I used to go to thrift stores with
my friends. We’d take the train into Boston, and go to The
Garment District, which is this huge vintage clothing warehouse.
Everything is arranged by color, and somehow that makes all of the
clothes beautiful. It’s kind of like if you went through the
wardrobe in the Narnia books, only instead of finding Aslan and
the White Witch and horrible Eustace, you found this magic clothing
world–instead of talking animals, there were feather boas
and wedding dresses and bowling shoes, and paisley shirts and Doc
Martens and everything hung up on racks so that first you have black
dresses, all together, like the world’s largest indoor funeral,
and then blue dresses–all the blues you can imagine–and
then red dresses and so on. Pink-reds and orangey reds and purple-reds
and exit-light reds and candy reds. Sometimes I would close my eyes
and Natasha and Natalie and Jake would drag me over to a rack, and
rub a dress against my hand. “Guess what color this is.”
We had this theory that you could learn how to tell, just by feeling,
what color something was. For example, if you’re sitting on
a lawn, you can tell what color green the grass is, with your eyes
closed, depending on how silky-rubbery it feels. With clothing,
stretchy velvet stuff always feels red when your eyes are closed,
even if it’s not red. Natasha was always best at guessing
colors, but Natasha is also best at cheating at games and not getting
caught.
One time we were looking through kid’s t-shirts and we found
a Muppets t-shirt that had belonged to Natalie in third grade. We
knew it belonged to her, because it still had her name inside, where
her mother had written it in permanent marker, when Natalie went
to summer camp. Jake bought it back for her, because he was the
only one who had money that weekend. He was the only one who had
a job.
Maybe you’re wondering what a guy like Jake is doing in The
Garment District with a bunch of girls. The thing about Jake is
that he always has a good time, no matter what he’s doing.
He likes everything, and he likes everyone, but he likes me best
of all. Wherever he is now, I bet he’s having a great time
and wondering when I’m going to show up. I’m always
running late. But he knows that.
We had this theory that things have life cycles, the way that people
do. The life cycle of wedding dresses and feather boas and t-shirts
and shoes and handbags involves the Garment District. If clothes
are good, or even if they’re bad in an interesting way, the
Garment District is where they go when they die. You can tell that
they’re dead, because of the way that they smell. When you
buy them, and wash them, and start wearing them again, and they
start to smell like you, that’s when they reincarnate. But
the point is, if you’re looking for a particular thing, you
just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard.
Down in the basement at the Garment Factory they sell clothing and
beat-up suitcases and teacups by the pound. You can get eight pounds
worth of prom dresses–a slinky black dress, a poufy lavender
dress, a swirly pink dress, a silvery, starry lame dress so fine
you could pass it through a key ring– for eight dollars. I
go there every week, hunting for Grandmother Zofia’s faery
handbag.
The faery handbag: It’s huge and black and kind of hairy.
Even when your eyes are closed, it feels black. As black as black
ever gets, like if you touch it, your hand might get stuck in it,
like tar or black quicksand or when you stretch out your hand at
night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness.
Fairies live inside it. I know what that sounds like, but it’s
true.
Grandmother Zofia said it was a family heirloom. She said that it
was over two hundred years old. She said that when she died, I had
to look after it. Be its guardian. She said that it would be my
responsibility.
I said that it didn’t look that old, and that they didn’t
have handbag two hundred years ago, but that just made her cross.
She said, “So then tell me, Genevieve, darling, where do you
think old ladies used to put their reading glasses and their heart
medicine and their knitting needles?”
I know that no one is going to believe any of this. That’s
okay. If I thought you would, then I couldn’t tell you. Promise
me that you won’t believe a word. That’s what Zofia
used to say to me when she told me stories. At the funeral, my mother
said, half-laughing and half-crying, that her mother was the world’s
best liar. I think she thought maybe Zofia wasn’t really dead.
But I went up to Zofia’s coffin, and I looked her right in
the eyes. They were closed. The funeral parlor had made her up with
blue eyeshadow, and blue eyeliner. She looked like she was going
to be a news anchor on Fox television, instead of dead. It was creepy
and it made me even sadder than I already was. But I didn’t
let that distract me.
“Okay, Zofia,” I whispered. “I know you’re
dead, but this is important. You know exactly how important this
is. Where’s the handbag? What did you do with it? How do I
find it? What am I supposed to do now?”
Of course she didn’t say a word. She just lay there, this
little smile on her face, as if she thought the whole thing–death,
blue eyeshadow, Jake, the handbag, faeries, Scrabble, Baldeziwurlekistan,
all of it–was a joke. She always did have a weird sense of
humor. That’s why she and Jake got along so well.
I grew up in a house next door to the house where my mother lived
when she was a little girl. Her mother, Zofia Swink, my grandmother,
babysat me while my mother and father were at work.
Zofia never looked like a grandmother. She had long black hair which
she wore up in little, braided, spiky towers and plaits. She had
large blue eyes. She was taller than my father. She looked like
a spy or ballerina or a lady pirate or a rock star. She acted like
one too. For example, she never drove anywhere. She rode a bike.
It drove my mother crazy. “Why can’t you act your age?”
she’d say, and Zofia would just laugh.
Zofia and I played Scrabble all the time. Zofia always won, even
though her English wasn’t all that great, because we’d
decided that she was allowed to use Baldeziwurleki vocabulary. Baldeziwurlekistan
is where Zofia was born, over two hundred years ago. That’s
what Zofia said. (My grandmother claimed to be over two hundred
years old. Or maybe even older. Sometimes she claimed that she’d
even met Ghenghis Khan. He was much shorter than her. I probably
don’t have time to tell that story.) Baldeziwurlekistan is
also an incredibly valuable word in Scrabble points, even though
it doesn’t exactly fit on the board. Zofia put it down the
first time we played. I was feeling pretty good because I’d
gotten forty-one points for “zippery” on my turn.
Zofia kept rearranging her letters on her tray. Then she looked
over at me, as if daring me to stop her, and put down “eziwurlekistan”,
after “bald.” She used “delicious,” “zippery,”
“wishes,” “kismet”, and “needle,”
and made “to” into “toe”. “Baldeziwurlekistan”
went all the way across the board and then trailed off down the
righthand side.
I started laughing.
“I used up all my letters,” Zofia said. She licked her
pencil and started adding up points.
“That’s not a word,” I said. “Baldeziwurlekistan
is not a word. Besides, you can’t do that. You can’t
put an eighteen letter word on a board that’s fifteen squares
across.”
“Why not? It’s a country,” Zofia said. “It’s
where I was born, little darling.”
“Challenge,” I said. I went and got the dictionary and
looked it up. “There’s no such place.”
“Of course there isn’t nowadays,” Zofia said.
“It wasn’t a very big place, even when it was a place.
But you’ve heard of Samarkand, and Uzbekistan and the Silk
Road and Ghenghis Khan. Haven’t I told you about meeting Ghenghis
Khan?”
I looked up Samarkand. “Okay,” I said. “Samarkand
is a real place. A real word. But Baldeziwurlekistan isn’t.”
“They call it something else now,” Zofia said. “But
I think it’s important to remember where we come from. I think
it’s only fair that I get to use Baldeziwurleki words. Your
English is so much better than me. Promise me something, mouthful
of dumpling, a small, small thing. You’ll remember its real
name. Baldeziwurlekistan. Now when I add it up, I get three hundred
and sixty-eight points. Could that be right?”
If you called the faery handbag by its right name, it would be something
like “orzipanikanikcz,” which means the “bag of
skin where the world lives,” only Zofia never spelled that
word the same way twice. She said you had to spell it a little differently
each time. You never wanted to spell it exactly the right way, because
that would be dangerous.
I called it the faery handbag because I put “faery”
down on the Scrabble board once. Zofia said that you spelled it
with an “i,” not an “e”. She looked it up
in the dictionary, and lost a turn.
Zofia said that in Baldeziwurlekistan they used a board and tiles
for divination, prognostication, and sometimes even just for fun.
She said it was a little like playing Scrabble. That’s probably
why she turned out to be so good at Scrabble. The Baldeziwurlekistanians
used their tiles and board to communicate with the people who lived
under the hill. The people who lived under the hill knew the future.
The Baldeziwurlekistanians gave them fermented milk and honey, and
the young women of the village used to go and lie out on the hill
and sleep under the stars. Apparently the people under the hill
were pretty cute. The important thing was that you never went down
into the hill and spent the night there, no matter how cute the
guy from under the hill was. If you did, even if you only spent
a single night under the hill, when you came out again a hundred
years might have passed. “Remember that,” Zofia said
to me. “It doesn’t matter how cute a guy is. If he wants
you to come back to his place, it isn’t a good idea. It’s
okay to fool around, but don’t spend the night.”
Every once in a while, a woman from under the hill would marry a
man from the village, even though it never ended well. The problem
was that the women under the hill were terrible cooks. They couldn’t
get used to the way time worked in the village, which meant that
supper always got burnt, or else it wasn’t cooked long enough.
But they couldn’t stand to be criticized. It hurt their feelings.
If their village husband complained, or even if he looked like he
wanted to complain, that was it. The woman from under the hill went
back to her home, and even if her husband went and begged and pleaded
and apologized, it might be three years or thirty years or a few
generations before she came back out.
Even the best, happiest marriages between the Baldeziwurlekistanians
and the people under the hill fell apart when the children got old
enough to complain about dinner. But everyone in the village had
some hill blood in them.
“It’s in you,” Zofia said, and kissed me on the
nose. “Passed down from my grandmother and her mother. It’s
why we’re so beautiful.”
When Zofia was nineteen, the shaman-priestess in her village threw
the tiles and discovered that something bad was going to happen.
A raiding party was coming. There was no point in fighting them.
They would burn down everyone’s houses and take the young
men and women for slaves. And it was even worse than that. There
was going to be an earthquake as well, which was bad news because
usually, when raiders showed up, the village went down under the
hill for a night and when they came out again the raiders would
have been gone for months or decades or even a hundred years. But
this earthquake was going to split the hill right open.
The people under the hill were in trouble. Their home would be destroyed,
and they would be doomed to roam the face of the earth, weeping
and lamenting their fate until the sun blew out and the sky cracked
and the seas boiled and the people dried up and turned to dust and
blew away. So the shaman-priestess went and divined some more, and
the people under the hill told her to kill a black dog and skin
it and use the skin to make a purse big enough to hold a chicken,
an egg, and a cooking pot. So she did, and then the people under
the hill made the inside of the purse big enough to hold all of
the village and all of the people under the hill and mountains and
forests and seas and rivers and lakes and orchards and a sky and
stars and spirits and fabulous monsters and sirens and dragons and
dryads and mermaids and beasties and all the little gods that the
Baldeziwurlekistanians and the people under the hill worshipped.
“Your purse is made out of dog skin?” I said. “That’s
disgusting!”
“Little dear pet,” Zofia said, looking wistful, “Dog
is delicious. To Baldeziwurlekistanians, dog is a delicacy.”
Before the raiding party arrived, the village packed up all of their
belongings and moved into the handbag. The clasp was made out of
bone. If you opened it one way, then it was just a purse big enough
to hold a chicken and an egg and a clay cooking pot, or else a pair
of reading glasses and a library book and a pillbox. If you opened
the clasp another way, then you found yourself in a little boat
floating at the mouth of a river. On either side of you was forest,
where the Baldeziwurlekistanian villagers and the people under the
hill made their new settlement.
If you opened the handbag the wrong way, though, you found yourself
in a dark land that smelled like blood. That’s where the guardian
of the purse (the dog whose skin had been been sewn into a purse)
lived. The guardian had no skin. Its howl made blood come out of
your ears and nose. It tore apart anyone who turned the clasp in
the opposite direction and opened the purse in the wrong way.
“Here is the wrong way to open the handbag,” Zofia said.
She twisted the clasp, showing me how she did it. She opened the
mouth of the purse, but not very wide and held it up to me. “Go
ahead, darling, and listen for a second.”
I put my head near the handbag, but not too near. I didn’t
hear anything. “I don’t hear anything,” I said.
“The poor dog is probably asleep,” Zofia said. “Even
nightmares have to sleep now and then.”
After he got expelled, everybody at school called Jake Houdini instead
of Jake. Everybody except for me. I’ll explain why, but you
have to be patient. It’s hard work telling everything in the
right order.
Jake is smarter and also taller than most of our teachers. Not quite
as tall as me. We’ve known each other since third grade. Jake
has always been in love with me. He says he was in love with me
even before third grade, even before we ever met. It took me a while
to fall in love with Jake.
In third grade, Jake knew everything already, except how to make
friends. He used to follow me around all day long. It made me so
mad that I kicked him in the knee. When that didn’t work,
I threw his backpack out of the window of the school bus. That didn’t
work either, but the next year Jake took some tests and the school
decided that he could skip fourth and fifth grade. Even I felt sorry
for Jake then. Sixth grade didn’t work out. When the sixth
graders wouldn’t stop flushing his head down the toilet, he
went out and caught a skunk and set it loose in the boy’s
locker room.
The school was going to suspend him for the rest of the year, but
instead Jake took two years off while his mother home-schooled him.
He learned Latin and Hebrew and Greek, how to write sestinas, how
to make sushi, how to play bridge, and even how to knit. He learned
fencing and ballroom dancing. He worked in a soup kitchen and made
a Super Eight movie about Civil War reenactors who play extreme
croquet in full costume instead of firing off cannons. He started
learning how to play guitar. He even wrote a novel. I’ve never
read it–he says it was awful.
When he came back two years later, because his mother had cancer
for the first time, the school put him back with our year, in seventh
grade. He was still way too smart, but he was finally smart enough
to figure out how to fit in. Plus he was good at soccer and he was
really cute. Did I mention that he played guitar? Every girl in
school had a crush on Jake, but he used to come home after school
with me and play Scrabble with Zofia and ask her about Baldeziwurlekistan.
Jake’s mom was named Cynthia. She collected ceramic frogs
and knock-knock jokes. When we were in ninth grade, she had cancer
again. When she died, Jake smashed all of her frogs. That was the
first funeral I ever went to. A few months later, Jake’s father
asked Jake’s fencing teacher out on a date. They got married
right after the school expelled Jake for his AP project on Houdini.
That was the first wedding I ever went to. Jake and I stole a bottle
of wine and drank it, and I threw up in the swimming pool at the
country club. Jake threw up all over my shoes.
So, anyway, the village and the people under the hill lived happily
every after for a few weeks in the handbag, which they had tied
around a rock in a dry well which the people under the hill had
determined would survive the earthquake. But some of the Baldeziwurlekistanians
wanted to come out again and see what was going on in the world.
Zofia was one of them. It had been summer when they went into the
bag, but when they came out again, and climbed out of the well,
snow was falling and their village was ruins and crumbly old rubble.
They walked through the snow, Zofia carrying the handbag, until
they came to another village, one that they’d never seen before.
Everyone in that village was packing up their belongings and leaving,
which gave Zofia and her friends a bad feeling. It seemed to be
just the same as when they went into the handbag.
They followed the refugees, who seemed to know where they were going,
and finally everyone came to a city. Zofia had ever seen such a
place. There were trains and electric lights and movie theaters,
and there were people shooting each other. Bombs were falling. A
war going on. Most of the villagers decided to climb right back
inside the handbag, but Zofia volunteered to stay in the world and
look after the handbag. She had fallen in love with movies and silk
stockings and with a young man, a Russian deserter.
Zofia and the Russian deserter married and had many adventures and
finally came to America, where my mother was born. Now and then
Zofia would consult the tiles and talk to the people who lived in
the handbag and they would tell her how best to avoid trouble and
how she and her husband could make some money. Every now and then
one of the Baldeziwurlekistanians, or one of the people from under
the hill came out of the handbag and wanted to go grocery shopping,
or to a movie or an amusement park to ride on roller coasters, or
to the library.
The more advice Zofia gave her husband, the more money they made.
Her husband became curious about Zofia’s handbag, because
he could see that there was something odd about it, but Zofia told
him to mind his own business. He began to spy on Zofia, and saw
that strange men and women were coming in and out of the house.
He became convinced that either Zofia was a spy for the Communists,
or maybe that she was having affairs. They fought and he drank more
and more, and finally he threw away her divination tiles. “Russians
make bad husbands,” Zofia told me. Finally, one night while
Zofia was sleeping, her husband opened the bone clasp and climbed
inside the handbag.
“I thought he’d left me,” Zofia said. “For
almost twenty years I thought he’d left me and your mother
and taken off for California. Not that I minded. I was tired of
being married and cooking dinners and cleaning house for someone
else. It’s better to cook what I want to eat, and clean up
when I decide to clean up. It was harder on your mother, not having
a father. That was the part that I minded most.
“Then it turned out that he hadn’t run away after all.
He’d spent one night in the handbag and then come out again
twenty years later, exactly as handsome as I remembered, and enough
time had passed that I had forgiven him all the quarrels. We made
up and it was all very romantic and then when we had another fight
the next morning, he went and kissed your mother, who had slept
right through his visit, on the cheek, and then he climbed right
back inside the handbag. I didn’t see him again for another
twenty years. The last time he showed up, we went to see “Star
Wars” and he liked it so much that he went back inside the
handbag to tell everyone else about it. In a couple of years they’ll
all show up and want to see it on video and all of the sequels too.”
“Tell them not to bother with the prequels,” I said.
The thing about Zofia and libraries is that she’s always losing
library books. She says that she hasn’t lost them, and in
fact that they aren’t even overdue, really. It’s just
that even one week inside the faery handbag is a lot longer in library-world
time. So what is she supposed to do about it? The librarians all
hate Zofia. She’s banned from using any of the branches in
our area. When I was eight, she got me to go to the library for
her and check out a bunch of biographies and science books and some
Georgette Heyer romance novels. My mother was livid when she found
out, but it was too late. Zofia had already misplaced most of them.
It’s really hard to write about somebody as if they’re
really dead. I still think Zofia must be sitting in her living room,
in her house, watching some old horror movie, dropping popcorn into
her handbag. She’s waiting for me to come over and play Scrabble.
Nobody is ever going to return those library books now.
My mother used to come home from work and roll her eyes. “Have
you been telling them your fairy stories?” she’d say.
“Genevieve, your grandmother is a horrible liar.”
Zofia would fold up the Scrabble board and shrug at me and Jake.
“I’m a wonderful liar,” she’d say. “I’m
the best liar in the world. Promise me you won’t believe a
single word.”
But she wouldn’t tell the story of the faery handbag to Jake.
Only the old Baldeziwurlekistanian folktales and fairytales about
the people under the hill. She told him about how she and her husband
made it all the way across Europe, hiding in haystacks and in barns,
and how once, when her husband went off to find food, a farmer found
her hiding in his chicken coop and tried to rape her. But she opened
up the faery handbag in the way she showed me, and the dog came
out and ate the farmer and all his chickens too.
She was teaching Jake and me how to curse in Baldeziwurleki. I also
know how to say I love you, but I’m not going to ever say
it to anyone again, except to Jake, when I find him.
When I was eight, I believed everything Zofia told me. By the time
I was thirteen, I didn’t believe a single word. When I was
fifteen, I saw a man come out of her house and get on Zofia’s
three-speed bicycle and ride down the street. His clothes looked
funny. He was a lot younger than my mother and father, and even
though I’d never seen him before, he was familiar. I followed
him on my bike, all the way to the grocery store. I waited just
past the checkout lanes while he bought peanut butter, Jack Daniels,
half a dozen instant cameras, and at least sixty packs of Reeses
Peanut Butter Cups, three bags of Hershey’s kisses, a handful
of Milky Way bars and other stuff from the rack of checkout candy.
While the checkout clerk was helping him bag up all of that chocolate,
he looked up and saw me. “Genevieve?” he said. “That’s
your name, right?”
I turned and ran out of the store. He grabbed up the bags and ran
after me. I don’t even think he got his change back. I was
still running away, and then one of the straps on my flip flops
popped out of the sole, the way they do, and that made me really
angry so I just stopped. I turned around.
“Who are you?” I said.
But I already knew. He looked like he could have been my mom’s
younger brother. He was really cute. I could see why Zofia had fallen
in love with him.
His name was Rustan. Zofia told my parents that he was an expert
in Baldeziwurlekistanian folklore who would be staying with her
for a few days. She brought him over for dinner. Jake was there
too, and I could tell that Jake knew something was up. Everybody
except my dad knew something was going on.
“You mean Baldeziwurlekistan is a real place?” my mother
asked Rustan. “My mother is telling the truth?”
I could see that Rustan was having a hard time with that one. He
obviously wanted to say that his wife was a horrible liar, but then
where would he be? Then he couldn’t be the person that he
was supposed to be.
There were probably a lot of things that he wanted to say. What
he said was, “This is really good pizza.”
Rustan took a lot of pictures at dinner. The next day I went with
him to get the pictures developed. He’d brought back some
film with him, with pictures he’d taken inside the faery handbag,
but those didn’t come out well. Maybe the film was too old.
We got doubles of the pictures from dinner so that I could have
some too. There’s a great picture of Jake, sitting outside
on the porch. He’s laughing, and he has his hand up to his
mouth, like he’s going to catch the laugh. I have that picture
up on my computer, and also up on my wall over my bed.
I bought a Cadbury Cream Egg for Rustan. Then we shook hands and
he kissed me once on each cheek. “Give one of those kisses
to your mother,” he said, and I thought about how the next
time I saw him, I might be Zofia’s age, and he would only
be a few days older. The next time I saw him, Zofia would be dead.
Jake and I might have kids. That was too weird.
I know Rustan tried to get Zofia to go with him, to live in the
handbag, but she wouldn’t.
“It makes me dizzy in there,” she used to tell me. “And
they don’t have movie theaters. And I have to look after your
mother and you. Maybe when you’re old enough to look after
the handbag, I’ll poke my head inside, just long enough for
a little visit.”
I didn’t fall in love with Jake because he was smart. I’m
pretty smart myself. I know that smart doesn’t mean nice,
or even mean that you have a lot of common sense. Look at all the
trouble smart people get themselves into.
I didn’t fall in love with Jake because he could make maki
rolls and had a black belt in fencing, or whatever it is that you
get if you’re good in fencing. I didn’t fall in love
with Jake because he plays guitar. He’s a better soccer player
than he is a guitar player.
Those were the reasons why I went out on a date with Jake. That,
and because he asked me. He asked if I wanted to go see a movie,
and I asked if I could bring my grandmother and Natalie and Natasha.
He said sure and so all five of us sat and watched “Bring
It On” and every once in a while Zofia dropped a couple of
milk duds or some popcorn into her purse. I don’t know if
she was feeding the dog, or if she’d opened the purse the
right way, and was throwing food at her husband.
I fell in love with Jake because he told stupid knock-knock jokes
to Natalie, and told Natasha that he liked her jeans. I fell in
love with Jake when he took me and Zofia home. He walked her up
to her front door and then he walked me up to mine. I fell in love
with Jake when he didn’t try to kiss me. The thing is, I was
nervous about the whole kissing thing. Most guys think that they’re
better at it than they really are. Not that I think I’m a
real genius at kissing either, but I don’t think kissing should
be a competitive sport. It isn’t tennis.
Natalie and Natasha and I used to practice kissing with each other.
Not that we like each other that way, but just for practice. We
got pretty good at it. We could see why kissing was supposed to
be fun.
But Jake didn’t try to kiss me. Instead he just gave me this
really big hug. He put his face in my hair and he sighed. We stood
there like that, and then finally I said, “What are you doing?”
“I just wanted to smell your hair,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. That made me feel weird, but in a good
way. I put my nose up to his hair, which is brown and curly, and
I smelled it. We stood there and smelled each other’s hair,
and I felt so good. I felt so happy.
Jake said into my hair, “Do you know that actor John Cusack?”
I said, “Yeah. One of Zofia’s favorite movies is ‘Better
Off Dead.’ We watch it all the time.”
“So he likes to go up to women and smell their armpits.”
“Gross!” I said. “That’s such a lie! What
are you doing now? That tickles.”
“I’m smelling your ear,” Jake said.
Jake’s hair smelled like iced tea with honey in it, after
all the ice has melted.
Kissing Jake is like kissing Natalie or Natasha, except that it
isn’t just for fun. It feels like something there isn’t
a word for in Scrabble.
The deal with Houdini is that Jake got interested in him during
Advanced Placement American History. He and I were both put in tenth
grade history. We were doing biography projects. I was studying
Joseph McCarthy. My grandmother had all sorts of stories about McCarthy.
She hated him for what he did to Hollywood.
Jake didn’t turn in his project–instead he told everyone
in our AP class except for Mr. Streep (we call him Meryl) to meet
him at the gym on Saturday. When we showed up, Jake reenacted one
of Houdini’s escapes with a laundry bag, handcuffs, a gym
locker, bicycle chains, and the school’s swimming pool. It
took him three and a half minutes to get free, and this guy named
Roger took a bunch of photos and then put the photos online. One
of the photos ended up in the Boston Globe, and Jake got expelled.
The really ironic thing was that while his mom was in the hospital,
Jake had applied to M.I.T. He did it for his mom. He thought that
way she’d have to stay alive. She was so excited about M.I.T.
A couple of days after he’d been expelled, right after the
wedding, while his dad and the fencing instructor were in Bermuda,
he got an acceptance letter in the mail and a phone call from this
guy in the admissions office who explained why they had to withdraw
the acceptance.
My mother wanted to know why I let Jake wrap himself up in bicycle
chains and then watched while Peter and Michael pushed him into
the deep end of the school pool. I said that Jake had a backup plan.
Ten more seconds and we were all going to jump into the pool and
open the locker and get him out of there. I was crying when I said
that. Even before he got in the locker, I knew how stupid Jake was
being. Afterwards, he promised me that he’d never do anything
like that again.
That was when I told him about Zofia’s husband, Rustan, and
about Zofia’s handbag. How stupid am I?
So I guess you can figure out what happened next. The problem is
that Jake believed me about the handbag. We spent a lot of time
over at Zofia’s, playing Scrabble. Zofia never let the faery
handbag out of her sight. She even took it with her when she went
to the bathroom. I think she even slept with it under her pillow.
I didn’t tell her that I’d said anything to Jake. I
wouldn’t ever have told anybody else about it. Not Natasha.
Not even Natalie, who is the most responsible person in all of the
world. Now, of course, if the handbag turns up and Jake still hasn’t
come back, I’ll have to tell Natalie. Somebody has to keep
an eye on the stupid thing while I go find Jake.
What worries me is that maybe one of the Baldeziwurlekistanians
or one of the people under the hill or maybe even Rustan popped
out of the handbag to run an errand and got worried when Zofia wasn’t
there. Maybe they’ll come looking for her and bring it back.
Maybe they know I’m supposed to look after it now. Or maybe
they took it and hid it somewhere. Maybe someone turned it in at
the lost-and-found at the library and that stupid librarian called
the F.B.I. Maybe scientists at the Pentagon are examining the handbag
right now. Testing it. If Jake comes out, they’ll think he’s
a spy or a superweapon or an alien or something. They’re not
going to just let him go.
Everyone thinks Jake ran away, except for my mother, who is convinced
that he was trying out another Houdini escape and is probably lying
at the bottom of a lake somewhere. She hasn’t said that to
me, but I can see her thinking it. She keeps making cookies for
me.
What happened is that Jake said, “Can I see that for just
a second?”
He said it so casually that I think he caught Zofia off guard. She
was reaching into the purse for her wallet. We were standing in
the lobby of the movie theater on a Monday morning. Jake was behind
the snack counter. He’d gotten a job there. He was wearing
this stupid red paper hat and some kind of apron-bib thing. He was
supposed to ask us if we wanted to supersize our drinks.
He reached over the counter and took Zofia’s handbag right
out of her hand. He closed it and then he opened it again. I think
he opened it the right way. I don’t think he ended up in the
dark place. He said to me and Zofia, “I’ll be right
back.” And then he wasn’t there anymore. It was just
me and Zofia and the handbag, lying there on the counter where he’d
dropped it.
If I’d been fast enough, I think I could have followed him.
But Zofia had been guardian of the faery handbag for a lot longer.
She snatched the bag back and glared at me. “He’s a
very bad boy,” she said. She was absolutely furious. “You’re
better off without him, Genevieve, I think.”
“Give me the handbag,” I said. “I have to go get
him.”
“It isn’t a toy, Genevieve,” she said. “It
isn’t a game. This isn’t Scrabble. He comes back when
he comes back. If he comes back.”
“Give me the handbag,” I said. “Or I’ll
take it from you.”
She held the handbag up high over her head, so that I couldn’t
reach it. I hate people who are taller than me. “What are
you going to do now,” Zofia said. “Are you going to
knock me down? Are you going to steal the handbag? Are you going
to go away and leave me here to explain to your parents where you’ve
gone? Are you going to say goodbye to your friends? When you come
out again, they will have gone to college. They’ll have jobs
and babies and houses and they won’t even recognize you. Your
mother will be an old woman and I will be dead.”
“I don’t care,” I said. I sat down on the sticky
red carpet in the lobby and started to cry. Someone wearing a little
metal name tag came over and asked if we were okay. His name was
Missy. Or maybe he was wearing someone else’s tag.
“We’re fine,” Zofia said. “My granddaughter
has the flu.”
She took my hand and pulled me up. She put her arm around me and
we walked out of the theater. We never even got to see the stupid
movie. We never even got to see another movie together. I don’t
ever want to go see another movie. The problem is, I don’t
want to see unhappy endings. And I don’t know if I believe
in the happy ones.
“I have a plan,” Zofia said. “I will go find Jake.
You will stay here and look after the handbag.”
“You won’t come back either,” I said. I cried
even harder. Or if you do, I’ll be like a hundred years old
and Jake will still be sixteen.”
“Everything will be okay,” Zofia said. I wish I could
tell you how beautiful she looked right then. It didn’t matter
if she was lying or if she actually knew that everything was going
to be okay. The important thing was how she looked when she said
it. She said, with absolute certainty, or maybe with all the skill
of a very skillful liar, “My plan will work. First we go to
the library, though. One of the people under the hill just brought
back an Agatha Christie mystery, and I need to return it.”
“We’re going to the library?” I said. “Why
don’t we just go home and play Scrabble for a while.”
You probably think I was just being sarcastic here, and I was being
sarcastic. But Zofia gave me a sharp look. She knew that if I was
being sarcastic that my brain was working again. She knew that I
knew she was stalling for time. She knew that I was coming up with
my own plan, which was a lot like Zofia’s plan, except that
I was the one who went into the handbag. How was the part I was
working on.
“We could do that,” she said. “Remember, when
you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble.
It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.”
“Can we please just hurry?” I said.
Zofia just looked at me. “Genevieve, we have plenty of time.
If you’re going to look after the handbag, you have to remember
that. You have to be patient. Can you be patient?”
“I can try,” I told her. I’m trying, Zofia. I’m
trying really hard. But it isn’t fair. Jake is off having
adventures and talking to talking animals, and who knows, learning
how to fly and some beautiful three thousand year old girl from
under the hill is teaching him how to speak fluent Baldeziwurleki.
I bet she lives in a house that runs around on chicken legs, and
she tells Jake that she’d love to hear him play something
on the guitar. Maybe you’ll kiss her, Jake, because she’s
put a spell on you. But whatever you do, don’t go up into
her house. Don’t fall asleep in her bed. Come back soon, Jake,
and bring the handbag with you.
I hate those movies, those books, where some guy gets to go off
and have adventures and meanwhile the girl has to stay home and
wait. I’m a feminist. I subscribe to Bust magazine, and I
watch Buffy reruns. I don’t believe in that kind of shit.
We hadn’t been in the library for five minutes before Zofia
picked up a biography of Carl Sagan and dropped it in her purse.
She was definitely stalling for time. She was trying to come up
with a plan that would counteract the plan that she knew I was planning.
I wondered what she thought I was planning. It was probably much
better than anything I’d come up with.
“Don’t do that!” I said.
“Don’t worry,” Zofia said. “Nobody was watching.”
“I don’t care if nobody saw! What if Jake’s sitting
there in the boat, or what if he was coming back and you just dropped
it on his head!”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Zofia said. Then she
said, “It would serve him right, anyway.”
That was when the librarian came up to us. She had a nametag on
as well. I was so sick of people and their stupid nametags. I’m
not even going to tell you what her name was. “I saw that,”
the librarian said.
“Saw what?” Zofia said. She smiled down at the librarian,
like she was Queen of the Library, and the librarian were a petitioner.
The librarian stared hard at her. “I know you,” she
said, almost sounding awed, like she was a weekend birdwatcher who
just seen Bigfoot. “We have your picture on the office wall.
You’re Ms. Swinks. You aren’t allowed to check out books
here.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Zofia said. She was at least
two feet taller than the librarian. I felt a bit sorry for the librarian.
After all, Zofia had just stolen a seven-day book. She probably
wouldn’t return it for a hundred years. My mother has always
made it clear that it’s my job to protect other people from
Zofia. I guess I was Zofia’s guardian before I became the
guardian of the handbag.
The librarian reached up and grabbed Zofia’s handbag. She
was small but she was strong. She jerked the handbag and Zofia stumbled
and fell back against a work desk. I couldn’t believe it.
Everyone except for me was getting a look at Zofia’s handbag.
What kind of guardian was I going to be?
“Genevieve,” Zofia said. She held my hand very tightly,
and I looked at her. She looked wobbly and pale. She said, “I
feel very bad about all of this. Tell your mother I said so.”
Then she said one last thing, but I think it was in Baldeziwurleki.
The librarian said, “I saw you put a book in here. Right here.”
She opened the handbag and peered inside. Out of the handbag came
a long, lonely, ferocious, utterly hopeless scream of rage. I don’t
ever want to hear that noise again. Everyone in the library looked
up. The librarian made a choking noise and threw Zofia’s handbag
away from her. A little trickle of blood came out of her nose and
a drop fell on the floor. What I thought at first was that it was
just plain luck that the handbag was closed when it landed. Later
on I was trying to figure out what Zofia said. My Baldeziwurleki
isn’t very good, but I think she was saying something like
“Figures. Stupid librarian. I have to go take care of that
damn dog.” So maybe that’s what happened. Maybe Zofia
sent part of herself in there with the skinless dog. Maybe she fought
it and won and closed the handbag. Maybe she made friends with it.
I mean, she used to feed it popcorn at the movies. Maybe she’s
still in there.
What happened in the library was Zofia sighed a little and closed
her eyes. I helped her sit down in a chair, but I don’t think
she was really there any more. I rode with her in the ambulance,
when the ambulance finally showed up, and I swear I didn’t
even think about the handbag until my mother showed up. I didn’t
say a word. I just left her there in the hospital with Zofia, who
was on a respirator, and I ran all the way back to the library.
But it was closed. So I ran all the way back again, to the hospital,
but you already know what happened, right? Zofia died. I hate writing
that. My tall, funny, beautiful, book-stealing, Scrabble-playing,
story-telling grandmother died.
But you never met her. You’re probably wondering about the
handbag. What happened to it. I put up signs all over town, like
Zofia’s handbag was some kind of lost dog, but nobody ever
called.
So that’s the story so far. Not that I expect you to believe
any of it. Last night Natalie and Natasha came over and we played
Scrabble. They don’t really like Scrabble, but they feel like
it’s their job to cheer me up. I won. After they went home,
I flipped all the tiles upside-down and then I started picking them
up in groups of seven. I tried to ask a question, but it was hard
to pick just one. The words I got weren’t so great either,
so I decided that they weren’t English words. They were Baldeziwurleki
words.
Once I decided that, everything became perfectly clear. First I
put down “kirif” which means “happy news”,
and then I got a “b,” an “o,” an “l,”
an “e,” a “f,” another “i,”
an “s,” and a “z.” So then I could make
“kirif” into “bolekirifisz,” which could
mean “the happy result of a combination of diligent effort
and patience.”
I would find the faery handbag. The tiles said so. I would work
the clasp and go into the handbag and have my own adventures and
would rescue Jake. Hardly any time would have gone by before we
came back out of the handbag. Maybe I’d even make friends
with that poor dog and get to say goodbye, for real, to Zofia. Rustan
would show up again and be really sorry that he’d missed Zofia’s
funeral and this time he would be brave enough to tell my mother
the whole story. He would tell her that he was her father. Not that
she would believe him. Not that you should believe this story. Promise
me that you won’t believe a word.
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