by Lorraine Ray
Chapter Six
Last night, before I came to your shop today, I cobbled several practice scarecrows, wardrobe scarecrows (or are they called skeletons?) showing the possible pants, the shoes, and the jewelry that I might wear with the shirt. Reverently, on an old plush chair of mine (it's embarassing to admit I began collecting antique furniture because of you), I laid out my final choice: the Guatemalan shirt, my favorite jeans, a charm bracelet, and high-heeled espadrilles. All night in the dark my best practice self sat akimbo, flattened, awaiting your approval.
I wonder now what I had in mind then. Did I truly believe in the love spell? Were my thoughts toward you kind, or did I plan to attack you in my magical shirt like some avenging, folkloric Valkyrie? One wearing a Guatemalan ethnic shirt? Well, I suppose three nights of crying over someone you love can produce a state akin to madness. My thoughts were certainly muddled.
But this morning I believed it was a glorious shirt, a marvelous shirt, scintillating and fashionable. When I awoke, I blinked at its wild embroidery; my hands shook when I touched it. In this shirt I knew you would love me. You would adore me as much as I adored you.
When I dropped the heavy shirt over my head, it fell onto my shoulders like a leaden bell, a kooky bell, with cold clapper legs, conking knee knockers, underneath. The surface of the shirt was so ornate that it seemed to have a life of its own; this was unexpected. As I descended the cracked linoleum stairs and shoved the brass bar on the door to emerge out of the stadium dorm, some uniformed football players, helmets in their beefy hands, whistled at me and barked. I saw them trip away, glancing back in disbelief, slapping one another’s artificially large shoulders.
Slipping behind the wheel of my car, I hoped I didn’t look as odd as I felt, nevertheless another man gulped before I had closed the door, and two women on a bus bench leaned toward each other and whispered. The shirt seemed to weigh a ton, but—I reminded myself as I smoothed it with one hand—the shirt was beautiful, and it had a spell on it, and through it, you would love me.
How the sky shone this morning. What distinct puffy clouds the desert can produce in December, what sprightly packages of clean white joy. A turquoise opalescent bowl had locked down over the cactuses and rocks in our valley and put everything in sharp relief and gleam, seeming to set the world to my purpose, seeming to celebrate my journey to the old imitation Mexican village with its niches and arches, its stairways and balconies, its chimneys and roofs. Somewhere there you’d hidden your shop.
I stepped out of the car and into this village, and immediately my upbeat mood changed. I looked forward fearfully, searching for you, jumping at the movement of sparrows and the sinister sway of fairy lights in the breeze. Here and there, but always skyward, corroded beams jutted out of the brickwork, and tile arches marched down. Thick wooden lintels provided threatening eyebrows to the various window displays: the soaps, the Indian jewelry, the dinnerware, the humongous bottles of humectant jojoba shampoo. With so much going on overhead, with vines trailing from the walls and a crazy quilt of talavera tiles in every corner, I was afraid I would blunder into you—or your spooky assistant. Under a safe arch, I lurked in a cold drippy shadow, emerged once, then retreated.
It was unclear whether I really wanted to find you. Did I think I might find her instead? Or you and her kissing in one clandestine corner?
At last, during a short foray away from the arch, blue neon on a stout tower snaked out the words: Sonora, A Country Restaurant. Next to the restaurant, at the top of a flight of red concrete stairs, I saw shop number nine. That was your office above your shop, World Arts and Architectural Salvage. Once the caretaker’s home, your office had a sleeping porch attached where airmen stayed in World War Two. Sometimes, I remembered you telling me, you spent the night there on a cot or arrived early to take a shower in the bathroom. I tried to imagine you in a robe on the porch, awake and happy to see me.
As I climbed the wide steps, past pots overflowing with succulent donkey tails, my gaze fixed on your glass doorknob. I thought I saw it turning, and I wondered if your assistant would spring out from behind the door, dash down the steps with a knife, and plunge it into my chest.
Partway up, I felt something tug my arm, and I wanted to scream, but instead I looked down at my dangly charm bracelet that had snagged the embroidery of the shirt. This was harmless, but in looking down, the toe of my espadrille caught the edge of the next step, and I pitched forward, landing with a sharp impact on one knee. I got up slowly. Then I noticed your dusty “closed” sign propped in a small side window.
Outside the village bakery, under a stout palm, flower boxes with occasional overarching weeds clung to a wrought iron gate. I drank a coffee there, gently probing my bruised knee, while at another table, two elevator repairmen slouched forward, their Styrofoam cups steaming in the cool air. One of the men dipped a finger in a spill and dabbled coffee droplets. I suppose they wanted to discuss the young woman in the strange shirt at the next table, but I could easily overhear them. A dispatch walkie-talkie, propped against a napkin dispenser, yawped and a voice said, “The lights there just burned out…do I replace those or have them do it?” The two men sat up and grinned at someone else’s troubles, and I thought of my predicament, and wondered what I would do when you came. What could I say? How should I act?
I sunk down in my chair and glared at the bizarre shirt I was wearing. Any illusion I had regarding its magical powers vanished. I noticed the folds of the shirt always arranged themselves such that the chartreuse bunnies showed only their headless hindquarters; the roses, I had to acknowledge, more closely resembled fiery cabbages. I began to wonder exactly what Guatemalan disaster, what Central American conflagration, the skirt commemorated. It seemed no surprise that the woman in fishnets wanted to be rid of it.
To the bottom of your steps, I returned, looking, I knew now, like some misshapen refugee. I dropped onto a concrete bench directly in front of a window, yours, that had gone unnoticed before. There I studied: three marble monks, as pale and expectant as me, a straw pig with a tatty mat on its back, a hairy paddle with a gruesome face carved on it. What would I do when you came?
High above, an arch spanned the gossamer sky. At the apex of the arch, a niche appeared like a ruined fireplace or a stage for some diminutive vaudeville troupe. I obliquely eyed the proscenium where a crumbling statue of our Lady of Guadalupe opened her benevolent palms. Half her clay face had dissolved; she was as hollow as an Easter chocolate.
When I’d sat for a moment, a bird flitted into the niche beside the mute Guadalupe. It was a cactus wren, a spotted bird, with a white chest and a close-fitting brown jacket. The wren crouched low, sharp toes gripping the edge of the wet brick. A white line above its eyes gave it an intense, argumentative expression. It glanced up at its huge sidekick and did a comic double take. Rather bravely, yet surreptitiously, it peeked around the Guadalupe’s skirt, studying her bare toes and the folds of a capacious sleeve. I watched the wren shuffle a dance step or two, bow to the statue, bow again and wait, just as I waited, though if you came I didn’t know what I’d do.
Then, without warning, the wren pecked the hollow statue and jumped back as though it expected some angry retribution. After a brief pause, the hem of the Guadalupe’s dress felt again the sharp snip of the wren’s beak, and the bird jumped back once more. Still there was no response. All at once, the wren made jabbing cuts at the hands of the statue, at the face, at the elbows. Repeatedly the bird popped forward and back, its wings flapping, its legs sprung wide, until, finally, with a violent thrust, the wren bashed the statue, smashed its chest again and again against the Guadalupe, and fluttered off, wildly, hysterically.
I chuckled. What an odd scene, though when I thought about it I realized that I shouldn’t have been surprised; I witnessed them often enough. Everywhere I went there seemed to be comic niches, God-bestowed moments, impressions of a life too glorious to ever encompass in words. Tiny mesqu
ite leaves falling on our faces, clouds like giant tortillas, the lopsided mission at night, those were more to me than simply the backdrops of our love affair.
Here I understood finally and completely that, unlike you, I was acutely aware of the world around me. And, more importantly, I knew I loved the world more than I had ever loved you.
I turned my gaze to your door. Just then a woman’s pale arm wearing three Huichol bracelets abruptly unlocked the door from the inside and flipped the sign from “closed” to “open”. Your bare legs came close to her and from the way your feet were positioned I knew you and she embraced. And then you stepped away and laughed—or rather your shower did—coming on in a squeaky, insincere giggle, squawking a raucous race as the water coursed through the old iron pipes. So you’d been there all along.
Chapter Seven
How happy I was on my way back to the dorm; I cherished every block that I drove, though I was alone, though you weren't with me.
I had seen what I needed to. I had seen the arm of that lady that I had met at your house. The lady with the assortment of Huicol bracelets. I saw your bare legs near her. I knew then clearly what it meant. I suppose I needed to be hit on the head, almost. But I was proud of the fact that I didn’t need to go to the door again. Your shower had turned on, her arm had come out and changed the sign. I didn’t cherish any illusions anymore.
I took the first steps away from your door with a certain confidence and happiness. That was strange for me as I somehow still thought I would be crushed by discovering the truth and perhaps, without wearing that Guatemalen shirt, I would have been.
As I walked away from your door, I noticed the tiles on the stairs were worn in the center and that each tile was extraordinarily beautiful. Next I noticed the succulent ice plants that spilled over pots that were mounted on the side of the iron railing. The beauty of each sparkly pink bloom was more than I could stand. I loved all of them, individually, ecstatically.
And on my way home in that heavy, silly shirt, I grinned at so many things in the world surrounding me. In rusty relief, on a truck panel parked at a stoplight beside me, the profile of Abraham Lincoln contemplated the West he had never seen and I loved that rusty patch and I grinned at it again and again; at a crosswalk where a large pink wad of gum had been stuck on a walk button, I couldn't keep the smile from bubbling into the laugh of a happy person contemplating the thing they love most. The world was crammed with exquisite moments of fun. I smiled broadly at an aged cowboy, emerging from a bank, who felt for his back pocket and tucked his worn wallet into his saggy baggy jeans. How glad I was to have seen that. And when a palm frond clamped onto an antenna in the wintry wind and hung on and on, like a desperate silent movie star, I saw it as the victim of some giant off-screen fan, a universal victim, a cellmate in this prison of pain and beauty, and I laughed.
When I meet the Guatemalan coed again, I’ll tell her the shirt with its love spell worked—and it did. For when an ocotillo, one of those towering bouquets of thorny sticks, stood trembling, as stiff and socially inept as me, before me in a planter on my way home today, everything fell into place, and I knew that awkward plant and I were destined, yes, certainly destined, to be lovers.
THE END
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Lorraine Ray is an avid reader and writer. She lives in an adobe home in the center of Tucson, Arizona with her husband and daughter.
Connect with Lorraine Ray at her Google blog (coming soon), at Facebook or Twitter: https://twitter.com/@LoRay00.
