She, this Oly, has reached the first slat landing of the fire escape and is hauling her thick carcass onto it with her spider arms and resting again — or, more accurately, peering through the dirt-fogged window of the room that looks out of this arse-alley backside of the noble West Hills, and, if those are tears puddling in the bottom of those wire-framed glasses she’s wearing, then this flabby old douche bag will be too blind to stay on the platform and will drop and crack like a beetle on the garage roof, next to the ornamental pool.
No, she claims she’s not crying, though her sinuses are trying to squeeze out through her eyeballs. She is, however, feeling sorry for herself because this is “her” window and the big dusty room on the other side is “her” room and Oly misses it and would like to crawl in and shut the window and never leave it again, but she cannot because instead of a brain she has been blessed with a flame-purple hemorrhoid and she is in miserable, though voluntary, exile until her little project is finished.
There, is she crying again? Or is she only realizing that if she had washed that smog-clogged hunk of glass anytime in the last three years she might actually see her reading chair and her hotplate sitting on the cupboard and the cupboard doors that open into the blanket nest where she sleeps with the doors snugged shut and her knees tucked up to her chin. This failure in the service of transparency is disheartening to the delicate mucous linings of the amphibious Miss Oly. Picturing her cranky joints curled in her own warm nest causes further heat and discharge from her cherry-pink eyeballs.
Quietly she slips the lock, pushes the window upward, snakes through into the warm dark, and feels the cushion-thick carpet beneath her brogans. She smiles her frog smile and considers calling a taxi for the trip back since surely she has punished herself sufficiently for what was, after all, an understandable weakness. Next time, she muses, I’ll simply stick my hand in boiling water.
I go downstairs and yell, “Garbage!” three times at Lil’s open door before she sits back from her magnifying-glass approach to the evening game show. Her white head moves, groping with ears and nose more than her sad, jellied remnants of eyes. Each time I look at her the white hair is paler and thinner, like spun glass above her mummy-grey scalp.
“Garbage?” she screams.
“Garbage!” I bellow.
She launches from her chair, leaping upward, neck extended, the tender underside of her jaw exposed in a flesh wedge aimed at heaven. Sailing the room, tacking from chair to table to cupboard, hand over hand, she locates her two wastebaskets and the tidy, plastic-wrapped bundle beneath the sink, clutches them to her breast, and turns toward the doorway, searching for me. I step in just far enough to grab the stuff. She opens her arms, letting it all go down to me. This is our Thursday ritual. To complete it, she will nod and turn away silently. I will lug the stuff to the junk closet at the end of the hall, where the big black bags of garbage from the roomers sit. Then I will drag all the bags out to the sidewalk, stacking them in the plastic barrels that sit there all week. That is all. We’ve done it this way for years. By the time I climb the stairs back to my room, Lil will be resubmerged in her struggle with the magnifying glass and the TV screen. Beyond the chant of “Garbage” we never speak. But tonight she cracks the mold. She follows me to the door of her room, leans there, waiting as I drag the big sacks past her. As I open the big front door onto the wet night, she calls out, “Thank you,” in a clear, unbroken voice.
I look back. She is poised, her milk-veiled eyes aimed in my general direction, her head tilted back, listening. “You’re welcome,” I say, and she goes back into her room.
I climb all the way up to Miranda’s door and knock. Then I hear a soft male voice laughing inside and turn away. She opens. “Miss McGurk!” smiling. “You’re sent by fate to try munching Gorgonzola and artichoke-heart salad while listening to …”
As she tries to pull me in, I try to pull her out into the hall. “Could I just speak to you for one moment?” She shrugs and steps out, folding her arms, looking down at me with her eyebrows pinched in concentration. “Something is wrong with Lily.”
Her eyes spring open and she sets to move quickly, “Is she hurt? Shall I call an ambulance?”
Gratified, I pat her arm, “No, no. She’s acting a little odd.”
Miranda hoots. “How can you tell?”
“No. She’s acting strangely. I can’t be here for a bit. I have to work. Could you keep an eye on her? Tonight? Just stroll down and listen for her breathing. You can hear her in the night if you put your ear to her door. She has a heavy sigh in her sleep. And if you can’t hear her, or if she sounds strange …”
Miranda hoists her eyebrows at me in surprise. “Sure. I’ll check on her. I’m not working tonight. Don’t worry.”
Nodding and waving, I retreat quickly. She stands looking after me. As I go down the stairs I hear the soft male voice call, “Miranda?” and then her door shuts quietly.
I stay in my room for a few hours, arranging the papers in the big trunk. At around eleven I hear Miranda on the stairs. Her footsteps pass down to the ground floor and pause for a while at Lily’s closed door. Then she goes back up. I find myself smiling as I listen.
I go down myself an hour later. The wheeze and bubble beyond Lil’s door is regular and strong. I use the wall phone to call for a cab and wait for it on the front steps.
I sulk all the way back to the tinhorn apartment. I want my own moldy room with its pale stench and its frail, maniac noise. The new building seems lifeless, incapable of decay. Its halls are narrow and pharmaceutically bright. Each floor is the same as all the rest. The only sound is the faint hum of the elevator. The orange carpet from the hall spills under my door, flooding the whole apartment. The rooms are low and square and it feels rented because I refuse to actually live here. In my home the air reeks of dust and jumbled layers of life, and it is dim unless you are right next to a window.
Here the telephone is white and has its own table. Where I live the phone is an ancient black-and-chrome wall box with coin slots and numbers scratched into its paint. It rings often but few people ever use it to call out. It is too exposed there in the grease-brown entryway. Whenever it rings, Lily answers, though it is never for her.
27. NOTES FOR NOW: Getting to Know You and Your.357 Magnum
What a bouncer she would have made! Shy as an egg, but so disguised. I can’t help it. She charms me. To see her hunched over her plastic tray — chin shoved straight at the big screen, her paw pokes a fork in the air, and she laughs, “Hu-hu-hu,” through her bulging cheeks.