by Rhian Ellis
Eventually, unnerved by traffic, I made my way toward the Garden District, where Uncle Geoffrey and his family lived. I found the house without much trouble—three stories, surrounded by trees and banana plants—but I didn’t stop. Instead I went to a park a few blocks away, got out of my car, and sat on a bench, eating the last of the food I’d packed myself so long ago. The sun came out and burned off the mist.
I was sitting there, squinting in the light and chewing the stale end of a peanut butter sandwich, when a person dressed all in green shambled up to me. I thought at first he was going to ask me for directions—that was the only reason a stranger would ever approach you at home. He had a big stick in his hand and a wadded-up bunch of tarpaulin on his back. His face was dark with dirt.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” he said, giving me a crooked bow. He didn’t sound like he was from New Orleans. He didn’t sound Southern at all—then again, neither did my mother. “But I was wondering if by chance you had some change you could spare for a hot meal.”
“Actually, I don’t,” I said. That was true; I’d left my money in the car, which suddenly seemed like a bad place for it. “Sorry.”
“Not even just a little handful of change for a hungry man, a lovely young lady such as yourself?”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. I took the last sandwich out of its plastic sack. “But you can have this, if you want.”
He snatched it out of my hand and stormed off. I watched as, several yards away, he opened the sandwich up, sniffed at the contents, and then tossed the pieces of bread into a bush, grumbling.
When he was out of sight I went over to the bush and rescued my sandwich. I pressed it back together again and stuffed it into the sack. I wasn’t going to eat it, after that. But I couldn’t stand to leave it there.
Before I went to Uncle Geoffrey’s, I walked around the neighborhood. I’m home, I whispered to myself. I wanted to believe it. And certain things swelled my heart: passing a small house shaped like the First Bank of Wallamee but painted pink and yellow, I smelled a sweet olive tree. The scent was like peaches, but better; it was a golden color exploding in my head. My knees wobbled and I thought I’d cry. What did it remind me of? I didn’t know. Something. I put my hand on a wooden fence post to steady myself.
But so much else was strange. The cars parked along the curb were small and expensive and clean; none were coated with the sticky dirt that covered cars in Train Line from October to May. The people I passed were tanned and dressed lightly. There was no one as pale as I must have been. I turned my face to the hazy sun, feeling my skin drink it in. No one said hello, either, or made eye contact. A woman in heels clicked by, walking a cat on a leash.
By the time I got to my uncle’s house, dragging my duffel bag, I was ready to go home. Probably I was just tired. Everything I’d seen in the last few days weighed on me. I thought of my mother, carless and lonely in her little cottage, and ached to see her. The front door of my uncle’s house loomed like a wall. On the other side would be more unfamiliarity: people I didn’t know wanting things from me, odd food.
Uncle Geoffrey opened the door before I’d gotten up the nerve to ring the bell. He must have seen me coming up the front walk. He was short, with very little hair and my mother’s beaklike nose. He wore corduroy pants and a pair of furry slippers.
“Naomi!” he said, taking me into his arms.
I stiffened automatically, then put my free arm around him. He was fat and soft, like a little man made of bread dough, and slightly sweaty.
“So good to see you again, Naomi,” he said over my shoulder. He sounded like he meant it. Then he pulled away, smiled, and took my duffel bag. “What a drive! Let me show you your room. Maybe you’ll want to take a shower? Then I’ll make you breakfast.” He trotted on ahead, turning and grinning at me.
I followed him.
The house was beautiful. The rooms were sparsely furnished, big and plain and full of light. What furniture there was looked ancient and dark, like monuments. My room had violet walls and a bare wood floor. There was jar of fresh hyacinths on the windowsill.
“This was Imogen’s room, until she got married. That was a while ago. She lives in Denver now. You remember her, don’t you?”
I did but only vaguely. She was a tall girl with straight black hair, a few years older than me. My one memory involved a family picnic, in honor of my grandfather’s birthday, I think. Imogen sat by a fence, tugging moodily at weeds, and she wouldn’t give me the time of day. But I nodded for Uncle Geoffrey and managed a small smile.
“It’s a nice room,” I said.
“That girl loved purple. Her mother and I made her settle for lavender, but she’d have had it the most gaudy Mardi Gras shade of purple you’d ever seen.” He took my hand in his and patted it. “Now, look. I’m semiretired now, and only go into my office a couple days a week. You’ll see me at home a lot. But you think of this as your house as much as mine, all right?” He looked me in the eyes intently.
“What about Aunt…?” For the life of me I couldn’t remember her name.
“Francie. Oh. Well. We’ve been divorced since Isabel was out of high school.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh,” he said again, shrugging, and then he smiled. “Bathroom’s across the hall there. You’ll have it to yourself. Men’s room’s over yonder.” He let go of my hand and gave me a quick salute. “Find me when you’re hungry.”
“Thank you,” I said, somewhat stunned. I’d expected to have to answer all kinds of polite questions. But Uncle Geoffrey just trotted back downstairs, whistling.
I went into the room and shut the door. My grubby Adidas bag, sitting on Imogen’s violet bedspread, looked like someone had drowned a litter of puppies in it. I picked it up and slid it under the bed. Cars rumbled by outside, but up here it was quiet. I moved the hyacinths to the bedside table, pushed up the screen, and leaned out the window.
Down below, people walked by. It was hard to imagine where they were all going. To restaurants, to work? Around the block and home again? A couple passed by, hand in hand, then a young man with a stroller. I was higher than most of the surrounding houses and could see the tops of the trees in the park I’d sat in that morning, and a distant glimmer of water. Was that the lake? The river? The ocean? I had no idea. I pulled myself back inside and sat on the bed. I felt too dirty to lie down, so for several minutes I just sat there with my hands in my lap. Exhaustion roared in my ears.
There was a tentative knock on the door, almost too quiet to notice.
“Come in,” I said, standing up.
“I’m sorry,” said Uncle Geoffrey. He poked his head in, but kept most of him in the hall. “I forgot to ask if you want anything.”
“Oh, I don’t think…”
“But if there’s anything you need. There’s clean linen in the bathroom, aspirin in the medicine cabinet…” He raised his eyebrows expectantly. His face was red and flustered but pleased. Clearly he wasn’t used to guests.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “But thank you. I don’t need a thing.”
“Then I’ll leave you alone.” He waved again and was gone.
I spent two weeks with Uncle Geoffrey. Every day passed in almost exactly the same way, from breakfast at the kitchen table each morning to coffee in the front room every night. In between the days stretched twice as long as they did at home. Breakfast itself seemed to last all morning; we ate courses and courses of toast and jam and tea and orange juice, trading sections of the Picayune. Uncle Geoffrey and I, it turned out, had a lot in common. We both hated small talk and could go hours without speaking and not even notice. We hated seeing the television on when it was light out. We loved pastries. We quickly became as comfortable with each other as an old married couple, but endlessly polite, and careful to stay out of each other’s way.
My habit, after reading the classified section of the paper and circling a few ads, was to wash the breakfast dishes and walk into town. Though it was pra
ctically winter at home, the air here was still gentle and predictable; the mornings were cool, the afternoons warm enough to take my jacket off. It didn’t rain much, and the sun was out for several hours every day. The walk from Uncle Geoffrey’s house to downtown took nearly an hour, but there was no reason to hurry, and there was a lot to see on the way. I stopped in flower shops just to look and at newsstands to read the headlines. There was a neighborhood I especially liked to walk through, where café tables crowded the sidewalks and young men sat in sunglasses, their feet stuck out far enough to trip me.
In town, I was supposed to be filling out job applications and stopping by temp agencies. The second day I was there I applied for a job as a copy shop clerk and for another one in a film store. I told the truth on the applications, which was that I’d spent the last ten years as a babysitter and librarian in a spiritualist colony, because I was sick to death of lying. I couldn’t stand the thought of making up a single other thing. Though I had given up my old life, I couldn’t yet face making up a new one.
Mostly I walked around and looked. I bought myself little things with Peter’s money. There was a shopping center near the river I spent whole days in, buying pretty candles and scarves, notebooks, things to eat. I sat on benches on the pier and watched huge freighters slide by. Sometimes I kept the gifts I bought myself, sometimes I threw them in the garbage, or dropped them in the gutter, disgusted.
One afternoon, drinking strong coffee from a tiny cup at a tiny coffee shop table, I saw someone who looked like Peter. My heart leaped up. He was passing outside, walking with another boy. In the sun his black hair was nearly blue, and he wore heavy, horn-rimmed sunglasses. I got up and leaned against the window, pressing my face to the glass to watch him go. There was something odd about his behind, and his walk seemed a little bouncy for Peter. Still. Was it him? I couldn’t tell. My breath steamed the glass, and by the time I’d wiped it away he was gone.
I finished my coffee with shaking fingers. This is how it would always be, I knew. He would never be completely gone, but he would never, ever be with me.
Uncle Geoffrey was getting nervous. Every morning at breakfast, he watched uneasily as I pushed away the classified section of the newspaper and read the funnies instead. He noticed that some days I didn’t go into town at all, but stayed in my room, or, sometimes, sat out behind the house in an iron garden chair, reading. “I know you don’t have much computer experience,” he said to me one morning, trying for nonchalance. “But if you wanted a job in my office I could get you some training. It’s not all that hard, and I know you’d just pick it up.”
“You don’t have to do that.” I smiled, partly to let him know I appreciated the gesture and partly because the image of me as a clerk in a law office was a funny one. “I’ll find something sooner or later.”
“Oh, I know you will.”
“If you’d like me to pay for my room and board…”
“Wouldn’t hear of it!” he said, throwing up his hands.
But that night I bought groceries and baked a quiche, which Uncle Geoffrey ate with cautious enthusiasm. For dessert we walked to the Donut King. He held the door open for me and insisted on paying, and we sat by the window, watching the sun go down over the city.
My uncle ate his doughnut and wiped his mouth carefully with a paper napkin. “I’m sorry I was never really in touch with you all, over the years,” he said.
“Oh, it’s okay.”
“Your mother never got over our brother leaving, you know. She really worshipped him. I guess I was a little bit jealous.” He paused a moment, uneasy, then went on. “He wasn’t a very nice person. I know Patsy doesn’t remember him that well, but he was awful to our parents. To everyone. He used to ask homely girls out on dates just for kicks, and then not show up. He’d make prank phone calls, tell people they won prizes. He was always happy, happy and cruel. What makes someone be like that? I just have no idea.”
He fiddled with his napkin. “He was nice to Patsy, though. I should just keep my mouth shut. Don’t tell her I said any of this, will you? I used to wonder if the whole medium business was just her way of trying to get him back, though God knows, Wilson’s probably still alive.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
He smiled and shrugged. “Here, I’ll get you another doughnut.”
He went up to the counter and came back with a coconut one. I could hardly swallow it: my uncle’s kindness seemed so unreasonable, it made my throat tighten up. The setting sun glowed in his thin, curly hair, and he looked out at the street, shaking his head at it, like someone who’d never seen a street before.
The next afternoon, I came into the house to find my uncle hanging up the phone. I’d been outside most of the day, reading a book on botany, but now the sun was going down and it was getting cold, and my behind hurt from the hard iron chair. I kept my finger in the book to mark my page.
Geoffrey was standing by the telephone table. He hadn’t turned the lights on yet, so the hallway was dark and I couldn’t make out the expression on his face.
“I just called your mother’s house,” he said.
For a long moment, I felt that everything must be over. She told him, I thought.
“She wasn’t there. I left a message on the machine.”
I breathed a secret, relieved sigh and leaned against the paneling. My uncle rubbed his finger along his lips.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to tell tales on you or anything. I’m just a little worried—I want things to go well for you. I hoped Patsy—Galina, I mean—could give me some advice.”
“I’m fine. Really.”
“All right,” he said. But he did not look convinced.
We watched television all evening, letting the malicious noise of it fill the room. It depressed me to see the shenanigans of the sitcom characters reflected in Uncle Geoffrey’s glasses. His face was worried and sad; his lower lip pooched out and his cheeks were pale. After a while his eyes fluttered shut and his head began to nod. I couldn’t bear to sit there any longer while he snored, so I got up and decided to take a walk.
I had my shoes and jacket on and was about to head out the door when the phone rang. It was my mother, I was certain; she would be returning Geoffrey’s phone call. I stood there frozen in the hallway, not two feet from the telephone table. I wanted, suddenly and acutely, to hear her voice. I let it ring once more, and then I answered it.
“Hello?”
But it was not my mother. “Naomi,” said a man’s voice. “This is Officer Peterson.”
Horrified, I hung up. Geoffrey came up behind me, shuffling in his slippers. “Who was that?”
I could only shake my head. As I stood there, mute, the phone rang again. I turned and ran out the door.
It was a cool night, breezy, with a moon that reeled in and out of the clouds. I kept running for a few blocks, but soon lost my breath and had to walk. Beneath my feet the sidewalk was broken and bumpy, and it rose and fell sickeningly, like the ocean. They know, they know, everyone knows what I did. Officer Peterson must have searched my house, or my mother’s house, and found something, perhaps tapping my mother’s phone to find out where I was, or maybe my mother herself had told him everything. Anything seemed possible—it seemed possible, even, that the moon could roll out of the sky and crush me. I wanted it to. I wanted everyone who’d ever died to come walking out of the houses I passed and to take me into their arms.
The city at night was not the same as the city in daytime. Seeing it this way, lit from the inside instead of from without, confused and disoriented me, and it wasn’t long before I found myself on streets I didn’t recognize. Here was a shadowy park with blue streetlights, and there was a house guarded by statues of dogs. It made me think of my grandmother in the last few hours before she died, wandering lost through the city she’d been born in and had once known intimately. Had she felt this way? I ran my hand along an iron fence and imagined it was her hand, her long arm with its loos
e skin and the veins that wrapped it like ivy. I passed an open window, and the smell of cooking gusted out of it. People crowded by me, overflowing into the street, smelling of alcohol and perfume, laughing. Young men in baseball caps sloshed drinks onto the pavement. Cars roared by. The city spun around me, and inexplicably, my heart began to open.
This, I knew, was how my grandmother felt. Stripped of memory, of her past and her future, she had only what was around her: the weeds growing from cracks in the plaster walls, the litter caught in doorways, the trees reaching over traffic to clutch at each other, her cotton dress, her body. The unburdened heart sees everything. I saw the shapes of leaves and the shapes of shadows of leaves; I saw every doorframe and window ledge. My grandmother was happy the day she died. Stumbling across hot and busy streets, past shops and bars and offices all humming with mysterious activity, my grandmother must have felt real ecstasy—the ecstasy of saints, of ascetics and flagellants when they finally give up their attachments to life. We were wrong to think she suffered.
I’d never in my life felt so happy. I hadn’t known my soul was capable of such a feeling! I ran and walked and ran. It was all strange, all new and perfect. And how beautiful it was—neon signs and architecture and things in shop windows, and people with their clothes and hairdos. I wanted it all. All over town, half-memories flew out at me. I thought of dresses I’d owned but couldn’t remember how I looked in them, if they itched, or what happened to them. I passed a bar I thought I recognized—had my father taken me here once? I stopped at the door and peered in. It was smoky and at the back was a row of washing machines. The same old familiar bar smell rolled out at me, but I couldn’t tell if it was familiar because I remembered it or because all bars have the same smell. He had carried me on his hip and bought me root beer.
