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By RAPHAELLA CRUZ
of TheColumnists.com
I was sitting on the toilet one cold December morning
when I spotted the most curious little piece of paper--or perhaps
it spotted me. It was just folded up there on the bath mat in
front of the tub: A tiny, white, quarter-inch by one-inch piece
of paper, almost like a fortune you would find in a smallish
fortune cookie.
I rubbed my eyes, reached over and picked it up. Unfolded, the
paper said, simply, "ellen," in six-point Helvetica
type. I folded it up again and examined the back. There was a
black, greasy fingerprint on it. I wondered if that fingerprint
could potentially, one day, lead me to its origin--if it would
be the one piece of forensic evidence that would cinch the case
once the jurors saw it magnified on a courtroom screen.
The only ellen I had ever known was a short, fine-artsy red-head who shared a studio space with me at the art college. Her teeth were short and square, much smaller than average teeth, spaced together like Chicklets, and her smile revealed too much gum line. It was as if she smiled with her nose first, the crinkle of it drawing her upper lip like a curtain, revealing the Chicklets on stage. That's about as much as I remembered of her.
I opened the paper again. "ellen," it still said, staring me in the face like a mysterious riddle. The paper had been cut with scissors and not machine cut from the larger page from which it was printed, so it was slightly askew on one edge and would not be a perfect rectangle, if measured. The right edge was torn, as if maybe ellen had been one of many mini-paper-strip-ellens, dangling from its 8.5 by 11 inch page like bangs on straight, smooth hair.
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Was the 'e' in lower case as to undermine her name? Was the proper noun-ness of ellen of no importance? Was she some sort of menial being, not deserving of a capital 'E'? Such a plain name to begin with, made starkly meaningless as it sat planted in the middle of this paper cage, without freedom to remove itself, stuck there for eternity, naked, for anyone to see.
He would deny that this paper had anything to do with another woman to be sure, or that he had ever seen it before. So I may never know the truth, I may never get to find who the mysterious ellen is, ellen with a lower case 'e.' But the curiosity was torturing me, so I'd have to ask him.
"I don't know what that is," he barked, when I presented the smallish paper. "What, do you think I got it in a bar, some girl's name, some girl I met in a bar?" he said mockingly, as if the question was too far fetched from reality to even deserve to be answered. "If it's a girl's name that I got at a bar, then where's the phone number?" He smugly ended the conversation.
Why was there no phone number? Why no last, middle, or nickname? No quotation marks, no bullet, no punctuation before or after? Had she been picked from a Secret Santa list and erroneously ended up on some stranger's bathroom floor, never to be receiving her $10 gift?
Or was she a prostitute, chosen from a line-up of several other lower-cased girls, because she had some asset that the others were lacking? Was she a stripper, a lap dancer, a teenaged run-away drug addict, whose stage name was Amber, Miranda or Candi?
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I taped ellen to my mirror, just a small strip over the left edge, so that she hung over the side like a flag. When the window was open she would flap in the breeze. She still had the fold mark in the middle. When I looked in the mirror, ellen stared at me from beside, a ghost professing a non-existent prophecy, haunting me from the corner of my eye each day nonetheless.
I never confronted him about ellen again. Even if there were an Ellen in his life, a real-life Ellen deserving of a capital 'E,' he wouldn't be able to hide her forever. She'd surely leave another clue, another message, call or come by. Ellen would make herself known, just like all the others had.
She stayed taped to my mirror for two weeks before the tape got dusty and dry and came loose of its grip on it. So when she fluttered to the ground, I sucked her up in my Hoover and put her out with the cat hair. I never saw ellen again.
But I never forgot her either.
© 2002 by Raphaëlla
Cruz. The illustrations are modified versions of drawings from
IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San
Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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