The Dances Not Danced
I wandered into my sister’s silent room and I touched her small possessions: a peach-colored robe draped over a chair, her powder blush-on––dusky rose––and most poignant of all, a silk print skirt hanging in her closet with the tags still on. I still think of that pretty skirt sometimes, wondering when she bought it, and where she planned to wear it. It represents dashed hopes and painful disappointments, all the things we thought we’d do and didn’t, the chances not taken or taken away, the dances never danced. The humble desires thwarted are the ones that make me saddest, the expectations of simple pleasures that should not have been so difficult to attain.
As a healthy child born between two siblings with congenital kidney disease, I learned early on that life is not fair, and not everyone is granted the ordinary gifts. My sister Marlene has been gone for twenty years, and my brother Eddie nearly thirty, but vivid dreams and memories of them have been appearing lately, as though they are visiting me during this time of isolation. I wonder what this quarantine would have been like for them, both dialysis patients, instantly among the most vulnerable. Their lives were unfairly short and already constricted in so many ways––it gives me a different perspective on whatever deprivations I might be experiencing now. Whatever is taken from me, I have still had more than they did.
And I sure do wish my sister Marlene had gotten to wear her silk skirt. I’ll never stop feeling sad about that.
Melancholia. That’s what this mood is. I am melodramatically melancholic. I’m even listening to Leonard Cohen, starting with Famous Blue Raincoat, inching my way toward You Want It Darker. That ought to do it. My friend Kappy wrote, “It’s hard for me to quell a gnawing desire, when I don’t even know what it wants.” I feel it too, a vague but gnawing desire, a yearning combined with anxiety. I have finished my re-reading of Jane Eyre, and I already miss my time on the sofa with Jane and chocolate, but I am trying to find a follow-up. I want a book that simply takes me away, no need for it to be edifying. There are too many blank spaces these days into which troubling thoughts may rush. I wish I were more crafty and creative.
This morning, the sun cast elongated window-shaped patches across the floor, in that charming way it does, and we were given a brand new chance to do or be better, within the pandemic parameters. I said yes to the offer, and resolved to go outdoors, reinforced by coffee. I put on a silk blouse that I once wore in Paris, and suggested a six-feet-apart walk with my neighbor Françoise, who actually is from Paris. The blouse is vintage, thin frayed fabric in shades of blue, with sparkling buttons, feminine and incongruous, and it suited me. I’m beginning to go through my closet and pull forward garments that I might have been saving for grander things, but all sorts of expeditions have their own inherent grandness. I think in the future I will become more adept at deciphering each day’s invitations and accept them all. I will be satisfied with less and know there isn’t anything meager about it. I’ll leave no stone unturned, no dance un-danced, and if there’s some little way of making someone happy, I will try to pitch in, because, damn, it all goes by so fast, and some wants are so paltry and worthy and easy to grant.
In any case, today’s excursion was top-notch. Françoise and I walked up the canyon road, beneath a eucalyptus grove, and beyond to an open area on the ridge from which we could see the mountains, sea, and pastoral land for miles around us. The air smelled sweet, like newly mown hay, and we sat in silence for a while, feeling the grace of the earth. It didn’t seem like anything could possibly be wrong.