by Lise Haines
“But he’s lived here longer,” she said.
I could almost see her brain fuel up, logic peeling off like broken heat shields. Putting the last stack of books on the shelf, I looked at her as she began to arrange T-shirts and pants in Lola’s drawers. Each time she folded an arm or leg, it was as if she were trying to get an unconscious child to move her extremities. I knew how she worried for Lola.
Just then I saw Ajay outside. He grabbed a large bottle of detergent from a pickup truck and walked around the side of the building.
“Eighteen shootings last year,” she said. “I won’t tell you the number of stabbings.”
“We have an understanding,” I said.
The understanding went like this: I would do my share of housework, help with Lola, and pay for some of the utility bills—at least my phone and data use—while I saved up to move out. She would pay the rent, buy the groceries, and so on. Meanwhile, I would keep my own hours, set my own rules.
“Well yes, but …”
An elevated train went by, and I shouted, “I’m going over to Howard Street for ice!” I knew I’d get no argument. The refrigerator had been unplugged when we arrived, and it still wasn’t cold enough to make ice cubes. Grabbing my wallet, I fled.
I stopped outside the basement entry on my way. The air that came up through the doorway was remarkably cool. Going down the concrete steps, I walked through clumps of lint and dust.
Ajay stood in front of a bank of coin-operated washing machines, about to pour his detergent into the cap. When he looked up I saw the blue liquid ribbon over his hand before he realized what he was doing. He shook his head, smiling to himself. Rubbing his hand on the clothes, he said, “I’ll be out of here in a half hour. The third machine is a clothes shredder by the way—skip that one. I’m Ajay.”
I stood there for a while trying to figure out why it was so pleasurable to throw him off guard. I came closer and saw that the clothes in that one washer were so thickly coated in blue detergent now there would be an overflow of suds down the washer and across the floor as soon as he got it started.
“How many quarters does it take?” I looked at his eyes instead of down at the slots. There was that peculiar sense of intimacy.
He reddened a little and broke away to wash his hands in the sink. “Eight for the washers, at least four for the dryers.”
Then I heard him say, “And you are?”
But I was already halfway out the door and didn’t turn around.
You do something weird one day and there’s no way to follow that except to get weirder still or stay out of sight. So I avoided him. And that had nothing to do with my mother.
He called out to me a couple of times in the weeks that followed and I almost stopped to talk. I thought of telling Nitro about him, but it took a lot to stir Nitro.
I met Cynthia Carshik when I returned from the store that first day. She was sitting outside her apartment on the stairs, moving the air around with a paper fan. The large window on the landing was open. The humidity was awful but there was a breeze.
“See that,” she said, pointing outside. I looked out at the massive dark cloud over Lake Michigan.
“It followed me home,” I said.
“Then you’ve brought rain with you. Thank God.” She introduced herself and said, “Hell of a day to move.”
“Any chance you have a can opener we could borrow? We haven’t found ours yet.”
She loaned me hers along with a cooler. Then she offered me a cold beer and told me about the people in the building. I took a seat at her kitchen table.
“Ajay lives with his grandfather on the first floor. He graduates from architecture school this spring. Women love him by the way. He had a girlfriend for a while, but he dropped her. He seems pretty serious about what he’s doing. Oh, and the iron gates and the sheet metal and pipes in the basement are the grandfather’s. You’ll notice them when you’re trying to get to the washers and dryers sometimes. He doesn’t like to have anything disturbed. If you ask him to move a fire grate, he’ll stare you down. But the next time you go down to the basement every last thing will be swept and stacked. He has a small welding business with a partner, so he tidies up when the work goes slack, not before. Though he seems to be working less now.
“Across from the Kapurs is a man named Neil and his wife, Rabbit. They’re tattoo artists. The guys in the apartment next to me are probably going to be evicted next month, don’t ask. And the old woman who lives next to you, all her mailbox says is Lily. You’ll never get her to talk. You can look her in the eyes and shout, ‘Good morning!’ and she’ll look right through you. And no, she isn’t deaf. I’m pretty sure she lives off Social Security or disability. You’ll see her wander around the neighborhood with an old camera. I’m sure she doesn’t have any film in it.”
“No film?”
“She just seems like that type.”
Cynthia was twenty-two and worked at the comic book store on Howard. She and I were the same height, close to the same build, listened to a lot of the same music and were nervous driving cars. I swallowed my fears to get Lola around, and Cynthia mostly clung to public transportation but kept her mother’s old car running. We had both had scarlet fever and liked to watch silent films. Cynthia smoked herbal cigarettes and had done insane things.
Her bedroom was directly below mine, and she had converted the walk-in closet between the dining room and bathroom to a tiny bedroom for those occasions when her musician boyfriend Luke’s three-year-old son Colin visited. There were Cubs pennants on the walls, lion bedding on the cot, a small nightstand with a lava lamp. All the hangers had been removed from the bar, and there were board games and plastic tubs full of toys up on the shelf. She had hoped he would stay over more often, that he or Luke would settle in, but Luke had taken off for New York with his collection of guitars and amplifiers just before we arrived. She said she had a recurring nightmare that went like this: “Luke returns for a visit from New York and we get into bed that night. The Ravenswood train makes its approach along the building and suddenly the cars jump track and drive into our bed, taking him out but sparing me. The last person who had your apartment said sometimes my screams were so loud the sound shot through the radiators,” she said, apologizing in advance.
I said that if I heard her scream, I would take something, a book or cup, and tap on the pipes so she’d know someone was there. She said she would do the same for me, anytime.
Before I dropped off that night, I thought about what holds us together. When I was little I could almost see the cord that stretched between my parents. He would stand behind her while she sat at the dining table, and he’d put one hand on each of her shoulders and rub her muscles and she would look content. He was doing well, selling plenty of policies. She was sculpting. Mom and he would make a point of dressing up and going out one night a week. She often wore full skirts cinched in at her tiny waist, and just before they left the house he would ask her to turn in a circle to show off her outfit, commenting on her legs as the skirt lifted in the air. He wore nicely fitted suits and ties, and his shirts always looked new. They were a handsome couple.
Maybe the cord frayed when she began to outpace him. She continued to work part-time to help with the mortgage since her costs as a sculptor were so high but often found ways to do this at home. She had become, however, a sculptor with gallery representation. And he got a new boss and began to feel pushed around at work. She did her best to hold him and the life we had together, but then his job disappeared. My mother told me losing his job was like a picture he kept folded in his wallet that he transferred from one outfit to another. Every time he paid for something, every time he’d think about what he was doing, where he was going, he’d see that picture.
It didn’t help that she liked classical music and stayed up half the night looking at images of art while my father spent increasing amounts of time watching crime series and the kind of talk shows that turn into brawls. As things ground gears, t
he volume cranked. I heard Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at earsplitting decibels while some sister’s boyfriend’s lover’s husband went down with a sonic boom before a live audience.
If relationships split along certain lines and we tend to fall out on one side or another, I knew my side. Sometimes in those days I got in bed with her and we watched a stream of visuals on her computer well past midnight, or drifted into movies, while he pitched about on the couch with his shows. We preferred stuff flooded with one brand of love or another, even airless romances that bring the wind back up into your throat, and the French films my mother adored where little happens.
It’s possible I was waiting for them to fail. By the time I was in seventh grade, somewhere between a third and half of my friends’ parents were divorced. Some should have been but weren’t. And statistically, I read in one of my mother’s magazines, half of the group that was left cheated, and half of that half felt they were doing more than their share of the housework and child-rearing or missing out on their real ambitions. Halve the last bit again and there was a small collection of funny people left to dodge inevitable heartache.
There were two couples. A friend named Deena who had two moms, both doctors, and though I didn’t spend a lot of time at Deena’s the moms seemed to be in decent sync whenever I dropped over. And Joe’s parents, the first to get a jumbo flat screen TV. We used to pile into their house on weekend nights. When we weren’t watching a movie or playing a game, pictures of the family would come up on the screen, the father’s arms around the mother, the mother’s arms around the father. They weren’t little people by any means. They liked to eat and have all of us for barbeque, baked potatoes with sour cream, garlic bread heavy with butter, and so many beverages stuffed in the icy cooler you could float away. They rarely raised their voices except to call out for more sauce or napkins. Even their kids said they just worked somehow.
When I realized I could only find two larger-than-life couples in the whole lot, I guess I lost faith in the idea.
At school the boys I knew were friends mostly and we traveled in packs with the girls I knew, and I watched them hook up and fall in love or the other way around. They broke each other’s hearts in the middle of movies, over cheap meals, on the phone, in fragmented texts, by ghosting.
My friends said I was too shy, that was my problem, but there was a boy who ran after me into Lake Michigan once and tried to tug my bathing suit off. Another one kissed me in a locker room as if I were a sport he had to win. I had crushes and months of sadness over a third guy but mostly I watched everyone else travel around fortune’s wheel, getting snagged and ripped on its nails.
When Nitro came along, things made their own kind of sense. I didn’t want to be a couple, at least on the conscious side, and neither did he.
That made it extra strange to wake up one morning curled in front of Ajay’s door in my pajamas. Mr. Kapur, his grandfather, stood above me. The morning light was coming up from the entryway. I had no idea how long I had been lying there.
I had mostly seen Mr. Kapur in passing, and he had one of those faces. Wiry and strong, he could have been fifty, but he could just as easily have been seventy or even eighty. He wore the same kind of jeans I had seen him wear each day on his way to and from work. His shirts were neatly tucked in and buttoned to his knobby throat. He was a welder by trade, and I sometimes imagined he and my mother might sit around talking shop.
His cowboy boots, in a state of high polish, were inches from my face. A sailing verbal assault began. “Get up, get up, get up! Do you have no shame?”
I worked my way to a seated position.
A crush of Hindi words followed as I brushed a layer of grit from my face. I asked him the time.
“What time is it? What time?” he mocked. “Six a.m. precisely. You would like the weather report now?”
“How long have I been here?”
“I am getting ready for work, going down to get my newspaper, and the girl from upstairs asks me this as if I have been standing outside my apartment all night long to see if some lovesick person will wander by and ask for a detailed report on conditions?”
“Lovesick?” I said with a laugh. I got up and took a seat on the stairs, too wiped out to make the climb to the third floor yet.
“My grandson is not a movie personality, and I am not the morning news station.”
“Your grandson is not … ? I don’t have any interest in your grandson.” It’s possible I reddened a little but if I did he didn’t seem to notice.
“What is wrong with you then? Making a spectacle of yourself.”
“Sleepwalking,” I said. “Sleepwalking is what’s wrong with me.”
He softened a little and said, “Then you have a nervous condition. You should see a doctor.” Leaving me for a moment, he went into the apartment and came out with a blanket that he draped around my shoulders.
I was going to say something about the uselessness of doctors but decided to drop the subject. Just then the low sun rolled further into the lobby and hit the hall window on the landing between the entry and the first floor, the reflection beaming directly into his face. I thought that’s why his eyes began to fill.
“Are you all right, Mr. Kapur?” I asked.
He looked disoriented.
“Mr. Kapur?”
Stepping out of the beam of light, he seemed to consider me anew. “Are you not the girl from upstairs? If you are going for your newspaper, you should wear a robe,” he said. “Did no one raise you correctly?”
“I …”
“It is a matter of common decency,” he said. Then he got his keys out and quickly disappeared into his apartment. I wondered if this was a one time incident or if his condition was progressive.
We rarely saw Lily, the woman who lived next door to us. She would leave her apartment once Lola and I were out of the house and Mom had gone on the clock with her phone sales. She returned before Lola’s afternoon pickup and long before I got home. It was almost as if she wanted to avoid us. Mom saw her figure from our living room window. She wore an old hat and coat and beat-in flats. She always had a camera with her and this made me think of the ghost images she must have inside. So far none of us had come face to face with her.
Though Mom often lost herself in her work, she was by nature gracious and warm. She liked to extend herself and offer help where she could with old people in particular and had volunteered at the senior center in Evanston for many years. Placing a plate of fresh baked cookies by Lily’s door one day with a short welcoming note, Mom hoped to strike up a conversation. The plate sat there untouched until Mom removed it, worried about drawing vermin.
One morning Mom got curious and, purposefully breaking her routine, stepped into the hall when she heard Lily’s door open. Lily was a tall woman, and she looked weary, my mother said, her face deeply lined. She had a Rolleiflex on a strap around her neck. Lily looked her square in the face, coughed as if Mom was a small bone to get out of her throat, and hurried back into her apartment.
It was sometime later that Mom agreed to accompany Lola’s class on a field trip, and I came home early with a migraine. My head was splintering as I got to the top floor. I noticed Lily’s door was ajar. I waited for a moment, trying to figure out if I should do something, but finally decided she’d be annoyed if I knocked.
All I wanted was to lie down with a compress and sip a cold Coke. If I got a dose of medicine quickly, I might avoid a forty-eight-hour siege that would include a light show and severe vomiting. The bottle of medicine was empty. I called the doctor’s office where we had gone for years, and they agreed to send a prescription to the pharmacy near our apartment. I rang Cynthia to see if she was willing to pick it up, but she was out. If I rested, even for a moment, I would be down for the day. Somehow I walked over to the pharmacy on Howard and got my pills and walked home.
When I returned Lily’s door was still open. I thought about my own grandmother, my mother’s mother, and what it would be like if so
me neighbor ignored a warning sign of a stroke or a fall. Knocking a couple of times, I got no answer. I stepped inside and found a small table and a chair set by the window, looking out toward the lake, the wood floors bare, no other furnishings.
Maybe it was the sparseness, but everything felt still. I called out before I entered her bedroom. A single bed and a small dresser stood watch. Her kitchen seemed to hold only the most essential items. No framed artwork or family pictures. Nothing on the walls. She had the same built-in shelves in her dining room, but where our cabinet doors had panes of clear glass she had backed hers with dark fabric.
The starburst effect from the migraine began, and in that awful glow I thought I must be hallucinating when I found rows of camera bodies and lenses inside the cabinet. A couple of old Kodak Brownies and a Rolleiflex 3.5T, along with a 3.5F, 2.8C, and an Automat. She had a Leica IIIc, an Ihagee Exakta, a Zeiss Contarex and a slew of other SLR cameras. It was impossible that all this beautiful machinery—a collection of cameras that might have taken a lifetime to build—was housed next door. I examined a few and though none had film, the mechanisms worked perfectly. I wondered if she counted out her wealth with regularity, sitting at her little table.
The halos of light grew worse, and I hurried now. The bathroom was, for all intents and purposes, a darkroom with an enlarger, trays and chemicals, though I did find a hairbrush and a bottle of shampoo. Lastly, I pulled back the set of curtains to the walk-in closet slowly so the sound of the metal rings moving along the pole wouldn’t peel through my skull. Inside, hundreds of neatly stacked print and negative boxes lined both sides with an open stepstool in the middle. Against the back wall the boxes were almost to the ceiling, each one clearly marked with dates and subject matter or location. I pulled one print box off the top marked Downtown, 1965.
The work was tender then gritty, cold-eyed then heartbreaking and almost uniformly luminous. Blacks were true, deep black, whites crisp. I pulled open another box and another. I lost track of time and place and even my head seemed to throb differently in those moments of discovery. Weegee, Dater, Cunningham, Bresson somehow all resided in her images yet she was her own photographer. Lily was her last name. Her first name was Anna.