A Private State: Stories (16 page)

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Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

BOOK: A Private State: Stories
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Page 102
had called it, in his dated way, a davenport. He had died of a stroke, falling from the wing chair in his apartment on a tree-lined street in New York. The cleaning woman told Alice he had been reading the
Times
. She'd flushed as she'd said this, and Alice wondered if there'd been something the woman wasn't saying. It was hard to imagine her father in anything less than perfect order. Tie correctly dimpled, socks pulled taut over ankles.
Nothing obvious had changed since he'd died; she'd kept going, a bit numb, but still moving, not exactly well but not destroyed. It was only slightly worse than the year when she was five and her mother had plucked her from New York and moved to California. Neither parent seemed particularly angry or even sad at the event. Everyone remained quite calm and cheerful, as if divorce were nothing more than a freakish storm that had blown them to opposite coasts.
Summers, the wind shifted and Alice found herself on a polite island off the coast of Maine where a fluttering buffer of aunts set itself between her and her father. Now and then the aunts took naps and he would take her sailing. She was always glad when rope creaked in the tackles and wind pummeled the mainsail: it made it hard to talk. On breezeless days, he would ask decorous questions. Was she having a good time? Did she enjoy her cousins? He seemed more like a vague relation from a remote and mannered time than a father. A gentleman who'd survived a terrible war. She had liked him better after thinking that. It meant his silence wasn't awkwardness with her, but a sign of some manly restraint. Even as she grew older and practiced a certain abruptness of style, darting from college to college, city to city, his kind and scrupulous reserve had never wavered.
Alice's floor boards shivered. A couple had just moved in next door. She had seen the new tenants in the hall last night, toting neatly sealed boxes. She was sure they hosted brunches with rounds of French cheese and crisp white wines. Pale and stylish people. Alice turned the
TV
on to block the pounding of nails on
 
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the other side of the wall. "Why do they bother me?" Alice asked herself aloud, the habit leaking over from work. The apartment had stayed empty for months and Alice had grown used to talking at the
TV
, singing jingles, reminding herself of errands and bills. With two new sets of ears ten inches away, she'd be much more shy. Schiff/Macalester the label on the mailbox said; it was printed in an architect's block letters.
Her father's handwriting had been like that, careful, stylized. Since the memorial service, Alice hadn't been back to the city. The key to the apartment sat in a glass bowl on a table next to the sofa, jumbled among tokens and paper clips. Letters from a New York law firm stood in a stack next to it. Alice's fist came down on the tabletop, and to her surprise, the tremor sent the bowl to the floor, where it broke in a loud, wild spray. There was a pause in the angular bustle through the wall, the gathering of an apprehension, as if everyone were listening for what would happen next.
The only thing that's happening in my life, Alice thought the next morning, is that I am always late to work. She crept in to the staff meeting just in time to hear Vicky describe something she was calling a New Tradition: birthday parties for the residents. Conrad was turning forty-five this week, though thanks to the rough chemistry of nicotine and psychotropic drugs he passed easily for seventy. Alice would have liked to say that New Tradition sounded more like a panty liner than a fête, but her lateness would have leant the remark a sour edge.
Vicky gave Marissa credit for the idea. Marissa's pet topic, so far mercifully ignored, was a cleaning calendar. She thought it inappropriate when Alice played Crazy Eights with Claude and Eddie. Stanislaus called Marissa "The Broom."
Alice opened the second drawer of the file cabinet, the home of Conrad's folder, as awkward and battered as Wawa's copy of the yellow pages. "Conrad thinks he's immortal, it says here about a thousand times. Birthdays don't mean anything to him," she said.
 
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Clinical reasons aside, Alice found Conrad's obvious distance from the festive tone of birthdays depressing. Aloud, she added he seemed to be gearing up for an episode.
"Was he quiet last night, Stanislaus?" Vicky asked.
Apparently, he'd been fine, though he'd set off a smoke alarm while lighting a cigar beneath it. But he did say he was sorry, Stanislaus noted. Alice could picture the gangly, satiric bow. "Apologies, m'lord," Conrad would mumble.
"People, perhaps we should give it a go," Vicky said. It was a chance, she continued, to build community, which was a bit much even for Vicky, but it made Alice feel chastened and surly, as intended.
With the zeal of the privileged and guilty, Marissa went ahead and baked a cake. Conrad didn't show up, nesting, Alice suspected, next to a wall of Hegel at the public library. Marissa had strung a few strips of crepe paper around the common room, which looked to Alice more like blue arrows pointing at mistakes in the ceiling's paint job. Claude batted a green balloon between his hands. Alan, who got antsy around anything that could pop, slunk to a corner. Everyone lit up. They all smoked generics, except Eddie, who had a job as a bagger at the Great Scot and earned enough for Salems. Marissa guarded her cake, a magnificent castle of chocolate.
Stanislaus came in and gave Claude a high five. "Where's that crazy man?" Claude said loudly, "I want that cake." Conrad was very late. Coffee blotched Marissa's card.
Alice said, "Maybe he'll show up later. Why don't we save him a piece?
Eddie shouted, "Time to chow!"
Claude turned on the
TV
and said, "My favorite!" It was a video of men playing guitars perched on their hips more like rifles than instruments. The singer slouched in a field. A knobby Holstein munched grass. Claude began to dance, shimmying around the
 
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room, knocking into side tables. ''All we need now is pheasant under glass," he yelled as he boogied past.
"Alice, could you tell Claude to stop moving so fast?" Alan asked.
"He's dancing, Alan," she answered. "He's having fun." The cow, still chewing, rose above the field.
"This song reminds me of my mother. She loved this music," he said, looking weepy.
"Your mother liked Def Leppard?" Claude asked.
"Mother, who's talking about my mother?" Eddie shouted, cake on his teeth. He pried two Salems from his pack and shouted they were presents for Conrad and he would chop off the fucking hands of anyone who tried to steal them.
It made Alice happy to think that from the street, there was no reason for anyone to pass this house in the spring twilight and see it as anything but an ordinary house. Anyone could look in from outside and think, things are going well in that house. Besides, they were. People had taken off their coats.
Several balloons sank in a weary flock to the rug. Alice was bending to pick them up when Eddie yelled, "Stomp!" The skins of the balloons squeaked on his sneakers then burst in fast, bright explosions. Stanislaus was there in a moment, pinning Eddie's arms and murmuring "Calm down, Eddie," but Alan was already shrieking, high and helpless, gone.
Alice closed the door and walked toward the Wawa Street bus stop. Wawa. It was supposed to be an Indian word for the Delaware that meant "rushing, rushing." It had always seemed more like the call of a lost Canada goose to Alice. "Wawa," she said, and it sounded forlorn in the warm air. The smell of asphalt and cigarettes in the bus had the same stink as the psych emergency room, where both Alan and Eddie had spent the evening.
Eddie had been laid off a week ago but was too ashamed to tell
 
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anyone. Alan had to be dragged from the bathroom, fogged and sopping thanks to a bout of handwashing. Alice returned from the hospital to give people their evening meds, and a stuporous calm descended on the house. Marissa picked up the ruins of her cake and cried in front of the residents, who stared at her, sleepy and disbelieving. Conrad hadn't come back. But there had been worse nights. At least they hadn't needed to call the police. Alice picked a livid scrap of balloon from the hem of her jeans. It was her stop.
When she slid her key into the lock, she found herself about to enter not her own apartment but Schiff/Macalester's. The man held a book open on his knees. She saw his expression change from surprise to irritation. "I'm sorry," Alice heard herself say, "my father just died." The expression moved back to surprise. Alice shut the door quickly.
She would have to call the super to have her locks changed. Did their key work in her door, too? Why had she mentioned her father? Alice felt her face burn red. Once her father had told her something that had made her blush like this. Then he'd said kindly that the red patches on her cheeks were like the shape of France. Alice heard murmuring through the shared wall. They, too, would call the super, worried for their privacy, their neighbor's state of mind. She straightened the room, nervous they might want to enter where they weren't supposed to, although she realized, as she tugged open a drawer, there was nothing much to hide.
Eddie and Alan returned the next morning and sat in opposite corners of the common room, imitating sculptures with faint life signs thanks to a slight increase in medication. But when Alice spoke to Eddie's caseworker, she said she could find him a job at Super Fresh. No one knew him there. Things would soon be back to baseline, which was not to say normal. A case in point: that afternoon, Alan ate peanut butter and mustard sandwiches for lunch, his favorite meal.
 
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Conrad still wasn't back. Marissa had stuck notes all around the office asking the counselor on duty to check with local shelters and hospitals. She was too new in the work to realize this just happened sometimes. Conrad just took off occasionally. If someone wanted to fly to Aruba, as Claude had once donethough he'd been deported in a matter of hoursit was well within his civil liberties if not his best interests. Alice had always been curious about where Claude had found the money and what sort of travel agent had sold an obviously crazy man a ticket. She scribbled a Post-it for Marissa saying, don't worryhis happens. It was part of the pattern; sometimes, he sailed just past the edge of the screen.
But two days later, he still wasn't back. Alice badgered the sergeant at the precinct into filing a missing-persons report, an unpleasant task. Conrad showed up at the station from time to time screaming, "Kill the
Wehrmacht!
"
Alice told Marissa that Conrad was now officially lost, though it would probably be more fruitful for the staff to pursue their own search. "Nothing looks like it's missing in his room," Marissa admitted.
Alice sat up straight. "You went into his room?" It was one of Wawa's cardinal rules. Residents were allowed to lock their doors. Staff came in by invitation only.
Marissa blinked. "I didn't open anything," she said. "I just thought maybe there'd be a note."
She might have been right, Alice allowed, although it seemed so wrong to march into Conrad's only private place. Certain territories had to be respected. But as she followed Marissa down the hall to Conrad's door, she wondered if this was one of the reasons she kept working here: that niggling curiosity about how other people lived, the wanting to know more than you were supposed to. Maybe she'd snapped at Marissa because she herself had wanted to open those doors, quite badly.
Still, it felt strange crossing the threshold. The room was neat,
 
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the bed made with a plaid comforter that was not regulation Wawa issue. Where had he found it? They would never know and there it was: thick and blue and red. "He likes birds," Marissa said and lifted a worn copy of
Peterson's Guide to Eastern Birds
from the desk. Yellow strips of paper poked up from the pages. Alice flipped it open. The strips were concentrated in the Accidentals section, birds that had escaped from zoos or been blown by storms and tricky winds from the other side of the world. Flamingos in Detroit and that sort of thing. "Can I?" Marissa asked, fingering a knob on the bureau.
Alice gave a slow nod. They would be careful, she promised herself. They would leave everything in its place.
Eddie appeared then in the hallway. "You're in Conrad's room," he said. "He's not gonna like that." He wavered there, looking blurry. "Claude said he saw him down at Rittenhouse, scaring the pigeons." Eddie yawned and told Alice that Alan was in the bathroom.
"Marissa," Alice sighed. "Please get Alan out of there. The water bill last month wiped us out." Marissa reluctantly uncurled her finger from the knob.
Alone, Alice stared at the bureau. "I don't want to do it," she said out loud. It didn't mean she was a good person. It was just that she would have hated anyone doing it to her. She had left her apartment spotless, though she'd balanced a bit of paper between the door and the jamb to tell her if Schiff/Macalester had dared to pry. But she'd also forgotten to call the super about changing locks.
She waited for a moment, then leaned over and gently yanked at the bottom drawer. It was full of birdseed that rattled madly as she pulled further. Spherical gold seeds, zebra-striped husks of sunflowers, brown and red specks of grain. She opened the window and looked at the sill, coated with chalky droppings. A dusty twist of a sparrow darted past.

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