White Rabbit Chapter 18

18.

The sempstress’ cottage was a curious place with pinkish-white painted brick walls adorned in thick patches of dark green ivy that seemed to crawl further up to the gables as Delores looked on marveling at the emerald glow of them. It appeared that everything in the Underworld grows with recognition or, rather, everything in the Underworld performs as the perceiver decides subconsciously that it should. The sempstress was a gentle old woman who introduced herself while holding a broomstick. She had a songbird-like voice. What a splendid metaphor that broom stick was, yet, left untouched. She was plump and had all the features an old woman should have; sagging cheeks, watery eyes, a red nose, glasses and a prominent twirl of silver hair pinned up on top. The familiarity of her face and of this cottage was overwhelming and Delores felt as though she would have an aneurysm, imagining that she knew the feeling. Perhaps, she would have another seizure or again, she thought, maybe she was lost in a seizure and this was her life within the chaos and convulsion of her broken mind. But she was violating the rules searching for logic and reason when there was none to be had. The woman introduced herself.

“Hello, Delores.” She said politely. “I am the sempstress. Are you ready to make your dress?” 

“Yes. I imagine so.” with a striking lack of confidence.

“Is this your first dress?”

“No,” Delores replied, “I have had many dresses.”

“I mean, the first dress made for you. It truly isn’t your dress unless it was made for you.” The pair stood out front and the lady began to take measurements of Delores with an invisible tape measure and scrutinize her with squinting eyes her glasses hanging from a string over her hilly chest.

“Don’t you need a measurer?”

“My dear, I have been doing this so long that I hardly need something as silly as a tape measure." She paused. "But being that this is a special dress, well, perhaps I should be a little more exact.” And with a twitch of the old lady’s left eye a long yellow measuring tape slithered through blades of parted grass and wrapped up Delores’ leg startling her for her natural fear of things that slither. “Oh, don’t be frightened. He will not bite you.”

“It is only that I never—”

“Certainly! I understand. It is that you never had much experience with measuring tape, of the kind.”

“Yes, of the kind. No.” Delores replied as the tape scaled her side and was ready to measure her back. “None, really.”

“Well, come in and you should have experiences with many things you have never. Come, come.” The sempstress motioned her hand to Delores and placed it on her back in case the motioning business didn’t work. That’s the way old people do things. The inside of the cottage was incomprehensibly enormous, a fantastic palace of endless fabric hanging from giant rods on the odd-shaped walls and thousands of giant spools of thread all over the place spinning rapidly, squealing on the wheels as though their slack was run by tiny invisible hamsters inside them. Possibly, Delores considered, if the measuring tape was a snake-like creature they too might have a mind of their own. She thought of old episodes of Bewitched. She was a fan of old television. Delores marveled at the high ceiling for such an apparently small cottage and in turn, like everything, the ceiling rose until she was distracted by a piano in the corner of the main room and a series of spiral staircases that led up to other levels of fabrics and threads.

Even more familiar. Her head was Chernobyl.

It was a player piano but it sat quietly, oddly in a room that everything else seemed to coordinate with the theme of dressmaking, even the framed art on the walls and the floor plants that looked like they were styled. And as Delores was about to ask the sempstress of the pianos origin, a white door opened in the back of the room and a strange family of mannequins walked out in a single file line, curiously, some without heads, some missing arms and some without legs or any lower extremities (they walked on their hands). The mannequins surrounded Delores and the sempstress, who was smiling rather bizarrely, and stood there waiting instructions as did many pairs of scissors that floated about like hummingbirds.

“I was in love once.” The sempstress said wistfully out of place.

“What happened?” Delores asked eagerly. Often in her eagerness her youth showed itself, naked and awkward. She had yet to learn that the line “I was once in love” just as often heralds tragedy as it augurs happiness. Delores was oblivious to the curious spectacle of living misfit mannequins of every size shape and figure with the congruous theme that they were each missing some limb standing like casualties of some God awful war and the flying scissors and ever-spinning spools of thread. She was wrapped up in the about-to-be-told love story. 

“What happened?” The woman replied dejectedly. “Common sense got in the way. I was too young, they told me.”

“They?” Delores cried contemptuously. “Who were they?” She followed like a stern interrogator as though she would do something if she figured out their identity.

“My parents, school friends, everyone. Everyone who had no stake in the matter and who certainly did not understand what he meant to me.” The way she said he was as though it was of another language. “It is foolish to ever give anyone love advice for it is such a personal matter, a freedom really that you should never let go of, never consign to another.”

“Please continue.” Delores begged. The mannequins were standing patiently but moving in place as though fearful that they might freeze and be inanimate again the way a dumb child might ramble suddenly blessed with a voice and words to construct.

“Well, listening to logic and reason, I left him. I left him!” She said slowly, laughing pathetically. “He was a writer and wanted me to move to New York with him in the spring of 52. I said, no. I simply couldn’t. And in my no he was lost for he was so sure I would say yes and that we were destined to be together, the way we met so fortuitously, everything; he thought that certainly I would say yes. He had bought two bus tickets. It wasn’t that he took me for granted it was that he knew I loved him as he loved me and it needn’t time to develop for it came in full bloom and it was without and expiration date. So he left and I assume he forgot me and I married someone everyone approved of and had children and grandchildren but never did the thought of him leave me. Many years later I went to New York to see him. He had written a book and was signing them in a little bookstore and I, I, um” she paused lost in the moment, trying to find the words to suffice, “I had his book in hand and waited in the line peeking at him sitting there in his blue suit and red tie, still as handsome as when I last saw him but his face with a certain sadness, and I waited. He didn’t see me. I waited and then I turned and left because I didn’t know what I could say or how I could excuse myself not only for saying no but for telling him I couldn’t see him anymore. So I left and never saw him again and I read a few years later he died in a plane crash and that he was survived by no family. I wanted to scream that he was survived by me but there was no one to listen. I treasured his books because I knew they were written for me, from his love for me. Not arrogantly, only sure, as sure as he was that I would be sitting on the bus next to him. But I was the empty seat. I can feel how sad that empty seat had to have been for I have that feeling inside of me and have carried it since 1952.”

The mannequins with heads expressed no sadness but looked at both the sempstress and Delores curiously. Plastic tears didn’t roll down their cheeks as they did on Delores’ face. The sempstress consoled her and smiled empathetically. “Dear Delores, you mustn’t cry. To be so young and beautiful and to be loved as you are—you have what I lost. You still have the chance to say yes and me in all my foolery need to do my work and send you on your way. I apologize!” Delores stood confused. The sempstress hurried about and was quickly giving polite commands to the mannequins. She tried desperately to resuscitate her spirit. “We have a dress to make!”

 Delores watched the mannequins without heads gather material and the innovative one without legs chase down the yellow measuring tape that slithered away across the stone tile floor as though being pursued by a mongoose. One without arms and with needles sticking out of every part of her appeared. Some of the others waltzed around like they belonged on a runway but none of them, with the exception of one, wore clothes, and so far as she could tell, none of them had sex organs, to which Delores marveled at their perfectness; to be naked and asexual; to be naked without perversion or corruption; truly independent. Sex is such a fatal flaw in the existence of human beings, a driving fatality, and the intuition that beckons the mistake is practically inextinguishable being the innate driving force that has perpetuated human life since Adam and Eve, or whenever. It is what bears us but what kills us ultimately, she theorized often the same thought when she gazed off. The dangerous flagrancy of deer in rutting season leads them to overpopulate and to be shot, harvested they say. It spawned AIDS and overpopulation and at some point, two people somewhere in the mood in Austria made love and nine months later there was a little fuhrer to be and fifty years later there were tens of millions of dead people across Europe. No one could convince her otherwise. She secretly read an expose on a millionaire porn star who was the most miserable person in the universe because she had no soul left. The thought of an androgynous planet danced in her pretty head but she tailed off in thought distracted by something else. Delores was measured a few times by a mannequin named Ruby who wore a short green crumply dress and whose face was stunningly perfect, with green eye-shadowed brown eyes that never blinked and lipstick on plastic flawless lips. She was beautiful and spoke eloquently introducing herself and her purpose; the articulacy of which befuddled Delores for her mouth didn’t move and she had no apparent tongue. Delores was perplexed for a moment until she remembered the golden rule of the Underworld: subtract logic and reason from everything and take what is left. Other than the mannequin’s oddity, she was quite stunning and if she was up for it, she could easily be Ms. Underworld, hands down, if there was such a thing.

“What is it to feel?” Ruby asked in a sweet voice that was in accord with her coquettishness.

“Well,” Delores replied uncomfortably off guard as the mannequin stood only inches from her, “it can be quite horrific, especially if you are struck sharply, or cut.”

“No. No.” Ruby plead. “To feel?” She emphasized feel so that Delores knew that she was referring to the emotions of it. Delores’ arms were straight out, palms up, as Ruby measured her arm length, then her torso from her waist to her armpit.

“It is confusing. Romantically, as I am sure you are speaking, the perplexity of it is bewildering. I felt so much once but I cannot exactly remember when now, like it has been taken from me, or that is yet to be. You are affected often by what you ingest physically and spiritually and it is all a matter of perception, luck and opportunity. It can be the worst thing possible to feel and the best, depending on how it goes. I haven’t yet to have a broken heart but—”

“A broken heart?” Ruby gasped inquisitively. “That sounds dreadful.”

“I imagine it to be fatal.” Delores replied. “The eternal question on Earth, or up there, rather, is, ‘to have loved and lost, is it better than not to have loved at all?’ I say yes, for however brief, even if it kills you, at least that way you know you were real. No offense. You knew what possibility you possesed.” Again Delores thought of the lady that leapt from the Eiffel Tower. She had a miniature at home on her nightstand that was green metallic which always made her think of love, the fate of which, the desperation that led that woman to fall, leap, or jump, whichever.

Ruby replied in a soft whisper as she stuck her face indifferently with a sewing needle holding it in her cheek, “I desperately want to feel. The sempstress has said if I work for her here for a few years that she will make me real and perhaps I may then find love.”

“Well, you are definitely beautiful…” Delores replied.

“Thank you.”

“….which could either be to your advantage or your detriment. Beauty opens doors but people are often terrible to you if they are jealous, contrary wise, they are pretentious if they lust over you, insincere. Even at sixteen, I know. So easy to see. People are so simple.” She complained, almost to herself. “It is hard to sometimes to determine sincerity in a very insincere world. Where will you go?”

“New York.” Ruby replied fantastically. “I have read magazines of there. Have you been?”

“Yes.” Delores smiled. “Many times and it is a wonderful place.” The two chatted softly like two friends in a classroom.  “You must go to The Russian Tea Room—and Broadway and—there is so much to see.”

 “I will remember. But if I am given life I will then age and die like anyone else human unless—oh, but it would be worth it to live. Wouldn’t it? Death is worth the life. Is it not, Delores?” Ruby was like a child, younger than Delores, anxious for answers but Delores hardly had anything to offer her except a collection of uncertain fragmented thoughts. She thought most clearly when she masturbated, after the orgasm or when she bathed soaking in hot salts. The thought, live free or die, came back to her suddenly and strengthened her resolve yet again. It had to be more than a thought. It should be etched on her grave.

“Yes.” Delores replied with an uncertain eek like the cocksure rabbit before the trap tripped. Ruby quickly disappeared and Delores was then greeted by a headless mannequin with a very pleasing pearl-colored body who exuded kindness in mannerisms. She took more measurements, wrote them down on a notepad, and hurried them off to a waiting sewing machine who grabbed his own fabric by motioning to a roll high up on the wall. The sewing machines were bulky robotic machines that looked masculine and were as big as linebackers in full gear. There thick legs were made of broken sewing machines clumped together and they had arms that were also parts of old machines. They were too fantastic to describe, a million intricate parts in their assembly. Ruby found a seat and looked like she was at the salon reading a magazine, a large Life magazine. Delores knew those magazines from somewhere but she couldn’t place it. Another sewing machine did the same thing as the other sewing machine and lost in all this curiosity of raining fabric and thread spinning itself from little floating spools climbing through the air mystically in search of needles was the sempstress who stood decorously in the back of the room having a conversation with a mirror drinking from a tiny china cup. Delores was in her bra and panties and looking straight ahead at a mirror some twenty feet from her reflection that enabled her to see the entire room. And light shot through the large windows and fabric dust mingled in the sunbeams.

The pearl-colored mannequin stood by a sewing machine seeming to have a conversation, though she had no head, for her arms moved animatedly expressing what appeared to be displeasure with something the sewing machine with a metallic box head was saying. His eyes and lips were seemingly drawn on with red lipstick and they moved as though he was speaking. Red eyebrows slanted down in a V form to express his anger at the headless mannequin. And Delores, looking at herself, her tall thin beautiful self that she felt wasn’t so beautiful because of her own insecurity, was lost in a fog as she is when she has seizures, awake, though, very much awake. Delores stared at the sempstress who was still chatting with the oval floor mirror.  She had a decorative hummingbird on a wire stuck in the back of her hair.

It was without provocation that Delores began to think that possibly she was a changeling, she had read of them. Children substituted for another by fairies, brought to this world and though she recalls entering and exiting there were no exchanges of the sort at all; she has always been here and will always be. Perhaps this is her reality and it all began when she was kidnapped and exchanged with the other girl. But then she dismissed the thought. There was something meaningful in the sempstress’ face, in the player piano. Then she suddenly realized, as the piano began to play itself a familiar tune she could not name, "Greensleeves" it played, that the sempstress was her grandmother who she had been kept from by her mother and who died of cancer two year ago. She lived in a cottage like this one in New Hampshire, a farm that raised neither animals nor crops. There was a large field of tall grass Delores remembered getting lost in, and when there wasn’t grass there was acres of snow, blankets, hills for sleds and a pond for ice skating. The same pond which in the months previous hosted an orchestra of night music, opuses of bullfrogs and symphonies of crickets. Her mother told her not to play in the grass for fear of ticks but her grandmother laughed, she remembered flooded suddenly standing there with a million memories, saying that it would be alright for a while and what is life if we live in fear of something as miniscule as ticks? Delores smiled taking another ginger cookie and flew out the door chased by a dog, a black and white dog named, Badger. And there was a large horse on the farm who Delores remembered riding quite well, a black mare named, Cleopatra. She remembers the feel of the saddle and the saddle that she was given once as a birthday present with her name stitched in cursive on it. Cleopatra hated Delores’ mother, and her mother forbade her to ride the horse comparing it to Satan himself. But her mother never knew and what she didn’t know didn’t hurt her.