Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Cheever Arms - Complete
10:59 PM |
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By Clara
Cheever Arms - Winter
Brrrrrrrrring!
Brrrrrrrrring!
"'Lo?" Charlie groggily answered the phone. He could hear symphony music coming from the next room. Tatum must be watching cartoons. He tried to listen to what the chief was telling him on the line, but Bach kept on slipping into his ear.
"Sure, be right there." He set down the phone, and looked over at the clock radio on his bedside table. 14:00. It's had only been six hours since he got off the night shift, but he needed the money. Since Carol left things had been tight. It seemed with each additional shift his resentment towards her grew for just walking out on their child. But now wasn't the time for anger, Charlie needed to find a place to bring Tatum.
"Hey Bud, what's on the tube today?" Charlie asks as he entered the living room. It was rather small, with aged 70's furniture and a musty old Turkish carpet. The furnishings came with the apartment, and neither Charlie nor Tatum felt the need to bring the small two bedroom into the 21st century.
"Bugs Bunny, the one when he's a barber," replied Tatum. She was laying full length on the carpet, an ugly orange pillow propped her up. She stared intently at the fuzzy television, swinging her legs in the air on time to The Barber of Seville.
"Nice. Hey listen bud; I just got called into work, so I'm going to have to bring you over to Nick and Norah's for a little while, k?"
"Nick and Norah are out today. Last night she told me they had to go pick out place settings. She said that if Nick bailed one more time he might not be in the wedding at all! But I think it would be hard for Norah to get married by herself, not to mention awfully lonely." Tatum babbled.
"Quite," Charlie agreed absentmindedly. Where would he take her now? He scanned the building in his mind. There were the Jones' upstairs, but Tatum thought they smelled funny and didn't like their miniature Chihuahua
"Stay there kid, I'll be right back," ordered Charlie as he slipped out the door. He descended the creaking stairs, hand running along the faded banister, glancing nervously at the cracked white plaster on the walls. If this place ever caught fire, it would collapse in a minute, he thought.
He tapped lightly at the red door, considering how to ask these strangers to watch his child while he worked. The metallic slide of a dead bolt being pulled back sounded, and Charlie was greeted by a small, kind faced woman who smelled faintly of lilac and baby powder.
"Good day," she greeted. Charlie could see her rigid husband sitting at the table behind her, apparently doing nothing.
"Hi, I'm Charlie…I live upstairs," Charlie started, unsure how to continue. "Er, I just got called into work at the fire department, would you mind watching my daughter, Tatum, for a few hours? If you're not busy, that is…" He added nervously.
"Of course we can," She responded, smiling charitably. "My name is Margarete, and my husband is Fedor." She motioned vaguely towards the inside of the apartment. Her speech rolled with a lilting Russian accent, but it never sounded harsh or unwelcoming.
"Thanks a ton," Charlie grinned, "I'll bring her right down."
Charlie rushed upstairs and prepared his daughter, and he was headed back down the shrieking steps with Tatum in tow not five minutes later. Knock-knock.
"Why hello, you must be Tatum," Margarete observed after she opened the very red door for the second time.
"Yes I am. And I am seven years old," proud Tatum proclaimed.
"Well my name is Mararete, and inside is my husband, Fedor."
"It is nice to make your acquaintance," Tatum replied with all the dignity a second grader could muster. She kissed her father goodbye after many promises of being good, and stepped into the porcelain packed dining room. There were memento plates and Dutch figurines in every possible crevice; Tatum was afraid that if she accidentally knocked one, the whole place would go down in a crash of shards and splinters.
A moment of awkward silence impended on the odd threesome.
"So…Do you like Bugs Bunny?" Tatum queried nervously.
A hint of a smile played in the corner of Fedor's mouth.
"Of course," He replied.
Cheever Arms – Spring
It was there, and now it's gone.
Where did it go?
That woman can't leave anything well enough alone.
I hadn't even done the crossword yet. Damn.
I head to my room, passing the bathroom. I hear the little girl from upstairs splashing around in the tub, another night shift for her dad. Another evening spent with a stuffy, old Russian couple. It can't be her idea of a good time.
I pass into our bed room and retrieve Dante's Inferno. Sure, he wasn't Russian, but that man sure could write. Without fame, he who spends his time on earth leaves only such a mark upon the world as smoke does on air or foam on water. I am just smoke. I look around the bedroom at what my life has become. The thrity year old furniture that was at the height of fashion when we moved in mirrored how isolated we were from the world. I sigh, and exit the depressing quarters with the heavy oak funiture and sagging opaque drapes.
I take my favourite seat at the dining room table, sitting rigid as a board as I was taught as a child. I come from a place whither I desire to return. Ah, Russia. I miss the cadence of the language, the food, the people. I haven't returned home since me and Margarete left over 30 years ago. It was nothing like here. I don't understand these people, these Americans. No wonder we're hermits.
I hear my wife shifting in the next room. The clinking of her knitting keeps time with the operatic music pouring from the radio, flooding through the apartment like a wave of violins and wailing sopranos. Faintly in the background, I can hear Tatum singing Row Your Boat in the bathtub. I read.
Dante is beautiful. I follow the ebb and flow of his writing like seaweed in the foaming water. Hours, days, months pass as I travel through his world.
I hear my wife stand and set down her needles with certainty. Madama Butterfly is still soaring from the scartchy radio speakers. The sound of a light tapping passes to where I sit, and my wife askes, "You done, honey?" tentitavely to the bathing youth. With no audiable reply, I hear Margarete open the door.
Her scream curdles my blood as Madama Butterfly soars.
This way a good soul never passes...
Cheever Arms – 10 Years Later
They asked me why I didn't move, after I saw that bloated child's body, floating grotestquely in my washroom. The answer is, because this is home. This apartment is the only constant thing for me and Fedor in this strange country. We've lived here for more than 40 years. Even with the child haunting my dreams, I couldn't leave.
It was all rather surreal, the day it happened. We were babysitting the girl upstairs, as we often did. We enjoyed her company, especially Fedor, though he would never admit it. She brought life into our home again.
Her father was working the night shift, so we put her in the bath before bed, just like usual. She splashed and sang, just like usual. I listened to Madama Butterfly, and knitted, and Fedor sat in the dining room, as usual. After 20 minutes, I checked up on her, to see if she was ready to come out. She didn't answer to my knock. I opened the door, and I saw her, face down in the water. Her body was swollen, her skin the colour of the sky. Her hair fanned out around her head like Medusa's snakes, her face submerged.
I screamed. I screamed as loud as I could. There seemed to be nothing else to do but scream. I screamed till my voice hurt, till I couldn't breathe, till I couldn't see, but still I screamed. There was nothing but the scream, the scream and the girl. No matter how I screamed she remained, bobbing macabrely in the soapy water.
I don't remember much else. Her father was never angry. He never swore or raged at us. He just died along with her. He moved out of the building a week after her death, and disappeared. He stopped going to work, they called looking for him. We tried to find him, tell him we're sorry, slightly hoping he would open up and shriek at us for killing his daughter. It would have eased our conscience, to finally be held responsible, or to be punished in this life. But we couldn't find him.
Life continued on in the Arms, and it was easier then I thought it would be to settle back into our old routine that we had before we met the girl. But she never really left. She haunts me to this day. She appears in my dreams, never as the sunny child of life, but as the rotted, bloated decaying monster of my bathtub. She doesn't accuse me, she doesn't attack me. She just stares. She pierces me with her black eyes, mouth slightly open with water sliding down her chin. She stares.
But still, I cannot leave home.
So I deal with the demon, the child I killed, and I live at Cheever Arms. And it is here that I will die.
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2 comments:
Sorry about the length, I was too lazy to pot it in three seperate "blogs"
I love the connections of the stories, like how in the last one you describe how she actually drowned retrospectivley. Really well written. Your work is VERY poetic! :)
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