Rumi and the Red Handbag

by Shawna Lemay

  While I was drinking in the contents of the tiny box, turning the purse over in my hand, Ingrid-Simone recited these lines from Woolf. Then, just as she was saying, in a much better British accent than I managed, —you must see the flinging, the flinging, you must look them through, my love, I noticed her embroidered signature below the word capacious: I.s. In crimson and unmistakable, however infinitesimal.

  I opened the clasp, feeling like Alice in Wonderland when she had grown very tall. Instantly I imagined the conditions in which this little work of art had been made. I imagined Ingrid-Simone’s apartment—I knew that much, that she lived in an apartment. Once she told me that she had hung swaths of fabric everywhere. To walk into the kitchen you had to walk through layers of Indian silk in pinks, yellows and oranges, some with gold sequins.

  She took the purse from me then, I was taking too long. —Hold out your hand, she said, and I did, smiling what was probably a drunken smile, hoping that no one would come into the store and ruin the moment. Later I found out that she had locked the front door. —Who cares, she said, —if someone can’t come in and browse, run their hands over the rows of jackets and pants as a child would run a stick along the rungs of a metal fence. She was not afraid of being caught out, though I admit, it made me feel uneasy when I found out.

  In the palm of my hand fit, all in miniature:

  a letter complete with postage stamp, addressed to Vita SackvilleWest.

  a netting filled with heartshaped stones, which were, in fact, heart shaped candies, whittled down and painted

  a white flower

  a cigarette in its holder.

  a moth

  a copy of Ulysses

  magazine clippings

  a portrait of Virginia Woolf done by Vanessa

  a pencil, the one she had bought while streethaunting five hundred pounds

  a candle stub

  a diary, bound in boards to the proper specifications—the cover being a marbled Florentine paper.

  She handed me a magnifying glass, about the size of my eye. I opened the diary, and within I found several quotations about the soul transcribed from Woolf’s diary which, squinting, I slowly read aloud, Ingrid-Simone mouthing the same words as though she couldn’t help herself from doing so.

  “As for the soul; why did I say I would leave it out? I forget. And the truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.”

  “But oh the delicacy and complexity of the soul—for haven’t I begun to tap her and listen to her breathing after all?”

  “I want to give the slipperiness of the soul. I have been too tolerant too often. The truth is people scarcely care for each other. They have this insane instinct for life. But they never become attached to anything outside themselves.”

  I later underlined these quotations in my copy of Woolf’s diaries. But at that moment, I was overwhelmed. And also uncomfortable. This gift was so personal and a very large part of me liked to keep my distance from people. Why was that? Oh sure, I had been burned by this friend or that, who hadn’t? Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that had caused me to quite lose faith in humankind, nothing so drastic, though I had really given up on the idea of friendship and felt I was growing too old for kindred spirits. I sensed, perhaps, that I meant more to her than I thought she could mean to me. I was born wary. I just was. And whenever I talked myself out of that wariness on the grounds that it was plainly foolish, I got burned. I got sent a flaming email or found myself backing away, slowly, carefully, having discovered something unsavoury. I had spent far too much time analysing the nature of women’s friendships when I should have been doing something productive, like looking for a decent way to make a living that didn’t ravage the soul, as this job would do without the fine company of Ingrid-Simone.

  Like Woolf, I had an insane instinct for life. I couldn’t become too attached to anything outside of myself. But when someone gives you a gift like this...well, it blew my mind. The craftsmanship, the time that went into making it, the talent, and the generosity of spirit were extraordinary. And when I said this, she replied, —Oh, yes… my very obscure talent, not too difficult to be generous with that then, is it? And smiled her becalming smile, downplaying the whole thing, laughing at herself. And then, more seriously, she said, —what I’ve tried to do is to put the breath of her soul, the delicacy, the complexity, in that streethaunting bag. And, hmm. I don’t know if I’ve done that, but I’ve tried, I tried to feel it, to breathe a certain way when I made it. When I designed it. I tried to put the quest for the pencil into that bag. The deep walking breath of a woman such as Woolf. Or maybe Mrs. Dalloway. The sort of even and hearty and yet delicate breath of a woman who goes questing for a pencil at night, or stops to buy her own flowers, the insane harmony of that. Do you know it’s true, people scarcely care for each other, but it doesn’t have to be that way, does it?

  —Now. Just put it away, take it. Don’t think about. Hmm? It was just one of those ideas I had, and I couldn’t stop until it was finished or meant something and I thought it might to you.

  So, I put it away and she unlocked the front door and suddenly the store was full of customers asking for this or that, saying they had an occasion for which they needed a dress immediately, and the dressing rooms were full, the cash register busy, and we scurried around after people, finding sizes and hanging up discards. Me, intermittently watching Ingrid-Simone very kindly directing a woman with frighteningly pulled back facial skin and protruding backbones away from the feathered gowns and toward a soft grey flowing number. I admired this, since I was too tired to care so much. Not that I wanted people to leave the store with something they looked terrible in, but I lacked the ability to direct them, to manoeuvre them toward what might flatter. Instead, I rang in purchases and helped ladies find sizes, colours, skirts and jackets. Ingrid-Simone was the creative one, adding things to dressing rooms, draping a scarf over the arm of a woman holding a green dress, pointing out a matching purse or mentioning a sash or belt that would enhance the garment. This went on until closing time.

  ***

  What a beautiful thing, this gift. I took it home and sat for a long time in my turquoise chair before taking off my tall boots. I took up the pen I had left on the wobbly side table and retrieved the notebook I had in my handbag. I set the box on the table and began to write and write. The next day I repeated some of what I wrote to Ingrid-Simone. A condensed version, less fragmented. I was afraid. I wrote that down on one page.

  Why was I afraid? I thought about past friendships. I thought about what Derrida said in his book Politics of Friendship. A book I had bought on a whim, trying to feel intelligent during a certain emotionally crushing breakup with a fellow grad student friend, which is perhaps an entirely unique category of friendship. Left on my shelf for years and never read, I only took it down when I began working at Theodora’s. I found it sitting on the table by the door, the table that looked similar to the one Jane Austen had written on. I picked it up and thumbed through, reading the bits I had underlined. “The two concepts (friend/enemy) consequently intersect and ceaselessly change places.” Is this true I wondered?

  I had vowed to give up on friendship. I had. What precipitated this, in short, was that the last several close friendships I had had with women had gone miserably wrong, though I do not exactly think of them as enemies now. Each went odd, askew for a different reason. One of them because my idea of a close friendship was rather more Georgic—I had wanted to write letters and be close in the manner of Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra. And she had wanted the relationship to be more Sapphic. I could not try things on for the sake of it or because it was fashionable. I had felt it would diminish my friend, were I to merely pretend interest in caressing her, in being caressed by her.

  Another woman I thought I was close to wrote me a flaming email that seemed to come from nowhere. Obviously she had been fuming about
me for ages and I foolishly had been utterly dumb to it. I was too opinionated; I didn’t appreciate her enough or cheer her on properly. I questioned her activities, as I might call into question a situation in a literary text. Maybe we were too much the same and maybe I should have spent more time analysing my faults or my shortcomings but my immediate reaction was just to run. To avoid. To stay as far away as I could from this person. Which was difficult at a small university.

  I didn’t leave the university because of her. I left in truth because I could not, did not want, to overcome my extreme shyness. As part of the program, I needed to teach a class. I wouldn’t always be able to hide behind research assistantships or the copyediting of obscure scholarly periodicals. As a professor, I would be constantly teaching classes. I knew this going in. And I knew that it would destroy me. I had barely managed to attend a class, participate in it, without crumbling. Mainly I had sat at whatever conference table I found myself and tried to assume an expression of intelligence. I had volunteered small opinions when I could but even the most miniscule threat of being called upon froze my brain, which of course made it all worse. When called on, I had mumbled, blank and stupid. How could I formulate thoughts, when my brain was in a panic state?

  When all eyes around the table made their way to me, I could feel myself burning. My palms were clammy. But maybe what went on internally was more interesting. I felt as though I had been boiled down to an essential truth. An internal dialogue, impossible to examine, ensued: Can’t. Must. Say something. Deflect. Turn your answer into a question. Lips won’t move. Heart beating. Say something you wrote down in your notes, unconnected. Try to connect it. Stop the redness, breathe. More redness instead. Very warm. Look, the person across from me has violet eyes, actually violet. The question. Directed at me. What was it? They’re all looking. I appeared deep in thought until now. Uncomfortable. Any longer and they will know. They will know. I’ve lost what we were discussing. Change the subject. Keep it short. Ask another student something, relate it to what they said, so they can pick up the thread. Bail me out. Might faint.

  A white light always arrived and saturated the mind. So that looking out, there was a blindness, a holiness that I wanted to go into, to delve deeper into, but instead, the rules of society forced me to attempt to swim, dampfeathered, against the light’s brilliant current.

  Being put on the spot and failing to express myself was made worse by the aftertremors. The inward kicking of self. The shrinking, the cringing. This was not something easily expunged. At home alone, lying in bed, a moan would escape. A phrase I had uttered, a thought that had escaped me, would arrive in my mind, a phantom, haunting me, and I would respond involuntarily with a deep, low moan that I wouldn’t always recognize as my own. Sometimes I needed to rock myself back and forth, a babe, swaddle myself and breathe, until the moment when I could return to my childhood.

  Aspects of my shyness tormented me. And yet I did not give it up. I thought shyness allowed me to look at flowers more closely, spring grass, and the light that rested on leaves illuminating their delicate veins. I was sensitive to the way snow fell, the rate of it, the shape of the flakes, I could feel it under my skin, falling into the cold parts of me, into the warm. I understood snow melting onto spring grass utterly and completely. A patient form of madness, shyness is, and I wanted to live it as one lives certain flowers, the hibiscus for example.

  I told Ingrid-Simone about my shyness and she said, —I think I completely understand. I told her how I thought it was fated that I would end up working at Theodora’s. I felt there was something preordained about it. I told her about my mother, who was extremely agoraphobic. Which didn’t really have much to do with shyness on her part but maybe did for me. Mostly I negligently communicated with my mother via snail mail. Letters. I tried to write her long, beautiful letters. I chose stamps with flowers on them at the post office. I embellished with movie stubs, candy bar wrappers, dried flowers. I enclosed small packets of spice. Miniature envelopes filled with pollen, sand, threads of saffron. We both pretended it was normal to want to stay indoors. To order groceries online.

  Sometimes I mailed the letters, sometimes I went to her door and knocked. The doorbell startled her so badly. I knocked and knocked and then waited. Could feel her looking out windows. I stood back so she could see it was me, pretending that I couldn’t feel her eyes. Usually she let me in and we sat at the kitchen table and drank tea. Other times she couldn’t face it. Opening the door, I suppose. Me. Or maybe it wasn’t me. I never took it personally. When she opened the door to someone, the rest of the universe came in too. And all of the dark and secret spaces within that person entered as well. The fears that made someone keep secrets. And she had enough fears of her own.

  On one of my recent visits, I told my mother that as a child I was torn between two fantasies. I wanted to fly, and as I walked home from lunch, I would look up and see a seagull, and imagine that I was that bird. I flew those five blocks home in my mind’s eye, I soared, cutting through the air cleanly, on my glossy and pristine white wings, and would always be mildly surprised when she asked me why it took me so long. It had seemed to go by so quickly.

  But the other childhood fantasy I had was that I could disappear. That I could blink my eyes a certain way and disappear from sight. Then, in school, when the teacher started asking questions, casting an eye about, I could just blink. First I would become luminous and then there would be that same feeling, as if disappearing into flight. I would be sitting in a place of silence; I could close my eyes and be the milky quiet. And maybe when I was dreaming up this scenario I enacted my own disappearance, for who could see me in my daydreams, alone? How liberating it was, how comforting, to drift into an inner quiet, sinking down into one’s self, one’s truest most liquid self, so that all through life it was possible to return to this milky embrace, to be saved by it, to have recourse to it, floating for a while, remembering without words, without warbling, this possibility of being unencumbered and uninfringed upon. So that, emerging, I always felt as if I were on the verge of inventing something wonderful, like selfpropelled flight or the most marvellous flavour of candy, or being the first to discover a certain delicious slant of light, another realm.

  The strange thing about having tea with my mother was, once you were in, once you crossed the threshold, all seemed normal. She lived a completely normal existence in one way. Her house was clean and orderly but not obsessively so. It was comfortable. We sat at her kitchen table and drank Red Rose tea and she put out a couple of cookies that she baked, usually something pretending to be healthy, oatmeal raisin or pumpkin spice. When I asked if she had everything she needed, or if I could bring her anything next time, she always laughed and waved her hand. —Oh no, everything comes to me these days, so simple, she said. —I can get anything, food, clothes, magazines, books, all on the internet. And she always dressed nicely, plainly, but nice. Her clothes fit well. She wore shoes in the house. They showed some sign of wear but were always perfectly clean, like the gym shoes you have in elementary school.

  ***

  We really began telling each other things about ourselves, Ingrid-Simone Stephens and I, after she gave me Woolf’s purse. Small divulgences that added up. Tesserae in a mosaic. It all happened there in the store, our relationship. Which seemed odd in a way, though I had done the same with friends at the university too. Never inviting anyone into my apartment, my home.

  —Oh, I just pretend to be sweet, I’m not at all. I’m really quite unscrupulous.

  She said things like this with a sly look and a laugh over her shoulder and walked quickly away. I found it immensely amusing when she said such things. I only saw rather magical evidence to the contrary. I thought I should be more patient and sweet with the customers, like she was, and told her so. Customers adored her and she was often getting compliments. Sometimes Florine even shared an email she got from one of them in praise of Ingrid-Simone. Certainly this never
happened to me.

  Ingrid-Simone told me she was always tracking the stars that appeared in movie adaptations of Jane Austen novels. —I care about them, she said. —I know it sounds more like I’m stalking them or have celebrity crushes on them, which naturally I do. And here she winked at me, laughing at herself, such an infectious laugh, pure music. —But you know, she said, I wonder about what happens after you’ve played Mr. Knightley or Mr. Darcy or Edmund or dear Wentworth or silly Edward Ferrars. So yes, I do like to take care of them, in my mind, I know it’s only in my mind. I want to make sure they’re content and serene. And I want to see if they go on being anything like the characters they portrayed. She took out several butterpat notebooks from her bosom and began flipping through them as one would thumb through a flipbook. I could barely make out her usual small handwriting. —And I keep lists on them, she said, —see, Ciaran Hinds, Colin Firth, Jeremy Northam, Hugh Grant, Jonny Lee Miller, especially him. Really, I’d like to make a movie with just them and scratch the heroines, you know? A movie about their lives after Austen, a documentary.

  And here she laughed loudly; I had never heard this particularly deep but giddy laugh from her. —I’m joking of course, she said. —But I read the books when I was just a kid in high school, we didn’t have a TV and I couldn’t afford to go to movies, hadn’t even heard of the BBC. I didn’t really know there were movies until much later. But I sat in the library and read Austen. All one summer. I lived at Hartfield and Pemberley. In humble cottages and glorious estates. I walked through mud to meet my sister. All that summer I was rescued and I feel I owe a massive debt to those who rescued me. Jane Austen, above all. But since I was the heroine, completely and naively so, I am quite in service to these characters. When I discovered the movies and watched them over and over I became oddly thankful to the actors portraying those gentlemen who made that one particular summer bearable, that summer when I became so obsessed with Elizabeth and Emma and Fanny and Anne and Elinor. I talked like them, in my head, had conversations in their voices with myself, I talked to all the gentlemen, asking their advice, and then I even began talking to the movie renditions, because they were closer somehow. Tried to talk myself sane you see. I was quite miserable and quite ready to leave this life, I’m not kidding.