Rumi and the Red Handbag

by Shawna Lemay

  She spoke quietly, in a perfect moment of calm, so that her words seemed to have always hung in the air at that juncture, as though a space had been made for them ahead of their arrival, and that we had always known she was a fortune teller.

  —One at a time.

  Which reminded me of the Grail Quest, when each of the knights must enter the thick and dark forest alone, at a point where no one else had trod and where the forest was overgrown and difficult to enter. To do otherwise would have been a disgrace.

  —One at a time, Florine said, as she ushered me in, as though there were any other choice.

  We expected to have our fortunes told together. We expected the fortune teller to have a fancy, madeup name, like Madame Carlota, or Madame Zanzibar, or even Madame Rochester. We both said that to each other afterwards. I was afraid of forgetting what my fortune was, so I wrote it down on postit notes while Ingrid-Simone was having her fortune told.

  Florine led me by the elbow into one of the change rooms with its scent of thousands of ladies raising their arms, a tremendously intimate loaminess, and pulled the velvet curtain around us, tying it with a tasselled rope. A piece of beaded fuchsia silk came from nowhere and she threw it over the plastic chandelier that hung in each fitting salon. I found, in my anticipation to have my fortune told, I could only focus on my inward breath and not the outward one.

  I walked into the fitting room, this tiny cramped space, and sat on the overstuffed red velvet chair while Florine sat on a small stool she had brought in. There was no table between us, no crystal ball, no worn cards with pleasantly frightening figures on them or tea leaves to read. Just Florine, sitting, and I, looking at her knees in the warmly worn brown corduroy of her pants. When the curtains were drawn and the cheap chandelier veiled, it was dim and I had the urge to draw my knees up under my chin.

  Usually when you go to see a fortune teller, you know the fortune teller is not as she appears. There is an element of disguise: jewellery, scarves, garish lipstick, an overly powdered and rouged cheek. But here, the fortune teller was Florine, the normally secretive Florine. The reverse seemed to have happened. That in taking up the fortune teller persona, she removed her disguise, revealed something about herself, rather than concealing it. We were in the presence of a being who had carefully stepped into herself, so that we were aware immediately that this was her most natural, most comfortable state.

  She went into a trance, eyes not quite closed, the way a dog or a baby will sleep and you have to fight the urge to run the palm of your hand over their face to seal them. I kept feeling as though she was about to take my hands in hers, cool and dry, so that I still have the memory of my hands being taken and held. Or were they? I felt myself go into a trance. I don’t know how long we sat like that. The air felt like the crackling of Ingrid-Simone’s pop rocks, my scalp tingled. I also had this feeling of complete freedom wash over me, which is a ridiculously simple way to describe it. Though this was possibly one of the most extraordinary things I had ever gone through, I didn’t write down how I felt at the time though, fearing I might lose it if I did. I’m writing it down now though, in case it’s something that Ingrid-Simone also experienced.

  I felt suddenly clean, cleansed, purified. Absolved, released. For during the time I spent with Florine, or perhaps Madame Florine or Madame Theodora, I was completely unattached, unconnected from the world and its people. It was like flying, gliding, but maybe the precise word is dreaming, a winged dreaming. And instead of one long pronouncement, there were phrases, sent to me as if in a dream. They were lobbed to me, as a child sends a balloon up into the air with her fingertips.

  —There will be a letter. No, two letters. On separate occasions. There will be waiting, there will be beauty in the waiting. This long waiting will be the centre of your life; everything will flower from this, move outward. Your destiny is to be lazy and elegant. Your destiny also is to wait, and to sorrow, responsible, your destiny to worry, and fragments. The letter arrives, a release. But you are not. Released. Found.

  And at the word ‘released,’ I was. At the word ‘found’, a strange afterthought followed me. I spilled out of the room, without looking back, still in a trance of sorts. I don’t remember Ingrid-Simone going in, just a blur off to the side, her entrance, entrancement, a blur.

  I should have stood outside, listening. But I was busy scribbling my own lazy and elegant fortune on skyblue sticky notes and the fleeting thought that it wouldn’t be right to eavesdrop passed through me. You see, I did have the thought. Ingrid-Simone came out of the fitting room, through the thick velvet, looking gloriously soaked. At first I was worried, and so was Florine, I could tell. We exchanged a look. But then, she transformed, like Audrey Hepburn at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, running into the alley in the rain to look for Cat and then Fred, who isn’t really Fred, comes. A beautiful, sad happiness. Holly Golightly was drenched in both the sweetest of miseries and the most joyful realization that she was loved and could accept being loved.

  I swear the same transformation occurred with Ingrid-Simone the day of our fortunes. Florine watched and said then, in the most normal, everyday Florine voice, —she’ll be fine. Which felt like part of Ingrid-Simone’s fortune, too. And then Florine disappeared, left the store, though we didn’t notice for some time.

  I handed Ingrid-Simone my pad of sticky notes, and said, —write. She sat down, with her knees together and toes pointed toward each other. She wrote in her tiny writing, so tiny though this time, that it wasn’t legible to me.

  When she finished, I tried to tell her about my fortune. Fragments I read to her. I stopped halfway because I don’t think she was listening really, which I didn’t mind. It seemed wrong to know each other’s fortunes anyway, so we both straightened clothes for a time. Ingrid-Simone had a way with arranging the colours just so. When she swept one dress out of the lineup and then put it back a few dresses over, it was a magical thing, the same feeling you get when the last piece of a jigsaw goes into place. Suddenly you saw the design as a whole. The colours of the store radiated, they pulsed, after Ingrid-Simone put them to rights.

  It seems odd to me now that we didn’t talk more about Florine, how she had revealed herself as a fortune teller. But maybe one more thing just silently clicked into place.

  Amsterdam

  How to unravel her. A cruel way to describe it, perhaps, but it happened in the smallest increments so it took me ages to notice. That she was unravelling, fraying, becoming undone. Becoming less calm and centred, more frantic. And I was being born into the unravelling.

  I’m not ready yet to tell you anything else except ice cream.

  She liked to eat ice cream cones. This would not have been quite so remarkable if it had been summer but in the winter it stood out. She made her own at home, constructing them with all the care that a child takes when making a snowman. —It’s something I’m quite particular about, she said, —I’m truly beyond exacting about the size of the cone, the weight of the scoop of ice cream. The whitest possible vanilla. It really has to be just so. She liked the cheapest ice cream, the kind that came in big tubs. There’s more air in the ice cream and therefore fewer calories.

  Some days she arrived at work in the morning with an ice cream cone for breakfast and she hadn’t yet taken a single lick. She had that sort of restraint. —The winter is perfect for such a morning meal, she said. —I walked all the way to the work and no melting. And here she twirled the cone slowly, majestically.

  —Hmmmmm. Do you know, she said, casually handing me her whiteassnow ice cream cone while she removed her coat and changed into different shoes, —that I never even had an ice cream cone until I was sixteen years old? It was at a friend’s birthday party. Well, really she was the neighbour and wouldn’t have dared to be my friend, and she was younger than me, fourteen I guess she was. And I was looking over the fence into her backyard, which was barely large enough for a picnic table, o
h, quite longingly, and the mother invited me over. Maybe they were surprised that I went. Oh, of course, I’d had ice cream, though not much. We were quite poor, quite poor.

  She sat down on the front counter, crossed her legs, and ate the cone in earnest. I turned on the lights and straightened up a little, dusting behind the front counter while she licked her ice cream in a spiral, starting at the top and working her way down. We started swapping, ‘we were so poor’ stories. I told her about eating cases of canned vegetable soup that had been on sale. The story I wrote down on my sticky note that evening when I went home though was this one: Ingrid-Simone said that after her father left when she was twelve, she was so poor that one day she went to a store and stole underwear. Because she had none. So she took some into a department store change room and put several pairs on and walked out of the store. —I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t go to gym class in junior high without underwear and I didn’t know what else to do, she said. —I did make sure that I chose the least expensive and ugliest pairs. She laughed nervously, so that I thought she might cry. And I solemnly agreed, that it seemed like a reasonable act—humiliating but also empowering somehow. That she could take care of herself. Solve problems on her own.

  Attached like a burr to my sticky notes about Ingrid-Simone’s ice cream cone breakfasts, there was another note I wrote, though it may not have been written on the same day. I don’t know when it was written and it doesn’t matter, because it was a train of thought that constantly struck me when I was in her presence. The fact of her openness. Words on the lightpink sticky note, such as: giving, refreshing, clarity, open. I never felt as though she was withholding anything. She gave what she could of herself every second, always utterly present. When she laughed it was as though she were placing a gift in your hand. No, it was more than that. It was like being taken to that open space yourself.

  But what this set up in me was a kind of ache. A wound of sorts that affected my fragility in unusual ways. I often felt that we were very nearly on the same frequency, our souls, but in truth we were just off from being on the same frequency. And this bouncing back and forth, maybe it was too much.

  And now the memory is harrowing because it reminds me that if I had known the right questions to ask, if I had known, things could have been different.

  ***

  I’m racing now to tell you more about her. How long can I hold your attention with my flimsy brushstrokes? I know that she held my attention completely. I went off happily enough to my subterranean job at Theodora’s and I endured the women who talked down to us, humiliated us, wore us down with their assumptions about who we were and why we were there, as they tapped the counter when we counted the change back too slowly or rolled their eyes when we couldn’t answer their trivial questions. And I put up with the pervasive and at times oppressive scent of the hundreds of homes that had somehow adhered to the clothes, and the dull and mad lowliness of checking pockets for lint and drycleaned gum that had sometimes even been chewed. And the spot washing of collars and sleeves and crotches and underarms. I endured all these absurd things when I could have been researching a dissertation on women’s literature, on the secret marks made in the margins of manuscripts, collecting and comparing notes on the variants of manuscripts, reading between the lines of correspondence and connecting all these with lines from published novels and poems.

  Ingrid-Simone and I didn’t meet after work. Our entire relationship took place in the cavern of Theodora’s in the context of work. But there were several occasions when we met, more or less accidentally, at the Shopper’s Drug Mart on Jasper Avenue, the one that seemed to be a glass palace. She lived several blocks on one side of the avenue and I lived on the other side. In the dark, the store was beautifully lit from the outside and we were moths drawn from our shabby homes into the clean brightness by the obscure and dangerous angles of the glass. Directly we went to the cosmetics. When I first found Ingrid-Simone at the drug store, she was applying eye shadow to her wrist. All the greens she could find so that she had begun to look a little like a space alien. When I pointed this out, she said, —Oh! you’re right. I hadn’t thought about that. Hmmmmm. Well, you know of course that I am a space alien. I am, indeed.

  We always whispered in the sanctum of Shopper’s Drug Mart. We were not so much worried about being overheard, but there was something about meeting Ingrid-Simone here, at night, and the way the light shone on us, and the darkness outside, that made whispering seem essential. Anyone walking by might see us in our reverent enchantment, as we wandered from the rows of lipstick and eye shadow to the magazine aisle, where we would silently flip through fashion magazines and National Geographic and Time and Oprah.

  We would then maybe saunter down the haircare aisle, the soap and bubble bath aisle, marvelling at all the scents—lavender, coconut, sage, cocoa, strawberry, vanilla, eucalyptus. We would look at the cold drinks for a surprisingly long time. If we did buy anything, it would be a drink. Something neither of us would usually buy. A Dr. Pepper or a Snapple Peach Iced Tea or a bottle of strawberry milk. We were warm from having stayed too long in the store reading magazines and wandering in our winter coats under the severe and mesmerizing and holy lights. And our thirst, our extreme, unquenchable thirst, always took us by complete surprise.

  We would leave, waiting until we were outside to open our drinks. Quietly, we knocked the bottoms of our bottles and popped off the lids, clinking them together. Cheers, we said to ourselves silently, I don’t think it was spoken. Swallow and then off in our separate directions. I always looked back after half a block or so but I’m sure Ingrid-Simone didn’t. Once, I walked a few steps then turned around and watched her and she never looked back. She was immediately in her own space, you see. I could tell as I watched her walk. She walked as though she were in a dream. A very long and involved dream. I remember thinking I’d give anything to walk into that dream.

  One evening, when we were in Shopper’s Drug Mart, there was a long line up at the pharmacy counter. We were looking at a display of plumtoned makeup. Lipsticks, eyeshadow and eyeliner. A small television was playing a tutorial on how to create the perfect smoky eyes and we were watching with happily sceptical looks on our faces. Maybe it was our third time through the video. We found that multiple viewings made the experience more pleasantly bizarre. This is when one of the people in the pharmacy line collapsed. We could hear someone calling an ambulance and within a minute we heard sirens. No one moved in to see what was happening. We just stood rooted to where we were.

  We watched from our spot in front of the plum makeup display. The line reformed itself about four feet over from where it had been while the woman who had collapsed remained where she was. Someone draped a white lab coat over her and put a Magic Bag as a pillow under her head. Ingrid-Simone and I watched the line. They continued to look straight ahead. There were a few discrete sidelong glances, over and down and quickly back to straight ahead. Maybe they were being discrete, pretending not to be curious, going about their own business, getting their own prescriptions for whatever pain they might be in, getting their preventatives. Or maybe they really weren’t curious. They didn’t want to know. Two of the people in the lineup were quietly discussing their places in the queue. One argued that he had been in front of the other in the previous incarnation of the line before it had moved over the four feet. One person strenuously disagreed but the other held his ground, wanting to move up one position. And their whispers became more fierce, until arms were thrown up in the air, and the one in front squared his shoulders and the one behind adopted a stance of vigorous seething, eyes flaming, licking the back of the other’s head.

  The other customers in the store also went about their business, filling their red plastic baskets with deodorant, conditioner, birthday cards, BandAids, antacid, loaves of bread, magazines, rainscented candles. As the paramedics rushed to the back of the store, I wondered to myself what the other customers were thinking as
they casually parted the sea of their consumerism, looking just long enough at what was occurring so that they would be out of the way of the medics. It was not as though any of us could do anything. We all had our own worries, ointments to apply, arguments to resolve, loneliness to abate, orange hair to redye.

  We stayed at the Shopper’s Drug Mart until the lady was taken out on a stretcher and the ambulance drove away, silently. —You’d never know anything happened, said Ingrid-Simone, —it’s eerie. And it was. The small crack that the woman had fallen into had closed over. Anyone walking into the store after the ambulance had driven away would have had no inkling of what had just happened. We began to question if it had.

  Was anyone else wondering what the fallen woman was going through? The thought had just occurred to me when Ingrid-Simone leaned over and spoke as though she was in a library.

  —I wonder, she said, —what she is going through. What falling down in the Shopper’s Drug Mart will mean to her life, all of the ripples that will be created from this dropping down. I nodded. I nodded again. She put her chin on my shoulder, lightly, frail.

  ***

  I arrived at the store the next day and Ingrid-Simone was already there. She was wearing very high heels, ripped and faded jeans, and a floral dress that had once been long. She had raised the hemline and added lace to it. Around her neck was a scarf made from six different kinds of lace she had interwoven with strands of wool and string and bits of fabric.

  —It’s incredible, I said to her.

  —Oh, it’s a concoction, she said, —a useless confection. It’s ridiculous really, isn’t it? But she seemed pleased, pleased with the scarf, she seemed at peace.

  There were no customers yet and we went about our business. The store was large enough that we could work in separate corners of the store and feel quite alone, and we were always comfortable with those times. Happy to drift into our own worlds, and later, often we compared reveries.