No exposition here. Just something I’ve been thinking about.
Title: Waltz
WC: 1100
Turning left into the winding driveway always felt like traveling back in time. The flanking redbrick walls with their bas relief oak leaves served as endpoints of an invisible line of demarcation.
There was no stop before making the great leap back that day. Usually there would have been, for an orange pop and a soft square hamburger tucked upright in the white cardboard castle. Usually the girl would have carried the bag, letting it swing at her side as she asked a stream of unanswerable questions that would last the entire way down the vanishing point–long hall with its haphazard line of wooden-backed wheelchairs and its scuffed, old-fashioned tiles.
The girl hadn’t asked about the change in routine. That day, she didn’t ask much at all, and the man wondered what she knew, what she understood, how she felt, but he didn’t ask questions. It wasn’t the nature of things between them, and the walk down the long hall with its scuffed, old-fashioned tiles was all but silent until they came to the shop.
They had tried for seasonally cheerful, whoever “they” were. Half volunteer, half charity cases themselves, like the rest of the place, he supposed. Worse-for-wear tinsel glinted dully in the overhead fluorescents. The nicked-up push bars on the glass doors had off-kilter red velvet bows and dented jingle bells dangling on ribbons.
The girl’s steps slowed as they moved past. Her hand, empty of its usual white bag, reached out to make the bell chime. His own steps slowed—stopped—as the tinny note sang out. They stood side by side for a moment, looking through the glass into the shop before wordlessly making their way in.
There was little out of the ordinary to him. The glass cases with their blonde wood sides were the stuff of his childhood, as were the lace handkerchiefs in cellophane-topped boxes, the rolling waves of navy, maroon, grey socks, three to a box, one shelf over and down.
To the girl, everything was out of another time entirely. The brush and mirror set with its mother-of-pearl backing was an exotic thing of beauty. The circle pins and tie bars tucked into tiers of blue-plush velvet were treasures locked away behind the curving glass that bent the light to pale green from her vantage point.
The man watched as she moved methodically from case to case, pressing up on her toes to peer in from the top, crouching low to study from another angle. She was careful not to touch the glass, though the warmth of her breath sometimes lingered in clouds, temporarily obscuring an object of particular interest.
She asked nothing either for or about anything she came across until the businesslike march brought her to a display of Christmas items. There was an unsteady circle of gold-plated angels dangling above a ring of tea lights. The man leaned down to tell the girl how they would fly on currents of warm air when the wicks were lit.
She nodded in awe and pointed to a white ceramic tree, rough with sprinkled on glitter snow, was studded with plastic pegs in red and gold and blue and purple. She traced the cord to the boxy wheel switch and smiled as the low-wattage bulb inside passed on its light in a wash of colors over the backs of her hands.
She asked nothing until she came to a mystery. It was about the size of a softball, red and heavy and round, with small feet to stand on. With a look up at him and nod down at her, she found it chimed as she turned it over and over in her hands until she found the swing hinge at its wide waist.
The globe opened into a mirror-topped figure-eight shape with wisps of snow, green leaves, and holly berries in careful paint around the edges. It was a music box of sorts. The stiff wings of its key were none too eager to turn under the stubborn force of small fingers
“Careful,” he warned, though she was by nature.
The music, when she’d worried the key more gently, more patiently, wasn’t the Christmas tune he’d expected. Warbling at first, as though the music came across some vast distance from another age, it smoothed out into a melancholy waltz that tugged just at the edges of memory.
“There should be a drawer,” he said, nudging her hands back to the red underbelly of the globe. “There should be skaters.”
He watched, holding his breath as her fingers found the seam. Her brow furrowed as she traced its edges, tugging with her short fingernails, then pressing and pressing until she hit the spring mechanism and the drawer slid open.
“Skaters,” she said, lifting the two figures free and hefting their surprising weight in one hand. It’s a boy and a girl with pretty painted cheeks and long winter grins bundled up for an outing. She set them on the surface of the mirror, one in each hand. She smiled in surprise as their heavy bases snapped to, and one after the other, they glided away from her fingers. They twirled in circles, together and apart, as the melancholy waltz tinkled on and on.
He bought the stupid little thing. He let the girl buy it, though he thought all the while how silly it was to let even the few dollars it cost go. He let her carry the flimsy bakery box the elderly lady at the counter had unearthed from somewhere, and the hundred questions she asked about it lasted the length of the hallway with its scuffed, old-fashioned tiles.
They spilled over into the room, their destination for now, and he thought at first to quiet her, to check her ever-present impulse to clamber up behind the head of the bed and set the grey rubber and stainless steal of the triangle grip swinging. But in the end he let things be.
In the end he sank in silence into the chair at the head of the bed and watched his mother’s eyes follow the movements of the girl’s hands as she swung open the wide waist of the red globe and set the skaters in position. He watched one corner of his mother’s mouth tug upward in the last vestige of a smile as the girl coaxed the melancholy waltz out of the cheap music box.
“Watch, Grandma,” she said. “They skate. Dad says it’s magnets that make them skate.”
MTZQ Telecommuniculturates 