Lady Madonna's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Lady Madonna walked into the wood with the flyer in her apron pocket. She stopped at the edge of the clearing where the audition stage stood. Painted swirls covered its columns. Circles inside circles pulsed on the backdrop. A line of women waited near the steps. One wore silk. One wore beads down to her waist. Lady Madonna looked down at her plain dress and the apron she had scrubbed clean the night before. Her hands smelled of soap. Her hem was stained where a child had gripped it. She stepped back into the trees before anyone saw her. She knew one door left to knock on. Eleanor Rigby lived in a small house near the chapel. Lady Madonna had passed the house for years and seen the same lamp in the window at the same hour. She knocked. Eleanor opened the door already dressed, pearls at her throat, cardigan buttoned. "I heard there was an audition," Eleanor said. "I wondered who would come." Lady Madonna showed her the flyer. She said she could not stand on that stage in an apron. She had no money. She had until morning. Eleanor let her in. The front room was warm and smelled of tea. A dress form stood by the window with a half-finished floral print pinned to it. Eleanor took a measuring tape from a drawer and went to work without speaking. She pulled a bolt of gold cloth from a trunk beneath the stairs. "I bought this a long time ago," she said. "For a wedding that did not happen." She held the cloth to Lady Madonna's shoulder. "It will suit you better than it ever suited me." She cut. She pinned. Lady Madonna stood still while the light moved across the floor. Eleanor sewed through the afternoon and past dark. She stitched a bodice of gold and a skirt that caught every lamp in the room. When she was done she stepped back and looked at Lady Madonna for a long moment. "There," she said. "Now they will have to listen." Lady Madonna could not pay her. Eleanor waved the offer away. "Come back and tell me if you got it," she said. "That is the payment." Lady Madonna carried the folded dress home through the wood. She hung it on the back of her door and did not touch it again that night. In the morning she put it on. It fit. The apron stayed on the hook. She walked back to the clearing and gave her name to the woman with the list. The woman looked up, took in the gold, and marked her down for a slot. Lady Madonna waited her turn at the foot of the painted stage, hands quiet at her sides, no longer invisible.