sent you to write: Bridal Seamstress Retires. Simple.”
From the front seat of her car, Aline could see the Roman shades on the guard’s front window and the green ash shedding more leaves on Beatrice’s porch in one glimpse. The green ash, the only one on the block, was still shaking ever so slightly in the afternoon breeze, letting loose a few more leaves. Beatrice was sitting on the steps in front of her house, watching the street, but mostly watching the leaves drop. It was an odd yet beautiful sight, the leaves seemingly suspended in the air, then falling ever so slowly as if cushioned by air bubbles. It was an image worth closing another type of article with, Aline thought, but in many ways it was so ordinary. It was fall, after all.
Aline was thinking of immediately heading back to the office to type up the story she’d been assigned: BRIDAL SEAMSTRESS RETIRES. SIMPLE. Mercilessly edited by Marjorie Voltaire, it would probably be reduced to a brief anyway, a five-inch announcement. But as she reached over to start her car, she took one final look at the prison guard’s house, wondering if there might be something there, a bigger story, one that could earn Marjorie Voltaire’s respect. Then something made her pull her hand away from the keys in the ignition. It was the house’s mailbox, a small, black, metal box, attached to the brick facade beneath the residence numbers. The mailbox was stuffed, nearly overflowing, as though no one had touched it for a while.
Aline got out of her car and crossed the street, then slowly climbed the steps to the front door. There was a small window, high in the door, but it was covered with what seemed like a piece of construction paper the same linseed color as the door. Flipping through the mailbox’s contents with her fingertips, she quickly searched for address labels, a name. She found mostly advertisements: flyers for mechanic shops, neighborhood dry cleaners, restaurants, and supermarket sales; catalogs for women’s clothing addressed to “Resident” or “Occupant.”
Aline walked down the front steps and stepped back from the house to have another look. The front window was too high for her to peek inside. Besides, it was well covered, with what on closer examination seemed like dark plastic, underneath the Roman shades.
There was a sliding window on the side of the house. It too had a curtain on it, but the window was lower than the others and the curtain was thin and there was a gap between the window frame and the drapery, which would allow her a look inside.
She moved swiftly, but casually, trying as much as possible not to call any attention to herself. If any of the neighbors saw her, she wanted to appear as though she was visiting and not trespassing.
As she raised her body to the window, she took one last look at the street to make sure no one was looking. A group of teenagers strolled by, crowding the sidewalk. They seemed to be on their way home from school, talking and laughing loudly, not paying attention to her.
She waited for them to pass the house, their voices blending with sounds of cars going by; then she stood on the tips of her toes, tilted her head, craned her neck, and looked inside. From where she was standing, she had an angled view of what appeared to be the dining room. The living room, she figured, based on the layout of Beatrice’s house, was the room you walked into when you entered the house. There was a wooden staircase leading upstairs, but the dining room itself was empty. The walls were gleaming white, as though they’d just been painted, and the parquet floors looked shiny, but sticky, as if they’d recently been varnished and hadn’t dried properly. It didn’t appear as though anyone was living there.
The sound of a car pulling into the driveway next door forced Aline to move away from the window. She walked back to the front of the house until she could see Beatrice once more, sitting out on her front steps, sewing.
“Are you looking for someone?” The next-door neighbor was standing in his driveway, leaning against his car and twirling a set of keys, watching Aline. He must be the Jamaican schoolteacher, Aline guessed. The lilt in his voice as he said, “Are you a friend of Dolly’s?” confirmed this.
Aline answered, “Dolly?”
“Are you a friend of Dolly’s?” he repeated, grinning, as though he would have very much liked her to be.
“Isn’t there a man living here?” Aline asked. “A corrections officer?”
“No one’s lived here since Dolly Rodriguez,” the man said, bouncing his keys from hand to hand. “And that was over a year ago. I know she’s trying to sell, but it’s hard to do that from Bogota. She just has to get her butt here and stay a while, if she ever wants to be rid of this place.”
“Thank you,” Aline said. “I didn’t know.”
“No sweat,” the man replied. He kept waving as she walked away from him. Perhaps he knew she was lying, for only when she made it to Beatrice’s front steps did he walk into his own house.
Beatrice had unbraided her cornrows so that her hair, now high and thick, looked like an angry cloud, a swollen halo floating a few inches above her. Aline sat down on the last step, where Beatrice’s slippered feet lay, and watched silently as she meticulously stitched the hem of a taffeta wedding slip, possibly her last.
Beatrice said nothing, as if trying not to break her own concentration. When she was done with the hem, her face relaxed and in this late-afternoon light, she seemed as airless as the green ash leaves that had gathered in small heaps around her.
“You’re back,” she said, gathering the slip on her lap so that, resting there, it looked like a large animal covered in gauze.
“The house is empty,” Aline said.
Beatrice didn’t seem shocked, as Aline had expected, or even embarrassed, as Aline had been, facing Dolly Rodriguez’s next-door neighbor.
“Of course it’s empty,” Beatrice said, raising her hands in the air as if to emphasize that it couldn’t have been any other way. “That’s where he hides out these days, in empty houses. Otherwise he’d be in jail, paying for his crimes.”
Beatrice moved the taffeta slip from her lap and gently placed it on the floor, at her side. She was not looking at Aline but was staring at the street, waiting for a few cars to go by before speaking again.
“I think the reason he finds me all the time is because I send notes out to my girls,” Beatrice said, keeping her eyes on the street. “I let all my girls know when I move, in case they want to bring other girls to me. That’s how he always finds me. It must be. But now I’m not going to send these notes out anymore. I’m not going to make any more dresses. The next time I move, he won’t find out where I am.”
Growing up poor but sheltered in Somerville, Massachusetts, Aline had never imagined that people like Beatrice existed, men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in their lives. Maybe there were hundreds, even thousands, of people like this, men and women chasing fragments of themselves long lost to others. Maybe Aline herself was one of them.
These were the people Aline wanted to try to write about now, no matter what Marjorie Voltaire said. And if Marjorie didn’t like it, then she would quit and go work somewhere else. She might even return to Somerville and, at last, let her parents learn who she was. Or she might escape to Florida for a while, to avoid eating that five-star- restaurant meal by herself.
But for now, she would simply sit with Beatrice and wait for some time to pass, so that she might see how the green ash leaves looked slowly falling from the tall tree in the very ordinary golden light of dusk.
MONKEY TAILS
Mother and I cowered beneath her cot after a small rock pierced the sheet of plastic she’d draped over our bedroom window the week before as extra protection against the alley mosquitoes. She was winded from all the excitement outside, forcing air out of her lungs while trying to contain a sudden bout of hiccups. Keeping her eyes closed, she felt for the rosary around her neck and between hiccups and deep breaths whispered, “Jesus, Mary, Saint Joseph, please watch over Michel and me.”
The sound of a large crowd stomping through the alley between Monsieur Christophe’s water station and our house seemed to be what was making the cot rattle, rather than Mother’s and my shaking bodies. Above the echoes of drums, horns, bamboo flutes, and conch shells, we heard voices shouting, “Come out, macoutes! Come out, macoutes!” daring members of the Volunteers for National Security militia to appear from wherever they were hiding.
