“I take it.” And immediately she saw many reasons why she had made the wrong decision.
Estelle left soon after, feeling relieved, and at the same time depressed, that she had a room. No matter how small, no matter how grim parts of the house looked, no matter she had to share the passageway with an old woman, it was going to be her castle; no matter she didn’t have a private bathroom as she had in Bernice’s servant-quarters, it was going to be her dominion, so long as she paid her rent. And when she found a job, she would move into a better place. Her present worry was to find Gray Coach terminal by means of the subway or the streetcar, and get back to her room before dark.
When she returned to Bloor Street from the Gray Coach terminal on Bay, with her valise, she realized with terror that in her excitement to get the room she had neglected to take down the address of the house. Her fear of present poverty and of future hunger must have done something to her senses and her judgment and her intellect. However, before she had time to think and guess again, she was standing before the house: the right house, her rooming house.
There was an envelope with her name, Miss E. Leech, written in lead pencil in a scratchy hand. On the back of the envelope was the information: from Mr. Wassermann, landlord. Key to front door plus key to your room. No duplicat keys must be made of these keys. By order of the landlord. Thank you. He had, unwittingly, put an idea into Estelle’s schemes. She made a mental note to do something about it, sometime. When she reached the landing, on the second floor, she could smell the same smell that came from Harvey’s restaurant on Bloor Street: a student, or an artist, was having hamburger meat for supper. It filled the whole house with its aroma; but the more she got accustomed to it, the more it nauseated her. She trembled to think that the old woman on the fourth floor with her might be cooking hamburger meat for her supper.
In her room, there was nothing on the wall — none of the furniture, the smell, the colour of the bedspread and the bed itself — that belonged even remotely in character to her. It was her prison. She thought of it again as a coffin. There was a framed picture torn from some magazine, depicting a scene in winter. There was handwriting on the wall; and she laughed at this handwriting which she could read and understand, which was different from the writing on that wall in biblical times presaging destruction. She read the writing: names of women, accompanied by their telephone numbers: Marta, 922-1111, Greta, LE 2-2001, Eloise, 922-1112, Nadia, 921-0084. Estelle wished there was a man’s name and his telephone number, but soon she regretted the thought and started to unpack her valise. There were black dots of sand in the drawers of the chest of drawers, running round on the stale, yellow newspaper pages which lined the drawers. It was rat-shit sand. She knocked this onto the floor, put her few belongings into the drawers, and her comb and brush and toothbrush into a glass, and put them on top of the chest. She lifted back the bedspread and the pink blanket which had LORD SIMCOE HOTEL printed on it, and she saw pools of dried sexual avariciousness. “Oh my God!”
It was becoming dark outside. In the West Indies it would be night, and Mammy would be going to bed, shaking out the sun and the dust and the bed-wetting of the straw matress, and shaking it into a comfortable body-fitting body-rest for her old bones to rest on for the long unsleepable painful night. Mammy coughed throughout the night, and she punctuated her coughing with talk. Would this old woman, her new neighbour, be the same?
Perhaps the old woman is doing just what Mammy is doing now, miles away; perhaps, like Mammy, she is down on her tired knees, her old useless knees praying to God or to somebody about how nice it is to be alive another day. Mammy would be finished now; and she would be taking her kerosene lamp with the sparkling crystal ball of a lampshade into her small coffin of a bedroom to die for the night, her Bible in one hand, and her kerosene lamp in the other, smiling and happy about some secret of old age which the young can never quite understand. Perhaps this old woman is the same age as Mammy: all old women are the same age when they start forgetting.
To think of this old woman: to bring back the memories of the past bad treatment she had given her own mother; to rent the one room in the whole of Toronto, a city of two million white, black, Chinese, Indians from India and Indians from Canada, Eskimo and the rest and to find that her neighbour is an old woman; to be reminded of her own mother, probably wetting herself in the almshouse; to be reminded
