Groundhog Day - Part One
At the back of the store's window display, a narrow, concave door, nestled flush in its concave wall, silently yawns and a window-dresser enters, steps up onto her platform. The swinging door and her ascent are highly noticeable disruptions of her cramped, posed world, but across the street and one story beneath her, Whit hasn't yet noticed her arrival. He is strategically considering his unwieldy sandwich (here bulging like a bluffing toad, there collapsing and retreating from its doom), and so seconds still remain before he is destined to see her for the fateful first time, a few more seconds corralling slippery, sheepish lettuce before -- tickled by a silent blur in their periphery -- his eyes rise.
Her back is to him when he first sees her.
She floats overhead, one story up, across the street, through two panes of glass, her image staticky through the intervening, mammoth, spinning tops of snow. She stands alone (but for a half-dozen headless dwarves) in a semi-cylinder of pale yellow light on the far side of the gray-green gloaming that backdrops evening snow in this city. Whit's helium eyes tug up his bowed head, though his lower jaw remains open, sandwich-magnetized. Through 30-degree air, he gazes skyward, 30 degrees up, as at a low-streaking comet spraying omens like spores from an airborne seed-pod in April, or at a condemned building squatting into a time-lapse cloud of consuming black dust. Her back is still to him; he has not yet seen her face. She twists and tiptoes gingerly among headless children in athletic or playful poses. Around her they catch balls or jauntily plump their stubby fingers into denim back pockets or leap into a wire-suspended caper of permajoy or perform headless headstands. She kneels in front of one cloth tot, its arms akimbo, and begins to strip the sexless toddler, working from its velcro'd boots up to a goofy hat suspended atop no head. She balances the frilly, horned cap on her own (relatively Neanderthal) head, and Whit smiles, open-mouthed, as her hat slowly slides to one side.
The sandwich untasted, his palms settle onto the cool copper of the restaurant's window-front counter. He leans slightly forward on the tippy wicker stool and, her front still unrevealed, something remarkable happens: he does not superimpose upon her the features of another. Until she turns, she will have no face. A minor accomplishment, to be sure. But for Whit, for the first time in 25 months, vicious memory dozes at its post, and a particular reflex of hope and sorrow is not triggered: he is not imagining that the window-dresser about to turn and face him will be his wife, returned to earth, burbling loving, laughing apologies for the evil misunderstanding (it's over, Whitty, God has agreed to set everything right again).
She squats, tilting her head to balance the falling cap. She wears some fashionable variety of jeans that stop short where the belt loops should be, and so her blue denim waistline drops and rises again to reveal an arc segment of smooth gray cotton and a thin knobbed strip of winter-pale spine, before modesty lowers the dark red curtain of her sweater. And still Whit's imagination is held in check by some bright, wise angel.
The window-dresser stands, the cap finally drops, and her light brown hair falls only so far and no farther, and he feels no disappointment that it is not Claire's hair. The girl fiddles with a dummy. She waves her fist at it when the new cap won't stay in place, and this threat does the trick. She steps backward toward Whit, half a step to examine her work, puts her arm behind her and touches the tips of her fingers against the store's window. And at last she turns and he squints away the snow. She is not Claire and he does not notice, does not deflate with old, familiar nausea. She is years younger than him. Unseen below her and across the street his palms are wet against the window-front bar of the sandwich shop he found this evening entirely by accident. She checks her hair in the reflective glass, does not focus past it, and so to Whit her eyes have a distant, lovely cast, far removed from the dish-racket and chatter of his surroundings.
She is watching something far over Whit's head. In her window, he catches the last reflected winking triangle of an airplane rising above and behind where he sit, and he watches her eyes follow its invisible ascent, through the whirl of ivory dust against jade air.
Corner-of-the-eye shenanigans, his sub-conscious' twisted fingers casting shadow-puppets against the back of his cornea: since that evening when the wind blew the snow sideways (until the window-dresser turned towards him, and the wind held its breath and the flakes fell suddenly vertical in dazed slow motion), he has begun to see apparitions of old girlfriends. The window-dresser kindly unlatched a gate for them. Just outside confirmable distance, in precisely the crowded, unreachable spots Claire used to haunt after death, Whit sees familiar faces from a dozen and more years ago. The young women ride the next car of the subway, deigning to visibility only at the peak curvature of banking turns. They rise then quickly vanish on the disorientingly mirrored department store escalator that forms an X with his descent. On the far side of the semi-frozen pond in the park, Sandy Carlin tosses bread crumbs to a rising convention of flapping pigeons and furiously rivalrous ducks. Whit steps towards her and at once a tipped bucket of stampeding field-tripping children swarms bellowing around his legs. He looks down and then up: more than enough time for Sandy to transform herself into someone else.
In these hurried holographs, the ex's have not aged since he knew them. In her various appearances, Sandy (freshman and again junior year) holds steady at 21, though she must be 39 if standard math and time apply to those he once slept with. Marnie -- his final and masterful tutor in insecurity before he met Claire and found peace -- has been spectrally stalking and electrically startling him for nearly a week now, unaged and displaying a characteristic creativity in her technique. Today, for example, while he lunched out with two co-workers (bottomless, boiling fonts of pedophile-priest jokes), Marnie, in a chef's toque, periodically shimmered behind the steam clouds which screened the fashionably open kitchen. Closer examination, however (he lied to his lunchmates, wandered around in a sham quest for a bathroom) yielded a cooking staff composed solely of Asian men. Now, irrepressible from her lunchtime victory, Marnie twinkles in and out of a crowd of extras in tragic Belfast, clamoring for a glimpse of a street-corner brawl in the Irish historical drama on the high-numbered channel that seemed the most promising soporific after the late-night monologuists failed either to amuse or snooze him.
Since they seem to be asking for his attention, Whit thinks, thumbing the remote and watching his distorted face faintly form on the blank brown screen, perhaps he is ready to find them in the flesh. He must be ready. Still alert, he strides nervously into the study (previously guest bed, née prospective nursery), and lumbers around cyberspace, peering here and there in the digital murk, asking after his old girlfriends. National phone directories evenly disperse two dozen Cassandra Carlins across the country, not even considering the Cassandra Anything's she might be by now. A sluggish search engine listlessly, hopelessly offers him family trees for two Marnie Sterlings, one born a century too early, one a decade too late.
