The Red Sari

Cody Black says that running away isn’t about highways and strangers you care about more than friends, that it’s about something else inside you that you love so much it hurts, hurts enough to haunt you the rest of your life.  And I’ve told him that I was haunted only when I pleased and that roads out equaled horizons, and horizons meant you could be anything at all.  But he was right.  I was haunted.  Even nearly twenty years later, Ruby was a ghost for me in one more rented room.  I’d seen rented rooms a plenty.  In Florida.  In Arizona, and all the way to the great Northwest.    Up in New England, then back places south again.  Folks I’ve met have wondered at me.  Me, a woman alone, traveling the roads here and back and away, but it’s simple.  I wanted nothing to do with Kentucky, with the place that made me, even if some days it was memory that kept me going.

I’d worked my shifts plenty of places and used my sixth sense to picked the customers who needed bad advice the most.  They always looked hangdog, the ones I’d pick.   They’d nod at me, real serious, after I’d slip my card underneath their drinks.  Waydean Loving.  Prophet Extraordinaire!  I’d meet them later at the bar and nod and say yes and yes all over again as they went on about wedding rings lost in the weeds or husbands that were as bad as the day they’d married them. Cards, just an ordinary old poker deck, were twenty.  Tarot, my special tiny deck with Queens and Kings of Scotland, was thirty.  And for fifty, I’d hold hands with them and wait until one or the other of us said they felt vibes flowing from skin to skin to skin.  What should it feel like, some mascara-clotted woman would say and I’d tell her to keep her eyes shut, that it would feel something like an electric fence in a meadow, and I’d study her.  I’d think about what it is Ruby would do and that’s where the difference in me and the past came through.  I’d tell this blonde-headed woman and her glitter nails just what I wanted her to know, none of it necessarily the truth.

Telling futures brought Cody Black to my room at the Red Sari, a room that smelled of carpet and fresh-made dal.  Live kind of plain, don’t you, girl, Cody said that first time I brought him up there.  He pointed at my suitcase in the corner and the dresser  with my moon-and-stars box. The second time he visited I showed him post cards.  Ones  I’d gotten from Della over the years, and also a picture of me and my 1967 Dodge Dart and the torn out-page from an old ladies magazine I kept like it was gospel:

 

Pages 18-23.   Ladies Stories, Serialized.  May 12, 1947.  Far from Home.  Chapter I

 

It was a cold, November night in 1890 when I woke to some sound I didn’t know.  I thought it was Nethaladia  whispering fortunes her sleep. It’s been fifteen years since she stepped off the boat from Germany and more since we wed but she still wakes me with predictions about love or fear or not.  I moved closer to her and hid my face in her hair. Outside on the porch, I the moon was gone.  Shadows moved.  I knew the woods were full of trees of heaven

 

The third time we sat around on the carpet in front of the television with the sound off as I laid out my best deck of cards for a Celtic cross.  He wasn’t haven’t a bit of it.  Waydean Loving, he said.  You don’t know what you’re up to for breakfast tomorrow, not to say where I’m headed in a year and day.  He laid back on the floor and laughed until I was mad enough to kick him out for good.  But I didn’t.

Cody and I weren’t lovers yet, but we’d moved beyond the just-friends-wanting-to-kiss-but-not days.  Nights we lay spooned on the queen-sized bed and I studied the varieties of tattoos on the hidden plains of his skin.  Waterfalls made of purples and blues.  Faces of rock stars.  Cody was still young, twelve years younger than me, and I flinched when his hands reached to unveil me.  He wanted to unzip, unbutton me  in front the late-night television light of reality shows.  I liked seeing him that way, his skin shiny, the expanse of his tattooed body in blue light.

“You’re beautiful, Waydean,” he said and kissed the ends of my fingers.

Those fingers against him, their bitten selves.  “You’re are, too,” I said, to change the subject, but I heard him laugh.

“You don’t call a boy pretty, Waydean.”  He turned on his back and I turned with him, touched the stubble on his face.

The truth was he didn’t have a pretty bone in body, but I’d known he was beautiful the first minute I laid eyes on him.  Ahead of me in line for an application form for a job at Willy’s Wonderama, like I was.

Willy’s Wonderama.  Museum Under Re-construction and We Need You!  Help Save the Two-Trunked Elephants!  The Hand-Dried Pygmies! The Albino Dwarves! And him.  I’d seen his kind.  More tattoos than I could count.  Crown-of-thorn black vines leading to his upper body, a swastika on the right side of his neck, then the face of Jimi Hendrix on one upper arm.  Across the application line I could see a few inky words about Peace and Love, and beside that, script that I thought said something about the Harmonic Convergence.  But above it all, a face without a mark on it, the gentlest face I’d seen, with eyes as clear as amber.

“When I look at you, Waydean,” he said now, his voice more serious than I wanted.  “I feel like I see all of myself.”

I didn’t have to answer.  The cell phone I seldom used began to ring and I reached over to turn it off.  I pulled the covers up around my shoulders.

“And one more thing,” he commented.  He looked at me out the corners of his eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“Your cell,” he said.  “I don’t know why you keep one.”

“Well,” I said and pulled the sheet up over my head.

“And dancing,” he said.  “I couldn’t make you dance if I set your feet on fire.”

I stayed hid.

“I could say it was like you dropped from nowhere,” he went on.

“Could?”

“But then I’d want to know where nowhere was.”   He tickled me through the covers.  “And you’re not about to tell me that one.”

He was right.  I knew his scents and I knew the paths his hands could travel.  I’d lie next to him in my tee shirt and sock feet, let him run his hands up inside, around, down my back  along the insides of my legs, but not my most secret places.  I wasn’t ready to show him me, my nooks and crannies.  My too-big feet, for one thing.  The ones Ruby said were a gift from on high.  She gave me silver nail polish for them.  Kicked off her high heels and stretched her arms way up.  Make them toes shine, honey, she said and grabbed my hands.  She looked like a movie star, a goddess maybe.  And me, my feet as big as whales.  A gift?  I didn’t think so.

“Don’t you think,” I asked Cody.  I was lying with my arms beneath my head now and I let the sentence trails away.

“I try to, now and then.”  He smiled in that lopsided way.

“I did have a question,” I said and I did have.  I’d been thinking about music in the Old City on a Friday night.  An Indian restaurant with a sitar and a dancer.  I’d been thinking about fun and being antsy for that, of late.

“I’m listening,” he said, but he wasn’t.  He was studying my face, his face so close up I could count the piercings, nose to ear and back.

“Never mind.”  I sat up, the sheet around me.

“What are fixing to talk about that’s so hard?” Words drifted out his mouth like smoke, and that made me nervous.  It was like an old romance movie.

“I don’t know what you mean,”   I said.

“I mean, I can tell.”  He hold on to a strand of my hair.

“Tell what?”

“That you’re about to hit the road.  On to the next pin on the map.”

“When have I said a word about that?”

“It isn’t about words, Ruby.”  He studied me, nothing amused his face now.

“Then let the body talk.”  I grabbed his hand, turned it palm up.  “Your fortune, Cody Black.”

“We’ve been through that one,” he said and tugged his hand back.

I traced his lifeline anyway.  “Right here, now,” I began.

“I know what you see.” He shoved the hand under the covers.  “And I know good and well what you don’t.”

He’d been talking about that more lately.  About us.  Hinting at the future and me in any given conversation.

“Waydean Loving,” he called after me as I got up and headed toward the bathroom and a shower to drown him out.  “You ever live up to your name?  Ever love a living soul, for real?”

I turned on as much hot water as I could stand.  Raised my face to it, felt it enter my pores.  The truth was I didn’t know if I had ever loved anyone, least of all a man who wanted me.  Wanted to touch me, not just the surface of my skin, not just the temporary color of my hair.  I’d been there, done that.  Boys.  Boys with their spiky hair and their spikier tattoos.  Their soft mouths and their questions.

“You gonna marinate yourself in there, Waydean?”  He called to me from the next room and I hummed aloud to drown his words.  Hold me in the morning time, hold me at night.  That song about some place called Inez.  The  song I’d heard so often when I was a girl.

I hushed.

The water was falling in tiny pellets that stung, and I liked it.  Liked how the wet heat made everything else drift off, his voice, the outside sounds of Knoxville streets and cars, drills and hammers and voices from the museum in my head each day.  Jack?  Hey, you.  Where’s this one go?  I raised my face to the water again and that was when I heard it the very first time.

Words with the rusty taste of Red Sari water.  A Ruby voice.  Just who are you, miss?  My insides seized up and I shook my head.  I’d worked a long day, yesterday, then been up all night, on the town with Cody Black.  That was what caffeine and cheap red wine did for you.  Made you hear things.  Spoiled your dinner before you’d had it and left a bad taste in your mouth besides.  I reached back, wrung out my hair and they hit me again like an ice-cold interruption in a nice, hot shower.  Who or what, I mean?  Words again, with my eyes open and the water pelting into them.  Steam was so thick in the shower stall I had to push it aside to reach for the faucet.  Words collided with the groan of the pipes as the water shut down.  The shower trickled still, a tiny stream I never could shut off.

            I stood on a towel, my eyes closed. I reached and wiped at the steam on the mirror above the bathroom sink, kept my eyes shut.  I’d seen myself often enough and saw myself now.  Hair dyed deep red and the roots already coming in, iron-grey and threaded with black.  My eyebrows wild and unplucked.  A hole in the side of my nose where a nose ring didn’t work out.  A forty something woman, in a room somewhere new with a twenty-something man who wanted to be kind, and how mad that made me.  So pissed off I didn’t open my eyes even when the voice circled in again.  One word, this time.  Inez.  Inez.  Inez.  A steady drip of a word that wouldn’t quit.   Aren’t you listening?

            I shivered when the bathroom door nudged open.

“Look at the steam in there, Waydean.  You alright?”

The door swung back but not before I’d grabbed a towel and draped myself with it.  I stood drying myself off.

“Waydean?”  Cody took a corner of the towel, raised it to my forehead, dried my eyes.

I was in a bathrobe and sitting on the edge of the bed and he was holding my face with his two hands and promising me he’d listen, not push me down some highway I wasn’t ready to travel, listen more about the roads I’d traveled without him. But I shut the motel room door after him, waited until I felt him gone.  You’ll come to who you are, the rusty words said and I felt like crying as I turned them over inside my own mouth.  I wouldn’t cry, not for her or anyone else.  My skin was still tender when I made him leave.

But it didn’t quit, even then.  She kept right on talking and I knew the words.  I knew as well as I was breathing who had said them.  Ruby Loving.  Her, here.  What had she said that last minute as I’d stood inside the bathroom steam and hugged myself.  Palms and crystals and the irises of eyes.  I shook myself hard, like a dog shaking off water, but I heard her voice again, plain as day. Love has power, girl, if you know where to look.

 Love.  I knew about that one.  About love and crossroads and back roads and on from there.  Love was a sign, a poster on a wall.  Nothing, I told myself, to do with who and what I was.  That wasn’t what bothered me most.  It was how, after Cody left, I slept long and hard, and I dreamed and then woke hearing her again, a ghost-voice that made me shiver all over again.  You’ll come to yourself, Waydean.  And you’ll come back to me.  And Inez.  I’d heard that name often enough when I was a child, but it meant no more to me now than it ever had.

 

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Karen Salyer McElmurray is the author of The Motel of the Stars (Sarabande Books), nominated for The Weatherford Prize in Fiction, a Lit Life Novel of the Year, and named Editor’s Pick by Oxford American. She is also the author of Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, recipient of the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction, as well as Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing.  Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Georgia College and State University, McElmurray is Creative Nonfiction Editor for Arts and Letters: A Journal of Contemporary Culture. “The Red Sari” is from Wanting Inez, her newest novel.