Pandora's Closet

TECHNICOLOR by Louise Marley

The screen door slammed, making the breakfast dishes jump. Dorothy winced, and Lin rolled her eyes in a manner only possible for a twelve-year-old. “Mother,” she complained. “Do you two have to fight every morning?”

Dorothy sighed and looked away from her daughter’s pouting face. She watched Phil stamp across the sunburned grass of the backyard. His back was stiff, and he slapped at his leg with his ancient baseball cap as he stalked toward the barn. Today, it was because Dorothy had forgotten to buy tractor oil on her weekly trip to the mercantile. Yesterday, it had been something else.

Dorothy wanted to defend herself, but the words wouldn’t come. In fact, it was hardly fair of Lin to accuse her of arguing, since Phil had done all the talking. Dorothy hadn’t said a single word yet this morning. She couldn’t remember if she had said anything yesterday morning, either. Silence was easier. And less provoking.

She looked across the jumble of cereal bowls and dirty glasses at her pigtailed daughter and forced words to her lips. All she could think of was, “Did you make your bed, Glinda?”

A mistake. “Mother! Don’t call me that! I’ve told you!”

“Sorry.”

“Breakfast was late because you two were fighting, and now I don’t have time,” Lin said triumphantly, pointing out past the porch to the plume of dust winding toward the farmhouse. “The bus is coming!”

Dorothy stood, crumpling her napkin. She carried the cereal bowls to the sink and stood gazing out over the pile of dirty dishes. The school bus, covered in dust, was all but indistinguishable from the dry wheat fields, the dirt lane, the browning leaves on the oaks and alders that drooped around the house. “Monochrome,” she murmured to herself.

“What?” Lin asked.

Dorothy just shrugged.

Lin was shouldering her backpack. “Where’s my lunch?”

“On the counter,” Dorothy said absently.

Lin snatched it up, and opened the bag. “Oh, Mother! Peanut butter?” Another roll of the eyes, with the bonus of an exasperated snort. Twelve-year-olds, Dorothy thought. Surely, I never snorted at Aunt Emily. Not even when I was twelve.

She crossed the kitchen to help stuff the lunch sack into Lin’s backpack. “Wait,” she said. “Your shoes are untied.” She bent to reach for the laces of Lin’s hightops, but Lin pulled her feet away, saying, “Never mind, Mother.”

Dorothy tried to brush her lips across her daughter’s forehead, but Lin spun away before she quite reached her. A moment later, she was on her way out the door. “Have a good-” Dorothy began, but the screen door slammed once more, and Lin was off, dashing across the yard to meet the bus. Her hightops, laces flying loose, disappeared up the steps, and the door folded closed behind her. Dorothy raised one hand in farewell, but her daughter never looked back.

Dorothy stood by the screen door to watch the bus rumble away in its cloud of beige dust. Did nothing, in all this landscape, have any color? Even the last of the hollyhocks had died. All of Kansas, it seemed to Dorothy, was painted in shades of brown.

She pulled the kitchen blinds against the rising heat and turned to face the piled dishes and the waiting laundry. It was as oppressive a sight as the dry fields stretching to the horizon. Dorothy knew a woman who started on a bottle of Dewar’s at just this moment every day, right after the school bus left. Today Dorothy could understand. She sighed again and started up the stairs, her house slippers scuffing on the bare wood.

She passed her old high school painting, still hanging on the landing despite Phil’s scoffing. She had tried, in her amateur way, to capture the colors, to remember them. Now the sun had faded them to the same brown she saw everywhere around her.

Lin’s bedroom door opened on chaos, the bed unmade, the floor littered with clothes, shoes, scattered schoolbooks. The years of her daughter’s childhood seemed to Dorothy at once endless and unbearably brief. She couldn’t remember the last time Lin had kissed her, or hugged her. When, she wondered, as she bent to pick up a pair of black jeans, had her daughter begun to disdain anything she said and everything she did? It had happened gradually, inching up on Dorothy until, all at once, her daughter had escaped her. She hadn’t seen it coming. She didn’t know what she could have done about it, or should have done about it. Maybe it was because Lin’s childhood was so different from her own. Or maybe Lin was following Phil’s example. He had not hugged or kissed Dorothy in a long time, either.

Dorothy crossed to the hamper with the jeans, and as she reached for the lid, she caught sight of herself in the mirror above the bureau. She stopped and stared at her reflection.

The jeans hanging from her hands were impossibly narrow. Had she ever, when she was twelve, been so slim-hipped? She straightened, holding them before her. She was twice the size of these jeans now, round-bodied, soft of breast and stomach. Even her hair had begun to gray in the front, the way Aunt Emily’s had. In fact, she had begun to look like Aunt Emily. It was a look she had taken for granted when she was young, as if Emily had been born that way, looking as if the sun had baked her dry, the prairie winds weathered her like the boards of the barn. And now the sun and the wind-and her life-were doing the same to Dorothy.

Dorothy dropped the jeans in the hamper and bent across Lin’s bed to untangle her sheets and blanket. She plumped the pillow, letting her hand linger a moment in the shallow depression where her daughter’s head had lain. She picked up the quilt to fold it across the foot of the bed.

Aunt Emily had made the quilt, in a wedding-ring pattern, its blue and red circles faded now. Dorothy traced them with her finger, remembering her long-ago wedding shower. How different the world had seemed on that day. It had been full of promise. Full of color.

Dorothy’s vision blurred with sudden tears. She dropped the quilt, turned her back on the mess, and hurried to her own bedroom. She ignored her own unmade bed-Phil had pulled the sheets loose again-and went to the closet. She slid the mirrored door aside and knelt to reach far into the back.

Her fingers scrabbled through boots and pumps and old sandals until she felt the stiff edges of the heavy, old-fashioned pasteboard box. She pulled it out and then stopped, listening to be certain she could hear the grumble of the tractor moving compost behind the barn. Phil must have found some oil after all, she thought resentfully. He could have told her, could have apologized, but he wouldn’t do that. She couldn’t remember him ever having apologized for anything. At least he was occupied, so he wouldn’t interrupt her. This box was her secret.

She got stiffly to her feet and carried the box to the bed, setting it on the tumbled blanket. Slowly, slowly, she lifted the lid and gently folded back the layers of tissue.

She had not looked at them in a very long time. They lay innocently in their bed of tissue, gleaming with a color that no longer existed in Kansas. Red was not an adequate word for this color. It was crimson, cardinal-red. It was the color of rubies, glowing from within, deeply, vibrantly, the very color of imagination.

Of magic.

She touched the shoes with one finger and felt their power surge through her skin, tingle up her arm, shiver in her chest.

Dorothy pulled her hand back. She glanced up at the mirror that lined the closet door, seeing a plain woman with one pudgy hand at her throat. A dull woman, whose life had lost every shred of its magic. She looked back at the ruby shoes, yearning toward them.

No, no, she told herself. She couldn’t. She shouldn’t.

She left the open box on the bed and crossed to the window. She lifted the print curtains she had made on her old Singer machine and gazed out at the fields. The sky was a flat, lifeless bowl, as if the sun had faded it, too. The sun glared on the house and the barn, the pigsty, the milk cows huddling in the shade of the silo. None of it had seemed so bleak in her childhood. In those days, possibility shone from every leaf, every wheat stalk. When she was young, enchantment rose with the sun every new day, and she had run, with her little dog at her side, to meet it.

Dorothy rested her forehead against the glass and let the tears roll down her cheeks. How had she come to settle for this? How had she let this happen, that her husband spoke to her only to criticize, and that her only child treated her like a piece of furniture?

It was her own fault, of course. She had drifted into it, letting the independent girl she had been transform into someone else, someone she didn’t recognize.

Dorothy turned back, letting the curtain fall closed behind her, and stared at the vivid shoes sparkling from their box. Lin would sneer at them, call them old-fashioned. Phil would have a fit if he even knew she had them. She had hidden them away the day he asked her to marry him.

The sudden wish that he hadn’t married her, after all, made her press her hands to her eyes. That wasn’t right. If she hadn’t married Phil, if they hadn’t taken over the farm after Emily passed away-she would never have had Lin. She could hardly wish her daughter away, could she? She could hardly… no matter how bad things were…

Dorothy dried her cheeks and dropped her hands. The shoes glimmered their scarlet invitation.

She had resisted their temptation for such a long time. Not for her the scotch bottle, or romance novels, or soap operas. For her there were only these ruby shoes.

As if in a trance, one foot before the other, she moved back to the bed. She knelt on the rug and reached for the shoes.

She turned them this way and that, letting the sun glint on their sequins. Their rounded toes and stubby heels were out of date, but Dorothy didn’t care about fashion. What she cared about, what she longed for, was magic.

She cradled the shoes against her chest. She knew why she had kept them in the back of her closet, why she had hidden them all these years. They signified something that threatened her life with Phil and with Lin. They seemed to sing in her hands, to call her away. They invited her to step out into enchantment. They were, like the Dewar’s and the romance novels, an escape.

Her toes curled with the urge to put them on.

Dorothy set the shoes neatly on the floor, side by side. She kicked out of her house slippers. She fitted her feet, first the left, and then the right, into the shoes.

They felt wonderful on her feet! She had thought the heels might be uncomfortable after years of wearing flats, but they were perfect. They made her ankles looked trim, her calves seem longer. Even her cotton skirt looked crisper above the ruby glow of the shoes. Smiling, Dorothy lifted her eyes to the mirror.

Her eyes shone with a gleam of excitement. Her cheeks glowed, and the gray in her hair looked like threads of silver in the morning light. Even her waist looked smaller, perhaps because of the heels, or perhaps…

Perhaps the magic still existed.

Dorothy took a step closer to the mirror, pulling off her apron as she moved, dropping it to the floor. Behind her the jumble of bedclothes, the glare of sun on the wheatfields, faded to a blur. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. She shouldn’t do it, of course. It was silly, and childish, but…

She giggled. And then-and then she closed her eyes tightly, and she did it.

Click. Click. Click.

Three times she touched her heels together. The shoes made a slight, plasticky sound. Dorothy started to giggle again.

A sudden, sharp pain lanced through her chest, and her giggle turned to a gasp. She struggled to breathe, but her lungs cramped. She couldn’t open her eyes, either, and beyond the closed lids was only darkness. Something was wrong.

She couldn’t tell what was happening. She heard a loud rush that seemed familiar, like a great, whirling wind, and then, in the darkness, came a stupendous silence. Dorothy went spinning into the blackness, shooting into some place where up and down had no meaning, where gravity was gone. She flew backward, and then tumbled forward. She clenched her hands together, having nothing else to hold on to. Had she had breath, she might have screamed, but there was nothing in her lungs, and her throat wouldn’t work.

And then, just when she felt as if her chest would burst…

Thud.

Her lungs released, all at once, and a great draught of sweet, moist air rushed to fill them. The pain in her chest vanished all at once, leaving a sense of lightness. There was light beyond her closed eyelids now, golden light. The silence was filled by the burble of running water, the whisper of a gentle breeze. Cautiously, she opened her eyes.

Her cluttered bedroom, with its unmade bed, her apron on the floor, was gone. The farmhouse was gone. Kansas was gone.

Around her, on every side, were green fields and blue houses and vivid flowers. A stream sparkled between grassy banks. The sun was gentle on her head, and Dorothy felt as if she had opened her eyes inside a kaleidoscope, her eyes dazzled by pink and rose and yellow and violet and other colors she had no name for, colors that existed nowhere else.

With a soft cry, she sank to her knees on the soft grass. Her palms crept to her cheeks, and she gazed about her in wonder. It was still here! The magic had waited for her all these years. She spread her arms wide, to embrace the bright world. “Hello!” she called. “Hello!”

For long moments she was alone in the world of color, and then, as if they too had been waiting, they began to come, creeping forward through the banks of flowers, popping up from hedges, peering around the blue houses. They were as perfect as she remembered, and as funny, small and smiling, bright-eyed. Dorothy laughed to see them and held out her hands.

The little people in their motley clothes crowded around her, twittering in their high voices. They patted her arms and then her cheeks with soft hands. They touched her hair, and the cotton of her dress. They hugged her.

They smelled of berries and cotton candy and sweet tea, scents that mixed with the perfume of flowers, the smell of new grass, the taste of rain not long past. For a long time they greeted her in this way, welcomed her back, and Dorothy remembered how good it felt to be touched, to be caressed.

After a time, they tugged at her arms, and she stood up.

She was twice as tall as they were.

Their twittering ceased, and their eyes went round with confusion. They stared up at her, dismay in their soft faces, their hands falling by their sides.

Dorothy said, “What-what’s the matter?”

They stared at her shoes and then at her face. They backed away, now beginning to murmur urgently to each other. One or two turned and ran, like fat puppies tumbling over the grass.

Dorothy put one hand on her chest. “It’s me,” she said, a little diffidently. “Don’t you remember me?”

Heads were shaken, brows furrowed.

“You have to remember me!” Dorothy cried. “I remember you so well! I remember all of you, and I remember this place, and the flowers, and the sky…”

“Oh, but, Dorothy,” came a melodic voice behind her. “Of course you remember us! We haven’t changed. But you-you have changed a great deal.”

Dorothy whirled.

She was just stepping out of her iridescent bubble, her spangled skirt as white as pearl, her hair like spun gold.

“Oh!” Dorothy cried. “Oh! I can hardly believe it’s you!”

Bright blue eyes twinkled up at her. “Of course it’s me, dear. But I would hardly have known you if it weren’t for the shoes! You’re not the same girl at all.”

“I know,” Dorothy said mournfully.

“Why is that, Dorothy? Is that because of Kansas?”

Dorothy’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t know. I think it’s because of growing up-and growing dull.”

“Dull? But you were so strong, so bright and clever!”

“I lost myself,” Dorothy whispered.

The little woman tipped her golden head to one side. “You’ve come back to find yourself, then. And about time. What took you so long?”

“I didn’t know I could come back,” Dorothy said. “And I didn’t think I should! I just-I was having such an awful day-”

“And you ran away?”

“Oh, no,” Dorothy said. “I can’t run away. I’m a grown-up now. Grown-ups don’t run away.” She looked around her at the vivid scenery. “And grown-ups don’t believe in magic.”

“You believe in magic!” the tiny woman said stoutly.

“Well, but-grown-ups in Kansas don’t.”

“Then I think,” the little woman said, putting her hands on her hips, “that Kansas must be a terrible place.”

Dorothy sighed. “It’s not, really… it’s just… oh, I wish I could stay right here and never leave!”

“Why can’t you?”

“I have responsibilities. I’ve made promises.”

Her companion only laughed. “Break them!” she said in her tinkling voice.

“I just-I don’t think I can do that.” Dorothy looked around her. All the little faces had disappeared, except for one brave one peeping over the hedge. But the colors were just as bright, the sweet breeze just as inviting, and there was a glimmer of gold in the distance, winding through emerald fields.

Her companion put a small, cool hand under her arm. “Come, Dorothy. Look!” She turned her around to face the shining bubble. “Let me show you something.”

She lifted her arm and waved at the bubble. The side of it opaqued, its iridescence fading until it turned as gray and hard as a television screen. And there, reflected or projected, Dorothy couldn’t tell, was Kansas.

The vivid green grass on which the bubble sat, and the bright blue of the sky above it, made the farmhouse and the wheatfields and the dusty lane look painfully drab. As Dorothy watched, her mouth open in wonder, the view zoomed through the screen door and into the kitchen. And there, bent over the sink scrubbing potatoes, was…

“It’s me!” Dorothy cried. “But that can’t be!”

The tinkly laugh again. “Of course it can be, Dorothy dear! So little of you was there in the first place-just a shell, really, a shadow-that it cost you nothing to leave that much behind. The main part of you-the real part-is right here!”

Dorothy stared at her own dumpy figure moving about the kitchen. She saw the graying hair, the thickening ankles, the rounded shoulders. Past the barn, she saw the thin plume of dust raised by the tractor, and coming down the lane, a thicker stream of dust whirling behind the school bus. “Oh, no,” she breathed. “Lin!”

She watched her daughter jump down from the bus, wave to her friends, and run across the yard. She could hear nothing, but still her nerves jolted as Lin slammed the screen door. She tossed her backpack into a corner and went to the refrigerator. Dorothy-the shell of Dorothy-turned from the sink with a potato in her hand, and her lips moved.

Lin didn’t even look at her.

Dorothy watched in bewilderment as Lin took her sandwich from the fridge, turned her back on her mother, and ran lightly up the stairs to her room. A moment later, Phil came in and sat at the kitchen table with a newspaper in front of him. He didn’t speak either.

The shell of Dorothy turned back to the sink.

The real Dorothy looked away. It was too painful to watch.

“You see, dear,” her companion said in her ear, very softly, “there’s enough of you there.” She flicked her fingers, and the scene disappeared from the side of the bubble. In its restored shimmer, Dorothy saw herself, looking tall, and slim, and straight.

“Is that the way I really look?” she whispered.

“Of course you do! You’re a lovely woman in the prime of your life!”

Dorothy touched her hair. It curled crisply around her chin and forehead. She smiled, and lines of wisdom and good humor curved around her mouth, brightened her eyes. “The prime of my life,” she whispered.

“Precisely!” The little woman laughed again. “Just as it should be!”

Dorothy looked down at the red shoes. She wiggled her toes to make them sparkle in the sunshine. “The prime of my life,” she repeated. “Just as it should be.”

She looked into the bubble again, but Kansas was gone.

She giggled, and then she laughed. She slipped off the shoes, and her bare toes sank into the soft grass. She hesitated only a moment, and then she picked up the shoes and turned toward the river.

One by one, first the left and then the right, she threw the shoes into the blue water.

They splashed, and floated for a moment, turning and dipping in the current. Then, glittering like rubies in the soft sunlight, they sank, and disappeared.