Skinned Angels
KATHRYN PTACEK
Jim didn’t want to go into the shop, but his wife insisted. ‘We’re tourists, and we should be doing touristy things,’ she said.
He relented. After all, it was his vacation — their vacation — and they were out to have fun, or at least that was the theory. Poking around in old shops was his wife’s idea of amusement; it wasn’t his, but he wanted to please her. They’d had some problems recently, and this trip to Santa Fe was one of the things they’d thought might start to help.
The bell clanged over the door as Jim pushed the glass door open. Immediately he wrinkled his nose. Old dust, dried herbs, perfumes and spicy incense assaulted his senses, and beneath it was the smell of something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He wanted to sneeze, but managed to control it.
Bev was already across the room, examining some rugs heaped into mounds along one side of the store. They had a handful of Indian rugs in their house and he hoped she wouldn’t insist that they buy some more. He didn’t know why he resisted everything; it wasn’t as if buying one more rug would break them financially, and he actually liked Indian rugs quite a lot. ‘You’re so negative,’ Bev accused him, and she was right. He was negative, but he couldn’t seem to help it.
No, he amended with a faint smile, he was positive he was negative.
He ambled over to the ramshackle bookcase that all these stores along this little Santa Fe street — hardly more than a burro lane, really — seemed to have and scanned the titles. Most were in Spanish, which he didn’t know despite having lived in New Mexico for over thirty years. He had avoided learning the language, although he didn’t know why because he spoke German and French, and could make himself pretty well understood in Italian. Spanish should have come to him so easily. But he hadn’t wanted to learn it, hadn’t seen the need, despite working with Spanish-speaking men and women ever since he got out of college.
You’re just being stubborn, his mother used to say. And she was right.
Stubborn and negative, he thought, and wondered how anyone stood him.
He took a look around the store and saw some leather goods — boots and saddles mostly — in one section, some bright clothing hanging from a few racks, a chest that looked like it had numerous little perfume bottles on it, and all around the room stood case after case of jewellery.
If they ever outlawed jewellery in Santa Fe, the city would go belly-up, he thought. That’s fairly uncharitable, he realized. He could add that to his long list of growing sins.
The autumn light filtered in through the dirty window and he felt warm standing in front of the bookcase. It was a comfortable feeling, and for a moment he didn’t want to move, didn’t want to do anything, and it was as if he’d gone into another dimension because he couldn’t hear anyone, couldn’t smell anything, not even the too-sweet perfumes and incense. It was just him and the bright sunshine, and—
‘Jimmy, come look at this!’
The sound of his wife’s voice was like the ripping of a membrane, and he shook himself, almost more a shudder. He left the mildewing tomes and headed across the room. At first he couldn’t locate her, then he saw her standing at a counter. She was being waited on by an old man.
He became aware then that there were two girls — excuse me, he chided himself, that was young women these days — standing not far from Bev, pointing at something in the glass case; one was talking while the other giggled. He came up alongside his wife and smiled automatically. If he did anything else, she’d want to know what was wrong, and he would say nothing was wrong, but she wouldn’t believe him, and they’d go back and forth like that until something was the matter.
‘Look, Jimmy, aren’t they great?’ She dangled a pair of silver earrings from her fingers, while the clerk smiled expectantly at him. She was waiting, he knew, for his response. His positive response.
‘They’re nice, honey. Really nice.’ Actually he thought they looked like a dozen or more other pairs of earrings she had pawed through in the dozen or more other shops they’d stopped in today.
There you go exaggerating, his teachers said, that’s very unprofessional and unnecessary.
These earrings, though, had inlaid turquoise in the silver triangles, and were pretty in an unflashy way. But still.
She was watching him, waiting for him to speak the magic words, although she hardly needed permission.
‘Well, Bev, if you want them, go ahead and buy them.’ His smile widened, and it seemed like his face was about to crack open. There, he’d said them. She had dozens of earrings in her jewellery cases, maybe more, and she had her own income and didn’t need his permission to buy anything, but she always waited for him to say that.
She looked at the old man and shook her head. ‘Not quite right. What else do you have?’
Jim never understood that, either. He said the so-called magic words, thinking she wanted to hear him say it was all right to buy whatever, and then she always put the item back. As if she no longer wanted it. He wondered what would happen if he didn’t say go ahead and buy it/them/whatever. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to find out, at least not now. This was, after all, their reconciliation trip.
For the next half hour Bev examined all the silver earrings in the three trays the old guy put up on the counter. She held one from each pair up to an ear and asked Jim for his opinion, and he smiled, his face now feeling frozen into that expression, and she’d sigh and put the earring down and pick up the next one. She went through a fourth tray, then decided to look at rings, trying each one on. The minutes ticked by, and Jim shifted from one foot to another. Behind him the warm sunshine tugged, and he wanted to stand there in the golden light and pretend to read the titles of the books even though he wasn’t cold or anything, but he knew the minute he did, Bev would call to him.