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June 11, 2003 ~ The Broken Doll
Wednesday.
The large double doors stood wide, a gigantic mouth open onto the downtown street, and, as we passed, the classical piano echoing in the large cavernous dark within floated out on the heavy, humid summer air. Li and I both turned toward it automatically, feeling a pull. Was that Beethoven? Passionate, yet haunted. Probably. The player was not keeping time as the piece was written, but going on at his own pace, faster when he felt it and slower when it suited him.
We stepped inside the entryway, seeing the "community center" sign. Plain concrete floor, a large, expansive, empty room with peeling paint walls. Dark. On the other end of the room was an open door, with golden light pouring out of it. A man sitting at a table within that little golden room, reading a book. The warmth was such a contrast to the dark, hard enormous outer room that the man with his book in the little golden room looked like a light-box, a miniature, a doll-house, from that distance. I peeked around the corner of the entryway, and there sat the piano player, his t-shirt full of holes, dirty face, dreaded hair.
I turned my attention back to the little golden doorway, but something next to it caught my eye. There, in that darkened far corner, my eyes adjusted to its contrasting dimness, and I saw a low table. On the table was what looked like a broken doll in a sullied party dress--a lacey affair with ruffles and a trailing hem, a sash not quite tied right. Her legs were crossed, and she was slumped over, head hanging to the side with long brown curly hair hanging over her face, but then the head shifted, and I saw that it was a woman, a book in her lap. The music, the dim lighting, the little reading man in his tiny light-box, the broken-looking slumped woman in the old, dirty party dress--my spine started to tingle.
And not only was she a living woman and not a broken doll, but I slowly realized that she was in fact a woman whom I've met before, a student at the college. And yes, she frequently dresses in old, dirty, frilly party dresses, and I was not particularly surprised to see her sitting slumped on a table in that back corner. Her manner has always struck me as that of Ophelia after Hamlet breaks her--whimsically handing out flowers and speaking not-quite nonsense. (Rather, nonsense with a hint of truth.)
Li and I, without saying a thing, turned and wandered back out, the piano lingering after us.
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