This apartment is noisy. Have there always been so many sirens, so many cars, so many bubbling lights? Where on earth is everybody going? I can’t sleep in the bedroom, my sister Mary and me we used to call it the deadroom because that’s where our ancient Aunty Rochester used to sleep, not her real name, and we actually put money on whether or not she’d wake up in the morning and what we’d do if she did and what we’d do if she didn’t.
She invited us for weekends to her New York apartment, she was our father’s aunt, crazy and beautiful when we were little but by the time we were teenagers she was only crazy, her barely-there skin see-through with dark islands also see-through, and they shifted, one day there’d be a blob on her chin like coffee the next day it would be pooled beneath an eye, or slapped against her temple, sometimes it was nowhere and I wondered where it lurked beneath her blouse.
She kept her hair not so much up but back it was only fluff but she fussed over it, her sharp blue eyes were immensely critical of her reflection, I asked her – I was always asking her things in fact I think my specific curiosity about her dictated the path of my career, I am a journalist, and my relationship with Aunty Rochester was my first, and it was life-long, interview – anyway I asked her about the hostility, the disdain I’d seen when she eyed her reflection, she could have gotten away with the answer I’d expected, something like you wouldn’t understand, something that used my age as detriment, but she simply said my youth is gone and with it my joy and I let it go, I paused the interview, I didn’t want to know.
She thought me and Mary were absolute beauties which we weren’t, we were only young, when she opened her door to us she said here you are you absolute beauties what shall we do this weekend and we always did something spectacular, she’d take us, bobbing, to restaurants and stores where it was like we were dreaming, she’d say does this come in a size whatever we were at the time, I was always bigger than Mary, I was what you would, if you wanted a punch in the mouth, call curvy.
I can’t sleep in the deadroom. There are no windows it’s like a crypt, only the two paintings she left me in her will. I am her only surviving relative so I get everything, some very valuable things but it’s the paintings she always mentioned she’d leave me, they were unnecessarily stipulated in the will, I didn’t know why for I’d shown no interest in them, what did interest me was the big map she kept in her hallway the one with red pins all over it stabbing where she’d been but she never wanted to talk about where she’d been, she only wanted to talk about where she’d go, especially after it was clear that she’d never again go anywhere, that’s when the places got fantastic, and the people even more so, perhaps these future travelling companions were the ghosts from her windowless deadroom, I can’t remember what she called them, the destinations I mean, not Neverland, not Wonderland, but you get the picture.
So many ways this story could go, I don’t often stumble at these opportunities rather I eat them, but not this one, I am leaving it intact and instead of a proper ending to this improper story, I offer you a little something I came across from The Paris Review, 1978, Linda Kuehl interviewing Joan Didion:
I had to vacate the apartment, they gave me a year, I took everything and it’s all here now in my house in Neuroshell, the two paintings I have in my bedroom she was right I adore them, I managed to get the map off the wall in the hallway, I have put it in my own hallway, all the little red pins returned to their holes, when I took it down I saw the ceiling above it was full of little red pins, too, and I left them there, all her imaginary places like stars.
