Star didn’t speak a word when she answered. “Hey,” I said after a few seconds. I said it just as I’d said it to my mother when we came home from my grandmother’s funeral. Sort of like it was a question. Softly. Slowly. It embarrassed me the same way when I said it then. “Hey.”
Duplex
by Stewart O’Nan
Bloomfield
She thought when Evelyn died she might finally get the second floor. She was not a selfish woman — a mother, a grandmother, used to doing for others — but in this one instance, after more than forty years of dealing with the soot and the street noise and people creeping through the alley and peeping in her windows, Anna Lucia felt she’d earned her reward.
She expected Eddie would leave and find his own place rather than live surrounded by his mother’s old furniture. He was a dwarf and a drinker. He’d retired on full disability from the public works, and Evelyn had left him everything. Anna Lucia figured he’d take the money and buy one of those new condos over by Highland, since he spent most of his time in the bars along Penn anyway. Instead, a couple of months later he brought home a girlfriend twice his size and half his age.
She was last-call trash, a tall blonde, but ugly, a big-nosed Russian, right off the boat, like a mail-order bride who’d bailed at her first chance. Eddie had ruined his back in the sewers. He was paunchy and bald, hardly a catch. As far as Anna Lucia could tell, the girl didn’t work.
Didn’t cook either. Every night while Anna Lucia was fixing dinner for herself, they came clumping down, banging the outside door shut. She watched from her front window, frowning as he waddled to the car and held the passenger door for the girl, as if she was a lady. As if he was in love.
If so, that was even sadder. In the hospital, Evelyn had asked Anna Lucia to watch over him. She’d done her best, but Eddie was a grown man, and after all his problems, he deserved some happiness, even the fleeting kind.
Suddenly acquiring a new neighbor after having lived there alone for most of her adult life confused Anna Lucia. Out of shame, maybe, Eddie didn’t introduce her. It was only by surprising them one evening on their way out that she learned the girl’s name: Svetlana.
“Pliz to mit you,” the girl said, shaking hands like a man.
She was taller than Dominic, with pitted cheeks and too much blush and her things falling out of her top. Not in a million years would Anna Lucia have let Roseanne leave the house like that, but Eddie seemed happy, dressed up like they were going somewhere fancy, and Anna Lucia was left to wonder exactly where as she picked at her leftovers.
They came back after the bars closed, laughing and making a racket on the stairs. Under the covers, she heard them moving from room to room, listened awhile, then settled back to sleep.
Some nights that was the end of it, but some nights they fought — no surprise, given their condition — and deep into the morning she woke to shouting and something heavy being knocked over, something being broken. Like most of the old row houses on the block, this one was brick, with plaster walls and high ceilings, so she couldn’t make sense of what they were saying, only bursts of words that shocked her heart. She clamped her extra pillow to her ear, picturing the two of them squared off in Evelyn’s living room, trading threats and accusations, destroying her precious snow globes and commemorative plates to make a point.
When their fights went on longer than Anna Lucia thought she could bear — when they sounded as if they were scuffling directly above her — she debated whether or not to call the police. She kept the phone Roseanne had given her on her nightstand. It would take so little. All she had to do was punch three numbers, yet every night, no matter how bad it sounded, she held off, not only because she suspected nothing would happen, but because they’d know it was her.
The mornings after these battles, she staked out the staircase, hoping to witness the damage — a puffy eye, a split lip — as if to prove she hadn’t imagined the night before. Rarely was anything visible. Once, Eddie came down with a large gauze square taped to the side of his neck, maybe covering a scratch or a bite mark. The girl appeared untouched, though it was hard to say, with her long sleeves and all that makeup. They acted like everything was hunky-dory.
“Good mornink, Mizziz Nardinny.”
“Good morning, Svetlana,” Anna Lucia enunciated. “How are you liking Pittsburgh?”
“I like Pizzburr very much.”
“Well, you couldn’t ask for a better person to show you the city. He knows it inside out — literally.”
“Ha, nice one, Mrs. N.,” Eddie said, herding the girl toward the door.
“Have fun,” Anna Lucia called after them, then stood there at the bottom of the stairs, biting the inside of her cheek, listening for his car to start.
She’d been waiting for this chance, but still wasn’t sure. Her plan was to take the spare key Evelyn had given her and go up and see what condition the place was in. Right after Evelyn died, Anna Lucia had been a frequent visitor, carrying up a pan of lasagne or some tomatoes from the Tomassos’ garden, but since the girl moved in, Eddie always stopped Anna Lucia at the door as if he was hiding something.
The key was in her little china teapot in the kitchen cupboard, along with her bingo money. All she needed was five minutes. She put the chain on the outside door for insurance and hurried up the stairs.
The place stank of cigarettes and old bacon grease. They’d rearranged everything. In the living room, on the antique sideboard where Evelyn had kept her family pictures, was a flat-screen TV. It faced her green velvet couch, covered with a flowered sheet spotted with burn marks. On the coffee table, beside a chipped glass ashtray piled with butts, as if waiting for their return, stood a half-full bottle of whiskey. Though her first instinct was to pour it down the sink, she made a point of not touching anything, kept silent as if someone might be listening.
The rug hadn’t been vacuumed in ages. The kitchen floor was sticky, the counter crowded with glasses. Her plants were dry and dying. At least Eddie had left Evelyn’s room alone — here were her snow globes and plates, exiled but safe — though he obviously never dusted. The bed in his room was mussed, a pair of pink sweatpants with JUICY written across the bottom draped over the headboard.
As she turned to leave, she noticed some money on his dresser — a wad of twenties folded in half, as if waiting to go into a wallet. She wondered if he was really that trusting or if he’d left it sitting out as a test. Whichever, it seemed wrong — like the girl’s sweatpants, a taunt to all that was decent — and with her lips pinched in concentration, she stepped to the dresser, peeled two twenties from the wad, and slipped them into her pocket.
It was only after she added the bills to her teapot that she remembered to take the chain off.
She didn’t say anything to Roseanne over the phone about her little visit, just let her know their fighting was getting worse.
“You want to hear fighting, you should hear Frankie and me going at it over the stupid insurance. People fight. Whatever it is, it’s their business, not yours.”
“They drink and they fight. It’s different.”
“Ma, listen to what you’re telling me. Drunk people fight. That’s not news.”
“You’re telling me I should have to listen to it every night?”
“I’m telling you it’s what people do. It doesn’t matter if they’re big or small, black or white, Russian or whatever.”