She Came From Sears-Roebuck

I was so tired of being alone that I used to haunt yard sales and auctions and farmers' markets and things like that just to be around other people. Just to smile casually at someone with a similar interest and comment on the price of things or to share in the colloquial banter of likeminded marketeers, my interest in antediluvian products a simple subterfuge. I was secretly hoping that "she" would make herself known at one of these random places. She. A powerful yet simple word for a soulful figure of such magnificent importance. Other times I sat in cafes, my eyes on the door scanning every female face coming or going, hoping for a sign or to recognize something familiar in someone I've never seen before. Some similar longing. But she never came in that way. In a world full of people, I was miserably alone. 

But last Saturday at an auction, my world irrevocably changed. I saw her perfect beautiful blonde head through lumpy groves of familiar ones. Through hats and bald heads and nests of white hair. She was stunning and the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen and I knew I had to have her at any cost. She was a mannequin from the defunct Sears-Roebuck department store chain, her description read simply. After surveying the crowd, I knew no one else was there for her. They were there for the shelves, the bicycles, the televisions, or the power tools. 

When it came time to bid, I knew I must play it cool. If they knew I was there for her, so desperate for her, they would drive up the price on me. They have people who do so by escalating the bid so that you in your desperation will bid more and more and just when they are about to break you, they will relent. They read your face. So I acted like I didn't much want her and forty two dollars later I was standing with her by my Prius, trying to get her in, which wasn't nearly as easy as I thought it would be because she didn't have jointed knees or elbows to help in the matter. And the thought of taking her apart seemed akin to dismemberment. So I stood in the parking lot while everyone else left and I finagled her into the passenger seat. I must have looked like an obedient husband coaxing a drunk wife into his car in the parking lot of a social club. 

I introduced myself, George Blaine, politely to her, but I didn't know what to call her. There was no identification on her whatsoever. No name written on her foot. No paperwork that came with her. And, of course, not a peep out of her. The whole way home her head was turned in such a way that it appeared that she was upset, looking out the passenger-side window and giving me the silent treatment. I didn't take it personally. She didn't have a preference of a radio station, nor what we would have for dinner, and I suppose it was less than an hour into our relationship when I felt it was doomed to fail. What was I thinking? She had no heart. No brain. No pulse. She didn't blink. She didn't feel. She was made of plastic and rubber topped with a head of bleached-blonde hair, yet I loved her. 

Never one to waist time or to hang on, I put her in the basement when I got home thinking I could use her for a Halloween decoration come time. But moments later, feeling bad about putting her in the musty basement, I rescued her and let her have her own room. A spare room I never used with a bed that was always perfectly made and a lamp that was never turned on. It seemed to suit her. I sat her in a wood chair at a rolltop desk. I rested her petite plastic arm on the desk and she looked out the window longingly. She looked comfortable, bound there for eternity. Or at least until I die and my brother or one of his kids inherit my house and its contents whereupon she would be, as she was, at the mercy of their goodwill. But my brother is an ex-Marine and his kids are spuds of the same potato, so I knew before then I'd have to figure something else out or else she would end up being shot by some new high-powered sniper rifle from 400 yards.  

I felt badly for her so I kept the lamp on and put a radio in the room and turned it on. I found a station that played oldies, supposing she would like oldies, later determining she had a particular fondness of Johnny Mathis. I bought her tasteful clothes I thought she would like. Dresses, mostly, if only for the simplicity of dressing her. I even bought her a sewing table and some spools of thread and fabric so it looked as though she were about to sew something, perpetually. My mother always told me that it is important for everyone to have a hobby or else we will fill the void with sinful things. I also bought her canvases and oil paints and brushes and books on birdwatching and a Nikon camera suitable for the hobby of photography. I wasn't sure which one would take. 

Such as it was, I felt sorry for her in that little room. So I moved her out of there and put her in the kitchen for a while, which my mother said is the heart of any house. I put an apron on her and a spatula in her hand. She was standing like she stood for all those years in Sears-Roebuck. Smiling gloriously with a definite sense of capitalistic purpose. Her name was Tatiana. It came to me that night over meatloaf. It was as though she whispered it to me, if the idea wasn't so preposterous. I put yellow rubber gloves on her hands and she looked as though she were doing the dishes with me. She had a sense of purpose again. She looked as though she was very happy. And I was happy that she was happy because that is how I have always been. Even if she didn't laugh at my jokes.

When the weather warmed she was looking out the window and I knew she wanted to garden. I ordered a subscription to "Good Housekeeping" and "Better Homes and Gardens" in her name with my surname affixed, Mrs. Tatiana Blaine, not to be too presumptuous, and she would sit on the porch with a glass of sun tea and read them. She used to smoke cigarettes. She used to enjoy drinks. And cocktail parties. And the company of powerful men. Executives and generals. Lawyers. Judges. Doctors. Those who yield influence or render important decisions upon other people's lives and change the world by their actions. I am no such man. I am a middle school teacher. I may mold someone at most, cultivate them the way one does a rose garden, but I certainly don't change anyone or anything. I am not even a professor.  

I dressed her in a sundress and we cultivated a beautiful garden. She stood there with the watering can slightly tilted. Wearing her big black Jackie O sunglasses and her straw sunhat and her green rubber gardening boots. She seemed happiest gardening and there was such a peace about her standing there in the warm summer air that I almost believed she was real. That she felt what I felt and wanted what I wanted. Sometimes it seemed as though her smile widened just a little. Or her eyes moved. She loved wildflowers but despised the burden of weeds that come inevitably with them. She was impervious to bees and occasionally when a bee or butterfly landed upon the plastic skin of her beautiful but still body, it was almost as though I could hear her giggle. 

Life is filled with inevitable outcomes, favorable or unsatisfactorily in some way. Every problem and equation has an answer or a solution, whether that is desired or otherwise. Life and love are not infinite things, unless you believe in the afterlife, and relationships and people have often undeterminable and certain inevitable ends where the only quandary is in the how and the when, but not in the why. This much I know and have known since my mother passed away when I was 14 of cancer, one such end of living beings that is for some unfortunately inevitable, predisposed in their DNA. It waits down the line somewhere like a ruthless hijacker not to be deterred by other richer travelers. I have grieved my mother for thirty years and do not suspect the grieving process will ever end in any absolute way before those inevitabilities at last find me.

I met a woman in a bookstore. I didn't expect to meet her. I wasn't there for any other reason than to by Tatiana a book about trees since I had noticed her gazing at the oak trees in the backyard with a look of particular interest upon her face. The woman I met wasn't nearly as pretty as Tatiana by any means, but the fact that she was flesh and blood and had a pulse made me believe she was more suitable for me than Tatiana. Still, as I flirted, I felt as though I were being unfaithful standing there holding that book about trees. I felt I was in the wrong in some way like a troubled man in a soap opera. Still, my desires as they were, I persisted and the woman, whose name was boringly Michelle, obliged because, as many women before her have rationalized at the thought of being with me - why not? I have always been nothing more than a "why not?" or a "might as well." I've never been an "as good as it gets" or "the one," nor have I ever been loved by anyone, I don't suspect in such a way that forsakes all others. I only believe that my previous relationships with women were a matter of convenience with a very less than forever attitude. I was a person born with an expiration date, woefully it seems. Or maybe I am putting on others that which burdens me. 

Michelle and I dated for a month before I brought her home. For that month I lived a dual life like one of those men in a Lifetime movie. At home with Tatiana and out on dates with Michelle. When it was time to bring Michelle to my house, an inevitability that could no longer be postponed, I put Tatiana back in the spare room I had her in first, standing by the window and the sewing table. In case Michelle proved to be the inquisitive sort of Nazi girlfriend and wanted to investigate my house and every room for whatever reason one might, Jews, dust, skeletons, or otherwise, she could easily be explained as a mannequin for clothes I made when I had a desire to be a designer. I have always had an interest in 1920s casual fashion, I previously told her. 

All went well until Michelle noticed a stack of "Good Housekeeping" magazines that were addressed to Mrs. Tatiana Blaine and I stammered through an explanation that Tatiana was my ex who left me abruptly for another man. I hoped that she would trespass no further, sensing the wound was still sore, but she asked why she had my last name since I had told her that I had never been married. So I lied and said that Tatiana used my last name because she was hiding from an abusive ex-husband which was made my life more of a Lifetime movie lie than it actually was. I was falling apart at the seams, but she relented in her inquisition and I was thankfully pardoned. But still as we ate dinner in my dining room, the small table for two could not be any smaller and I felt an overwhelming sense of paranoia that led me to ending the night early, shamefully with the banal but trusty excuse of an unforgiving migraine headache. 

She couldn't have possibly believed it. No one is that dopey. I didn't expect to hear from her and I had planned to let fate run its course by not calling her, but I was surprised when she called the next day and said she had a very lovely time and she hoped I was rid of my headache. She related she too suffers an occasional migraine in such a congenial way that is was almost a pleasantry we shared rather than an agonizing condition. Yet another thing we have in common, she added with a nauseating abundance of cheer. Her call absolved me of my fumbling the explanation of the fictitious person of Tatiana Blaine. I couldn't have told her she was a mannequin I bought at auction who sustained me through two years of otherwise bitter loneliness, or that she came from Sears-Roebuck, or that I treated her very much like a living person and bought her things including magazine subscriptions. It would have been more favorable had Tatiana been a real person, my ex-wife, even if I had murdered her with an axe because there is always an explanation for murder but there isn't for the delusional thoughts and abject madness. 

Such as it was, the subject never arose again and Tatiana was imprisoned in the spare bedroom for the next several months as Michelle and I engaged in the standard rituals of traditional male-female human bonding and subsequent mating. What must Tatiana have thought hearing us through paper-thin walls as the relationship swelled to it's inevitable climaxes, especially when we drank liquor. I tried to rid myself of thoughts of Tatiana, but I frequently opened the door to peek in on her, pretending I needed to use the bathroom or to get a glass of water. And there she stood, looking out the window at all the possibilities of life, gowned in moon or street light, her silence adequately conveying her disapproval of me and my philandering. I whispered that I was sorry more than once. When Michelle left, I told Delores that it wouldn't be this way forever and that Michelle didn't really mean anything to me. I wasn't lying. I must have lost my mind somewhere in all the hours and hours of loneliness that quietly became days and months that wore so relentlessly on my sanity. I wondered if any psychologist has ever heard anything as strange as this. If it is some type of condition recognized in a medical journal or the DSM. I wonder if there are other George and Tatiana Blaine's out there. 

At night in bed with Michelle I could hear Tatiana stir. Walk around. Occasionally I thought I heard the sewing machine sew which sounded like a satin-beaked woodpecker on a cardboard tree. I could hear her weeping. I could hear her laughing and sometimes singing faintly. Michelle heard the noises as well, but she excused them to the neighbor's radio or dog, or the wind in the trees, or a branch against the house, or exhausted hundred year-old pipes, maybe a ghost or two. She said she was infatuated with the supernatural, which was yet another thing we had in common, she went on. I believe she wrote these things down somewhere and there was a list she relished in the disparity of. 

But I knew better. It was Tatiana's objection to me betraying her. It was her being tired of being trapped in that room like it was a masoleum. She deserved the finer things in life. And if I wasn't going to give them to her than someone else would. I couldn't hold on to her and Michelle both forever, so like any human-being would, I chose the rational choice. I chose the one who would age with me. Who would stink if she did not shower. Who defecates and urinates after she eats, though hides it with rancid potpourri sprays, and who has to shave her legs or else they'd prickle me in bed beneath the sheets. The one who gets sick and spread her germs to me. Who picks her nose when no one is looking. Who is dying like I am dying. Slowly but surely headed to some definite and inevitable end that waits like a ghost in the night, an opportune thief on the blackest of highways. 

So I needed to find a new home for Tatiana. Somewhere that she would be safe from harm. Somewhere that she would be happy. Perhaps in some kind of museum that comes to life when they close like it does in that movie. So she could mingle, schmooze. Or perhaps it would be better had she met her inevitable but unnatural end because nothing can go on forever and it would save her from the indignity of dying. Not even plastic mannequins live forever. Synthetic humans with no internal organs be they as they may, everything suffers an end. Sears-Roebuck didn't last, after all. Plastic biodegrades, eventually. And what doesn't die becomes obsolete which is a fate worse than death. Maybe she will be recycled. Maybe she will someday be a park bench or a dashboard of a luxury car. So the day before Michelle moved in, I moved Tatiana out. I coaxed her back into the Prius and she looked out the passenger-side window and didn't say a word. 

I felt like I was a hitman driving her to her unsuspected demise because I couldn't trust her not to talk. Or because she had outlived her usefulness. Or because she made my life uncomfrtable. Two shots from a .38 and a shallow grave in the woods. She was a loose end and this is how you tie up loose ends. It had to be done, I told myself. She wasn't real, after all. Michelle was real. If I had any hopes of being normal, of having a happy life, of being loved, Tatiana must go. This was something that I had to do. I decided that I would sell her at a flea market to a lady I knew named Rhonda who would be interested. She sold vintage clothes and she always seemed short on mannequins. I once had a conversation with her about the attractiveness of mannequins and she believed it mattered in order to sell clothes. Unattractive mannequins sell half the clothes attractive ones do, she made a point to say. She would love Tatiana. There was no more attractive mannequin in this world than her. And to think that she came from Sears-Roebuck.

Rhonda offered me 80 dollars cash and like some heartless pimp I took it. Our goodbye was short and final. Tatiana didn't say anything. She stood there and the beautiful smile she once had seemed to have faded from her face leaving that of a crestfallen woman who looked as though she had been recently divorced from a marriage she had been soulfully invested. I have never been one for long goodbyes so I didn't try to apologize or to say anything meaningful that would stick or matter later to her. Nor did I dare try to explain the other woman. I took the money and offered only a curt, "Goodbye, Tatiana," that gave me no sense of relief. No closure. 

The car ride home was awful and I felt nauseous. The trees, the other cars, the clouds, they all seemed to mock me. Life had long-since teased me in this sort of cruel way. It was a depraved older brother that kept me in the sweaty hairy pit of it's axilla. Yet, still I persisted as though it might one day tire of harassing me and let me live, think and love in the traditional way, adoring such things as holidays and surprise parties and my day job teaching nosepicking middle school kids general science. I will suddenly love TV shows, media narratives, commercialized indoctrination, and uninteresting and cheaply written magazine and newspaper stories they call "human interest." I will love Christmas songs that get played over and over and insipid Superbowl commercials the way other people do, have a 401k to boast of, the latest cellphone in my pocket, and I will love Pottery Barn and Starbucks and care about some overblown social justice issue and go to a glitzy new-age church where everyone pretends to be better than they really are and to have it all figured out. 

No. Not me. But here I was driving home to Michelle like a dopey dog who had broken his leash only to sniff his way back home. A woman I didn't really love but who I was supposed to love because she was my why not and a pretty good might as well, but certainly not the one. Not to forsake all others. Because she sweats and bleeds and her hair grows and she blinks and cries and laughs and her body has a half dozen apertures that make her special. One that takes food and air and speaks words, eloquent or otherwise, one that pees and menstruates and accepts penis(es) and issues babies, one that poops, a few more that hear and a few more that breathe and smell. So in her assembly of these finer things, what some mortal unwitting God in some factory in Poughkeepsie felt that Tatiana didn't need, Michelle was suitable for me and I was abiding by the natural law to which I was bound by my birth.

Michelle greeted me at the door. It was now our door. She had moved some more of her things in. Her cats were staggering around the house searching for a sense of familiarity, trying desperately to get their bearings and to determine if this was a hostile environment or a hospitable one. They were both females so they were forced to be lesbians or to be asexual or to find a means to escape and in their unspoken feline quandary, I somehow related. I was never particularly fond of cats, but there I was, laying out litter boxes for them and pouring in the gray sand-like crystals that smelled like lavender, recalling the jingle of the commerical that played over and over, wondering why lavender. And if their litter was also available in citrus or pine blends or perhaps vanilla sugar cookie. Knowing this is what it is to be normal. To wonder such ridiculous things you never speak of. To sing that jingle in my head as I was pouring in the litter and inhaling in the dust as the cats stirred impatiently. 

Aperture priority. That is what Michelle said. I have only known aperture to mean a hole of some sort, and have only related it to anatomical considerations, never to cameras. 

"It is a setting on cameras for taking pictures of things that are still. Your ex-girlfriend was more than a novice," she said holding the Nikon I bought Tatiana, flipping through images. 

"Who?"

"Your ex-girlfriend. Tatiana. I hope you don't mind, but I was planning on using that spare room for my office. We talked about it. Remember? I was just looking through the pictures she took of birds. She got some really beautiful shots!"

I stood up from the litterboxes and rubbed the lavender clouds out of my eyes to look for myself. And sure enough, on the camera I bought her, Tatiana had taken some beautiful pictures of birds. Orioles, cardinals, blue Jays, even an owl. There were also pictures of sunlight streaming through the window and filling the room. Of rain cascading down the window. Of peaceful but sullen things. Things of longing and dreaming. I wasn't as surprised as I should have been. I wasn't surprised at all. 

I thought to go after her. To tell Michelle to beat it. To give Rhonda her money back. Offer her a thousand more, if necessary. But I didn't. I just didn't. I put the damn camera in a drawer and helped Michelle unpack her things. I lack human interest, it seems, but I was decidedly being more human than ever. Thinking and feeling less for myself since others have already done so for me. Sometimes I get the camera out and look at those pictures. But sometimes I don't. And maybe in a while, I will forget.