The Ivory and the Horn Page 9

  “Some other time,” Jim told him.

  “I’m telling you, man, this woman’s trouble. She sounds way too neurotic for you.”

  “You don’t know her,” Jim said. “For that matter, / don’t really know her.”

  “Yeah, but we know her kind. You’re not going to change your mind?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Well, it’s your loss,” Scotty said. “I’ll give the ladies your regrets.”

  “You do that,” Jim said before he hung up.

  It took him a few moments to track down where he’d put Brenda’s number. When he did find it and made the call, all he got was her answering machine. He hesitated for” a brief moment, then left a message.

  “Hi, this is Jim. Uh, Jim Bradstreet. I know it’s late notice and all, but I thought maybe we could get together tonight, or maybe tomorrow? Call me.”

  He left his number and waited for a couple of hours, but she never phoned back. As it got close to eight-thirty, he considered going down to that new club that Scotty had been so keen on checking out, but settled instead on taking in a movie. The lead actress had red hair, with the same gold highlights as Brenda’s. The guy playing the other lead character treated her like shit.

  That just added to the depression of being alone in a theater where it seemed as though everyone else had come in couples.

  5

  Sometimes I feel as though there’s this hidden country inside me, a landscape that’s going to remain forever unexplored because I can’t make a normal connection with another human being, with someone who might map it out for me. It’s my land, it belongs to me, but I’m denied access to it. The only way I could ever see it is through the eyes of someone outside this body of mine, through the eyes of someone who loves me.

  I think we all have these secret landscapes inside us, but I don’t think that anybody else ever thinks about them. All I know is that no one visits mine. And when I’m with other people, I don’t know how to visit theirs.

  6

  Wendy wasn’t on shift yet when Brenda arrived at Kathryn’s Cafe, but Jilly was there, Brenda had first met the two of them when she was a reporter for In the City, covering the Women in the Arts conference with which they’d been involved. Jilly Coppercorn was a successful artist, Wendy St. James a struggling poet. Brenda had enjoyed the panels that both women were on and made a point of talking to them afterwards.

  Their lives seemed to be so perfectly in order compared to hers that Brenda invariably had a sense of guilt for intruding the cluttered mess of her existence into theirs. And they were both such small, enviably thin women that, when she was with them, she felt more uncomfortable than usual in her own big fat body.

  This constant focusing on being overweight was a misperception on her part, she’d been told by the therapist her mother had made her go see while she was still in high school.

  “If anything, you could stand to gain a few pounds,” Dr. Coleman had said, “Especially considering your history.”

  Brenda’s eating disorders, the woman had gone on to tell her, stemmed from her feelings of abandonment as a child, but no amount of lost weight was going to bring back her .father.

  “I know that,” Brenda argued. “I know my father’s dead and that it’s not my fault he died. I’m not stupid.”

  “Of course you’re not,” Dr. Coleman had patiently replied with a sad look in her eyes.

  Brenda could never figure out why they wouldn’t just leave her alone. Yes, she’d had some trouble with her weight, but she’d gotten over it. Just as she knew it was a failing business that had put the gun in her father’s mouth, the bitter knowledge that he couldn’t provide for his family that had pulled the trigger. She’d dealt with all of that.

  It was in the past, over and done with long ago. What wouldn’t go away, though, was the extra weight she could never quite seem to take off and keep off. Nobody she knew seemed to understand how it felt, looking in a mirror and always seeing yourself on the wrong side of plump.

  She’d asked Jilly once how she stayed so thin.

  “Just my metabolism, I guess,” Jilly had replied. “Personally, I’d like to gain a couple of pounds. I always feel kind of… skin-and-bonesy.”

  “You look perfect to me,” Brenda had told her.

  Perfect size, perfect life—which wasn’t really true, of course. Neither Jilly nor Wendy was perfect. For one thing, Jilly was one of the messiest people Brenda had ever met. But at least she wasn’t in debt. Brenda was tidy to a fault, but she couldn’t handle her personal finances to save her fife. She’d gone from reporter to the position of In the City’s advertising manager since she’d first become friends with Wendy and Jilly. At work, she kept her books and budgeting perfectly in order. So why couldn’t she do the same thing in her private life?

  There was only one other customer in the restaurant, so after Jilly had served him his dinner, she brought a pot of herbal tea and a pair of mugs over to Brenda’s table. She sat down with a contented sigh before pouring them each a steaming mugful. Brenda smiled her thanks and lit a cigarette.

  “So whatever happened with that guy you met at the bus stop?” Jilly asked as she settled back in her chair.

  “Didn’t Wendy tell you?”

  Jilly laughed. “You know Wendy. Telling her something personal is like putting it into a Swiss bank vault and you’re the only person who’s got the account number.”

  So Brenda filled her in.

  “Then when I got home on Friday,” she said as she finished up, “there was a message from him on my machine. But I decided “to take Wendy’s advice and play it cool. Instead of calling him back, I waited for him to call me again.”

  “Well, good for you.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And did he?”

  Brenda nodded. “We made a date for Saturday night and he showed up at my door with a huge box of chocolates.”

  “That was nice of him.”

  “Right. Real nice. Give the blimp even more of what she doesn’t need. You’d think he’d be more considerate than that. I mean, all you have to do is look at me and know that the last thing I need is chocolate.”

  “Jesus, Brenda. The last thing you are is fat.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Jilly just shook her head. “So what did you do?”

  “I ate them.”

  “No, I meant where did you go?”

  “Another movie. I can’t even remember what we saw now. I spent the whole time trying to figure out how he felt about me.”

  “You should try to just relax,” Jilly told her. “Let what happens, happen.”

  “I guess.” Brenda butted out her cigarette and lit another. Blowing a wreath of blue-grey smoke away from the table, she gave Jilly a considering look, then asked, “Do you believe in wishing wells?”

  Wendy took that moment to arrive in a flurry of blonde hair and grocery bags. She dumped the bags on the floor by the table and pulled up a chair.

  “Better to ask, what doesn’t she believe in,” she said. “This woman’s mind is a walking supermarket tabloid.”

  “Ah,” Jilly said. “The poet arrives—only fifteen minutes late for her shift.”

  Wendy grinned and pointed at Jilly’s tangle of brown ringlets.

  “You’ve got paint in your hair,” she said.

  “You’ve got ink on your fingers,” Jilly retorted, then they stuck out their tongues at each other and laughed.

  Their easy rapport made Brenda feel left out. Where did a person learn to be so comfortable with other people? she wondered, not for the first time. She supposed it started with feeling good about yourself—like losing a little weight, getting out of debt, putting your love life in order. She sighed. Maybe it started with not always talking about your own problems all the time, but that was a hard thing to do. There were times when Brenda thought her problems were the only things she did have to talk about.

  “Earth to Brenda,” Jilly said. Under the table, the po
int of her shoe poked Brenda’s calf to get her attention.

  “Sorry.”

  “Why were you asking about wishing wells?” Jilly asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I was just wondering if anybody still believes that wishes can come true.”

  “I think there are magical things in the world,” Wendy said, “but hocus-pocus, wishes coming true—” she shook her head “—I doubt it.”

  “I do,” Jilly said. “It just depends on how badly you want them to.”

  7

  Most wishing wells started out simply as springs or wells that were considered sacred. I found this out a while ago when I was supposed to be researching something else for the paper. I had just meant to look into the origin of wishing wells, but I ended up getting caught up in all the folklore surrounding water and spent most of that afternoon in the library, following one reference which led me to another…..

  All the way back to primitive times, a lake or well was the place that the sick were taken to be healed. Water images show up in the medicinal rites of peoples at an animistic level, where those being healed are shown washing their hands, breast and head. At the water’s edge, reeds grow and shells are found, both symbols of water as salvation—something that Christian symbolism took to itself with a vengeance.

  But even before the spread of Christianity, the well of refreshing and purifying water had already gained all sorts of fascinating associations. It was symbolic of sublime aspirations, thought of as a “silver cord” which attached a human to the center of all things. The corn goddess Demeter or other deities would often be shown standing beside a well. The act of drawing water from a well was like fishing, drawing out and upward the numinous contents of the deeps. Looking into its still waters, like looking into a placid lake, was seen as equivalent to meditation or mystic contemplation. The well symbolized the human soul and was considered an attribute of all things feminine.

  It’s no wonder the Christians came to include it in their baptismal rituals; Christianity has had a long history of taking popular older beliefs and assimilating into its own— even I knew that. But there was so much here that I had never heard of before; fascinating stuff, even though it ended up taking me way off my initial topic. And anyway, the idea of making a wish at a well is tied up in all those tangled stories.

  Throughout Europe sacred wells were given new names after various saints. But as the centuries passed and religious beliefs changed, many of these saints’ wells became less esteemed and pilgrims no longer approached them with the same feelings of devotion they once had. People stopped offering prayers to the saints and made a wish instead.

  And the associated rituals often survived. In some places the wish-maker had to dip her bare hands into the water up to her wrists, make a silent wish, then withdraw her hands and swallow the water held in them. Other places, one left a pin, often bent, or the ever-popular coin. In some ways, wishing wells are a reversion to paganism, the serious wishes made at them being reminiscent of when people approached the sacred water to make an offering or benediction to some god or other, or to the spirit of the water.

  Of course water wasn’t seen just as the home of benevolent spirits. Folklore throughout the world relates the dangers of water witches and sirens, kelpies and other malevolent creatures whose sole existence seems to rely on drowning those they manage to snare with their various wiles. Everybody knows the story of how Ulysses confronted the sirens and most have probably heard of the Rhine maiden Lorelei—although, oddly enough, she entered folkloric tradition through Clemens Brentano’s ballad “Lore Lay.” He was so convincing that people just assumed it was based on true folklore.

  Among the creepiest of the water witches are the Russian rusalki. They’re lake spirits in female form—very beautiful and very deadly. They were supposed to bring a weird kind of ecstatic death when they drowned their victims, although some stories said it wasn’t actually death they brought, but rather passage to another world. Another book I read said that before their current place in folklore tradition, they were considered to be fertility spirits. I found one reference where some Russian peasants were quoted as saying that “where the rusalki trod when dancing, there the grass grew thicker and the wheat more abundant.”

  That’s the weird thing about folklore. Everything gets stirred up so you don’t know which story’s the original one anymore. Whatever comes along, be it a church or a new government, usually assimilates into their own the traditions and beliefs that existed before they came, and that’s what creates the tangle.

  This bit with the rusalki being psychopomps—leading human souls into the afterworld—makes them reminiscent of angels or Valkyries. Certain birds and animals could also act as “good shepherd” spirits. All of which might make the rusalki seem less scary, except I saw a representation of one in a book, and it gave me a serious case of the willies. The picture showed a tall, scowling woman dressed in a tattered green dress, with claw-like hands and burning eyes. In another book I ran across a painting of a Scottish water-wraith that could have been the rusalka’s twin sister.

  It’s funny how the same inspirational source can make for opposite beliefs. Fertility goddess from one point of view, harbinger of death from another. Benevolent spirit or collector of souls. Weird.

  Anyway, through all my reading, I never did discover anything interesting about the wishing well at the motel. It wasn’t erected on some sacred site; it wasn’t the central crossroad of a bunch of ley lines or the home of some Kickaha corn goddess. It was just a gimmick to get people to stop at the motel. But that makes for another funny thing— funny strange, still, not ha-ha. Jilly once told me that if you get enough people to agree that something is a certain way, then it becomes that way.

  It almost makes sense. For one thing, it would explain how Elvis or JFK can be as much a spiritual avatar for some people as Jesus is for others. Or how a gimmicky wishing well could really grant wishes—just saying it did. Doesn’t do much to explain the voices, though.

  Or the ghosts.

  Here’s something I’ve never told anybody before: One day, about a month or so ago when I’m at the well, I get this weird compulsion to close my eyes and try to imagine the faces that once went with those long-lost voices I now hear.

  All I want is for Timmy to look at me the way he looks at Jennifer.

  That girl—was she pretty, or fat like me?

  Please make Daddy stop shouting at Mommy the way he does.

  That child—I can’t tell, is it a boy or a girl?

  We’ll love each other forever.

  Did they? They sound so young, that couple. Don’t they know that nothing ever lasts? Nothing is forever. Except maybe loneliness. Or does being lonely just feel as though it lasts forever?

  The air is thick with the scent of rose blossoms, the hum of bees. I look down at my legs and see them crisscrossed with the shadows of rose thorns and tiny jagged leaves. The faces rise easily in my imagination, but later I realize that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, calling them up the way I did.

  Lying in bed that night, it’s as though I’ve actually summoned their ghosts to me by imagining them. I dream about them, about their lives, about wishes that were granted and ones that weren’t. About how the wishes some received weren’t what they really wanted, how others are happy they never got theirs….

  It all seems so real.

  I learn to put them aside in the morning, but lately it’s gotten harder. These last few days I can feel my life tangling with theirs. They’re not dead people, I think, but then I realize some of them might be. The Wishing Well closed its doors twenty years ago. A lot can happen to a person in twenty years. I really could be living with their ghosts—if there really were such things.

  Jilly believes in ghosts. As Wendy says, Jilly believes in all kinds of things that nobody else would. Not exactly tabloid fodder, but close. Everything’s got a ghost, she says. A spirit. And if you look closely enough, if you pay attention and really learn to see
, you’ll be able to recognize it.

  While Jilly can be persuasive, I don’t think I can quite believe in ghosts. But I do believe in memories.

  Jilly’s friend Christy Riddell—the writer—made the connection between ghosts and memories for me. He told me it’s not just people that have memories; places have them, too.

  “If you think of ghosts as a kind of recording,” he says, “a memory that’s attached itself to a certain place or an object, then they don’t become quite so farfetched after all.”

  “So why don’t we see them everywhere?” I ask. “Why doesn’t everyone see them?”

  “People’s minds are like radio receivers,” he explains. “They’re not all capable of tuning into every station.”

  I still don’t believe in ghosts and I tell him so.

  “Look at the stars,” he says.

  This is happening in the middle of a party at Wendy’s house. Christy and I are having a smoke in the backyard, thrown together because we’re the only ones with the habit in Wendy’s circle of friends.

  “What about them?” I ask, my gaze roving from star to star in the darkness overhead.

  “Did you ever think about how many of them are ghosts?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “We’re not seeing the stars as they are right now,” he says. “We’re seeing them as they were thousands of years ago, maybe millions of years ago—however long it took their light to reach us. Some of them don’t exist anymore. What we see when we look at them right now aren’t the stars themselves, but the light that they gave off—images of themselves, of what they once were.”

  “So… ?”

  “So maybe that’s what ghosts are.”

  I hate to admit it, but I can almost buy this.

  “Then how come ghosts are so scary?” I ask.

  “They’re not always,” he says. “But memories can be like wounds. They’re not easily forgotten because they leave a scar as a constant reminder. It’s the moments of strongest emotions that we remember the most: a love lost or won; anger, betrayal, vengeance. I think it’s the same for ghosts, the strength of their emotions at the time of their death is what allows them to linger, or go on.”