Adapted from an image © ph2212
Simple Vanilla
For now there is no storm. I stand with my back to the red rocks. The noon sun trapped in the stone warms my shoulders, slides to my spine where I hold it like a secret.
In another place, a woman reads to her sister. The sister only half listens; she’s read this book before. Instead she gazes through a window too small to hold her heart. Is this the first time she’s been in love? Or is this just how every time of falling in love feels—like the first real time? The voice reads on, a voice from an island, while the sister waits, chin on fist, for the man who may or may not come. Who may or may not carry roses, and the roses may or may not be for her.
But that’s not in this story. In this story my skin is warm, peppered with sunlight. I just left a man in a city gray with rain. He sat on the bed and said nothing as I filled a bag with things I’ll never need. I came to the Redlands and my bag felt heavier with each step. Why did I pack the piano? That last jar of gooseberry jam my mother ever made? The medicine chest from under the sink?
The man I left was not the man the sister is waiting for. That would be too easy. I’ve never been in the same story as the sister... Although yes, perhaps once. Long ago we passed each other, shadows in someone else’s story. A tailor in Warsaw. He carried no roses, no red rock color to his cheeks; his only color was in his name, which he tried to change. We left him on a train—no seats, no windows, only broken glass. Crammed tight beside other tailors, closer than polite, although they were strangers. The train tracks were thin. Slender rails, leading only to one place.
The sister and I brushed shoulders briefly, moved on. The tailor didn’t see us, but we nodded to each other, recognition of the future. Because now I see we will be in the same story soon, when her heart is torn by the man she’s waiting for, who will carry roses, carefully, so he doesn’t prick his thumb on the thorns, because that’s for her to do. He will visit every night for a week, and once he’ll even sing to her, a sweet blue song of gardens and owls and kisses, although he won’t know all the words and will sing “ants” instead of “owls.” The sister won’t notice.
But then on the Sunday, she has combed rose oil into her hair, to remind him always. She waits and it’s not until midnight she stops waiting, although she never stops waiting her entire life. She only distracts herself by doing other things: flying on a plane to the Redlands, baking cakes that I eat with my fingers, simple vanilla cakes, perhaps a little rose water.
Now the sister sits beside me, watching the dusk, the rain that looks like smoke across the horizon. I don’t tell her about the storm the night before she arrived, chamisa bushes ripped and sagebrush bent, as if the gods were wiping their hands over the surface of the earth, birds flying up, trees rumpled. After the storm, I polished the mixing bowl, set the bottle of vanilla ready.
By day we warm our backs on the red rocks. Sometimes she reads to me. She never sees an ant without a catch of her breath.
Copyright © 2008 by Tania Casselle
