New for this month's show!

I am excited to announce that we will have the privilege to have copies of the wonderful journal, Dappled Things, for sale at our March Show!  What a wonderful opportunity to support the greater Catholic Art and Culture movement through our local venue!  And what a perfect addition to our current Writer's show!  The journal is published quarterly and includes both visual art from Catholic artists as well as poetry, prose, and essays by Catholic writers.

Here's a sample of a piece written by Julie McGurn for the current issue of Dappled Things.  It's titled Old Grace and New Beauty and quite appropriate for this week, I think.  You can find the rest of her short story here.

Old Grace and New Beauty

Julie McGurn

At the end of the block on Main Street sits a small dry cleaners owned by the Choi family. It is a model of tidiness and precision. Every day the hum and whoosh of electric dryers and steam cleaners sound forth like the beating heart of a great giant. Mrs. Choi runs the register with an efficiency bordering on the brusque, but mitigated by her ability to greet each customer by name. The pronunciation may sometimes be wanting, but she’s got the raw data down cold.

No one could doubt her willingness to extend herself for her customers either. Like one February morning when a regular, Mr. Sam Gilette, came in with a black smudge on his forehead. After her usual boisterous hello, Mrs. Choi leaned over the counter, pointed to her own forehead, and whispered, “Your head,” in a discreet gesture meant to spare the man a day of embarrassment.

“What?”

“Your forehead. It all dirty.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “Church. I’ve  just come from church. Ash Wednesday.”

“Oh. Church.” A flash of recognition crossed Mrs. Choi’s face as she remembered seeing such a smudge before. She was satisfied by his explanation and her own solicitude, and business could proceed. It’s an admirable service they provide to the public. People bring in their soiled, stained, wrinkled and ripped clothing and receive them back a few days later fresh, pressed,mended and clean.

Serena, Mrs. Choi’s niece, works as a seamstress. She sits just near the front counter, facing the wall under a pegboard of dozens of large, brightly colored spools of thread ready for any contingency. She had left Korea as a teenager to join her aunt and uncle who had emigrated to America several years before, and everything she knows of her new home she learned from them. But she possesses all the softness her aunt lacks. Her face is smaller and finely shaped, not the broad block of Mrs. Choi. She speaks infrequently to the customers, but when she does, a shy sweetness emanates from behind her unfashionable glasses. When things get busy, Serena gets up from her sewing machine and helps at the counter, but this is always a last resort. Everyone knows Mrs.Choi is in charge.

All that changed the day Mrs. Choi suffered a stroke. She had been sorting the day’s receipts when Serena noticed a trickle of drool fall from Mrs. Choi’s mouth onto the counter. The right side of her face had gone completely slack and looked as if it were melting. Now Mrs. Choi is in a rehab center and Serena is running the shop. At first, Serena was terrified. Though her aunt’s imperious manner could sometimes be irritating, it had been so much easier when Mrs. Choi was there. Serena had never needed to think for herself or make any decisions. Submitting to the commands of her superiors was second nature to her. When her aunt told her to step lively and help at the register, barking orders at her one at a time, she would do what she was told. Serena could even anticipate what her aunt would say next, but she always hung back and never let Mrs. Choi know. Out of politeness, perhaps. Her aunt liked it that way and Serena liked to please. But from such submission she had learned to do things on her own. Serena soon found herself doing what she would have imagined unthinkable a mere six months before. “The buck stop here,” she had taken to saying. Sometimes her new motto confused patrons. Some thought she was talking about the bus. Others had visions of marauding bands of male deer.

From her days of hemming and mending, she had gotten good at concocting lives for the garments customers brought in. Bits of the world came to her one hanger at a time, like bodies without spirits. Each suit, each dress, each cardigan, was an occasion for her to wonder about lives being lived on a big stage somewhere.

Say a 38 Long Brooks Brothers suit came into the store. Serena would see a man strutting through the morning rush at Penn Station as if wading in the shallow end of the shore, the other people like so much water in a wave, their presence a slight dragon his progress. In the evening he would reverse course, but slowly, buffeted by more waves than before. Serena would smell the stale odor of cigar clinging to the jacket and conjure a scene of male bonhomie, muttered complaints and bursts of laughter, the slow release of strife amid the billows of acrid smoke.

Serena liked cocktail dresses and ball gowns best. Her eyes would widen at the first glimpse of sequin or bead. One dress in particular caught her fancy. Long to the floor and short off the shoulder, its golden silk ruched on the side to conform to the wearer’s shape. She could almost feel the soft skin of the slightly rounded shoulders, cold like a marble statue. This one, this one, would be worn to a party, a grand party with string quartets and canapés. She could see the lady in the gold dress walking into a parquet ballroom, a row of enormous floor to ceiling windows with layer upon layer of trim framing a Manhattan street scene a few stories below. The darkness outside would be punctuated by a haphazard array of lights—some red from the backs of cars,others white from lampposts or blue from shop signs.

Serena wondered what the size 6 gold dress lady would be thinking as she stood looking down to the street in between sips of her vodka tonic. Maybe she was steeling herself for the appearance of the woman her husband was carrying on with, andthe fake cordiality that she would endure. Maybe she would be cursing the ultra-support hose this clingy number necessitated, counting the minutes until she could free herself from the flesh-suffocating torturer. Or maybe she was thinking how pretty the street looked below with all the lights twinkling and the noise muted, and how golden the ballroom looked, and how she felt part of it all.

Serena never considered her own life a stage. She was always backstage. She was wardrobe. The real action of life was always elsewhere. She wasn’t depressed by this, and she suffered no envy. She was content with her place backstage. Almost.

Serena’s fear of Mrs. Choi had kept any thoughts other than pleasing her aunt in check. Her job was to do what Mrs. Choi told her, and she did that well. But with Mrs. Choi no longer there and her eventual success in running the shop assured, Serena began to think the stage not so scary either. She could run things. Mrs.Choi had become training wheels she no longer needed.

One day Mr. Gilette came in shortly before close. He placed a slender department store shopping bag on the counter.

“Serena, I have something I need cleaned. I need it tomorrow. Can you help me?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Gilette. It almost five o’clock. I don’t know. But I can try for you. The buck stop here.”

Mr. Gilette reached into the bag and pulled out a dress of lilac silk. He held it for a moment and then smoothed it out on the counter.

“Oh, very pretty.” She liked the smell of tea rose that accompanied it. “For Mrs. Gilette?”

“Yes, it’s my wife’s. Her favorite. I need it for her funeral the day after tomorrow. Is it possible?”

Serena, who had picked up and was admiring the dress, shuddered a little as if death had somehow touched her, too. “Oh, Mr. Gilette. I very sorry. Very sorry about Mrs. Gilette. I make sure it be ready.”

“She always looked so pretty in this dress. So soft,” his voice trailed off.

“You must loved her very much.”

“Yes, yes. Thank you, Serena. See you tomorrow.”

Mr. Gilette walked out the door and Serena took the dead woman’s dress to the machines in the back of the shop....

Read the rest of the story here, and be sure to buy a copy of the journal at our March 2nd and 3rd show to support the authors and artists both here and all over the country that share our beliefs and love of our faith and culture.