Drastic

by Maud Casey

  I think about what will happen after this necessary indulgence. We’ll go back to my apartment—shop for dinner and wine, pop popcorn, and watch a late night movie on TV, do exactly what we want—until Clarissa returns to her real life elsewhere with risk embedded in her breast and I go back to the comforting rhythm of work and home, work and home. For right now, though, watching Clarissa watch herself in the mirror, I love her in the same way I would love a landscape that is still and unselfconscious. These moments in my life are subtle as the new gold streaks through my hair. These tiny jewels are what I live for.

  RELIEF

  THE winter will ruin my life,” Flora says out loud, standing alone in her kitchen near the small hole that allows her to see through to her landlord’s kitchen below. “Ruin me, ruin me, ruin me.” This is one among many things she rehearses saying to her landlord. She mimes cutting her heart out and throwing it down the hole into her landlord’s kitchen. She imagines it landing, still beating, in his sink full of dirty bowls and spoons.

  Cold air rushes into her lungs, and Flora pushes the speed dial on her phone to call downstairs to Rock—just Rock, not for Rock Hudson, not for rock ’n’ roll, just Rock, as in stone, as in mountain, he explained to her the first time she called him to complain about something. He is eighteen and lives alone—Flora sometimes catches glimpses of his spiky hair through the hole; on her days off, she listens to him pour his bowl of cereal for breakfast, and again for lunch, and again for dinner. Flora has decided, after careful consideration, that she loves him.

  His mother used to live in the apartment above Flora until very recently. Flora never heard a sound. She suspected the mother did not move once she was in her apartment; she imagined her sitting in a wooden chair, immobile. There were no problems—no leaks, no crumbling grout—when the mother was here. One day Flora heard her yell down to Rock, “The more I do, the more I hate.” Flora couldn’t imagine what she did sitting in that chair. “Then leave,” Rock said flatly, and she did. Flora has decided that Rock would understand this important question: How old were you when you realized life didn’t necessarily get better? She feels sure he understands that there isn’t necessarily an accumulation, a building of one thing upon another, until you reach the end as your best self. She thinks he understands that you may in fact reach the end as someone quite different from your best self. You may even arrive at the end so many rungs down from your best self that you can’t even see what your best self looks like.

  A year ago Flora and her friend Peter ate in the same cheap Indian restaurant every night, talking about the directions their lives might take. Then Peter’s life, like the lives of other friends of Flora’s over the years, actually took a direction. His screenplay about lovable losers like himself and Flora was picked up; he was introduced to a crowd of formerly-nerdy-now-excruciatingly-hip writers; and he met a woman who was just like Flora only not Flora. Peter invited Flora to parties and screenings, but Flora found that she lost her bearings in public, that she couldn’t be funny the way she could in private. She and Peter went back a few times to their Indian restaurant but it wasn’t the same. Their relationship had revolved around possibility, not achievement, and they weren’t equipped for the change. While Peter had been waiting to someday leave the confines of the restaurant for the bigger world, Flora had been happy sitting there at the table across from Peter.

  There is a pulse of sound downstairs as Rock turns on his TV, which he often does, sometimes in the middle of the day, halfway through a soap. Don’t leave me but you must because we are in love, because we are related, because, because, because, don’t leave. Now the saccharine-sweet soundtrack—Jim Croce or someone trying to sound like Jim Croce—of a Sunday afternoon movie about somebody dying of an incurable disease drifts up through the hole.

  Flora goes to the phone. She has learned the power of using the telephone, the way she can cradle Rock’s voice against her ear. There were days, after all, when the phone was the only way to reach him, especially right after his mother left him and he wouldn’t even answer the door. Often, Flora will put her ear to the hole in the floor to hear him opening a cereal box, or rearranging his toolbox, or humming a tune that sounds like wind caught somewhere. Then there is Flora’s letter-writing campaign. With increasing frequency she composes eloquent diatribes on clogged drains, sporadic hot water, poor water pressure, chipping paint, the way the kitchen window doesn’t fit in its frame and clangs in brutal wind.

  Strangely, her interest in Rock, her love for him, manifests itself in complaints. She’s like a little girl who shows she likes a boy by hitting him. She can’t stop herself. These days a thin film of poison coats Flora’s words whenever she speaks to anyone. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when Flora was considered funny, a real crack-up, but over the past year her sense of humor has gradually been stripped of its graceful acrobatics, its fanciful costumes. There is a nugget of rage at the heart of it that Flora has struck upon and she can’t help touching it again and again, like checking a canker sore with her tongue. But today, she thinks. She is unable to finish the thought. She’s not sure exactly what she has in mind, but today she will make true contact with Rock. The winter chill that has crept into her body wells up inside her like a storm.

  “Uh-huh.” Rock answers the phone, mouth full.

  “Rock,” Flora says. She wraps her mouth carefully around the word, hopes that he’ll hear more than just his name in the way she speaks it. “Rock, have you seen the hole in my kitchen floor?” What she means is: Have you noticed my beating heart in your sink?

  “Get to the point, Flora. I’ve got new tenants—a young married couple,” and Flora wonders if he’s emphasizing this to spite her. “They’re moving onto the third floor any minute now,” Rock says wearily. Then, pausing as if to decide whether to offer her the next sentence, “I haven’t been feeling so well.”

  “I’m not giving you breaking news here, Rock. This is the same hole that’s been here for a week now,” Flora says, ignoring his complaint and raising him one. She’s practiced other words in bed in the dark—What kind of cereal do you like the best? Are you lonely?—but they are lost inside of her somewhere. She peers down into Rock’s kitchen to a single white tile with blue trim. She is not so sure that she wants him to fix it, or what it is precisely that she does want him to fix. She imagines Rock laying his spiky head in her lap and falling asleep, snoring a little. She’d shake him awake to tell him tenderly to be quiet.

  “Listen, Flora, I really have something wrong with my head. Terrible headaches,” Rock says, also the sort of person who doesn’t need another person to carry on a conversation. With Rock and Flora, there is always one extra person.

  “If you look at your ceiling, you will see what I mean,” Flora says, waiting for Rock, who now stands right below her, to look up through the hole, but he doesn’t. He moves, and there’s just that one blue-trimmed tile.

  “Every day for the past week I have headaches,” Rock says.

  “Don’t think I don’t know about you,” Flora says, hanging up the phone. It sounds good, like she has something on him.

  She looks out the window at the terrible cold sky going dark. The gray shadows of winter fill her with a boredom that drills into her bones. The world lit like the apocalypse at dusk. Every day threatens in its cold murkiness to be the last. She said this to the deli guy on her corner, but he just looked at her blankly and then stared past her to the next customer. She was practicing to say it to Rock because she suspects that he would appreciate the images she uses to articulate loneliness. This winter, cold air sneaks in through her ears, nose, and mouth and sets her on edge, makes her shiver from October until April, and she is not an old woman. She is still of marrying age, her cousin Carol said, hopeful when she called today, her obligatory Sunday call. Carol lives in the city, though Flora hasn’t seen her in years. A year ago Carol became a devotee of a self-help guru among whose directives was: Find someone less fortunate than you and be
charitable. So Carol calls each week to see if something miraculous has happened to Flora, and if nothing miraculous has happened, then Carol offers herself as that miracle. “You look thirty-seven,” she said today. “Not a day older than thirty-seven.” Flora is thirty-nine.

  “I’m thirty-six,” Flora said. “Thanks a lot. And besides, how do you know? You haven’t seen me in years. I may have aged beyond recognition.”

  But she was sorry when Carol made an excuse to get off the phone.

  Leaves mixed with gusts of city dirt blow mercilessly down the street. It makes Flora want to blame someone—the deli man who doesn’t understand her and whose fruit is rotten; scaredy-cat widowed Carol, who sends checks faithfully (the self-help guru encourages this along with the monthly donation to the guru’s institution); Samson, her boss at the art gallery where she works part time taking calls from creditors; the man who is pulled by his leggy Great Dane puppy down her street every morning. He once asked her the time, still moving as his dog dove into a hedge after some quick movement.

  Life was always skittering away from Flora like that, diving into hedges. Her career as an artist. Well, those drawing classes she took until the instructor asked her in front of the entire class to draw something that we all might recognize. That man she met in the gallery who eventually slipped his cold hand down her shirt as if he were fishing for forgotten change in a pocket. Without meaning to, when he asked for the time, she scowled at the man with the Great Dane puppy, up to his thigh in hedges, and shouted, “Five thirty-seven!” in the same tone she might have shouted, “Get out!”

  On the street, people walk by wrapped like packages in coats and scarves, making twisted faces at the weather. The Great Dane puppy pulls his owner down the sidewalk and then stops dead in his tracks, cowering at the wind. Naked trees line the block like rows of skeletons, and Flora pulls a chair up to the window to smoke as the night grows darker, though it’s been on the verge of dark since half past four. The cigarettes mark time as she waits for Rock to call her back. She wills him with every exhale to pick up the phone and dial her number, to respond to her comment. “You don’t know anything about me!” he might yell. What she would give to hear him yell.

  There are voices on the steps as Rock lugs boxes with the new tenants, the wordless buzz cutting through the thick, musty air of the old building. The clunk of the radiator kicking in startles Flora, not because it scares her but because it will continue to clunk this way through winter whether it is happy or not.

  Flora retreats to her bed and decides to nap until Rock calls back. Again she dreams she has insomnia. She’s dreamed a variation of this dream for weeks now; sleep exhausts her—she never gets any sleep in her sleep. In her dream now, she wanders her apartment, room to room, trailing her quilt behind her like a child. She makes herself warm milk and finishes only half before she puts the mug on the tub’s edge, draws a bath, and slides into its heat, letting the washcloth lie across her belly, ears dipping below the surface into watery silence that sounds like the blood rushing through her body. In these dreams Flora knows how to take care of herself; she knows what to do to survive. But always, still, that constant angry buzz—I drive people away. How to love? How to love?

  “People are just silly,” the woman says pertly on her way past Flora’s door, and Flora lurches out of the gray weather of sleep. The woman’s voice sounds like an effort to be cheerful at the end of hours of moving, with the first night to spend ahead of her in the new apartment stacked with boxes stuffed with things that have lost their meaning moved from their rightful places. Flora imagines the standing lamp in the corner by her door out on the street, unrecognizable. She holds it by its neck for balance as she leans against her door. There is no bump, bump, bump of boxes, so they are finally empty-handed on their way upstairs. Silly is a word that means nothing, Flora thinks—like crazy, nice, weird, or interesting. Flora convinces herself that the woman must be talking about Rock, helping her husband to see that Rock is just a child, not a man who might come between them. She rushes to the hole in her kitchen floor.

  Pulse. Rock turns on his TV—a sitcom with canned laughter every third line—to go with his cereal while upstairs in the new tenants’ apartment a chair slides across a room, newspaper crackles, a giggle trickles like water through dry stone. The silliness, Flora thinks, fighting back. She puts the phone by the bed in case Rock comes to his senses. She sleeps in the T-shirt she’s worn all day, dreams brightly colored flannel pajamas into the back of her dresser drawer. In her dream she pulls warm wool socks up to her knees and walks outside in the snow. The socks are quickly soaked through and the hairy wool clings damply to her calves as she wanders the neighborhood, though even here in her subconscious she is exhausted.

  The next day at work, she sits in the tiny back room of the art gallery surrounded by piles and piles of haphazardly stacked art books. The front room of the gallery is just as tiny, filled now with a series of paintings with brightly colored backgrounds—red, orange, pastel blue—each with large overlapping gold rings like the symbol for the Olympics. All the paintings are framed in shiny gold frames. Flora thinks they are hideous. She told her boss, Samson, and he agreed but said, “Flora, sometimes art is hideous. Sometimes art isn’t pretty.” It’s something Samson has been saying since Flora first starting working for him, a refrain that has become sound without meaning. Now Flora stares at the paintings—her scratchy gloves, scratchy hat, scratchy scarf, and scratchy coat piled at her feet—trying to recapture that season when life hid mysteriously around a corner up ahead, mischievous and playful. “Sometimes, Peter, art isn’t pretty,” she used to say, getting up from the table and slithering around the mostly empty Indian restaurant à la Samson. Peter would have to spit his tandoori chicken into his napkin. She could make him laugh that hard. “Sometimes art is like a pimple—hideous and yet salaciously succulent, on the verge of bursting.” She would go on and on.

  A man wanders in, looking for warmth. Flora hopes he will linger, but he scans the wall dubiously, not understanding that sometimes things in life that are ugly are actually trying to be beautiful, then pulls his jacket collar up around his ears and heads back out into the night.

  No one calls except the collectors or art dealers, who are tired of her excuses. Samson isn’t here, she swears. Even when he is here, he tells her to say that he’s not. He owes money. Lots and lots of money. He will be back this afternoon, Flora promises, this evening, tomorrow, next week. Would you like to leave a message? Would you like to leave another? Would you like to hold? There is no hold option on this antique phone. There isn’t even call waiting. Flora just hangs up. A man in coveralls comes in near the end of the day and without looking at Flora walks up to the biggest, ugliest painting—thousands of those Olympic rings against a washed-out background—and plucks it from the wall.

  “Marty sent me,” he says. “Smile, it’s not so bad.”

  Flora thought she was smiling.

  Flora thinks of the new tenants sorting through boxes, holding items up—“Where should this go?”—and making love on their bare, dusty floor because even the dust holds temptation in their new home. She never wanted to marry Peter; she wanted to be his deepest, darkest friend, and when that didn’t work out, she headed others off at the pass. But with Rock she feels a connection surging up through the hole in the kitchen floor. She leaves work early, eager to return to her post at the window.

  There is a knock on Flora’s door just as Flora is speed-dialing Rock’s number, and she is furious at whoever it is because she knows it is not he. She can hear him scuffling around his kitchen. Every couple of scuffles she glimpses tufts of his unwashed hair through the hole.

  “It’s Rock here,” his answering machine message says. There’s music in the background—the wail of background singers hitting notes of blissful despair. “You know what to do.” The casual indifference of his voice causes Flora to speak in a higher pitch than she’d intended.

  “Rock, there is a s
erious issue that I have to discuss with you. Call me immediately.” She hopes that he will hear the intimacy of her not identifying herself, of her assuming that he knows her voice. It pleases her to imagine him trying to ignore her call, walking away from the phone. She has altered his day in some small way.

  When Flora flings the door open indignantly, a young, gangly woman bursts into the apartment like a bird that has accidentally flown in the window. She carries two shopping bags with small shovels poking out of the tops.

  “I was on my way home from the garden store and I noticed your flower box filled with those dry branches.” The young woman is already headed for the window. “And I just thought since I bought extra…What are your favorite flowers?” Her voice is chirpy like a bird. Silly, silly, silly. She opens the window and a blast of cold air forces Flora back a few steps, but the young woman is unstoppable. She reaches out and grabs Flora’s flower box off the ledge. It is filled with gravelly dirt, dried twigs that have held their own for years, and a small dead mouse. “Oh dear,” the young woman says resolutely, picking the mouse up by the tail and heading for Flora’s bathroom to flush. “The plumbing’s not that strong,” Flora says, but the woman is determined. Flush, flush, flush.

  “I’m Liza,” she says, extending her newly washed hand but still moving, letting Flora’s hand drop in order to reach into her bag. “Your upstairs neighbor.”

  “Flora,” Flora says. She leans against the counter, arms folded, to watch Liza empty the old dirt into the garbage and start anew.

  “Bulbs.” Liza holds them up like precious eggs. Flora nods helplessly. “You keep them inside.”

  “I’ve never once touched that flower box.” Flora is stunned at the way Liza just waltzed right in, and also by the fact that it never occurred to her to touch the flower box. “I’ve lived here five years and I never thought about it once.”