Rumi and the Red Handbag

by Shawna Lemay

  —Where the hell is Florine, I muttered. I popped my head into the back room when I got a chance but she had disappeared.

  After the lunching ladies had dispersed, around midafternoon, Florine reappeared. I told her what had happened, where Ingrid-Simone was sitting. She was incredibly sensitive to the situation, very quiet, saying, —we shall close the store, then help her up and walk her home. Usually a distant, gruff person, a stony person, Florine softened in that moment into the woman I had had that brief encounter with in the hayfield. She put on a big wool buttonup sweater, the kind that someone has to make for you. The buttons were wooden and worn and the wool was a muddy grey that tricks you into thinking it is almost purple. I swear I smelled sunwarmed hay as she pulled Ingrid-Simone’s coat around her, pulling her forward and putting her arms into the sleeves, as you would dress an infant.

  Florine nodded for me to wait. I had dressed in my winter coat and crocheted toque and Florine returned in a minute with her coat on as well. Ingrid-Simone, still hugging the purse, leaned against me—the way a large dog will lean against its human, as a sign of their connection, trust, as an opportunity for the human to scratch behind ears, to let that happen.

  We walked her home in the winter’s early dark, Florine holding one arm, and me the other. We neither of us had any idea where she lived, only that it wasn’t terribly far. We set off in the direction Ingrid-Simone always took when she went home. At each corner we asked which way, and she whispered, straight or left or right. Six or seven blocks later we arrived at a fourstory walkup crowded out by highrises. I reached into her coat pocket for her keys since Florine was carrying both her own bag and Ingrid-Simone’s too. We got her to the fourth floor, a slow climb in circles so that it felt like we were inside of a turret. We got her into her apartment and sat her at the kitchen table. Florine made tea while I slipped Ingrid-Simone’s coat off, setting it behind her on the vintage chair complete with crocheted cosies for the feet designed to save the linoleum from scratches.

  Florine found soda crackers in the cupboard and a flowery china plate, and set them down beside the toaster on the table. She poured tea into a pastel pink mug. Then she tenderly prised the handbag from Ingrid-Simone’s fingers. I can still hear the sound of my gasp, coming from deep within me, and this surprised me also, the force of it. My surprise made audible. I realized then that we would take the purse with us, the red purse that Ingrid-Simone had birthed from the cardboard box that afternoon.

  Florine said, —we’ll go, then. I stroked Ingrid-Simone’s arm and she nodded and so we left. I followed Florine and it seemed to be the right thing to do. When I looked over my shoulder, I could see Ingrid-Simone’s lips move too, my soul breaketh for longing of Thee.

  On the street, I turned around to see if I could make out which window was hers. Her kitchen table was near the window and I could see a figure holding a teacup as though she were about to take a sip, not yet at her lips, hovering. I took a moment to look at the building, so I would remember which one it was, and was quite stunned by its architecture. From the 1960s I imagined, but quite subtly designed to echo a castle, with hints of turrets on either end, the bricks at the top of the building laid in an interlacing pattern, giving the illusion of crenellations. The name scrolled on the front of the building was The Royal Parzival.

  ***

  You might think that the next day would have been strained or confessional or intimately dramatic. That we would descend into a woeful silence. Or all be visibly altered. But instead, it was as usual. When we got into the store, Ingrid-Simone took off her long coat to reveal a beautiful outfit. Pencil skirt and fitted jacket in Robin’s egg blue. A black turtleneck and thick black hose and tall vinyl boots.

  —Look, she said, —and there’s even a matching hat, which she took out of her bag and pinned into her hair, a 1950s affair with netting that she artfully arrayed. —Oh, and there’s matching gloves, let me show you, they’re just priceless, a scream really, and she dug them out of her bag. —I bought them at the thrift store, the whole shebang came in a traveling box, I’m sure none of it has ever been worn, and the case is mint, wonderfully pristine. I know there’s a story there, don’t you think? Hmmmmm.

  I had arrived at the store a bit early on purpose. Florine was already there. I wanted to see the handbag up close. I had an insatiable urge, a frantic desire, to look inside it and feel its reverberations, what I imagined to be its very own aftershock. The day before, Florine had spirited it away, and to me it seemed as if she had accomplished some magic trick to make it disappear. —It’s in the bottom of the filing cabinet, she said and let me look at it while she hovered in the doorway to the office.

  The filing cabinet was wooden, from days gone by. Greasy and smokydark, cavernous. Heavy too, the previous tenant must have decided to leave it rather than struggle with it up the narrow back staircase. Maybe they had wanted something more modern, cheap metal. I opened the drawer; it slid out so smoothly. The purse, I looked at it for a moment in the depths, in its cocoon. Florine had forced it in so that it was crumpled on the sides. It was large but not huge. Long and quite narrow. More narrow than a doctor’s bag, though it reminded me of that. Slightly less structured. Red, faux crocodile. There was a buckle clasp and also a zipper. Inside, I saw it was lined with paisley. I felt it, and it was very soft but not like silk, more plush. Brushed cotton, I guessed. There was one zippered side compartment, very discrete; I almost overlooked it. Otherwise, it was roomy, empty, a hollow. I closed it and hefted it by its handles. Took a few steps. Imagined walking down the street with it. Shopping with it. I don’t know why. I imagined walking with it in Paris, walking by the Louvre, the Opera. Or in Rome, approaching the Coliseum down some side road.

  I closed my eyes, held it in my arms, cradled it. I don’t know what I was doing. I put it back in the bottom drawer and it closed rapidly when I nudged it with my boot. Reminded me of the drawers at morgues, though I’ve only ever seen such things on TV.

  ***

  We went on. And Ingrid-Simone was herself, though occasionally I still saw her lips moving and I knew she was reciting to herself, my soul breaketh.

  As a test, I suppose it was a test, a few days later, I asked her for her favourite Rumi.

  —“What is the soul,” she said with a campy grin, her arms out, as she walked around the store, dramatically hiding behind a rack of dresses. —“I cannot stop asking.” And here she took one off the rack, a long gown with flowing sleeves. She danced with the dress, fervently, spinning and spinning, dizzyingly so. —“If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks.” So you see, she said, —we are all of us prisoners, drunks, her wild choreography taking her to the front desk, which she jumped onto with ease. I couldn’t help but think of the box, the purse, all of the births that occur in a life.

  —We are, I said, —oh how we are. I thought without despair about my limitations, then. I thought about how my shortcomings, or maybe let’s call them truths, were what brought me there, that the various faltering paths I had set out on had convened, so that my falterings were what brought me to that particular truth. The truth that was Ingrid-Simone, that is I.s. Capital I, small s.

  I thought about the reasons I had decided not to continue as an aca demic, even as I mourned. I mourned, but it was a resolute mourning, a contented one, perversely contented. I had confronted who I was not, had come to know the contours and severe limits but also the reaches of my intelligence. In not becoming an academic, I came to understand my intellect, and knowing it, I had some strange feeling that I could make use of it in some unforetold yet important and sublimely insignificant way. I may have been deluded in this matter; I’m not sure.

  A couple of weeks later I felt oddly compelled to visit the filing cabinet again. This filing cabinet, which had become a monument, a secret shrine. The thing that hid, this monolith in its dark corner with the dust bunnies that convene at it
s feet and are sent scuttling across the floor when the drawers open, heavy but with a whoosh, on their smooth, wellworn mechanism. Over the years this chest, this cabinet for files, has been patted, has heard: they don’t make ’em like this anymore, no sirree. This greasy wooden beast, bovine, with its four stomachs, and the one that concealed, at the very bottom.

  I had arrived fifteen minutes early, though this was unplanned, so I told myself. Ingrid-Simone usually arrived at the store a minute or two before it opened. When I arrived, Florine said she needed to go out and left. Her ghostly manner of taking leave was so quiet, so unobtrusive, that when she is gone you hardly believed she was there at all.

  For some reason, I imagined the drawer wouldn’t open, that it had been locked. When I pulled on it, I didn’t expect it to give. But it did, it slid out cleanly. Minutes passed. I could see it there, huddled, foetal, wedged, and yet the handbag seemed more expansive than I remembered. The purse a belly that has let out its breath, has at last stopped trying to suck in its gut. Relaxed. It had moulded itself into the space allotted. And yet I sensed internal tremblings, contractions, a lustre, the silent rumbling an egg will make before hatching. As I withdrew the purse from the compartment, I was overwhelmed by vertigo, laden with possibility.

  This is what I think must have happened. As I bent down, grasped the purse by its handles, pulled gently gently, it filled sideways with air. I yanked on it, with some force, and then increasing force, until it was expelled from that sliding passage, and I took a quick dance step backward, straightening up in the process. I was willing to accept magic. A spell was cast, then. I knew to open it, to feel along the inner seams. It contained. Suddenly, as they say, I understood. Less about what it contained, but that it did. I understood this purely metaphorically. But then my fingers, caressing, probing, compressing and then sliding over the innards of this hidden purse, discerned.

  ***

  My fingers discerned.

  The purse a belly that had let out its breath. Expelled. Along the bottom of the purse there was a pocket, unzippered. Impossible to see because of the darkness, because of the busyness of the paisley pattern. I only knew because of my tentative foray into the depths. What compelled me to remain there, an unevenness, a slight imbalance? I reached into what was a fold, sewn into the pocket, an interval of fabric that was designed to hold whatever contents, preventing them from sliding out, from being born.

  I reached in. I birthed a thin sheaf of papers, without thinking about the repercussions, without asking myself, are you sure? I reached into the extreme silence of the handbag, into the paisley abyss, into the wound of this side compartment, and withdrew. I replaced the purse, the placenta, for now it appeared to me as a mode or passage, a path, an arcane and sultry innocence. I looked down and noticed what I held, then. A leather folder, kid goat, softest leather, so very thin. A fold within the fold from the depths. And then I entered a silence so vast.

  ***

  I took the leather folder and placed it into my own purse. Ingrid-Simone arrived just as I was hiding it. I hid it from her. Smiling, nonchalant, I turned toward her, welcoming, with my hand in my purse, fumbling. I put my purse in the cupboard behind the front desk, which is where I always put my purse.

  —I have something for you today, said Ingrid-Simone. Then she slipped elegantly out of her long black Mary Poppins coat and draped it over the counter. She handed me a plain shopping bag with handles, very light. Red and tangerine tissue artfully brimming out of the bag, like licks of fire.

  —You didn’t! I said. She nodded happily, vigorously.

  —Open, open, open! She responded. And I did. Another miniature purse, I knew this, reaching into the fiery paper. A bit larger than the Woolf purse. This one was black. An oldfashioned tag with thick twine hung from it on which she had written, “…to her left a capacious black bag, shopping variety, and to her right a collapsed parasol…” On the bag itself, she had embroidered the name Winnie, and once again her own initials were embroidered below, hardly visible. So this was the bag from Beckett’s Happy Days. Do not overdo the bag, Winnie.

  On the back of the tag there were words, a list. She pointed this out to me, wordlessly, her lips pursed, inward. She seemed to be calm and jittery both at once.

  toothbrush, toothpaste

  small mirror

  spectacles

  bottle of red medicine

  lipstick

  magnifying glass

  comb/brush

  revolver

  unidentifiable odds and ends

  musical box

  nail file

  When I fumbled open the petite bag, which nevertheless seemed huge, weighty, I found the contents of the list. I examined each thing, each exquisite object, the red medicine bottle, the music box. I wondered and laughed over the unidentifiable odds and ends. And then we remembered that we had to open the store and ran to the front door to let in an elderly lady, walking with a cane, stomping her boots on the front carpet as she came in. —In my day, she lectured us, —we were always punctual. That meant something. And we were silent, and looked at each other without any expression at all and said nothing to her. Nothing for a good long time. I put the Beckett purse back in the bag, wrapping it carefully in the tissue and nestled it by my own purse in the cupboard.

  ***

  What day did I write: I haven’t considered her a friend. There was no giddiness about the way we connected, no need to analyse or label. Maybe there was relief from the usual obligations of friendship, of named relationships, because we were coworkers. Coworkers manage a distance between each other that is generally understood to be a wise rule. You don’t go out for coffee, or have each other over for tea, setting out the China that was left to you by your grandmother and rushing out to buy biscuits that might tantalize.

  I had not considered her a friend but it did not mean she wasn’t a friend. Were we kindred spirits of some sort then? Some as yet undefined permutation of friends? Soulsisters? Certainly a permutation. I copied out a quotation from Nietzsche on a scrap of paper, “It is not how one soul approaches another but in how it distances itself from it that I recognize their affinity and relatedness.” We were two souls who were diligent at keeping a certain distance from each other. At first I worried that it was just me who needed distance, but Ingrid-Simone was also artful. I knew that though she still fawned over the handbags and purses that came in, we were not really to talk about them. I noticed that when she was selling them, she seemed desperate to see them go, to clear them out of her sight but also call them back if she could. There was a longing that she banished from her gaze, sometimes with a literal blink of the eyes.

  When I tried to approach the subject of the miniature purses she made, she became a bit secretive, danced away from the subject, making some joke or gliding over to a customer that she might have easily ignored for another little bit. She once told me that each one took weeks, and she dressed up in attire that might match the purse at hand. Tweeds and serviceable shoes, or wide brimmed hats and vintage heels from the 1950s.

  We were uniquely bonded in the way that intelligentenough people are when they work in jobs that others might consider being ‘beneath them.’ Theodora’s was a refuge for us, a place to breathe, to regroup and maybe to hide for a while. We laughed though, at the way some people talked to us. At times slowly and loudly, enunciating for us lowly shopgirls their demands. I often received more of the condescending and patronizing remarks than Ingrid-Simone did, because customers must have assumed that someone my age working in a secondhand store must not be able to find anything else while a younger person could be there working while she went to college. Or at least she had the hope of making something of herself.

  Ingrid-Simone was constantly amazed at my restraint, —you’re so Zen, she would drawl when a woman wearing plasticsurgery induced sunglasses handed me her paper coffee cup and said, —dispose of thi
s. No please, no thank you, no could you possibly… just, dispose of this. Partially shocked at this type of behaviour, I found it interesting to observe in my camouflaged, anonymous state. Or so I told myself. Ingrid-Simone rolled her eyes and said, —Oh, I almost blew your cover and told her myself that you’re researching a book, and that you have twelve university degrees no less, and that you’re the most brilliant person I know. And then she laughed a musical and outraged laugh that made the experience of being handed a trickle of brown liquid in a lipsticksmudged paper cup unfathomably mysterious and almost philosophically profound. As though together we had confronted the awkward and lopsided order of the world and arrived at a grandiose compassion for all those who existed on one side or the other, all because of the woman with dark owl glasses, thick legs, and tight skin. Because we each knew how to exist as someone we weren’t and to fool them in this way. And better, we could keep the secret quite well.

  ***

  But my calling is also to dream. While writing this, reconstructing and concocting, I take naps to dream my way toward remembering things I forgot to write down. I don’t really sleep; my naps are more of a lucid daydream. This is difficult work, so sometimes I arise more tired than when I lay down. During a nap, one time, I remembered Ingrid-Simone telling me that she also likes to nap but not very often because dreaming in the afternoon frightened her. She said to me, —I take a little Diet Coke before having an afternoon nap. That way my dreams are more awake, more effervescent, and once in a while I put pop rocks in my mouth just as I’m lying down. Then my dreams sparkle as well.

  Occasionally I walked around the store and heard crackling and never remembered what it was until I came upon Ingrid-Simone. I walked around thinking there must be a mouse or an electrical short. And then there would be Ingrid-Simone, steaming a ruffled pirate shirt, her mouth full of pop rocks. She would put her hand in front of her mouth and try not to laugh and shrug her shoulders. When they finished crackling, she would say, —oh, I couldn’t help it. I’m such a child, aren’t I?