Old piece I’ve worked on and put away

I’d appreciate any suggestions or comments.

*********

Damn. I didn’t expect it to be this cool. I remember the trail of sweat racing down the back of my cotton shirt at the market just hours ago.

The wind cuts across the Caspian less than a mile away and bringing cool air into the faded pink stucco courtyard. Quite a change during the span of a cab ride. As if answering, a breeze ripples across the pool gathering a last accessory of chilled moisture. My skin rises in greeting.

I weigh my options. The waiter may think the crazy American abandoned her venture if I leave for a shawl. He already repeated my request twice, questioning that I preferred to sit outside in the pending dusk. Rushing in rubber flip-flops, I pass the stunned young man and in my best “talk and point” let him know I will return for the coffee. I receive a kind but internally chiding assessment in his nod as I rush up to my room.

My fingers rapidly weave through the pile of plastic and paper market bags in the corner of the room until I locate the shawl. I pull an artistic construction of sunset colors – soft oranges, flaming pinks, muted reds and purples -  from a torn paper bag. It smells of cigarettes and the bitter odor of the heavy Russian from whom I bought the coin necklace.

“Try it,” he said as he slipped the chain over my head. My eyes closed involuntarily as the pungent smell of overripe onions rushed at me from his raised armpits.

“See? Beautiful. Very old. For beautiful girl. Very young. Fifty manat,” he said and then, leaning in closer, whispered, “first price.”

With one hand, I finger the coins still around my neck remembering the bartering dance we dutifully performed. Both of us smiling, as we knew the outcome: flattery. feigned bashfulness. Wily smile. Arched eyebrow. High-price. Low-price. Middle-priced sale.

His caricature grin even made the body odor bearable. I imagined he came straight from the fairytale gypsies I read about as a child. We looked at our joint reflections in the dust-coated mirror. I had the urge to hug this huge grandfatherly bear of a man, certain we were old acquaintances from my eight-year-old imagination. I studied him more than the necklace as he went through the same routine he’d versed with countless other blue-eyed American and European women. Still, I felt like an exotic beauty in his accented rhapsody.

I stopped short of the hug and simply paid five manat more than I anticipated. The odor still entrenched in the paper bags confirms my choice.

The coins clank against my chest as my left hand releases the pendant. Remembering my pending coffee order, I quickly wrap the shawl and rush through the hotel’s glass doors to my poolside table.

The two young women and man sipping their beers with plates of dried fruits and pistachios left in my absence. A half-empty glass of cherry juice remains among their dishes, along with an assortment of nut shells lying lazily beneath the table. No one  seems in a hurry to clear them.

I sit alone by the pool. Wrapped, book in hand. Finally at peace.

“Are you sure you would not be more comfortable on the inside?” a different waiter asks as he sets the coffee and menu before me. “I do not believe it should rain, but it is getting cooler and dark,”

I’ve never heard comfortable pronounced with quite so many syllables.

“No, I’m comfortable on the outside,” I smile at him, adding the extemporaneous syllables for encouragement. “Is the cool night unusual for the summer?”

I throw in a gesture lowering my hand to the ground and immediately have no idea how it  relates to my question.

“Only sometimes.”

O.K. that’s as much as I get, I guess.

“I’ll have the baked cheese with the honey oranges, please.”

He nods and hurries back inside. I know he finds me impractical sitting in the cold with a shawl and flip-flops. I couldn’t be more giddy, hoping age had turned impractical into eccentric.

Comfortable on the outside. That has a nice ring to it. After months of rebuilding, I am finally comfortable on the outside. You would think it would have been the opposite. Outside appearances are easy. I prided myself on a presentation so coiffed and polished, co-workers, family and friends all forgot the stories they had heard. No one had to be prompted to an awkward exchange. No, an overly enthusiastic smile can distract from tear-swollen eyes better than you think.

But as I rebuilt myself on the inside and started healing, I noticed I was no longer checking the façade. I felt comfortable presenting this person I had become. Maybe even more so than the person I presented prior to emerging from the “unfortunate” year. It’s part of me, inside and out.

I release the book clutched to my chest during my brief exchange with the waiter. I glance down at the slyly smiling portrait of Edna St. Vincent Millay on the cover. I guess she was pleased with her nestled positioning. I snort out loud at my crude, internal joke.

Three pages in, the older waiter sets a plate before me containing a huge slab of firm ivory dripping with honey and vanishes.

How had I overlooked honey all these years? I recall my father occasionally slathering honey on hard disks of canned biscuits, but I assumed that was only when he was saving the last spoons of grape jelly for us. And of course the cheap Central Texas Mexican restaurants served honey in ketchup red or mustard yellow squeeze bottles with coordinating baskets of greasy sopapillas. That honey tasted fine, but it was hardly worth the trouble of prying layers of torn paper napkins from your sticky fingertips.

No, this was not the same honey from my youth. This honey is worth it. This honey is not only sweet and sticky, but exotic. This honey is in Azerbaijan. I am in Azerbaijan, I gleefully remind myself. I’m sitting with my book wrapped in a beautiful shawl by a pool at dusk licking honey from orange slices in Azerbaijan.

Suddenly warm tears spill as my mind projects a mirrored scene: a fourteen-year-old girl in her Texas backyard licking sticky peach nectar from her tips of her fingers. Without thought to appearance or rules, her awkward arms and legs dangled from the diving board. She cherished every moment before the reprimand came from the house that it was too dark to read outside in the cold like a crazy person.

Welcome back girl, you’ve been missed. And this time, savor the sweetness.