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Excerpt from Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral: |
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There is a hole the size of a golf ball in the right side of Katherine Givens' black Bali bra. This is the one article of clothing that has made her feel sexy for the past 3.6 years in a row and even though the straps lie at half mast on her fine shoulders, the elastic exploded last summer and the hooks have been pulled so many times she has actually used a needle-nose pliers on them, Katherine cannot bear to throw the bra away. "Shit," she says, turning into the mirror and then leaning so her nose practically touches it to make certain there really is a hole. It's there, and getting wider every second, as she puts her finger in the middle and realizes that one wrong move could explode all of the seams and send her breasts into orbit. Just as she grabs them and begins laughing hysterically at the long-held notion that the bra, like her lost marriage and her fabulous mother and the man she thought she loved two men ago or even the one she loves now, would last forever, the doorbell rings and makes her scream herself back into reality. Her scream, the kind you might make when something normal - like a doorbell - flushes you from a very far away place, reaches the UPS woman on the front step who is glad as hell that someone is home so she doesn't have to leave a note and come back the next day. In the UPS world, screams, especially those coming from anywhere in front of the brown trucks and not under the rear wheels, are very good signs. Then the UPS woman waits. Katherine does not care who is at the door immediately because she is already in mourning about the loss of her bra. The bra that held her up and onto her when her daughter announced that she had her first kiss (3.1 years ago) and then snapped the back of her Bali bra instead of the regulation high-five; when she found out her ex-husband Michael was about to be married (2.8 years ago) as she was sorting wash and the bra moved from her fingers and into the black depths of a dark load; when FINALLY a man boldened by vodka martinis put his hand down her strategically placed low-cut sweater and ran his fingers very slowly past the elastic top and curved his hand around her left breast; when her father came to her one night (2.1 years ago) and said that he could no longer care for his wife, her mother, and could Katherine, "please, please, please" help him find the right place and then leaned into her, just below her neck and clutched her shoulder, his sad and tired arm thumping against the metal hook; when she let Alex finally make love to her(1.8 years go) and he turned her around, lifted her blouse and took his sweet, sexy and fabulous time unhooking the Bali and then replaced it with hands that spoke seventeen languages; when she leaned over her mothers coffin, (.8 years ago) the metal from the under wire tapping against the edge of the coffin and ran her hands through her mothers hair one last time and then wept so long and hard that the funeral started almost an hour late and just now the hole emerging like an omen of age and change slapping her upside the head and making her wonder, "What next? What in the hell is going to happen next in this life of mine?" The doorbell. Katherine, angry at the unseen intruder who startled her, miff about the meaning behind her disintegrating bra, and half naked, lunges for the door as the terrified blond woman drenched in brown is reaching for the doorbell for the third time. "Jesus," she shouts as Katherine falls into her arms the very moment the door opens. Katherine, still angry about the intrusion, has managed to grab a kitchen towel on her run from the bedroom. It is a small towel but a towel it is and when she falls into the arms of the UPS woman the towel drops and they both watch it descend to the floor as if it may break and shatter the moment it touches earth. Anyone lucky enough to be watching would be breathless. What next? Who will move first? Will the UPS woman find this incident funny or humiliating? Will Katherine begin screaming again? And the package…. what in the hell is in the package? The UPS woman, who just happens to be a kind and gentle soul who lives alone and keeps notes on all of her customers, has her arms wrapped around Katherine to steady herself. Katherine has a brief moment of clarity when she feels the warm fingers of the woman on her shoulders and this resurrects a historic moment into her mind. She remembers that her friend Reva took her shopping the day she bought the bra. Reva stood in the center of an old-fashioned department store, hands on hips, moving from foot to foot and said that her mother had sold bras door to door in rural Nevada and it was a simple gift that a woman could give to herself - the proper fitting of a bra. This was said to Katherine P. Givins, attorney at law, who had purchased every undergarment her entire life on the fly, cups too small, elastic tight against her back, tiny dents under her ribcage from wires that should never have been put into women's clothing in the first place. And then, the moment the woman fitted her - the measuring tape sliding to the floor, her aging fingers gently lifting her breasts into this bra - this very exceptional bra - and the look on this woman's face, kind satisfaction, as she watched Katherine move and realize that, "Yes, damn it, a good bra can change everything". Their eyes meet then. The UPS woman asking with her soft green eyes what she should do next as she was just ringing the doorbell and Katherine not moving away, holding her there, for one, two, three seconds while she lets go - just let's go. "It's the bra," she tells Ms. UPS. "Have you ever had a bra that has taken you through so much and held you in place like nothing else?" The UPS woman, who was a woman way before she was UPS, does not flinch. More than once in her 26-year career a man has answered the door naked. She has walked in on clowns dancing on tables, a wife throwing meatballs at her husband's favorite television show and so many drunk people she cannot even begin to remember them all. Katherine in her favorite bra, holding her in the foyer is nothing. "I love jogging bras," the UPS woman begins. "In my business there is quite a lot bouncing and jumping and although I am far from voluptuous, I need a good, solid foundation for the kind of work I do." Katherine falls right into the conversation, wearing her favorite undergarment, a pair of faded green cotton shorts that have another story to tell, and absolutely nothing else. The UPS woman, with more than a hint of subtle and gracious poise, motions for Katherine to step back inside of the house but the women do not stop talking. They dance backwards and Katherine, hands flailing idly as they always do when she is excited, continues to talk about the demise of her Bali. "Well, how about just getting a new one?" Ms. UPS asks. "I've written and called and stopped at every department store in the United States and in three foreign countries. They do not make this bra anymore." "How sad is that." Katherine, who is usually gracious and poised herself, has this ridiculous urge to invite the UPS woman into the kitchen for a glass of wine or a cup of coffee so they can talk about undergarments all day but she's also a practical and usually wise woman. She knows there's a good chance Ms. UPS has to finish working but she can't quite stop herself. Undergarments, she thinks to herself, surely do strange things to one's inhibitions. Later, when days and weeks have passed and she has time to backtrack to this very moment she will remember it as one that she should have paid more attention to when she was asking herself about why the hole in the bra was spreading now and why she was standing in her underwear in front of a stranger and why none of it seemed out of the ordinary. "That thing," she will eventually say to herself, "that inner voice that was tapping against my heart and asking me to pause - Damn, I should have listened and paid attention because everything changed." Everything changed. But first a wave of laughter rising from the two women who visually embrace each other as women do who can talk at the ring of a doorbell about underwear, and breasts and menstrual cycles and the way women connect and can fall into each others lives and arms so quickly. "This must seem ridiculous," Katherine says as the women tip their heads and the sounds of their laughter mixes and rises to the edge of high windows in Katherine's very old but lovely home. "Well, as you can imagine, I've seen everything. I'd much rather be greeted by a woman in a black bra who has a great story then a man in black underwear who has no story at all." Then Ms.UPS reaches inside of her brown pants pocket and she pulls out a small, soft stone that has been worn smooth and shiny by one ride after another inside the cotton pants pocket. "You have a lucky bra, something that I imagine has carried you through some challenging and tough nights and days, and I have this rock." She lets Katherine take the rock into her hand and feel how just holding it, like wearing a fabulous bra, can be a comfort. They don't talk about it because they are women and they know. They know about comfort and the loss of it and they know about sacrifice and change and that the ring of a doorbell, a wild call at midnight, the scent of something new, the touch of a baby or a lover's fresh face can change everything. They know. "I see," Katherine says and then she gently hands back the stone, understanding it's importance, but also not able to stop herself from saying, "You'll understand if I don't hand over the bra." They laugh, which is the perfect thing to do, and then Ms. UPS says, "The package." and goes back to the front door where she set down her clipboard and the box, wrapped in the requisite brown paper with one single and simple label. "This is for you if you are indeed Katherine P. Givins." "I am." "Expecting this?" "I have no clue." "Well this is your surprise and you were mine then," Ms. UPS says, smiling as she dips to pick up her sign-off sheet. Katherine signs the metal backed ledger and then Ms. UPS bends to pick up the box. The transfer is swift and easy and the package passes from woman to woman in a ceremony that is completed only when Katherine, who has always been way to the other side of spontaneous, bends to hug Ms. UPS one last time. "You are a sweetheart," she tells her new blonde friend. "Well, that's nice but it's all part of the job. I never know what is going to happen or what I might see when I ring someone's doorbell." "I imagine you've seen more action than a pile of undergarments," Katherine says and then pauses for just a second. "There's something new and exciting behind every unopened door." "Sounds like a book title," Ms. UPS responds just before she turns back towards her waiting van. "Time to go see what's behind the next door." There is a short, fast wave and then Katherine finds herself alone in the foyer of the home she has spent 12 years restoring. The home she bought with the proceeds from her first fairly huge lawsuit which netted her $69,283 and allowed her to move from a two-bedroom apartment with her daughter Sonja following her divorce from a man whom she had once loved a great deal but had come to realize she should have never married for a variety of reasons including the not-so-obvious fact that he had never gotten over the love of his life - a woman he still saw three times a week at places like hotels, nice restaurants and the backseat of her husbands car. The package. Ms. UPS is stepping into the brown van when Katherine looks for just a second at the package that is wedged against her chest, just where the Bali touches the top of her last rib, and wonders if the shape of the box does not hint that there may be a pair of shoes inside. Her mind stops there as Ms. UPS turns, shouts, "Bye now," smiles as if she knows a wild secret and then disappears behind a sliding door that sounds like a smooth and even gunshot. The door closes and as Katherine turns to tap it with her heel, because ever since she has owned the home that is what she does to make certain that it really is closed and when she turns she can see her reflection in the oak mirror by the door. When she turns to move her feet, twisting at the waist, the bra hole which is now wider then the size of a golf ball - maybe even tennis - becomes like the shape of an almost ripe grapefruit. "Damn it," she says, even though she is not prone to swearing and loathes the societal turn of events that makes a word like "fuck" commonplace. "Just damn it." The package is wedged under her bra and Katherine does not realize that it is the package that is holding the bra into place. She does not see that there is a strand of threads the size of three toothpicks that is holding together the left side of her bra and that the minutes she sits and moves too fast the bra will fly open and be lost to her forever. She doesn't see this but she is thinking about it. She is thinking about the miles of highway that the bra has seen her over and the heartaches and the laughs and then, because she harbors a secret, very old and almost forgotten desire to write children's books, she wonders if anyone has ever written a story about a girl's first bra. She is also thinking about the mysterious box and the who, what, when, where and why of its existence. This is how her mind works, flashing from thought to thought like an echo trapped inside of a metal cave. In her late 20's Katherine finally came to embrace her mind following years of misunderstood conversations where one minute she would be discussing her mother's trip to Australia to find an old high school friend and the next a historic civil rights case that helped change the world. Katherine settles into the rocking chair just beyond the edge of the front hall, the box pushed tight against her chest, and rocks for one, two three minutes wondering if Ms.UPS will race home and call someone to tell the story of the wild woman with the ancient bra who answered the door just past noon. "No," she answers to herself the same way we all speak when we are alone or working and need to just hear a word so we can validate our own precious thought. "This probably happens all of the time." She imagines then for just a few moments what it would be like if she had the UPS woman's life or anyone else's life but her own. She wonders about delivering packages with unknown contents instead of drafting law briefs, she wonders about changing an entire career just like that, like the snap of a bra, for something new and maybe not so ferocious and seemingly arbitrary like distributing little pieces of the law. She wonders about skipping a beat, about missing an appointment, about maybe running down the road naked or doing something impractical like not even wearing a bra anymore. Something. Anything. She wonders and as she wonders she realizes she is tired. Physically tired and mentally tired. Tired of routines and all the expectations of her own life that she has designed and now scrambles daily to keep in place like one of those ridiculous plate balancing acts at the circus. Then it is time for the package. Wrapped in a brown paper bag that has been cut with scissors and then taped so the edges touch perfectly. A package that comes to Katherine's house on a Wednesday when she is rarely, if ever home, but because of a scheduling mix up and a sick clerk and the desire to breathe in some rare quiet for just a few hours, Katherine, who considers herself beyond predictable and way the other side of reliable, slips from her assistant district attorney's job and into her favorite nasty clothes where she expects to read a pile of old magazines until her daughter comes home for dinner from her third year of high school, track practice and a Spanish IV study session. Her hands on the brown paper feel nothing but the smooth skin of old trees. The heart of a seedling turned into a cover sheet, she thinks, that is now wrapped around a mysterious package in the arms of a woman in Northern California who is about to push aside its opening embrace and see what has certainly become part of a very interesting stolen afternoon. No return address. Printing neat and slanted, the hand of a woman, Katherine thinks correctly because there is something familiar and feminine in the way the letters turn and slant. She has seen this writing before. Someone she knows sent the package - but whom? When she moves to open the package, spreading apart the sealed edges, this is when the bra finally and forever snaps open and when everything changes. Katherine does not feel the bra give way because from the moment she sees the note, from the moment she smells the rushing scent of sage that has been sprinkled across the top of the box and sees the two red tennis shoes nothing else, not even the glorious bra, matters. The note, folded in half once and written, Katherine thinks, by the same woman who addressed the outside of the box, tells half of the story before she even begins to read and she gasps in astonishment because what she is holding is something spectacular, unforeseen and frightening. Katherine,Katherine does not cry or move. She sits for five, ten, and another five minutes after that. Then she moves both hands across the tips of the red shoes and bends over to kiss them and that simple, lovely, beautiful movement snaps the bra in half. |
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