As Good as Dead (4 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Evans
“Can I help?” I called.
She turned. Very pretty, even while frowning and wearing her red hair in Pippi Longstocking braids that stuck out comically from either side of her head. Then the frown broke into a dazzling smile that seemed miraculously to confer immediate friendship. “Would you mind?” she called down to me. “I have to get this nasty thing up to the third floor!”
Better and better. A potential friend. I doubted that she was all that much older than I was—I’d turned twenty-one the week before—and the apartment that I’d come to view also was on the third floor.
The next time that I would see Esmé—perfectly made up, dressed in boutique capris, hair all retro Gibson Girl—I initially wouldn’t recognize her, and, then, when I did, I’d feel almost . . . tricked (also entirely too
zaftig
). But I was so happy that first day, working my shoulder under her unwieldy, flabby futon.
“Hurray!” Esmé shouted as we got the thing moving upward. I liked the noise of her, though it did make me a little nervous. My parents tended to grimace at any display of self-assurance or enthusiasm on my part (I’d been a surprise the year my mother turned forty-one), and this young woman with the red braids was actually beginning to
sing
—pausing to add a question mark at the end of the first line: Want to join in?—a very boisterous version of “Erie Canal.”
“Oh, I had a mule and her name was Sal?”—
It was strictly because my brainy, older boyfriend, Will Ludlow, had received a chance to spend the fall semester in Italy that I had undertaken the job of finding us an apartment on my own. Though I felt a shock at this stranger’s bravado, nothing could have charmed my lonely self more, at that moment, than the opportunity to join in on a song that my elementary school classes had regularly belted out on Music Fridays.
Low bridge, everybody down!
Low bridge, for we’re coming to a town!
My rental agent hadn’t shown up by the time we got back downstairs, and this fun person needed help, so I joined her in carting stuff from the yellow U-Haul trailer parked on the street up to the third-floor apartment. There was a TV and a video player and a table-size trunk. An astonishing amount of stuff: suitcases, boxes, laundry baskets, and pillowcases crammed with clothes and dishes and books and photo albums and knickknacks. An hour must have passed before it hit me that my rental agent was not going to show, that the apartment I had come to view was the apartment into which this young woman and I almost had finished moving her possessions. I took the no-show personally (back then, I’m sorry to say, I took most everything personally). We were in the middle of singing “Johnny Verbeck”—a song I’d learned at Scout camp about a man who ground his neighbors’ pets into sausages—and lugging upward the unwieldy wooden stand that would hold my companion’s futon, when I just completely lost heart.
I broke off singing. The UPS man who’d had to flatten himself against the wall scowled as we trundled past. “Sorry,” I told him.
My companion stopped singing, too. Her eyes went sober. Dark eyes with heavy lids slightly downturned at their outer corners. In a voice that was low and tender to my ears, she said, “You’re shy, aren’t you? I can tell because I am, too.”
Although this seemed highly unlikely, I did love the
idea
, and I confided, “I’m nauseatingly shy, though.”
She grinned. “I’m
ridiculously
!”
While we set up the futon stand in the apartment’s little living room—grinning at each other—we developed a long list of adverbs to describe our condition.
Me: Morbidly!
Esmé: Ludicrously!
Me: Pathologically!
Esmé: Magnificently!
I felt giddy. Giddy! Because, honestly, didn’t most of my shyness derive from fear that my encounters would not turn out right? Female friendships always had been so hard for me, fraught with relentless deconstructions of who liked whom better, but this person seemed utterly available! Utterly suited to me! She offered me a cigarette and it was a Kool! We both smoked Kools! I didn’t know anyone else who smoked Kools!
While we sat smoking—she on the dusty futon, myself on the ratty orange sofa that came with the place—she told me her name: Esmé.
My mother had finished the eleventh grade; my dad had left school at thirteen to help support his family. He was a brakeman for the railroad; she was a part-time egg handler at the big hatchery in our tiny and shrinking Iowa hometown. The idea of being the offspring of parents familiar with the classic J. D. Salinger stories—surely that was too good to be true, but the name was unusual enough that I had to ask:
“As in ‘For Esmé—With Love and Squalor’?”
She nodded and said, sounding wearily content, “The parents grew up as fans, although I think their tastes these days run more to Richard Ford. But, hey”—she grinned—“you’re not, by chance, going to be at the Writers’ Workshop, are you?”
Her response to my nod was a mixture of wail and laugh that I would come to know well. “And I bet you’re here to see this apartment, too! What an idiot I am, Charlotte! But”—she grabbed my hands and pulled me up from the sofa and turned us around in a circle—“rent with me! Look at all this space.” She started running around the little living room, doing a goofy crawl stroke with her arms to demonstrate how large it was. In reality, there had been just enough room for us to add the futon to the furnished pieces (the ugly sofa, one easy chair, a side table with a fake hurricane lamp). “You can have the bedroom and I’ll sleep out here, on the futon, so it’s no problem at all!” She hesitated. “Unless you need an apartment all to yourself?”
I’d already started consoling myself with the thought that I would have turned down the place for Will and myself, and not so much because of its decrepitude—the World War II–era wooden floors worn to the texture and gray of dirty suede, the hinges on some of the kitchen cupboards hanging cockeyed—but because it stunk; from where I stood in the middle of the living room, the kitchen’s smell of mice was almost but not entirely overcome by a shriek of odor that I’d identified as most likely emanating from a yellow, buckled swath of plaster over the bathtub. But the prospect of having this terrific person by my side at the notoriously intimidating Iowa Writers’ Workshop! A friendly pal with whom to attend the readings by famous authors and the parties afterward—a vague, but ideally dreamy, creamy future filled my head, something heartwarming and gloriously pink and orange and frame-filling as a sunset.
I sighed. “Actually, though, my boyfriend’s in Italy for first semester. I’m looking for a place for the two of us—that will work for when he gets back.”
Esmé Cole laughed. “So live with me just fall semester! We’ll both save money! All kinds of places are bound to open up in January, and I can tell you and I would have such a good time!” She jiggled her shoulders and said a teasing, “Why should your boyfriend be the one off having all the fun, right?”
I laughed even though I did not like her evoking a picture of Will, off in Italy, having fun. That morning, during a telephone call to my parents in which I’d explained that I’d be looking for an apartment large enough for Will to share with me after he returned from Italy, my father had said—not for the first time, “Don’t be a sap.” Then my mother, echoing a fear of my own, had chimed in on the extension, “Would someone who genuinely loved you go off to Italy and leave you all alone, Charlotte?”
“Come on!” Grinning, Esmé Cole held her palms pressed together as if in prayer. I had to think. I was honored that I’d received a graduate teaching assistantship from the university, but the pay
was
low. And Will—surely he would be glad to be relieved of the obligation to pitch in four months’ rent on a place in which he didn’t live. As for Esmé: If I didn’t move in with her, we might not be friends. I would be alone—
“Okay,” I said.
“Hurray!” she shouted. “Hurray!” Like a cheerleader after the team scores a point, her red braids bouncing, she jumped up and down on the apartment’s battered wooden floors. “Hurray, Charlotte!”
Despite my upbringing, her enthusiasm had overtaken me. I began to jump up and down, too. I shouted, too. “Hurray! Hurray, Esmé!”
The morning of her surprise visit to Will’s and my house, I did not watch Esmé walk back to the beige SUV parked beyond the creosote bushes. As soon as she left, I collapsed against the front door. I was drained—elated and sick-nervous. I wanted to tell Will—the person I was closest to—but I checked that impulse: What could I say that Will would understand? Also, he would be irritated that I’d accepted an invitation to eat lasagna at the Fletchers’ house without asking him (we always consulted each other over plans that involved both of us). Obviously, I could not speak to him about my happiness at a chance to redeem myself with my old friend.
Redeem yourself for what?
Also, I had no idea where my cell was, and if Will saw that I was calling on the landline, he’d flip:
Shouldn’t you have left for school by now, Charlotte?
Yada, yada, yada. Yes, I appreciated the way the man looked out for me (ran my car to the gas station if he saw that the tank was low, printed me Google Maps if I traveled anywhere without him, stopped by the store if we were low on this or that), but his generous—and so hard to resist—gestures could suggest that he saw me as incompetent. Irresponsible. A child.
How glad I was for the twice-a-day mantra that had made me halfway decent when Esmé rang the doorbell!
I always wash my face and brush and floss my teeth before bed, and first thing again in the morning.
I’d initiated that jingle at age thirty when, on a visit to my elderly parents, I got up in the night and found, at the back of their bathroom sink, two gleaming grins sunk in matching tumblers of Efferdent.
Eleven forty-five read the clock on the kitchen microwave. Was that possible? I checked the clock on the DVD player. Eleven forty-six. Christ! My undergraduate fiction workshop met at twelve thirty! I started slapping together papers and books, racing around the house. Will’s flannel shirt was big enough that I could yank it over my head as I moved, blind, toward the bedroom closet, where my old standby, a gray Chinesey cotton jacket, hung on the left hook. No time for socks. Step into black Dansko clogs. Into the bathroom for lip gloss and powdered blush. Too much of the latter. I looked sunburnt. With one hand and a dry washcloth, I rubbed down the pink, with the other, stuck a charcoal eye pencil into my bra (I’d try to dab a bit along my lash line at a stoplight). Time to make a sandwich? Eleven fifty-four. No time.
Christ. Definitely
not
looking forward to leading the undergraduate workshop. On page four of the syllabus handed out at our first class I had written: “Please do not submit any story that features porn, torture, or weapons-wielding that might make your classmates and me afraid to point out your dangling modifiers,” but I had not gotten around to reading one of the stories up for the workshop until last night, and so there had not been time for me to e-mail the class a veto of the tale of a happy-go-lucky psychopath who, for a finale, burns down the house in which he has duct-taped a pair of tots to one another in a bathtub of kerosene and experiences great happiness as he stands on the sidewalk, across the street, and takes in the aroma of the children’s roasting flesh.
Christ.
I wheeled my rattling fat-tire bike off the ramada out back and started around the house toward the road. What—
—yes, a twitch of furry tail near the base of the oleanders. The scrawny black cat had found the plate of tuna. “Hey, there!” I called jubilantly.
The cat did not look up. Could it actually be Bad Cat, so named by Will and myself a year or so earlier, during a period in which, almost every morning, we witnessed its flying into view and, before we could spring from the breakfast table to object, racing off, mouth firmly clamped on a house finch or sparrow that had been drinking from the birdbath a split second before?
The contracted expression on the cat’s face as it took its bites of canned tuna suggested some bitterness. Cats were supposed to be picky eaters. “Finicky,” the ads said. Maybe it would have preferred salmon or chicken? I wished that I had time to stop and see if the poor thing would tolerate some petting. When it had stopped coming around, I’d worried that the coyotes had gotten it. “Nice to see you, kit-kit,” I called. Still no response, so I whispered to the glittering gneiss boulder that Will and I had picked out for my fortieth birthday, “Thank you for your loveliness.”
The gravel road hissed under my tires as I pedaled toward the Third Street bike route. Back in ’98, Will and I had been looking for a solid neighborhood with a good grade school. In order to buy in this area, we’d had to take a fixer-upper. We’d felt good about all of our sweat equity during the housing run-up. In 2004, prices for the neighborhood shot up twenty-five percent in nine months. Now, four years later, the local newspaper reported that the collapse of the market had put us back to the levels of 2001.
For Sale signs stood in many of the front yards of the homes I was pedaling past, and I supposed that a number of them meant foreclosures. Supposedly, corporations were scooping up houses to rent to people who’d lost theirs in the crash. Here was one, I bet: sere oleanders, a citrus gone leafless and even losing its bark, several slumping cardboard boxes and a tire leaned up against the front door.