One day Jane and Damien and I found some thrown away bits of window dressing from one of the downtown department stores. Filene's or Jordan's. Fake branches and flower parts, very well used. Stomped on twigs, maybe a bird's nest. Just the ticket for our Spring Tableaux.
Spring Tableaux was what you did when, bored, you borrowed someone's top vent VW bug and crowded inside with your fake greenery and drove through the streets of Boston's labyrinthine downtown.
Who drove? Was it Jane, with her mouth full of mystery, her eyes full of spying, her throaty cackle of delight, head thrown back, laughter like the smallest living animals freed from between her lips to sail toward the Heavens? Or was it Damien? he of the wispy beard and imp's small toothed grin, hair flying out the window in the faintest scented spring breezes. It could have been me, with no skills, lurching the clutch, pounding the brakes, sending them all flying and the decorations to, toward certain fateful collisions and policemen's Irish disappointment.
But no, not I that day in spring, as the car glided, not hunched along, the narrow Boston streets, no longer cobblestone, not where the stores were, the big department stores, with their multiple basements, each one cheaper and darker and less civilized then the last, like the deepest darkest circles of Dante's Hell. Only on this earth and voluntarily entered for purposes of bargains. Women with arm wattles elbowing each other for the choicest spring frocks, wrinkled and worn and tossed on heaps, dressing and undressing right there in the warm bowels of basement no. 3, young extra-hire clerks busily stuffing bags full of treasures hidden under counters and down underfilled bras and hips and crotches of clothing.
It was April in Boston; cherries budded and robins breasted and VW bugs sprouted garlanded plastic branches through their sun roofs, while we three leaned out of windows and chortled "Spring Tableaux! Spring Tableaux" to the imagined delight of passersby on their frenzied way to shopping Nirvana.
