It’s been one of those fire and ice days. The sun’s been up. Now it’s going down. Call the finished work ‘Sunfall,’ a dark yellow sky spread uniformly across the canvas. Already the bushes nearby the front porch appear as silhouettes. It’s windless, too, and an evening that will fall from gold into darkness and stars with hardly any in between. But I’ve still got a time before I have to go—to witness this sunset, this soleil couchant as we used to say back when I numbered and did not name my paintings, in Quebec a long time ago. And I’ve still got time to get into town if I hurry.
Am I hesitating now? Not me at least not any more. You can’t hesitate for long, anyway. You think you can and you can try. The world moves you along anyway. But I’m standing here, sure, looking twice at the moment because it is very worth my parting look. And catching my breath, too, in this hanging and balancing moment, just when the leaves display their last intricacy as a wrought-iron trellis that frames the edges of the porch.
Out In the front yard, the afternoon shadows have already been mutely folded into the spreading evening. In the far distance, the line of hills becomes smaller and a darker blue inside the black trellis. Time tonight won’t let me, although I could paint all this if I wanted. But the crepuscular sounds (just as paintable) have already begun and so be it. It’s officially sundown—the time of day that just was and the time of night that now is.
Inside, behind me, there’s a shiny brass clock (who knows whose it was?) on the living room wall. Its radiating circle of spikes keeps very good time after all these years. Its telling me I better get on with it—take that quick look around as I pick up my books and magazines, and remember to lock the doors, out of habit but now a good habit even out here, and then drive into town. Start someone else’s class. Teach. What a word that’s become.
This ring of keys, my keys, the house keys, and the school’s, won’t be misplaced. They’ve been heavy in my pocket since morning. I’ve felt them against my leg all day, but now I press my hand through my pants against them anyway. OK. But I don’t lock the doors, just turn back to see the desk lamp on. Yes, yes, I know. Just get in Mustang Sally and go.
Tonight I’m taking Bob’s evening class, talking about things I’ll be doing on natural surfaces with acrylics and mixed media. But whatever I talk about, they won’t care and that’s fine. They’ve heard me before. They’re into their stuff, not what I’m going to do. So I may as well talk about anything, say my new heart-affair with Cinderella. They won’t mind that and neither will I. Besides, at this point, I may really be out of art for good. At least I keep saying so, just to defend myself. But this time it’s Bob who comes up with a gig for me. Fresh country air, bacon and eggs. An afternoon schedule, just a few painters. Two studio classes, no grade book, no conferences. That’s nearly the whole deal.
Oh, you have to do an Art History along with painting. Oh? Yes, one or two, depending on enrollment. What about an amber sky like this one? Do I do that, too? In the bright colors of bacon and eggs and fresh air? Sorry. But you know I’ve never drawn dawns or evenings or aardvarks or fruit on a plate. Who on the edge has in the last, what, hundred and more years? I could draw it on a piece of eggshell, I guess.
I take the job just to get busy on my own stuff out here by myself. I’m only a mile from the sawmill and my organic canvases. A new medium, a new way. Besides, It’s getting to be a couple of years for me since big canvas. The old inspiration about vanished for good when the big pieces stopped working, but things are registering with me, in me, now. I feel even more independent out here in the countryside and that’s good for the meditating spirit. There’s some good art things going on out this way, too. And studio space is no object. You could paint an eighteen-wheeler inside my studio out back, a small wood-working shop included. And metal-working any time, next door over at Bud’s. A visual artist’s haven, Bob said, and I’m here in the middle of it for at least four months. That’s a lot of time going over Art History. Maybe I’ll give all A’s and paint those hours, too. It’s been done.
Why’d I end up out here? Like I said, Bob. But personally, you look around at everything you can, and go everywhere you can think of, when you get stuck. I’m talking empty canvas stuck, solo exhibition stuck, and life event stuck. Luckily the way ahead’s almost always the same. Then, If you don’t find a way, you will find a wall. You can’t climb it, and you just sit there at the bottom staring up at a light source you can’t see. It’s happened one time and then again to me, so I’ve taken that trip to hell twice. It was exactly the same both times. So hell’s there. A place for your spirit that closes up on you like a fist. Hey, forget it.
You know what’s better? I’m happy out here. Not a bad spot. There’s the state park, the national reserve, the local palisades and caves, a meandering river, and well-kept farmland everywhere. Some talented local men and women, too. Plus the Amish and the new Swiss. Granted the Swiss who arrived are major no nonsense—managers, accountants, and engineers—Porsches and Audis everywhere, all of them brought over here, Lena’s blue Carrera leading the way. Now that I’m thinking of it, things may indeed be heading up for me romance-wise. Which is everything. It’s where all art starts and ends with me. Woman and man equal the original wholeness. Plato’s ‘Symposium, right?
That’s my story of here’s where I am now, until I walk out back this morning. To see if that old Lab of mine wants to run or take a short morning walk, the old guy. But things went another way. I found a slipper upon the grass today.
Another harbinger, last night I also had this year’s first nightmare. Just one rough stomach-churning scene, but no more. So, the cute little slipper I found is the (Heart) Fire, and that dark blue nightmare is some kind of Ice that freezes or paralyzes the soul. If these occurrences, the pretty shoe and that solitary dream, are some kind of messages, something’s telling me to get going and things will be alright. Or maybe’s urging me, lest we be eaten whole, to find that lady and run away fast.
Remembering that daylight easily restored the gentle countryside to me this morning—the ordinary world undeniably and truly at hand—and then focusing on the order of their appearance, first, the black dream, then the dawn and the silver slipper—it looks like what is brightness is really winning, even if sometimes you’re tempted to ask, is it still possible that it should? And even if you don’t get that answered, can’t you hope that, considering things go up and down, it’s about time for things to swing smoothly for a while?
Mercifully, these orderly pairs make the whole thing possible to decipher. Easy. Took me about a minute. That golden slipper is everything. The bad dream is murder or death or it’s what living dead would be—nothingness and uselessness, either way. The slipper’s the thing, the chalice, the ballet. So easy to figure. But can I still live on love? I’ll admit, it’s a little scary.
My so-called bad dream was short-lived, thankfully. No bat-winged strokes flying out of the foreground and into my mind. Boo! No swarthy organ music pumping through damp caverns. Boo! It was the one scene in my driveway, that’s all. Not one note of music, only voices, and a sky without stars, I remember that. Now that I think about it, when I was inside or outside the vehicle (our old blue station wagon), I was always looking up—for the whole dream—like everything happening was somehow happening above me.
It was the yelling and cursing from the road that set the nightmare off or woke me from it. A fitful night, it was hard to return to sleeping. Only after dawn and with the delicate slipper’s discovery did things stabilize. I forgot I’d had the dream. Why? Because of a single shoe of a type as common as a yellow tulip in spring, yet seeing it clarified what the whole garden was supposed to have been about. So things immediately got back to feeling good inside after the reminder it was beauty that turned open the locks on most people’s doors. I washed all the dishes, swept all the corners in that rambling kitchen, and started a march through the house that isn’t over until everything’s put back in its place.
Think of all things light. Then think where all things light lead. That’s what finding that sweet, svelte slipper has set off, that small canvas chausson leading everywhere. It seems it is the feminine symbol of, at least, my own future. But how does a pristine future commence? Cherchez vous la femme? Cherchez un chausson! Voilà!
A bit of deduction is what it takes. Whose golden slipper is it? Not that I’m even the one meant to find her. Everybody who needs to know knows I swore off love a long time ago. I say ‘swore off the women,’ sounding rough about it. Is that sexist? What else? But I don’t mean it like women are products to just decline or addictive drugs to foreswear or whatever. I only mean it in general, and in a neutral fashion, but I guess it’s hard to say ‘I’ve sworn off women’ and get it come out in a reasonable way. Not that anybody cares, I love women, OK?
Cherchez un chausson! I learned the little French I still know in Quebec, the city. We soon moved west to Vancouver—about as un-French a city as it gets and more expensive also and less friendly, too. Not a city of love in my opinion.
But maybe it’s me—I’ve sworn off women, no doubt about it. But that’s getting harder to say, especially now that I’m gaining on or regaining something strictly feminine. I’ve meditated on that lovely and fragile shoe all day, and I’m obviously happy about the whole idea and my feelings about the sandal. Let the sun try and run from me now is what I say. So I’ve got one winged sandal. The whereabouts of my other Mercury-swift shoe? Cherchez la femme. Then to the ball to dance a waltz we go.
About the damned dream—so you’ll know both sides of what’s happened. Unless I really lose my way, say by accident, I have nothing to do with dark shades or disturbing acts or morose reflections. Panic is never my state of mind unless something drastic comes up, a life event like a fatal sudden accident or a death in the family. No, I’ve never much been fearful or overwhelmed or panicked easy. As they said in one of Jan’s groups and said always to say, “I’m core positive now!”
And you may as well face forward. What else is there but that? In the best way one can. I brought every art book I owned and all my other books and tapes when I moved out here. Determined I’d catch up on everything I’d missed or wanted to explore but had to triage. Yet every night for the first three weeks I’d drive into town for no reason and do nothing but maybe buy some music or a just a coke, then drive back out. I did that more than a dozen times. Now I almost wish I didn’t have to go all the way in just to substitute teach tonight.
I’ll make it, easy. Positive Bob. And he’s right. Positive has always been the light of the sun for me, and I’ve never been bored by thinking good things. Who has?. Especially with a mysterious woman’s shoe thrown in. I’m thinking I know whose it is, too. But how did it get in my back yard on my doorstep?
The two fellows in my dream, demons, acted fit and friendly at first, like they’d known me from somewhere and were happy to see me again. They showed their evil nature quickly. Two dark demons unmistakably from a chthonic region. But human, too. Traveling killers, maybe? Something like that.
The big one shoves a beat up motherboard under my nose. Not a green one, blue with long wires. The blue ice of hell, I guess. Big deal. I wasn’t scared and the dream’s definitely in color at this point. But the large one’s hectoring me like I’d broken the board, and goes on like I was responsible for every shitty thing in my life and the whole world. Informing me what my life would be like now, with them here. How I’d missed golden opportunities in my life. Some crap about my old art school, my two marriages, my artist’s poverty. And the whole third degree: why didn’t I ever have kids? Sneering stuff, that kind of crazy bull.
I woke up scared and guilty for about a second, and then I cured that nightmare hangover with a pure shot of morning sun. But it was a dream, I’ll admit, where you have a feeling they do know something. Which is because you are telling yourself you could be doing better. You could be happier and more optimistic. Something we don’t all want? We all do. It comes out, hopefully, so you can do something about it.
The nightmare reaches a mundane and predictable finale. Two bantering mouths (the short one’s really in the scene now) grow their usual fangs, both grinning with huge tombstone teeth. The large one says to me,“Hey, we’re close pals, now,” rubbing my head. Rubs my head! The bastard. The dream ends as he turns his back to me so I can see his greasy mane, but then lets himself go down, resting his Satan head on my lap. That’s it. They say when they come back to get me there’ll be a knock at the door, simple as that, and I’ll be gone for good. Then the noise of gravel spewing and tires digging into the dirt wakes me. I look out in the dark, but if I saw a car or truck, I don’t remember it.
Much better for me, the sunlight regions of my Fire & Ice Day were far luckier and simpler. I soon found that the slender slipper revealed to me is an ordinary slip-on, a ladies casual tennis shoe of delicate size, black, a very light grade of canvas with a white sole. It was a joy for me to find that secret shoe, so discreet and so demure—perhaps solitary upon the back steps, but bright as a silver whistle or an unfurled mainsail in the sun. Perfect. Had Aphrodite a small, slender foot, this was hers.
So I might observe when inside, I moved it up to the top step where I imagined I would be able to see most of its features. But first, I relaxed with it outside. The morning grass could not have shone brighter if sunlight had walked down from heaven and sat beside me on a lawn chair, us both viewing the simple chausson atop the dais of the rear steps. For half and hour, I variously contemplated painting the chausson. Draw it first, I thought, as just a small shoe left by someone whose own presence would somehow be accounted for or at least alluded to in rendering the piece. The natural surface approach I’d been getting together sounded good, too, suited to this subject in several ways, but the truth? It’s always the subject matter—the subject matter lives on without an artist. The artist is absent. The artist dies. The artist’s part is finished. The subject matter is always fresh. I finally thought to be simple, not suggestive: a shoe from a dollar store, lost or abandoned by a road in the country and painted accurately and much that way, road dust and all, upon an adequate square of chain-beaten green oak. Sure, that way works—and so would others—it’s a women’s shoe, a simple thing.
It was an odd occurrence, that sandal ending on the back stoop of the old Tarpley’s farm house where I was living. Only one stone’s throw house was near me. Zeal and Rosebud (Bob) Macklin live next door. Zeal’s the perfect mom, Bud’s the best welder. Four, count them as they run, four kids. All nice, behaved and respectful, too. The Macklin children’s toys accidentally find their way over here, sometimes stay a day, but the bikes and trikes are put up every night from the lawn. They are loud and happy kids. But the delicate slipper didn’t belong to kids or to Zeal Macklin, herself a large enough person for the shoe’s size, as well as being a trim and seriously athletic person. This afternoon she came over, wanting to know the brand and model. She had never even seen the little shoe.
On summer days, balls looking like big marbles roll and bounce in. Big deal. Safe lawn darts and plastic throwing rings, I’ve tended to them, too. But I hardly ever see any of them when they get here, even though I sit out back a lot.
They’ve got a good-sized plastic castle over there and croquet balls that never get over here because they are too prized, I think. We all took great care of any croquet equipment when we were only kids, I guess because we saw the accomplishment in making the whole wooden set. We approved the regularly spaced, repeating colors. Abusing the balls or misusing the mallets was not welcomed. And the rules were fair. A map of life, that game seemed. The Macklin’s own family set was a sturdy traditional one with lathe-turned and smoothly painted and varnished pieces and even stainless wickets. I heard the Macklin kids early today trying to decide what to play, and they took me permanently from under that shroud of a B-movie nightmare, just hearing them laughing in their back yard, and me in chuckling in my own, already facetiously thinking my princess is a prisoner over there, locked up in that plastic castle of theirs.
About an hour or so after noontime and lunch, I came back out and sat where I could listen to the kids still yelling, cavorting, splashing in the water. The Macklin pool has been up since the first of June. Exactly that day, by the way. I watched Bob struggling because one side kept falling over before he could get to it. We finished the job together.
Today, it was pleasant cacophony, their water games. Sounded a lot like Jan and mine‘s modern music—violins, shrill, hurried, talking fast up and down the scales—with the sirens and truck or boat horns they’d put in coming and going—all sorts of these riffs going on. That was avant-garde orchestral then. Still is modern for me. Hey for me today, give me what I have in the hand, that certain silent and coy intimating slipper, hourly turned more beautiful by the afternoon’s easily falling sun. I was pleased all right, it was a beautiful summer, and my ‘Who, oh who could it be?’ game kept me sparked up, willing and eager to find out who she was.
It was a precisely a gold-colored slipper in the morning, but at noon it glowed silver in the small, high sun and then afterward glowed gold again that evening—not a stunt of the mind but a trick of the sun. Maybe it just confirms the way most artists see the world, light and subject changing together—and that also goes for artists like me who don’t draw sunsets. At one point I was down to a color field series you could inadvertently look past before coming back for a closer look to see if they were really there. At nothing really—that closer look, and that was near to the point. There was nothing to see that mattered. I’d recreate the appearance of this shoe now as a meditation piece that, like my color field work, just barely occupies a space, though letting you look it over just as it sits there insuperably silent in the face of rather extraneous questions that could never be replied to.
Sure, in everyday ‘lingo’ just call her a cheaply made Chinese look-alike that can say absolutely nothing (or speaks in a language you do not know?) But if that slipper would, say, rise up somehow, animate, begin dancing with its lovely mistress—magnificently and freely—and not for anyone’s delight but hers (and mine). What would that one dance be, the dance she chooses herself? What but a waltz?
The first one to my mind is ‘Tales of the Vienna Woods.’ I almost get up from gazing at the sandal, go inside and play that lilting waltz over my big computer speakers. Take a glide myself. Funny, right? And then I think no, I’m just fooling around a couple hours until I leave for town with that small stack of magazines at the corner of my desk, but I’m not making a single note for class. That’s the hard reality of that. Is it that young girl who waves at me afternoons? Who else could it be? In the flesh, I mean.
I know chimeras, too. I know this won’t end with any princess walking in and sitting down to have her foot fitted by me. Yet if something important in my life wasn’t happening, why the slipper and nightmare when nothing’s been happening out here for weeks? It’s not true they’re paired like Yin and Yang or Ice and Fire, I know that’s absurd, but there’s something headed toward fullness and completeness (perfection!), or maybe a less major symmetry or koan or a slightly revealed movement from a cosmic ballet, or maybe something else. I can’t even guess what the whole thing is, only some writer or painter like a Hawthorne or a Melville could fathom it, or maybe better, a writer like Italo Calvino or like Bruno Bettelheim, the fairy tale explainer and childhood psychologist—you know, enchantment.
I ran past Bettleheim’s name this morning, when I was reading up on Cinderella on the net. His Cinderella is hiding her guilt, so not much help there. I also saw where Homer said there’s dreams of ivory but also of horn. Just like I myself am saying. Both sides converging, doing something. Only the slipper is of ivory and thus is true. I say the slipper has already won.
Unfortunately, the thumb-worn history of Cinderella branches out everywhere like an African thorn tree. Spreads wide like a peacock’s plume, I guess, would be a better figure. But she’s fully African as well as Hungarian and Latvian. Hundreds of tales of Cinderella. There as many tales of her as seem to be bright stars in the sky. Frankly, there’s enough stars but there seems to be too many of her, so many more than I was expecting anyway.
I dropped the Internet after an hour away from the slipper and went out and checked on her. I then went directly back to my own illustrated Aesop edition and to an Encyclopedia Britannica that wasn’t mine and looked the age of the house. Solutions everywhere. Britannica—no disconcerting clutter there. The name Britannica does remind me of my undergraduate poem that began with the lines ‘I have sailed to a cold blue Britain / where flowers are made of steel / women cry, cannot love / the silence imperial.” Anyway, anyway! Became a modest painter, instead. That was late seventies. I was as young as a slipper myself when I wrote that, unfortunately to a partial finish.
As those lines suggest, I was a just another sufferer of love then, too: the wonderful Canadian girl of mine who took life far better than I and far more seriously than I. An artist the way she lived, she left me nearly five hundred dollars (nearly all we had), the books, mountain camping equipment, and her young female Lab who would not travel too conveniently. After four years crossing the Canadian provinces and never finding our present to be what we wanted, we parted. No present meant no way to the future. A long time ago.
As I’ve said, I’ve missed opportunities. Sure have. Nothing’s written on the remaining cards though. Nothing should automatically become meant to be or not meant to be. My future is an open question about as plain as a chameleon’s coat—which means that choices and decisions are still to be made. That the way ahead isn’t determined. So now’s the perfect time to fold up the past for good to find an opening to the future. Art again? I can almost do it.
A series depicting a machine-made slipper lying in the amber sun and in other framing surroundings, times, and weather? But I began to feel that slipper also beginning to fade away into the past. Necessities. Teaching. Insurance. The porch is significantly broken. The yard needs mowing—a play ball from anywhere couldn’t roll through it. I hear there won’t be woodland creatures helping me trim back the privet or weatherize the studio, either.
The chiaroscuro sneaker, my once-so-recent great diversion, that never-was svelte slipper that probably tumbled out of the back of an old pick-up on the way to the dump or the Salvation Army is right where I left it. But I need to get going. Time to get cracking is the order of the day.
The first and only time I held le chausson, turning the tennis shoe over in my hands and examining the ivory-colored sole, I was struck by and disappointed by its own intricacy. Endless tiny rows of white rubber: one, two; one, two, three; one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four, five; and on to the heel’s slightly raised white end. It drove me to disappointed distraction. But then I had the fortune to look up and see the noon-time sky’s orderly advancing bars of very high clouds—exactly those same endless rows of white clouds passing perfectly evenly. Writ large! That’s what I’d been looking for, a bold correspondence reflected in nature, working its way up through it all, up into the largest magnitudes imaginable.
In a small circle I read ‘Size 8.’ Sweet, fragrant reality! Indicating nothing less than my anticipated love was, indeed, of a particular flesh, bone and blood, and that she may also tower above me! The little slipper has finally completely won me over. It was true as a compass needle, and I was completely hooked.
To beat it all, working in the early evening with Aesop and Britannica and then with the computer again—all the while observing through the back screen the sandal—I found out some troubling things about the Cinderellas, things that will seem merely curious to others. Among them, that the historical Cinderella and the historical Aesop were fellow slaves together long ago in Egypt. Unbelievable in the extreme, right? Wrong.
If Bob is reading my notes he may already be saying, “What’s that anyway to that old sack, the depleted palette-monger himself? Cinderella and Aesop suffering indenture and outright bondage together? Balderdash!”
Well, who the fictional Cinderella is, exactly where she came from, and generally, what she represents all matter a great deal to me. I’ve almost put enough reliable facts together about her and her slipper. Some few things, inconsequential, are yet to be aligned, but Cinderella’s exotic Egyptian history cannot be doubted.
Let me be as clear as her own slipper about the real Cinderellas. First, let anyone confirm my verity. Begin brewing a cup of tea and before it fully steeps you’ll confirm Cinderella and Aesop’s close relationship. I will cite sources. Further, the Egyptian authors call Aesop ‘a short, ugly man.’ That part is doubtful, for reasons irrelevant here. The chief confirmation of their relationship, of which I am jealous, comes from one of the greatest classical historians:
“Herodotus, some five centuries before Strabo, supplied further information about Rhodopis [Cinderella Ροδώπις- ‘rosy-cheeked’] in his Histories, writing that Rhodopis came from Thrace, and was the slave of Iadmon of Samos, and a fellow-slave of Aesop. She was taken to Egypt in the time of Pharaoh Amasis, and freed there for a large sum by Charaxus of Mytilene, brother of Sappho, the lyric poet.[6][7]”
My head’s spinning from these many Cinderellas from every continent (except, perhaps, Australia). I’m wondering if I should change that informal art talk of mine to the ‘Literature Line-up: The Thousand Faces of Cinderella’? The story of the Chinese Cinderella was the final one I discovered, and it is huge. But I’ll confess that the lovely dark-haired Yeh-Shen matters not at all to me at this point. I’m up to here with it. Finally, numerous commentators attest, examining the uncanny parallels between the animal fabulist and Cinderella, that Aesop himself was a masculine Cinderella, proven in the many events of his own life. I’m swirling. Unbelievable.
I’m trying to be through with it. I’m not a researchist, and my own arts grants, which in former days I could’ve stretched to examine Cinderella’s selves and done the scenery for that generative, troubling, spidery nexus of world tales, those grants ran out way back when. I should never have had the first one, and I don’t even remember how that one happened. The secretary did the paperwork and renewing was a snap. Anyway. I didn’t even want to apply for the last one or two, I was just in the habit of getting them by then. Not even spending out the last two wasn’t one of my mistakes. As far as a life in art itself went, I knew I just couldn’t do the work there and then. Those grants were something that the department secretary applied for, for instance one to be performed with a clinical psychology person, but I used them only to fund my canvas works, no matter what I was supposed to do. A little later I began to just adjunct teach with no strings attached and completely off on my own in my own studio, out of the system and always only doing adjunct when I had to.
Here’s a last quick list, short and in order. I have to get everything together and head out soon.
1 I’ve got to get into town. I may even have enough time for a haircut if I’ll just calm down and get in the car and leave.
2 Here’s my final meditation on that Chinese-manufactured, all alone now, and oh so delicate sneaker: it’s not which Cinderella might be hers, but whether she is even coming at this late moment.
3 Forgiveness, acceptance comes from inside yourself. I believe even a black and white slipper can absolve me and forgive me, maybe better than an understanding confidante or close friend. If I find her—and that is a must, I see that now—I will speak first. I will thank her for her beautiful clues about myself. I think I have all but tracked her down.
4 It’s clear how dangerous a slipper like the small glass shoe is for lovers who, left with a tiny slipper, continue to seek the whole woman no matter the danger or distance. Who makes these dashing leaps but men in love?
—-
I’ve spruced up and I’ve set up the house for coming home. I’ve put out something for the dog, who’s hasn’t moved from his house the entire day. He’s on his last legs, that’s been clear for a while. This evening, he begins pushing around the kibbles with his nose, like always, but then he lost interest and drew away. Not a good sign. He is thinner, too.
I was returning from the dog run to the house when I got to the steps. Wow! Am I astounded or just floored and crestfallen? The shoe that was on the back steps moments ago is missing. Disappeared. The gray steps bare. I am uninformed and at a loss.
Probably gone when I was inside shaving. From the bathroom, I didn’t hear a knock, if there was one. But wait. A small note, folded, is stuck between the screen and the tensioner. The wind is picking up, as they say!
I feel my own reasoning about the mysterious shoe was solid. The notion that the argument I heard last night completely boiled over as I shifted under my summer covers and that as a consequence a slipper was angrily thrown is a scene nearly impossible to believe. From my Little League to my college physics it‘s not possible that a little shoe made of light canvas can be thrown so far. Over the house? Or the world’s greatest curve ball around it? Approximately a hundred yards (a football field)? And land on the steps?
It isn’t Zeal Macklin’s shoe, either. I checked with her right after lunch. Well, I mentioned it to Bud, showing him the sandal, and he shook his head smiling and slipped back on his hood. Zeal came over a couple of hours ago and confirmed it wasn’t hers. Neither does it belong to the young widow, the blond girl in the National Guard who’s dating and who drives by waving nearly every afternoon. I emailed her and she emailed me back. If not any of them, then who?
Whatever the danger, I want to know her Cinderella-like name and see her pure graces, if I can. So I’m opening the note. What else is there to do? I will read it, whatever the cost. I say to myself, ‘wondering and dreaming are one thing. I will read this now.’
But I want everything back when I do. I want Cinderella’s love. I want Truth, I want Art, I even want back. If I want it, that high-dollar construction job I had up north. I want someone like Jan, too—the judgmental stuff no longer matters or even applies. And I want to see everything again as clearly and pristinely as a child sees a sparkling glass slipper just as it is perfectly fitted to a fine lady by a kneeling prince. I even want back today’s yellow and blue morning, this morning when things were a bit more clear and a normal summer day was my only plan.
There’s something about reading the note, opening the door and then going out—all in one motion—that I would like to happen. The fanlight above the door has darkened. I glance back at the books that led me around the world today as I discovered Cinderella dressed in her many looks. I see, too, all the bills and notices, my old Soleri tray for lemon drops, and I notice that the computer’s still running, even though I thought I turned it off.
There’s a knock at the door while I’m standing by it, startling me out here by myself. I’m opening the lavender envelope now. Then another small knock, like a question, ‘are you there?’ A girl from Vancouver would be nice, but that’s not going to happen. I haven’t even stopped that lie about me swearing off women. I need to do that, so everybody knows. I’ll open the door now. But what about the note half-opened in my hand?
‘Give me the note,’ I say to myself, ‘I’ll just see who it’s from. Then I’ll answer the knock at the door.’
I understand that I’m exhausted and not in any shape to teach in town tonight.
But the note is golden cursive. Its words are all that I hoped for. The vellum falls from my hands, and I fall on the floor, crying and crying.
The door knob rocks slightly. The door opens. A beautiful light shines in.