New England Review

The paint had rubbed off Cornelius Crawford's nose again, and I knew it was going to be my responsibility to repaint it before I went home. Two months before, I'd pointed out the missing paint on the very large nose of our animatronic Cornelius Crawford, who greeted visitors at the beginning of their tour of Crawford Caverns. Overalls-clad Cornelius sat in an old rocking chair and told tourists the tale of how he discovered the cave on his property in 1840. He'd noticed his cows gathering at the same spot on his farm day after day during an exceptionally hot summer. He walked past his cornfields to his cows and saw they were standing near the mouth of a cave, where cool air blew out. Cornelius crawled into the massive cave and discovered a world of limestone and stalactites and stalagmites—and a few bats—and two years later, Crawford Caverns opened to the public and soon became one of the top tourist destinations in the state of New York. Each day I was grateful that animatronic Cornelius told this origin story because it meant I didn't have to as I guided packs of tourists through a mile and a half of underground tunnels in Crawford Caverns.

Children liked to reach up and touch Cornelius's nose as they moved from the room where he spoke at the beginning of each tour to the elevators that lowered us one hundred and sixty feet into the cave. The children were drawn to the nose's largeness and bulbousness, leaving Cornelius a grayish proboscis, paint rubbed away, grease from many small, grimy hands rubbed on. And so every week I got a cotton ball, soaked it with alcohol, rubbed the grease off Cornelius's nose, then painted on a fresh layer of nose I created with a mixture of yellow ochre, cadmium red light, and titanium white, one of the formulas I learned for painting Caucasian flesh tones in my painting class my sophomore year of college.

When I turned in the receipt for reimbursement for the paints and a paintbrush, my boss, Dale, said, "Why'd you buy three paints for one nose?"

I told him the paints mixed together made a good color match for the rest of animatronic Cornelius's face, and Dale squinted at me as if I'd done something suspicious, like the fifteen dollars and forty-two cents I was asking for in reimbursement for three tubes of student-grade acrylics and one paintbrush was going to put Crawford Caverns, top tourist attraction in the shadow of the Helderberg Mountains, out of business. As if the sale of one lump of fudge from our gift shop wouldn't put that money right back into the coffers.

"There wasn't a tube of paint for skin color?" Dale said. [End Page 39]

"Actually," I began, but then I stopped myself because my younger sister, Felicity, told me one of the worst things a man can do is begin a sentence with the word actually. Besides, what I was planning to say about the fact that skin does not come in just one color would be something Dale, son of upstate New York, man who's probably never left the little hamlet where he was born, wouldn't appreciate hearing. In Crawfordville, skin pretty much does come in one color. My sister and I, with our peach undertones from being half Asian, provide some much-needed, let's say, local color.

"Well, it's your job now," Dale said, "to paint that nose when the gray shows through. Since you brought it up, I notice the gray all the time."

I nodded, despite his accusatory tone, as if making someone notice something beyond the end of their own nose was a crime.

After I finished wiping and painting Cornelius's nose, it was only four o'clock, but I didn't have anywhere else to go, so I went home. Or to my parents' home. I didn't expect that I'd be calling my childhood home my home again at twenty-two, after graduating from college...