Apartment Stories – Chap 2 by ktmccoll..,

I leaned on my cane. I must have looked senile — mouth open, eyes wide and washed out, befuddled.

A young woman approached.

She was a dead ringer for Viv. Astral twins separated by half a century. The number of years and the volume of water under the bridge unnerved me.

The young woman wore a light summer dress. I remembered a dress like it on Viv. The vague outlines of it, rather than the specific color or pattern. The way the fabric flowed in places and stretched in others, both the flowing and the stretching beguiling in their own ways. On the young woman, the dress looked retro and maybe a little trendy. On Viv, it was just the way women dressed in the summer in those days. The young woman wore white Chuck Taylor All Stars, no socks. Viv might have done the same, but I couldn’t remember.

A dark haired Marilyn. An hourglass figure. A dress that hypnotized in its movements. Zaftig, my Yiddish friends would say of the girl. I didn’t even speak the language but the word captured her essence better than any in my mother tongue. Juicy and succulent indeed.

My daughter, almost as old as my memories of the original dress, waited for me, finger poised on the elevator’s call button. I moved slowly at the best of times these days, but had stopped at the sound of soft footfalls behind me. The sight of Viv’s twin had robbed me of locomotion — either the will or the ability.

“Dad,” called my daughter impatiently.

I ignored her. She would blame it on my dodgy hearing, never considering anything else.

The young woman, Viv’s twin, approached, dress swaying to her movements like a snake that has been charmed. Or maybe it was me, the charmed one.

It sucked to be a large fraction of a century old. At another, earlier time, I would have felt something more than mere nostalgia at the sight of an attractive woman. Comes a time when nostalgia is all that remains.

The girl slowed, not sure what to do about the addled old man in her way.

She wore more makeup than Viv ever had. Dark raccoon eyes, lipstick the color of arterial blood. Still, it worked. Maybe Viv would have done the same at the same age, fifty years on.

“I’m sorry,” I said as I shuffled to the side.

The woman moved past. “For what?” she asked over her shoulder. She smiled and I was gut-punched, unable to breath for a moment. The smile would stay with me like a tattoo.

The woman took the stairs. I shuffled for the elevator.

“Would you mind driving past the old house?” I asked after we’d done my weekly shopping.

“Oh, Dad. Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Jo was worried, rightly so, that visiting the old house would make me maudlin and depressed. I was more susceptible to the ebb and flow of moods. Stupidly giddy one moment, on the verge of unexplained tears the next.

The house was where Viv and I had started. It had been our first house, where newly married we had played at being adults. Where that playing had eventually produced Jo because play often had consequences.

Jo drove, following roads that I knew by name, but no longer by sight. Cattle used to watch these roads. Now houses did, and strip malls.

Suburbia ended as though held back by a spell and we drove on into scenery that I remembered. Jo knew the way and turned this way and that until we neared the house.

“Can you park please?”

“I thought you wanted to drive by.”

“I changed my mind. Park please.”

We turned right and crunched along the gravel driveway that led to the house. It seemed shorter now than it used to, closer to the road. Jo stopped the car next to the house and before the barn. The sound of absolutely nothing embraced us.

At length I got out of the car, my legs and my back whining at the indignity of movement. I stood, placed my cane carefully, and looked at the house. Painted plywood covered the windows like eye patches. The deck sagged. The occasional railing spindle had been kicked out by teenagers because teenagers were the default perpetrators of mindless vandalism and acts I no longer understood.

The house looked sad and forlorn. I longed to go inside but knew that the house had been buttoned up securely to avoid liability. Teenagers would be kept out. Ghosts would be kept in.

The margins of the town had encroached over the decades and the house was now designated as expendable in the face of progress, of urban sprawl. It would soon be demolished, its foundation dug up. Where would the ghosts live then, I wondered. The trees that stood sentinel would be removed unless protected by the town out of respect for their age. A declining number of residents would remember the farmhouse that once stood here and the fields that once grew produce. Ludicrously-sized homes would sprout up instead.

I walked through the tall weeds to the back yard. I would have burrs on my trousers and Jo would tsk as she would later have to pluck them off. My cane rustled through the undergrowth like the most harmless of scythes.

Jo let me walk unaccompanied, perhaps sensing my mood, perhaps more interested in whatever she was looking at on her phone.

At the back of the house, I sat on a bench that looked as old and worn out and rickety as I felt. I leaned against the bricks behind me and allowed their warmth to seep into my shoulders.

Before me lay fields and beyond that a woodlot, unchanged in the decades since we lived here. The deck used to hold our patio furniture and a charcoal barbecue. It was also where the clothesline extended to a pole in the yard. The pole in the yard still stood, as did the pole on the deck with the pulley that was always too high for Viv.

I should have lowered this end of the clothesline as she’d asked me to do many times, but then I would have deprived myself of the view. Viv on her toes, reaching up to peg a shirt on the line.

Viv on her toes. Her heels — the ones she scraped, sanded, and lotioned obsessively — raised up off the wood of the deck. I followed the lines upwards. From heels to tendons that flared into calf muscles, bunched into shapely knots. I’d always been a sucker for calves. Then the covered bits — the thighs hazily outlined through the fabric of her dress by the sun. The hips, full, and the waist narrow. Tanned arms reaching up to fasten a peg to the clothesline. The muscles of her shoulders.

Her dress, tight in spots and loose in others. A thin sheath that her body operated within. It fluttered at her knees in the light breeze.

“You really could lower the line a bit you know.”

“You could use a step stool.”

I never lowered the line and she never used a stool, at least not when I was around. Viv on her toes, heels off the ground, calves bunched. She humored me as I’d once admitted to admiring the view, how this vision of her made me weak.

“Doing chores?” she’d asked.

“No. Being bewitching.”

On the few times I’d been around on laundry day, I watched this part of it. She always declined my offers to help. I think she enjoyed displaying herself for me, recognized the weird domestic kink that I had for her doing mundane things in a summer dress. Especially this.