Mom stood in the opening to the dining room. I looked up at her face, streaked with sweat. No one had alerted us that the super would leave old food crusted in the refrigerator and cabinets, rat droppings under the sink, a broken toilet roll and towel bar in the bathroom. All of this, Mom said, was to be taken care of along with the promise of fresh paint in all the rooms, and we got none.
She too had run into the first-floor neighbor on one of her trips up and down.
“He has the look of a drug dealer. Ignore him if he tries to talk with you. Avoid any eye contact.”
“That sounds kind of … racist,” I said.
“Don’t go there,” she said. She knew I was trying to drop this guy as a subject, but her face lit up. “We’re in a high-crime area, that’s all I’m saying.”
“But this is where we live now,” I said.
“But he’s lived here longer,” she said.
I could almost see her brain fuel up, logic peeling off like broken heat shields. Putting the last stack of books on the shelf, I looked at her as she began to arrange T-shirts and pants in Lola’s drawers. Each time she folded an arm or leg, it was as if she were trying to get an unconscious child to move her extremities. I knew how she worried for Lola.
Just then I saw Ajay outside. He grabbed a large bottle of detergent from a pickup truck and walked around the side of the building.
“Eighteen shootings last year,” she said. “I won’t tell you the number of stabbings.”
“We have an understanding,” I said.
The understanding went like this: I would do my share of housework, help with Lola, and pay for some of the utility bills—at least my phone and data use—while I saved up to move out. She would pay the rent, buy the groceries, and so on. Meanwhile, I would keep my own hours, set my own rules.
“Well yes, but …”
An elevated train went by, and I shouted, “I’m going over to Howard Street for ice!” I knew I’d get no argument. The refrigerator had been unplugged when we arrived, and it still wasn’t cold enough to make ice cubes. Grabbing my wallet, I fled.
I stopped outside the basement entry on my way. The air that came up through the doorway was remarkably cool. Going down the concrete steps, I walked through clumps of lint and dust.
Ajay stood in front of a bank of coin-operated washing machines, about to pour his detergent into the cap. When he looked up I saw the blue liquid ribbon over his hand before he realized what he was doing. He shook his head, smiling to himself. Rubbing his hand on the clothes, he said, “I’ll be out of here in a half hour. The third machine is a clothes shredder by the way—skip that one. I’m Ajay.”
I stood there for a while trying to figure out why it was so pleasurable to throw him off guard. I came closer and saw that the clothes in that one washer were so thickly coated in blue detergent now there would be an overflow of suds down the washer and across the floor as soon as he got it started.
“How many quarters does it take?” I looked at his eyes instead of down at the slots. There was that peculiar sense of intimacy.
He reddened a little and broke away to wash his hands in the sink. “Eight for the washers, at least four for the dryers.”
Then I heard him say, “And you are?”
But I was already halfway out the door and didn’t turn around.
You do something weird one day and there’s no way to follow that except to get weirder still or stay out of sight. So I avoided him. And that had nothing to do with my mother.
He called out to me a couple of times in the weeks that followed and I almost stopped to talk. I thought of telling Nitro about him, but it took a lot to stir Nitro.
I met Cynthia Carshik when I returned from the store that first day. She was sitting outside her apartment on the stairs, moving the air around with a paper fan. The large window on the landing was open. The humidity was awful but there was a breeze.
“See that,” she said, pointing outside. I looked out at the massive dark cloud over Lake Michigan.
“It followed me home,” I said.
“Then you’ve brought rain with you. Thank God.” She introduced herself and said, “Hell of a day to move.”
“Any chance you have a can opener we could borrow? We haven’t found ours yet.”
She loaned me hers along with a cooler. Then she offered me a cold beer and told me about the people in the building. I took a seat at her kitchen table.
“Ajay lives with his grandfather on the first floor. He graduates from architecture school this spring. Women love him by the way. He had a girlfriend for a while, but he dropped her. He seems pretty serious about what he’s doing. Oh, and the iron gates and the sheet metal and pipes in the basement are the grandfather’s. You’ll notice them when you’re trying to get to the washers and dryers sometimes. He doesn’t like to have anything disturbed. If you ask him to move a fire grate, he’ll stare you down. But the next time you go down to the basement every last thing will be swept and stacked. He has a small welding business with a partner, so he tidies up when the work goes slack, not before. Though he seems to be working less now.
“Across from the Kapurs is a man named Neil and his wife, Rabbit. They’re tattoo artists. The guys in the apartment next to me are probably going to be evicted next month, don’t ask. And the old woman who lives next to you, all her mailbox says is Lily. You’ll never get her to talk. You can look her in the eyes and shout, ‘Good morning!’ and she’ll look right through you. And no, she isn’t deaf. I’m pretty sure she lives off Social Security or disability. You’ll see her wander around the neighborhood with an old camera. I’m sure she doesn’t have any film in it.”
“No film?”
“She just seems like that type.”
Cynthia was twenty-two and worked at the comic book store on Howard. She and I were the same height, close to the same build, listened to a lot of the same music and were nervous driving cars. I swallowed my fears to get Lola around, and Cynthia mostly clung to public transportation but kept her mother’s old car running. We had both had scarlet fever and liked to watch silent films. Cynthia smoked herbal cigarettes and had done insane things.
Her bedroom was directly below mine, and she had converted the walk-in closet between the dining room and bathroom to a tiny bedroom for those occasions when her musician boyfriend Luke’s three-year-old son Colin visited. There were Cubs pennants on the walls, lion bedding on the cot, a small nightstand with a lava lamp. All the hangers had been removed from the bar, and there were board games and plastic tubs full of toys up on the shelf. She had hoped he would stay over more often, that he or Luke would settle in, but Luke had taken off for New York with his collection of guitars and amplifiers just before we arrived. She said she had a recurring nightmare that went like this: “Luke returns for a visit from New York and we get into bed that night. The Ravenswood train makes its approach along the building and suddenly the cars jump track and drive into our bed, taking him out but sparing me. The last person who had your apartment said sometimes my screams were so loud the sound shot through the radiators,” she said, apologizing in advance.
I said that if I heard her scream, I would take something, a book or cup, and tap on the pipes so she’d know someone was there. She said she would do the same for me, anytime.
Before I dropped off that night, I thought about what holds us together. When I was little I could almost see the cord that stretched between my parents. He would stand behind her while she sat at the dining table, and he’d put one hand on each of her shoulders and rub her muscles and she would look content. He was doing well, selling plenty