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ENVELOPES
I drew a face on the back of an envelope, which I liked very much,
and I thought that I would look at it every night, before I went to
sleep. So I kept it by the side of my bed, under the window, under the
stars. But one day (it was a day when everyone missed buses, or closed
fingers in screen doors) I forgot about it, and threw it out with other
things that had become meaningless to me.
A day the following week, I felt very bad and sick, and regretful, like
a dried up pen. I painted all the walls in my room, the nauseous blue
of rotten seawater. On a shelf (which was not painted blue, but rather
painted white, like absence, and a great lacking) I arranged bottles
I had: of blackberry water and ginger ale. At the very end, I put up
a gilt mirror that my grandmother had left me. (Grandmothers are always
leaving things behind like gilt mirrors and silk scarves and costume
jewelry.) When I look in that mirror, I don’t see myself, or even
my grandmother, but rather that face on the back of the envelope. The
one that’s lost and gone forever. I threw it out with a pile of
newspapers, as if it was nothing important at all.
The following Monday, I go out to lunch with a friend of mine, and we
eat outside. There are sparrows everywhere, and two very small children
go running through waves of them, sending them airborn. I am drinking
mandarin soda, because I like the bottle it comes in, and my friend
is drinking tanqueray, because for her, it’s not too early in the
day for that sort of thing.
I brought up the business of throwing out envelopes, and she says that’s
always a problem. She says once she got a letter from someone she loved
very much. Unspeakably so that it kept her awake and lonely, and very
cold. But on the day she got the letter, her life melted like icicles
dripping off a roof. She says she kept the letter, but the envelope
she threw away, and the return address was gone, so she had no way of
ever reaching this person again. It’s a very sad story, especially
in the way she tells it, and we’re silent for a while, looking
into our drinks. The birds miss a beat of their wings, and then she
starts talking again.
Besides the invaluable return address, she speaks impassioned, about
the ink, which was green, with the fluidity (or so it seemed) and with
that angular script that meant so much to her. The stamp was of an olive
tree. She said it was placed upside down, and when stamps are placed
upside down, they signify love.
Since the children who have been running through the sparrows have left
by this point, the birds cease to fly, and drop solidly to the ground.
I tell her the front of my envelope was not so important. It was from
the Leukemia Foundation, or the battered woman’s shelter, or the
telephone company.
Moving on from such, I tell her the general news about how I painted
my room. The blue is actually the same color as her eyes, which always
have a look of perpetual heartbreak. But regardless, she likes them,
that shade of blue. She says it’s expressive, and it has a lot
to say.
Many hours pass by, and then she says she has drunk enough to go home,
but she needs me to go with her to a bus stop. So I hold her arm, and
while we walk down the street, she recites poems by e.e. cummings. There
is one I remember very well and it goes at the end /the moon rattles
like a fragment of angry candy.” I ask her about the angry candy
part, but she can’t explain what it is.
The bus comes, shining very white in the sun, and when she accends up
the stairs, her eyes are tearing up, and water is falling from them.
It’s like angry candy, I believe, if there was such a thing.
I start to walk home, in the other direction, with a bottle to fill
my shelf. It’s getting sticky in the heat of the day. I don’t
quite mind, I’m thinking about e.e. cummings, but when I turn the
the corner onto the next street, I see that all the garbage cans are
out, and my head fills with ideas of envelopes, and suddenly, again,
I mind everything very much.
- Emily Jacobson
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