Again: the show did not go on. The rest of the run was cancelled. The town was thunderstruck.
And then eventually, sooner than you would think, the town became un-thunderstruck and routine took over once again. Even for me, routine took over once again. I had guests calling, reserving, but always in paltry numbers—I am only ever full when it’s graduation time. Not until everything went on the Internet did I see feedback from guests who had stayed here, and many of these postings, “reviews” they are called, were mean. So mean. Adequate service, but the proprietor does not bring a cheerful atmosphere to the place, et cetera. Well, I have no heart for it anymore.
I wait. I still wait.
And I still, in the middle of the night, look through what somehow the police never found, and poor Carina never knew she’d left behind: one of the scrapbooks they always had with them when they traveled, showing clipping after clipping of this little brown-eyed girl winning Miss Cornflower, Best Baton Twirler, beauty pageant winner, mascot for the Buffalo football team. All of it is recorded here, in this scrapbook with the tape yellowed, the clippings yellowed, and in almost every clipping there is Carina, the mother, clapping her hands, smiling radiantly, both of them—sun.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL HOUSE
BY AMITY GAIGE
College Hill
I moved into the Armory District in the springtime of my fourth year of college. A handwritten sign on the door of a beat-up china-blue historic home on Dexter Street: Attic/One Bedroom. At the time, the area was full of dropouts like me—storied young people, generously tattooed. I like to think it had a tang of Berlin to it, circa 1990—I mean the contradictions, especially between Broadway and Westminster: RISD types mixed with Dominican muscle men mixed with gay professionals, with a couple defiant elderly people lording over each block. It reminded me a little of old Woonsocket, a place I no longer felt I could return to. For the several months before Dad and Ma discovered I’d left Brown, I walked the district, content to be alone. What I loved best was the building itself—the Armory—a castle-like structure running an entire block of Cranston Street, bookended by two crenellated turrets. In the daylight its bricks were tacky yellow, but in the nighttime the Armory building filled up the West End with its medieval shadow, and remained, since it had been in disrepair for decades, unlit; you could almost hear the dripping of pipes in the great hall. Nobody came in or out.
I had been happy once or twice, and these moments were also associated with large buildings.
1999: The Metropolitan Opera House. Mémé in a stole. I was ten. “Champagne for me,” Mémé had whispered to the barman in her Woonsocket French accent, “and champagne for the child.” I did not watch the ballet; I watched the hall itself, five fan-shaped levels studded with gold lights, red velvet everywhere, a thousand rapt faces and no one looking back at me. The air was smoky with rapture. As the starburst chandeliers rose up on their pulleys I knew they would rise up in my dreams for years afterward. Was it the champagne? I don’t think so. Later, when I was inside other big buildings, not nearly as pretty as that, I felt a similar weightlessness, a deep, wheezy, excited freedom, tinged with the illicit. I am a watcher. I don’t like to be watched. Mémé would put her two fingers to her eyes, then move those fingers to my own. I know you. Later, this identification made me quite uncomfortable.