SINCE THE DAYS when Myrtle Avenue around the corner was nicknamed Murder for cautionary reasons, the days before crews from the city came to dismantle the yellow cane seats and leather hand straps of the elevated train, the days when men who built ships at the Navy Yard used to travel in packs with their cigarettes rolled up in their sleeves and curtsy at women and hoot, the days when several generations of family overflowed onto their stoops in the summer: sixty-six years she had spent at the same window. Of course there was much that remained: the magisterial art students from the nearby institute, their fashions shifting but their insolence and unwieldy bags of supplies the same; the steady pour, between six and seven o’clock, of those with jobs in Manhattan, the grunting up their stairs nearly collective.
At her core, Edith believed herself to be the same person she’d been at five, twelve, twenty-three, and so aging was mostly a point of interest, almost an entertainment were it not for its increasingly tangible interceptions in her daily life. Were these really her veins, a purple so bright as to seem inorganic? Her hair, thin and staticky, so reluctant to cooperate? She forgot sometimes: that these were hers, and more recently other things, gaps she found amusing or depressing, depending. Using a can opener became a deliberate, thought-through act; while reading, she had to concentrate, or else she was likely to follow some memory around a low-lit corner. Her daughter Jenny’s first birthday, the living room vibrant then and filled to the ceiling with balloons the baby didn’t know whether to carouse with or to fear. She and Declan, just married and new owners of the building, naked and sweating out August in one of the apartments yet to be rented, her linen dress balled under her head as a buffer between her tawny waves and the hardwood floor, his expression so different than when he’d courted her with flowers and offered handkerchiefs. How feverish her sister June’s eyes had gotten when she’d visited Brooklyn and then the city, how she’d marveled at Edith for going without hose and hailing black taxis. Owen, born second, surrounded by primary-colored blocks, content to play alone. The taxi he insisted on taking to college with money he’d saved.
Declan, an Irish drinker with a nervous heart besides, buried twelve years now, and Jenny gone or dead more years than Edith had actually known and held her. The same building, their apartment unchanged, though the spring before Declan died he’d had the whole thing repainted the color of milky coffee, had enjoyed sitting on the scaffolds with the men, yelling things down to her and passing emptied glasses of lemonade back through the windows. Theirs had been a protected love, this fact reliable to her since the Navy Yard produced vessels as tall as seventy men, and even after he collapsed, finally, while applying lather to his face with the wide-bristled brush. It was another object she kept in a box full of things that told her the story of her life, and she fingered it some afternoons and felt wildly envious or obsessively tender, it being the last item that had touched the perfect line of his jaw.
The tenants over the years had followed a cycle nearly generational, seeming to arrive and leave in demographic groups, their incomes growing and manner refining as the years went by. The couples who showed up with hands clasped, the women peering into the closets as if they might find another room or some other unexpected benefit, the men checking the locks on all the windows: few, in the decades of suburbia’s blossoming, lasting more than a year after the appearance of children. When they knocked to return their keys, the towheads balanced on their hips and reaching for their mothers’ earrings, Edith always wished them well in their new lives.
The present mix of renters was somewhat unlikely; that is, Edith might have thought so had she possessed the curiosity and energy to find anything at all very strange. She drank them in like tap water, unconcerned about their original source and the details of their travels to her, though she welcomed them in for coffee or tea and always waved when they passed on the street.