Rumi and the Red Handbag

by Shawna Lemay

  Rumi and the Red Handbag

  Rumi and the Red Handbag

  a novel by

  SHAWNA LEMAY

  Copyright © 2015 Shawna Lemay

  All rights reserved

  Palimpsest Press

  1171 Eastlawn Ave.

  Windsor, Ontario. N8S 3J1

  www.palimpsestpress.ca

  Book and cover design by Dawn Kresan. Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro and Edwardian Script, and printed offset on Rolland Natural at Coach House Printing in Ontario, Canada. Edited by Aimée Parent Dunn.

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Palimpsest Press would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program. We also acknowledge the assistance of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Lemay, Shawna, 1966–, author

  Rumi and the red handbag / Shawna Lemay.

  ISBN 9781926794266 (PBK.)

  I. TITLE.

  PS8573.E5358R86 2015 C813’.54 C20159018072

  “I too am: is.”

  —Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

  “Even mountains hang on strings. The ‘isness’ of things is miraculous: that there is something rather than nothing.”

  —John O’Donohue

  I.s.

  At sixteen, I tenderly resolved on my pseudonym. Shaya Neige. I knew I needed one if I were ever to write anything. Much later I discovered that this name, the last of the hundreds of possible autographs beginning with the sound of a hush, I would, with utmost seriousness, gently and savagely write in a notebook, was very close to the name Chaya, the name given to the author I most revere, Clarice Lispector, when she was born. A name she kept until she moved to Brazil.

  There is a thing I do with names. I look for the secret in them. And maybe that is why I took the job at Theodora’s Fine Consignment Clothing in the basement of the fusty brick building. I wanted to approach someone named Theodora, though it turned out there was no such person. I still like to think of her though and imagine her walking down the crumbling brick stairs, holding the surprisingly elaborate wrought iron railing. Gliding into the store with a Danish pastry in her hand or a vintage birdcage held high. But no. When I first walked into the store that winter day with my résumé, merely toying with the idea of working there, I met a young woman behind the counter. I was compelled to ask her name as I could see she was daydreaming, breathing the shallow mist of daydreams deeply into her small lungs. Lungs that, when she was younger, her doctor had xrayed. She remembered him tapping, pointing at her illuminated lungs, saying—these are very undersized, undeveloped, strange.

  Maybe for a short time I even thought of her as Theodora, but she was Ingrid-Simone Stephens. Never, I learned, just Ingrid, or just Simone, but Ingrid-Simone. I don’t know whether she made up her own name or it was given, but she wrote her initials thus—I.s.

  I will tell you straight away, you should know that I refuse to tell her story if the ending is sad. Like Macabea, there but for the grace of God go I, run over by a yellow Mercedes. Speaking of yellow, did I mention that Ingrid-Simone Stephens wore a bright yellow daisy in her hair the day I met her? The temperature was thirty degrees below, at least, and she had had a flower in her hair. The memory of a fresh flower in a young woman’s hair at the beginning of an early winter has made me resolve that, in contrast to what I wrote before, this story will verge toward honesty.

  I would get to know her slowly. Writing this, I will slowly get to know her. I reserve the right to tell myself this; I reserve the right to tamper with my fragile and trembling remembrances, with my often illegible notes. After I was hired, we were mostly left alone. We were alone, the two of us, that entire expansive winter, with its record cold spells and abundant snow. The owner of the store, whose name was actually Florine, received the consignments, the secondhand gowns and cocktail dresses, the blouses and scarves, the shoes and purses, in the rear of the building. She steamed the dresses and put them on a rack, pushing them, rolling free and headlong, out onto the floor. I looked after the dresses and most of the other clothes. Ingrid-Simone took hold of the accessories.

  One day I came in just a couple of hours late due to a doctor’s appointment. The clothes, which had previously been arranged by size, had all been moved and were now arranged by colour. I was stunned. The store was transformed. What had been a dingy mass of mournful discards was a singing glorious array. I laughed out loud when I walked into the store, stomping the snow from my saltstained boots, my eyes wide. I twirled around arms out, quite incredulous, gaping at the lime greens, the reds, the oranges, and all the shades of blue. It felt tropical. Ingrid-Simone watched from the front desk, smiling. And she said, —you know I did that just to make you happy.

  How did she know I was unhappy?

  She was maybe twenty years old when we worked together at Theodora’s and I felt for a while that I had joined her quest merely by watching from the sidelines. To hear her plan and dream, you see, helped to pass the long days. She was driven to take a journey and desperately wanted to visit the Museum of Bags and Purses in Amsterdam. Sometimes she seemed absurdly frantic when she talked about it.

  —If I can’t get there, I don’t know what I’ll do. Did you know that there’s a handbag at the museum, covered entirely with peacock feathers? It’s exquisite, I’m telling you, it’s divine. If I could open that particular bag and breathe in its breath, that would be something. Rhapsody! I’m not saying they’d let me, but maybe I could have someone open it or tell me what was inside it when they brought it to the museum. They probably catalogue such things. Wouldn’t you catalogue such things if you worked at the Museum of Bags and Purses? I’m sure there are lists and lists of things that came out of the museum’s handbags. Maybe they leave some things in? Just for the sake of authenticity. Or to keep people wondering. Worn down lipsticks, their colourful peaks and valleys, the nerves and desires and bold confidence of the women who applied them. Humbug candies, maybe there are one or two of those in the black leather one shaped like a huge ocean liner, the Normandie, it is.

  Ingrid-Simone had rescued a chaotic jeweltoned sequined evening bag that had arrived in the store and used that to collect her mad money, as she called it. Her interest in handbags was contagious, grave and exuberant, but I eventually found that her true obsession was the soul. “What is the soul?” asks Rumi, the poet. “I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks.” She quoted this to me, I, who has no memory for quotations but loves poetry. I asked her for quotes when the store was empty and she would hop up on the high front counter in her short black skirt, sitting with her netted legs dangling, and recite.

  —The Rumi, I would say, and she obliged.

  It was odd. I was mesmerised by this young woman immediately, the soft careful way she talked, slow and deliberate but chocolaty, smoky, you know, like a deep red wine—plummy. I had dropped out of a doctoral program and had internalized my identity as a failed scholar quickly. This new identity did something to me, compressed my spine, and all of the fear I harboured did not turn into fearlessness but rather an agitated despair. I often felt lost and dizzy and numb and stupid all in a rush. I became suddenly interested in all the nuances of my own dreams rather than with anything I had ever read, I was liquid where before I had been solid. And here was this eloquent and passionate woman, largely unschooled, who perhaps had a better sense of how to seek and compile and delve than I ever had. For I feared improper tangents, going off rapt for long
stretches in the wrong direction, wasting time. For Ingrid-Simone, the idea of hoarding thoughts, holding so many threads of ideas like cupped water as you knelt, knees grinding into finest gravel, thirsty by a mountain stream, did not terrify or oppress but instead exhilarated her.

  I knew I would always be distant from her, but this distance was immediate and irrevocably intimate, filling me with the most intense apprehension for random instants. I was being born in her vibrant and remote presence, rising up awkwardly into the quiet swan of myself and no one saw it. This birthing was somnolent, unreachable, and yet profound and mysterious. I felt elegant, sublime. She had a nonchalant way of accepting, not just who I was, but also who I was becoming. I felt engulfed by a joyous inebriate inhalation. Did I imagine such things? Such feelings? I felt I had become part of a prayer, or a mantra, or a few bars of a Chopin prelude.

  She was so young and so calm. Occasionally I thought I saw glimpses of myself in her, but I, I have always been nervous, skittish, timorous. I had been researching my dissertation all summer, that expansive, luscious, green summer before I came to Theodora’s, the summer before I fled. Before I chickened out, as one colleague named this act of surrender. The topic, which I was yet refining, was the secrets of women writers, and by extension, the secrets of women characters in literature. I was trying to find the connections between the two. I had difficulty narrowing down which writers, but this paled compared to the problem of writing about secrets. Sometimes they were revealed, sometimes they were hinted at, but often it was just something I felt in my bones.

  I was overwhelmed by how well women could conceal things, hide and cover tracks, by how very elusive they could be. There were the public secrets, the ones let out of birdcages painted white. And juicy ones too, that were used, maybe subconsciously, to hide other ineluctable secrets, smaller more precious and damning secrets.

  I compiled lists of known secrets: Charlotte Brontë’s unrequited love. The toothache she had had when she began writing Jane Eyre. The two diaries that Anais Nin kept: red for Henry Miller, green for her husband, Hugh. And I thought a lot about burned or destroyed letters and—their potential secrets—Jane Austen’s letters burned selectively by her sister Cassandra, for example. Scholars surmise that the author of Sense and Sensibility had, at points, described an illness with a rather unbecoming precision.

  I also compiled lists of possible secrets: Affairs. Unrequited love. Children given up for adoption. Hidden sexual orientation. Yearnings. Leanings. Lapses. Injuries inflicted. Unrealized dreams. Skeletons in the closet. I also thought about the changing nature of secrets. How our modern sensibilities cause us to react differently to secrets when found out. We are not so easily shocked by them now. But still, they are kept.

  The idea of betraying these secrets once discovered, once intuited and scraped out of dark places, out of carefully hidden spots, contributed to my collapse, my flight.

  I was dealing with the personal repercussions of having left the university, of the label ‘ABD,’ of feeling that I had betrayed an institution and my soul. My psychic discomposure was taking up residence in the pores of my skin. I was nakedly visible and yet felt dispirited, as though I were disappearing. And yet.

  I considered going back, knowing that I couldn’t. I considered carrying on writing about the secrets of women writers and literary characters from the 18th to 20th centuries through a framework of genetic criticism —the branch of criticism that looks at authorial intention via the DNA of a manuscript, its origins in scribbles, strikeouts, and marginalia, and the layers of the writing itself. I was interested in the genesis of the text, the soul of it, you could say. The rough draft, the handwritten text. The glimpses into a nascent state were thrilling to me. The study of genetic criticism, it has been said, is the study of writing in the process of being born. I was drawn to the scribble, those marks which indicate the pause of the pen or pencil. A thought, being formed, the hand poised above the page. Signs of the writer. At such moments, you feel more connected to the writer than you ordinarily would while reading their work. Scientific and at times merely descriptive on the surface, this type of scholarship had a magical force that drew me to it.

  I considered writing this from outside the institution, outside the academy. I imagined myself just finding out the facts, making lists of the marks I found, notating them, and writing nothing. I wanted to know, really, if I was capable of keeping secrets. And I was worried I would find out too much or that there were, after all, no secrets of the sort that I posited. Or that perhaps all of my hunches and scant evidence was a sign of my own madness. So maybe, maybe, with all this roiling in my head, it was difficult for me to see that Ingrid-Simone herself was carrying a secret.

  Who doesn’t, of course, carry secrets, a pouch of butterfly wings, or paper burned in a fire, the dark flesh rising up from a bonfire in the middle of summer. Some you forget are secrets, having no one to reveal them to anyway. Like how I first met Florine, the owner of this secondhand emporium full of battered cocktail dresses, hawked plumes, outgrown gowns, everything verging on très unfashionable. Had she remembered and kept this secret to herself too, or had she not recognized me?

  I used to take extremely long, solitary walks. I walked out to meet my loneliness, to take care of it, to speak with it rhythmically and gently, as one would rock a baby. I would strike out from the university that fall, when I had begun to contemplate bolting from those halls. Once, I found myself at the edge of the city, by a highway and a narrow stretch of farmland. There were huge rounds of hay, freshly baled. The scent from them was heaven. Yes, I was that sentimental, I imagined heaven had a corner that smelled just like fresh mown hay and I stood with my back to one for quite a while, drinking bottled water from the pouch I had slung over my shoulder, just breathing in the clover and timothy. When I looked up, for I must have closed my eyes or been so deep within my reveries, I didn’t see the bicycle until it was nearly upon me. Nor was I completely visible to the cyclist. A woman was pedalling in a standing position on the dirt trail, wobbling on the strict unevenness. A faint cloud of dust arose. She was wearing a lumberjack shirt and a white scarf on her head. She seemed to have arrived from another time and place, the 1950s maybe, near a small town. Even the bicycle was from some other era, having no gears, no fancy gadgets. Maybe there was a silver bell. The bicycle was blue with a white flourish for the chain guard. I think she wouldn’t have stopped but my presence against the hay bale surprised her and set her off balance.

  And though she was surprised, she said, I’m sure she said, —Hello, my name is Maureen. How pleasant it is today, and added, unhurriedly, softly, as though she were speaking to a child clasping a bouquet of daisies, —I love riding in this field, sometimes I’ll see deer and coyotes.

  —Do you live near here? I asked her.

  She floated her hand vaguely and said, —Not really. Then we went our own ways, me following her for a bit, watching her struggle, wobble, and pedal on the dusty trail before taking the exit that led into the suburbs, back to the busy road with the convenience store, where I would buy a solemnly cold bottle of cream soda, something I hadn’t had since I was a child.

  I thought of it as the Cream Soda Day. And I often found myself wondering about Maureen, who she was, where she had come from and how she seemed so much at home in that field, in herself. I kept thinking about the softness of her eyes, the checked flannel shirt, the way she seemed to welcome me into the field. I remember the puff of dust that followed her when she departed. Staring at the dust, watching it settle, long after she had disappeared. I remember thinking she rode the bicycle as though she were wearing glass slippers; the glass, I imagined, was millefiori.

  When I arrived for my interview months later at Theodora’s, I recognized her, shocked, but I said nothing because she said nothing. What could one say? I thought, dust settling, I thought, cream soda. I was yet breathing the reluctant and relieved escape of dust and old paper of
the beloved library I had given up. Had I given it up, walked away? Was the library still breathing me? I felt as though I had been on a respirator and the library had been my source of air, that my obscure and delicious research supplied my blood with necessary oxygen. I adored these puppy breaths I could not comprehend, was not asked to comprehend. I had not factored in this loss, this bereavement, into the possible effects of my escape.

  ***

  Even at the beginning, Ingrid-Simone told me of her discoveries, breathily surreptitious, waiting for the store to be empty, for the racks to stop their swaying, or for a woman heaped up with garments to try on, some of which were guaranteed to be illfitting, and which would occupy a decent amount of time. Ingrid-Simone always tossed in some matching shoes and draped cheap necklaces and bangles over the heavy curtain, winking at me over her shoulder. She would then withdraw a small notebook, no larger than a pat of butter, from her cleavage. She had a strange talent for writing elegantly in an incredibly tiny but perfectly legible hand. This was not a feat as far as she was concerned and she never allowed me to make anything of it at all.

  “The word ‘soul’ is an immortal word,” says Gaston Bachelard. “In certain poems it cannot be effaced, for it is a word born of our breath.”

  —Is not that amazing? The word ‘soul’ I’ve always felt is exactly like breath. You don’t say it like a breath but you feel it as one. You think it as breath. The word soul in your head is a breath. Does that make sense?

  —Yes, I found myself saying to her, —yes. And I thought: how does she know Bachelard? I had barely heard of Bachelard. How did she know to hold the word soul in her mouth, in her head, so?

  ***

  Ingrid-Simone was responsible for the accessories that came into the store. Piles of shoes that needed scuffed bottoms washed or faux jewels that needed polishing. She also undertook a task I could not, not having the stomach for the grit and residue of others, of going through the boxes of purses that Florine would, sighing and shaking her head, dump unceremoniously on the counter behind the front desk. She cleaned the exterior first, saving the interior for last. Savouring, she said, the moment when she opened the purse. It was a torture she allowed herself, a sigh’s benediction.