Antiquity.
She had my name.
The late afternoon light shot through the paned window like a wide, angled ruler. Particles of dust floated in calm, melting mini-galaxies until provoked by her tiny feet: covered by white loafers, she would kick the air absentmindedly from her perch of an antique armchair. When one foot bobbed, the other defiantly ascended, and the dust would swirl gleefully, happy for the change of pace. She sat like a royal child yet unaware of her power, 91-years-old and smiling.
She had my name. I considered this an oddity, seeing as how I’d met only two other women in the same predicament of identity, each younger than myself. But here sat a woman with the white hair of a duchess, curled gracefully at the bottom, and she too called herself Camille. I watched her, half-grinning. She sat on the dreary velvet, fell softly into position, and shook every few seconds with youthful energy.
“Camille, this is my grandmother Camille,” Kathryn had said upon introduction. She moved over the words slowly, paused to let the information seat itself in both our minds. My lips parted in mild shock; I had known the fact originally but had since misplaced it. The tiny lady before me, not quite reaching to my chin, raised her animated eyebrows: a reflection of the same awkward elation that had pulsed through me.
“Well, there’s not many of us,” the older Camille said. She clapped me good-naturedly just above my left elbow. There was a tone of gladness there, mixed with a Southern extension, and I felt her roping me into a ludicrous bond that we formed without meaning or having to: a name, a word, two syllables-the first crunching, the second smoothing it out again--that had caught the fancy of our mothers in decades a lifetime from one another.
My friend Kathryn and I had driven to the small North Carolina town of Whittier that afternoon. We arrived to her grandmother sitting happily on a long expanse of wooden porch. Camille’s daughter, Sandy, a thin-framed woman appearing fifty, was attending to overgrown bushes and vines surrounding a breathtaking cabin: two-stories, log, once a frequently visited bed and breakfast. Kathryn’s grandmother used the place during the summers to have regular antique auctions out of the largest room, selling off her latest finds, each piece with a particular exhilaration or story attached.
“You know where it comes from?” Sandy said. “The name Camille?”
I sputtered in my shyness. My mind was punctured by several options, recalling a black and white film by the same name, its heroine tragic, pearl-draped; further, the word “innocent” as its meaning, my pale face as a child, resonant simplicity. I told her no.
“It’s French,” she said simply. She paused for my reaction, rake in hand.
I cooed an exaggerated approval. But I was tackled with things to think of: a snowy string of lace, tickling the floor seductively; the sophisticated purr of a French accent, infinitely more romantic than my dry Southern heritage; petite plates of food that resembled art more than nutrition. I was happy with its origin. I gave the last strip of sound an elongated dip in my mind, making it fashionable, sensual, like an involuntary moan that breaks with loss of breath.
“Now, you just choose yourself a walking stick here,” Camille said. With the heartfelt pushiness of a mother, she poked around for emphasis in the thin barrel that displayed our options.
I took up the wild handle of a wooden stick a little too tall for me. Its top appeared carved from a villainous trunk--its head gnarled and grotesque but daring. Kathryn chose a plainer stick, her handle the intricately painted body of a bluebird. We made our way down the steep road that wound up to the house, passing a hillside where a pair of territorial dogs ran full speed and stopped along the edge to choppily curse us in a language we thankfully could not understand. She led me across a severe curve of concrete road, cutting suddenly from it and strolling cautiously down towards an abandoned cabin that slept hidden by half of a menacing hill, the roots spilling out of its hip like a wound. From there, I followed sloppy, sparsely-placed wooden steps that led to a spot I would never have assumed lay in hiding.
The path, bordered by patches of delicate purple wildflowers, took us to a small, flattened section just at the riverside. And there was a bench: ordinary, dull wood, ripped from any standard park, perfect for seating two women seeking a bit of undisturbed beauty. As I was so impressed by the sight, I smiled at it curiously, constantly, before taking a seat beside her. Kathryn settled into her place on the left, closest to a large patch of sloping grasses that lived submerged in the olive-hued water. I felt the mosquitoes begin to pierce.
A wide, wide river ached before me. Its waters were hardly moving; its body was flat yet not thin, the top expansive, gleaming with a spell. Were it not for the caravans of dusty, orange leaves that floated slowly near the opposite bank, I would not have been able to guess at its motion at all. Truly, I’d never seen a river move so sadly, so deceptively. I imagined myself in a hasty rage of wild ambition, creeping across a fallen log that had cemented itself to the scenery, its stomach just peeking out of the wetness, and longing to dangle a toe or finger just an inch below that curious surface. But with the innocent infiltration of my skin, I would be snatched and made prisoner to a sneering, dark dimension that knew nothing of the muddy floor of the river or the comical unpredictability of fish.
Kathryn and I talked. I was unable to look at her, the angle too much a strain for my neck, the loveliness of her sun-draped face too shocking for a mere second’s absorption. Instead, in passing, I let my eyes graze the tan of her cowboy boots that rested on a tangle of weeds. She told me about her family: her mother and father’s openness and willingness to let her create her own path, their supportive love and her luck in having it. I endured a cruel bolt of envy.
“What was your grandmother like?” I wondered. “You know, when she was young.”
She seemed to smile at the instant recollection of a dozen stories. She explained that her grandmother had married young, as many women had, but had then divorced her husband when she was thirty years old. She said that her grandmother had played with ten years of flirtation, of dances and independence, before entering another marriage. I loved the idea, spun it around with the idea of a gleam of gold, a room with white, circular tables, the cackling buzz of a jazzy note swaying over a room of dancing couples. In Chicago, I saw her, imagined her 91-year-old frame a little taller, carved a little thinner, the hem of a skirt bouncing on a windy street or twirling maniacally in a ballroom that she surely dotted with an irresistible feminine courage. I heard the scratchy air of her current voice as I imagined it then: with a depth, smoothness, capable of leaving a word or two echoing in a man’s empty ear. Imagine, I thought.
“We should go,” Kathryn said.
Imagine an entire decade of romantic gallivanting, sliding her name in and out of introductions, leaving those syllables fastening to the memories of handsome faces with a veil of perfume behind her.
That name. That name in a decade so far away.
We ate a dinner of spaghetti around a charming Lazy Susan, the middle spinning to our laughter, the plate of bread and platter of fruit stopping at four evenly-spaced intervals as if on a tedious but cheerful bus route. Two candles spun with the food-one significantly taller than the other, flames tilting. At my back was a long, open room with antiques on every table. Camille and Sandy used this room when they held sales of their finds. A fully decorated Christmas tree sat awkwardly next to a large, cold fireplace. A cabinet was overburdened with stacks of British porcelain. At the back, piles of old toys, musical instruments from the early part of the century, meticulously decorated women’s hats from the 30s, a lumpy teddy bear holding a faded pillow that said “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.”
I talked very little. Spinning my spaghetti with my fork, I listened to a grandmother and granddaughter jump over and under topics. Sandy retreated early, a Lifetime channel mystery demanding her immediate attention.
“Now, I don’t agree with what Bush is doing, mind you,” Camille said.
This information stilled my fork, brought me back with a start. In the course of five seconds, this dainty old woman in her patchworked, Autumn-themed vest, sitting atop a cushion just to see a decent amount above the table, had squashed a significant stereotype within me. My bewildered admiration furthered. She and Kathryn went on, updating one another on the whereabouts of family members, discussing Kathryn’s early decision of vegetarianism, Camille’s recent birthday of 91 years. This, I realized, put her birthday very near to mine.
“Now, most people claim to have a purpose in life, but I don’t reckon I’ve found mine yet,” she admitted. She said it lightheartedly, but I half-suspected regret.
“Oh, I’d say you’re doing wonderfully,” Kathryn said.
And I agreed. Here sat a woman who could be applauded (at least, by society’s view) for many things: an active lifestyle, unaffected hearing, a beautiful home, original teeth in commendable condition, and all her wits about her. Someone who functioned in pursuit of something.
Someone who still recognized the audible slopes of her name.
Nighttime surged. The air was cooler and sat more bitterly upon my skin. We needed to be heading back.
Upon farewell, we stood awkwardly in the lamp-lit hallway that bled into the living room adjoining the front door. Sandy’s Lifetime mystery roared with screeching tires and gunshots. I saw a mother’s face on the screen, her mouth agape with screaming words. When I turned back again, I beheld Kathryn and her grandmother in mid-hug, Kathryn’s back pulled downward slightly by Camille’s small hands. Embarrassed, unsure of what to do in the presence of that love, I stared at the floor, its fibers a heavy red.
“And, here, let me give you a hug, too,” I heard her say, but it was distant, unconnected to me until I looked up.
As I raised my head, I saw her move towards me, the gold frames of her glasses passing under my chin, then disappearing. Her white hair was at my neck. I closed my eyes: typical protocol for the moment, but then I was stolen into reverie much larger. Her frame felt fragile, almost transparent by touch. I let my hands drape on the plain of her back. I was gone.
I saw her mother’s hands, a comely pink hue, resting on her lap, fidgeting, a blackened newspaper headline on the side table, the words “war,” “Titanic,” question marks. There was a baby’s head against white cotton, the eyes crinkling. “What will we name her?” a voice asked. A man’s voice. A toddler’s hand pulled grass from the ground with ferocious curiosity. It shook a little, the world. A field wore a hood of sunlight, and I saw her in it. It was her, dark-haired, biting her lip, never imagining she would live this long. I had her, held her, as she had me, a decades’ difference between our bodies, her heart having pumped entire tubs more blood, her skin carrying hundreds more bruises, more cuts, more touches. She pulls on a slip in her teenage years, smoothing the satin from her stomach down. I saw her, thirty years old, signing the divorce papers, her hands quivering a little, the “C” of her first name angled in an anxious way she’d never done it before. I saw her, taking a sip of champagne, her blush too strong a pink on her cheeks, having a private thought with her fingers on the glass before returning to the confident man at the table forty feet away. The music was too loud. I saw her cry happily, collapsing a little in her own room, her knees shaking on the carpet, when she learned she was pregnant. 1960. The Florida sun felt like a blanket, her eyelids closed, seeing orange. 1978. Her hair is wet, standing in the kitchen with a mug of coffee, and she wonders why her son is doing poorly in college. What did she do, after all, but love them too much? Her hair is turning white. She stares at her face, that old cabin mirror, for two hours entirely. How is it that wrinkles drip onto your skin permanently without seeing them? She runs her fingers over the velvet of an antique cushion, thinking it does little to enhance the living room, thinking the other chair purchased from the woman thirty miles away would settle much better. When will her son call?
And here, holding me, an unknown friend of a granddaughter, for no longer than four seconds, with my name touching hers, and she had carried it all her life as I will never have to carry mine.
Seventy years lined the space between our stomachs, but our names were just the same.