Caroline
Excerpt from a short story in progress
Eva Talmadge, Hunter MFA Fiction 2008
I only knew her name by the name on the letters in the mailbox, but I'd known her through the walls for months: Caroline Wilson-Blake, apartment seven, across the hall from me: Jonathan Tracey, apartment eight, known to my few friends as Trace. I knew the sound of her phone playing the Ninth, and the siren of her alarm on Saturday afternoons. I knew her muffled laughter, talking to herself, and the low moan of the pipes between us when she bathed.
I lived at the top of an old brownstone in Jersey City, in a railroad apartment near the waterfront in Paulus Hook. Cut off from everyone. The PATH train ran directly below the building. I listened to it every morning, in the pale gray light of dawn, as I waited for my neighbor to come home. The train would surge toward the city through the earth, then wash back like a wave.
I listened to her music, too. The records she would play. I imagined she put them on for me.
What I could see from the window near my bed: three construction sites and part of upper New York Bay, the flat green blank of Liberty State Park, and the green-covered chromium dump behind it. When the trees had lost their leaves, or were heavy with rain, I could see Liberty herself, some of Staten Island, the edge of Brooklyn, and the Verrazano, connecting them. Mostly I looked at the fire escape, lying on my side: its metal railing flat against the sky, like violent, abstract art. Littered with empty flower pots and the lawn chair I left that summer, and Caroline's flower pot, full of cigarette butts.
I knew she waited tables in the city. She always stayed out all night, and came home around the same time I woke up. I would hear her slam her door and lock it, then kick off her shoes. Sometimes I would hear her push her window open and climb out. Our bedrooms shared a wall, and the fire escape connected our apartments in the back. She'd sit down on the metal steps just out of view, light a cigarette, open a bottle of beer. Her silver cat would climb out with her, and twine around the railings. Once he came right up to my window and looked at me.
It would have been so easy to climb out and talk to her. And I had a perfect excuse: our windows. They were single-hung, with ropes and counterweights that didn't work. They could be wedged open with a book, or covered in plastic to keep out the cold, but they could not be locked. I thought I should warn her about the roof jumper who'd stolen my stereo that spring. And, more recently: some of my old records were taken, and the wireless card in my computer was pulled out. But that was easy to replace. And I didn't need the records. Caroline would play her music loud when she came home. I wanted to tell her how much it meant to me—hearing those old songs. Some of the bands I recognized: ancient sub-pop, New Order or the Cure, smothered by the wall between us, from the decade I was in high school. She must have just been born.
"Caroline" by Eva Talmadge: ©2008 Eva Talmadge.
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