Snow is holy.
It falls on the streets and the cars. It softens and obscures the hard edges of the buildings and falls on the shoppers hurrying about their business. It muffles the sounds of the traffic and slowly builds up in white mounds on the windowsills and fire escapes, covering everything with pure, soft white.
Each flake is a jewel, perfect in its own right. They sparkle and gleam and cling to your coat like gems, and then are gone. Water needs the cold to bring out its real structure, and each snowflake owes its six-fold symmetry to the geometry of the water molecule. In snow we are seeing nature's secrets made manifest, and with such beauty that it astonishes us and takes our breath away. And none of them duplicates.
Well, I suppose some of them are, but who has time to look for them? Not me. Christmas eve and I was finishing up my shopping, leaving the liquor store and headed back to return Marilynn's necklace for the fourth time. This one was too femme, I was sure of it: too fine and wispy. The first one had been too S&M: a thick slab of jet on a solid silver choker. The second one had been too long. Marilynn had pointed out the same type of necklace to me at lunch just after I'd bought it and told me how the woman wearing it was going to dip it in her soup as soon as she leaned over. I was glad I hadn't given it to her: long necklaces were evidently silly. The third one had been silver too, like the first, and I realized as soon as I left he shop that she would never have stood for silver. Now this one was too fine. It would make her look old. It was what Marilynn referred to as "dowager jewelry".
Probably I should have gone to a more mainline jewelry store or maybe Bloomingdales or Nordstrom's, but I liked the stuff at Coretta Dor's: semi-precious stones set in simple but elegant settings of gold and silver. Slabs of jade and jasper and chalcedony and malachite, snowy agate and amethyst and labradorite and spinel and jet and amber. The names of the stones were magical to me, and so were their warmth and color, the intricacy of the patterns in them. In their delicacy and honesty I found some kind of depth and profundity that I just didn't find in the kind of jewelry Marilynn liked: real faceted jewels in ornamental settings, very baroque and artificial, all naked gleam and gloss.
The shop itself was down at the end of a mall in Evanston, converted from a town house with the shop on the first floor and set back from the street so it didn't get that much traffic. It was more like a mineralogist's shop than a jewelry store, with geodes split open on stands so you could see the fairylands of crystals inside, crystals that had taken eons to form: polished stones not perfect enough for jewelry but too beautiful not to show, and spiky blooms of amethyst and quartz standing about like bunches of frozen flowers.
I never saw Coretta, if there was a Coretta. The shop was apparently run by her niece Tracy, a slight girl with hair dyed raven black to go with the black clothes she always wore, with a bunch of slightly rebellious piercings: four in one ear, five in the other, and a small gold ring in her nostril. None of her jewelry was Coretta's. She told me she couldn't afford it.
I'd come to know her pretty well in the last few days as we tried to find something that Marilynn would like, and so when I opened the door now and walked in out of the snow she looked at me with a wan expression, already knowing what was up. It was Christmas Eve and there was no one else in the store.
"No good again?" she asked me.
"No. No good again." I set the shopping bag from the liquor store on the floor. "The chain's too fine. She'll think I was too cheap to buy something bigger."
Tracy sighed and shook her head. "She must really be special, huh? Most men wouldn't spend so much time on a gift."
I made a sour face. "Well, let's just say she's a woman who knows what she wants. And she gets very disappointed when she doesn't get it."
Tracy took the box from me and unwrapped it. I hated to see the paper go, it was a beautiful wrapping job and Tracy had just done it just that morning. She opened the black velvet box and took out the necklace and held it between her hands.
It was a lovely necklace, gossamer thin with tiny crystals that gleamed like dew on a spider's web. It looked like something magical dangling from her slim fingers. She sighed again and put the necklace back in the box.
"Well, do you want to look around some more?" Her voice was sympathetic. "Or do you just want a refund?"
It was dark out, and I looked out at the snowy street where already the traffic had all but disappeared as people got ready for Christmas, their shopping done.
"It's almost four. You'll be closing soon, won't you?"
Tracy turned around and put the box on a shelf. "I'll stay open as long as we have customers. Take your time."
"But it's Christmas Eve."
She turned back and leaned against the counter, then shrugged. "Nothing special to me."
The store was simple and elegant, just like the jewelry: dove-gray carpet, simple glass display cases, muted, recessed lighting that shone down on the stones and gleaming metal.
"Don't you celebrate Christmas?" I asked.
"You mean presents and all that? Sure. I'll be over at my mom's tomorrow, getting faced on punch and fighting along with the rest of them. It's a family tradition."
"But you don't do anything for Christmas Eve?"
She looked at me for a moment and then said, "No. I kind of like to be alone on Christmas Eve. I just don't feel like being around people. It's kind of special to me."
"Do you live around here?" I said it without thinking, then I caught myself. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to get personal."
"No, that's okay. In fact, I stay here at the shop during the Christmas rush, upstairs on the second floor. Help keep an eye on the place, at least until after the first of the year, then I'll probably move out. I've been doing it since high school. Coretta can handle the place alone after Christmas."
"Are you a student?"
Evanston was full of students from Northwestern, and Tracy looked the part.
"No. I'm all done. Degree in art history. I'm looking forward to a rewarding career in fast food management."
She gave me a slow smile and I was suddenly struck with how young she looked. I had one of those rare moments when perception suddenly shifts and you see the person behind the face, and this person was young and, it occurred to me, strangely hurt. She was putting up a brave show, but there was something wounded in her. She seemed too young to have been hurt already, but there was no mistaking it. It made her seem younger, as if the pain had knocked the grown-up out of her. I couldn't imagine spending the holidays being tied to a jewelry store.
I quickly turned my eyes to the display cases, looking at things I had looked at four or five times before, but the stones drew my eyes and rewarded them again with their proud polish or the depths of their beauty: so quiet and still yet so alive.
