecaps jumped out at the eye from a midnight blue sea. Waves too large for the Sound, except in a hurricane, crashed on craggy rocks in a fireworks display of spray.
    “Not bad,” Margaux murmured to herself. The painting, as naïve as it was, drew her in, made her wonder what was happening just outside the frame. She riffled through the rest, each getting a little more proficient. The landscapes contained more people, and the people wore more colorful outfits.
    She was taken by surprise by the white wedding dress. It was one of her first fashion renderings. No landscape, no crowd of people. Only one model, one dress, with a wide billowing skirt and a train that ran off the page. It had a princess neckline with little dots Margaux thought must be seed pearls.
    She remembered the day she’d drawn it. She’d been at the library looking over the newest edition of Modern Bride . She must have been ten or eleven. She always sat at the same table and pretended it was her studio. Except there was this older kid who always sat across from her. She didn’t mind. He just read these big fat books and hardly ever moved or made a sound.
    She’d seen that dress in the magazine and pulled out her sketchbook and copied it. The model had Brianna’s long blond hair.
    Margaux smiled and looked at the next sketch. A flounced dirndl of large red, magenta, and pink flowers. The colors should have clashed, but they didn’t. Just popped the skirt off the page.
    Beginner’s luck, she thought as she looked through several more designs.
    She’d come a long way since those early days, but she felt akin to that young girl who’d created them. Colorful. Bold. Optimistic. Joyous. This is where she had started. This