Esther Stories (2 page)

S
HE SAID
she had a theory about the places she’d lived: that she carried all her old rooms around with her, and that those rooms, in a sense, were her past. She’d been adopted, and for that reason had always felt a void in the back of her eyes. All that family lore she’d never know. But, she said, the fact of her adoption prevented her from having any excuses, from being able to blame her life’s failures on some baggage of the past. She’d seen too many people crippled by their family histories to want to go digging around to find out who she was, who she came from. She had the luxury of nobody coming before her. She wasn’t captive. She said she’d never be captive.

But she took the rooms she had lived in around with her the way some of us lug around our grandmother’s battered photo albums, leather-bound, with pictures pasted on black construction paper. She used to tell me about the room with the morning rainbow. How she’d wake up to a tiny rainbow in a corner of the ceiling. It had something to do with refracted light, the way the sun hit the window, causing particles of light to collide, smash, creating color. She said she didn’t want to understand it completely. She just wanted to take it. The rainbow wasn’t always there. When it was raining or cloudy or snowing, the corner trapped shadows. She said she could always tell the weather by first looking there.

Another room had a ceiling like the bottom half of a sawed-off pyramid. It was like sleeping in a coal freight car. At night in bed she’d be hauled across Nebraska through weeping crickets and dead-tired towns.

Another room, up a hill, in Spokane, was all windows, and she lived among the squirrels and the phone lines, and spent entire afternoons watching the old flowered-dress woman across the street. The woman, Helen, sitting in an unsteady folding lawn chair, crossing and recrossing her legs in a garden of tiger lilies and garbage.

She had fears. One night I woke up and found her on the floor of my room, naked, wrapped in my ratty army coat. Her eyes were wide open, but she wasn’t looking at anything. She said she was afraid of the fan. The incessant whir and blur of the fan. I said I’d turn it off. No, more than the noise. It’s a hateful thing. I’ll throw it out the window, I said. Just please don’t sleep on the floor like that.

We started staying at her place only. Her apartment was on the third floor of a rambly mansard-roofed house on Pond Street in Jamaica Plain. Her room was clutter and pillows. We squeezed. I dreamed of being strangled by ivy, choking on spiked leaves. She’d scissor-kick the covers off the bed and say, Now I have you where I want you, my den, my warren. I’d show up late for work, groggy, tugging on my collar, itching.

It was a small white room with heavy drapes. I looked around for rainbows and freight cars and asked her what of this room she would carry when she left. She said she’d think of the parts of the walls that smelled like smoke and the dried blood she’d scrubbed away from a spot near the door. But also that her memory of the place was not yet formed, that it would take time, that things would come to her later.

Sometimes in the mornings she’d tell me about other rooms.

I had an efficiency in Toronto. A little girl had been raped in the closet. I used to listen to her screams in the walls. You don’t believe me.

I believe you.

I’m not talking about ghosts. I’m talking about things that happened. Things that stay.

Go on. Tell me more.

At first she shrieked for only a few minutes every night. Then she started talking. That lasted longer. She kept me up at night listening to her. Sometimes she still does.

She kissed me. Then she left me in bed and went to work. I stayed there and listened and watched, waited and watched. Under the sweaty covers, I stared at the walls, tried to see laughter, moaning. Dinner-table battles, a slow caress. An old man haunted by fingers letting go of his wrist. Whose fingers? He can’t remember her face. And then it was dark, and I saw a boy in nothing but a light-blue pajama top looking out between the gaps in the blinds at the retreating taillights of his mother’s car. I watch him pull his hands slowly down his cheeks as he stands at the window.

S
HE GOES
to their tiny country house in the woods with her young daughter, ten days after the sudden death of her husband, and it isn’t the silence but the noise, the wind in the trees, the way the leaves whack the window. It’s fall, the height of fall, and it was a disease that took him with the blank force of a fist pounding on a door in the dead of night. It must have been eating away at him in secret for a long time, maybe even last summer as he worked on screening in this very porch, something she’d never wanted; she always said, Who screens things in? Don’t we have enough of that already? After years of this argument, she’d finally given in, though she insisted she’d sit on the steps, that she’d never drink her coffee in there. Now she remembers what her mother whispered to her at the train station, and she was only trying to be helpful. She didn’t mean it the way it sounded, but her mother had whispered, Don’t lionize him, meaning, You’re young, you loved him, but don’t fall so far into grief when—eventually, her mother didn’t mean tomorrow—there are men who can pull you up. Meaning: Don’t steel yourself out there. And now, standing on the porch he destroyed, it’s the noise that doesn’t have the common decency to wait awhile to begin.

At night she reads while her daughter sleeps. She’s surprised she’s able to concentrate as long as she does. This might have been a book he read, a book he may have even talked about. She can’t remember things like the names of books, the names of people, the names of places. She could never remember the name of one or another town they once loved. You remember? The one with the old guy and the singing dog? Little dog not much bigger than a mouse sitting on his shoulder oooh-oooohing. Used to infuriate him, and he’d seethe, Boone, Boone, North Carolina, in the parking lot of the state park. It was in Boone and the dog’s name was Rudy and the man’s name was Flynn and he kept telling us that his mother had wanted to name him Errol but his father had insisted on Richard.
Richard Flynn, the guy with the dog’s name was Richard Flynn.
Facts he never forgot. But he couldn’t remember tilts of a head, or impressive sneezes, or the way someone once said yes by doing nothing but breathing quicker. Not for anything could he remember the droop of a chin. She puts the book down because, yes, her mind has wandered like he always said her mind wanders. The light beneath the brown shade reminds her of the dying light she saw out the train window on the way here. They always took the same train at the same time, so she knew the light, the early-November burlap light, and she might have nudged him had he been on the train,
the light,
and he would have looked at it as if he were seeing it for the first time. She leaves the lamp on, stares at it awhile before half-sleep descends.

T
HE LANDLORD
didn’t know what to do with her clothes. The furniture he could either use or sell, but the clothes, some mothy, others pungent, mildewed, the cheap fur of one of her old coats like a cat he’d seen around a while ago. He puts on a pair of rubber gloves he found under the pipes beneath the kitchen sink, one yellow and one green, and climbs quietly, slowly, up the stairs, as if he’s afraid of waking her. The her who’s already been buried eight days now, at the expense of the county, in the scabbled yard out past Buffom Road, near the industrial park. He wants to run up the stairs and get this over with, but dread yanks him back, dread of opening the accordion doors of her closet. Her smell. She lived up there umpteen years; she always paid her rent on time, sliding it under the door in envelopes with scratched-out return addresses. She never complained about his plumbing, about his insistence on never replacing anything with a new part when an old one would do. For years it had been easy to forget about her. Even though her feet were always peckering around up there. That and the sound of her continually moving furniture. The jolt and scrape of her tugging a bureau across the floor, an inch, then another, then another. She went out two times a day. Once for a walk in the morning and once in the afternoon, down the hill to the L’il Peach for milk or cigarettes or an ice cream bar. The rest of her groceries were delivered. His ex-wife used to go up there and visit with her. After Ellen moved out, that was the end of that. He’d long known he had it coming to him; he never once complained about getting left to the dogs, didn’t lift a finger to stop her when Ellen stood in the kitchen and wrapped exactly half the dishes and glasses in newspaper—but to abandon the old lady? When she was the only person besides the kid down at the gas station who ever talked to her? He’d meant these past two years to mount the stairs himself. He’d meant to go up there and have a chat, as Ellen used to do, maybe even apologize for driving Ellen away, out of her life as well as his, but he never got to it.

Never a louder silence than when you stand in a room where someone lived for many years alone. He looks at the clean walls; she was meticulous, but even so, her smell remains strong. A blend of trapped smoke and what? Jergen’s? Burned butter left crusted on frying pans? Or simply that her body had begun to rot while she was alive up here? She never had many things. Not even a rug in the hall; only a bus schedule for the 112, long out-of-date, thumbtacked to the inside of the front door. (Where did she take the bus? Whom did she go see?) Three rooms: a kitchen, a cramped living room, mostly taken up by a couch that was once yellow but now bleached nearly white by the sun of the uncurtained window, a tiny bedroom made cave-like by the slope of the roof. He stoops and goes into the bedroom. He tries to avoid looking at the bed and fails. It is neat and hand-smoothed, except for a small furrow in the pillow. The afternoon sun has forced its way into this nook. There’s a glint of a spider’s thread reaching from the dresser to the window like a fishing line. Determined to stop lolling over this, he flings open the accordion doors and rams his face deep into the jackets and sweaters and coats and bear-hugs them together. Then he lifts all the clothes, as one, off the rack.

He and Ellen had been lingering forever at the kitchen table. In the bright kitchen glare of one or two in the morning (neither of them had bothered to look at a clock for hours), he stared at her warily. She’d already crumpled every bill from the basket on top of the refrigerator and flung them at him. Eastern Edison, City of Brockton (water), City of Brockton (late property tax adjustment form), Bay State Gas (urgent reply requested), New England Telephone and Telegraph, Delta Visa, another Eastern Edison, Sears Automotive, another City of Brockton. He used to call himself a restorer of houses. One year he even told people he was a “preservationist.” He had loved his falling-down wrecks, his albatrosses, but he can’t do the work anymore. He blames it on his knees and his lower back, but it’s really this tiredness he’s got. Ellen asking, always asking, “My God, what’s wrong with you, man as big as you, look at the size of you.” And his wanting to explain, but not knowing how, repeating, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” This exhaustion that no amount of sleep or coffee could defeat. And like the clutch of houses he bought so many years ago, with the money that landed in his lap from the moon—an inheritance mailed from some lawyer’s office in New York City (when Ellen first said, “We can be landlords. We’ll never pay rent again!”)—he’s letting himself go slowly to ruin. Now he sits on rents. Now he won’t come to the phone when tenants call. Now he’s being sued. Now he’s being hailed before the Massachusetts Land Commission Review Board on property-neglect charges. It’s not the bills, Ellen once said, but that you think you can live without anybody noticing you. Even so—the overdue notices and the warnings were starting to kill her, and that night she was just about to open her mouth with more bad numbers when the old woman upstairs started pushing something across the floor. Ellen lifted her head and listened; then suddenly she spoke in her hushy curious voice, a voice he hadn’t heard in so long: “She’s blind, you know.”

“Who?”

Ellen pointed at the ceiling. “She told me the other day. She said she’d been going that way for years, and she might as well tell somebody it actually happened. No more sight. Just lights and darks.”

“The old bird? But she gets around fine. She’s got to be able to see something.”

“Memorized. Neighborhood’s all in her head. Potholes. The aisles down at the Peach.”

He looked up. “And all the redecorating?”

Ellen laughed and slid her cup toward him. Her cold coffee sloshed on the table. “I asked her finally. I figured if she was telling me things, why not? And you know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said if I don’t make my apartment an obstacle course, I’ll forget I can’t see.”

“Huh?”

“I have so many pictures in my head, she said, so so many pictures.”

He took her hand and rubbed her long, thin fingers. “How long?” he asked.

Ellen let herself look at him before she yanked her hand away.

A purple cardigan with suede elbow patches, the brown coat with the fake fur like that cat, a ragged pea coat (where the buttons used to be are now only tiny rock-hard balls of thread), a sequined dress for a much bigger woman, enclosed in plastic, a royal-blue windbreaker with yellowed lining and a union local logo on the back, skirts clipped to hangers by rusty safety pins, four moth-eaten men’s suits, all charcoal gray.

Ellen had grown tomatoes and a few cucumbers in the backyard garden. The tomatoes were the children she always insisted she didn’t want, refused to burden the world with—she’d measure the vines as they grew up their plastic ladders and record the heights in a notebook she kept in the drawer with the car keys and matches. They’d eat them in salads, and sometimes just them, like apples. Ellen would pack up the extras in a shoe box and carry them upstairs to her.

After Ellen left, he began hearing shrieks in the night. He thought of going up there and knocking and saying, Is everything okay up here? I heard something. Some yelling. I was concerned. Was it you? But he never did go to her, and after a while he stopped worrying, because in the morning, as usual, he’d listen to her slow clack down the stairs right on time, between 7:30 and 8:00, and she was the same as always out the window, small but not hunched, curly white hair that looped up from her shoulders like a girl’s. It got to be that he’d stare at the ceiling and wait for her. The nights she didn’t shriek were the worst: that old hooter sleeping peaceful, fending off whatever haunted her, and him, never more awake, listening for his own breathing.

Six-thirty on a Saturday evening in July and the St. Vincent De Paul’s on Calvert Street is closed. A sign says
PLEASE NO DONATIONS AFTER HOURS,
but someone’s already left an old computer in the seat of a baby stroller, a microwave with no door, a box of waterlogged encyclopedias, a set of Santa salt and pepper shakers, a steering wheel, a tacklebox, and a cabinet that looks like somebody shot the back out with a pellet gun. He sets the clothes in a heap on the sidewalk next to the stroller and hurries away.

Another of Ellen’s ideas that they’d both believed in for a while was expanding the garden and selling their tomatoes right out of the driveway. He’d even found a good cache of lumber in the basement of one of their houses and hauled it over in the truck. He was going to build a small stand; Ellen wanted it to look like a puppet theater. The old lady upstairs was going to tend the counter on weekdays, when they were both away working. And there won’t be any problems, Ellen said, because she’ll figure out what to charge by the dip of the scale.

When she didn’t come down in the morning and then again in the afternoon, he called the fire department and said, Something’s happened to my tenant. She lives upstairs. I’m at 817 Strossen. When the two paramedics moved slowly, but absolutely, up the walk with their shoulder bags and cases and defibrillator, he handed one of them the spare key. An hour and a half later, as he stood on the lawn with the neighbors, the quiet lights of the ambulance, the two police cars, the fire truck, streaking across the windows—much more commotion than she ever made in life—they brought her down. The paramedic, the one with the sandy hair and different-color mustache, the one he’d handed the key to, stopped to talk to him. The paramedic might have asked, If you thought something wasn’t right up there, why didn’t you go up there and check on her? But of course he was trained not to get involved in anything personal, and God knew, he’d seen a hell of a lot stranger things on calls. For now the paramedic needed only her full name and next of kin.

“Husband deceased?”

“Yes.”

“Children?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“So no grandchildren, cousins, sisters, anything like that? Anyone else?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

Sunday early morning he wakes to shrieking, and he isn’t surprised that it’s himself, that the hollering and carrying on is coming from his own throat. Rain pecks at the window one tap at a time, as if someone out there is trying to get his attention. He’s at the bottom of the bed, in a gnarled wrestle of sheets and blanket. A place he used to find himself after long dreams when he was a kid, dreams he never remembered. But now he remembers the moment before waking, and it’s a vision that sweeps his old fatigue away, even as he continues to scream at the walls of his own room: himself, kneeling on the sidewalk in the rain, weeping over those clothes.