Rumi and the Red Handbag

by Shawna Lemay

  —Every purse has its own, you know. Each one opens with a particular, though somehow familiar, exhalation. A puff, a grand dilapidated and sometimes obscure sigh. The scent of eucalyptus lozenges, or peppermint, or a powdery perfume. Sometimes there is a fragrant mossy scent. Foresty. Sometimes, pure sour cough. And here she said the word cough with just the hint of a cough.

  Quickly I became fond of her without meaning to, though I constantly encouraged myself to stay detached from everyone and everything in this store full of castoffs and whatsoever is fleeting. I would not let her meet with any yellow Mercedes. It occurred to me early on that she was trying to tell me as much as possible. She was spilling things out, unexpected things, as though just realizing how stuffed full she was and how no one would be saving what she held dear, what could be held dear. I put my hands out. I laced my fingers tightly together so the offerings would not slip through.

  She talked in a way that dying mothers, dying young, talk to their children. I had seen videos mothers with terminal cancer make for their small children, on talk shows, and had had my heart broken at three in the afternoon. How intently I listened to Ingrid-Simone, not least because I felt that this act—listening, listening itself—could prevent any possible collisions. I could fend off cars, if need be, herds of them.

  Was it dictation? A dictation of the soul? She was handing herself to me, the way you hand someone a tissue out of your purse, digging down, grasping the package in your hand, and drawing out triumphantly the cloudy tissue, waving it a second, airing it out.

  I returned home at the end of the day and tried to capture this—her sweetness, for that is what came through. Everything I could remember, I wrote down. I became more adept, more fluent, an unsanctioned amanuensis. Did I ask permission to do such things? I was only doing this to sort things out in my head, I told myself. And then the more I wrote down her, the more I remembered myself at that age. I got carried away and wrote down things I might have been thinking at her age, fifteen years ago. How could I not remember what I was thinking fifteen years ago? Why had I not recorded them then? Would she remember herself at this age? And failing to remember, perhaps I could at some future point bestow upon her my recordings with their increasingly ample liberties edited out.

  I talked myself into believing that I wasn’t stealing but preserving. I imagined the nice paper on which I would type up and print off the notes I took, the Japanese paper I would use for the cover, the ribbon I would use to bind it all. Yes, I infringed, embellished, but if I couldn’t quite remember myself at twenty, would she? I would hand it over in a handmade box and talk of rough sketches, smudges and debris, and the conjunction of artist and thief.

  I was fifteen years older than Ingrid-Simone and yet I thought of her as a daughter, though we as easily could have been sisters. Yes, she was a daughter. The love I felt was daughterlove, rather than sisterlove. I knew this though I had had neither sister nor daughter. For her to have been my daughter, my real daughter, I would have been seventeen years old when she arrived on this earth with its blue sky and swirling clouds, the skies of so many different colours. I wondered what the sky was like when she was born. What the scene was she saw through the window when her mother first showed her the great outdoors I imagined people did such things. Showed their newborns how glorious things are, despite how narrow and confined and limited our view happens to be. That nevertheless there is a chance, a window, and sometimes a bird will fly by, maybe the miracle of a hummingbird or a bumblebee or a dragonfly or a leaf. So there are surprises just like that, too.

  ***

  I often walked in the door of my apartment and, without taking off my shoes or my snowdamp winter coat, sat in the nubby turquoise armchair with dulled silver legs and took out the pad of large sticky notes from my bag and began writing. On a ceruleanblue sticky note, I wrote: she remembers names with blistering accuracy, names of ordinary people. People that appear in news stories, good Samaritans, the victim of a break and enter, an elderly woman who fell on the ice, a child who raises money for Tsunami relief. Martin Colrain. Martha O’Hara. Fabiana Levesque. All these she’ll remember. And even the customers in the store. She would read their names from a credit card and hand it back, thanking them by name, sincerely. Looking in their eyes. And a week later she would say, —remember Sandra Edmondson, who bought the lilac organza floorlength a couple of weeks ago? This evening bag would go perfectly. And she would dreamily outline the embroidery, lazily opening and closing the clasp, twisting and untwisting the round metal pieces in her fingers, rubbing them as though they were a crystal ball.

  ***

  Ingrid-Simone had the habit of softly beginning —hmmmmm. Hmm, she would say, and pause. As if pondering, or saying a mantra, somewhere between the two.

  ***

  Once, I came upon her at lunch. That is, I went looking for her, ran out with bare arms, leaving the store empty, taking the stairs in twos, and found her in the nearby coffee shop where she was sitting in the window, reading. She had forgotten to return to the store that unseasonably warm winter day, absorbed in what she called a vintage Harlequin romance. She had bought a huge armful of them at Value Village. I would have been embarrassed. Too embarrassed to read a romance in public, the reflection of the cover overlapping, doubling, wobbling, face onto face, décolletage concealing décolletage, the title repeating itself one line down in bright yellow in the frosted, dripping, sunny window for all to see as they walked by. I would have been embarrassed that I had fallen into the well of such a book and forgotten where I was supposed to be. Had I mentioned this, Ingrid-Simone might have said something like, —well, however are we to know precisely at any one moment in time what that means, where you’re supposed to be. Certainly she did not appear discomfited when I came to retrieve her, pulling her reluctantly from the story. I could see it was an effort for her to stop reading.

  —Oh, I know they’re stupid. But they’re so, hmm, impossible, you know? That it’s possible to believe, and also… Hmm. They set up an ache that is warm and perversely fulfilling. To know it’s impossible, anything that perfect, so well orchestrated, so full of coincidences. Silly. Whoever wrote the book must understand, at least, that however simple we are, this need to feel loved, we’re not alone in that. It’s a way to manage heartache too I think. You can let it out in dribbles and rein it back in just as the heroes have to rein in their passions at some point in the narrative. Captivating really, the collective energy that must be created, all these women sitting in their rooms writing these, for years and years, for decades, producing romances, so many of them. And then, all the women in turn reading them, just devouring them. Focusing on this one type of plot. Which so often seems to involve a Jane Eyre character and a male love interest slowly coming to recognize who the protagonist really is, when even she doesn’t quite know it herself. I suppose that is what overwhelms me. The sheer quantity of silence surrounding this moment, of identifying with this character who feels she will never be understood, knows it so thoroughly. Never be recognized. But then, but then, she is. She is. And besides, I want to know what they’re all going through. All these millions of women who read these things. What are they going through that they read these like candy?

  —Hmm. And all those people who automatically disparage romances, I don’t trust them, you know? What are they afraid of? The small fantasies of millions of women? I wonder.

  —I admit that what I really like about them is that they stop, they end, right at the moment before all the real things in life happen. I’m free to imagine blissful lives for them, even if sometimes I can’t. I appreciate the ones that have epilogues. What a lovely idea. Those are the romance authors I admire—they don’t leave things to chance. I once read a romance that had the most detailed epilogue. There was every certainty that those characters were going to be happy for generations. Generations! How sublime. How comforting!

  Then she stood and wrapped herself slowly
in her tweedy brown floorlength winter coat. She stood and I waited. Then we ran back to the store in the cold because I was wearing a dress, my plain grey dress that day, with lime green tights, and I hadn’t taken the time to drag out my coat to come find Ingrid-Simone, languishing with her crumbling book. The pages were even disintegrating as she read, falling out, the glue holding the book together eroding. When we got back to the store she got out a large elastic band and wrapped it around the book, which hid the noses of hero and heroine. I noticed the illustration of the woman; this must have been a cover from the 1970s. She had a crown of wild yellow daisies woven into her hair, which was loose and tumbling and waving, as all hair does for such women. This reminded me of Ingrid-Simone, though she didn’t at all look like this.

  —Just imagine, that we are so often standing beside someone, hmm, say, in the grocery store or at the bus stop, and they are, well, full, so full, just brimming with small fantasies and dreams. Isn’t that interesting?

  I thought I should point out the work being done by academics on the romance novel, their studies of gender inequities, empowerment, narrative reinscriptions, societal codes, and patriarchal discourse. We could have talked about the ways in which women portrayed other women or the history of the romance novel. But it was as though she were under a spell cast by her escape into this decrepit novel, into thoughts of imminent rescue, of being known and understood and cherished, and I was drawn into that spell somehow as well. Or I was reluctant to break hers.

  ***

  Back at the store, Ingrid-Simone polished an entire box of tangled vintage necklaces we had received that morning. Costume jewellery, it was once called. She told me she liked to take the bus to the University after work some days. To the Humanities library. Usually, she took the elevator right up to the fifth floor where all the books of literature and criticism are shelved. Other days she sought out the art books, or philosophy books.

  —It’s so interesting, everyone knows I’m not a student, I can tell. They look at me so oddly. Maybe it’s because I’m glowing. I feel like I’m emanating, oh, I don’t know what. But there are colours swirling all around me, because I know I’m about to find something. Saffron and turquoise, honestly, and then sometimes a sort of Venetian pink. It’s very beautiful. The library brings that out in me.

  —Anyway. What I do is I find a carrel that has a stack of books left in it. I never use the computer to find books. Sometimes I go to the shelves and wander through and see if any books fall out as I walk by. This really happens, honestly. Once a book fell right into my arms and I cradled it all the way to my carrel, nervously, worried that it might disappear.

  —Last night though, I read the most interesting book. I can’t remember the author’s name. Which is a pity, because I would like to look at this book again someday. I’m sure it will find me. Here is the thing she said that I keep repeating in my head: that she must write “as beautifully as love.” It made me wish I could write, you know? If I could write, oh, as beautifully as love. Of course, then I was thinking that maybe this thought was not entirely incompatible with what occurs in my crumbling pulp romances, my cottoncandy books. Of course, it’s not entirely compatible either, the writing is so syrupy and silly. But the intention, the intention. Is it possible, do you think, to live as beautifully as love?

  She said all this, drawing out the syllables as Audrey Hepburn might have, here and there, as she polished and untangled, her head at an angle. If Vermeer had painted her at this moment, he would have captured the face of a young woman, both wounded and serene. He would have painted the mound of glitz, the rhinestones and the gold and silver chains, and with just a few flicks of the brush, cobalt, ruby, indigo, emerald, he would have indicated the entanglement, the slender fingers imprisoned, so gently, softly. Maybe there would have been the slightest indication of those colours she feels swirling around her. Saffron, Venetian Pink, turquoise.

  ***

  I was never able to wear secondhand clothes, truth be told. There, I said it. I suppose that sounds strange. But I found they held too much of the person who wore them previously. I felt that the moment I tried a sweater on in the store, no matter how lovely it was, no matter how pristine, I felt various things—sometimes unhappiness, at other times smugness, selfrighteousness. I didn’t want any of it on me, the film of these grimy states of being. The terrible sadnesses, the mistakes, the abandonments. Sometimes I felt illness, or death, or despair. I suppose there was also happiness, joy, but that was more difficult to sense, I don’t know why. There was a residue of the places the previous owner had travelled, a smudge of the struggles they had had, of people they had embraced, a scent of the rooms they had lived in, however softly, however fearfully or belligerently or even kindly. The complications, the attachments, overwhelmed me. Intolerable. I could not drape myself in them.

  Once, I broke this rule and bought a heavily beaded scarf unlike anything I had ever seen. The fabric was tangerine on one side and the beads were fuchsia and buttercup and seashell pink. Flowers and little birds and stars. I wore it out to a restaurant one evening. I met a friend from the English department, the one person who didn’t think I was making a dreadful mistake by quitting or try to talk me into going back and completing my degree, and who didn’t mind being in the company of one who was so unfinished. We sipped some sparkling wine and were about to make a toast to the unfinished, to the abandoned, to the deliriously courageous, a toast to following your bliss, a line from Joseph Campbell that has made it onto fridge magnets and tshirts and decorative pillows. A line we subsequently laughed about, since working in a secondhand clothing store was not exactly what I would call following my bliss and had more to do with paying the rent.

  Nevertheless, I was enjoying the bubbles, when a woman walked up behind me and laid her hand at first lightly on the back of my neck, on the scarf, then tightened like a bird claw, and said, —this, as she picked up an end and let it trail through the fingers of her other hand, —belonged to my mother, may she rest in peace. She came around, then, and I saw her, her skin pulled tight, obscenely tanned in winter, with a vulgarity about the way she was dressed.

  —You bought it at Theodora’s, she said.

  —Yes, I replied.

  —Good! She uttered with gusto and walked away in a slow motion swirl. Was it good? I never wore it again without feeling her strong, old hand on my neck. My overactive imagination conjured up thoughts of the woman having killed her mother, tightening the scarf around her mother’s neck with those taloned hands of hers.

  The city was not so large; I could see this sort of thing happening all the time. These encounters. Oh, maybe the previous owner wouldn’t always say something but there would be looks. The feelings I had wouldn’t go away, not even after several washings, so I gave up on buying sweaters and certainly scarves.

  Ingrid-Simone didn’t share my squeamishness. She had a knack for putting brilliant outfits together. For dressing entirely in secondhand clothes and somehow making them all seem new and vivid as though she had stepped off a London runway.

  —Where did you get that dress? I asked her. She was wearing a lilac cotton and lace dress over seemingly expensive tattered jeans with high heels and a long, thin scarf patterned with a field of spring flowers around her swanlike neck.

  —Oh, very funny, she said. When she realized I was serious, she said, —from here silly, from here, of course. It came in last week in the same batch as all the lilac clothes. Remember the woman who was divesting of her lilac, smokeinfested wardrobe? Yes, I did. We had called it the ‘lilac smoke collection.’ No amount of steaming and freshening could expunge the scent, deeply held in the garments, but somehow Ingrid-Simone had purged the odour from her dress. On Ingrid-Simone, the colour deepened, had a smokier hue, more mysterious than when all the lilacs had hung on the rack together.

  In this way, she was someone new each day. One day she wore a grunge inspired, bohemian outfit; th
e next, her outfit was inspired by the 1950s with a pencil skirt, fitted jacket, pillbox hat, gloves. And yet another, she arrived wearing a black shirt, skinny black pants and black pointy flats with white socks, exactly like Audrey Hepburn in the movie Funny Face, where she had danced in a jazz club in Paris. To know Ingrid-Simone was to surrender to her many possibilities. I often thought a picture ought to be taken every morning of the way she dressed and how she breezed in through the door, or entered slowly, catlike, or briskly, or swishily, or as though afraid someone was following her. Capturing each outfit combined with the way she entered the store, that would be a work of art of some importance.

  ***

  —Exactly why did you leave the university? Ingrid-Simone asked the next day. As I tried to explain, my reasons became all tied up in knots, though at the same time they began to clarify a little for me. There’s hardly ever just one reason for doing something that is both so small in the grand scheme, but monumental, in the life of one person. Maybe at the core, I felt fraudulent, or perhaps the academic process seemed fraudulent. The idea, perhaps, that one person can teach another person how to live, how to read this life of ours, even if through novels and poems, seemed illogical or misleading. In the end, after obtaining my degree, I would have had to sell myself as a teacher, more than as a scholar or researcher, which is how I saw myself. Teaching would include revealing those literary secrets I didn’t feel privy to, or secrets which were not my own to tell. Teaching included putting novels on the stand and questioning them until the truth was wrung from them. Until a confession was extracted.