TANIA A. MARRON
The Circle
Victorious, that’s how I felt when I entered a dark post-soviet department store, as if I hadn't been nervously recounting money in my pocket on the way there. On the second floor, there was a jewelry stand full of fake silver rings, crafty earrings, and matching sets that would make any drag queen jealous. The seller, an overweight woman in her 50s with bright red lips, was sitting behind the counter. Her thick fingers—which demonstrated part of her collection—were turning pages of a celebrity gossip magazine. She was surrounded by a heavy, astringent smell of burning incense sticks: to my young mind, they promised wealth and fortune.
She barely glanced at me when I picked up a ring—the ring, my ring. To her, I was just one of many penniless teenage girls who came to admire the sparkling jewellery and never bought anything. I put the ring on—the heavy, cold metal twining my thin middle finger—pretending to assess whether I should buy it. That decision had been made a month before, the moment when I first saw the shining head of a roaring panther encrusted with tiny crystals lying on a dark velvet cushion. I acted as if buying such luxury was a mundane thing for me: a decision was made at that moment and didn't require any daydreaming, saving every coin and praying that the ring would wait for me. I took the ring off and placed it on the counter. "I'll take this one."
I emptied fourteen сreased banknotes and thirty coins; those were the two-week equivalent of school lunches and bus tickets. I anxiously waited until she counted the money, not daring to take the ring before she finally gave me a nod of approval and swept the money into the money belt situated on her ample abdomen. A second later, she was back in her gossip world, and I grabbed the ring and walked out, suppressing an urge to hop away—I was an elegant woman now.
The ring caught my eye a month before, when I came to buy a cold blue string of pearls for my mother: one of few things in the shop that were kept behind the locked glass drawer. It was time for an annual school ball and my mother—a teacher—had the same routine there: she'd diet on boiled beef and cucumber salad for a few months, get herself a bold bright evening gown, find matching stilettos that she'd never wear again as they were too "chic" for all other life occasions, and put on a vivid lipstick that was too "fancy" for every normal day. It was her annual Cinderella night, full of flowers gifted by grateful students. In her fairytale, she had to be an evil stepmother too: the next day she'd come back to tiresome work, the dress and shoes would find their place in the wardrobe, and I occasionally sneak into her room to use a "too chic for now" lipstick. She never noticed.
"Too fancy," "Too chic,' we had many of those at home: the porcelain teacups, the silver cutlery, the gold-encrusted dinner set, all of them, untouchable, unreachable, hidden behind the glass cabinet as a reminder that this day again was not special enough to use it. We were not special enough to use it.
When I saw the ring, I knew immediately it was too chic, too fancy for a girl who cut her own fringe with kitchen scissors and lived in a grey concrete Kharkiv in the east of Ukraine. The ring called me as if I was a weak-willed hobbit, promised me adventures and new powers. It whispered to me that I was special enough to wear it, all I had to do was to reach it and buy it.
Before I finally entered the adult life of a university student, I wore it religiously every day the next two years. I didn't mind that the panther’s head was slowly losing its crystals and that the inner rim became brown. I didn't care that the ring sometimes would glide off my finger and magnificently swoosh across the room when I gesticulated too much. I wasn't bothered by my mom's comments that my tomboy eleganza didn't match with such a big, shiny adornment. I was chic, fancy, special. Every day was my day.
In my late 20s, I saw the same ring on eBay. I chose the right size and paid the price, unbothered: I could afford hundreds of them now. When it arrived, I felt the familiar cold heaviness of a panther's head on my finger. This time there was no overwhelming desire to leap, no profuse sense of being special. This time it was just a ring.