How to Be a Great Lady Part II

Everything happened on a damp afternoon of a Spring day. The phone call, the text messages, the heartdropping news. It was a day like this and the smells on this day sparked a memory chain that unraveled me back to the past

I burned incense to fill my little space, my writing nook, with the smell of spices and to clean the air. The curls of the smoke danced in the air, charming the wind and dancing in whirls and spins. They spun through the windowsill as the rain misted, it was the kind of rain that if I turned my face up to the sky, would cover me from ear to ear with an instant light dew. The dead leaves of winter were soaked and the chill in the air was a happy one because for once, at least, it was just no longer cold.

When the smoke started sifting its way through the window, I had been listening to music with the sound of bells and women singing and in the light of the afternoon sky I suddenly became stricken and broke down in tears. The sounds of ringing and full throaty declarative harmonies of their voices bore my memory back, and when the scent of the incense reached my nose I was instantly transported. I wept with my face turned back, and felt the tears stream endlessly down the sides of my face, dripping past my ears, falling into my hair.

I remembered climbing with curiousity into my aunt’s room, on bandy nine year old legs with wild hyper hair and excitement in my eyes. It was connected to a terrace that overlooked the sea, where she would stretch in the mornings those days she didn’t rush out for business, listening to opera arias in her wide sleeved robes. There would be incense burning, the smell masking the smell of her cigarettes and tea as she thoroughly enjoyed herself in the morning light. I would climb the steps hewn from native canes, with bamboo to glide my hands on. With my young impatient steps I would barrel into her open doorway into a room lit by low lamps and lanterns of diffused light.

It was the treasure trove of an explorer; in every corner were jewelry boxes laden with gold chains and precious gems that spilled out, inviting me to try them on and give myself a glimpse of my young self in the costumery of a princess from a faraway land. There were dusty antiques, warriors carved out of tropical wood that stood in attack mode under faded paint and a collection of fearsome crucifixes sacrilegiously adorned with leis and NY Knicks caps. All the mirrors had been dulled of their silver. I could pull hats off of mannequins posed exquisitely, limbless. I was surrounded by all of the accoutrements and accessories of various grand places in time.

Across the world in her midtown Manhattan apartment, I slept fitfully in the week after she died. I couldn’t even think about the exact place where she might have dropped dead, or the sinister shadows in the demonic faces of the cherubs in the dawn light. It was no longer charming to be surrounded by so much haunted history, because now I was living that haunted history. I coasted forward during those days, not stopping to sink, breathing steady.

She left me, my sister and her granddaughter some of her shoes and clothes, and we bedecked ourselves in her things like costumes that somehow became molded to us perfectly by the time we left New York. My sister’s leopard print boots and my niece’s fur coat suited them because she had imparted in us some of the personality that it takes to pull off that kind of fashion showmanship. I came home with a floor length giraffe print jacket, and a pair of water shoes that I secretly always wanted.

This afternoon as I felt the low pressure of the weather system lull me, and the scent of the incense haunt me I remembered those shoes and felt compelled to pull them out. My friend sat patiently in my living room as I dug through my closet flinging shoes across the room, looking for the pair. I could find one, but not the other. I panicked, knowing that I hadn’t seen or wore those in a while.

"Freaking shizz! I lose everything!!! I can’t freaking lose those."

A breath and a step later I looked aside and under a pile of my clothes peeped the toe of her shoe mysteriously, as though her spirit had nudged it into my sight. It’s moments like those that I felt that she might still be close to me. I stepped into her shoes and trod through my backyard across the wet leaves to call my dog in. I was stricken though with the thought that almost a year after she had gone the shoes were relatively still kind of new and with the style of my time, since she was always slightly ahead of the curve with her fashion instincts. One day they wouldn’t be and in the years ahead her things would wear away. It has already taken me a whole year to begin adjusting to all the things she left in the vacuum of her presence, and I am left with a great legacy to one day start writing. What I want to hold on to are the things about her that are timeless, the things that will travel with me decades down the line. All she could really leave us were those instincts and that sensibility. The rest will fade, or harden into relics, but my life is too dynamic to carry around dusty baggage.