“I’m getting to that. It’s my story, isn’t it?” She smiled, and glanced at Genevieve, who nodded her head and smiled back.
“But I loved that little place. It was the first apartment I ever had, the first time I’d ever lived away from my mother and father. It was in this anonymous, square, yellow-brick building. I guess you could call it university housing, or something like that, because it was near a college, but the people who lived there mostly weren’t college students. A man in his seventies lived in the apartment below me. He’d come up and knock on my door if I played music too loud, but never in a mean way. He called me Clairekins. He’d say, ‘Clairekins, your music isn’t so bad, but it’s so loud.’ He brought me a tin of cookies for Christmas. And there was a Vietnamese family who lived two doors down. They didn’t hang curtains over their windows, and when you came up the walk toward the building, sometimes you could see them eating dinner, with chopsticks and everything, through their front window. I remember thinking it was so much better than TV. And a woman who lived on the first floor who’d set up a small patio outside her kitchen window. Each afternoon I’d come in from work, she’d say, ‘Hello, beautiful!’ which, at that age, surprised me every time. One spring day she asked me to sit next to her in a lawn chair and have a glass of wine. She told me she was married once, and that she lived in the country with her husband. And she said the thing she missed most was hanging laundry on clotheslines. She loved to see the wind billowing her sheets and her husband’s white shirts, particularly when the sun was bright and they seemed to blaze like the robes of the holy. She used that exact phrase. The robes of the holy. I always remembered what she said about laundry. Did I tell you I used to hang my daughter’s diapers on a clothesline behind the hotel?”
“Yeah, you did.”
She thought about it. She realized she had her eyes closed. “Are you sure I told you that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Anyway, my neighbor and I had our glass of wine. And that was a time I was drinking a lot. With the man I was living with. I couldn’t tell you why now. It’s not like I was trying to numb myself. Or somehow overthrowing the memories of a painful childhood. It tasted good, then. And at night, you know? It made it easier. I was only nineteen. I was still used to thinking of my body as a child’s in some way. I remember how we’d sit across from each other almost every night. At this small dining room table we’d dragged home from Goodwill. It had metal legs that someone had painted with a thick, green paint, and this Formica top that was supposed to look like wood, and two matching metal chairs. It was probably patio furniture, but that never occurred to me then. We had a bottle of whiskey on the table between us, and two shot glasses we’d found at Goodwill, too, mine with Betty Boop and his with a hunter’s hat. Who would make a shot glass with a hunter’s hat?
“Anyway, he started calling me Betty, and I started calling him Hunter, which I think he liked. His real name was Seth. He was young, too, twenty at the time, and not much more worldly than I was. So we’d sit across from each other, and our first shot glass we’d sip. We’d talk about our days, the silly details. At the time, he was working unloading trucks in the market district, and he’d tell me how he was shifting crates of lettuce when a chicken came from behind one of them, and his boss ordered him to capture it. Then he’d describe in great detail how he had to chase it around the back of the truck, and how they had to close the door behind him so he could corner it. Those silly kinds of stories. I don’t know if they were even true. I was working in an Asian market that sold sandwiches to college students, and I was in charge of making them. I don’t think my boss understood half of what I said, but he always smiled at me, and he paid me well, under the table.”
She heard something scurry near a trash bin next to the school building, and flinched.
“It’s nothing,” Genevieve said.
“I thought the guy from Salt Lake was making another appearance.”
“That’d be something, wouldn’t it?”