She had a room on the third story of a rooming house with a window that looked out on the street, and in the evening she would watch people pass by. She noticed when babies started walking, when an old man began to use a cane. At first there was a sway-back mule that pulled a wagon of odds and ends along the street, standing patiently while the junk man lowered the tailgate every block or so to let people see what he had to sell. At the end of the second winter they were gone. Somebody opened a sandwich shop. Now and then a new car came down the street. There were always papers blowing along the pavement, men talking and smoking by the streetlight. There were drunks, at night mostly. Sometimes she’d hear laughing or shouting or singing until morning, and she didn’t mind it. Just people doing what they do.
She went to the movies. Every payday she put aside the money it would cost her to go two times a week, and then she got by on whatever was left after the rent. Those women were right, no children to feed. She could live on just about anything, but for a child you had to find something nourishing. So at least she always had a movie to think about. And when she was sitting there in the dark, sometimes, when it was crowded, with somebody’s arm or knee brushing against hers, she was dreaming some stranger’s dream, everybody in there dreaming one dream together. Or they were ghosts all gathered in the dark, watching the world, seeing all the scheming and the murder and having no word to say about it, weeping with the orphans and having nothing to do for them. And then the dancing and the kissing, and all of the ghosts floating there just inches from a huge, beautiful face, to see the joy rise up in it. Like sparrows watching the sun come up, all of them happy at once, no matter that the light had nothing much to do with them. Another day eating bugs, that was what it amounted to. Or maybe they ate the bugs so that they could watch another sunrise. Well, the movie was beautiful, even when it scared her. The music they played before the feature made it seem like something so important was about to happen that she could hardly stay in her chair. She could have watched that lion roar all day. Then the movie. If it wasn’t very good, it was still all there was in her mind for an hour or two, a week or two. She might look like some woman going about her work, sitting by her window, but she’d be remaking a story in her mind. If they decided not to kill the old man but just took off in his car. They could pay him back afterward. She took most of the killing out of the movies, and most of the fighting. She kept the dancing and the weddings. But the best part was always to be sitting there in the dark, seeing what she had never seen anywhere before, and mostly believing it. If she had been a ghost watching Doane and Marcelle, so close she could have seen the change in their eyes when they looked at each other, it would have been there for sure. She imagined a wedding for them, both of them young, Marcelle with her arms full of roses. What to imagine for Doll. That she had never cut that old man. That she’d never held a knife or spat on a whetstone. That she was wearing a new shawl that was really the old one on the day whoever owned it first had bought it. She couldn’t wish that scar away, or how Doll never forgot to hide her face from anyone but Lila. The ghost couldn’t really be part of the dream. Lila would just be there, so close, seeing that tender, ugly face. Just her. Nobody else would even want a dream like that.
That was all the life she had for a long time. Three Christmases passed. She helped put up some garlands in the lobby one night, and a year later, and a year after that. Garlands. Tinsel. Everything has a name. Everybody else knows the name and they think you’re stupid if you don’t know it. Don’t matter. The third Christmas passed, then the dirty part of a winter, then it was spring, and summer, and when she was walking home to her room one afternoon with her hair still tied up in a rag, thinking she might wash up a little and get a hot dog and walk down to the river looking for a breeze, she saw two men unloading some crates from the back of a truck and one of them was Mack. He saw her, too, and laughed, and said something to the other man, who glanced at her and then sort of shook his head the way people do when they don’t want a part in something mean. She thought Mack took a step or two after her, but then she thought she heard him say, Lila, too, when he never knew her real name. How could it be that she had never told him her name? There was ringing in her ears. She almost thought she felt the brush of his fingertips at the side of her neck. The worst part of it all was that she knew better. He only teased her so Missy would be jealous. But she felt the rush of blood into her damn cheeks and even that damn sting in her eyes. And walking on away from him was like walking into a strong wind, or
