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Member
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Florida
Gender: Female
Posts: 7
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4-D
He wanted to be one of those boys who could wear mismatched shoes intentionally and pull it off because of his independent quirkiness. Instead he would chicken out each morning before opening the front door, a threshold to the world of eyes and commentary.
She wanted to be the kind of girl whose stories ended suddenly and quietly, leaving the reader with a profound disillusion. They would not understand, but they would extrapolate until it sounded as if it was absurd not to understand.
They lived next door to each other and the air particles between them never charged or touched. Empty receptacles, they'd only swell, from time to time, with the fullness of delivered curry to apartment 4-B or Vietnamese BBQ to 4-C.
One late morning, while Bob Barker was on commercial break, I saw a yellow pea coat standing at her door. I only saw because it was commercial break and I thought there was knocking, like Jehovah's Witnesses, but instead it was footsteps. Having never seen the girl without the perpetual blur of hurried motion, I half assumed it was a robber. But then, as she coughed and turned her key, I saw her shoulders slump a little and realized she was 4-B.
Bob Barker's caricature of a voice called me back to my sofa and I wondered just how sick 4-B was. Resolving to make her some soup, I became engrossed, instead, in Alice, a housewife from Texas who was guessing that a gas grill cost $296.
She was wrong.
Actually, I'm the sort of person who dreams up nice things to do for their neighbors all the time. I have a drawer full of Hallmark cards, fully addressed and stamped, that I've never sent. Sometimes I'll collect five or six for the same person and send them all at once or sometimes I wait until I see them next (which is never, in some cases, like when I see someone interesting on TV).
Anyway, I was always cooking up schemes like that, like making soup for 4-B or marrying off 4-C. One summer I had nearly dreamed up an entire wedding for 4-C--during a 3's company marathon--without even knowing his name.
The disappointed Texan returned to her seat, but not before a kiss that lingered a second too long on Bob's cheek. A silly part of me imagined this woman dancing on her bed with a framed photo of Bob Barker clutched to her chest. It seemed entirely logical, you know.
As the afternoon wore on, 4-B continued to cough across the hall and through my walls. At last, to drown her out, I put on the tea kettle. A little ripple of horror surfaced when the kettle began to alarm and her coughing suddenly stopped. Had she heard the kettle through her mountains of Kleenex and blankets? Afraid to seem rude, I checked the peephole.
Nothing. Then another cough. I was safe. She didn't even know I was home.
A few hours later the familiar stomp of 4-C's matching shoes shuffled down the hall. The rhythm stopped just short of my door. My breath held, on tippie toes, I strained. He stood there, motionlessly staring at 4-B's door.
COUGH. COUGH.
KNOCK, KNOCK.
Gray and crumbly, 4-B opened the door. Words tried their best to slip under the crack of my door but skinned themselves in the process. Only the flesh of them came through, the lulls and coughs. The substance of words, without their veneer, is utterly useless. In that way, words are the opposite of fruit, you know.
A few moments later 4-C disappeared into his space with a peculiar expression drawn across his features. The building was quiet.
This room, its walls--they are like the walls of cell: semi-permeable. Parts of the world slide in but I could never get out. The perfect cell, "or so you have decided," Dr. Harrington would say over the phone.
I imagined, sometimes, that he was really a fish, after all I'd never met the man (and it would be impossible for a fish to swim up to the 4th floor). It ws completely possible, you know. Sometimes, when he gets on me about some issue, I picture his assistant, Magda (who I HAD met), carrying him around in a little fish bowl. The idea of his water sloshing over Magda's skirt as she climbed four flights of stairs would make me giggle. Then Dr. Harrington would ask, "are you hearing me, Janet?" and I would have to concentrate.
If I were the kind of girl I thought 4-B wanted to be, this is where the story would end. Instead, I'll tell you about the chicken soup.
At 4 AM--I was only up because that’s when Designing Women is on and I love to watch the varying widths of Delta Berk--I heard 4-B's door slam. She looked like death. Like a pale Mona Lisa from Auschwitz or some other tragic episode on another continent. Keys were fumbled and dropped. cough. The purse slipped off her shoulder and flattened on the floor. 4-B's shoulders slumped again, as if they wanted to touch the ground. She coughed and strained for a moment before giving up whatever notion had driven her from bed and retreating back to her apartment.
I imagined death and an insurance agent playing a game of strip poker outside her door. The agent, unfortunately, was down to his boxers. I pulled a chicken from the fridge and began to chop veggies.
"Don't do this," warned an onion in severely broken English.
"Hush," said the carrot, "let her be kind." The carrot was right, if a bit self-serving. Perhaps he imagined he wouldn't have the same dicey end as the onion, maybe he thought he'd be boiled whole, like a lobster. So I mutilated potatoes and celery and garlic and an entire genealogy of egg noodles (who floated defiantly to the top of my pot as if to say I had not killed them at all, which was a relief.)
The cell smelled like being twelve again. I had even missed Bob Barker and I wondered momentarily if that Texan lady had stalked him back stage.
The metal of the doorknob in my hand did not feel real. I don't remember much of what happened next except chicken shrapnel flying at the walls and a bay leaf stinging my face. Dead veggies lay in a puddle of their own simmered blood, martyred on my floor.
When Magda showed up a few hours later, the veggies had been mummified in congealed yellow fat. I wondered what Dr. Harrington paid a girl like Magda to clean cold soup off the floor of strange apartments. It couldn't have been much, judging by her eagerness to put me in bed. MASH was on, so it must have been around 2 PM.
"Dr. Harrington is sending a car for you," she said, "we want you to come in and rest for a few days."
"They died in vain," I answered, "the onion knew. They all died in vain and 4-B still needs soup." Trying to explain something to someone who thinks you're crazy is worse than trying to explain it to someone who knows for sure. She who thinks attempts to understand, to decipher something, as if words meant anything at all.
When the car came that evening it must have been 6PM, I only know because Designing Women was just ending. A young man named Jerry let himself into the apartment after Magda. They helped me out of bed and to the door in time to see 4-B striding out of her door.
"Excuse me," the words came from my throat with no will at all, "are you Julia Sugarbaker?"
She took a look at Jerry and Magda. Maybe they signaled her but I missed it because I was searching her coat for an indication of shoulder pads.
"Why yes; yes ma'am I am. How do you do?"
"I’m just fine, thank you," Jerry eased his grip on me a little, "these are my friends, Anthony and Charlene."
She nodded, "of course! It's a pleasure. Now if you'll excuse me," she bowed a little toward me and smiled. With that the yellow coat, with no discernible shoulder pads, disappeared into the stairwell.
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A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. -Wilde
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