The bookshelf, the other bookshelf. … Let’s start again, my writing runs ahead of itself.
There are—were—three built-in bookcases in the old house, the house that shrank around my growing years. It was bulldozed late last year. It disappeared one day between 9 a.m. and noon, as if scissors had cut a house out of a picture. After the lumbering trucks ground away trailing broken tiles and cracked beams and wind-blown plaster, I moved across the wounds in the ground imagining the rooms. Shards of a mirror winked where the bathroom had been. The earth in which it glinted hadn’t seen sunlight for seventy years.
I changed direction and walked into the ghost of a kitchen. Its wall once held six shelves, a 1950s showcase for kitchen kitsch. It held ceramic teapots no one used, café salt and pepper sets in diagonally-cut glass with chromed rocket ship tops, a flour canister filled with old stamps, and a bronze buddha someone brought home in 1972 from either India or that incense shop in Lygon Street. These items reluctantly gave way to Leon Uris, Fodor, Sunday missals, postcode books, bus timetables, and used envelopes.
The second bookshelf, the one I figuratively tripped over at the start of this post, was in the sitting room, closer to the west side of the bare earth, where a big absent window once let sunsets into the room to colour the motes like a flood of orange dust.
In those years I spent as much time on the floor of this room as in any of its mismatched chairs, reading broadsheet newspapers spread on the pinks and greens of the carpet. (My mother wouldn’t buy a lounge suite, even the name of which for her suggested a stultifying bourgeoiserie.) For most of that teen year of prescribed pills and Rorschach tests and dreadful fear, I lay on the floor and read the afternoon Herald stolen from my father, while ‘So Long Frank Lloyd Wright’ and ‘Airport Love Theme’ unwound themselves from a speaker deep in the wireless cabinet.
Meanwhile the bookshelf carried its million aloof stories. Silent battalions of Reader’s Digests, their island-and-palm-tree spines and distinctive sans-serif typography—OCT 1957—buttressed the sad Ernestine Hills and tattered Ethel Turners, whose boarded covers hung off their spines like ill-closing doors. Herman Wouk, Alec Waugh and Neville Shute writhed luridly in their 1950s Pan covers next to a fat old hardback in sun-faded green: O. Henry Collected Stories. That year I read one: ‘The Furnished Room,’ about a girl whose name was Eloise Vashner, and who had disappeared, and whose lover searched in vain for her traces.
*
Years later, my Eloise Vashner artefact was a brush. She (my Eloise, not O. Henry's) had left it behind. In the conventions of nostalgia, the left-behind object becomes more important if the leaver is understood never to return. Of course, you say. It’s a reminder, a keepsake. You don’t look at it twice if she’s coming back tomorrow. It’s as if the item becomes the proxy of its owner. A totem. A relic. Something you can’t throw out due to the superstition of finality. She wasn’t coming back tomorrow.
I looked for a hair, so black that it might have flashed a hint of blue in certain light. Like it did. One day the handle of the brush broke off. I’d kept it far too long; everyone in the house used it. Better than stashing it away like a ghostly memento.
*
My Eloise Vashner artefact was not really superstition. Just something she had touched. I could still see the brush in her hand, back arched, face with that crinkling frown of effort. And the sheer beauty of her brown forearm as it anti-clockwised from crown to nape.
Comments
Post a Comment