This may be too personal, but I just found myself locked out of the apartment wearing gym shorts. The cold is extremely bitter tonight, so drastic measure lead me to calling my 82-year-old landlady. She is a sweet old lady, but lonely and sometimes the effects show in the way she talks--she doesn't have much a grasp on time, she asks me the same questions often. That said, she is still very sharp, even without all of her wit.
She has been in the same apartment for fifty-something years.
She answered the phone and asked me around to the back of the apartment building. The backdoor lead to her living room, beautiful, high cardinal walls covered in art, a black, marble fireplace, and a hue of dust on all the pillows.. Her yorkie was yapping.
She said her day was weary.
This is not my first episode with her, nor Erik or Matt. Two weeks ago she asked me to come down to her apartment because there was a discrepancy with the rent (there wasn't). Though it was a brief debacle, it required the consolation of also Matt and Erik. Later the three of us were asked to carry a 300-lb cast iron "couch" from her basement to the hallway, where now it just sits, waiting for any passing leg to clip. But after that, we talked to her for over an hour. We talked about the history of the house, the history of Mt. Vernon (the hysterical district), and about her, a bohemian model once-married to a successful entrepreneurial beautician. After he died, she started adopting children, and eventually stopped fixing the apartment building. It is not in disarray, but it's slight upkeep is one of the reasons our toilet recently toppled over and flooded her closet below. It was four in the morning when that happened, and Erik had to clean her silk robes from China. He stayed there until the sun came up. One time, Matt went down there after she called because she wanted to show him pictures. We guilt-tripped him into doing it, but he came back with some bemusing stories. The other night, she asked Erik to take her yorkie out. The three of us went down to her apartment to say hello. We walked in and she wasn't wearing her pajama bottoms. We took Sunny outside and he consequently attacked a great dane. When we walked back to her apartment, Matt reminded her about all of the pictures she had shown him, so it became Erik's and my turn to see them. It was true, she really was pretty.
As I write this, it doesn't seem as awkward now as it did an hour ago.
She said her day was weary. Though I felt sad for her, I didn't want to enter the rabbit hole of sad conversation. She rightfully feels sorry for herself, and she can rightfully let go of the notion that life can be good again. She lived in the zenith of Baltimore's greatest time period ever, the '50's, and travelled all over the world collecting art and antiques and unimaginable things you only see in museums and Disney films. And, she has also seen the city decay. She stopped looking out her window in the last couple of years. She cannot see the wonderful things that are starting to happen now. And she rightfully doesn't have to, because they already 'started to happen' and have already ended, and I wonder if the art and the 'scene' that I know could ever be as meaningful as what she has experienced. But I do know that she can understand why we see what we see in everything we make in this part of the city, if she were to just see it all.
She calls us her boys, and I guess we are. It makes me think--Where are all of the kids she raised? Where are the daughters in the pictures that she showed Matt? What happens to the apartment building after the big inevitable happens? She once told us, "I'm 82 and I'm a realist." That's why we moved the couch. She wants to sell it.
I complimented her beautiful living room. Sunny was barking and she talked like a baby to him, not moving from the back door. I got the sense that I couldn't just "keep walking" directly out of her apartment, so I stood there and started blabbering nervously; it's just what I do. I talked about work and the gym and something else that I don't remember because she nodded and cut me off.
"Yes, that is wonderful, dear," she said walking towards me. I don't think she remembers my name. She was wincing a little and rolling her right shoulder. "Keep talking, I'm listening. Just get these knots out of my back."
I think I blinked a couple times. Sunny was still yapping. She turned her back to me. She coughed into her hand a couple times, stood straight as bent 'i', and waited. I don't know if it was shock or disbelief, but that is when I started massaging my landlady's back.
I put my hands on her shoulders and started crab crawling away. I forgot what I was talking about so I started talking about whatever was in front of me. "That pillow on your couch is cool." "I like your walls." I even started talking to Sunny.
"Don't be so gentle! You're not gonna hurt me," she said. "Dig in there."
I could feel her scapulas. They felt like uneven go-kart hupcaps. Her back felt like a sun-warped coffee table. I dug in. She started moaning.
"Harder," she actually said.
I started doing things like poking her shoulders with my fingers, and rolling my wrists around like a horse would knead dough. She started moaning louder, but I just kept doing whatever it was I was doing. She moaned louder until finally she almost yelled. She stood there for a moment, and released herself.
"Thank you so much," she said. "I feel much better now." She walked over to Sunny and picked him up. "My daughter usually does that for me, but--" she stopped.
I raised my eyebrows and stood on my toes. I did a "well, look at the time" kind of thing and gave her an awkward hug. We were in the kitchen now and I could see all of the wine bottles in the sink. She hugged me a little longer and let go when I thanked her for letting me back into the building. She said goodbye and I walked up to my room, grabbed my car keys and sat on my couch. I thought about her daughter; I'm scared to ask what her name is.
I don't think this is the end.
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