Meissen and Crystal

by Fran Blake

You were a child, but you knew fine things. You stood before the table. Your friend, Guinevere, bent down to place some folded cardboard beneath one of the legs. The table wobbled. The table was light. When you touched it, it wobbled some more. The legs were very thin. You said you laughed, even though you were only going on twelve and your friend had just died, so you already knew nothing lasted. You mentioned how seeing your friend in that casket was like looking at frozen wax. “She was all yellow,” you said. “Her hair, her skin, her lips like something on display in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum where you had often gone together.

You laughed because Guinevere’s grandmother came in as you stood before the table. She cackled something impolite and hit Guinevere with her cane. She fell when she did so, and her skinny wobbly legs looked exactly the same to you, the same as the table—grey tubes that could not keep her steady. I thought at first you were very observant but not a very nice child to make such a remark, but I realized that for you it was just something to note, how people were not so different from objects. You were just beginning to realize this.

You watched your father use metal and adhesive, nails and needles and threads to put people together when they had broken into pieces. You called your father “Dr. Frankenstein” as you watched him re-attach limbs, and sculpt cheekbones and orbital sockets. You knew early that life could be reconstructed.

Mrs. Handel’s Madeira lace cloth that covered the table did not hide its imperfections. Again, you said to me, “It reminds me of how women apply makeup to mask their acne, their ombre sun-spotted skin, but you know that makeup always ends up gathered heavily in wrinkles so that the flaws are more noticeable than if the skin was just left au naturel.”

Guinevere crawled out from beneath her grandmother. She had tears in her eyes. Then, she grabbed her roughly by the sleeve of her cotton blouse. Her blouse was unbuttoned, and you noticed the dehydrated breasts, tiny with pale orioles, almost concave. You noticed her rib cage, and you thought of the Magritte show you and Guinevere had just seen, the rib cage within a viola. All that came out of this woman was gravelly grunts as if she had smoked her entire life. She coughed deeply, swallowed, and grunted again.

Guinevere dragged her down the hall. It was narrow, dark. There was a wall adorned with plaques: names written in calligraphy, thick black letters so ornately designed, it was almost impossible to distinguish one letter from the next. Beneath the names, each plaque had dates of birth and death. Each one had a stick of incense stuck between the frame and the glass. Guinevere and her Grandma barely fit between the walls. The space seemed more like a tunnel than a hall.

You heard the door swing open. You heard it shut. You heard the key inserted and the lock click. You saw Guinevere strut towards you with a smirk on her face. She brushed her hands together. “That’s done,” she said.

You heard the howls like the woman locked away in the tower in Jane Eyre. “Was she mad,” you asked “or did she go mad?” So you wondered about the grandmother. How long had she been locked up? Were the grunts actually German? The language was guttural. They were from Austria.

That is why there was Meissen on the wobbly table. A magnificent candelabra as wide as the wing spread of an eagle with 18th-century ladies and gentlemen—you could see their costumes, the bustle to accentuate the ladies’ derriere, the breasts lifted by the high waists; men, with hats in hand, bowing. One arm of the candelabra was taped on. It moved dangerously on the unsteady table.

The napkins were folded several times. You supposed they would be quite large. The drinking glasses were of such thin glass, etched with flying birds, you feared one would crack in your hand.

The plates were white with birds of different colors. You tried to recognize them from your bird-watching sojourns, but you could only make out a European Roller with its various shades of blue, strokes of orange, and black-tipped wings. You repeated the shades of blue, “periwinkle, savoy, cerulean, teal,” whispering aloud so that Guinevere asked if you were praying.

“No,” you said. “ I gave up on God when I was six.” You didn’t tell her that you spent man hours challenging him to appear or send you a sign to show how he saved the sick.

“That Jesus Christ stuff…he might have healed the sick and risen from the rock, but his miracles ended there.” Mrs. Handel said you shouldn’t talk that way as if you could offend a god, as if you were in a Greek tragedy.

The silverware was that fancy stuff you hated, “the stuff great grandpa gave to us so large and heavy, the tines of the fork practically went down one’s throat,” you said. Each tine was like a tiny knife, and you feared piercing your tongue. The swirling silver designs made gripping the piece difficult. You felt you were killing the food.

And what did Guinevere’s mother serve?

“It was as if she opened a bakery for you,” you said, embarrassed.

Apfel Strudel, Sacher torte, Mozart torte with pistachio, marzipan, dark chocolate, and sponge cake. “Everything’s delicious, Mrs. Handel,” you told her but, in truth, the desserts were just too sweet, and as much as you love marzipan, you spent that evening running to the bathroom where large clods of apple and pistachio dropped from your mouth into the black bag lining the waste paper basket. It looked totally undigested. It was as if you had sucked entire pastries down your throat. You said you felt bad that Mrs. Handel had gone to all that trouble for you. After all, you were a child. It disturbed you, the same way you were disturbed when the woman who looked after you said “Miss” before your first name.

Still, you did not know then, you did not realize until years later when the internet allowed you to find Guinevere.

You were both old by then, but not really old. Your figures were still good, and you were still in your childbearing years though those years were waning. You were both married. You both had careers in medicine. Neither of you had lost inches from your height yet. She was still six feet, you five-nine. Your hair was thick, honey blonde. Her hair was thick, and gold like wheat stalks. Neither of you had wrinkles though you noticed broken lines around her lips. You could smell the cigarette smoke. You could almost see it—Guinevere emerging from a cloud.

There were tight hugs and jumping up and down, just like the days the two of you would skip down the stairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, going straight for the black limo with the dark glass windows that always seemed to lurk at the bottom of the stairs. “Henri,” you would say to the driver as if it were your car.

“No, Miss, I am Jones.”

“Oui, oui,” Guinevere would exclaim. “Nous sommes desoles.” We are sorry. You girls were always sorry even if you meant no harm. There was that time you went to that French bistro on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth, I think it was. They had special luncheons, like little dishes of escargot soaked in butter as thick as gravy with little bits of green parsley and cloves of garlic that looked like tiny eggs that would make you belch all day, so you could savor the taste and aroma repeatedly.

They served warm logs of goat cheese with bright green olives and hot sesame sticks. The napkins were that Provence weave of orange and reds—or blues and greens—and the tablecloth matched. The water was served in an etched carafe, and the ice sparkled with silver edges from the light of the candles. There were wood beams on the ceiling, a fireplace, and clay tile floors. The windows were inset with curtains of yellow and blue.

You went there with Guinevere.

The Waiter brought out the food, and the two of you chattered in French. The waiter joined you and then kindly suggested you might do better in English if you really wanted to be understood. Guinevere and you laughed because you did not want to be understood. You were just having fun, pretending. Speaking a foreign language was not about communication, though certainly there was the underlying message: you already yearned for an alternative world.

Thirty years later, Guinevere sat on the couch in your home. She asked for an ashtray and lit up one cigarette after another. You noticed she was smoking Gauloises, and it made you laugh. Did she still have the dream of a life in France, Paris’s Left Bank, mingling with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Isadora Duncan, Sartre, Matisse, and Maurice Chevalier? She brought you a bouquet for this reunion: tiger lilies and purple irises with myrtle, mint, and lavender. They did not rid the room of the heavy tobacco odor.

The smells rested side by side.

The flowers quickly were wilting, but you loved her. You had loved her.

 “My mother set out her best china for you. She considered you a special visitor.”

“Why?” you had asked.

“That’s what you were used to,” Guinevere said.

“Do you remember,” she asked “ how dirty those yellow bricks were? That building was so old. Do you remember, as you walked up the entrance stairs, the windows on either side were always broken? No one lived there. It was just the hallway, but there was always glass all over. You cut your foot once. Do you remember? You had to hobble up the four flights. At least the stairs were wide. You left dabs of blood after each step. I tried to clean it up as we went, but the blood got worse and worse.”

“Your mother was so tender. I do remember. She had me sit on the couch and put my foot on her lap. She washed it. She cleaned it with iodine, and it stung. She wrapped it in gauze and tape. What a fuss she made over me.”

“Yes, and you worried about getting blood on our floors and on Mother’s apron and the sofa, but she knew how to get it out before it stained. And, anyway, the way she felt about you, she might have made a shrine. You know, cut the material that you bled on and put it under glass with candles on either side and a statue of the Virgin Mary.” She laughed, but you detected anger.

“I didn’t know,” you said.

“How would you? You were oblivious to the fact that our lives were so different.”

“Your mother was beautiful. She dressed beautifully. She played the piano. You had shelves of books and artwork. She made the most delicious food and spoke three languages. You did live like me.”

“Yes, except for the cars, travel, designer clothes, and a bathroom in my private bedroom. Except for the fact that our grand piano took up one room of our very small apartment, and yours was in a special room where your parents entertained.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t live in much luxury now.”

“The privilege of the rich.” She was silent for a few minutes. “Did you know my grandmother was crazy? That’s why we locked her up. She’d scream all night. Did you have that in your life?”

“No,” you said.

“Good, now you feel guilty. You should. You were one of the luckies.”

You went to a restaurant near Gramercy Park. You tried to choose one you thought Guinevere would like, one that would remind you both of that bistro on 53rd Street that no longer existed. You had the salad with goat cheese.

She had a cheese omelet, fries, and two slices of cake. She swallowed it down with a dry, red wine. She giggled. Was that because of the wine?

“It’s for your birthday,” you said.

Her glass was empty. She refilled it and drank some more.

“Like the old days,” she said.

Hadn’t the relationship been wonderful when you were both young? Even though you pretended, you talked a lot, too. Didn’t you? You both lost that friend and, well, maybe she was the reason you and Guinevere bonded as if, somehow, that would cement the gap that your friend’s death had left, as if it could take away the reality that all that lives dies. The relationship had seemed wonderful, the two of you exploring the city as if you had no restrictions.

It was wonderful at one time, or maybe it wasn’t. And even if it had been, it was another time, and, maybe, it had to stay in that time.

You knew that so many events, so many people in your life, worked within a particular context unable to successfully traverse space. You visit them. They live in your brain: the hippocampus, the amygdala, the neocortex. You don’t have to call them. They appear on their own within their own time frame, and there you are, too, with them and looking on at the same time. It is the magic of memory. It is the pain. Everything that is forever. Everyone.

BIO: Fran Blake works with people undergoing trauma due to personal and political reasons. Her work has appeared in Bitter Oleander, Oxford Magazine, The contemporary Review, Loss, Citron Review and publications. Fran was a nominee for The Westinghouse Poetry Award and a fellow at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.