"Her story"
Everybody has a story. Look around any café in any city in the world, and you’ll find a room full of them. For instance, it would be easy to imagine a story for the thirty-something, brunette over there sitting in front of a chess board across from an empty chair. She’s studying the board, her narrow chin in her hand; her head leaned slightly to the side. Perhaps, she’s waiting for an opponent to come back from the washroom. Perhaps she’s just interested in the final positioning of an abandoned game – divining the stories of kings and queens, knights and soldiers. Yes, this is a woman who wears scarves, winter, spring and fall – and quite often in the summer. She is a woman who appears to take great care when it comes to her shoes. They are always high-heeled, and they consistently straddle the line between elegant and fashionable. This is the same woman who wears amazing leather boots that hug her calves with such perfect clarity – boots that convince her legs to become beautiful and curvaceous.
These stories always start with questions and more questions, which eventually lead to suppositions. Abstractions. Oblique theories. Why does she come to Café Pi alone on a Saturday morning? Is there a family at home? Is this negotiated alone time? Is she originally from Montreal? Was she born here? There is an “away-ness” about her that speaks of an older place of origin. Was she born in a small town in France? Or Spain? To be able to say you are from the Basque region of Spain would be very romantic. Perhaps her name is Mary Francis and she was born in Trois-Rivières, half-way between Montreal and Quebec City. But she has no immediate family, not here anyway. Her narrative is there in her eyes, which flash with a hazel rawness and lust for life. She loved someone she was not supposed to love, and that chasm, that crack in her life, is her best story. Does she choose to be alone now? Is she alone? Does she tell her story? Does she whisper this narrative to a lover in a burgundy bedroom at 3 a.m.?
There is another women sitting across from her now. This woman is younger. She has short but careless blond hair and wears the tortoise-shell, thick rimmed glasses that represent the trend of the day. She is tapping her foot with nervous energy. She wears runners with red laces. There are more questions now, about the first woman, who today, is wearing a chestnut-coloured scarf...and additional questions about this new blond woman with reckless hair. These women seem pleased, comfortable in each other’s company. They are not playing chess.
Everyone has a story, but not everyone knows how to tell a story. Some stories are hidden behind smiles and graciousness. Some will never be told. And some come out despite their owner’s desire to keep them buried.