The Bell and the Bottle

The Bell and the Bottle

She always looked forward to hearing the bell tingle when she walked into the musty store. Full of the usual things, like croquet blankets forgotten by children who curled up in them. Chipped plates of small and large sizes used to serve hungry families who lived in perfect cookie-cutter houses encircled by white picket fences and freshly mowed grass. All the sad and lost things packed up in boxes and adopted out. She was, however, the adopter, searching for the most loneliness of all.

The store had become her favorite place to hunt for treasures, from a pair of 1930s earrings to vinyl rock and roll records, she thrived by the calling of old and forgotten items, remembrances of the past. Today, it was glass vases. She had taken a flower arrangement class and needed vases to display her bouquets. The volunteer assistant, a young lady with striped, purple hair and tattoos, saw her walk in and went over to greet her. She had been there since the store opened two years ago and she had taken a shine to this young lady and often brought her a Starbucks coffee. They talked about the usual things: the weather, the town gossip, the high prices of gasoline.

She didn’t need to ask where the glass items were. She knew. She walked down the narrow corridor, walking on stained dirty carpet. It brought back memories. On the back shelf, drinking glasses and ashtrays sat. Rummaging through the shelf, she moved them to get to the very back in hunt for vases. Her fingers, barely reaching the back,  felt something taller than the other items. It had a wide bottom and narrow neck of a vase, jackpot! It was as exciting as hitting the jackpot at the slots in her favorite casino, well maybe not but close to it. She lifted it straight up as to not knock off the other glass items. It was beautiful. Not clear but crackled and vintaged and waxed as to tighten the seal to keep water out. Very odd for a vase but as she looked closer, it wasn’t a vase, but a bottle that could hold drinks, like Tab and RC Cola. Although she couldn’t use it as a vase, she knew she couldn’t give it back. There was a tug and a familiarity to it, she felt as if she held it before, a déjà vu. Then she saw it, a piece of paper inside. She had a difficult time opening the waxed seal, but years on the sea helped stripped the wax. She pulled out the paper and gasped.

The 1960s was a decade of transformation and revolution. Hippies, Kennedy, and Vietnam. Her hair was long and Chestnut, a fall cry from the short, gray-haired old woman she’d become. Even so, she kept her Moxy throughout the years, ignoring the outside skeleton and wrinkled skin and brown spots that lived on her hands. She was still beautiful. That beautiful long hair is what attracted him to her at a political demonstration against Vietnam. They fell fast and hard.

They smoked pot and made love to the songs of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs while heading for the waves. California offered love, freedom, and Jesus. Adults called them lazy bible- thumping hippies designed to warp the future generations of children, a menace to society. They couldn’t be more wrong. Sometimes they would lie together after a vigorous round of lovemaking and dreamt of places they wanted to explore. The world was open with promises of roads flowing with milk and honey and the promises of serpentless paradise.

Other vagabonds considered them the “It” couple. They put each other on a pedestal and knew no one would ever push them off. They were perfect. They danced in the mud at concerts. Others made love, others did drugs and danced in a hallucinated stupor. It was the age of love, and they had tons of it. Their love was intoxicating. Both were each other’s first and she cried after the first time they made love. It was the high of first love and nothing would ever change that.

Until it did.

He left the next summer, only a note stayed behind. The words cut. “I feel my path is leading me in a different direction. I love you but I must go my own way. I will always remember you.” This was love? What happened to forever? What happened to making love everyday as if it was the first time?  How dare he leave her. His promises were void; his leaving was impossible. When they met, he did say he wanted to explore other faraway places but never did she feel he would not include her. Vegas, crooners, Stardust. She was no longer his desire; the desert called, and he accepted. Words meant nothing, pedestals crumbled, integrity gone.

It took two years to catch her breath. She went back home to her parents but wasn’t welcomed. The hippie child crawled back home devastatingly with hippie beliefs and hippie clothes and a hippie bible. She didn’t argue. She willed herself to her parent’s beliefs, parent’s clothes, and parent’s orthodox religion. Her first love was her first heartbreak, and everyone feels that, but parents sometime forget. Just get over it.

She would frequently walk the beach looking for shells she would make necklaces with multi-colored yarn and tight, nooselike knots. Sometimes she would stand on the pier and watch the people get baptized in the shallow, murky blue water. When they emerged, they had joy in their faces, and some would weep in the baptizer’s arms like they were hugging Jesus himself. How much she wanted this joy. Everyone advised her to let the grief go as if a shattered heart could glue itself together. They knew nothing.

Sitting at the yellow Formica kitchen table she caught a glimpse of an empty, tall glass bottle, probably one that delivered milk to the house. She reached for the bottle.

It couple

First the laughs, the kiss, the mud. I knew you were my It

Smiling strangers and validation from others, we were It

Making love, surfing buses, California oceans, Golden Gate Bridge, deserts, and Vietnam

We were air, untouchable

It, not It, It, not It

It started to fade. The pedestals crumbled. He saw I was not It

My lover, my best friend, saw me in the rear-view mirror. He kept going.

My hope of my last first kiss extinguished. I felt you drifting on the sea. You ran from baptism.

Decisions. You followed your dreams while I drowned in the waves. I was not It.

Crying, she could barely make out her own words on the paper, but she felt like they were good words. Goodbye words. She curled the paper and slid it into the bottle. The next day she took her usual walk to the pier where salvation was taking place. She took the bottle and pitched it into the sea.

The bell tingled.