I almost didn’t open the letter, it was so forbidding – a dark brown envelope with even darker ink. Something in me knew it would be a summons, and so I laid it on the mantel and pretended it wasn’t there for the whole last week of October. Or tried to. But letters like that aren’t easily forgotten.
When at last I tore it open, I read these words:
Come to my house. You know when and where. I’ll expect you.
Oh, crumbs! I thought. I seized my trusty fountain pen and tried to compose a delicate rejection but the words dried up and the ink smudged the back of my hand. I would just have to go.
She would be dour, I thought, and so I have two choices as to dress: a bright smack of color or a neutral gloomy fog. Puckishly, I chose the former – a red flamenco skirt, turquoise jewelry dripping from my wrists, a pink camellia tucked behind my ear. On a whim I purchased a second flower to present to her. That would either tickle or enrage her, I knew, and I didn’t really mind which.
When she opened the door and looked into my face, I understood immediately just how foolish were all of my efforts, all of my flowers, all of my resistance. I was a bonfire that realizes suddenly it is a candle standing in a gale. Instantly, the wattage of my skirt and jewelry, of my gaudy bravado, dimmed. I handed her the camellia and she took it without a word, gesturing me into her dark house and further into her dark sitting room. You won’t be surprised to learn that she is one of those steely New Englanders who don’t turn on a light until they can’t rise without stumbling. Nor heat, either, until their fingers fumble in the cold.
I sat down on an ancient article of furniture and felt its springs grope upward like hard, questing fingers. I wriggled and offered a comment about the weather. Still she said nothing. I chirped a few syllables about a mutual acquaintance, but to no avail.
Time, as any child knows, can run or walk, depending on how you are spending it. I am inclined to be frivolous, a quality which those who love me call endearing, but which can irritate and vex those who don’t. I have many faults: I prattle, I fidget, I laugh over nothing. But I found I could do none of this in that dark room, with that silent hostess. There was not even a cup of tea to alleviate the austere quiet, and every comment I ventured sounded ridiculous to my ears as soon as it was uttered. I thought I would go quietly, coldly mad in that room!
We sat, and I listened to the clock tick. I heard a bird whistle, a plane rumble, my own heart thump. Eventually, I gave up the frantic search for something to say. From time to time, we looked at each other, and always those hooded eyes and that unsmiling mouth seemed to warn me not to disturb the quiet. I noted that her hair was pulled back so severely it made her head appear threadbare, like a worn cushion. Her clothes were as simple and unglamorous as a nun’s habit, but of such a curious color I found myself captivated by it: a combination of midnight blue, chocolate brown, and shoe-polish black that shifted as she moved (and I would hardly swear to it, but I thought I spied a hint of squid’s ink purple once when she went to the window to adjust the curtain). I studied the room and my eyes grew accustomed to the twilight. There were no pictures, no brick-a-brack or trimmings to mar the stern walls and the bare, dutiful floor. And still we sat without injuring the silence.
After a time, a curious thing occurred: I began to breathe the room. Or, perhaps I should say that the room began to breathe me. I sank into a slower pulse and felt my mind mimic it, and then join with it. The half-light seemed, for the first time, a gentle thing – a kind of mercy after so much glare. The cold made little blankets of halted time around everything, and suddenly there were avenues I hadn’t noticed before into the world of dreams. I could follow the scuttle of a dead oak leaf into a vision. I could trace one long brush of storm cloud into a fantasy. The long night was a sweeping black stairway into a hall filled with cherished and long-gone friends. I found myself at last comfortable in a place between sun and snow, between dusk and dawn, between this life and other lives. I sat on that ancient settee and pulled up a thick rug of turf over my ears and, like any bear at the mouth of winter, slept.
Without warning, she shook me and placed a dark glass into my hand. “Sherry,” she remarked. “Drink it through your teeth.”
I was still, at least on a spiritual level, wrapped in turf and fancies, and it took me a moment to grasp the glass and contemplate that last odd comment. But I suppose it is a mark of just how different I felt now than when I had first come in, that I obeyed her command without question. The sherry was good. No, it was excellent. By the third sip, I knew it was the best I’d ever tasted. By the time I’d drained my glass, I knew I’d been given a rare gift – and even more when I felt a pearl strike my teeth. I rinsed it carefully in my mouth and then admired it in my palm.
“For you,” she said, and the ghost of a smile crossed her features.
Just then the door opened and a smiling woman with silver hair and merry blue eyes came in carrying a candle. The room flared into being again in its light. And the woman herself seemed to shed silvery sparks as she moved. I looked the question at my hostess, still dazzled by the sherry and the pearl, but surprised and pleased to see that she had pinned the pink camellia to her blouse.
“My sister,” she said, pulling a chair into our orbit and gesturing to that lovely woman with the candle. “My sister, December.”
And so my visit with November turned out, after a very unpromising start, to be one of the strangest and most wonderful visits of my life so far – and one that I knew I would be glad to repeat every year in the late autumn until the end of my days.
