morethanenoughtruth

It’s hard to remember now the first time I saw Denise.  One thing that sticks in my memory was the frumpy dress she wore as a concession to the job interview.  It had the apologetic look of something hung for too many years on a wire hanger.  After that day it was over a year before once again I saw her in a dress, and that too was calculated to accommodate and to influence.  What she liked to wear was running shorts, the shiny, fitted kind, and a T-shirt with the neck and sleeves cut out so she could stretch and move.  She was a mover for sure, a mover and a shaker, not one to be fettered or restricted, ever.  Denise hadn’t worked for me a week before all of that was firmly understood.  If I was to benefit from her expertise, things would be done her way.

Her dark curly hair, inheritance from her Italian father, was cut to softly frame her face, but usually she shoved it up under a braided headband to keep it off her neck while she ran her daily sixteen miles.  She was fanatic about those miles, convinced that if she missed even one day she would regain the pounds she had lost, compliments of her long fingers and sensitive gag reflex.  I learned after we became friends that she had gained the weight after her mother died.  Denise and her mom were not speaking.  Hospitalized and mortally ill, Mom begged her to come and see her to make peace.  Denise only said, “Later maybe,” and then suddenly her mother died.

Denise told me, with dry fixed eyes, how guilt had summoned the fat and slathered it over her body in great quivering blobs, insulation against her shame.  Shame because she hated her mother, with her long blonde hair, azure eyes and sweet southern speech that never could seem to deter Daddy from having his way with her big sister.  She hated her mother for her ineffectiveness, her softness, her gentleness, all the things Denise would never allow herself to be or feel.  Arms crossed like breast armor, she paced as she talked, about how she never let Daddy touch her.

“He would get drunk and try to sweet talk me onto his lap, begging me for just-a-little-kiss.”  Her eyes flashed hatred, lips curled, the taste of scorn acrid in her mouth.  “I would fold my arms up like this (poking her elbows out, coupled with an upward thrust of chin), and it worked.  If he grabbed for me, I ran.”  Later, she showed me her fat photos, grotesque images only vaguely resembling her now thinner face, only the fair skin and gold-brown eyes begging comparison.  It’s too bad I didn’t understand the fatal connection then, so early in our story, between Denise’s dead and unmourned mother and my own long blonde waves, my blue-green chameleon eyes, and my slow, soft southwest drawl.

Denise was the answer to every employer’s prayer.  I had bought and expanded a tiny business and was suffering from too much success, too much growth, too fast.  When Denise showed up, the last bookkeeper applicant on my interview list, she was just too, too much.  She came to my small time Laguna Beach bookstore-coffeehouse from the renowned South Coast Plaza, shopping center Empire of the Segerstroms, and had performed impressive financial feats for many businesses bigger and richer than Fahrenheit 451.  Confidence radiated about her like a force field, scattering assurance as she moved and gestured, conquering any room she entered.  I had to have her.  We fenced some about pay, but I didn’t try very hard.  She had me in the bag.  Before she left my office, the job was hers, and I had a savvy accounting person on staff, who would shepherd me through the myriad mysteries of payroll, financial statements, taxes, everything.  When Denise demanded a free rein, I agreed, happy to apply my own serious effort where my heart sang, buying and selling wonderful books, brewing serious coffee, and dreaming up events to tantalize the mind and delight the soul.

Denise showed up every morning at 4 AM, and amid a flurry of computer printouts, stacks of invoices, books coming and books going, ignoring the din of grinding coffee beans and musicians warming up, with the phone plugged into one ear and the other ear scanning for ambient information, she performed the miraculous.  She made peace with all the creditors, set up payment plans, kept an eye on the early shift of sleepy eyed employees, and successfully passed on to me her confidence in our secured future as a viable business entity.

I appreciated her.  The employees adored her.  The delivery people tried to date her.  The accountant sent her roses and proposed marriage.  The Alta-Dena Dairy man accosted me in my office, flexed his lovely black neck muscles, tensed his jaw, and accused me of making her work too hard.  I didn’t resent his passionate protest; I understood.  Denise had us all, every one of us, in her pocket.  She was afraid of no one, matching verbal assaults, parry for parry, with the most hostile of collection specialists.  They were less than no match for her.  She listened to everyone’s problems, asked the questions that mattered, applied her interest in people as liberally as Miracle Whip to the dry bread of our pitiful little lives.

And then the unthinkable happened…unthinkable but unmistakable.  She wanted to be my friend.  I couldn’t believe it.  Me, feminine translation of nerd, a frumpy middle-aged grandmother, retired engineer, business owner to be sure, but Denise couldn’t have any illusions about all that.  She worried about how hard I worked, how many hours, what I should eat.  She lured me away for long talks and relaxing cocktails and light healthy suppers.  Her interest in me was a heady elixir, applied soporifically to my vulnerable ego.  She asked endless questions about me, everything surrounding me, how I got to be the person I am, how I felt about everything and everybody in my life.  Nothing was too forbidden to be discussed, no private terror too discreetly hidden to elude her interest.

As the summer of 1992 approached the dog days of August, Denise distilled the essence of what she had learned of me in a poem written for my birthday and attached it artfully to a poster of a small girl child with long blonde hair sifting sand on the beach.

The poem read, in part:

“Dorothy by the sea,
Her eyes bright with wonder,
Does she dare to live today,
To bathe in the ocean’s water,
To run freely with the seagulls,
To fear not the ocean’s waves,
To be all that she has ever been?

Dorothy by the sea,
Will you use the sand of life
to build castles or let it sift
through your fingers?
I too believe the star’s light lives.
I believe in you.”

It was dated July 31, 1992.  On July 13, 1992, just two weeks and four days before, Denise had begun her artfully contrived six figure embezzlement of my beautiful store, a loss that would lead ultimately to bankruptcy and divorce.

After 25 years of light and life in Laguna Beach, Fahrenheit 451 Bookstore was soon to be a memory, and I, who had dared to follow my bliss and embody my dream, had entered a Twilight Zone where Rod Serling’s voice posed, and continues to pose, an endless litany of questions, but not a single answer.