2)More again, lost on a stranger

Something Southern was happening. An inauguration. Small bits of staging began to appear, in place for a show. Theatre in the round. Then full wall and ceiling enclosure, and gradually block the wings. Geek. What is expected of me. I'm a mule from The Music Man. It's all I know.
___________
There would be another new bookseller soon, after me. But her arrival would be an important social debut for "small town" Nashville---that is, the elite.

The older women in the back office, who kept the accounts, tracked and ordered books, and wrote our paychecks, had babysat the debutante a mere 15 or 20 years ago, had her to their own childrens' birthday parties, watched her grow. They all knew her family well and I gathered it was an important Nashville family.

Now Mariah was all grown up and like a friend to them, especially to Martha, the book-keeper, and Eleanor, who was about to be demoted from book-buyer to book-seller. Eleanor, my fellow inebriate.

They were talking to her on the phone every other day and reporting back to those of us who loitered at the information counter.
Mariah might take a job at the florists across busy Hillsboro Avenue.
She changed her mind.
Mariah is coming sooner, or she was coming later.

Mariah is coming for lunch, Martha told the claque at info. You'll get to see her.

Many of these booksellers were happy too. They'd heard of Mariah, or knew her older brothers. Maybe they thought their bookstore life was about to change importantly. It always can, when someone new is coming on board.

Why was this a debut? She was an enigma because she'd attended a private, experimental school at Vanderbilt from pre-school to her high-school graduation. She'd gone to synagogue instead of church. Her last name meant nothing to the youngest booksellers, until someone explained about the Maye Hosiery mill, which had been sold a decade earlier and was now out of business. For 80 years the mill had employed hundreds of people. It was fondly remembered , in spite of everything I suppose.

Mariah spent four years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor studying Creative Writing, Theatre, and German. Independently she'd become an expert horticulurist. (Her father made the corny, off-color joke, so she liked to repeat it: 'You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think'.) She had a large, waist high work table in the enclosed front porch of her house, where she dried flowers and made artful arrangements, reefs.

After her graduation, she'd spent two years working in a flower shop in the city-state of Hamburg.

Her Jewish parents, grandparents, and two older brothers all endured this bravely, even defiantly, never speaking to one another of their worries. Mariah called home once a week. That was her rule, and it was never to be on the same day of the week or at the same time of the day or night. Otherwise they might panic if she were delayed or forgot to call.

She let people think she was an Arab in Germany, where she worked in a flower shop. In Germany, at a bar, she and her friends joined some jovial group of young people and " after someone visited our table and then turned their back to leave, one of these strangers made like a pistol with his thumb and finger and sneered: "Jew. Pow pow!"

She moved to Turkey, where there was a hut-dwelling family that happily accepted her and let her stay for a month or two. Long enough to list off the names of their five children, cousins, in-laws...

One of the five children was studying in London, hence the primitive accommodations. On her way home she spent a week in London, and dreaded meeting this man, but then all went well and they spent all that time fucking at the Mayflower.

For years afterwards he sent her letters in beautiful hand-painted envelopes.
______

"Guess what?" Julie Yarborough announced a week ahead of time. "Mariah Maye was at my 5th birthday party."

"What, really? She was at mine too," Carter said.

"My parents got out some pictures last night and showed me. She was extraordinary, she looks like a doll. Kinda creepy, like. The cutest little girl I've ever seen, I am not exaggerating! She must have been like three or four, oh she looked so ethereal, so ...seraphic."

This was the way with Julie, the cello player. She had a way with words you never heard before. Seraphic?

Carter asked, "Was I at your party?"
"I don't think so."
He laughed his monster laugh. "No I wasn't"


Martha, one of the older women who had an office in back, overheard.

"Julie, you should bring that picture in next Wednesday. Try to remember to do that. Mariah will love that. I'd love to see that too. I remember her as a tot, you're right she was a doll. Don't forget to bring that in, ok?"

"Ok!" Julie had long red hair and blue eyes. She was slender and beautiful, kind, mannerly as a princess. You didn't even think of her unless she stood before you speaking.
____
Mrs. Davis, the owner of the store, teased that I wouldn't be "the kid" anymore. But that I'd continue my training with Mariah.

I received this as a jolt. Fitting in with the crowd was one thing, having a singular relationship with this Mariah Maye might require me to speak in small talk, in another language and in another culture.
________
She started at the bookstore two weeks after me, while I was still bewildered and afraid of everyone. It was summer in Nashville and for two months there hadn't been a cloud in the sky. People joined me now in longing for the sun to go out.

Martha ---who would save my life a few years later---brought her over to me, where I was shelving "You Might Be A Redneck If..." books.

I stood up and lo.
____
Mariah Maye's dark brown hair was thick and tossled, fallen down to her shoulders. She looked aggrieved and exhausted and afraid, like she'd just finished a night of belly dancing. Doped by endorphins, but still alert, like she'd been fending off groping hands.

Her brown eyes seemingly shy, but frankly shading me with the balm of maidenly approval.
___
Past where her eyes were just slightly crossed, I saw the shaky willfulness and uneven temperament.

She was imperfectly beautiful. The possibility that she considered herself unattractive made me wolfish for a second, then when she spoke in that quackish voice of hers my heart fell and my brain released an overwhelming chemical concoction that turned me into a yearning, speechless uber luft mensh.

She was very sexual, standing only five foot five with the a solid frame and good posture of a drum majorette. She was a swimmer in her family pool, once in the morning, half hour at night.

She looked up as she shook my hand, and it was a long instant but only an instant. My self-talk stopped for good. Gone like the hiccoughs.

And I was wounded. Immediately suffering due to this supreme, or penultimate, indifference of the merely acquainted. A form of "where have you been ...?" And I could already hear the Last Word, that waits on every woman's tongue...

In this long instant, then the white-veiled bride. There was the violinist. I was the floating bride-groom forever unable to get his feet back on the ground.

I knew I'd win and I knew I'd lose too. I seemed to know everything but the details of the next five years.

Her eyes, Jerome! Two dishes of light for the lapping, and two sparkling diamonds that would be the same if she lived to be one hundred years old.

There may have been a readiness to rule, still a secret to herself. Much later, during a foolish bookstore coup, this maid stepped in to be boss---inventory manager, actually---and became all the more worried that she was not married.

She'd seen it all. I couldn't tell at the time and would never have imagined, but this young woman was self-conscious at age 24, not to be married.

After our introduction I led her to "main service" and everyone was waiting. She was introduced and then Ty, one of the most at-home-in-the-world people I've ever met, asked if Mariah was an exchange student? Here at Vanderbilt?

Her temper flared but she kept it concealed and then chided herself for her impatience. This was the way in small town Nashville, after all. (But to ask a stranger that, right off the bat, she told me a year later,...well, who wouldn't know that was offensive!?)

People guessed she was from Morocco, Lebanon, perhaps "the south of Spain".

"Mariah? Is that a family name?" he asked.

"No. My middle name, Catherine, is a family name ," she said very softly. It was an old, practiced response to a question that vexed her.

"It's spelled 'M-a-r-i-a' on the schedule."

"It's pronounced Mariah, though."

"You look like a Maria, sort of."

She was gratified when someone sang the famous line, "They call the wind Mariah ..."

"My grandmother was Scottish," she said.

When she'd visit the store on her days off , dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, I'd watch her, rapt and heart-broken. The other fellows at Information...why weren't they weeping? Mariah Maye had breath-taking hips, magnificent curves, a full, heavy bosom. Days she wore her hair up were melancholy. She had hair I wanted to pile into my mouth, or wrap around my cock.

Va-Va-Voom! You guys ever read Archie Comics? No? Means hubba-hubba.

________
Her mother ran the gift shop at Cheekleaf, Nashville's botanical garden and museum. I knew the place because my sister was a waitress in the Pineapple Room. One day I drove over on the pretext of visiting Jane but it was my interest in seeing Mariah's mother. She turned out to be one of the top ten, most beautiful women I've ever seen. One day I would have a photograph of her holding a three year old Mariah in her lap and I would simply marvel, wondering at loves physical location, like how my soul is right here. Where it bothers me like a tooth.