Lila Blue

by Annie Katz

  I decided not to tell Lila about the vision. I thought it was just my vivid imagination running away with me, taking a fear and building it up into a movie that seemed real. I didn't want to give it any more reality by talking about it, writing it down, or analyzing it. It was only a picture, like a dream image, like a bad daydream, and I would forget about it.

  Lila noticed how quiet I was when I got in. "Everything okay?" she asked.

  "Yea," I said. "I just got a little cold."

  "Mmm," she said as I got my things together for a shower.

  In the shower I remembered the red pattern of blood and looked down to see if my knee was okay. It was of course. Then I felt all the humiliation, shame, fear, and disappointment Janice must have felt at that moment, and I was sad for her. I hoped the scene hadn’t really happened. I was willing to convince myself it was like a dream metaphor, like the dream of the man and the dog, just a symbol picture of my fears. That's all.

  By the time I dried off, dressed, and braided my hair, I had put the vision behind me. It was nothing.

  When it was time for Lila to go to work, I went into the village with her. I wasn't sure what I would do, but I knew I didn't want to spend all afternoon alone in the house.

  I went into the flower shop first to see if Franny had pretty cards I could send my mom and Shakti and the brothers. Franny carried lots of arts and crafts things by local artists, so each thing was original, and I'd found a beautiful card for Shakti the last time I'd been in. On the front of the card under the thinnest rice paper covering was a butterfly made of dried flower parts. Shakti had loved the card and her mother had it framed for her to hang on the wall.

  Franny was in the workroom behind her cash register counter, and she called out Hi to me when I came in. I liked the smell of her shop. It was a combination of fresh flowers, incense, and dried herbs. None of the cards was exactly right, or I wasn't in the mood for them. I was pretty sure they didn't even make greeting cards that say, Dear Mother, I miss you. Don't bleed on anyone's boat.

  I heard Franny oohing and aahing, and I peeked over the counter to see what was so exciting. "Look at these, Cassandra," she said, and she brought out a box of pottery packed in shredded brown paper, like recycled paper bags. Each little pot she pulled out of the box had its own rich color and unique shape. She handed me a jade green one that had the faintest lavender streak meandering through the deep shiny glaze. Inside the pot I saw where the glaze had dripped down from the rim, leaving teardrops of shiny color on the coarse brown clay.

  I turned the lovely green pot over, and it was signed Dante. "Beautiful," I said, wondering if I should send one of these to my mom instead of a card, and one to Shakti, too.

  "I asked Dante to make me some little flower pots that would fit the smaller potted plants," Franny said. "I never dreamed they'd be so pretty." She held another up to admire it, a squat dish glazed with royal blue.

  "Wow," I said. "Are they from the valley?" I knew some of her artists lived in Salem, Corvallis, and Eugene.

  "No," she said. "Dante lives south of town. His parents are potters, too, and they weave rugs."

  "His work is beautiful," I said, not wanting to put the jade pot back, but not knowing if I could afford it. I wondered how long it would take to get that good at something. "Did he learn this in college?"

  "He learned from his parents, I'm sure," she said. "And he's not much older than you are, Cassandra. He's been potting since he was ten. He has a real gift."

  "Wow," I said, not sure how I felt about someone my age being a skilled artist. Where had I been all my life? "How much do they cost?" I asked Franny.

  "I was thinking about seven fifty for the ones that size. Do you think that's reasonable?"

  "Yes," I said, glad my guess had been way too high. "I'll take this one, please."

  "Don't you want to see all the rest? There's another whole box."

  "This is the one," I said. When I know what I want, I hang on to it.

  I took my little green pot to show Molly and Marge in the bookstore. Molly was ringing up a sale and Marge had taken Bradley to get some new shoes, so I walked around the store, checking to see what new fantasy books had come in. I liked the artwork on the science fiction and fantasy book covers, but I knew from experience the cover art didn't necessarily fit the characters, action, or mood of the story. I'm sure the artists didn't read the books.

  The best way to choose a book, and this Molly taught me, is to read only the first page and then close the book and put it back. If you find yourself on page three or four before you remember to close the book, you should read it.

  I was picking up paperback books at random testing this method, and I got to page seven in a book about vampires of all things. I put it back anyway. Who wanted to read a whole book about vampires?

  Molly was done and came and found me. "What did you get?" she asked, pointing to my Franny's Flowers bag.

  I showed her the pot, and she smiled and said, "Dante," before she even turned it over to check.

  "You know him?"

  "Sure," she said. "Haven't you seen him in here? He hangs out with Curtis discussing astronomy every time he comes to town."

  "No," I said. "Was I here when he was?"

  "I can't remember," she said, looking up to check her memory banks. "You'd remember if you met him, though." She got an impish look on her face, "In fact," she said, "I bet you'd really like each other."

  She pulled me over to stand in front of Curtis. "Curtis," she said, "Cassandra just bought one of Dante's pots. See?" Molly used her tone of voice that worked to get Curtis to look up from his book. He looked at the pot.

  "Green," he said, looking from Molly to the pot to me and back to Molly.

  "What do you think of Cassandra and Dante together?" she asked him, and I poked her with my elbow.

  He studied me, he studied the pot, he studied me, and then he grinned and said, "Fate brings us together and separates us in myriad ways." He dove back into his book, which was a biography of some English guy by the looks of the cover.

  "Is that a quote from Shakespeare?" I asked Molly.

  "I don't think so," she said. "Curtis is profound all by himself."

  "He's good," I said.

  It was fun standing there talking about him as if he weren't sitting right in front of us. His lips were curving up in the tiniest smile, but they could have been responding to what he was reading rather than to us. He was an enigma.

  An older couple came in the store and looked around as if they were lost, so Molly went to offer her services.

  The couple looked at each other and then down at her little pixie face, and then they searched the store until they saw me by the vampire book and Curtis in his recliner. They seemed to relax then, perhaps thinking they understood there was an adult present to run things. It was true. What they didn't suspect was that Molly was the adult.

  It reminded me of something Lila had said. We see what we expect to see, not what's really there.

  The couple didn't seem interested in books, because they didn't touch any, but before they left, Molly had convinced them to buy a copy of Fishy Tales, by Captain Bob. Fishy Tales was a collection of stories by a local fishing boat captain about his adventures on the dangerous coastal waters.

  Lila cut Captain Bob's hair, and he was always telling her new stories that were going into his second book, tentatively titled, More Fishy.

  Molly sold more copies of Fishy Tales than everyone else combined, because she had a special deal worked out with Captain Bob. For each book she personally sold, he gave her a dollar commission from his own pocket. Molly was brilliant.

  After the couple left with their autographed copy of Fishy Tales, Molly came and took the vampire book out of my hands and put it back on the shelf. "So ask me to tell you everything I know about Dante," she said to me.

  "Tell me, then," I said, crossing my arms over my chest and pretending to be put out by her being such a smarty pants.

 
"He's home schooled, which means he gets to study what he wants and his parents buy whatever books and supplies he needs."

  "Home school?" I asked.

  "Yes," she continued. "He got bored in fifth grade and found out you could get around the education laws by being home schooled."

  "He sounds smart," I said, interested in the idea of a kid figuring all that out and doing something about it just because he was bored. Most of us daydreamed or drew pictures or wrote notes to each other on tiny scraps of paper when we were bored in fifth grade. He actually did something to get out of school forever. Impressive.

  "He's smart, but more than that, he's an artist, and his parents and sisters are artists, too."

  "Franny said he was making pots when he was ten," I said.

  "He started selling them at ten. I think he was born at the potter's wheel. His parents were both potters before they branched out into fabric arts. Now they have a black sheep, because dying white wool doesn't work when you need black."

  "How do you know so much about them?"

  "Dante's little sister Reba is my friend. During the school year I hang out with her a lot. She's great too."

  "So you think I'll like Dante?"

  She grinned and nodded. "You'll like each other. You'll see."

  Lila's gun essay came out in the Rainbow News early Friday morning. When I got out of bed, she already had her copy of the paper on the kitchen table.

  "Here it is," she said, handing it to me. "Next we find out the consequences."

  When I read it aloud to her, I was surprised that it was almost nothing like the draft she'd been working on a few days earlier.

  Growing up with Guns: My Point of View, by Lila Blue

  I usually keep this column light and fluffy. But this time, I want to talk about something heavy. Guns. Handguns in particular.

  I grew up in northern Idaho among farmers and hunters, which means I grew up with guns. When I was twelve years old, I knew where the guns in our house were kept, how to get them, how to clean and load them, and how to shoot. Guns were normal.

  For many of us, guns are an unquestioned part of life, like church on Sunday morning or bingo on Friday nights.

  In the past three months, two children were killed by handguns. These deaths were not caused by an intruder forcing his way into their home. Both were caused by children playing with guns in the house, without their parents' knowledge, permission, or consent. Because of these facts, I think it's time we ask ourselves some questions.

  How safe are handguns? Is the potential benefit of having one in your home worth the risk? Should we as a community discuss this issue?

  Is it our business whether or not our neighbors own guns? When does it become our business? When a child takes a gun out into the front yard to play with it? Or takes it across the street to school?

  I don't know the answer to these questions. I don't believe any one person has all the answers. But I do believe in all of us working together to keep our community safe.

  Please come to the community council meeting Tuesday night to share your experiences and opinions. Together we can make wise decisions on issues that affect us all.

  "You changed it so much," I said, slightly confused because the argument from the first draft was still in my mind.

  "I prayed about it some more, and that helped me take some of the judgment out of it. I was pushing my own viewpoint too much in the first one."

  "But the column is your viewpoint," I said.

  She laughed. "I try not to have such a strong point of view that I feed its opposite."

  "Huh?" I asked.

  "Here's how I think things work," she said. "A very good position to take about any issue is neutral, right in the middle, maybe yes, maybe no. That way you are allowing everyone's opinion to be okay. Opinions are only thoughts after all. We've all changed our opinions. We've all learned more and reversed our previous stance on some issue. So neutral is a good, balanced position on most things."

  "Okay," I said, not really knowing where she was headed.

  "For example," she said. "If someone had a strong opinion about how I should wear my hair, it might cause me to have a stronger opinion than I had before. They might say to me, 'Lila, you're too old to wear long hair.' Then I would either agree or disagree with them, but either way, my opinion would get stronger. Say I disagreed or was even offended by them having an opinion about my hair, so my new opinion might be, 'Nobody has the right to talk about how I wear my hair,' or 'Long hair looks just as beautiful on older women as it does on teenagers, better even.' See? That person's opinion fed my opinion and made mine stronger."

  "Okay, I think I get it," I said, getting lost in all the memories of my mom having strong opinions about how I should wear my hair and how that fed my resistance to doing anything at all with my hair.

  "So, in the first essay draft, my opinion was so strong it was guaranteed to feed someone else's opposite opinion, and I didn't want to do that. So I tried to make my point of view be that we should all get together to discuss how to keep our community safe. I wanted to stress meeting, not stress my personal bias about handguns."

  I read the essay over to myself again and thought about it as I got some coffee and banana bread. "I think you succeeded, Grandma," I said.

  "Thanks, Cassandra. I value your point of view."

  We went for our morning walk as usual, and there was a misty fog that felt good to walk through and breathe. I was so used to the beach that it was no longer cold or uncomfortable. Instead it was bracing and exhilarating, crisp and invigorating. I had metamorphosed into an Oregon beach person. My tenderfoot days were long gone.

  I was still mulling over what Lila had said about feeding opposites. "Do you mean if I love something, I'm feeding hating it?"

  "Give me an example," she said.

  "If I really love my mother, and I want her to be safe, then am I feeding not loving and not safe?"

  "That's a good question," she said. "What do you think?"

  "If I want her to be safe, then I'm watching her all the time, waiting for her to do something not safe, so she tries to get away from me to have some freedom, and then she gets reckless with that freedom? So my pushing so hard for her to be safe makes her reckless?"

  "Wow," she said. Then she didn't say anything. She kept walking along, looking at the waves, stopping to pick up pretty stones, yipping at the gulls and sandpipers.

  I walked beside her in silence, only my silence wasn't peaceful. I was questioning everything I'd ever felt strongly, every time I pushed myself to do something or someone else to do something or every time someone pushed me to believe something or be a certain way or choose a certain path. My silence was chaotic.

  When we got back to the house, the phone was ringing. Lila just took her time as usual rinsing off her feet and drying them, and admiring the rocks she'd collected before adding them to the basket. By the time we went inside, the phone had stopped ringing. It started again right away, though, and she answered it on the second ring.

  I was sure it would be someone calling about the column, but it was Janice. I could tell by the way Lila sat down at her desk and adopted a very patient tone of voice, as if she were talking with a troubled child who needed to be handled with care. It was exactly the way I felt when I talked with my mother.

  I tried to remember what I'd been repeating to myself on the porch when I was practicing forgiveness. I accept Janice as my mother. I accept my mother. I allow her to be my mother. I stop resisting being her daughter. I let her be who she is. I stop pushing on her to be stronger, smarter, safer, saner, more grown up. I allow her to be exactly who she is right now. That helped my breathing so I was able to listen to one side of their conversation without getting myself all opinionated about it.

  I could tell Janice wanted something and was making excuses when Lila questioned her about the paperwork she needed to register me for school. Finally Lila said, "All you have to do is sign the papers and send all her re
cords to me. Then I'll wire you the money."

  She waited much more patiently than I would have, and finally said, "I'm sorry, dear, but I can't do that."

  Another long wait, and she said, "Yes, as soon as you get all the right papers to me."

  I was suddenly struck with the idea that Lila was buying me, like buying a car. She was making a deal for me, bargaining with a crazy person to get the goods on her terms. I knew my mother didn't want me back. She hadn't called to talk with me the whole time I'd been with Lila. I felt myself getting worked up into old anger again, so I said over and over, I accept my mother, I let Janice be my mother, Janice is my mother and it's okay with me, she's not perfect but she's not a monster, etc. It helped a little, but not much.

  When Lila hung up, she smiled a sad tired smile and said, "You mother says she'll send the papers we need. Let's hope she does."

  "How can you be so patient with her?" I asked. "I wanted to slap her, and she wasn't even talking to me."

  "I'd slap her if I thought it would do any good," she said. "But I'm pretty sure it would set us back about ten years. I can't risk that, even for the satisfaction of a slap."

  I grinned at her. I was glad to know Lila wasn't perfect either. She'd actually considered slapping my mother. The thought thrilled me.

  The next time the phone rang, I answered, and it was Molly. "We all thought Lila was very diplomatic in her column," she told me. I put Lila on so Molly could tell her. They talked and laughed a few minutes, and then Lila handed the phone back to me.

  "Cassandra," Molly said, "I need your help. I found the perfect dog for Kitty Lynn, and I need you to help me take it to her."

  "But after last time, don't you think we should ask her first?"

  "Oh, I learned from last time," she said. "I found out you can check the dogs out for one day to see if they are a good match for the family, so I'm going to check out a dog, and we can take it to her shop and let her fall in love with it and then give it to her."

  "Molly," I said, remembering how much we all cried just a few weeks before in Kitty Lynn's sunroom. "Are you sure?"