Rumi and the Red Handbag

by Shawna Lemay

  —When I was a child, Ingrid-Simone told me, —I called eye shadow, cry shadow.

  I wore foundation but it too was pale. The lines under my eyes were really starting to be visible but I found them interesting and wanted to see how they were going to develop over the years. I remembered reading somewhere that Georgia O’Keeffe once had a makeover by Elizabeth Arden, who was a patron of O’Keeffe’s art. O’Keeffe couldn’t get home fast enough to wash it off. I told this story to Ingrid-Simone, who had never heard of O’Keeffe, so that night she looked her up on the internet. The next morning, she pronounced her the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, so wholly real. Knowing and serene.

  —Oh, Shaya, I’m still swooning, like a honeybee that dipped and bumbled into so many flowers last night! What a world of delight and mystery. How wise O’Keeffe must have been, for only someone who was a true seer could have painted such flowers. I felt as though they were portals, hmmmmm, I looked at one red flower for ages, and you know, I could have walked into it, maybe I fell into it. Like Alice in Wonderland. I was at home, you know?

  Her newfound interest in O’Keeffe, which I was proud to have stirred up in her, resulted in a miniature purse shaped like the skull of a cow. And inside there was a washcloth and an empty change purse, since she had read that O’Keeffe never kept money in her purse. But an enormous and vibrant red flower took up most of the purse. It was designed so that when you took it out, it was a small red dot, but this unfolded, blossomed, right before your very eyes, opening, opening…

  ***

  She nearly made herself ill some days talking about her growing need, her compulsion to get to the Museum of Bags and Purses. The only thing that unwound her was the selfanalysis of her compulsion. Trying to understand compulsions in general, why so many people have such strong desires to go somewhere they’ve never been. And how you always hear people say things like, “I felt at last that I was home,” when you read travelogues.

  —There’s an exhibit you see, and it’s only there until the end of January and I dearly want to see it, but it’s the beginning of January and well, you know it won’t happen, but it torments me all the same. It’s called For your eyes only: the secrets of the bag, and it’s all about the private contents of women’s bags. That’s what it says on the website. I don’t have to tell you, Shaya, how I was both so thrilled to read about it and at the same time utterly bloody vanquished by it.

  —Oh, I’m embarrassed to tell you how long I spent on Google street view last night, she said. —How futile it is, how incredibly exquisitely frustrating. It’s not enough, constantly seeing that front door, and never being able to open it. I want to know how it smells when you first enter the foyer, what the door handle feels like in my hand.

  She wondered about what to wear and decided on something classic but elegantly nondescript. She imagined walking up to the museum, feeling dizzy, dreamy, as though she were sleepwalking. She worried that looking at it so often on street view would not make it seem real when she finally did make it there.

  —I have this recurring dream. I’m in the museum and it’s the middle of the night. I open all the purses, the Judith Lieber cupcake purse, the crystalencrusted Diet Coke purse by Kathrine Baumann, the Normandie, the peacockfeathered bag, the shiny red bag by Alexander McQueen, and I can hear them sigh one large collective sigh. And then, I’m taken in by an inward breath. In my dream, suddenly I’m drawn into this huge breath, transcendent; there is a vast and silent warble, so acute and patient, that I interpret as God.

  ***

  I began to think about her in my dreams. At some point during the winter, she crept into me, as though for warmth. Her voice. Her hmmmms. Her hymns. I would hear her breathe in dreams without images. It was a comfort. I became more silent as winter went on. I attempted to explain it. I had read there was a culture in which the women became silent after the age of forty. I felt I was approaching a very deep silence and I didn’t know how long it would last but I wanted it, felt myself moving into it, that inner quiet, even though I couldn’t quite understand it. But Ingrid-Simone accommodated it.

  My silence was accommodated.

  As I became quieter, we both became nervous also. There was an escalation in nerves, it seems to me now. She for her reasons, me for others. It made us compatible, each of us in our estrangement. We were vibrating on the same frequency, agitation on the brink.

  There was an understanding, too, that we wouldn’t infringe upon the other in the hours outside of our humble little jobs at Theodora’s. We were delicate with each other in that way. There was a balance that we had achieved rather mysteriously, that we were not willing to throw off. We both felt that. I know we did.

  ***

  Listening to her talk about purses as she cleaned and polished them with such reverence was consoling. When I watched her, I became mournful. I was reminded of the way women used to wash corpses for burial, especially the feet. Loved ones or someone they knew, a part of their community. Not the way it is now, bodies shipped off into the mysteries of the funeral home to be looked after by strangers.

  There was an intimacy, a respect, a profound sadness about her as she went about her task.

  ***

  Has it taken me this long to get back to the leather folder, hidden in the red handbag, the handbag that lead to Ingrid-Simone’s crumbling? I have been reluctant to return to it. I had the folder of letters and bits of paper but I couldn’t look at them. I held them; I had this feeling that I was holding them for her, holding the leather wallet. I carried it around with me everywhere, in my own purse now. Waiting. For when I felt that Ingrid-Simone would want to look at them, be strong enough for them, they seemed to belong to her, though who knows to whom they belonged. I had opened it, just a small increment, not even a centimetre. I saw handwriting. I closed it. I had this idea, this feeling, that one day she would ask to see the fawncoloured folder, even though there was no way she could know about its existence.

  ***

  It takes me a while to put things together, but I realized that Ingrid-Simone’s obsession with the private contents of handbags was not that dissimilar to my previous obsession with the secrets of women writers. Along with secrets though, I also wanted to know about spongecakes. Jane Austen wrote in a letter to her beloved sister Cassandra, “Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?” and later, “You know how interesting the purchase of a spongecake is to me.”

  The miniature Jane Austen purse that Ingrid-Simone made me was an intricately embroidered reticule in a silvery blue silk fabric, filled with a multitude of small, very small spongecakes.

  ***

  I want to write down every single quirky and delightful and awkwardly elegant thing I can think of about Ingrid-Simone. Before I get to the rest. I want to write down all of our conversations that took place in the brightness of new snow, her pure heart.

  There was the morning that a very young woman wearing lofty boots teetered into the store with her baby. She looked at clothes for a while as she rocked and swayed with her baby in her arms. This seemed fine. Neither of us, I imagine, was the sorts to fuss over babies and coo and ask silly questions, or offer the advice that strangers give mothers. We just went about what we were doing. The baby started to cry rather shrilly and the mother looked anxious, flagging me over.

  —It’s so cold out, I don’t want to sit in the car to breastfeed, is there anywhere I can sit? I’ll be quick, she said

  —Of course, I said, —you can use one of the change rooms, it’s not busy. I pulled the velvet curtain and she asked if I could leave it partway open so it wouldn’t get too stuffy.

  —I can’t stand stuffy, she said.

  —Okay, no problem, I smiled, and left her, thinking little of the whole thing.

  A small winter bird flew into our store that day. Maybe it had hopped in when someone had opened the door for another slower person. Fe
eling the warmth and measuring it against the drabness of its existence, the bird had taken a chance and entered in the blinding whoosh of a door opening in winter, leading into warmth however impossible.

  The bird, my god, found the change room and flew inside. The bird conceded to fly in. Proceeded. This startled the young lady and there was commotion, the air was altered, stirred. Soft grey feathers were alight. The woman attempted to shoo the thing without disturbing her feeding babe. Her handbag fell, plunged, from the chair and spilled onto the floor and the child lost its grip on a moment of nourishing comfort as the mother bent over with the bundle in her arms and scooped her belongings. At this point, Ingrid-Simone walked by, shrieked, and ran out of the store with a look of abject terror on her face, though she returned quite composed fifteen minutes later.

  Throughout the day though I noticed that she was humming more than usual, that her lips were moving subtly from time to time. And I knew it was ‘my soul breaketh for longing of Thee.’ She seemed spaced out, but fine, too. That was the day I came home and wrote on a note: sorrowbird.

  The next day she came in with a rumpled paper grocery bag of her vintage romance novels and spent most of the day consuming packet after packet of pop rocks and reading, one romance after another. I think she read five that day. She made little attempt to work, and I said to her, —don’t worry, I don’t mind. And really I didn’t.

  Once in a while, I walked by her chair beside the front desk and without my asking she’d say, —this one is about Chase and Mackenzie and it’s a classic case of amnesia. She’s forgotten that he’s really her meanhearted boss, but after their car went off the road and they had to break into a cabin to stay alive, she’s falling drastically and secretly in love with him. Of course, he’s really not meanhearted, but has been in love with her for a long time. But since she had a boyfriend, well. She was off limits. The trouble is he thinks she still has the boyfriend, and because she has amnesia, she can’t tell him that they’ve broken off ages before. Naturally he’s a terribly honourable sort of fellow and won’t trespass on another guy’s girl. It’s made him seem nasty, but at heart he’s quite a daaarling.

  There was a glimmer of playfulness in her otherwise dry description, her dampened demeanour.

  Then she showed me the cover, as I always enjoyed the covers, and went back to reading. I proceeded to put things on hangers that had been left in the fitting rooms the day before. Occasionally a customer would come in, and I sold a Chanel jacket to one older lady. A woman with fuchsia smudged lipstick came in looking for a handbag, throwing out names like Jean Paul Gautier, Coach, Prada, Hermès, Alexander McQueen, as though we were situated in New York City and not this buriedinsnow city in the absolute middle of nowhere. I thought the word, handbag, would enliven Ingrid-Simone, but she resolutely sank into her book, raising it so it covered her face, with no concern for anyone seeing her hide behind a picture of a woman in a nurse’s uniform from the 1970s with a man looming in the background, his face chiselled, his hair perfect. Only if you looked very closely did you see he was holding a doctor’s bag. So, I took this lady with the short, pink, downfilled jacket and heavily mascaraed eyes around and showed her the various purses we had. And she showed me the dress she had brought with her in her own monstrously huge satchel so we could match the colours.

  ***

  Through the winter, Ingrid-Simone ran out of her vintage romances and shifted to reading contemporary ones. Maybe we were twothirds of the way through the winter, the cold. The early darkness had just started to retreat so there was more light, and some days seemed so intensely bright, the sun reflecting off the snow and leaving us squinting. This kind of light entered one in a way that it didn’t at any other time of the year. This cold light, its brightness stark and lonely and severe entered us, sharp and clean and reminded us to agree with C.S. Lewis, that we do not have souls, we are souls.

  —The contemporary romances, said Ingrid-Simone, —are so much more extravagant, embellished. I don’t read them for plot; I’m not interested in plot in the least. I read them strictly for, here she paused and I jokingly said, —sex, whereupon she looked at me severely, then smiled with such lovely impish joy.

  —For the loneliness and the emptiness and the longing that wants filling. I just read one where the protagonist had been a foster child, going from family to family, never feeling loved. Her entire life had been about wishing and longing and not daring to believe that she could be loved. What I most appreciated about this romance was the descriptions of clothes, of course she had lived in secondhand clothes all her life and her suitcases were so wellworn. Clichéd stuff I know but it focused my own longing, as through a cold crystal, and when she finally realizes she’s loved in return, it was such a holy release for me, that I wept like a fool and felt so happy for a moment or two. Two beautiful minutes that felt real enough. If dreams are real in a way, if we can think of dreams as real, because we really had them and lived them, cannot this sort of happiness be as well?

  —Oh, I’m so ashamed, Shaya! Romances are just so terrible, aren’t they? Ingrid-Simone said with the widest eyes and her red lips in such a playful smile.

  I could see that she wasn’t ashamed, not really, and when I think of the way that she said the word ashamed, I could tell it was one she was intimate with. She was able to play with the word but I had the sense that she had said it in so many ways that she knew many of its sides, shapes and depths.

  We went on from the discussion of romances to how winter longing is so beautiful and sweet and how that at times it made us inexplicably happy and gently sad, as well. Maybe because the return of green leaves reaching toward the sun was inevitable. The way the trees raised their arms in praise, a green scripture, slow and shimmery and patient, no matter what.

  ***

  Skip the rest, if you want. In fact, I won’t mind if you stop right here. You already know everything important, everything I want you to know about Ingrid-Simone. I can’t help but feel wretched and responsible for you now, if you go on with the story. That is, unless you are the sort of person who is consoled, once in a while, by imbibing in the unfortunate fragments of a young girl’s story. If you are, I suppose we should talk about happiness again, right now.

  All winter, we were happy, but not at the expense of losing our sadness. Not at the expense of forgetting that we were responsible for guarding each other’s sorrows. We were each the guardians of one another’s soul.

  But what is the soul? The question persisted. I told Ingrid-Simone about the Steppenwolf treatise.

  —The Steppenwolf at first believed he had two souls, one being of course the wolf soul, but no, I said, —in the treatise he learns that every human might consist “of ten, or a hundred, or a thousand souls.” The manyflowered soul of the wolf. The treatise was considered to be a ‘fortune telling booklet.’

  And I wondered how many times Clarice Lispector had read the book. And if she reread it before writing The Hour of the Star. Before writing the scene of Macabea and the fortune teller. Macabea and Madame Carlota. Ingrid-Simone and I talked about these books in the most random and unacademic way. I mentioned the creamfilled chocolates that Madame Carlota drops into her mouth and I mentioned her greasy face. I remembered somehow there were trampedupon blades of grass, fiercely growing in the cracks of the pavement that Macabea notices before she enters the fortune teller’s house. I told her how reading about the blades of grass growing in the cracks affected me. I had to put the book down. I had to pick it up again. A common image that is used to maximum effect. How does a writer do that, I wondered? Take a plain and weary image and make it mean so much.

  —Maybe any time one reads about blades of grass growing in the cracks of pavement in the middle of winter, this will incomprehensibly disrupt your heart, said Ingrid-Simone. —But no, she said, —I believe it is only someone like Clarice who has the nerve to write such awakened shards of hope and despair at once. Is thi
s true? When I nodded, she said, —yes, I’ve been reading her work. And this gladdened me to such a degree, mostly because she had sought the books out on her own, not quite secretively, but quietly.

  —Remember Zerbino? asked Ingrid-Simone. —It’s a brilliant passage, isn’t it, when she relates her dream about the soft drink that everyone drinks and everyone dislikes but they go on drinking it anyway. It’s dehydrating and everyone knows it. They can’t stop themselves. Maybe they like feeling thirsty. When I was reading it, even I wanted to try Zerbino, though maybe I’ve been drinking Zerbino all along. We talked about Zerbino for a while and then suddenly returned to discussing creamfilled chocolates. Which led to a discussion, quite naturally it seemed, about fortune tellers. We talked about Mr. Rochester telling fortunes in Jane Eyre.

  —What a wolf he was, Ingrid-Simone said, —dressed in sheep’s clothing, even though it was a red cloak. A manysouled wolf? He tells her she isn’t the sort to sell her soul for bliss. He knows her, he understands. And then, it’s his own fortune he’s telling. And he’s interrupted in his interchange with Jane, eventually, by the truth, by an arrival in the form of a visitor, the presence of Mr. Mason. Jane gives him the message of the arrival, it must be her who passes along the message, mustn’t it?

  How truths are passed from one to another, we spoke about this, Ingrid Simone and I. Sometimes we pass them, without knowing the message. Secret messages.

  And next we spoke about going to a fortune teller ourselves. We were deep in a discussion of how one goes about finding a decent fortune teller when we noticed that Florine was standing near and may have been for some time. We asked her if she might like to come along with us, though honestly, we wanted only to be accompanied by each other.

  —I can tell your fortunes, said Florine.