By way of apology she said to Delph, “That is one very brown sandwich.”
Delph smiled. “It’s really dry too.” She took another bite as she closed the front door with her ass.
Lady dropped her purse on the hall chair. She stepped into the living room. “Is that my album you’re playing?” she asked.
“You’re the one who left it behind,” Vee said. “That old saw about possession being nine-tenths of the law? It turns out to be true.”
“I don’t want it back,” Lady said. “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m happy you like it. Mi shit es su shit.” She looked around. “Where’s Eddie?”
“Exhausted. Asleep.”
“I’m going to make you a sandwich of your own,” Delph said. “With jelly. I think you’ve lost weight. You look terrible.”
“Especially the way she has her hair pulled back,” Vee said. “So tight. She looks like Olive Oyl.”
“Well, she’s not that skinny,” Delph said.
We ate in the living room, Delph transporting two sandwiches, two glasses, and a bottle of Southern Comfort, managing everything at once, though this meant she had to carry her sandwich in her teeth and wedge the bottle under her armpit.
“Since when Southern Comfort?” Lady said.
Vee shrugged. “We’re listening to Buffy and drinking like Janis.” And when we were situated, the sandwich-eaters on the couch, Vee on the floor, she said, “Delph’s right, Lady. You do look like crap.”
“I got it. I didn’t think the Olive Oyl comparison was a compliment.”
“Look at your eyes. It’s like you’ve been crying.”
“When have you known me to cry?”
“Well, you don’t cook, so I know you weren’t peeling onions.”
“I cook,” Lady said.
“Spaghetti’s not cooking.”
“I cook things requiring peeled onions all the time.”
“So you were peeling onions?”
“No.” The record had ended. We listened to the sound of the needle lifting, returning to the first track, same side. “They’re painting the halls outside my apartment,” Lady said when the music began again, the song about the sexy woman who was pursued by every man in town. The three of us used to sing it together in Lady’s room, wiggling our hips, using roll-on deodorant bottles as microphones. “What’s hoochy koochy mean?” Delph would ask. “What’s oversexed?”
“Really?” Vee said. “The slumlord’s painting the halls?”
“The fumes are killing me. My eyes keep watering.”
“So stay the night here,” Vee said.
“Maybe I will.”
“Stay two nights. Stay forever. Come home. Nobody understands why you don’t.”
Lady looked down the hall to the master bedroom’s ever-shut door. We’ve long called that bedroom the Dead and Dying Room. Our grandmother Karin died in it after many years suffering with an unnamed illness we assume was cancer — cancer back in the day when no one said the word out loud. And a couple of weeks after she died there, our grandfather Richard died there too — although technically speaking he didn’t die in there, but from there: he’d opened the window, hoisted himself up on the sill, wobbled for a moment, then propelled himself forward. Our mother had been in her bedroom across the hall doing math homework when she heard the screams from neighbors as his body passed each floor.
Like her father, our mother hadn’t literally died inside the Dead and Dying Room, but it had been her bedroom when she drowned herself across the street.
“I don’t know,” Lady said. “Sometimes I do think about moving back. But it’s a little haunted house-ish here.”
Delph nodded. “Tell me about it,” she said.
As botched as Lady’s attempt ended up, that’s how promising it had seemed at roughly four in the morning when she left her old bed where she’d been lying in her dress. She stepped into her flip-flops, patted her hair back in place, and headed to the front door. She stopped before she opened it, took a moment to look into the living room, where her half-eaten peanut butter sandwich remained on the coffee table, where the empty bottle of Southern Comfort lay on its side on the carpet. She could hear Vee and Eddie and Delph snuffle and snort in their sleep. She gazed out the window and saw the park and the Hudson and, when she looked uptown, the George Washington Bridge, its necklace lights ablaze for the holiday after two years of energy-saving darkness.
But once she was downstairs in the laundry room, she didn’t dawdle. She headed straight to the rusted shelving units where tenants kept cardboard boxes of detergent with their apartment numbers marked on the sides and where the super kept old wooden soda boxes filled with hammers and nails, electrical cords and rags, things like that. A few Phillips-head screwdrivers. Lady recognized them now.
The box that interested her was the one containing a few old clotheslines. She chose a waxy white rope that seemed cleaner and stronger and less likely to burn her fingers or abrade her neck than the ones of brown hemp. She was also drawn to the obsessive tidiness with which it, of all the clotheslines, had been stored. It had been curled around and around itself until it lay in a flattened circle, a pretty coiling pattern like a sisal placemat.
Her head began singing. A pretty coil is like a melody. She questioned the lyric. Was melody right? Or was it memory? A pretty girl is like a memory? She was feeling a memory coming at her now, she was recalling Joe Hopper during their happier years, which had lasted from her freshman year of college right up to her weak-kneed decision to marry him spring semester of her junior year. She was remembering the way he used to cheese down the docking line of the small sailboats they’d sometimes rent on City Island. Cheese down. It meant to coil the tail of the line to give a neat appearance. He’d taught her the phrase, couldn’t believe she knew so little about sailing. “New Yorkers think they’re so sophisticated,” he’d said, “but the truth is, you’re all rubes in your own way.”
She thought he hadn’t minded that she was an unsophisticated New Yorker. She knew he liked educating her. “You’re probably wondering why I’m going to all this trouble,” he said the first time he wound the line so it lay on the sunny pier like a hairy snake nuzzling its own tail.
She hadn’t been wondering. She’d been gazing out at the bleached horizon, trying to distinguish the migrating strips of white that were clouds from the subdued circle of white that was the sun from the broad canvas of white that was the sky. But she listened as he explained. She knew that was her job. She didn’t mind it. She liked learning new things.
“It’s a seaman’s tradition,” he’d said of the whorled rope. “A gesture of courtesy for the next sailor.”
He said this as if he’d come from a long line of seamen rather than a long line of life insurance agents. He said it as if taking out an eight-foot dinghy once or twice a summer made him John Paul Jones or Popeye. When he’d been fifteen, his parents had made him transfer from his local public school to an all-male prep school in New England, the kind with mandatory chapel and a dress code involving navy blue blazers and rep ties and an impressive record of sending its students on to the Ivies. This was where he’d learned to sail. But, as he later told Lady, he’d also found himself having sex with his roommate, which had freaked him out, and he returned the next year to the coed high school in his hometown in Connecticut, a comfortable suburb on the outskirts of a moribund mill city.