Who's Gonna Buy You Ribbons?

Part III of III.

The time I last saw Bess - in person - it was quite by accident. Five years had passed in which she appeared to me only in photographs, or in memories, or via quick and distracted phone call. Gloria began mentioning her less, too. The sad young dance of drifting away, of the tearing up of roots, easy as pulling weeds. 

You’re the reason I’ve been wandering on. 

I’d been gone from home so long that, upon my return, I realised with a shock that it was no longer home, not home at all. I’d become rootless as a pressed flower. Ornamental and useless.

In my travels, I’d comforted myself every now and then by watching the scene from The Wizard of Oz wherein Dorothy clicks her heels. There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, and is sent, as if on a wind, back to Kansas. I thought of this scene at a monastery in Spain, sandals on my feet. I thought of it in a London basement cafe with a girl from Oklahoma who claimed Zelda Fitzgerald as a distant cousin and studied ancient greek. She had long, hair, parted in the middle. She was part Cherokee, wore a dark linen shift and carried an antique beaded reticule. We drank mineral water in crystal glasses, with marigolds floating amongst the ice, and talked about Oklahoma, Paris, Judy Garland, Kansas.

There’s no place like home.

You’re the reason I’ve been wandering on.

Imagine my shock upon realising I was distinctly without home. No place. 

This all brings me to the last time I saw Bess. 

*

I’d returned to the city where my parents lived - note that I neglect, here, the use of the word home. 

I am aware that I’m belabouring a point. 

For a month I tried to lay low. It was the longest I’d been with my parents since childhood, and the stagnation sent me reeling. My hands shook uncontrollably, tears sprung to my eyes at the slightest provocation, the sun proved too much for my vision, and I took to wearing dark glasses. I felt like a cheap Brett Easton Ellis imitation, or a two-bit detective in a pulp novella.

On occasion it can be wonderful to live your life as if you are in a pulp novella.

This was not one of these occasions. 

There is nothing unusual about the spot in which I’d found myself. A sufferer of a slump. A sufferer, probably, of a ‘generalised anxiety disorder.’ Disordered. In my mid twenties, sleeping on a fold-out bed, too fragile even to drink my morning coffee. 

One sunny day, I was sent on an errand. I’d begun to notice that almost daily, I’d be sent off by a family member on some task or other which needed completing. A thinly veiled attempt to keep me on top of it all.

I sat on the top deck of a ferry. The particular errand on which I’d been sent escapes me now, so much have those days blended into one, like there was no sunrise and no sunset, and the earth stopped rotating until I could get my shit together, a kick up the rear to entice me to reenter the world of the living. It’s tiresome, going about life as a ghost. Everything felt numb, no newness, all listlessness. I bought a new notebook but could think of nothing to write in it. Wrote November First. Crossed it out. Tore out the page. 

As the ferry pulled away, I caught sight of a silhouette, clipping along the tiles, past the dock. It was Bess, back home, moving fast, on her own - no doubt cheerier - errand. 

I’d not known that angels were among us.

I called out.

She turned quickly, lithe as ever, and spotted me. She whipped off her sunglasses, and waved a big pantomime wave. 

‘What are you doing here? Back?’ She yelled, squinting to see me.

‘What are you doing here?’ I laughed for the first time in weeks. 

‘Are you well?’

‘Bess, I’m doing horribly. Horrible. I feel like I’m hardly alive. Everything’s stagnant. Rotten.’ 

I didn’t care that I was airing my sadnesses for all on the ferry. I saw her alone, spotlit, her hair long and fair, her smile open, open as I’d not seen a smile for forever. 

There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. 

‘My darling boy! Give yourself time, but do come back. Remember when we’d wake up at sunrise, and when we’d dance, and how we’d talk til we fell asleep.’

I remembered. The people around me stared, but I didn’t feel it, and I felt wide awake. 

‘Remember, we were born in paradise!’

‘And I’ve been living in hell ever since!’ We laughed, loud guffaws. A whistle was blown, and the ferry began to pull away. The engine was loud, deafening, and Bess leaned over the railing. She pulled off her scarf, a length of white silk, and waved it. The wind blew. I couldn’t believe that she was there, before me, getting smaller as the boat sped up. 

‘It’s always going to be something, my boy. It’s something. Don’t forget! Hey! Don’t forget!’ 

She smiled and waved, the sun beat down on her scarf as she waved it, a flag. The ferry pulled away, and the reverberation is with me still. The flag and the wind said her words. 

Don’t Forget! 

*

I thought of her often. I lost track. In fact, she disappeared from me entirely, as if I’d dreamt her up. I thought of the people she was no doubt with now, cleverer than I,  more literary. In some major city, Paris or New York, or at the Iowa’s Writers Workshop, or hitchhiking through Syria in linen robes. Gloria died, quietly in a hospice, and as per her request she was cremated and disposed of with little fanfare. (‘Funerals are for Catholics and if any of you dare fly home to in any way mourn me I will come back and haunt you for a million years.’) I missed her only in an abstracted sort of way. I loved her as much as ever, and felt her, still, to be surprisingly present. 

My questions about what ever came of Bess were answered, eventually, and in a very strange sort of way. 

She stared at me from the glossy dust jacket of a volume of essays. 

I hadn’t been thinking of her for a few weeks, maybe even months. Had finally learnt that, if you let them, the ghosts end up disappearing. Places don’t hold meaning forever. The hat gifted for one’s twenty-first birthday becomes just a hat. The mourning ring one wears, always, in place of a wedding band is just a ring. The mourning fades but the ring remains. 

And yet there she was. Eyes wide. A deer in headlights - Bess Nazareth is an essayist and poetess - There she was, her hair shorter than it used to be. Wearing an Yves Saint Laurent tweed coat and a victorian blouse. My coat, the one I’d given her years prior, when we left Gloria’s house in the rain, after a dinner. My coat had launched to literary fame before me. My coat, proud, published. My little manuscript of stories yet to find its completion.

I remembered that there’s hope yet, there’s hope yet. 

I walked home, to the house where I was then living. A terraced house in a different city, where the backyard was overgrown with dandelions and tomato vines, and I could sit, in the quiet, and think, and remember. 

No place like home, no place like home. 

I know now that angels are among us. In ribbons, with new shoulder freckles from summertime. In coats, on the covers of books. I remember the elegance, the liveliness, the battered old nikes, the trilling laugh in the apartment with stone floors and grey curtains. 

These angels have footfall lighter than mine, and I needn’t fear the echo of my step, only listen extra closely, and take note of the marks they leave in the dirt, map where they go and whence they wandered.

The plea to never stop moving. 

You’re the reason I’ve been wandering on. Wandering on.

I know now.

Don’t forget! Don’t forget!

*