My name’s Gardenia Jones. I sat in the back of the courtroom today, watching you. I said to myself, Gardenia, that man’s gonna help you. Maybe you saw me there? Wearing a white sundress and fanning myself with my newspaper?
It was damn hot in there with that endless parade of sorry people passing by, but, I admit, I didn’t mind guessing the outcomes of their cases. Like that one you had. I was right about your client. Judge agreed with me, too. Guilty as they come. There is no way that man was trying to buy a pupusa from the undercover lady cop all dressed in red leather and high heels. Oh, he was trying to buy something all right, but not any kind of food I ever heard of.
But you did a good job, yes you did. And that blue suit fits you real nice, too. I know clothes because my mama worked as a seamstress when she came to this country from Mexico. She met my daddy in Richmond, Virginia a year later and they opened a tailor shop in Jackson Ward. But after he died of one of those silent heart attacks in the middle of the night, she never touched another man or his clothes again.
Later, she lost the store and found work at a boutique making wedding gowns for rich white women, pretty ivory dresses with lace and pearls and tiny buttons running down the back. When she held up a dress for a customer to look at, all’s you could see were the tops of her hands, slender brown fingers like clothespins clasping the dress up high. I’d sit on the counter, hidden behind a wall of white, watching Mama holding up those dresses or steaming the wrinkles out of a floor-length veil while standing on a chair to reach the tippy-top.
Sometimes I’d play at her feet, sewing dresses for my dolls, tying up tangles of thread and pricking my fingers with needles. You might think I grew up wanting to be a bride all spun up and cocooned in a dream, but no, sir. I wanted to be like her, like my mama. Independent.
Truth be told, she was shy, too, with her mouth pressed closed and her eyes cast downward whenever she smiled. She smelled like cocoa butter and sweet pipe tobacco, though I swear she never smoked a day in her life. She didn’t talk much neither, but she did like to sing while she sewed. Crooning to her creations, I’d say. Stitching magical seams made of happy dreams and good wishes for the brides-to-be.
She sang about love and the ocean and the Cuban countryside where she grew up before the Revolution sent her and her family to Mexico. And I would listen to her, holding my dollies, imagining two lovers humming the same melodies on their wedding night, the groom breathing in a hint of Mama’s cocoa butter as he nuzzled his bride’s pretty neck.
Mama’s favorite song was Dos Gardenias. You ever heard it? It goes like this:
Dos Gardenias para ti
Con ellas quiero decir
Te quiero, te adoro, mi vida.
But you don’t speak Spanish, do you? I don’t either, really, but I sure do know those songs.
When Mama got sick and no longer remembered things, I filled her room with potted gardenias as bright white as those wedding dresses. Their creamy jasmine fragrance reminded her, I hope, of her childhood, of those beautiful dresses, of me playing at her feet. This evening, before she took her last breath, she closed her eyes and sang those very words. Softly. As if to forgive me. Or maybe thank me for what I was about to do.
