Originally published on Thumpcity.com
Three Keys
She was starting to feel like the woman
of a thousand keys. Her worn red leather Coach wallet contained exactly 32 separate
keys to other people's houses, apartments and condos. As a semi-professional
house/pet/plant sitter, Joanna Greenberg had one of those "responsible" type
of faces which gave her a trustworthy air. Only lately, she was feeling weighed
down by all the keys--it gave new meaning to the term "heavy metal" and she could
totally empathize with school custodians and building superintendents clanking
around with their massive keyrings containing bits of metal that unlocked secret
doors into other worlds. Worlds that contained lives within lives and worlds
that were inhabited by surreal tableaus; overflowing ashtrays, clutter gathering
in cobwebbed corners and some worlds that could fit on the head of a pin in their
anal neatness. Personalities assaulted her in the form of lime green shag carpets
and Pottery Barn room replicas of pg. 72 of this month's mail-order catalog.
As if one could mail-order a life so cozy and chic, yet at the same time undeniably
bland and safe.
An expression she'd come to abhor, probably
as a direct result of her occupation, was "Take Care"; it was how many of her
clients signed their notes with instructions on how much Fluffy would eat in
a given day or how the spider plant desperately needed reviving and could she "..be
a love and add a few drops of Miracle Gro every third day, pretty please?" She
cherished the colorful touches of flamboyancy that her gay clients added. One
couple left snapshots of their kitties with brief personality profiles. She supposed
these were her favorite moments--bursts of sweetness added in amongst the often
dull routine. And they never signed signed these missives with the impersonal
to the point of rudeness phrase that now made her wince. Take Care--wasn't that
redundant? After all--that's what all these jobs were about were they not? It
was excessive and yet almost infuriatingly noncommittal at the same time.
Once, during a dusty yet awe-inspiringly
beautiful trip to Greece, she'd come upon a unique key in a jewelry shop on the
island of Santorini, famed for its black sand beaches and its hush-hush rep as
a long-ago Jackie O. hideaway oasis. This particular key was silver and ornate
and the older woman shopkeeper, wearing traditional Greek black (was it the national
uniform?), noticed her admiring it and pulled her aside conspiratorially, whispering
in an accented and breathy-grave tone, "That is the Key to Happiness". When happiness'
price was haggled over until mutual satisfaction, Joanna had won the token which
she'd carried home with her over the Mediterranean and then worn on a chain as
a pendant. For awhile, she'd even harbored fantasies that it would someday unlock
the secrets of her future lover's heart. Schoolgirl stuff that had been shattered
when the head broke from the shank leaving her happiness mojo symbol cleft in
two.
In high school she'd worked the obligatory
retail mall jobs and became the "third key" a position imbued with the dubious
honor of having an extra key in case both the Manager and Assistant Manager happened
to be hung over at the same time. An altogether frequent occurrence as it happened,
especially when her 16-yr.-old form of transportation at the time did not include
a set of keys but rather a well-worn bus pass. The third key position, which
her parents had beamed briefly about and then gone back to watching Dateline,
had been the beginning of this affair with the keys. Or the beginning of the "Key
Karma" as she sometimes liked to think of it. With all this key karma she figured
at least one of these keys would lead to a Pandora's box of forbidden yet interesting
treasures. Never a stranger to irony and symbols, she translated things into
keys sometimes just for amusement. For example, the third finger on the hand,
or key, was the middle finger aka the bird. She made ! up riddles and poems for
herself.. "The bird is the third key and the key to happiness broke in two making
happiness split itself into a head and a body. The second key points to the other
keys on the keyboard--key...bored." This frivolous sort of wordplay was an attempt
to assign meaning to the meaningless and to give her brain cells a task other
than figuring out how to muffle the sounds of metal clicking against metal.
Each time she added a new key or set of
keys to her ever-growing collection, she'd feel it in her hand--its solidness,
its cool sharp edges. She fancied herself a key clairvoyant. Sometimes when she
touched a new key she'd be inundated with a rush of images, colors, sounds and
snippets of conversation. It was if she were able to decode the vibrations held
by the metal, just like those psychics on TV who could hold an object of a dead
loved one and then with all sincerity tell the bereaved, tear-streaming face
before them the tiniest of details that seemed impossible to know. It was a fascinating
yet fleeting sensation and it would pass as quickly as it arrived leaving only
a residue of a memory behind. Maybe the key to her destiny was hidden in these
moments. She could be a key reader--reading lives rather than deaths. She'd looked
it up once... psychometry... something about reading the energy of things. She
did know for a fact that objects, like people, had an energy that could be read.
If Russian telekinetics could bend spoons just by intense thought concentration
then maybe she could bend keys into a life of her own by simply willing it to
be so.
In the meantime, she waited. She waited
for the one key that would turn all the locked places in her life. The one that
would be the equivalent of an epiphany worthy of E=MC2 or if not that profound
then something softer but equally powerful in its revelatory quality. She didn't
necessarily need the grandiosity of an AHA! or a EUREKA! Maybe just a humbling, "oh." As
she studied the keys more closely she saw that some were more worn than others
and some had the shiny glare of having come freshly made from the hardware store--a
set made especially for her. Keys with no history yet. She had a few of those
thicker dorm style ones that had dire warnings of the illegality of duplication.
Just like the warnings on mattress tags that everyone ignored except to make
the occasional passing "mattress police" joke.
Joanna often wondered at that first stoner
store manager who'd decided to so casually pass on the power and burden of her
third key status. What if the decision that had imprinted her life in such a
way, shaping it with its own grooves and sharp places, had been a mistake? What
if, rather than a destined quirk, it had been a drug-induced prank? Give the
kid a key and let her feel important so we can go off and party like cheetahs
smoking our faces off and boozing it up until the dawn yawns back at us? No matter.
It was all part of a bigger picture and the details were unimportant. This path
had chosen her, hell, even the keys, themselves, had chosen her in a manner of
speaking. She'd go on watering and feeding and walking and locking up and unlocking
strangers' doors. The keys were her passport to other places. And the other places
were the keys to her mystery.