MY WILLADEENE, MY WILLADEENE. (A Series)
Truman Capote is coming to call, and I haven’t a thing to wear.
Mostly, I blame Willadeene. Oh, not for lack of haberdashery, an ensemble impervious to Mr. Capote’s refined eye and serrated tongue. I blame her for hatching the whole affair. For inviting the dead Mr. Capote here in the first place.
Sometimes, I can hardly bear Willadeene. And just who is she you ask? This Willadeene?
Most assuredly, she is a conundrum. A someone I forever have struggled to explain. Such a puzzlement she was to Mama. You’ll outgrow her one day, she would say. Oh, that Willadeene, she’d smile, she’s Robbie’s imaginary friend. Isn’t that precious? Isn’t it sweet?
Just how might I parse her? No Mama, she was never a blanket. Never a toy. My Willadeene is not childhood ephemera; she is a forever thing. A mélange of citadel, patron, and spirit guide, I think. What she is and who she is—on this curious account, she speaks in riddles. How shall I ever know with certainty? But this I will tell you: she is irksome as she is solicitous.
Always, she has existed alongside me. Before my earliest memory, before the hatching of my first tooth, I suspect she drifted and rattled the mobile above my infant bed. Keeping watch. Humming me to sleep.
Through the years, she finagled her way into my schoolboy bag. Kanoodling my Trapper Keeper. Stirring trouble in my pencil box. Plotting my first kiss.
To what tumble of fortune or mischance I owe my Willadeene, I do not know. Only, I suspect her charity to be forged upon fondness for the lonesome and susceptible—for an orientation such as my own. Boys such as this require careful tending and reassurances, even when we have long grown into men.
When it first happened, when Willadeene set that initial caller upon me, I was ten and fresh from the heels of a playground walloping.
“Why don’t you ever play with the boys?” my assailant asked, knocking me off the swing, kicking the air from my lungs with his foot.
From my pocket Willadeene crept, tickling my ear. “What a stupid boy,” she whispered. “That goes without saying, do you not think?” At times, my Willadeene is irreverent. Never has she coddled, a grievance I have long since held.
How could I have imagined it would be Charlotte Brontë whom Willadeene would arrange to console me. Like all the others who would follow, she came to me in the night, when the dead slip more easily through the veil.
Even then, in preparation, I fretted over my appearance, agonizing over what I would wear to greet Miss Brontë. With a conservative glob of Mama’s Dippity-Do and her old curling iron, I managed a soft, feathery coiffure. Settling upon my denim leisure suit and a patchwork shirt with pearl snap buttons, my visage and comportment seemed to both amuse and dazzle Charlotte all at once—a triumphant reward for my efforts.
Perched upon my desk chair, her skirt hem pooling the floor, and I sitting upon the corner of my bed, she read to me from the pages of her novel, Jane Eyre.
“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you!” Charlotte said. Her voice rose to fever pitch, an unraveling not to have been predicted from her shy restraint, a happening no doubt induced by unrequited passions and my copious servings of Mountain Dew.
“Shhh, Charlotte,” Willadeene whispered. “You will wake the living.”
Charlotte closed her book, handing it back to me. “Is this not my purpose?” she asked, her voice returning meek once more.
There is a knock upon the door. Truman! He is here, and I am hardly ready. This moment just before greeting the dead, I am always anxious.
Which Truman Capote has come to call? The young, incandescent, Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman? The genius, In Cold Blood, Truman? The drunken, slurring, tragic, Truman? And why exactly has Willadeene brought him here to me?
“How do I look?” I ask her, tugging at the sleeves of my black wool, turtleneck sweater.
Through the candlelight and electrical current Willadeene speaks. Her voice: a Morse Code of flicker and hiss. “How do you think you look?”
Maddening always are her questions answering my questions. But this is how it always has been between Willadeene and me.
I give myself one last look in the mirror, turning this way and that. Truman Capote has come to call, and I haven’t a thing to wear.
