We Are Not Ourselves(95)
He didn’t respond. Connell looked as if he preferred to sit there too. Rather than squeeze past them, she went around to the side door and up the back stairs to the second-floor landing. Peeking in, she was overcome by the emptiness of the place. A spasm of anxiety rooted her to the spot; she couldn’t enter the apartment. She’d half expected to see Donny and Brenda and Sharon there, but the previous week, Donny had moved them to a three-bedroom apartment—Brenda and Sharon in one bedroom, he and Gary in another, Lena in the third—in a monolithic structure around the corner that possessed none of the charm of the garden co-ops, with a cramped, concrete common area instead of generous grass. She called “hello” in the echoing dining room and stepped inside. She stood where she’d sat and told the Orlandos of her plans—which was where she and Ed had eaten when it was just the two of them, and for the first few years after Connell was born—until she got spooked and left.
She hurried down the stairs to her own apartment. She could see it that way now, as an apartment. The whole time she’d been there, she’d preferred to think she lived in a house with floors she didn’t use.
When Angelo Orlando sold her the house in 1982, he’d done so in distress. Just shy of a decade later, his heirs had had an opportunity to buy back their childhood home, and they’d failed to secure it. The story of their line in the house had come to an end. They were adrift in temporary shelters: someone else’s apartment, someone else’s building. The great churning never stopped. Spackle was placed in the holes where nails had held family portraits, paint covered the dirt marks of shoes left by the door, a coat of varnish leveled the worn hallways, and it was ready for a new family.
The family who’d bought her house was making a stand against obscurity. It would be their nail holes puncturing a fresh coat of paint, their cooking smells sinking into the upholstery, their shouts of laughter, pain, and joy bouncing off the plaster walls. They would use all three of the house’s floors. In enough time they would forget the structure had ever belonged to anyone else. It was a thought that worked both ways: it would be as if she’d never lived anywhere but Bronxville.
At the closing, she’d met the Thomases. She was surprised to learn that the husband’s first name was also Thomas—though the middle name listed on the contract was something closer to what she’d expected, a tangled thicket of consonants and vowels. When she couldn’t stifle her surprise at such an odd name as Thomas Thomas, the husband, who was exceptionally tall and wore tinted glasses, explained to her that he wasn’t even the only Thomas Thomas in his hometown, that the name was extremely popular there, due to the fact that St. Thomas had gone there in the middle of the first century to spread the faith among the Jewish diaspora. She dismissed this idea as ridiculous; St. Thomas might have visited India, but there was no way he or any other apostle had reached there before Western Europe or Ireland. Thomas Thomas seemed like an intelligent enough man, but his dates had to be incorrect.
The fact that Indians had bought her home and were going to fill it with their entire extended family, floor to ceiling, was another reminder that Jackson Heights was a big cauldron and that it was spitting her out in a bubble pushed up by heat. Supposedly it was the most ethnically diverse square mile in the world. Someone more poetically inclined might find inspiration in the polyphony of voices, but she just wanted to be surrounded by people who looked like her family.
The only thing left to do was walk through her own apartment for anything left behind. In the guest bedroom she spotted a solitary die on the floor and went to pick it up but pulled her hand away right before she touched it.
In the kitchen pantry she found a broom leaning against the wall like a forlorn suitor at a dance. Ed and Connell were waiting outside, but she couldn’t resist the urge to sweep up the dust bunnies and bits of debris on the floor. She remembered sweeping the kitchen floor in Woodside as a girl, methodically, covering every inch of that fleur-de-lis-patterned linoleum in an invisible geometric march. Back then, she’d dreamed of a house like the one she was now leaving. Somewhere along the way, she’d adopted a higher standard. Her new house was large and full of light and made an imposing picture from the street, with a sloped driveway, slatted shutters, and stone pillars to mark the front walk. It was everything she wanted, and she tried not to wonder if the new house would one day feel as old and heavy as the one she was leaving.
She stared at the pile in the center of the floor. There was no dustpan, not even a scrap of cardboard to sweep it onto. It would be dispersed by the footsteps of movers, or the Thomas family themselves. It wasn’t her responsibility anymore. This was another woman’s kitchen now. There’d be a victory in leaving it there and heading outside, in allowing something niggling to go unattended to, but she’d been cleaning messes all her life. She’d heard Ed tell Connell once that skin cells constituted the majority of dust. If that was true, then there were microscopic bits of her in that pile. She got down on her hands and knees, carefully because she was wearing stockings, and scooped the dirt with one hand into the cupped other. She dumped it in the sink. When she saw a little raised ridge of residue where her pinky finger had passed along the floor, she wet her hands to mop up the last remnants of her life in the house.
She went outside. Ed and Connell were already in Ed’s Caprice. She had driven the Corsica up the previous night after work and parked it in the driveway. The house had been dark, and she’d started for the train in a hurry, not wanting to linger too long there alone.