Jacquie Trims Her Manicure (Fiction)

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark …” — Ayn Rand

Dedicated to Miss Belle Ferguson

Jacquie handed Dan his clean shirts and sat on the edge of the bed to watch him finish packing.

“How many days this time?” she asked. “I can’t keep your trips straight.”

“Three with the client in San Fran,” he said, setting his toilet kit on top of his shoe bag. “Then a week with the IT guys in Phoenix and we’ll be ready to roll. You’ll hardly know I’m gone.”

“You always seem so excited to leave,” she said.

Dan stopped zipping up the suitcase. “Jacquie, how can you say that?” He sat next to her. “Throw some things in a bag and come with me.”

Jacquie shook her head. “I’ll get fired.”

“You don’t need that job. We’re hardly extravagant—we can get by on what I make. I’d rather see you doing what you love instead of working in an office. Concentrating on something instead of jumping from hobby to hobby.”

“I’m not going to live off you.” She walked out of the bedroom and he followed, wheeling the suitcase. She opened the door to the garage. “You go do what you want to do.”

His hand cupped her cheek. “There’s nothing you want to do?”

She avoided his eyes. “Nothing that would be as important as your job.”

“I guess it’s important, but that’s not why I do it.” He kissed her. “If I were passionate about knitting, I’d be the best damn male knitter in the country.”

She managed a smile. “I’d like to see that.”

Dan put his suitcase in the trunk. “Talk more later?”

“Come home safe.” She waved as he backed the car out. The garage door came down to cut off her final view of him looking at her. She listened as the car moved away. Then the house was silent.

She wandered into the living room. “What does he mean,” she said, “why don’t I do something? I’ve created more than he ever will!”

She sat in her favorite seat, a rocker she’d fitted with a needlepoint cushion, and scanned the room, full of her pottery, her quilting, her knitting. Her flowers. Her stained glass. Her Vietnamese and French and Moroccan cookbooks.

She’d filled her life not just with a job, but with a richness Dan would never know.

But Dan’s eyes had told her what he wouldn’t say aloud. Not bitterly, but sadly.

Coward.

Jacquie got up and untied the cushion from the seat. The pillow had taken her two months to make, working before and after her job, not counting the time needed to adapt the pattern of roses to her own taste and find the right colors of wool. Some days she’d even taken the project to the office and worked on it for a few minutes during lunch.

She ran her fingertips over the intricate design, remembering how she’d become so involved that she didn’t notice time passing. Almost as if she’d used the needlepoint to hypnotize herself.

There were the hours of her life, stitch by stitch by stitch by stitch, imprisoned in the pattern of the wool.

She knew. She knew why she kept herself busy with a meaningless job and these crafts that ate her concentration and devoured her life. She’d been afraid of the wrong thing.

Dan’s eyes were right. “I’m a coward,” she whispered.

She hefted the cushion, then hurled it across the room. It smashed into the shelf of her pottery, and the cups and vases crashed to the floor. What had they cost her? A six-month course on using the wheel, great stretches of time spent shaping the clay — it must’ve added up to three years.

She hurried into the kitchen and came back with a handful of garbage bags. She tore the quilt from the back of the sofa. Thirty-six weeks of her life. She took the cookbooks from the shelf and stuffed them on top of the quilt. Two years lost, learning to cook! She packed her stained glass pieces, her afghans, ripped her flowers from the vases, stripped away her wasted hours, all her excuses for not doing what she most wanted to do and knew she should, all the barriers she’d so doggedly built to wall herself off from what she loved.

She worked until every vestige of her wasted lifetime was packed away, then hauled the bags out to the curb.

The room looked empty when she came back. Clear. The clarity was soothing. A promise.

Her mind felt as clear as the newly cleared room.

She went to the bedroom closet and rummaged around. In the back behind the suitcases she found a music case beneath some old blankets. She carried the case to the rocking chair and opened it.

There was her mandolin, which she’d set aside years before.

She picked it up and the strings sang to her softly.

She ran her hands over the smooth surface. The instrument’s curves were more graceful than the curves of her pottery. Its wood of a thousand golden hues was more beautiful than her stained glass.

When she turned the pegs to tune it, she didn’t need the pitch pipe. Her ears remembered the sound of each double string. She’d just had her nails done and was afraid her fingertips wouldn’t fit the frets, but she settled the mandolin in its place against her breast and tried a few notes.

The lovely voice spoke to her. Hesitantly at first. It had been silent so long.

Her mandolin could sing an infinity of music. More music than all the stitches of her knitting, her quilting, her needlepoint. Music with more variety than any of her cookbooks offered, poignantly sweeter than any flower in her garden. Music more enduring than anything made of clay.

The voice of her mandolin filled the empty room.

As she plucked the strings, fingers remembering their places, one of her acrylic nails broke off.

Jacquie laid the mandolin down, went to the bathroom and cut off the rest of her nails, trimming them down to the quick.

Now her fingers fit the frets.

She played hesitantly, starting with a few bars from a Vivaldi mandolin concerto, then the mandolin aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

When she came to the end she sat back, eyes closed, tears running down her cheeks.

The feel of a sonatina she’d started to write long ago came back to her. She’d never finished the piece.

Her fingers found the notes. The sweet tang of the strings thrilled her blood.

She’d finish the sonatina and play it for Dan when he got home.

This short story is from Sally Jane Driscoll’s anthology, “You Can Get There from Here.”

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About the Author: Sally Jane Driscoll

Sally Jane Driscoll, Literary Editor of The Savvy Street, holds an M.A. in Publications Design/Creative Writing and Publishing from University of Baltimore, where she taught writing and co-founded the literary quarterly, Passager. She worked as reader/fiction editor for a literary agent who represented popular novelists and is senior copy editor on a medical journal. Her short stories, poetry and articles have appeared in Asimov's, Ellery Queen, Interzone, Daily Science Fiction, Capitalism Magazine, The Intellectual Activist, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Lyric, Seventeen, Woman's Day and others.