Celie smiled

Celie smiled

Bert Haverkate-Ens

Jake looked up from where he sat at the counter in Aimee’s coffee shop. The words he had written weren’t expressing what he had wanted to say. He was used to it by now. He had time. Celie, one of the baristas, stood up from her crouch from where she had been restocking the cooler. She placed her hands on the waistband of her jeans, thumbs to the inside, grabbed hold and shook her bottom into place with two firm tugs.

Celie didn’t realize how beautiful she was. Jake knew she could see the extra pounds she carried but she would never be able to see how her smile transformed her sometimes pensive face. She might practice trying to be so very many kinds of beautiful as she put one face on after another in the bathroom mirror, but it was her unconscious smile that undid him. Smiles that he wondered if she even had any idea were there.

Life was tricky that way. Once you became aware of what you were doing, a little of the magic escaped. Ordinary returned. He had talked to a woman once over several months about Zen Buddhism - for hours into the night, night after night - and he could never manage to put the right words into words as he listened to what she was saying. Her words had tumbled over each other, making some sense in his mind. And then, when he had woken up the next morning he had realized he hadn’t gotten it after all.

With Celie, her laughter was like a spilled glass of ice water. Like when they had been just talking the other day. Her arms had become disconnected from her shoulders. And a hand fluttered and tippled against just the very edge of the glass she had only just filled for him and set in front of his neatly stacked papers. In his mind, now, it seemed as if it took hours, water sloshing, the glass leaning, wobbling, and then ice cubes spinning on the counter, water splashing on the floor.

You couldn’t keep moments like that. You couldn’t anticipate them. Trying to relive them just wasn’t the same. Awareness of yourself broke the spell. And yet paying close attention promised to reveal the mysteries of the universe. Mindfulness. Buddha had tried to explain it. Corey, the woman with colored scarves tangled into her hair, had tried to explain it. He would have given anything to hold on to that moment with Celie when her startled look broke into the most beautiful expression on her face. Forever. But what did he know? He had seen her smile again and again. But it’s like Heraclitus said, you never step into the same river twice.

But it was Jesus that he had never gotten into his heart the way Amanda had tried to show him all those years ago. Love was giving, she had said a hundred times if she had said it once. He still felt a twinge when he remembered the last day she had said it.

Jake had thought then that he knew her so well. When she set her lip just so, he could tell she was about to cry. And just a crease turned the other way and he knew he was home free.

But it really turned out to be not at all that simple. He hadn’t even known her jean size and, unforgivably, it turned out, he had never asked her for her father’s first name. Not that everything could possibly have mattered, he’d thought at the time.

That day had begun as ordinarily as it could have. Jake had stayed in bed, staring up at the mobile twisting slowly in the current from the heating vent. He had listened to Amanda in the shower, water splashing off her naked back against the plastic shower curtain. He remembered that he had lain there knowing that she would have left her T-shirt and pajama bottoms in a loose pile in the corner next to the sink. Her side of the counter would have been littered with bottles and jars and tubes. Earrings scattered in the spaces.

His side would had been clean, except for his toothbrush, although as he had laid there in bed, he had already expected some spillover.

He hadn’t minded. Not really.

The mobile had reached the end of its turning, the tension of the wire pulling it back counter clockwise and the water had finally ceased its splashing. Jake had swung his feet onto the floor, stood and stretched. He had padded to the bathroom door and knocked.

“Who is it,” Amanda had called.

Jake had pushed the door open. Amanda had stood there, her body wrapped with a plush, green towel shaking a little as she had rubbed her brown hair with another towel. Then she had turned from the mirror that had already fogged over where she had already wiped it once.

And then, in that steamy mist, she had said to him what took forever for him to realize were her final words: “I can’t live with a man who doesn’t understand what it means to give.” Her eyes had been flooded with tears, rivulets leaking down her cheeks, droplets from the shower still on her bare shoulders.

They had made love the night before after a long fight and he had assumed that he had again escaped his careless ignorance. Standing there in his shorts, he had tried to understand Amanda. He had used words. He had tried to touch her face.

She had turned away, saying that had already talked about all of this for a long, long time. “It was yesterday evening when you met my father that I finally knew you would never get it,” she had said.

Like a giant fool he had said, “Get what?”

“Love is giving.”

He had turned on his heel and, skipping his shower, pulled on his clothes and headed for campus. It had been over, but it had taken some time for him to get that, too.

Jake had gotten married to another woman several years later. He and Sarah had been happy, reasonably happy. No kids. And then – one day – or so it seemed – she had left him.

He had told himself at the time that he was better off – him, always finding the toothpaste tube, the cap always on, and all those other little things. He had friends. People laughed at his jokes. He could hardly complain.

He had run into Sarah on the street now and then. The last time, late last year, he saw her as she had been pushing a stroller next to the daughter she had apparently married into. Her name was Kathy or Kaitlin. She had shaken his hand firmly and smiled. “So you’re Jake,” she had said with no hint of anything he could decipher. Sarah had smiled as she always had and asked him how he was doing. He had said that he couldn’t complain. She had laughed then, and he had seen the creases around her eyes. And then, suddenly he had realized just how slow he was to get things.

He had half-stumbled into Aimee’s, a coffee shop just steps beyond where Sarah and her daughter and granddaughter had left him, Jake blinking hard as they had walked on down the street, talking and laughing.

A young barista had taken his order. He had sat where he sat now, drinking a root beer, watching her make a club sandwich. He later had learned that her name was Jen. She had since moved on – law school, if he remembered right. But Jake had continued coming into Aimee’s, sitting at the counter now and then as he was today, sipping on an egg creme, nursing regret. Jake laughed at himself. He was too old for regret. He was only nursing a little wistfulness.

Those baristas he had observed when nothing he wrote made any sense might have been his kids. But they weren’t. Aimee’s was a good place to watch how people lived and to write a little. He might still be a mostly selfish, old dog, but he was trying to practice giving more of himself. He hoped maybe he was finally starting to get all those women he had known. He paused to write a note to himself, ‘drop an extra buck in the tip jar now and then.’  Jake smiled to himself as he watched Celie pull up on her jeans one more time.