Sunday Scribblings #190: Beauty

BEHIND GLASS

The fog rolled in about three in the afternoon, bright blue sky morning turning to midnight black. Where she’d found the fog is anyone’s guess—her own pockets, upstairs, downstairs cabinets, her need was on the clock, circus of visiting family, circus of boys will be boys, testosterone cowboys, testosterone jockeys, and the gathering coo of mothers and aunts, hymns to family and reconciliations and forgettings, the biggest forgetting the absence she stumbled in, room to room, voracious lean panther foraging for the meat of self-destruction.

We’d picked her up in the fairy tale morning of Morristown, in golden autumn shade, the grey hag I’d imagined after all these years still the winsome lass, under a tangle of unkempt reunion hair, blossom fur you’d almost want to call it, a nest she carried, a place to lie down, carrion comfort. Standing there in front of the bank, no business of hers, looming fantasies of commerce in the abandoned fairy hall of her brain. Across the street to the old trust building, dignified aunt in her starchy columns now tamed by the ubiquitous green awnings at her feet. Chapel Hill, Ashland, Waitsfield, Bethlehem, anywhere, I thought, where youth lolls in splendor and dreams dream long into the fairy night. N turned in the tiny village street and we were off through the trees back to grandma’s house.

The others off to the childhood playgrounds, I sat at the table with S and split a bottle of pomegranate cider in tiny port glasses, playing the games of backgammon diplomacy, the tiny tits for tat that make, in the roll of dice and the click of tiles (and later, the shuffle of cards), for shadowy regard and weary détente. The morgue had not yet set in, though A was already rummaging. I poured her a glass of the cider as she walked through with her poverty of gleanings in a plastic bag. The smell of cigarette smoke poured off the woman who’d once gently argued the merits of soy in my coffee, heresy at the time to a man just two years from the magic of Fat City waiters pouring elixir from steamed copper lanterns of righteous brew.

It started, of course, with mild tangents and tea-time lunacies, before flowering into the black storm that swept the dinner table with its liturgy of recognitions, a ghost who could not perch, conversing with the masks she’d placed on all those around the table. At one point the two boys, ten and seven, were the thieves of the cheap necklace she’d lost under the table with the cell phone that had slipped from her grasp.

N and I drove her back out into the night at last, first to the music shop for an incomprehensibly long round of negotiations—an alms house, really, demure pawn priest behind the counter, selling whatever tiny bit of solace he could muster. From there, her dark eye ticked off the donut shops we passed on the way to weary Walt’s weary Camden. I wonder if his ghost still walks its streets, turns, as N did, in front of Diane’s Furs, tiger behind glass, patron saint to the nomads at the Nomad Motel just down the weary block.

N pulled in behind the building, dark and abandoned but for one other silver car. Of course, the red key was not to be found, just the yellow (“to the bathroom at work”). I knelt in the dark and sifted through the avalanche of her purse, who knows what salvation still lurked there, out of sight, beyond the reach of daily probing fingers. A walked three doors down, words with the hidden figure inside the door, comes back with yet another tale from another time. We walk round the building, up the hill to the office. Bearded ferryman looms behind glass, sends us back down the hill to the housekeeper’s, the very same door she knocked on minutes before. Rita, lovely Rita, with her dim old woman’s smile of blessing comes out, takes us all by the hand, gently, as gently as she opens A’s door and steers her in, and for the moment, yet again, in the darkest of places, I know that we—and more importantly, A—are still in the presence of God, nesting even for the unnestled.