The Doll (by: Egmidio Enriquez)
HE was christened Narciso and his mother called him Sising. But when be took a fancy to his mother’s old rag dolls which she preserved with moth balls for the little girls she had expected to have, his father decided to call him Boy. His father was excessively masculine, from the low broad forehead and the thick bushy brows to the wide cleft chest and the ridged abdomen beneath it; and the impotence of his left leg which rheumatic attacks had rendered almost useless only goaded him to assert his maleness by an extravagant display of superiority.
“We’ll call him Boy. He is my son. A male. The offspring of a male.” Don Endong told his wife in a tone as crowy as a rooster’s after pecking a hen. “A man is fashioned by heredity and environment. I’ve given him enough red for his blood, but a lot of good it will do him with the kind of environment you are giving him. That doll you gave him—”
“I didn’t give him that doll,” Doña Enchay explained hastily. “He happened upon it in myaparador when I was clearing it. He took pity on it and drew it out. He said it looked very unhappy because it was naked and lonely. He asked me to make a dress for it—”
“And you made one. You encouraged him to play with it,” he accused her.
Doña Enchay looked at her husband embarrassedly. “I had many cuttings, and I thought I’d make use of them,” she said brushing an imaginary wisp of hair from her forehead. It was still a smooth forehead, clean swept and unlined. It did not match the tired look of her eyes, nor the droop of her heavy mouth.
Don Endong saw the forehead and the gesture, took in the quiver of the delicate nostrils and the single dimple on her cheek. “You are such a child yourself, Enchay,” he told her. “You still want to play with dolls. That is why, I suppose, you refuse to have your son’s hair cut short. You’ll make a sissy out of him!” His eyes hardened, and a pulse ticked under his right ear. “No, I will not allow it,” he said struggling to his feet with his cane and shouting, “Boy! Boy! Boy!”
His wife leapt forward to assist him, but as he steadied himself on his cane she couldn’t touch him. Even in his infirmity she could not give him support. His eyes held her back, melted her strength away, reminded her she was only a woman—the weaker, the inferior, the dependent. She felt like a flame in the wind that had frantically reached out for something to burn and having found nothing to feed itself on, settled back upon its wick to burn itself out. She watched him struggle to the window.
When he had reached it and laid his cane on the sill, she moved close to him and passed an arm around his waist. “The curls will not harm him, Marido,” she said. “They are so pretty. They make him look like the little boys in the story books. Remember the page boys at the feet of queen? His hair does not make him a girl. He looks too much like you. That wide thin-lipped mouth and that stubborn chin, and that manly chest—why you yourself say he has a pecho de paloma.”
Don Endong’s mouth twitched at one corner, looking down at her, he passed an arm across her back and under an arm. His hand spread out on her body like a crab and taking a handful of her soft flesh kneaded it gently. “All right, mujer,” he said, “but not the doll!” And he raised his voice again. “Boy! Boy! Boy!”
The boy was getting the doll ready for bed in the wigwam of coconut fronds he had built in the yard below. The doll was long, slender, rag-bodied with a glossy head of porcelain. He had pulled off its frilly, ribbon trimmed dress, and was thrusting its head into a white cotton slip of a garment that his mother had made and was a little too tight. His father’s stentorian voice drew his brows together. At whom was his father shouting now? His father was always shouting and fuming. He filled the house with his presence, invalid though he was. How could his mother stand him?
“Boy! Boy! Boy!” came his father’s voice again.
Ripping the cotton piece from the head of the doll where the head was caught, he flung the little garment away, and picking up the doll walked hastily towards the house.
His father and mother met him at the head of the stairs. He looked at his father’s angry face and said without flinching: “Were you calling me, Father? My name is not Boy!”
“It is Boy from now on,” his father told him. “That will help you to remember that you are a boy. A boy, understand?”
His father looked ugly when he was mad, but he was not afraid of him. He never beat him. He only cursed and cursed. “I don’t understand, why?” he asked.
“Because little boys don’t play with dolls,” Don Endong thundered at him, “that’s why!” And snatching the doll from the boy, Don Endong flung it viciously to the floor.
Boy was not prepared for his father’s precipitate move. He was not prepared to save his doll. One moment it was cradled snugly in the crook of his arm. The next it was sprawled on the floor, naked, and broken, an arm twisted limp beneath it, another flung across its face. as if to hide the shame of its disaster. Suddenly it was as if he were the doll. There was a broken feeling within him. The blood crept up his face and pinched his ears. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move. He could only stare and stare until his mother taking him in her arms cradled his head between her breasts.
ONE day in May his mother came home from a meeting of the “Marias” at the parish rectory in a flurry of excitement. Our Lady of Fatima was coming to town. The image from Portugal was making a tour of the Catholic world and was due in town the following week. Doña Enchay had been unanimously elected chairman of the reception committee. ‘‘What shall I do? What shall I do?” she kept saying.
“To be sure, mujer, I don’t know,” Don Endong told her. “Ask the Lady herself. She’ll tell you. Maybe.
“Endong! you mustn’t speak that way of Our Lady of Fatima.” she told him in as severe a tone as she dared. “She’s milagrosa. haven’t you heard how she appeared on the limb of a tree before three little children—”
“Oh, yes! Also the countless novenas you have said in my behalf.”
“Ah,. Endong, it is your lack of faith, I’m sure. If you would only believe! If you would at least keep your peace and allow Our Lady to help you in her own quiet way, maybe—” She sighed.
He couldn’t argue with her when she was suppliant. There was something about feminine weakness which he couldn’t fight. He kept his peace.
But not the boy.
It was like the circus coming to town and he had to know all about the strange Lady. He and his mother kept up an incessant jabber about miracles and angels and saints the whole week through. Boy easily caught his mother’s enthusiasm about the great welcome as he tagged along with her on her rounds every day requesting people living along the route the procession was to take from the air port to the cathedral to decorate their houses with some flags, or candles. or paper lanterns… She fondly suggested paper buntings strung on a line across the street. “Arcos” she called them.
“Don’t deceive yourself,” Don Endong told her. “You know they’re more like clothes-lines than anything else. Does the Lady launder?”
“Que Dos te perdone, Endong!” Doña Enchay exclaimed, crossing herself and looking like she was ready to cry.
Boy wondered why his father loved to taunt his mother about her religious enthusiasm. Sometimes he himself could not help but snicker over the jokes his father made. Like when Mr. Wilson’s ice plant siren blew the hour of twelve and the family was having lunch. His mother would bless herself and intone aloud: “Bendita sea la Hora en que Nuestra Señora del Pilar vino en carne mortal a Zaragoza,” and begin a Dios te Salve. His father would ostentatiously bend over the platter of steaming white rice in the center of the table and watch it intently until someone inquired, “What is it?” Then he would reply, “I want to see by how many grains the rice has increased in the platter.” If Boy had not seen his father’s picture as a little boy dressed in white with a large silk ribbon on one arm and a candle twined with tiny white flowers in one hand, he would think maybe, he was a protestante—like that woman his mother and he happened upon one day on their rounds.
The woman had met them on the stairs of her house and said to his mother: “The Lady of Fatima did you say, Ñora? You mean some woman like you and me, or your little girl here,” pointing at him, “with such pretty hair, who can talk, and walk. and laugh. and cry?” His mother retreated fanning herself frantically and flapping the cola of her black saya. “To be sure she can’t, but she stands as the symbol of one who can!” she explained with difficulty as though a fish bone was caught in her throat. He hated the woman for making his mother feel that way, and on the last rung of the steps vindictively spat her error at her: “I am not a girl. I’m a boy! A boy! You don’t know anything!”
When they arrived home he told his mother he wanted his hair cut short. “1 don’t want the Lady of Fatima to mistake me for a girl like the Protestant woman,” he told his mother.
“But Our Lady knows you are a boy. Her Son tells her. Her Son is all knowing.” But Boy threw himself on the floor and started to kick. “I want my hair cut! I want my hair cut!” he screamed and screamed.
THE Lady came on a day that threatened rain. The brows of the hills beyond the rice fields were furious with clouds. The sun cowered out of sight and the Venerable Peter dragged his cart across the heavens continuously drowning all kinds of human utterances—religious, profane, ribald, humorous, sarcastic-from the milling crowd gathered at the air port to see the Lady of Miracles arrive. There were the colegialas in their jumpers and cotton stockings, the Ateneo band and cadets in khaki and white mittens, the Caballeros de Colonwith their paunches and their bald heads, the Hijas de Maria with their medals, theApostolados with their scapulars, the Liga de Mujeres with their beads… there was nopanguingue, nor landay, nor poker sessions anywhere in town; nor chapu, nor talang, nortachi in the coconut groves, for even the bootblacks and the newsboys and the factory boys were there to see the great spectacle. Even Babu Sawang, the Moro woman who fried bananas for the school children. was there, for was not Our Lady of Fatima a Mora like herself, since Fatima was a Moro name?
But when the heavens broke open and rain came tearing down, the people scampered for shelter like chickens on the approach of a hawk. All but a few old women and the priests and the bishop and Doña Enchay and Boy hung on to the Lady on her flowered float intoning hymns and repeating aves.
The bishop laid a hand on Boy’s head and Boy immediately shot up into manhood. His chest filled out, his arms grew thick, and his strides stretched as long as the giant’s of the seven-league boots. He felt a thousand eyes leveled at him, and he gathered those eyes and wore them on his breast as a hero wears his medals in a parade. “You are a brave little boy,” the bishop told him. “Our Lady must be well pleased with you.
Boy took a look at the Lady. She was smiling brightly through tears of happiness. Her eyes spilled water of love, her lips dropped freshets of sweetness. And her checks—they were dew-filled calyxes of kindly care. Suddenly, he was seized with a great thirst. His lips felt cracked and his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. An urgent longing to drink possessed him. He felt he should drink, drink. drink-of the Lady’s eyes, of the Lady’s lips, of the Lady’s cheeks…
AS he grew older his thirst intensified. He felt he should drink also from the cup of her breast, from the hollow of her hands, from the hem of her trailing white gown, from the ends of each strand of her long brown tresses. But when he approached his Lady at various shrines in the town chapel, whether she had a serpent at her feet, a child in her arms, or beads in her hands, his cracking lips climbed no higher than her pink and white toes and his thirst was quenched.
When he was nineteen and graduated from high school, he told his mother he wanted to take Our Lady for a bride. “Que dicha!” his mother said. “To wed the Mother of God. To be a priest and sing her glorias forever. Que dicha!”
But his father said: “A priest? Is that all you will amount to—a sissy, a maricon, a half-man? I’d rather you died. I’d rather I died!”
It was night, and late, when the household was making ready to turn in. The feeble light of a single electric bulb lit the veranda where Boy stood facing his father in his wicker chair; but the yellow light was flat on the boy’s face and Don Endong saw that it was a dead mask except for the eyes which held a pointed brilliance. The boy’s voice was as taut as the string of an instrument that is about to snap. “The priesthood is the noblest profession on earth. Father,” he said. “It is the most manly, too. One who is master of himself, who can leash the lust of his loins to the eye of the spirit. is indeed the man! A man is not measured by the length of his limbs and the breadth of his chest or the depth of his voice, but by the strength of his mind, the depth of his courage, the firmness of his will!”
“God gave you the body of a male to do the functions of a male—not to hide under a skirt!” Don Endong goaded him.
Boy gripped the back of a chair until the knuckles turned white. Sweat broke out on his forehead and a trembling seized his frame.
“Strike! Strike your father! Raise your hand against the man who was man enough to give you the figure of a man!”
“Boy! Boy!” His mother’s voice pierced through his clouding mind, unnerving him, leaving him strengthless. Suddenly, he couldn’t look his father in the face. His mother’s wail followed him as he fled into the night.
ON the little deserted and unlighted dock where the wind was carefree and all was still except for the muffled cry of a hadji in the distant Moro village and the mournful beat of an agong, Boy faced the night and the sea He flung his eyes to the stars above and gave his body up to the wind to soothe…
Fingers touched him lightly on the shoulder, a little nervously, like birds about to take flight at the least sign of danger. Fingers dipped into his sensitive flesh, and melted into the still pounding rivers of his blood. A strong. sweetly pungent scent invaded his nostrils, and his heart picked tip the beat of the distant agong.
“What do you want with me?” he asked the woman without turning around. He had not sensed her coming. She could have sprung like Venus from the foam of the sea—but there she was, and her perfume betrayed her calling.
Her hand dropped from his shoulder to the bulge of his biceps. “You are a large man. You are very strong. And you are lonely,” she said.
Her voice was cool as water from a jar and soft as cotton. And it had a sad tingle. He checked a rough rebuke. Who was he to condemn her for what she was? Had not Christ said to the men outside the city walls who were about to stone the adulterous woman, ‘‘Let him among you that is without sin cast the first stone”?’
He looked up into her face. Stars were beating in her eyes. And on her wet lips were slumbering many more. Her arms were long and white and slender like fragrant azucenas unfolding in the night…
“Yes, I am strong, and I’m lonely,” he said. “And I’m a man. A big man,” he added almost angrily, “am I not?”
“Oh, but of course,” she said. “I can see that. and I can feel that!”
And fragrant azucenas folded about him in the night.
HE opened his eyes in total darkness. He couldn’t see his hand before him, but the air was thick around him, and he had a feeling he was trapped in a narrow place. He flung an arm out and the body of a woman slithered under his arm. She turned toward him and her breath pushed into his face. He raised himself on his elbow for air. The woman stretched herself awake, and slowly a long clammy coil like the sinuous body of the serpent at the feet of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in her shrine in the town church began to close around his neck. His flesh crawled. With a quick movement he caught the coil in a strong grip, twisting it.
The hoarse cry of a woman lashed out and cracked the stillness of the night. A mouth found his shoulder and sharp vicious teeth sank into his flesh. The stinging pain sent a shiver through the length of his long frame. but he hung on to the squirming limb, squeezing and twisting it… until the clamor of angry voices, and a splintering crash, and a sudden flood of light burst upon him…
Lying at his feet before him was a woman, naked and broken. But a short while before, under the sheet of night, she was cradled in his arms, receiving the reverence of his kisses. Now, under the eye of light, she was but a limp mass of woman flesh, sprawled grotesquely on the floor, an upper limb twisted behind her another flung across her face as if to hide the shame of her disaster.
Two men grabbed him and dragged him out into the street. Angry cries and curses followed him. But as he felt the clean air of morning sweep against his face, his chest filled out, his arms grew thick, and his sturdy legs stretched long like the giant’s of the seven-league boots.
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d0c MY REACTION d0c
The story is so mysterious. I don’t know if it’s really like that. But for me, it is. At first, I don’t really know what the story is all about. I do understand the first part of it, but the last one, I really don’t. I have read the story many times and yet I really don’t get nor understand the ending. I got some of the ideas but I don’t know if it’s what the story tells the readers.
I chose it as one of the three literatures for my English Project because when I’m reading it, I felt that there’s something in the story that somewhat reached my heart, that hit something in my own self. The story is telling me something but unfortunately, I failed to get it. I’m still on the process of understanding the whole story.
What I understand about the story is that we should know our own selves and our purpose in this world. We should honor our father and mother. We should know the difference of reality from fantasy. About the title, The Doll, I really don’t know why it is the title. Perhaps it has something to do with the first part and the last part. The woman in the last part is compared to the doll when it is snatched by his father and was sprawled on the floor. I think that doll is a symbolism. Too sad I still can’t figure out what’s the symbolical meaning of it.
I hope you’ll understand what the story is telling you. You’ll know in your heart if something hits you or something touches your heart. I hope you learn something from it.
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The Gift of the Magi (by: O. Henry)
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young."
"Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.
Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling--something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pierglass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: "Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds." One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."
"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della.
"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."
Down rippled the brown cascade.
"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
"Give it to me quick," said Della.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value--the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do--oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?"
At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty."
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again--you won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!' Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice-- what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you."
"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"
Jim looked about the room curiously.
"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you--sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?"
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young."
"Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.
Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling--something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pierglass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: "Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds." One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."
"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della.
"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."
Down rippled the brown cascade.
"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
"Give it to me quick," said Della.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value--the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do--oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?"
At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty."
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again--you won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!' Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice-- what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you."
"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"
Jim looked about the room curiously.
"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you--sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?"
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year--what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs--the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims--just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!"
And them Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it."
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.
"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on."
The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs--the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims--just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!"
And them Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it."
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.
"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on."
The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
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d0c MY REACTION d0c
I first read the story when I am still in my second year in High School. That time, I’m bored. So when I saw a book, I open it and look for a good selection to read. That’s when I saw the story of O. Henry (whose real name is William Sydney Porter). It is a nice story, telling us how a young couple (Jim and Della) discovers the true meaning of gift-giving.
Notice the title. What comes in your mind after reading that? (…) Honestly, in my case, the first thing that comes in my mind is the question: “What’s the meaning of word Magi?” I really don’t know the meaning of that word. But after reading the story, I discover its meaning. The Magi are the three wise men and the trio of kings who traveled to Bethlehem from the east to deliver three presents to the baby Jesus Christ. Familiar of it, right? Why do you think O. Henry gave the story that title? For me, it’s because the characters, Jim and Della, are being compared to the Magi. Why? It’s because they gave each other the wisest gifts of all and the best gifts anyone could have chosen-though it turned out to be useless at the end. It really touched my heart because the two sacrifice their own precious possession in order to give each other the best Christmas present they know. That really shows how much they love each other.
About the ending, did you notice something? Yes, the ending is not that clear. What I mean there is that the ending has a twist. O. Henry is known for that. I have read another story of him entitled The Last Leaf and it also has a twist and surprise ending. Anyway, that twist adds beauty to the story.
I hope you like and appreciate the story. (n.n)
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Sister Of My Heart (by:Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni)
Chapter 1
They say in the old tales that the first night after a child is born, the Bidhata Purush comes down to earth himself to decide what its fortune is to be. That is why they bathe babies in sandalwood water and wrap them in soft red malmal, color of luck. That is why they leave sweetmeats by the cradle. Silver-leafed sandesh, dark pantuas floating in golden syrup, jilipis orange as the heart of a fire, glazed with honey-sugar. If the child is especially lucky, in the morning it will all be gone.
“That’s because the servants sneak in during the night and eat them,” says Anju, giving her head an impatient shake as Abha Pishi oils her hair. This is how she is, my cousin, always scoffing, refusing to believe. But she knows, as I do, that no servant in all of Calcutta would dare eat sweets meant for a god.
The old tales say this also: In the wake of the Bidhata Purush come the demons, for that is the world’s nature, good and evil mingled. That is why they leave an oil lamp burning. That is why they place the sacred tulsi leaf under the baby’s pillow for protection. In richer households, like the one my mother grew up in, she has told us, they hire a brahmin to sit in the corridor and recite auspicious prayers all night.
“What nonsense,” Anju says. “There are no demons.”
I am not so sure. Perhaps they do not have the huge teeth, the curved blood-dripping claws and bulging red eyes of our Children’s Ramayan Picture Book, but I have a feeling they exist. Haven’t I sensed their breath, like slime-black fingers brushing my spine? Later, when we are alone, I will tell Anju this.
But in front of others I am always loyal to her. So I say, bravely, “That’s right. Those are just old stories.”
It is early evening on our terrace, its bricks overgrown with moss. A time when the sun hangs low on the horizon, half hidden by the pipal trees which line our compound walls all the way down the long driveway to the bolted wrought-iron gates. Our great-grandfather had them planted one hundred years ago to keep the women of his house safe from the gaze of strangers. Abha Pishi, one of our three mothers, has told us this.
Yes, we have three mothers—perhaps to make up for the fact that we have no fathers.
There’s Pishi, our widow aunt who threw herself heart-first into her younger brother’s household when she lost her husband at the age of eighteen. Dressed in austere white, her graying hair cut close to her scalp in the orthodox style so that the bristly ends tickle my palms when I run my hands over them, she’s the one who makes sure we are suitably dressed for school in the one-inch-below-the-knee uniforms the nuns insist on. She finds for us, miraculously, stray pens and inkpots and missing pages of homework. She makes us our favorite dishes: luchis rolled out and fried a puffy golden-brown, potato and cauliflower curry cooked without chilies, thick sweet payesh made from the milk of Budhi-cow, whose owner brings her to our house each morning to be milked under Pishi’s stern, miss-nothing stare. On holidays she plaits jasmine into our hair. But most of all Pishi is our fount of information, the one who tells us the stories our mothers will not, the secret, delicious, forbidden tales of our past.
There’s Anju’s mother, whom I call Gouri Ma, her fine cheekbones and regal forehead hinting at generations of breeding, for she comes from a family as old and respected as that of the Chatterjees, which she married into. Her face is not beautiful in the traditional sense—even I, young as I am, know this. Lines of hardship are etched around her mouth and on her forehead, for she was the one who shouldered the burden of keeping the family safe on that thunderclap day eight years ago when she received news of our fathers’ deaths. But her eyes, dark and endless-deep—they make me think of Kalodighi, the enormous lake behind the country mansion our family used to own before Anju and I were born. When Gouri Ma smiles at me with her eyes, I stand up straighter. I want to be noble and brave, just like her.
Lastly (I use this word with some guilt), there’s my own mother, Nalini. Her skin is still golden, for though she’s a widow my mother is careful to apply turmeric paste to her face each day. Her perfect-shaped lips glisten red from paan, which she loves to chew—mostly for the color it leaves on her mouth, I think. She laughs often, my mother, especially when her friends come for tea and talk. It is a glittery, tinkling sound, like jeweled ankle bells, people say, though I myself feel it is more like a thin glass struck with a spoon. Her cheek feels as soft as the lotus flower she’s named after on those rare occasions when she presses her face to mine. But more often when she looks at me a frown ridges her forehead between eyebrows beautiful as wings. Is it from worry or displeasure? I can never tell. Then she remembers that frowns cause age lines and smoothes it away with a finger.
Now Pishi stops oiling Anju’s hair to give us a wicked smile. Her voice grows low and shivery, the way it does when she’s telling ghost stories. “They’re listening, you know. The demons. And they don’t like little eight-year-old girls talking like this. Just wait till tonight . . .”
Because I am scared I interrupt her with the first thought that comes into my head. “Pishi Ma, tell no, did the sweets disappear for us?”
Sorrow moves like smoke-shadow over Pishi’s face. I can see that she would like to make up another of those outrageous tales that we so love her to tell, full of magic glimmer and hoping. But finally she says, her voice flat, “No, Sudha. You weren’t so lucky.”
I know this already. Anju and I have heard the whispers. Still, I must ask one more time.
“Did you see anything that night?” I ask. Because she was the one who stayed with us the night of our birth while our mothers lay in bed, still in shock from the terrible telegram which had sent them both into early labor that morning. Our mothers, lying in beds they would never again share with their husbands. My mother weeping, her beautiful hair tangling about her swollen face, punching at a pillow until it burst, spilling cotton stuffing white as grief. Gouri Ma, still and silent, staring up into a darkness which pressed upon her like the responsibilities she knew no one else in the family could take on.
To push them from my mind I ask urgently, “Did you at least hear something?”
Pishi shakes her head in regret. “Maybe the Bidhata Purush doesn’t come for girl-babies.” In her kindness she leaves the rest unspoken, but I’ve heard the whispers often enough to complete it in my head. For girl-babies who are so much bad luck that they cause their fathers to die even before they are born.
Anju scowls, and I know that as always she can see into my thoughts with the X-ray vision of her fiercely loving eyes. “Maybe there’s no Bidhata Purush either,” she states and yanks her hair from Pishi’s hands though it is only half-braided. She ignores Pishi’s scolding shouts and stalks to her room, where she will slam the door.
But I sit very still while Pishi’s fingers rub the hibiscus oil into my scalp, while she combs away knots with the long, soothing rhythm I have known since the beginning of memory. The sun is a deep, sad red, and I can smell, faint on the evening air, wood smoke. The pavement dwellers are lighting their cooking fires. I’ve seen them many times when Singhji, our chauffeur, drives us to school: the mother in a worn green sari bent over a spice-grinding stone, the daughter watching the baby, keeping him from falling into the gutter. The father is never there. Maybe he is running up a platform in Howrah station in his red turban, his shoulders knotted from carrying years of trunks and bedding rolls, crying out, “Coolie chahiye, want a coolie, memsaab?” Or maybe, like my father, he too is dead.
Whenever I thought this my eyes would sting with sympathy, and if by chance Ramur Ma, the vinegary old servant woman who chaperones us everywhere, was not in the car, I’d beg Singhji to stop so I could hand the girl a sweet out of my lunch box. And he always did.
Among all our servants—but no, I do not really think of him as a servant—I like Singhji the best. Perhaps it is because I can trust him not to give me away to the mothers the way Ramur Ma does. Perhaps it is because he is a man of silences, speaking only when necessary—a quality I appreciate in a house filled with female gossip. Or perhaps it is the veil of mystery which hangs over him.
When Anju and I were about five years old, Singhji appeared at our gate one morning—like a godsend, Pishi says—looking for a driver’s job. Our old chauffeur had recently retired, and the mothers needed a new one badly but could not afford it. Since the death of the fathers, money had been short. In his broken Bengali, Singhji told Gouri Ma he’d work for whatever she could give him. The mothers were a little suspicious, but they guessed that he was so willing because of his unfortunate looks. It is true that his face is horrifying at first glance—I am embarrassed to remember that as a little girl I had screamed and run away when I saw him. He must have been caught in a terrible fire years ago, for the skin of the entire upper half of his face—all the way up to his turban—is the naked, puckered pink of an old burn. The fire had also scorched away his eyebrows and pulled his eyelids into a slant, giving him a strangely oriental expression at odds with the thick black mustache and beard that covers the rest of his face.
“He’s lucky we hired him at all,” Mother’s fond of saying. “Most people wouldn’t have because that burned forehead is a sure sign of lifelong misfortune. Besides, he’s so ugly.”
I do not agree. Sometimes when he does not know that I am watching him, I have caught a remembering look, at once faraway and intent, in Singhji’s eyes—the kind of look an exiled king might have as he thinks about the land he left behind. At those times his face is not ugly at all, but more like a mountain peak that has withstood a great ice storm. And somehow I feel we are the lucky ones because he chose to come to us.
Once I heard the servants gossiping about how Singhji had been a farmer somewhere in Punjab until the death of his family from a cholera epidemic made him take to the road. It made me so sad that although Mother had strictly instructed me never to talk about personal matters with any of the servants, I ran out to the car and told him how sorry I was about his loss. He nodded silently. No other response came from the burned wall of his face. But a few days later he told me that he used to have a child.
Though Singhji offered no details about this child, I immediately imagined that it had been a little girl my age. I could not stop thinking of her. How did she look? Did she like the same foods we did? What kinds of toys had Singhji bought for her from the village bazaar? For weeks I would wake up crying in the middle of the night because I had dreamed of a girl thrashing about on a mat, delirious with pain. In the dream she had my face.
“Really, Sudha!” Anju would tell me, in concern and exasperation—I often slept in her room and thus the job of comforting me fell to her—“How come you always get so worked up about imaginary things?”
That is what she would be saying if she were with me right now. For it seems to me I am receding, away from Pishi’s capable hands, away from the solidity of the sun-warmed bricks under my legs, that I am falling into the first night of my existence, where Anju and I lie together in a makeshift cradle in a household not ready for us, sucking on sugared nipples someone has put in our mouths to keep us quiet. Anjali and Basudha, although in all the turmoil around us no one has thought to name us yet. Anjali, which means offering, for a good woman is to offer up her life for others. And Basudha, so that I will be as patient as the earth goddess I am named after. Below us, Pishi is a dark, stretched-out shape on the floor, fallen into exhausted sleep, the dried salt of tears crusting her cheeks.
The Bidhata Purush is tall and has a long, spun-silk beard like the astrologer my mother visits each month to find out what the planets have in store for her. He is dressed in a robe made of the finest white cotton, his fingers drip light, and his feet do not touch the ground as he glides toward us. When he bends over our cradle, his face is so blinding-bright I cannot tell his expression. With the first finger of his right hand he marks our foreheads. It is a tingly feeling, as when Pishi rubs tiger-balm on our temples. I think I know what he writes for Anju. You will be brave and clever, you will fight injustice, you will not give in. You will marry a fine man and travel the world and have many sons. You will be happy.
It is more difficult to imagine what he writes for me. Perhaps he writes beauty, for though I myself do not think so, people say I am beautiful—even more than my mother was in the first years of her marriage. Perhaps he writes goodness, for though I am not as obedient as my mother would like, I try hard to be good. There is a third word he writes, the harsh angles of which sting like fire, making me wail, making Pishi sit up, rubbing her eyes. But the Bidhata Purush is gone already, and all she sees is a swirl—cloud or sifted dust—outside the window, a fading glimmer, like fireflies.
Years later I will wonder, that final word he wrote, was it sorrow?
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d0c MY REACTION d0c
I love reading books, especially those books that captured my interest and touched my heart. The one that I posted above is only an excerpt. After reading that, I desired to have that book so that I can read it. I hope I can have a copy so that I’ll know the whole story. The (main) protagonists are Sudha and Anju, Sudha being the narrator. The above excerpt is very touching. The two are cousins but have been sisters of the heart since the day they were born (hence, the title). The excerpt is really, really great. It makes me think I’m part of the story. I even found myself in the place of Sudha. It’s like I’m trapped in the scene, in the story. I really want to know what the story is all about so I did some research about it. I even read an analysis/book review about it. I found it here:
I hope everyone will appreciate the story as I do. Enjoy reading! Have fun!
