Rumi and the Red Handbag

by Shawna Lemay

  I had a feeling that mulling over Anna Karenina flinging herself under a passing train was not a good place for Ingrid-Simone to dwell, so I distracted her with another outfit change. I had nearly forgotten I was wearing the black dress. I took a brown dress with a white stripe on either side and along the neckline and with a very full skirt off the chichi racks. Maybe it was a Chanel or a Chanel knockoff, I had no idea. And I grabbed a pair of low brown pumps, a bit small, but bearable.

  —Oh, Shaya, I remember Ingrid-Simone saying. —How beautiful you are! Though I know I am not at all. And then she said, —Shaya, our souls are not aligned for retail are they?

  ***

  Without meaning to, I began writing a paper for a conference I had seen in the department bulletin I was now receiving again electronically since I had agreed to teach the course. The conference was titled, “The ExtraTextual Scribble: Marginalia, Cocktail Napkins, Movie Stubs, and Other Unusual Flotsam of Writers Through the Ages” and would be held in Florence, Italy, in the spring. I sent in a proposal for the paper, on a whim. It seemed a like whim. I said I would write a paper about the use of postit notes by contemporary writers and ordinary people as well, and compare this usage to past practices. The paper itself, I said, would be written on sticky notes and presented in a power point presentation. I wrote the proposal as an exercise, I told myself. An exercise in writing proposals. And because I had always wanted to see Florence. I honestly had little thought that I might be accepted.

  I thought writing notes for my paper on sticky notes, on the notes themselves, made the most sense, and so they ended up in unusual spots around my apartment and even at Theodora’s. I wrote about adherence, the minimalism of it. How the inventors had been trying to produce a strongly sticky substance but instead had made a lowlevel adhesive. Then the question that remained was how to apply the adhesive and so postit notes were invented. Inadvertently. A mistake had been made and capitalized on.

  I liked that the notes don’t exact too much, in space and form. They require little, but in their abundance give free rein to the writer. I wrote about how we forget them in certain accumulations, that maybe we are meant to forget. We write on them to remember so that we may forget. I wrote about how they are sometimes difficult to keep track of, especially in instances of overuse. Ingrid-Simone told me that her mother, when signs of her earlyonset Alzheimer’s began to manifest, used them to remember what things were. On the fridge was a note that said: fridge, the cupboard said: cupboard, and so on.

  I also wrote about accretions in writing. About how things build up. About interruptions and interjections and about loss and misplacement. I wrote about the sticky note as a message that could be left in library books, on the doors of bathroom stalls, at bus stops. The postit as guerrilla art. As a message in a bottle. As fish scales, human fish scales, that we peel from our bodies and place on walls, on desks or kitchen tables. We remove our scales, write on them, and hope they will adhere to certain pages of books—our thoughts sticking to the thoughts of others, or on the fronts of cupboards or fridges. Are they about hope, I asked? And what about a certain type of removal from context? Or sequestering? Words inhabiting a small and circumscribed space. The sticky note as corral. A holding pen.

  I talked about how words stick to things, cling, how they flutter off in a strong breeze. How, used too often, affixed too often, postits lose their ability to adhere. There is a certain angst in thinking about that particularity, in dwelling upon it. I wrote about them as discards, as love letters, as a space to hold meaningless scribbles, offhand thoughts, lists. I wrote about the cultural significance of the todo list. I wrote about aidememoirs. I wrote about how they soothed the absentminded, the forgetful, the overwhelmed. I wrote about aidememoirs as scraps, as slips, as slippages. I wrote about the fleshtoned notes, their affinity with the writer’s skin. I talked about sunburn and how the dead white flesh peels away from the body with minimal pain, but that the flesh underneath is suddenly exposed and raw.

  My paper was accepted, and instead of being afraid, I was delirious, happy. I felt like I was home. Returning to my people.

  ***

  I went on the date with the man from the bookstore. And maybe there were sparks, or maybe the knowledge that I was going to Florence in three days made everything seem more romantic, and I was glad that I could seem romantic, knowing otherwise. We agreed to meet again when I arrived back, after my seven days in Florence. I suppose I ought to say more about this date, about Xavier, but when I think of the evening, what I remember most is how after the opera he took my hand and led me through traffic to a café across the street. We wove through cars on the street and I remember noticing the brand names on the hoods of the vehicles. Lexus, Acura, Mercedes, Toyota. How silver they were and how it was not quite dark yet but the lights on the cars shone on each other and the steel shone too. All night I noticed the effects of light.

  The stage lighting, illuminating faces, emotions. The colours of the silk dresses, the deep azures, and emeralds, and rubies, imprinted on me in such a way that everything else I saw for twentyfour hours after was seen through a veil of colour and brightness. The light in the café was at first dim with natural light but as it became dark outside, candles were lit on the table. We sat by the window, he in his dark suit, and me in my black dress and low heels, and occasionally I glimpsed our reflection in the dark window and saw two happy strangers, rather aglow. And when we parted we agreed to see each other as soon as I returned and I went to sleep that night thinking about our reflection in the window, Xavier Beauchamp and Shaya Neige. I was attentive to our conversation, enthralled maybe is the proper word, but at the time I seemed to be living in an extrasensory realm that held a meaning I didn’t want to ignore either. The way that the candlelight flickered across his hand when he placed it on the table and how it moved with the gestures he made. And how the chandelier, placed high but in the middle of the room, produced a play of light on the floor from its many facets, and that as I stepped on them, I seemed to dance a single dance step as I went by.

  When we went outside, the air was cool and everywhere the lights seemed sharp. But also very changeable, fluid. When he walked me to the door of my apartment, the light outside, overhead in the awning, was soft and yellow and we bathed in it for a short while as he held my hand and kissed me and took my key and opened the door for me. When I went inside without him, I felt I must have glowed with that buttery light of a textbook first date. And when I awoke in the morning, the pale light on the wall made me feel that I wasn’t quite real anymore, that I had become a little bit of something else, fairylike, maybe, that I had powers involving dust and sparkles. That I could go to the piazza and let birds fly free, whatever the synonym is for that act.

  I also felt suspicious, doomed. It was too lovely and that sort of thing only happens in pulp novels. I had glimpsed too many of Ingrid-Simone’s romances to believe in the enterprise.

  ***

  I went to the secondhand shop, to Theodora’s, the next two days. Strangely, when I tried to remember the date in any detail, I couldn’t. I suspected myself of making it up. Did Ingrid-Simone ask me about the date? She was discrete; she was delighted. It was busy at the store those two days and we couldn’t dwell on the subject for any length of time. I was feeling quiet, introspective. And we talked about my trip. In the evenings, I put the final touches on my paper. I practiced my delivery. Read it aloud to a pretend audience. I walked to the Shopper’s Drug Mart and bought tiny shampoos and hairspray. When I went to the drug store, I thought I glimpsed Ingrid-Simone, a coat like hers, a stance, a blur, but went about my business, filling my red plastic basket, and when I stood in line, I wondered if she was there and thought I would look for her after I paid, but for some reason, I didn’t, I just left. I began to feel stressed, unorganized. I needed to get home and pack and check my documents, print off my paper.

  ***

  In Italy, it was already
spring, already green, that particular new green of spring. I delivered my paper to a small audience and listened to several other papers and drank espresso with colleagues from the United States in cafés, practicing our Italian for a while before lapsing back into English. It was April and there was still snow on the ground when I had left. And when I came back she was gone.

  This is what happened according to Florine:

  I came to the front of the store, early in the morning. A woman came in with her daughter, who played on the floor in front of the front desk while her mother looked around. The child had a purse with her, plastic, lilac in colour. And Ingrid-Simone bent down and said —hello, little friend, what a pretty purse you have. The little girl opened it. I was waiting to tell Ingrid-Simone something, I don’t remember what now. The purse opened, the plastic handles wrenched by small hands. And inside was a doll, a naked doll that the child had scribbled on with red felt pen. So many children do these sorts of things, cut the hair off their Barbies, you know. But it was red felt pen, indelible. All over the body, the plastic chubby body.

  She stood up. Ingrid-Simone rose. She said, —Yes. She walked out of the front of the store. I thought she was getting air; she was clearly upset. I stayed at the counter, expecting. But she didn’t come back. And I knew this was it. This was it for her. I was right because she didn’t come in the next day. I closed the store and walked to her apartment and she let me in and she was packing. Her madmoney purse, the glitzy sequined thing in purples and reds and emeralds, sat beside an old brown case, it looked like a Louie Vuitton case. It might have been, though if it was, she didn’t get it at Theodora’s.

  I sat on her bed and she packed things into that case, you can’t believe how much she fit into that brown case, it was like a magic trick. She rolled dresses and shirts into tight cylinders. Shoes went inside shoes. There was something perfect about the placement of each item. Well, as she packed she told me that when she was fifteen, I think she said fifteen, she was at a party at a friend’s house and that the world became murky, wavy, and she didn’t remember anything else until the next morning. She woke up and she hurt though. There was a hurt. —It doesn’t matter who or why, said Ingrid-Simone. —There was more than one. I have a vague memory of a white bedspread with flowers, very small flowers on it, the kind that children draw. I never went back and I left school. I wandered, she said, —I went to the library, I read stories of betrayal, I hurt. It was a very big hurt, she kept using that word, the h sound was a long exhalation, and when she said the word it became a wound, a soulbeating, an abyss.

  The word was an abyss. —I was so hurt, she said, —and my body ached, not just there. She made a motion over her genitals with her hand open as though it were a hot stove and she’d been burned. —My entire body hurt, my head hurt, I wanted to sleep and sleep but I wandered. I remember once I walked down a sidewalk and stopped to lean on each tree on the boulevard for a time, as it was the only way I could make it to the end of the street. My mother was at home in our rented townhouse but she had begun to forget who I was, though neither of us were admitting that yet, and she refused to see doctors and so did I because I was afraid. Without her, I had no one. And I needed her to care for me, to care, even if she didn’t always quite know me, even if she had no idea what I was going through. I couldn’t tell her.

  —I spent hours in the public library and sometimes the university library. I read, but I couldn’t think. I wasn’t able to think. I absorbed things, stories. They’re in me but I’m not sure I remember them. I was remote from myself. I could feel my heart in my chest but I knew it wasn’t mine. How could it be mine?

  —Some days I would get on a bus and ride to the suburbs, to the WalMart. So far away, WalMart. You could spend hours just walking up and down the aisles and no one would care or notice. I had a route. I walked up one aisle and down the next; I tried not to miss any. First produce and groceries, then the pet food and supplies. Children’s toys. Hardware, and sporting goods. Housewares. Clothing. Seasonal. Crafts and sewing supplies. Cards and books. Lamps. DVDs and CDs. Electronics. Games. Printer ink. Tires. Plants. Each time when I was ready to go back to the bus stop I would stop in at the bathroom and someone would have always just cleaned it and signed their name on the plasticcovered sheet that hung on the wall.

  —I wandered for five months and maybe it was five months when I was in the loo and the pain was too much so I sat on the toilet and I couldn’t get up because my body ached so much. Maybe I was there for an hour or two. It was a meditation. Sitting on the toilet with my underwear around my ankles, holding my dress, twirled in front of me, a long twist. And then a psychic relief. There was a blue light, a huge blue circle in front of me, and then it was around me, straightening my spine. All the pain came at once and then it was gone and I didn’t know why but something came out of me.

  —Something came out of me, but it wasn’t something it was someone. It was someonesomeonesomeone. Which couldn’t be. But there was this ugly doll covered in blood in the toilet and I knew it was me. It was me and

  I picked it up. I stood up and took my purse off the hook and grabbed the tiny doll with its blood. I opened the stall and found paper towels and wrapped myself, wrapped the doll of me, and put her into my purse, which was a red bag, a doctor’s bag. And I took her on the bus, I was on the bus with her and I didn’t know I didn’t know I didn’t know what to do. So I went to the trees that had held me up, I found one of them, alone. We were all alone and I dug a hole in between the roots with my house key and some sticks and my fingernails. I clawed into the earth deep and long and hard and ugly. I did it in the middle of the day and cars went by as I sat on the boulevard, kneeling in the mud, praying into my dress, my soul breaketh my soul breaketh.

  —And what do I remember is the dirt, the mud, the way I panted like a dog, panting hard and heavy in the sun, parched and wild, turning into a wild animal, I was baying groaning yelping. I bled from my ache and a little of it went down my leg all the way to my ankle bone. Cars went by, I heard the music pouring out loud into my silence and no one stopped, maybe they thought I was gardening with my red doctor bag, my purse by my side. This girlbabything inside it wrapped in brown paper towels from the WalMart bathroom. I didn’t know but I wouldn’t even believe that myself. How could I not know? I buried her in the red doctor bag, the red bag was her cradle, her tomb, a womb. I hurt again but it was different, it wasn’t my body, it was my soul. It was her soul, I buried her, I buried me, our souls.

  ***

  And that was all Florine said, all she could say. That’s all we knew. Ingrid Simone never came back to the store.

  —Where was she going, I asked. But Florine didn’t know. I went the next day to Ingrid-Simone’s apartment but there was no answer. The landlord was there and said Ingrid-Simone had turned in her key and I saw that the kitchen chair with crocheted pads for its feet was by the big blue garbage bin in the back alley. She was gone, said Florine, and that’s all we knew.

  —She did mention the darkness, Florine said. —How the lights surged, the power, and there was a dimness when she sat in the cubicle, in the bathroom stall for so long. How everything had gleamed, the surfaces shone, and everything seemed cheap, cheap metal gleaming. And how in the dimmed room the reflections were dark, and the baby gleamed aglow in the white toilet bowl darkly. I think that’s all she said.

  She’ll be back to pick up her cheque next week, though, I thought, she’ll come in and then we’ll know. But she didn’t come in and Florine put a sign on the door, help wanted. And she hired the first young woman who came in.

  The beginning of spring and green was unbearable. I worked with the new person for a while. Her name was Edie, named after Edie Brickell, and she had all of Brickell’s songs on her iPod including “What I Am,” which was sweet. And she was lovely and smart and capable and tried to make a good first impression. But I was cold to her because I was utterly distraught. And Flor
ine knew I was leaving, going after Ingrid-Simone, and we both knew where.

  ***

  A better writer would end here. The rest would be just life. Which would be more irresponsible? To let you imagine what happened to I.s. in her disappearance, or to imagine it for you. Neither would be true.

  I followed her. Or rather, I followed her disappearance. I kept it company; I held the left hand of Ingrid-Simone’s disappearance. I did it mostly for myself. I did it because I was terrified. I did it because I needed to listen for her.

  “Put your ear down close to

  your soul

  and listen hard.” (Anne Sexton).

  ***

  I sat on a green bench on the Herengracht in Amsterdam, half a block from the Museum of Bags and Purses. I had been in Amsterdam for a month; I was a fixture. The first week I went into the Museum every day before taking up my stance on the bench. I looked at all the purses and afterwards I waited in the tearoom and looked out the front window. I asked the ladies who served the tea and who worked in the gift shop and who sold the tickets, if they had seen anyone resembling Ingrid-Simone. I found it hard to describe her. —She has dreams pouring out of her, a froth a stream, stars. She’s afraid of heights, I said. —You might notice the contractions, I said. —She is giving birth to the spirit of blue hearts like the magnificence of butterfly migration, and she is lightfilled and glows like pollen on a white table cloth, she reminds you of threads of saffron on the palm of your lightly stained hand. When you see her you will taste champagne on your tongue, while simultaneously hummingbirds will appear in your mind, and Mozart’s music will fill you.