Grey's Gift
Spring 2022All that could be felt by Grey spun itself into thread, which she would parse through using her fingers and try to make sense of, but, like a mortal attempting to cipher the threads of fates, never was she successful. Ring! The telephone invaded her thoughts, but as Grey reached for the receiver, she remembered that she had yet to go to the post office, where it should be! A package — heavy and wrapped with thick yellow paper and a little tightening of twine — she could hear its solid, crumpling sound as she opened it. And the bright feeling she was bound to board and soar on when the sight of the gift entered her eyes! But alas, the voice of the phone spoke:
“Courtney, how are you, I have been thinking of you, but something has prevented me from calling you…” her mother rambled as Grey began rolling a thin strip of paper that was lying limp on her desk into a tight spiral. Her mother’s voice, a soft, weak siren, came in and out of its deep waters, and Courtney began her journey to the post office. She could picture the blue of the sky, and from her mind’s eye, Grey could see two people wearing bright yellow jackets. How serendipitous?! That two unrelated people would head out their doors from different corners of the city with the same piercing shade painted on their backs. The event pleased her, and it made Grey wonder about the odds of her life, and the odds of the giver of her gift. A strong inflection in the still waters of her mother’s incantations drew her back, pulling Grey’s opinionated chin from the window to the curvature of the receiver.
“Oh Court! You really should’ve married him when you had the chance. Anne is going to have another baby, and Louis is the best of fathers,” she said.
Grey always thought her mother talked in a rather wasteful way — Edwina Moore threw words carelessly and strung them together with proper syntax and impeccable drama, but failed to find a majestical spine that would connect a beast’s appendages, into something meaningful… worthwhile. And so it lay limp around her, pieces to revel at, dismembered and bloody. A day thirty years ago shot through Grey’s mind. Grey — Courtney rather, yes she was Courtney then — would stand at the edge of the tulip bed, as her mother would fret and spin around her, like a wild panther, while her words confusingly clawed at her. Either her dress was not spotless, or she spoke too loudly at supper, or her French was not up to the tastes of the other Edwinas of society. Grey let these memories pass, but the indignance they once held left a tremor in her small heart.
“I do believe I have quite a few errands to run,” Grey started. Like a hawk she tried to find a point where she could exit, to dive away, to get back to the steady ground of her life. Wasn’t the notion insane? One’s own life. How could you own something that you had no business purchasing at the market.
“But I’ve barely just spoken to you, and I have not told you what they were saying about you today when I went to the department store yesterday,” Mrs. Moore protested.
Grey sighed, the paper that she had been rolling had wasted away into a thin string of fibre, and she could feel the pattern of its motion on her fingertips. Her sigh must have been extraordinarily audible, because Edwina Moore began again in a sharper tone. Grey could see her brown curls, once tinted with red, now with grey, but still glistening with the resilience of the wife of a parliamentarian. They shone towards her with a blinding light, and Grey squeezed her eyelids together as her mother’s phantom wrapped around her head.
“Courtney, I do not care about your errands, I am actually calling you because of your concerning disposition, and as your mother I deserve at least that,” said Edwina Moore. “Please tell me you have at least made yourself useful this past summer, Mrs. Lowe told me you had stopped going to the charity dinners on Sunday.”
Grey assured her mother that all was well, that her head had been bothering her, that everything but the monkey in her that makes decisions had been plotting against her. Her mother accepted her excuses one by one like a boy holding out a basket to an apple-picker. The call was finished — at last — Grey leapt out into the summer air like a salmon bounding upstream.
Eyes, in all shades of possible plumage: green, sapphire, the deepest shade of brown, hid under neatly arranged sun caps and umbrellas. Grey was one for peering, and she did. Oh dear! Did anyone look at her? She wanted it, others’ eyes, and yet she did not know what she would do with them, other than take them to the ocean to watch the waves lap back and forth, and throw them into the soft dunes. What was she? A grain of sand? She did feel rather granular as the sun began its descent, pixelating details, shrinking her down, making her a point, a bee in a field, a boat in a bay. It was a bearable feeling, this shrinking, but it was also unequally unbearable — she was devastated. She wanted expansion, to grow big and devour and take from the world. Her chest tightened and constricted. Not now! Look around you! Look at the children, the dogs, the splendour of flowers spilling in abundance.
These risings and lowerings came over her whenever she headed to the post office. A bashful encounter, a triumphant day of errands, an angering conversation beneath polite words, they flitted through her like endless jolts of waves washing up and over, drawing in, drawing back, towards Rome and then out to the horizon.
But what was the use of these wonderings when she was about to receive her gift? It was from Joanne. Joanne, the star in her night sky, the Joanne whose lips were always painted red. “I love you,” she had said with those lips one night. Like a spell, those words have governed Grey’s life from the moment they spilt into the world. But Joanne was not here, she was in the painful “there”, a place Grey could only understand but could only touch when she unravelled the brown parcels she was sacredly allotted. Was that enough, Grey often wondered. Yes! She shouted it from rooftops. No! She thought to herself one late night pouring herself a cup of warm milk in the kitchen. To be held, that was too much one could ask for! And yet it was also all she had ever wanted.
Grey’s shoes hit the pavement like beats from a metronome. She could feel it — Paris, Joanne’s home — getting closer. The summers she would spend there “studying art”, swinging from one cafe to another wrapped in her mother’s silks. Grey swore she could hear those dense afternoons under the sun, as the heat of it all exploded into storms around 4 o’clock, just to be brought up again into a frenzy by night bugs and their orchestral melodies.
There stood the post office, on stout legs of brick, sporting a pair of dashing white windows looking out onto the busy street. Grey liked its posture, how neat it was, how the shrubbery was arranged around it, how no unnecessary accessories poked out sorely. Grey lifted her skirt. She carried herself up the steps like that of an altar, as if she was a sacrificial lamb — about to offer herself to Joanne, to decades of waiting before a lonely grave. She turned the door knob. It was shut. She tries again. Never did words hurt her so more than the sign that pressed itself up against the window: CLOSED. How dare they keep her from her? A drop of rain theatrically lands on her cap, as if the period to the death sentence Grey felt hanging above the nape of her neck. What if she had married, what if the love she had chosen was not worthy of the fortune of time she spent on it. She grasped onto a nearby railing, the red rust crunching into her fine gloves, and her fine gloves becoming inkish under the accelerating rain — it was all becoming a single blur. This is real, she was not dreaming, only that it felt immoral that her gift was somewhere in “there”, on some hardy table, and here she was, on the steps, a fake devotee, a phoney, nothing at all.
She stood at the door above the street, back erect and chin still sharp, but she seemed so small. One could see from the house across the street, a lady, two and forty, hidden beneath the armour of a black gown, arms mechanically crossed like a nutcracker. And what was in her eyes? The defensiveness of an animal backed into a corner, the hardness of someone who has lived in a room of her own, the wicked brilliance of a narrow creek that managed to carve a path for herself. Grey peered in one last time, into the dark of the closed post office. She could make out a golden outline now that the sun was halfway down the horizon, taking its last breath, exhaling soft rays into the office, diffused, spreading about. The brain did not matter at all! Grey can feel it, she was the thread being woven, and time, forever headed in one direction while immovable in the other, was finally within her grasp. She was no longer parsing, with glimpses of truth bestowing upon her. But she too was that divine hand. She could see it now. In the back, on a shelf — it sat like an Emperor: a glorious, brown package. That was Joanne’s, that was hers. Theirs. She was sure of it. And she will be back tomorrow.