by Beth Kephart
It was when I reached the intersection and turned right, toward the railroad tunnel, that I saw something I had never had reason before to look up and see: a row of large, lit-up windows, all of them belonging to one room, and not one of them curtained over. Beyond the windows there were mirrors, and between the windows and the mirrors there was dance. A girl frowning at her own reflection. A man with jet black hair dancing beside her, explaining something, placing his hands on her hips, swirling her body. A couple out on the edge of things, strung up, it seemed, by puppet strings. Someone had pushed open the wood-frame windows, and through the windows music drifted. Another country’s music.
I stood in the shadows of the Sweet Loaves awning and leaned against its door. I watched the arms and the heads and the whirl of dancers, the man with the black hair demonstrating. The couple cut a diagonal across the room. The girl in front of the mirror swirled her hips in a figure eight, and then the black-haired man ironed her shoulders flat and talked until she shook her head the wrong way, saying no to something—so much no that she proved it now by stomping away even as he stood where he was, still talking. Passersby just walked on past, not seeing. Every once in a while a train went rumbling by on the tracks, and the dog would bark, and the cars would brake and accelerate again. Someone in the room above Sweet Loaves snapped on a TV show and coughed.
Nobody anywhere was waiting for me. I could watch for as long as I wanted, and I did, because now the girl had come back to the black-haired guy’s talking, and now they were a yes, a one thing moving; they were a tree that branched apart above their joined-together legs and hips. They danced, and he stopped her. He held her still and rearranged her chin, pushed her face away from his, and up, and then they moved again, together. The music was gone, and they didn’t care. They were dancing again, so together and so apart. They were all lit up in their box of windows. I was there, and they didn’t know it, and if they had, they wouldn’t have cared.
FOUR
“HOW OLD,” I asked Granddad the next day, “is Riot?”
“About your age.”
“And what can she do besides sleep?”
“Preen.”
“A purposeful life,” I said.
“Aren’t guests,” he asked, “supposed to be polite?” I had bought yesterday’s cinnamon buns at Sweet Loaves for half the price. I was eating mine with a fork, like cake, counting the raisins and wishing Granddad would eat. “You must be worth a fortune,” he’d said when I’d pulled the buns from the bag. “First turkey sandwiches, now this.”
“A trust fund babe,” I’d said.
Now we were quiet. I’d found him upright when I’d stepped in, sitting in a chair, not reclining on the couch. He’d been reading one of those getaway magazines. He’d put it down, removed his glasses, and looked me up and down, shoulder to shoulder, as if I had changed since yesterday, become someone new.
“So,” he said, after a bunch of motor-cyclists had gunned at the corner light and startled all three of us out of the messy silence, “I had an idea.”
“What’s that?” I pulled one more raisin out of the sweet, fat bread and placed my plate on the table.
“I need someone to help me get things straight around here.”
I looked at the spill of it all, the triple-stacked books, the old newspapers, the stacks of paper cups, last night’s dishes. The spiderweb in the nearest window was white and thick as Santa’s beard. The candlesticks on the mantel were burned down to squat nubs. There were photographs in piles, like used-up decks of cards. There were Tupperware containers inside containers, preserving empty space. “Well, that’s a surprise,” I said.
“I’m willing to pay.”
“Mom’s the one with the clean touch,” I said.
“Your mom’s not here.”
I looked around again at all his stuff. I looked more closely at him. At his thick white hair and pale white skin. At his eyes—more blue, more round than ever. At his feet, so long and thin. At his satellite dishes for ears. “I don’t want your money, Granddad. You’re going to need it.”
“What could I need money for?”
“For doctors. For hospitals.”
“I’ve had my fill.”
“Mom says it’s in your bones.”
“Enough,” he said. “Okay?” Riot was yawning and arching and kneading at the orange pillow in her wicker basket. She settled back in for a new nap.
“Riot’s a funny name for your cat,” I said into the silence.
“Life is awfully ironic.”
I thought about Leisha at the shore with her crazy cousins—Leisha, who couldn’t keep a notebook organized or her own room straight, but who was so glamorously, enviably, fabulously tall that the world at large could never guess at her disorder. I thought about Nick, messing with the innards of those cars when what he loved was sky. I thought about Mom and how all she said she wanted in life was quiet, and how all she had been doing lately was tempting big-time trouble. I thought about me and the summer ahead and how I’d been angling for a purpose. “What kind of keeping straight were you thinking of?” I asked at last.
“I want to put my things in order.”
“Where were you thinking of starting?”
“Down here.” He glanced around the room, toward the bookshelves.
“Do you have a thing for old newspapers?” I asked.
“No, I don’t, Rosie. Not anymore.”
“Do you have some string?”
“I think there is some in the kitchen.”
“Does that record player work?” I asked.
“We could find out,” he said, “some other day.”
“Then let’s find out. Okay?”
“There’ll be plenty of time for that.”
Sure, I thought. Right. But I was silent.
Riot shook her head and yawned and stretched again. She took a sudden leap off the table, her long tail swooshing the air. She put herself on parade about the room, shook out the mane on her bobcatish head.
“We have disturbed the queen,” I said.
“Rosie Keith,” Granddad said, “you talk about your friends that way?”
“No,” I said. Then: “Sometimes.”
“You still friends with that boy next door?”
I felt my face go hot. I didn’t answer.
“Nick,” he said. “Nick B—something. Do I have that right?” He looked at me, made a funny Santa Claus smile. I shook my head, still not answering. Some things are private.
“So where do you hide your string?” I said.
“It’ll still be under the kitchen sink,” he told me. “If we’re very lucky.”
I found the string. I cut it into right-size lengths. I bundled the first batch of the millions of papers and carried them out to the curb. I came back in and bundled more. Two more trips; then I sat and rested, swiped the sweat off my face. After a while Granddad slept, and I was a little out of breath from bundling. I got myself a glass of ice water from the chaos kitchen and went back into the room where Granddad was; told myself I was keeping watch, though in actual fact I was resting.
You still friends with that boy next door? I thought of the question, and I knew the answer: Of course I was. Of course. Even if he was the most mysterious guy in the whole tenth-going-into-eleventh grade. A guy Rocco had been calling Clam ever since fourth grade. A guy Leisha used to say was hers, except he never said it back. I was still friends with Nick Burkeman, because I’d known him the longest.
He’d moved in next door halfway through my first-grade year, back when I still had a dad. He was an only child too, and his mom had a thing for TV, and our backyards shared a couple of big trees between them. He had these miniature planes he used to fly—paper planes and wooden ones he’d build from kits—and one or the other of them was always escaping, sailing off to the Robertsons’ or plunking down into my mother’s little squares of outdoor zinnias.
We started being friends when I started rescuing his planes, digging them out
from wherever they crashed and walking them back through the trees so that Nick could fix them up again. One day he said that I could help him make them fly. The next day I said I wanted to. And we were friends like that—flying planes, but hardly talking—and sometimes climbing trees together and sometimes climbing out onto Nick’s flat roof to look at the stars, the birds, the clouds, the real planes, the smoke the real planes left behind. He hardly talked, but he didn’t have to. He started talking less when he went to work, after school and on the weekends, for JB’s Automotive.
You still friends with that boy next door? Granddad had asked, and maybe friends was the hardest and funniest of words. Maybe friends wasn’t something I talked about. Maybe I was friends with Nick, but maybe it should have been more.
FIVE
THAT NIGHT rain was threatening. I yanked the screen door tight at Granddad’s house so it wouldn’t flap off its hinges. The sky was a spool of dark cotton candy, and the windows in the apartments above the stores had been pulled shut. There weren’t many cars on the street, not many people; all the temporary sidewalk signs and bargain tables were plainly out of sight. I felt little spits of rain, then nothing. I felt a breeze, and then the clouds got thin where the moon was. And then the moon got lost again behind the cotton candy, and the wind blew harder, and there was a brisk, white snap of lightning. Right from the place where the sky had broken poured buckets and buckets of rain.
I was closest to Pastrami’s, and so I pressed against its door, hunched beneath the overhang and against the purple neon squiggle that spelled BAGELS, which is another Pastrami’s special, bagels sweet as doughnuts and jeweled up with seeds, poppies being my favorite kind. I had flip-flops on, a denim skirt, and a halter top, and the hair that I’d pulled back into one of my mother’s tortoise-shell claws had gotten loose and tangled. I saw a man run by, holding a briefcase above his head like a slickened black shelf. I saw the feet and the legs of a man and a woman beneath the dome of an umbrella. Down the road in the railroad tunnel a handful of commuters took shelter, and there was a boy, impatient, with a bike. I thought I heard that mongrel barking. I thought I heard someone crying in a second-story room above my head. The rain made the sound of people clapping.
I thought about Granddad back on his couch, the newspapers I’d bundled and carried out to the street curb for the recyclers, how all those days would become one day in the soggy mess of the rainstorm. I wondered if the rain would sound louder now that I’d made his place more hollow. “Just the tip of the iceberg,” he’d said after I’d knotted the last bundles tight. And then he told me to go straight home so that I could beat the storm.
But it had come on quick, and it was falling fierce, and there was no point in going back to Granddad’s house, but there wasn’t much point in rushing home either. I was drenched up to my knees, and the hem of my skirt was rain soaked too, and whenever the wind blew, the rain slanted in, toward Pastrami’s. A long train pulled into the station across the way, and first the passengers stood in the door to the train as if they were going nowhere, and then they shot down the metal stairs and slopped through the puddles, fighting with broken umbrellas. Maybe my mother was already home, and if she was, would she be watching for me through her windows?
Another crack of lightning unzipped the sky. Another roar of thunder answered. The rain fell heavier and harder, and there was a bigger crowd in the railroad tunnel, and the few cars there were threw sheets of rainwater sideways in the glare of the headlights. I don’t know how long I stood in the shelter of Pastrami’s or how long it took before the rain lost its power, turning into something spritzy. But it was only then, after the storm had gone soft, that I once again heard music playing. I stepped out from beneath Pastrami’s and looked diagonally across the street.
There was hardly any light at the dance studio, but in the dim illumination I saw a woman with candy red hair in a tight-fitting black Lycra dress. She was working the air as if the air were silk, and behind the streaks of rain she disappeared and returned and blurred and bent, and I could not see a partner. It was just the woman and the mirror and the windows streaked with rain, just the woman, turning and snatching, and lifting one arm, and making two of herself in the mirror.
I heard the boy with the bike pedaling up from the tunnel. I saw the tunnel people slowly dispersing. There were more cars on the road, sloshing the deep puddles sideways, and still the dancer kept dancing, wrapping herself up with her one arm, then spinning and unspooling. She did the same thing over and again, as if she had made some sort of deal with herself: so many repetitions, so many spins, so many tosses of the right hand. She spun out of sight, came back, then vanished. The place went dark. Wait, I thought. Come back. But she was gone, and when I was sure that she was absolutely gone, I started running home through the tunnel, lifting my arms beneath the clouds that were slowly getting lighter.
“Is that you, Rosie?” my mother called when she heard me shut our door.
“Just me,” I said.
She came halfway down the steps, took one long stare at my streaming dark hair, tucked her own behind a porcelain ear. “You’re soaking wet,” she said.
“There was a storm,” I told her.
“What you need, Rosie Keith, is a warm shower.”
“I know,” I said, and when her back was turned, I did a quick turn in the shadows.
SIX
GRANDDAD TRIPLE STACKED HIS BOOKS, and in peculiar places between his books he’d stuffed papers and ribbons and things. He said it was his personal filing system, and when I asked him how I was supposed to know what to keep and what to toss, he said, “When you get to be in my condition, you don’t keep things for yourself. You let somebody else decide what should be held in trust.” He had asked me to focus on the in-between things. The books we’d get to later.
“We should ask Mom,” I said.
“You’re here,” he said. “She’s not.”
“But how am I supposed to know what any of it means?” I asked, shaking an old envelope out of a book of Shakespeare sonnets. A crust of something flowerish plopped out from some fat textbook: crunchy, old, and gray. A package of seeds slipped from a dictionary. An old ketchup bottle label dropped out from The Old Man and the Sea. “I read this book,” I said, holding up the Hemingway so that Granddad could see.
“A classic,” he said. “Built to last.” He was sitting upright on his couch with Riot asleep on his lap. He had put on his glasses, which made his eyes look even bigger than they were, more watery, like pools.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I forget your question.”
I punched my free fist into my hip and turned back to his shelves. From between the pages of poetry slid a feather, red and puffy. “How,” I said, saying each word slowly, “am I supposed to know what any of that stuff means?”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s simple. Ask.”
I stared at him. I waited. I was learning about Granddad that he could be 100 percent exasperating, and maybe he liked being that way, or maybe that came from the cancer. The front part of his pure white hair had fallen down across his face. With his hand he pushed it back. I could see all his finger bones, as if there weren’t even any skin, and I thought about what Mom had said about the cancer’s starting in a place that nobody could see, and how it was his back that had ached at first, how it had hurt to work his garden, to ride his old bike with the basket, but he’d ignored it. Ignored it and then, when he’d found out what was wrong, done what he could to fight it, something called thalidomide, another thing called corticosteroids. But that had been three years ago, and the cancer had come back, and now it was too far gone to catch it. “I’m all through fighting,” he had told my mother, but that didn’t stop her from arguing with him or from trying to hide her sadness.
“That feather?” he said at last. “That feather has meaning.”
“Yeah?” I turned back toward him and shifted on my feet. “What kind?”
“It was a f
eather on a dress.”
“A dress?”
“Not my dress.”
“Couldn’t have been Riot’s.” The Maine coon opened her eyes when she heard her name. She stood and padded Granddad’s khaki pants, then wrapped herself back up into a fur ball.
“Red,” he said softly, “was your grandmother’s color.”
I tried to imagine the sort of dress to which such a feather might belong. Tried to imagine a woman with feathers for a neck, or for a hem, who said red belonged to her, tried to picture Granddad with that woman, young.
“Aideen had such style,” Granddad said, drawing circles over the head of Riot with his hand. “She was always the star of the show.” He said nothing else, just sat as if he’d forgotten I was there: I, his one and very only granddaughter. The windows in his living room were open. A mellow breeze was blowing through, and also the zoom of cars and the sound of someone across the street, whistling some tune. The feather felt like nothing in my hand. I had to keep my eye on it to be sure that it didn’t disappear. I waited for Granddad to tell, but his mind had traveled and I was still stuck in a room full of things that were old and mysterious.
“I’m putting the feather In Trust,” I said, after a while, placing it on the coffee table beneath a book of poems. I left a puffy corner sticking out, so that I would not forget it later.
