In Search of Beauty

All around her, the city was grey, bland, and muddied as the rain fell into tiny puddles, too small to be fun, and too big to be pretty. Storefronts and buildings were closed and quiet; her mother’s car was silent (as was her mother) but for the engine and the little tapping of droplets against the metal. Anise wondered how unremarkable this world could be, sometimes, until, just beyond glass panes of Anderson’s Antiques, she glimpsed a warm light. It came from a lamp, its lampshade made up of a thousand colors of brilliant stained glass,  and though the store looked small, it didn’t look like a store at all. It looked like a home, with its pictures, sculptures, and oak brown bookshelves, even through the rain-splattered car window. Anise knew somehow, in a way that could never be explained, not even with the wisest of words, that she must go in there one day. She did not have to say it out loud to know it or even to rationalize it to herself. It was a simple urge; an instinct, that she knew was right, right in the way that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. It simply was. 

And so, when her mother asked her what she wanted for her ninth birthday a week later, Anise got her wish. Her mother had looked at her with a funny little tilt of her head, the look usually reserved for Felix, Anise’s older brother when he came home late after school, smelling strange and spouting vapid excuses. 

“Why would you want to visit the antique store?” Her mother had asked.

Anise smiled. What could she say and how could she say it? She shrugged. The explanation hardly mattered at any rate, as they were already on their way to the store and Anise had worried she might never get to be ‘on her way’ to that warm-looking place. 

“Because I want to,” she had said, and her mother had sighed. 

“You kids,” she grumbled, but Anise could tell that her mother seemed happy, even if it was just a little bit happier than her ordinary weariness with the world.  

Inside the store, there was a smiling woman with white hair and an old wrinkled face, who welcomed them through the door into the warmth. Immediately, Anise was awed by the sheer amount of dazzling things, that seemed to cover every single inch of space. What a place, she thought. She saw shimmering beads, old faded toys, shining bright old clocks, worn but pretty clothes, and paintings of every sort (oils, watercolors, inks, pastels, and more unidentified materials). They captured portraits of ancient dignified people, the imperious and the joyous, the uptight and the humourous, all the various spectrums of the human condition, captured in portraits. This was a place full of treasure. 

While it was not big, the room was designed in such a way that there seemed thousands of things hidden in little nooks and crannies. Behind a mirror, there would be old toy soldiers, motioning and commanding themselves in what could only have been an invisible war of sorts. Inside a chest, Anise found clothing, and under that, scrapbooks with faded photographs of big families and smiling babies. Surrounding it all were towering shelves of books, who knows how old, each decaying to the touch, spines trembling under her fingers, and pages tearing at the slightest provocation. 

There were also two cats, one thin and tan, wizened with age, and the other black, with shimmering fur and iridescent green eyes. Anise was fond of the second one, and she was sure that that it liked her back. Animals, she had always thought, were not like humans. They were quiet and observant, and they never missed a single thing. 

“You can buy one nice thing, or a few small things,” her mother had told her, in her usual strictness. Anise had nodded dutifully. Surrounded by shelves and boxes and colors, what was she to choose? What she wanted was one day to live in a place like this. If every year she came here and bought just one thing, one nice thing, one precious thing, then she could do it. In twenty years, she could have a room like this one, if on a smaller scale, and she would only be thirty-one. And still, if thirty-one could be counted as an adult, which she was fairly sure it did, and if what her mother had said was true- that adults lived in different ways than children, and the future is unpredictable, no matter how many charts and calendars you use- then she just might have more than twenty things by then anyway. 

Anise had considered the jewelry, which was mysterious and shiny, attractive and promising, but it reminded her too much of her mother, who kept glancing at rubies behind glass panes, and the look in her eyes was making Anise sad. She had thought of the toys, too: there was a beautiful porcelain doll with starry blue eyes and velvet soft blond hair. But in a sense, even though they were strange and old, they were ordinary. They seemed too much like the plastic barbie dolls she had played with at school, or the Happy Meal trinkets her mother got her on occasion. The comic books reminded her of Felix and a little wood-carved dog of her labrador Calypso. She had even asked the woman if the shimmering black cat might be bought- but no, Harriet was not for sale. In the end, what stopped her in her tracks what the painting. 

It was small, no bigger than her two hands, but in it was the prettiest, most vibrant red rose -painted or actual- that Anise had ever known. It was found buried under old books, in the deepest corner of the store, and she had wiped the dust off of the glass with her fingers, not caring if the dust would cling and compress itself under her nails. In the center of the picture was the rose, as rich as a single drop of blood or the cherries on an ice cream Sunday. The rose was surrounded by a dark and shady bush, and perched on the edge of the rose was a white butterfly. It was speckled with grey and black and rendered in such fine detail that she could see its little white spindly legs; it was a kind of butterfly Anise had never seen. 

And nothing else mattered after that, not the dull, rusty metal frame or the look her mother gave her at the price tag, or even the smallness of the birthday cake that she suspected was really just a large muffin, because she had found beauty, and it made the world remarkable again.