Mannequins Through the Window

Mannequins through the Window

By

Sunny Bu

October 23rd, 2013.















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Mannequins through the Window

    She stares back at me through the outdoor café’s glass doors mannequin-still and eyes glinting.  My smile isn’t becoming.  In fact, it’s bromidic.  It’s the false reality and the face she’s showing, which is one pining, pained and puppy-lost.  I feel as if the reality between her and me are two different worlds, that Starbuck’s Coffee shop is between us and her looks the reflection of the false reality of the stereotyped setting.  I’m blurred from the coffee and bicyclists surrounding her, those men whom represent a mainstream lifestyle whereas mine is ground zero compared to theirs seeing I’m from the outside and just a student.

    I see things from the outside too and have to, just as I see her deeper reflection and not her form.  The deeper reflection is my own self.  It’s broken, the soul and heart bleeding and the coldness of reality inner-city cruel.  I could never touch this  mannequin because it’s not real either, but I somehow smile my bromidic smile as her eyes meet mine.

    “Exuse me” I say opening the glass door.  “You’re in my way”, I say again stepping around her.  She heard me, and even saw me in the flesh what with the Bermuda shorts and the scar on my knee.  “A ‘boo-boo’ ”, I recall.  But what of the deeper wounds?

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    “I know they’re homeless and need food and a place to live” one bicyclist mocks whiningly and plaintively.  He’s speaking of ‘the hordes’ across the street from Sarasota’s downtown Starbuck’s and raises his eyes towards them as if it’s their responsibility to feed and house them.  These are the Salvation Army’s ‘homeless hordes’ that gather here.  They sit in Five Points Park and smoke spice.  Or so the local businesses say to have the cops keep an eye on them to contain the eyesore they represent.  They’re the legacy of the city and the center of attention.  So is she, and the bicyclists.

    But by now she’s hidden her face from me.  It’s blocked by a bicyclist’s yellow, squeaky tight spandex shirt and glare of his sparkling  Schwinn racing bike.  I know he’s going somewhere quick, and she’s riding with him, and them.  I have to study so skirted on by and plopped myself at the last table nearest the socially safer Japanese restaurant. 

    That was a place I remember that was real.  Japan and the woman I knew from there reflect in the unreality between them and us now, which is one blinding and spell-binding from both viewpoints.  But what was I doing there? And what am I doing here?

    Their cordial coffee relations end with a cacophonous clanging of metal chairs stridently scraping on concrete.

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Suddenly, nearby fire engines and ambulance sirens penetrate the air with screams.  A station is around the corner.  But if here early enough-6a.m-peace blankets you warmly.  Unfortunately, it just as suddenly ends when the city dump truck rumbles by.  The driver gives me a honk and waves to alert me-just like the ambulance now-that this is the real reality.  But the dump truck driver’s smile is becoming, as if saying “I see you studying” and “Glad you’re hard at work, too”.   

      As if frightened, the bicyclists bustle through the glass doors, the mannequin in tow.  I feel her push her clanging chair gently beneath the metal table just as becoming as the dump truck driver’s smile and as if to say “I see you, too”.  A warm feeling stirs me like coffee. 

          ___________        ___________        ___________

    But there’s a colder feeling now as I walk through the café doors and look at my face in the glass reflection.  It’s a face I don’t want anyone to see, or know.  It’s the face of the past.  I was once a mannequin, but now I’m an outsider socially and economically and live outside the mainstream.  I push myself away as I open the door and step into reality.

      Outside, the sunlight is an impasto painting on the pink and mauve condos and the scintillating Mediterranean chalky-white

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color of the nearby Selby Library.  This is the veneer of Sarasota, Florida.  It’s a Hollywood veneer.  The plasticity is like L.A.  But what is reality compared to gastromancy and gourmet restaurants which tourists from Europe savor and businesses predict with future earnings?  Whole Foods and outdoor café’s reflect their predictions as crowds flood there now in downtown Sarasota.

    “Excuse me, do you have a dollar?” a homeless woman asks.  She’s plump and well fed and dirty, but I prefer not to call them homeless and sublimate my feelings.  They call them transients along the west coast. 

    “Yeah” I say after the uplifting experience at Starbuck’s.  “Here” and I hand her a buck and some change.

    “Oh, Thank you sir!” she says elatedly and skips along, probably to the park to buy some spice.

    Panhandling is something I’m familiar with, though.  I’ve lived in Seattle for seven years before.  There it’s a profession and an exigency for the downtrodden of the maritime drug culture.  I’ve even seen transients train dogs to hold out hats in their mouths to passersby on the sidewalks near Pike’s Place Market while they slept snugly.



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    There they hung out in another park, however, one called Pioneer Square, where tourists sauntered as did horses and buggies and even Native Americans.  Big, bad bike cops did, too, due to the fact the transients stalked the sidewalks and it was near the business district and dangerous, as I found out one night on duty.

    A night security guard on my rounds, I watched from the lobby one night as a transient slumped on the outside stairs entrance bleeding profusely from a knife wound, or so the paramedics said.  Not able to leave my post, I called 911 and an ambulance arrived with its sirens stifled and shuffled the transient through the back doors like a cadaver a morgue freezer.  He was pronounced dead on arrival, I later found out in the paper, and I had to wash his blood down the gutter as if it never happened and was just a blur.

    A third shift worker, my life blurred by just the same.  I could feel it draining from my face each time I climbed the steps to go to work just like the transients blood.  Was I, too, meant for the gutter? I glanced at the tourists and shops along downtown Seattle overlooking the Olympic Mountains scintillating in the brilliant Northwest sunsets and blue reflecting like Japanese watercolors by Horishige and Hokusai.  The striking colors splashed crisply and poignantly against the skyline just like the

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artists’ woodcuts and now the wooden mannequins that reflected in the shops and on the streets.  It felt, once again, unreal compared to reality and a fantasy world one couldn’t touch.   

    Just as I couldn’t touch the mannequin’s face at Starbucks and the one I saw one day coming up the outside stairs fresh from a Japanese watercolor.  She waved and smiled at me standing duty that day as she was new and on her way to her first day on the job at the office on the 8th floor.  A mug of Starbuck’s coffee shone bright yellow in her hand and led her like a beacon.  I could’ve waved but since I was on duty a nod “Good morning” was all that was needed, particularly because I also had to keep my hand on the page of the novel I was reading.  This perhaps made her think “Oh, he’s taking notice of me and marking me down in his log”, which I really would’ve liked to have done (although more so in my diary).  That is to say, which is what I should’ve done-mark her arrival down in the log-but being a Pacific Northwest security agent there seemed to be no such excess precautions in this particular neighborhood we guarded.  The only concern was intellectual property and computers and transients. 

    “How are you doing in the rain?”  I managed to squeeze in as the lobby’s elevator doors opened.  Once again, my word order

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and syntax were screwed up.

    “Just fine” she squeezed back crisply as the elevators winked shut just like her starry eyes. 

    Her name was Ms. Kitano-as I later found out by looking in the directory since she was a lawyer-and she was a Nisei, or second generation American born Japanese.  Every day she arrived promptly at 6:20a.m., probably because Starbuck’s opened at 6:00 and the fact she wanted to beat traffic.  Either that or she was a dedicated, hard worker.  I rather gathered she was the latter because she drove the sporty Japanese made Mazda that I espied in the underground parking garage as I made my last rounds.  Plus, she was Japanese.

    “So silly, me” I said to myself.  “How are you doing in the rain?” you dope.  Like rain’s a reality none has to face here in Seattle.  Day after day it rains.  And why would she be in it? 

    I was going through the ‘crash’, or the period of depression when I came to the end of my 7p-7a graveyard shift.  Coffee was the raison d’etre’.  I had to stay awake to survive due to my boss’s surprise attacks so drank five cups a night.  But the other reason was to keep on my toes mentally as well so I could hear him coming.

   

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    My boss was a martial artist and having his own keys to the building, sometimes snuck up on you ninja style to assure you were awake, which I always was because I, too, toted a mug of Starbuck’s coffee before I arrived.  Only mine was a thermos.  Yet then came the 6-7a crash when the biological clock stopped no matter what.  It was also the time I had to look professional and stand my post. 

    My shift finally ending, I mumbled “Morning” to the 1st shift guard as I lumbered down the front steps and walked to the bus stop.  I slumped my baggage-looking body in the seat far to the back.  Here, I could soliloquize in my sleep

    “Could I meet with you for a cup of coffee?” I rehearsed on my way home on the metro.  “Would you like to meet sometime?” I said again.  No, those are called polite, indirect speech.  How about something more like imperative statements such as “Let’s meet sometime” or “I must have coffee with you!”.  No, too eager beaver.

    Days passed and eventually turned months before I’d attempt any moves.  I wasn’t sure.  The starry eyes frightened me.  They seemed scared.  Maybe she felt I was unbecoming.  Perhaps my hair was too military-like or my torso too stout or



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my nose bulbous.  Self-consciousness afflicted me.  I knew, however, that she knew I was single and I knew she was, too.  Ms. Kitano and Associates on her office doors gave this away and the fact I assessed her slender ring-less middle finger as she held her coffee that first day.  It also made things more apparent when she threw me a backward smile on her way to the elevator one day, too.  I was in one of my low moods and her look sublimated me like a dog.

    I decided then to learn Japanese.  The whole nine-yards of etiquette, culture norms, food, history and art were included.  In the process one thing I’d learned was one way to get to an Asian woman was through intellectual status.  My image had to change.  School called and the easiest subject to study, the Fine Arts.

    “What are you doing?”  she surprised me one day as she popped out of the stairway on her way from the parking garage and saw me furtively drawing chiaroscuro of a fat nose on my paper. 

    “Doodling” I said shakily.  Perhaps she heard my quaver or saw my hand tremble as I imagined her lithe, little hand dexterously extend towards mine, the fingers feeling antenna-like  and attenuating  brush my hand caressingly, but which actually was my other fat hand concealing it.

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    “That’s nice” she quipped and squeezed through the mouse hole of the elevator doors.

    Nonetheless, I was determined.  “It’s a portrait” I said as she twinkled with her starry eyes from the dim elevator.  That’s when the other hand did become real.

    “Oh, let me see!” she whispered and the elevator’s doors cleaved open just like our lives.  After getting the nerve to ask her out, we went to the Seattle Art Museum and the Playhouse Theater and ate seafood at Pike’s Place Market along Elliot Bay.  We took trips to Tokyo where I learned of green tea ceremonies and purification and ate soba noodles and drank the interminably intoxicating drink called Saki, where one day I drank too much and fell and cut my knee and she bent down saying tenderly, “Oh, Let me kiss your boo-boo”.  We also drank deeply of each others’ intoxicating love.

    Until that bloody day I can’t see from the reflection in the front entrance glass doors and the reality of the news.  Right before dinner, the 6 o’clock news, downtown Seattle, a disgruntled office worker gone berserk and unloaded .  The covered bodies were toted down the stairs, cameras flashing this time all the way down the steps to the back doors of the



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screaming ambulances, where now scintillated blood stained white sheets and lifeless mannequins.  I was off duty and a client with a grievance shot her and three other associates dead, including the guard.

¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬      ______________    ______________    ______________

    Could I remember what happened the day before I would because the same reflection stares at me from the mannequin at Starbuck’s now, eyes grave still.  The same crowd surrounds her though it’s another day and I in my safer side nearer the Japanese restaurant.  But it’s fifteen years later and I’m wearing a suit and a tie since school’s done and it’s my second week at the new job.  I’m an elementary school teacher now.

    But it’s over and I crossed myself.  By this I mean I’ve had to cross over, which is something therapists say means changing your identity and direction and shaking yourself out of your old self.  But outwardly I’m still me without a real inward change as the light blue eyes indicate from the other side.  They rivet me to attention and her eyes lock with mine.

    “No way” I say to myself amazedly, as I scrape my chair softly and tuck it gently under my table.  “No way will I let this reflection blur my vision now”, I say again, as I get up from my chair and saunter softly along the outside café’s railing towards

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the glass doors.  I see her real reflection beaming, my eyes now brighter and beaming, too.  I throw a look at the glass doors and see myself, her, sitting together and the image the same as the first time I saw her minus the bicyclist.  Skirting around her, I push open the glass doors and in so doing throw her a backward glance, just like she did that last day I saw her at the office whispering “I love you”, as she passed through our reflections in the glass doors, just like I do into the real world.  Yet I wonder if she’s real, too, and if she and I will ever have the time to meet and perhaps drink green tea at a purification ceremony and cleanse ourselves from the past the reflections broke.