Rumi and the Red Handbag

by Shawna Lemay

  —Oh, Ingrid-Simone said, —I remembered how last weekend I found a place in the ravine where I could lie down in the snow and no one could see me. I was wearing my long white coat with the white buttons. There was such a gentle slope and I was looking up at the sky, through the tree branches. And I felt like I had disappeared, dissolved, into the deep snow, angelically. It was so delicious, because it started to snow enormous flakes of snow, cotton candy, and I was able to meet them, embrace them and welcome them. I think I slept for a while, so deep was I in the sublime snow, sated, buried. I can’t explain it, how tranquil I felt, how loved. Hmmmmm. I felt like I called down the branches, in my mind’s eye, so that I had the most serene daydream of being in a giant nest of my own making, my arms greeting the sky, and all the branches around me. I felt so rested. So embraced. Embraced by the universe, you know?

  But maybe this is beside the point. Because while Ingrid-Simone was in the rear part of the store, organizing dresses by colour, and daydreaming and remembering her enchantment in the snow forest, I was behind the counter. I bent to pick up a clump of thread off the floor and put it in the wastebasket nearby. I pulled the basket out from under and noticed a newspaper article had been crumpled and stuffed in and sort of hidden, under another piece of paper. It seemed hidden though maybe it wasn’t. I retrieved it, I smoothed. The article was about a woman who had had a premature baby in the WalMart washroom and left it in the toilet. Was the baby alive when it was born? Yes, there were speculations that it had been alive. How could the woman not know she was pregnant even though she claimed this was so? She left it, ran, afraid, and only went to the police station to confess when the story was first reported. There were comments by outraged parents waiting on a list to adopt a baby. There was more wild speculation and the headline “Monstrous Act!” There was an interview with the woman who cleaned the restrooms and had found the baby in the toilet. She was quoted as saying, “I was shocked. I didn’t know what it was, how it could be. I thought it must be a doll, someone had bled all over it, you know, the monthlies.” And, “It wasn’t there the last time I cleaned and then it was there.” And, “It made me feel so terrible, so sick. I can’t stop having dreams.” And, “I’ll never be the same inside after what I saw.” And, “She’s not insane, she’s just evil.”

  Every six months or so there is always a story like this on the news about a woman who didn’t know she was pregnant abandoning her baby in a dumpster or on a front step or giving birth in a WalMart or a back alley. Inevitably, there are a requisite number of people who jump on various aspects of the story. There are cries that the mother should be put in jail. The religious people are scandalized, and the barren people who would have taken and loved the child are full of sorrow. Others contend that there’s no way you can be pregnant without knowing it, in spite of extensive documentation to the contrary. Comments float that it could only happen to one of those people, whoever those people might be. Racist undertones, questions of how immoral, stupid, poor someone like that must be.

  Newspaper articles on these subjects, I noted to myself with sadness, never tried to understand what the woman in question, usually a young woman, was going through, had been through. And then, I stuffed the article back down deep into the garbage and threw the threads on top. For good measure I took a Kleenex from the box we kept behind the counter and threw one of those on top as well.

  I tried to glimpse Ingrid-Simone’s face but she seemed to be humming to herself, so I took the glass cleaner and went to the front of the store and cleaned the windows and polished the cold doorknobs.

  ***

  The eye of the hummingbird. From another of Ingrid-Simone’s most loved poems, this one by Mary Oliver.

  —I was walking down the row of books in the library that must have contained poetry, she said. —I was about to go home, and I was running my hand lazily along the rows as I was going, oh so dreamily. And one of the books leapt out, fell into my hand, so I cradled it. I did, and then it opened to a page, I don’t remember opening it you see, which seems implausible, oh, I know that. But it did in fact happen as most implausible things do.

  She read:

  “Is the soul solid, like iron?

  Or is it tender and breakable…

  Does it have shape? Like an iceberg?

  Like the eye of a hummingbird?”

  —Maybe, said Ingrid-Simone, —we are reborn as the eye of a hummingbird, or the bird itself. Free at last to seek nectar, all eye and trembling heart, so alive.

  And then there was a very long pause and her heart seemed to me to be trembling, her arms at her side were nearly still but maybe they were vibrating at such a speed that this was invisible. At length, she said, —hmmmmm, a longer than usual hmmmmm. And smiled and shook her head.

  ***

  The day we received the fake purse troubled her deeply.

  —I just worry that she didn’t know, you see, said Ingrid-Simone. —She, whoever she was, thought she was carrying one thing, and in fact, it was another. A fake watch is one thing, but a fake handbag—criminal. The bag is a divine stomach, it contains our most mundane secrets, the entrails trace how gorgeously ordinary we are. Oh my dear, it’s a beauty factory, a shield, a companion. It’s a pretty portable archive, an unconcealed weapon, a sturdy, personal lost and found. It transforms, transports. It clutches, snaps, clasps. Thumps and flaps. It spills. You can carry it, lug it, tote it, schlep it.

  She spoke this as if speaking the lines from a Shakespeare play in an audition, convincing and innocent.

  —The purse is a diary containing the scattered sprawl and patient sticky grunge of life. It’s a skin, a husk, it holds guts and gizzards. Think of the disruptive depths, the darkness of a purse! The purse is a portal, a hinged door. It’s the heavy burden to the bruised portal of our intimate murky depths, our tranquil and faroff selves. We carry these objects relentlessly, courageously, anonymously, absentmindedly.

  —I cannot help but think of all those fronds and flingings that find their way into purses. You could reconstruct a life, a woman’s life, just by looking inside, by connecting the dots from one item to the next. A bottle of scent, a book of poetry, a packet of flower seeds. Pencil stub. Hmm. Seashell. Feather, of course, a feather. A tin of mints, a telephone book. Cookie crumbs. A coin from another country.

  —Oh, my dear, my love, the quivering lists of things to do, somno lent plots.

  —Useful things, things that comfort, things in which to lose oneself. Books.

  —One reaches into one’s bag. One reaches in and finds. One reaches into the trembling breath of the bag, the bag breathes in and out, sighs in silent splendour, sighs with each unclasping, unzipping, unsnapping, unfolding, unflapping. And things, it contains things that endure, that escape me, that are elusive and clamorous and fragmentary.

  —A purse may be fancy. It may be slouchy, ornate, cheap, cheeky, flamboyant, chic, humble, durable, bulky, sleek, chunky, iconic, functional, luxurious, formidable, reliable, handy, strappy, smug, witty, thrifty, monumental, classic, coquettish, modest, elegant, discreet, graceful, amusing, clever, coy, natty, extravagant, vital, delicate, glamorous, retro, eccentric, staid. What have I left out?

  —In short, a purse is real. It is incontrovertibly real. I won’t have that taken away from me, I don’t want to be devoured, swallowed by what isn’t even real.

  ***

  I have a particular pile of sticky notes, maybe they are over an inch thick, with a couple of pages from a small notebook sandwiched within. On top of the pile I added one note that said: The Summons. The summons seemed to come from another dimension. Ingrid-Simone and I had been nestling in our separate dimensions together but this was from elsewhere. There had been an early glimmer of spring, the scent of it. After the cold, long winter, the sort of winter that freezes your lungs and contracts your skin and especially your scalp, this moment of spring made us delirious.

 
When I went home that evening, walking in the unseasonable warmth, the respite, I felt at peace, really at peace. Something I hadn’t felt in ages. I felt I was exactly and precisely myself. Clear and fine and unburdened. I felt I was the perfect weight. Not too heavy and not too light and that I was taking place at the proper frequency for my universe.

  I arrived home to a blinking light, a message. I noticed how dusty my archaic answering machine was and while I listened to the lengthy message, I massaged the faux wood with a damp cloth.

  I had been offered a sessional teaching job at the university, which catapulted me into an immediate state of psychic despondency. As I mulled over the offer, envisioning myself in a room with students, I began to fray, revert. There are some intervals when you become acutely aware of who you are. How at odds with the rest of the world I knew myself to be where only minutes before I had experienced such peace. How strange, how weird. I could feel how out of step I was in my skin, my nerves. Does that seem possible? All those years of trying to ‘act normal,’ or at least acting as though I was not constantly terrified, jittery or shattered by academe—I’d set them aside working at Theodora’s. And I didn’t want to pretend any more. But could I work in the basement of a secondhand shop for the rest of my life? What sort of acting was that?

  I always look for what I call little signs. What path to take, what path to take, I suppose this was my intermittent mantra. Bread crumbs, give me bread crumbs. I knew to abandon the university because there had been a culmination of little signs all in one day, beginning with my horoscope that said: “you will find that you are in the wrong place today but it’s not too late to get to where you need to be.” I saved it, folding it up and placing it in one of my three copies of Jane Eyre.

  I went out walking later that night amid the streetlights and towering golden trees, the night of the horoscope, when all the shops were closed, and I wandered toward the word, Theodora’s, which was bright—handwriting that reminded me of my mother’s. And the word lodged within me, so that when I did finally leave the university, when the snow had fallen and cleansed me and made me long for unsullied sheets of paper, wordlessness, it seemed proper to walk back toward it.

  I escaped. And I knew that I had been right to leave because I didn’t belong, I was in the wrong place. A simple feeling you have as a child at certain times and know to listen to. And I was very proud of myself for listening to the feeling.

  But here I was being summoned from the extra dimension that we had discovered, Ingrid-Simone and me. We hashed it out for days. The department wanted me to teach a course tentatively called ‘literary secrets and genetic criticism,’ which was my subject precisely. I was enticed. And then I agreed to teach because how could I not? I agreed before I could change my mind. Maybe my tolerance for being treated like a shopgirl was quite low that day. The tapping of fingers on the front desk when I wasn’t moving as quickly as someone wanted, an exchange of looks between friends when I couldn’t answer a question about a designer or name the place of origin of a clothing company. The huffing and rude leavetaking of a woman who was annoyed that we didn’t have any Chanel dresses in her size and couldn’t understand that we were a secondhand store. Maybe that was the day a woman bumped into me while I was doing up buttons on a peacoat. She lurched with her heavily whipcreamed mochacino and spilled a rather generous amount on my sleeve and said nothing. She said nothing even when I let out a little, —oh! She said nothing as I swabbed at it. Nothing. She might have bumped into a post or a tree. I wasn’t really there.

  Though not yet spring, the birds sang as though it was, and the teaching position at the university wouldn’t begin until fall. Agreeing to something so far into the future seemed reasonable enough. But we were both bereft in advance.

  ***

  Around the same time, a man I met in a bookstore one evening asked me out on a date. I was lingering. I let my fingers sweep over titles, books in a row; I played the books on the shelf like the end flourish of a piano piece. I listened to the music of the books on a shelf, the hum and hush and vibrations of them. Here is where the cello comes in, and there is where the flute trills, and over here there are kittens purring and the mother cat’s deep exhausted breaths.

  He was looking down from the top of the stairs on the second floor, holding a coffee, leaning on the bannister. He was at home in the honeyed glow of the bookstore, amid the dark wood and yellow lights. I was in a movie then, I knew I was being watched or knew, anyway, to look up over my shoulder. Embarrassed, I took a book from the shelf and leafed through it, and then, cut, he was standing beside me, telling me that I had chosen well. I suppose these are the sort of scenes that make us believe in the movies, this camera angle and that one, the blinking of the camera that takes us from the top of the stairs to the woman in front of a bookshelf.

  I’m a ruthless editor though; I’m leaving a bunch of film on the cutting room floor. Blink, and the camera takes you back to Theodora’s, back to the basement, the cavern, the subterranean level where this story takes place. The next day, while Ingrid-Simone polished the scuffs and the residue of dirty pink bubble gum off the bottoms of a pair of black and white pumps, I told her what happened.

  —In short, he asked me out on a date, to an opera, to Rigoletto. And I’ve accepted. But now, I tell her, —I’m having second thoughts. Maybe it’s too Pretty Woman, I said, —okay, without the ride on the private jet. And I don’t have anything to wear. Which was true. I had spent the last few years in academe trying to dress invisibly. The clothes I wore at Theodora’s, the three outfits I rotated, the grey dress, the black dress, and the long shirt with leggings, were too frivolous for the opera. I had nothing.

  —Nothing? said Ingrid-Simone. —Oh, my soul. Nothing? Look, look around you, love.

  —Oh, but. I said. And she knew. My electric fear of wearing secondhand clothes was not to be overcome.

  She went to the rack with the crimson and cherry and candyapple red clothes, she knew my size even, and pulled out a killer red dress, swishing it about.

  No, my eyes said emphatically, no.

  —Okay, then, this. It’s black, classic, dressy.

  —Just call me Julia Roberts, I said, as she stuffed me into the fortune telling fitting room. That is what we called it, the fortune telling room. We still had the feeling that anything could happen there. When the drapes closed, and they must close dramatically, as is their nature, it was as though you are separated from the world. Or, that you knew you were separated.

  I tried not to think about the musty smell of the clothes, the drycleaning fluid, the scent of embalming, all the dead people who once wore these dresses, scarves, carried these purses. The distressed and the smug and the brokenhearted and the falsely happy and the preciously simple, all those people for whom these clothes were no longer a fit. Ingrid-Simone threw some jewellery over the top of the drape, next slyly sliding in a purse then a scarf. I heard her walking around the store saying, —hmmmmm. And, —hmmmmm. Clearly enjoying herself.

  I didn’t want to think about who once wore the dress and on what occasions. So I started to throw out possible topics relating to my situation. I thought about the wardrobe in literature. Symbolism of. The closet. Exits, entrances. The abyss of the swirling dark room. Or was it a womb. The red drape a placenta. I thought about transformations. Eliza Doolittle and Pretty Woman. I thought about Cinderella goddammit. About fairy tale fantasy and the expectations and passivity it inscribes in young girls. I thought about waiting, waiting to be saved, and what a ridiculous stance that is but how it made me angry too, because I wanted it, to be saved. I thought about how much I love the scene in Pretty Woman when she goes back and tells the saleswoman who had treated her badly that she missed out, using her shopping bags for emphasis. How the movie was a fantasy that never happened to anyone. Not exactly like that. But how beautiful to imagine that it could.

  I had the black dress on, and to humour In
grid-Simone, I draped on the long necklace, I stepped into the shoes. The dress really was quite marvellous, though there was a bit of static electricity until we sprayed it with the big can of static guard. The dress came from what we called the ‘fancy racks’—the area where we hung all that glittered, all of the ritzy, highend, glamorous, big designername dresses. It had been dry cleaned but there was still a scent. I had the overwhelming urge to take it off, to get it off of me, it just felt wrong. The wrong thing to have on.

  A herd of women came into the store, of course. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn they all got off the bus at the same time but more likely they all jumped out of their SUVs at the same time. One of them brought clothes in thin plastic shrouds but the rest were on the hunt. We thought they were separate at first, but no, they were all together. They wouldn’t say what they were hunting for but they touched everything, taking everything off the racks, creating disorder where we had toiled in a religious manner to arrange our existences. Committing the sacrilege of mixing the reds with the oranges, the lime greens with the forest greens.

  —They must all be colourblind, Ingrid-Simone, scandalized, leaned over and whispered in my ear as I walked by her in my black dress, the shoes clacking with some force as I walked. And then feeling guilty, she said, —oh, hmm, well perhaps some of them really are?

  The next hour was taken up with helping our unruly customers find the finery and the accessories to go with their newly chosen pieces, listening to them say crassly, —what a find, what a fiiiiind. Ingrid-Simone sold four purses to three women. When the store cleared, she described the purses to me.

  —You know the one with the black beads, gold clasp, the baguette. Hmm. When you opened it, honestly, the scent of French bread, I’m not kidding.

  Here, I laughed and asked her to go on.

  —Okay. Okay. Hmm. There was the faux fur with leopard spots, the clutch. You would expect the breath of a house cat, but no, when you opened it, roses, the way they smell when you walk into the cooler at the florists, subdued and reserved, but also unimaginably fresh. Then there was the woven leather backpack with the incongruous fringe, yellow and buttery. The scent of erasers and pencil shavings. A bit overwhelming. Lastly. Hmmm. Lastly, a little red velvet satchel. The one I imagined was just like Anna Karenina’s, the one she throws onto the tracks before she herself succumbs. The little red bag that delays her, as she struggles to remove it from her arm, oh, why did she not listen to the little red handbag? If only it could have delayed her just another few seconds. Oh, and the exhalation? I had steeled myself for gingerbread, especially cloves, you know, hmmm. But lemon drops, distinctly and irrevocably, lemon drops.