Chaos

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Standing there on the sprawling grounds in the late afternoon sunshine, Myrinda shivered a little looking up at the apartment building, surprised by the sudden intimidation she felt. It loomed up over them, almost seemed to lean in toward them, inspecting them. Its sun-glared windows staring down at them gave away nothing, but she thought they didn’t really need to. In every brick of the place, in the very air that it seemed to pull to it like a shroud, she could feel a sense of waiting, a sense of unemotional expectancy. She thought to mention it to Derek, to ask if he felt it, too, but decided against it. She looked up at the set of his jaw, the mouth not quite frowning, eyebrows tenting suspiciously as he studied those upper windows, too. He hadn’t fallen in love with the place, but he loved her, and he knew her well. She wanted to live here; it glinted in her eyes and made her voice tremble when she talked about the place. They’d already signed the lease. Their suitcases and a few possessions they’d acquired between them waited in the trunk of his Mazda.

  Mrs. Sunderman, the landlady, stood waiting for them outside the door to the main office, a small woman in an oddly jarring provincial floral top and jeans, her silver-ringed fingers patting the jumble of silver-tipped dark hair piled and clipped upon her head. On her tanned face was the polite but mildly empty airiness of one anticipating superficial pleasantries. She held a small keyring with a sibling line of similar keys—one to the outer doors of the lobby, one to their own front door, one to the fenced-in pool and tennis courts that lay off to the west of the Old Ward, one for their mail box, one for their storage bin, and one for the door to the laundry room in the basement.

  “Hi, Mrs. Sunderman.” Myrinda waved.

  The landlady waved with the hand holding their keys. They jingled lightly, reminding Myrinda of wind chimes. Derek held out a hand to her as they approached. She looked at him a moment—just a fleeting moment, with a following glance at her—before taking his hand and smiling pleasantly. Myrinda bristled slightly. She knew sometimes she was perhaps oversensitive, and saw judgment or derision where there was none, but in that fleeting moment, she was fairly certain a sense of superiority hung around the woman’s face, just as she had when she’d first met them. She could almost hear the accompanying thought: ‘Well

  I wouldn’t do it, but some folks—those modern liberal folks—do resort to some wacky things, probably for attention. Dating outside their race, throwing paint on fur coats, tossing broken baby dolls on the porches of abortion clinics. Don’t want to know what sorts of trouble they like to cause, so long as they pay their rent and don’t damage anything.’

  Myrinda stifled a frown.

  “Well, then. Welcome to Bridgewood Estates,” Mrs. Sunderman said, and held out the keys to them. Myrinda took them and thanked her. She could feel Mrs. Sunderman’s eyes on them as they climbed the porch steps and entered the lobby through the neatly efficient dark green double doors.

  The ground floor lobby of the building had a faint musty smell that contradicted the newness of the décor. The tiny gray and green floor tiles lay in tidy little diamond patterns. The walls were painted a soothing light gray that complemented the floor. Neat metal rows of mailboxes, lettered in silver with apartment numbers, hung against the wall to the right. To the left was a door to the staircase leading to the upper floors. Against the back wall stood the doors to the elevator, still shiny and unscuffed.

  “So this is home.” From his tone, Myrinda couldn’t tell if Derek thought that a good thing or a bad thing. When he turned to her, though, he smiled. “Why don’t you go open up, and I’ll start grabbing stuff out of the car?”

  The U-Haul Derek’s cousin was driving up from Pennsylvania wouldn’t be arriving until the following afternoon. They had packed Derek’s car with the breakable stuff, the toiletries, the personal items, suitcases full of clothes and shoes. She’d wanted, at least, the cleaning supplies, so she could start washing away the invisible film of previous tenantry, if there had been any. She wanted the little odds and ends she could put out or away to stake claims on the place as being her own.

  Myrinda smiled back at him and nodded. He kissed her, quick but loving, then headed back out to the car.

  Alone in the lobby, she sighed, content. This was their new home, a fresh start away from the suburban repetitiveness and smallness of her home town. She would not miss generations of those people growing up on top of prior generations, everyone gathering at the local bars, the local restaurants and judging who’d gained weight or lost hair or settled for someone in a stagnant marriage formed to raise a brood of kids. Sure, they’d moved to New England, and for all intents and purposes, it was sequestered small town living at its epitome; she saw the irony in that, she really did. But here, they were strangers. Here, they were new. High up on the hill, they were removed from the town below. They were in the ivory tower, mysterious, even a little feared. She didn’t think she’d want to stay forever—not if she and Derek got married and had kids someday—but for now, for what she wanted, this place was perfect, because there were no old ghosts to run into. No familiar faces. This place was their own secret delight, for her and Derek to share.

  She moved toward the elevator and pressed the button. The upward-pointing triangle above the doors lit up and the shuffling hum of the car moving between floors lifted the edge of the lobby’s silence. She stepped into the car and it was just as the doors slid closed behind her that she noticed the graffiti.

  Graffiti seemed somehow too big a word for it, truth be told, but that’s how it struck Myrinda—stark, vaguely obscene in its contrast to the sleek mirrors and metal of the elevator car. It was written in thick-tipped permanent marker, dark blue, and simply read:

  I tried to take it all back.

  For some reason, she found this sadly disquieting, a glimpse at someone else’s private desperation. She leaned closer, her gaze tracing the neat, sharp-angled script, looped slightly to the left.

  The distorted face that materialized in the mirrored surface above the words made her jump. She wheeled around, expecting against reason to see its physical counterpart: hollow eye sockets smeared out of shape down the sunken cheeks, long black hair awry and ripped away bald in some places on the misshapen head, blood smearing the pale forehead.

  There was, of course, no one behind her. No one had gotten on with her in the lobby and she was only going up one floor. Her heart pounded blood into her ears. She turned back to the graffiti. The mirrored surface reflected only her wide-eyed, startled face.

  With a cheerful ding, the elevator car stopped on her floor and the door opened.

  The second-floor hallway stretched toward the left and right, turning occasional corners that took the doorways out of her view. The walls were painted a cool gray, slightly darker than the lobby, with a light gray carpeting on the floor. In contrast, the molding and the staggered doors were the same pine-green as the tiles in the downstairs floor, with silver letter/number plate combinations to mark off each of the apartments. She moved off to her left, toward apartment 2E, confused and shaken.

  She had just put the key in the lock when a voice spoke from behind her.

  “You new?”

  Myrinda flinched and turned toward an old woman hovering in the doorway of 2H. The woman smiled. Her thinning white hair drifted in soft, white wisps around soft, lined cheeks. Her eyes, large and brightly blue, took in Myrinda without assessment or judgment.

  “Hi,” Myrinda said. “My boyfriend and I, yes—he’s getting our things out of the car.” She thought of mentioning what she’d seen in the elevator to the woman, but decided against it. First impressions, and all.

  The woman nodded, then crossed the hall with sure but measured steps to Myrinda’s door. She wore a dress, white with large daisies, and with her floated a faint scent of flowers and bleach which Myrinda felt certain wafted up from the loose folds of the linen.

  The old woman extended a hand. “Agatha Roesler,” she said. “Aggie. It’s nice to see new faces filling up some of the rooms i
n this place. Happy faces. New building and all—we don’t have that many tenants yet.”

  Myrinda shook her hand. “I’m Myrinda. Derek and I are just moving our stuff in. Nice to meet you.”

  “Myrinda—that’s a pretty name.” The old woman’s eyes glazed, the comment seemingly present in the here and now, but not necessarily the speaker. Her body seemed to shiver from deep inside, rippling outward in the most infinitesimal shudder of her frame. After a moment, she returned to herself, offering Myrinda a faintly sheepish smile. “Okay, well, I won’t keep you. Welcome to the building, dear.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Roesler.”

  “Please, call me Aggie.”

  “Aggie.” She smiled at the old woman.

  Satisfied, Aggie nodded once again and made her careful way back to her apartment. Myrinda let herself into 2E.

  The foyer of the apartment was a wide white space that opened into a living room on the left, behind which was an equally open dining room. To the right of that was the kitchen, behind the foyer wall. A small hallway ran parallel to the kitchen on the right, offering doors to the bedroom and, farther back, the bathroom. It was a neatly stacked and packed series of rooms that gave the impression of possessing a slightly odd shape without really having any particular characteristic to give that impression. The walls were all that same stark, clean, anonymous white, faceless canvases for Myrinda to imbue with personality. She stood among those walls, imagining what might go where, what art to buy and hang, what color to paint them for the length of the lease.

  In the kitchen, she turned on the sink and let the water run for a bit before shutting it off. It was a mindless gesture, a possessive one, vaguely maternal. This was her place now, hers and Derek’s. She opened and closed the cabinets, the drawers, the dishwasher door, the pantry, faintly smiling at the domesticity of the gestures.

  There was a low, plaintive whine, not quite of vocal chords, and Myrinda suddenly sensed someone behind her, displacing the air and the thinness of solitude with a solid presence. She turned, expecting that Derek had come in behind her.

  She was alone in the kitchen. She frowned, crossing the neat planks of hardwood flooring to the dining room entrance. “Derek?” She called through the scantly sun-lit rooms. “Honey?”

  That same low, plaintive whine carried back from the hallway. She crossed the dining room and the living room to the hall. “Hon, are you up here?”

  The bathroom door stood open. She thought, although she couldn’t be entirely sure, that the door had been closed when she’d first let herself into the apartment. “Derek?” This time, her voice in the empty apartment sounded less tentative, a little louder in her ears.

  She made her way slowly down the hall, chiding herself even as she did so that she was being silly to feel that iciness down the back of her neck and under her arms. Who else would it be but Derek? Or maybe Mrs. Sunderman?

  “Hello?”

  She pushed open the bathroom door and flicked on the light switch.

  The bathroom was of a decent size—one of the appeals of the apartment—all beige and chocolate tiles and smooth porcelain. Toilet, tub, and shower all seemed to be in order. The apartment, she discovered as she moved back through the rooms, held to the same order and accountability, and the sweep back through proved neither Derek nor Mrs. Sunderman nor anyone else had joined her. Nonetheless, a pervasive feeling of otherness left her unsettled, a sensation that in each room she entered, someone had just left. Someone who left an imprint, not so much of ownership but of familiarity, of native locality, that she kept walking into like a light cloud.

  I tried to take it all back. She felt a small, sharp jealousy well up in her, and she shivered, its unpleasant aspect like a breeze that had gone from cool to just a little too cold. You can’t have it back. It’s mine, the jealousy congealed into thought-words, and she shivered again at the absurdity of them.

  The quiet in the apartment where she stood alone issued its own counter-challenge, biding time, smug.

  ***

  “It was probably the pipes,” Derek wrapped a towel around him and stepped out of the shower. “Apartment buildings like this are all full of odd noises.”

  Myrinda leaned in the bathroom doorway, watching him, already dressed for bed in a soft black cotton nightie. “It wasn’t just that, though—that’s what I mean. Those noises I heard in the kitchen weren’t what bothered me. It was...I don’t know, something more, something....” she struggled to find the right words.

  “Baby, it’s a new place, and I think what you felt was...well, not the creeps at being alone, but more the anticipation—for good or bad—of being in a place that has no history, no sense of belonging to anyone.”

  “So shouldn’t that make it easier to feel like it’s ours right away? I loved this place when we came to look at it. I still do. I just don’t understand why I should all of a sudden feel like an outsider here.”

  Derek squeezed her shoulder as he crossed over to the sink. “Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe apartments are like horses—you have to tame them, ya know? Break them in before anyone can feel at home in them.”

  She shrugged. It sounded plausible, she supposed, but a little anxious part of her mind felt unnerved by the thought. She didn’t want resistance. She wanted...acceptance was the word that came to her mind, but she didn’t quite understand why.

  “It’s not totally familiar. Not quite ours yet—but it will be. You’ll see. We’ll unpack all those boxes in the living room, get the furniture set up, put up shelves, and it will feel like yours. Mine. It’ll be ours. And I bet you that feeling you had this afternoon doesn’t ever come back.”

  “You think so?”

  He glanced back at her, smiled one of those smiles that made his eyes dance, and smoothed a thin sheen of shaving cream foam onto the stubble of his jaw and chin. She watched him, his strong back rippling with muscles beneath the dark caramel of his skin. The towel was wrapped around his tapered waist. She wanted to pull it off him, to pull him close, fresh and steaming from his shower, naked, pull him to her, inside her. He had a cool, polished way about him that men envied, a deep chocolate voice and a GQ face and body that made women turn and stare. People naturally liked Derek, with his easy smile and quick wit. He could talk to anybody about anything. She was proud of him, awed by him, very much attracted to him, and glad that at least his mama didn’t care that he was dating a skinny white woman. Derek often told her he loved her. He said he loved her cooking, the way her long legs felt wrapped around him when they made love, her laugh that always made him smile, too. He told her he loved the way her blue eyes swirled almost teal when she was excited or passionate about something, the way locks of her straight black hair fell over her eye or shoulder when she tilted her head, the way her lips moved when she wanted him. He made her feel smart, funny, talented, strong, and beautiful. She felt so lucky to have him. She only wished her own family saw in him what she did.

  “Come to bed,” she said.

  He peeked at her in the mirror, an eyebrow raised, grinning through the foam. “You miss me, babygirl?”

  “Terribly.” She pouted prettily.

  “I’ll be there in a minute. Let me just wash this off.”

  A few minutes later, he joined her in the bed they’d put together that afternoon amidst a small scattering of cardboard boxes, and they made love in their new home, passionate and excited and slow, until they both fell asleep beneath familiar sheets and a new white ceiling.

  It wasn’t until hours into that sleep, some time around four in the morning, that Myrinda woke up. She remembered snippets of a dream—bloody fingers, bathtubs with chunks of rotting meat blackening the chipped and stained porcelain, burning people she couldn’t save, a deep black chasm beneath the foundation of the apartments into which the whole of the building tilted crazily. She couldn’t remember much else, or recall how any of it fit together, but she awoke in a sweat, her heart thudding beneath her tank top and in her ears, tears blurring her sleep-sme
ared vision.

  She hadn’t screamed, but Derek’s soft snoring into his own pillow ceased, and he mumbled, “Whazdamatter, babygirl? You okay?”

  She stroked his shoulder, aware of the trembling of her fingers on his skin. “I’m okay. Go back to sleep, hon.”

  He put a hand over hers. “Bad dream? You’re shaking.”

  “Yeah.”

  He rolled over, awake now and concerned. “You want to talk about it?”

  She shook her head and smiled at him. “I’m okay. Just hold me?”

  “Of course. C’mere, babygirl.”

  She lay back down and snuggled up against him, her back to his chest, his arms around her. She lay there a long time, feeling his breathing against her, stroking his arm, until she fell asleep.

  TWO

  Hal Corman turned the television louder so he could block out Eda’s words. They had only been living at the Bridgewood Estates apartment for two and a half months, give or take a few days, but to hear Eda go on about the new couple who had just moved into 2E, one would think she’d strode off the Mayflower and claimed the building as her own. Eda usually had something to say about their neighbors—the gay recluse in 2B, the dotty old woman from 2H, the alcoholic in 2J. It seemed the interracial relationship between the Bridgewood Estates’ two newest young tenants offended Eda’s highbrow sensibilities. Hal tried not to roll his eyes or sigh too loudly when she crossed in front of the Patriots game (not that he was missing much; Brady might as well have had a rubber tentacle for an arm and Pittsburgh had a 16-point lead), but he found her voice over the white noise of the television crowd grating.