Rumi and the Red Handbag

by Shawna Lemay

  How is one to do this? I had underlined this sentence and circled the word soul and that is what Ingrid-Simone read aloud, —“The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.”

  —But how difficult to empty one’s soul! She knew this immediately. And then she made the connection between the emptying of the purse and the emptying of the soul, and her name, in part, on the book.

  —It seems a message, a darling message. We could call the message, Sorrow. But we won’t, she said with a lopsided smile. —No, we won’t. I refuse. And still I did not ask her at that moment, “What are you going through?”

  I did not ask.

  Later I found myself thinking deeply on this subject—how one can feel compassion and not act on it, not voice it.

  We put the contents back into the purse. She took my mangled feather and placed it as a marker on page 115. I wedged the book back into my handbag, along with the matte pink tube of lipstick and sugarless chewing gum.

  The Red Handbag

  That winter of the record lows, of frozen cheeks and sugar frosted hair, I put less milk in my coffee. Was I becoming more bitter? Or was it that I had less of a need for what is mellow and milky.

  The first day we decided to follow Florine home, so we might at least know where she lived, it snowed. We were not yet oppressed by the early darkness as we would be later in the winter. The snow was illuminated by the streetlights and the first large flakes seemed like ethereal fireflies, spinning floating aloft. We left the store by the front door and Florine locked us out. She then exited from the rear of the building. We stood outside the store as we often did, before setting off in opposite directions. Pulling our scarves up, and our hats down.

  But this night we waited before wordlessly skirting around the building. It was childish but we were utterly serious. It seemed a simple idea, to spy her around the building’s edge, to see what direction she went and to follow her footsteps in the snow. We hadn’t expected that first night for Florine to head down into the ravine at the end of the first block, into the trees, down a steep path. She had seen us, felt us, she had felt followed, we surmised, and so we held back. But on other numerous occasions when we had the inkling to follow her, she always headed down into the ravine, always at a different spot so that no path was worn.

  Once we dashed down the steep incline, sliding and grasping at small trees for balance, to a paved footpath, over the pedestrian bridge, and back onto sidewalks. Down the block with old clapboard houses, some refurbished, some dilapidated. Followed by a couple of blocks of tall apartment buildings with blueblack windows. We thought we had caught up to Florine; we slowed. For several more blocks we followed a woman with a long black coat, carrying a huge satchel. Ingrid-Simone said, —no, stop. It’s not her. We hurried then and caught up and it was not Florine.

  —How did you know, I asked.

  Ingrid-Simone said, —the music I heard wasn’t right. It should have been more Gorecki, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. And what I was getting was more, hmmmmm, a waltz, Strauss, The Voices of Spring. Poor Florine, we both nodded.

  We became much better at identifying her. All that winter, we caught glimpses of her but never learned where she lived, or very much about her at all. Once, I looked out of my apartment window at 3am and I was sure I saw her walking by, streethaunting, Woolfian, going to buy a pencil, I imagined. Hunched over, looking at the cold cement, it must not have mattered to her where she was, just that she was moving. Another time, Ingrid-Simone reported seeing her pedalling her blue bicycle with such large wheels in the middle of the night, down sidewalks, slow—dreamslow. She rubbed her eyes and shook her head and Florine was still riding, teetering along.

  —I was worried, said Ingrid-Simone —because it was a cold night, and I could see a fog around her, her breath, but she was only wearing a sweater, a big wool one, navy blue, but still, only a sweater.

  —Perhaps she had many layers, I offered.

  —Yes, Ingrid-Simone said, —she is a many layered woman, and she laughed, her musical laugh.

  Back at the store, Florine seemed no worse for the wear.

  We worried about not worrying about Florine, some days. We were so absorbed by reading the narrow confines of our lives and by making it interesting in myriad ways, in ways that scarcely seem so now. In the end, what did we learn of Florine that winter? Almost nothing. We learned, I suppose, how to keep company with her silence, to listen to the rhythm of her footsteps, to recognize how she walked from great and dim distances: slightly stooped, her walk lilting and graceful in the manner of say, an ostrich that believed in its own flight. We knew her pace, her gait. Could identify her silhouette on cement walls and through café windows. We learned how to keep watch. How not to get caught. Or did she know? We learned how to leave be. Though following her felt a bit like a game, we truly were respectful of her. We thought a great deal about the space between us. We learned to imagine and not know, to try to understand without knowing, to ask small questions, to listen. Ingrid-Simone could do an imitation of the way Florine breathed, the rhythm of it, the slight catch every so many breaths, the nervous sniffs, the long sighs, and the way she puffed out every so often, the way a horse will breathe out over a carrot in an outstretched hand.

  We imagined the possibility that she had no home. That she walked out away from the store at closing time and came back much later. That she slept in the office chair, tipped back, her feet on the desk. That she kept her clothes in the filing cabinet and her toothbrush in the desk drawer.

  We talked some days, low and quiet, when the store was empty or nearly so, about those things we cannot usually ask others. We didn’t feel we could ask Florine where she lived, or what she loved, or who she was. There were the things we felt about her, hardly knowing her. We could list these. There was a deep sorrow in her, she was so fragile and she must have led a radically different life from the one she was in at that moment. Ingrid-Simone heard her soul music, she said. It went with the auras of people often, but not always. —Fernando Pessoa, Ingrid-Simone said, —once wrote “My soul is a secret orchestra, but I don’t know what instruments—strings, harps, cymbals, drums—strum and bang inside me. I only know myself as the symphony.” But I believe we can also at times hear the secret orchestra in another. And as for me, I don’t know that my soul is not a symphony, because sometimes I hear it being plucked, at other times I surely hear flute music, so many wind instruments. There are, at times, the solitary bleatings of an oboe. I’m certain of it. Hmmmmm. I must be composed of awkward soloists with stage fright!

  —But what I need to know is when the soul’s music begins. At birth, do you think it’s at birth? And can you absorb the soul music of someone when they die? What happens to it do you think? And then, there’s the question of preexistence, the bluebird of happiness, you know, the old Technicolor movie with Shirley Temple. All the little angelic souls waiting to be born. Some of them so wise. Is the soul born and then once it leaves the body in death, does it get to be reborn again, stand in queue? And then, what inhabits the soul? Remember the line from Emily Dickinson? “Hope is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul.” I imagine sometimes that the soul is a tree, with all these branches, perches, you know.

  —Oh, I know philosophers have pondered this for hundreds of years, the state of the soul before and after death, the question of whether or not the mother shares the baby’s soul while it’s in utero, but I can’t stop thinking about it. What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. What is the soul?

  The Rumi lines were a sort of nervous twitch for her at times, an incantation, a mantra, said under her breath, and if you didn’t know the lines, it would have been possible to miss them entirely. Not knowing Ingrid-Simone, you might mistake these mutterings for a pop song, hummed absentmindedly.

  Early on I realized that Ingrid-Simone was profou
ndly more intelligent than I am, though she was young and I was the one who had spent a decade in university. Soon, I hardly blinked when she dropped someone like Fernando Pessoa into the conversation and continued with a mashup of poetry and film references, and then proceeded to mull over a position, philosophically and poetically. She felt free, I flattered myself, to talk to me in this manner because she knew I would understand. Where before I reeled with the types of things she thought about and knew and could memorize, I had learned to be quiet and listen and gently question, though of course more often than not we were interrupted.

  The bell on the door would jangle and she would jump off the front desk and we would resume our tasks, helping the customers find this or that and so on.

  We spent a great deal of time reading the people who come into the store. A game we developed together, I suppose. A woman in her fifties left the store and we tossed words back and forth:

  —Caesar salad.

  —Liquid lunch, Ingrid Simone countered.

  —Divorcee, I interjected —Charitable organization. Executive.

  —Kind, Ingrid-Simone said softly, then with sadness, —Pushover.

  A girl in her twenties entered.

  —Shallow, I said.

  —Troubled, angry, Ingrid-Simone responded. —Convinced she is right.

  And then, one of us would ask, —are you certain?

  No, no we never were.

  Even amid all our glorious discussions, often so unconnected and breezy, and then intense and insistent, I sensed that Ingrid-Simone was learning to become ruthlessly lonely.

  I want to tell you more about her, all the little things that were so delightful. I wanted to record them as a tired mother with her newborn begins to record beautifully incoherent snippets of behaviour, divine to her, sacred. When and where a first step was taken, surprising phrases, moments that reveal how a person has been formed, has come into themselves. I wanted to write down all the lovely bits that were Ingrid-Simone before I tell you about her unravelling. I don’t want to misuse what I have been given. I wanted to watch over her, to let my watching over her change me. To record, also, those alterations in me. Did we change each other? I only know she changed me.

  Florine rolled out a rack of clothes, letting it fly. —Not much today, she said, with an unlit cigarette hanging from her lip as the metal rack reverberated. That music. She must have forgotten it was there. I mean the cigarette. And on the front counter she dumped a rather huge sagging cardboard box full of a heap of jumbled pumps, necklaces and purses. One of the necklaces hung over the edge, a piece with large misshapen turquoise stones intermingled with baubles, glass beads in pink, gold and green. Florine flipped it back into the box before walking away and I heard it rattle to the bottom, the sound similar to those made by intricate seethrough gumball machines, where you can watch the coloured ball meander and clatter through a clear plastic path.

  I watched Ingrid-Simone out of the corner of my eye as she disentangled. She began slowly, methodically, her hands in the box, fingers moving, her head off to the side, not even looking as she delved. She stood behind the front desk on the little stool we used to reach items hung on hooks close to the ceiling. A spotlight above and behind where I stood hanging up flowery frocks and cocktail dresses emanated a soft glow, a nimbus that appeared and disappeared as she moved to an unknown rhythm, a quotation that she was repeating in her head perhaps. I could see that she was deep in thought, somewhere else entirely, and I laughed softly when I saw her extract the long beaded necklace, or part of it, an umbilical cord. She put the end of it in her mouth, between her lips at first, then her teeth, as she continued to tease out the rest of the thing with her hands, invisible in the deep, slightly buckled cardboard.

  I was watching an improvisation. A luminescence. A divination. Glass beads dripping from her lips, sparkling, casting bright colours, as she delicately and minutely moved her head in the clamour of daydream. Where was she? Her hands rummaging in the box, she a doctor in an emergency room, calm, otherworldly, in command of the universe. She removed a red pump, examined it for scuffs I imagine, marks that she would later remove. Set it down on the expanse of the desk. Continued.

  I was smiling, so endearing was the scene, so dear the person, spaced out and absorbed at once. I hoped for her that there would be some lovely purses in the box amid all the other jumble that would amuse and delight her and send her off on her usual unexpected tangents. I predicted, awaited, a pleasant afternoon, listening to Ingrid-Simone recite bits of poems, quotations, ready to accompany her on whatever flights of fancy were inspired by the contents of this container. Maybe then I realized I was living her life moment by moment, that I had become hooked, addicted even to this kind of unfolding, this curious truth that was I.s.

  It was a blur, the purse that she birthed from the wilting cardboard box. I was fiddling around, trying to get a recalcitrant dress to hang properly, to drape, and it was giving me some trouble, so my attention to Ingrid-Simone was temporarily taken away from me. Why do I think things might have been different if I’d been watching?

  There was a kind of red blur, I saw that she had taken a large red handbag out and clutched it to her breast. I smiled to myself, I thought, lovely, she’s found something then, and continued for a minute before looking up again.

  She was in a new state, altered. I looked up from the dress I was wrangling and saw her face, a look of sorrow so intense that it read as terror, as though she had encountered a malevolent ghost. This thought entered me, drove into me, pierced me—that her heart had been broken, not just broken but also wholly massacred.

  I went to her, walked, walked as though I was pulling my feet out of mud. A very large part of me wanted to turn away, bury my head in the dress rack, pretend I saw nothing, felt nothing. I wanted badly to not have seen this, to not have to enter whatever I was about to enter. I wished it away, strongly. I already knew everything would be different in our slight lives, our wildly insignificant lives, even if not another living soul noticed. It seemed that all I could focus on was the front counter; I have the exact colour of it etched in my mind, the large scratch that ran down the middle of it where so many people had run their hands, a wound they helped erase, smooth away. I saw the tall cardboard box in my mind, close to it as I was then. I remember the corrugations, the bulging out at the bottom, and the wilted flowering at the top. A water stain darkened an area on the side in the shape of a heart; honestly it was a heart. All that winter, working with Ingrid-Simone, this shape would appear and appear, though I took little note of it at the time and only now looking back does it seems meaningful. Heart and soul, have they not always gone together?

  She sank. Behind the box, behind the counter, and when I reached her she was in a squat position, confronting heaven knows what. Was I equal to this, to watch over her suffering? I wasn’t. I actually confessed this to my entrails; deep inside I cried this. I am not equal, I won’t be, I refuse. And, why am I here? This is not my realm. I cursed myself for having left the academy and for now being so incredibly unimportant, and in the same breath, for connecting myself to someone equally unimportant. I promised myself to learn to keep distant from people. From Ingrid-Simone.

  Smiling, it was almost a smile, I walked toward her curled up body, shrimpcurved spine, head on knees, below hair, soundless. This magic silence—we were plunged into another dimension. I forgave myself quickly for the thoughts of easy abandonment I had wished for as I met this sea creature huddled behind the great reef of our front desk. Had I not just pledged to watch over her? But that was when she was giving to me—the warmth and joy of her spirited and wise innocence.

  I examined these moments later that night from the comfort of my turquoise chair, passing them off, saying, yes, you are only a human and humans have the capacity for small monstrosities, quick betrayals, of creating distances like chasms. I let myself off the hook very easily because it was only
a brief betrayal. Only a thought.

  I had wanted to exist only in the moment that winter without worrying or feeling responsible for anyone or to anything. How’s that for the slipperiness of the soul? I could hear the sea foam crashing at the door and seeping seeping, so that my next thought was: I must get her off the floor. She must stand, must not drown, she will breathe.

  I put my arm around her, her arm over my shoulder and she clutched the red blur of a handbag to her bleeding breast, the two merged together into a river of sheer pain, screaming, the colours pierced my ears as we walked slowly, as though she were her old, forgetful mother. I walked her to one of the fitting rooms and heard the bell jingle, the front door opened and some liquidlunching ladies frolicked and bubbled into the store. I called out, —hello, welcome to Theodora’s, I’ll be right with you, over my shoulder as we inched forward.

  I curtsied as I set her down, a dead weight, and heard her chant, not Rumi as I expected, but a psalm. Faint at first. My soul—breaketh—for longing—of thee. This is when I first knew that she was truly breathing and in her breaths were airy words, wispy.

  My soul breaketh for longing of Thee. My soul breaketh for longing of Thee. My soul breaketh for longing of Thee. My soul breaketh for longing of Thee.

  I would later remember that this very phrase was one of the epigraphs to Clarice Lispector’s book, Soulstorm.

  I set her down, propped her against the wall, and drew the heavy, bloodred and gold brocade curtains threequarters closed, so that she would have air and so that I could see her as I walked by. I promised to get her a glass of water. I turned my attention to the lunching ladies. In my mind’s eye, I saw her as a blur, a vague crimson, though she was completely still, stone still. The store was suddenly full of browsers, of ladies who wanted to try things on. A couple of them made a fuss over having found the exact dress that one of their society cohorts had worn to a certain gala. There was a lineup for the fitting rooms. Not a soul mentioned the halfopen room, the one containing the young woman curled up, looking at the handbag in her arms, whispering to herself.