White ivory is not easy to come by. Ask Harriet Lake. If anyone knows about white ivory, it’s Harriet. She’ll tell you how ridiculously easy it is to find yellow ivory; how impossibly hard to come across white – not off white, but true white. The kind of white she spent several years and several bundles of money to come up with for her replacement eye.
Of course she admits vanity is the cause. She’s seen too many yellowed orbs peeking out between nearly closed lids in her day and, quite frankly, they give her the creeps. Made a person think the wearer of such didn’t give a good shucky-darn for their personal appearance. To Harriet, wearing a yellow eye is tantamount to wearing yellow teeth, chunks of yesterday’s egg yolks hanging around between gaps. Not pretty. Not pretty at all, teeth like that. Same for replacement eyes -- could turn an onlooker’s stomach and has turned her stomach more than a time or two.
What you need to be wary of is Harriet’s proclivity to go on about nonessential things, like the one eye she tried that had been turned to a perfect orb from the spine of a whale, or another one (what a miserable failure that was!) some idiot artiste had mosaic’d together from lost baby teeth. Never mind how it preyed upon Harriet’s mind that the idiot didn’t wait for the youngsters to lose their teeth naturally, instead extracting them from their small open mouths as they slept – it still makes her shudder when someone reminds her of all those small empty mouths, not to mention the small empty Tooth Fairy pillows, because the idiot artiste was too cheap to leave quarters or dimes in their pockets. Harriet’s only saving grace is that none of the children are hers; she has no children. Oh, a couple had started – but they’d shriveled up before the age of five or six and blown away with the first gust of any real wind.
I tell you, if you let her get started on how she lost the damned eye to begin with – you’ll never, and I mean NEVER get her back on track. But then maybe your interest is more about the empty eye-hole than it is about how to find true-white ivory.
It’s never easy for us writers. I mean, a story starts about one thing, a thing thought to be of interest, like white ivory sources – and next thing you know – the focus gets all fuzzy. It’s like the bread crumbs you thought were there to follow already got ate and the birds that ate them are nowhere in sight. In fact, they mightn’t be birds at all that ate the crumbs but small, underfed, toothless children who come along the same path, picking up each crumb and gumming it down.
Anyway, the focus or direction of this tale is divided now. Damn it! Did I not warn you about letting her get off on some tangent or other? It’s always the way. Some character or another takes over; they’re whimsical that way, characters – and fickle, letting the ball bounce back to the poor misunderstood writer’s corner (who else do you think’ll be blamed for this tangled mess?). You got it. It’ll be our fault, us writers. Well, me, my fault, in this particular tale if I opt to take the wrong path: To tell about Harriet’s eye-hole and how it got to be a hole without a proper eye instead of about the ivory itself and how she got it and her current pristinely true-white eye. Or vice versa. I’m damned either way.
Hm.
Both? Tell about both? I don’t think the planet’s got enough hours left to waste on hearing about both.
Hold up there a minute.
Here’s the deal: this started out about white ivory and I’ll be ding-donged if I’m going to let anybody as inconsequential as Harriet Lake stop me from sharing how you can have an eye, left side or right, as pure and white as the one she wears. It’ll be her downfall, that eyeball, in the end, she’s gotten so boastful, so vain about it. How she pops it right out at social occasions, cocktail parties and such, and plops it into the palm of anyone willing to hold it up close and give the perfection of its white smooth rounding close-up scrutiny while she stands there with that sunken flap of a lid, those fake eyelashes hanging down about level with where her nostrils flare out. I’ve often thought somebody ought to hand her one of those fancy toothpicks, you know the ones with that green or red shredded looking cellophane on one end, so she could prop that eye hole open and folks, whoever it was taking turns holding her white ivory eye, wouldn’t get too envious and decide to pocket the thing and leave that hole in Harriet’s head empty and wanting its orb back in place. It’d take an awful hard-hearted person to look at that toothpick holding up Harriet’s lid and still make off with her ivory eyeball.
Oh, but it won’t be me who hands her a toothpick. You see, I’m not all that fond of Harriet. Not hard-hearted enough to steal her eye, but feelings not kindly enough toward her to stop somebody else from doing so. Come to think of it, it might just be you, one of you listening to this as it’s read to you by someone else still fortunate enough to have both eyes – although I can’t recall when I’ve seen a naturally two-eyed individual in the last quarter century or so. I hear rumors, right enough, about some folks still in existence with such treasures accommodating vision needs. And, as I have a writerly imagination, I give those rumors the same credit I give to tall tales about the existence of yeti and big-foot types roaming uninhabited terrains – frozen and/or forested out-of-the-way domains for the unproven to maybe, and I do mean MAYBE – exist. Just because a big foot character doesn’t hold up the check-out line at Piggly Wiggly with endless carts of groceries doesn’t mean there aren’t a few out there. Same for naturally two-eyed people, I say.
So. Where was I? Wait. Where you going? Don’t you want to know about the source of true-white ivory? About the wizened old lady who polishes the orbs after her brother brings the ivory into perfect rounds? No?
And you don’t care to hear about how Harriet Lake lost her eye to begin with? How her last husband, who was fighting her like a demon grabbed hold of her face, got a grip on her cheekbone on the right side and, while she held his head under water, him thrashing for all he was worth and his fingers finding some purchase to grip inside that eye socket, died while holding on – her right eyeball in his grip. He was dead weight then, and sinking, and Harriet, she was sinking with him. Being the thinker she was, she cut off his hand at the wrist and managed to save herself. Not the eye though. That right eye was done for. Once the hand was cut off, it was easy enough for Harriet to work the hand and fingers loose. She knew right away by how the damn thing banged and swung about when she ran, there’d be no saving it, so she cut it off with the same all-in-one tool she used to saw her mister’s wrist in half. It was a damned fine tool for sawing bone once you got through the willy-nilly tendons and such.
Well. As I seem to be talking to myself – no sense in continuing. I knew they’d blame me, the writer. And half figured right from the get-go they’d walk away. They always do. No skin off my nose when these things happen. Creation’s no easy thing. I’ve learned to harden my heart, to leave my ears down below safely festooned in a satin-lined casket, to cast a blind eye after them. Like I said, No skin off my nose. None at all. No nose anymore to get skinned anyway. That damned Harriet Lake! My god, but she makes this empty skull ache!
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