Portion of the Sea (38 page)

“No,” he laughed.

“Then I don’t have to answer that one.”

“No, you don’t,” he said. “But are you available tomorrow, same time, same place? I’ve got another survey I’d love to conduct on you. You’re a great demographic.”

I laughed. I was not only flattered, but I was interested. Ours was the first stimulating conversation I had since … since I was in Jaden’s arms and we had been talking about my being a woman and the choices I had since becoming one.

“I’ve taken too much of your time. Thank you.”

“Your welcome,” I replied, snapping out of my Jaden daydream and remembering where I was now and who I had become—a woman dressed in a curtain standing in the middle of town answering a list of questions about my life, which suddenly didn’t sound anything like the life I could have chosen for myself had I stayed on that island and married the man I loved.

The next day we met again, but this time I brought a blanket and a picnic basket and suggested we sit under a tree instead of standing for two hours.

“I don’t want to damage your reputation by doing this,” Leonardo said as he took the basket from me and watched as I flipped the blanket up into the air and let it land flat on the ground. “This is a professional survey, you know. I am here on business.”

“To hell with everyone,” I said as I took the basket from his hands and sat down. “I’m tired of living in fear that I might offend someone. I wasn’t put on this planet to properly please others and pretend I like doing so.”

He stood there staring down at me. “I’m thinking you fall into a different demographic category now that I’m getting to know you a bit better,” he said. “You’re not the typical woman.”

I rolled my eyes and opened the basket. “Yes, I do live in a lonely category all of my own, don’t I?”

He sat down beside me and took the bread I handed him. “I wouldn’t say that. I see women like you in New York all the time, and I’m thinking there might be more of you out here in the country, as well, but they’re not being honest in their survey answers. They’re in hiding, and they’re afraid to come out of the haystack, maybe. I appreciate your honesty.”

“Why?”

“My job is to interview all kinds of women and then create a publication that appeals mostly to the masses but also to ladies living on both sides of the spectrum. Because of you I’m thinking of going out on a limb in future publications. I’d like to start gearing my material more toward the women out there who actually want to be doing more in life, meaning sporting costumes and so forth.”

He asked me a bunch of silly questions and then took a break to eat bread and cheese. And then I pulled out a secret stash of brandy I carried with me from time to time, and I sipped just enough to tingle my toes.

Soon, I took charge and started asking him the questions. He was thirty-one. He came from a wealthy but small family. He was the only son and inherited his parents’ wealth. His father had been a banker in New York and died a couple of years ago. His mother died five years before that. He knew people in New York, and it had been simple for him to get a job at the catalog. They paid him well, and because I was now trying to figure out what sort of demographic he was, I asked him to be more specific with regard to his financial status. I liked his answer, and I liked him. Had my heart not sunk to the bottom of the sea, I probably could have fallen in love with a man like him.

“Do you have time for one more survey tomorrow?” he asked when we stood up a few hours later.

“I do,” I said. “I do,” I said again after the next day’s survey. “I do,” I said the day after that. “I do,” I said a week later and again two weeks later.

“Do you?” I started to ask ten surveys later, when I learned he wasn’t as interested in my information as he was in my long, dark hair, heart-shaped face and brown oval eyes. It was the first time anyone put shapes to my features, telling me I had a heart-shaped face and oval eyes. “Do you want to marry me?”

“I’ve never heard of a woman asking that before,” he replied. And then he said, “Yes, I do.”

I didn’t love him, but I liked him. I especially liked the way he complimented my features, making me feel like I was an exquisite and detailed object straight off the pages of his catalog. I was also flattered that beneath my old faded dresses I still possessed beauty, for I hadn’t felt any since leaving Sanibel Island nearly two years ago.

And when he placed a ring on my finger, a ring I had only gawked at in the catalog for years, I cried, for I never thought my hands or fingers could ever look feminine, not after all the work they had done.

Dahlia gave me her blessing, as did Stewart. And the girls were giddy
as river otters the day I married Leonardo out back, behind the pond with the sun glistening down upon the brown, muddy water. Their Aunt Mary, the one they adored, had arrived from Alabama, and she was as excited to take over as their caretaker as they were to see me go.

I left Kentucky and moved to New York with Leonardo, him having no idea he married a heartless woman. He was a good man and attractive, too, and I felt bad marrying him when my heart was elsewhere, but I couldn’t see I had any other choice. I carried the burden of my crime within me for years, trying never to make it difficult on Leo, the innocent victim of my heartless love. But every night I faced the consequences of the crime I had committed.

I quietly cried myself to sleep thinking of Jaden and how I loved him. At first, it was horrific trying to love a man when my heart was settled on the bottom of the sea, longing to be rediscovered by the man it belonged to. I thought about what dear old Grandmalia once told me: a woman would be wise to marry a man that loves her more. That way, he’ll stay devoted. I now disagreed with her and had to catch my mind from fluttering off to a time and place where I loved someone who loved me equally. That sort of balanced love is out there, but it’s rare.

Soon, I became like any other woman who simply thinks back fondly to the boy she once loved and wonders how his life turned out. Had he any hardships? True joy? A woman to love him? And, most importantly, had he ever in the course of time thought of me in any way?

Leo loved me aggressively, and his words of affection read from his mouth boldly and confidently as if they were coming from one of the advertising campaigns he was working on. I never had to question his love for me. If ever I was ten minutes late after shopping or having tea with the ladies, he came in search of me. His kind of assertive love made me think Jaden never loved me as intensely. If he did, he would have come searching for his lost treasure. And because he didn’t, I now belonged to someone else. And now Jaden would no longer recognize me, starting with my clothes. Leo took pride in dressing me like a model from his catalog. He surprised me with extravagant reception gowns and visiting dresses, and despite years of living and socializing like royalty, I stopped in my tracks
like a wood duck one day when I spotted my lovely green, purple, yellow, red, buff and blue gown in a mirror I was passing by.

Who
was
that woman wearing a huge picture hat piled with flowers, ribbon, and stuffed birds? And look at that excessive jet beading trim on the shoulders, waist and lower half of her skirt! Fancy trim meant one thing: status!

“That can’t be you,” I muttered beneath my breath, turning to view my new plumage. Ava—the girl who once wore curtains and didn’t care about fashion or outer appearance and who had in the past become so meshed in tedious tasks that she swore she was the color gray. It’s the male ducks that live the loveliest, most colorful lives. The females are drab. “But not anymore,” I said into the mirror. “Look at you, Ava. Your new outer color reflects so well who you are on the inside, a creative being. Try to adapt.”

“Talking to yourself, dear?” Leo asked, startling me. “I guess a few words of positive affirmation to one’s self is a good thing.”

I laughed and felt my face turning red. Then I looked him in the eyes, not sure whether he’d understand. “I guess I still perceive myself as the girl chasing after the turkeys instead of my own dreams,” I said.

“How about perceiving yourself as Leo’s beautiful wife and as royal-looking as any queen?” he asked. “Ava, you don’t notice all the heads turning your way when you walk by, but I do. You don’t have to feel guilty for your beauty. You’ve hidden it long enough.”

We both laughed at how silly our conversation had turned, and he took me in his arms and started kissing my neck and whispering into my ears.

“Whistle,” I said with a grin.

“Why should I whistle?”

“Just do it,” I said, laughing. “It might bring the stuffed birds on my hat back to life again.”

He pulled the hat off my head and tossed it on the ground, and we laughed as we often did and then walked hand and hand down through the long halls to our bedroom.

Later that evening I told Leo that I liked the social world he had introduced me to, but that I craved more than biscuits with the ladies, fashion shows, and chit-chatty female gossip. I told him I always wanted to be a
writer and that I cared more about inner ideas than I did about outward appearances. It surprised me horribly the next day when he had told me he talked to his creative friends over at one of the women’s magazines and they agreed to give me an opportunity to write fashion articles. Leo knew everyone, and he was well liked, and when he wanted something, he had no problem asking, and they had no problem giving.

But fashion articles? I didn’t tell Leo how disappointed or uninterested I was in writing about fashion. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings or make him look bad in front of the people giving me the opportunity to write in the first place. Still, I wanted nothing to do with it and longed to run and hide within the private corridors of my mind, where maybe I had some ideas lying dormant for a novel.

Instead, I took on the challenge presented and to my astonishment my very first article was published in a local woman’s magazine.

A victory for women—ladies, you can kiss good-bye to that hourglass shape of the nineties and say hello to the longer- lined, over-laced corsets that support the spine and abdomen. No more losing your minds! Now women can have both health and curvaceous, decorative fashion at the same time
.

Shortly after my first article appeared, I witnessed the power of the wardrobe. The daughter of our neighbors was between plain and outright ugly, but one day she went out wearing the most lavish ball gown, and it converted her into a princess, sparing her from life as a spinster. It had been worth her mother’s investment and made my writing about fashion meaningful. Maybe there was more to fashion than I thought.

I went on to write many more articles, including ones about the feminists who were influencing women’s dress behind the scenes. Women were starting to wear suits, shirts, hard collars, and ties—typically worn only by men—and these same women were working their way into professions historically belonging to men.

Of course, I wrote articles on the bicycling craze because it was this contraption that turned sport clothing into fashion. No more wearing full wool
costumes covering the body in extreme heat just to preserve modesty.

I wrote fast and furiously for the next several years, turning the 1903 opening of the New York Stock Exchange’s first building at 10 Broad Street into a fashion story, and the opening of the Manhattan Bridge that same year into a style story, and the 1904 start of the construction on the Grand Central Station into a trend story. And when a woman was arrested for smoking a cigarette while riding in an open automobile in New York City, I was there, jotting down notes concerning everything that woman was wearing, from head to toe. And when the New York subway opened in 1905, I rode along with the 350,000 people on the 9.1-mile tracks, all the while taking notes about what people were wearing.

When I received news that my grandmother Dahlia was on her deathbed with pneumonia, I immediately made arrangements to return to Kentucky. I couldn’t imagine the world without her. She was like a horseshoe crab, living on this earth for what seemed like centuries, way before dinosaurs even. She had always been in my life.

But when I saw her lying there in the bed with her eyes open but not seeing anything, I knew it was her time, and I feared I had arrived too late. But then she started to talk, and the things she told me made me wish I had missed my train and arrived a day late so I wouldn’t have to hear it.

“That boy, rather, that man from the island showed up here in search of you.”

“What man?”

“Jaden, his name was. He showed up at our door six months after you left for New York with Leo.”

“No!”

“Yes. I told him you fell in love and got married and moved off to the East Coast. I didn’t say where exactly. I figured if a man is nervy enough to come hunting you down all the way from Florida, he’d find a way to tear you apart from your marriage.”

“No,” I said. “No.” It was all I could say. But I knew my heart, wherever it was, was kicked by her words, and it probably left a trail, a track like no other on the floor of the sea.

“He probably would have been a nice one to marry,” she continued.

“Remember when I once told you to marry a man that loves you more than you love him? Any man who’s going to hunt you down in Kentucky surely loves you more. Are you all right? You look pale. Ava … Ava?”

I think I felt more like death that day than Dahlia did, and when she passed later that evening I begged the Lord to take me, too. But instead I returned to New York where I poured every ounce of my mind into my work in an effort to bury the pain I felt for Jaden. Hearing news that he had come searching for me was too much to bear. I couldn’t release my love for him, and it flourished deep within me, in that most precious of worlds, like the intricately woven interior of a seashell, the inside kingdom that every woman has, near her beating heart or its former site. I regretted marrying a man for money and instead wished I had chosen another route of escape. If I wanted to make changes in my life, why hadn’t I done whatever was necessary to pursue a writing career on my own? I didn’t see it as an option back then.