A Mirror of Before and After - CHAPTER XVII

By Frank Moore circa 1970s

Suzy appeared during my first D.C. visit; she was lonely, caught in this world. But she couldn’t be of this world. She would shatter if she had to stay here much longer.

It was hard to believe she was really real. Really a flesh and blood person. More like a sad spirit with pale, oval face with large, black eyes which went back for ages upon ages. I fell into them when I first saw her sitting on the tower step, just listening, just watching from somewhere far inside herself. Her hair was the only part of her that was happy. Long sunbeams, now red, now yellow. The sun of her hair surrounded the moon of her face. Pale, white milk with streaks of blue. Her hands were like a child’s, with long, fragile fingers. Her body was so fragile, I was afraid she would blow away, vanish into the nothingness where she had come from. She just sat there on the step, bundled up in an old navy coat, looking sadly at me.

“What is your name?” I pointed out on my board. I knew she read it and understood it. She was not ignoring me. She wanted to answer me, but the words would not come out. Her lips moved a little, trying to form words. But she remained mute. Just sitting there looking sadly sad.

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“See me! Feel me! Touch me! Heal me!” Debbie and Buzzy were straightening up the bellbottoms, stacking them neatly into the cubbyholes along the left store wall. Moe was talking to a middle-aged woman who fell in love with the shirt he was wearing.

“I want three of these darling shirts for my son,” she said, clinging to Moe’s arm, feeling the texture. “How much?”

“For you, three dollars for three. What taste you have!”

Three down. I looked through the window, and there was Suzy smiling at me. She ran in and hugged me, then she sat on the car seat just like the year before … wearing the same clothes she wore the last time … now they were pinned together in danger of falling apart at any minute. She had changed.

“You are getting fat,” I said. She looked healthier, less like a ghost.

“I am not,” Suzy said smiling.

Wait a minute! She talked! She talked in a low, breathless tone which I could hardly hear. But she talked. She didn’t need my board anymore. It looked like that smile, that silent laugh last year, had caught hold and spread. Suzy came out of her world finally …even if she didn’t come to the coast. I had waited for a week last year; then when she didn’t come, I got worried. Maybe she had been caught in the rescue attempt. So I had called Moe. He said she had been in once since I left. When he asked when she wanted to take the plane ride, she just stared into space and went blank. That was the last time I heard anything of her. She disappeared. But now her Southern drawl made me laugh. Her voice made her so sexy, so coy in spite of herself. However, something kept running through my head: Why didn’t you come? I didn’t want to ask that. It wasn’t fair to ask that because it would come out like an accusation … there wasn’t anything to accuse Suzy of. She didn’t know what I went through because of her. What I went through gave me more freedom. So I didn’t mind. But the question wouldn’t go away.

“Because you were here with me,” Suzy answered.

“I was with you in thought.”

“That isn’t what I mean. I didn’t have to because you were here. You didn’t leave me. I talked to you every day. We hitched to places together. Don’t you remember?”

“You were here with me in my world,” Suzy said, and added with a little ironic smile, “If you were in California, why didn’t you write me?”

“I didn’t know where you were.”

“Some excuse!”

Suzy wanted to push me around the block, so Debbie got me into my coat and showed Suzy how to use the brakes. When we got through the door, Suzy halted like she had forgotten something. She went back into the store without me. I braced my feet on the sidewalk and turned around to see what was happening. Suzy went back and forth in and out of the door as if the cameraman took the same shot over and over again, as if Suzy was trapped in walking out the door. The unlocked wheelchair wanted to roll down the hill, but my feet stopped it. After Suzy walked through the door for the twentieth time, she resumed pushing me as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. It was a sunny, but chilly day. The ice had melted from the sidewalk so it was an easy ride. Suzy stopped and left me again. My feet went automatically down. Suzy went back a couple of feet and it looked like she was talking to someone. I couldn’t hear her words. Moreover, I couldn’t see the person she was talking to. There was nobody there. She was trying to coax the person to come along with us, pulling on his coat sleeve like a young girl trying to pull her tired grandpa to the candy store. Finally, the invisible old gentleman consented and let Suzy lead him by the hand, over to me. We continued our walk … the three of us. But the old fellow kept lagging behind and Suzy kept going to get him. Suzy was in a happy air, skipping over the sidewalk cracks. But she wouldn’t walk inside of telephone signs. When we came to one of those, she would leave me, walk in the street past the pole, then return to the walk and come back for me. At this rate, it took us an hour to walk around the block. If Suzy did this all of the time, I wondered how she escaped being picked up like she was before … or at least avoided attracting attention. I enjoyed our normal walk, even though I was back in the horror movie. The Invisible Man.

When we were back in the store again, I asked, “Who was walking with us?”

“Just someone I once knew.”

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. He is past,” Suzy said, then hugged me and left. At least, she tried to leave. She was walking out and the door got in her way again. She kept going in and out, opening and closing the door, waving her hand in her face as if she was trying to take in some of the store’s good vibes, splashing them in her face, wrapping them around her to protect her while she was away from the store. After one last ring of the bell over the door, she was gone.

“Does she always do that?” I asked Debbie, who was watching the ritual too.

“Most of the time, at least around here where we accept her … sometimes she seems to forget and goes through a doorway just once … but not often.”

“It’s a wonder she gets anything done or goes anywhere that way. She is talking again; I thought she was better. But she is worse.”

“Suzy is strange. But I like her. It just takes getting used to walking with her invisible friends.”

“I found that out,” I said.

Later that day, Carol came in with Bo to push me to the library. When we got there and tied the dog just inside of the first glass door, Carol asked what kind of book I wanted.

“Something on witchcraft and magic,” I said.

“Why on earth do you want to read something like that?”

“There is a girl who comes into the store … pretty freaked out. Her whole life is twisted around some kind of ritual, based on what she calls “the Curse” that she thinks she is under. Maybe if I invent some magical ceremony and make her believe that it will release her from the whole thing, she will break through it. It’s worth a try.”

But the library didn’t have any occult books. By the time Carol paid a visit to the Religion section, the forsaken Bo was making so much noise we had to hurry to check out the two spiritual books we had, grab the dog and go.

“Would you be up for a ride in the country tomorrow … get away from that place?” Carol asked, pushing me along the sidewalk to the store. “The place is so physical … so material. It is a nice place to go into for awhile to escape. But after a while, it closes in on me. It must close in on you too. That is why I take you on walks … and now with the car, I can take you on rides … maybe take some grass with us.”

“Great.”

“How can you stand living in that?”

“In what?”

“In the store, with all of that corruption and temptation around you.”

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