The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [39]
“And now?” Dorothy asks.
I stare at the greening earth. “I don’t know,” I admit. “I had a troupe and now I don’t.”
Dorothy leans forward to stretch her back.
I want to be a glacier, but even when I will myself hard and solid, I only seem to manage a brittle facade—a lacquer-thin sheet of ice on the lake’s surface. I say, “There’s a meanness in people, you know? A greed. I used to think it was just out there in the world, but now I see that it’s in everyone. There’s a violence. When I was a kid, they taught me about evil and sin and all that—about meanness—but they taught me it could be exorcised, driven out. I believed that. But it turns out people are really shitty. You’re left with this impossible choice: You can trust no one, tell your stories to no one, become a hermit or a lone traveler or something. Or you can just expect betrayal. You can swallow hard and expect betrayal. The worst part is that it’s in me, too—the meanness. I get to hear my own justifications whispered under my breath, but that doesn’t change anything.” I must sound like some babbling adolescent.
“Listen,” Dorothy says.
No sound.
Shhh.
A quick rustling behind me. What is it?
Dorothy fumbles around in her bag, produces a smooth, fat nectarine. “Just life,” she says, then bites into the orange fruitflesh. Juice dribbles down her chin and onto her neck. It occurs to me that Dorothy must have been a beauty in her day. It’s not so much that she’s lost her looks, either. It’s just that it takes a while to notice because you never see a face like hers on television.
“Where you from, anyway?”
“A lot of places,” Dorothy says. “Oakland. Chicago. New York.” She sets a crumble of cheese on the log next to her. “Go ahead.”
A walnut-colored chipmunk with two white stripes down its back darts up onto the log, gives me a sideways glance before taking off with the cheese.
I want to ask Dorothy how old she is but decide the question might be rude. “Lived here long?” I try.
She sort of nods and shakes her head at the same time. “I lived in New York City.”
I can’t picture Dorothy in New York City. Strange that a person can live somewhere long enough to claim it and still not have a hint of the place on their skin.
“Wait,” Dorothy says. She leaves her bag on the log as she steals off between some trees. Did she hear something?
I’m alone in the glen for what feels like a long time, building New York City lives for Dorothy in my imagination. She’s an East Village beatnik bohemian in the late fifties. She’s a Harlem armed revolutionary in the late sixties. She’s a Broadway star, maybe, belting out campy show tunes with Carol Channing.
“Sending your mind on wild goose chases?” Dorothy asks as she hands me a Sierra cup of icy stream water.
“No,” I lie.
“I was a journalist,” she says flatly, then takes a long drink.
Just what I need. Another journalist.
“So you sat around waiting for tragedy?”
Dorothy wrinkles her nose. “Hardly. You never accomplish anything with fear and horror stories.”
Thérèse of Lisieux
(IF YOU NEED A LITTLE LOVE)
A.K.A. The Little Flower, The Saint of the Little Way
FEAST DAY: October 1
SYMBOLS: violets, roses, wildflowers
The Lord set the book of nature before Thérèse of Lisieux, and she saw that all the flowers he had created were lovely. The splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily didn’t rob the little violet of its scent or the daisy of its simple charm. Thérèse realized that if every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness and there would be no wildflowers to make the meadows sing. It’s just the same in the world of souls, she thought. God had created great saints like lilies and roses, but also much lesser saints who had to be content to live as the daisies or the violets that rejoiced his eyes whenever he glanced down. Perfection