The Cunning
of Rosa Marie’s Lace
By Emily Ann Bingham
The street was age, and the wooden sign hung above it, held by rusted
chain links. It read in an engraved lettering, Rosa Marie’s Lace.
Like Angela it had endured the wear of time and showed a change in
appearance. Seen by Appointment Only had been added, painted
along the sign’s lower edge, and a partition had been placed behind the
shop’s large front window facing the street. It barricaded the view
from outside to inside. On its blue facing a piece of lace was pinned
for display. The sample appeared meager and remote from the activity on
the street, easily forgotten. But the presence of the lace was
faithful, and by its permanence was Angela now drawn.
Angela remembered being pulled beneath it as a child when the chain
links were still bright chrome that caught the glare of the sun’s rays.
She was in her mother’s firm grip, palm against palm. “Can we go in?”
Angela had asked. Her mother would say, “No,” that they didn’t have the
time. But as Angela grew, she came to struggle from her mother’s
clutch.
Angela rang the buzzer. A white curtain was moved to the side, and a
thin-face with dark complexion and arching drawn eyebrows peered out.
There was a rapid slide and the sound of locks being jolted from
socket. Rosa Marie held the door ajar and said, “Miss Drive?” Angela
nodded. Rosa opened it fully and allowed room for Angela’s entrance,
then closed it, pushed in a lock, and in a scratchy-deep voice said,
“Follow me.”
Rosa walked like a hunched pygmy: exaggerated shoulders, shriveled
body. Her neck had withdrawn into recesses of her back. Heels tapped
in steady precision, like a sewing machine, an echo sounded. She turned
and faced Angela, “Wait here.” She walked to the back of the room to a
staircase, and gripped the railing as she mounted each step, pulling
herself up. Rosa ascended in a body her craft had long since claimed,
shaped from a life sitting crouched between a dim light and needle with
thread, stitching the most minute of all detail.
A yellow florescent bulb hung in the center of the room beside a long
pull-chain with a tassel of mauve filigree. Beneath it rested an
overstuffed armchair where an afghan draped. Behind was a mahogany desk
where an hourglass lay on its side with a still mound of sand in both
ends like miniature pyramids. Clutter rested: business cards, envelopes
laden with foreign stamps, and binders stuffed with paperwork.
Underneath were crates crammed with shipping packages of various
sizing. Uneven piles of books lined the floorboards, dark in color,
obtrusive in size, with frazzling cloth spines. Remnants and string had
been abandoned to the floor. A chill swept through Angela, as though
this were a place where silence had been collected.
But for the walls…they orchestrated. Imagery arose, broken and
motionless, European hours, suspended on the backdrop in profuse
collage. Angela’s vision shifted to illuminated faces: Galileo,
Descartes, and Mozart, among many. Their haloes were tarnished with
sadness, hovering above tired eyes and thin lips. Greatness is not
always happiness. Written near were small passages revealing great
words, genuinely large…Truth, perhaps, declared through language, but
really belonging to that unwritten law of custom. Words were to be said
again and again, but always the same: always the same.
Beside the pictures of men and their written wisdoms were others whom
Angela didn’t recognize; they were photographs of smaller people whom
she perceived as Rosa’s heritage, her family. She recognized them in
every face she had ever seen, gliding by on that unchanging paved road,
the common with a clinging taste of salt: sweat and tears. Angela felt
the kinship. They were her family too.
Pasted from the ceiling to the baseboards were ancient maps outlining
younger worlds. Angela traced the borders of the land and thought of
the ages and histories and civilizations and tribes of humankind, of
their falling and rising and beating hearts. And the thought spun
before her like a twirling, dusty wind. Thick boundaries are drawn
everywhere, and within and outside there is the good fight.
Centuries…walls, the flesh immured her. She felt a secret pass
through. The cunning of Rosa’s shop tricked Angela’s senses.
The past is contained, is here, is now.
Angela glanced down at a cedar chest wedged between piles of old-famed
literature, then to corners that escaped into blackness. A stone had
been cast, ripples in the water. Impressions continued to surface as
she saw the spiral of the conch shell, city walls, and sand…multitudes
of faces, their passing into the abyss of never-being-seen-again. Her
heart lit and warmed against Rosa’s devotion to age, the craft of time,
and then fell to the floor like a gold band with a hollow clink.
And marriage was her fingerprint in the sand.
She heard a distant ring. Cathedral’s bells, or that buried hint of
repetition, or was it merely Rosa’s steady step descending the
stairway? Yes, that was it. Rosa met Angela and asked; “Now you’re to
be married and are looking for a veil?”
“Yes.” Rosa spread her vision over Angela.
“I don’t know which would best suit you.” Angela unbuttoned her wool
coat, un-wrapped the scarf from around her neck, and removed her
gloves.
“Something pretty,” Angela replied, feeling a little shy. She reached
for her strand of pearls and began rolling them one by one in the tips
of her fingers. Rosa cast a spinster’s shadow, standing with her
silver-streaked black hair pulled into a bun, in her dark attire:
high-collar blouse, pleated skirt, and crocheted shawl draped across her
hunched back, rousing in Angela childhood memories of fairy tale. Rosa
transformed into a character hidden away in an attic drawer with straw
strewn about, spinning her wheel. Rosa was novel, standing in the
center of the room, before the backdrop of spreading imagery, as though
she maintained a connection with her origin. She could have existed in
any era. Human: old, dusty, and worn. The wrinkles etched upon her
face, running down her neck, were vestiges of time’s toll, like rivers
and gullies that had run dry.
Rosa turned on her black heels and stepped toward the chest. She knelt,
lifted its lid, and began sorting through the contents. She removed a
brown paper bag and walked to the desk. Stopping, she pushed the
envelopes and binders to the far end, and laid the bag on the smooth
surface. After un-wrapping the tissue paper, Rosa pinched the top of
the lace, and in one theatrical sweeping movement pulled it above her
head and took a step back. Her arms arched in a circle. She said,
“It’s the Belgian rose print. The pattern dates the 19th
century.” The veil draped above the floor. It fanned out a delicacy of
foliage and fern that brushed against each other in a ballerina’s
grace. “You’re fortunate. Some of history’s most lavish brides have
worn this print.”
Angela stepped close. Her fingertips traced the foliage, imagery that
sprung from hardly anything more than air…looped thread. She gripped
the bottom of the lace and stepped back, pulling it flat. If the
foliage was the ballet, the rose was the music. The willowish ferns and
leaves formed clusters at four corners, hemming in a grand, large rose,
bowing to it in acquiescence. The petals folded out around the center,
not in full bloom, but approaching it…always approaching. The pattern
repeated itself, and the rose ascended again and again. Stitched inside
time, they silently made their claim, belonging and remaining and
rooted.
“It’s priceless,” Angela said. She looked at Rosa’s eyes behind the
veil and saw what would become of her, truth in age. No pulling her way
free from this grip. Some things are ordained.
Angela heard her mother’s voice in a distance, saying that they did not
have time. And was not that the way it seemed? Or was that only an
appearance, like a worn face? Angela realized then that she was but a
passenger, simply moving through into the show of change. She belonged
to a kind of timelessness, a stream of silent voices. The land knew
something of this agelessness where there weren’t distinctions. The
lines were imaginary. It was always day and night, always spring,
summer, and fall. The rose only grew. Convention lived and outlived.
Life was her right of passage. Angela curtsied time with an
acquiescence, as life seemed to last forever, and said, “I’ll take it.”
Angela reached into her purse and became affiliated again
with the immediacy of being, distracted within the new details, her hand
shuffling between lipstick, keys, and mail. The sentiment flew. She
buttoned her coat, and paid Rosa Marie. As she walked through the frame
of the doorway, the arch, Angela remembered that she would be a bride, a
mother. She remembered her life and the dreams to fill it. “Ms. Rosa,
I’ll soon be a wife, inside a new home. I’ll be needing curtains.”
Angela was a little surprised by this sound she made, her new language.
Everything was changing if only for her.
Rosa nodded her head and said, “Of course.” Angela thanked her, stepped
outside, and closed the door. As she walked into the crowded activity
of the street, she faintly heard locks being jammed back into socket.