Monday, November 8, 2010

the story of matilda jennings

It wasn't always to be believed, but the story was true just the same. Born in the same month of the same year as she, Matilda Jennings was Louise's closest confidante when they were schoolgirls. She resided in a massive white townhouse where the P.S. 10 now stands. It was a corner lot, the envy of all the neighbors. Her parents has passed before she turned three, which is when the neighbors stopped envying and instead shook their heads and said things like, "Poor little Matilda" and "Isn't it a pity." The housekeeper, Ms. Dean, who lived there and cared for Mr. and Mrs. Jennings during their last days, stayed on to raise her, the single child, as there were apparently no close or distant family members available or willing to step in.

It turned out that the housekeeper was a poor excuse for one, letting the house go to ruin inside and out. By the time Matilda and Louise were in grade school, the awnings had begun to tumble, the vines growing between brick and mortar, pulling apart the foundation. But Ms. Dean loved Matilda and treated her handsomely, never depriving her of the good fortune her father had wrought in the pantyhose business. In the afternoons when Matilda and Louise were young, Ms. Dean would plant them in the backseat of her rust-colored dinosaur of a towncar, where they sat silently together, staring straight ahead, their brunette and hay-colored heads swinging this way and that as she turned corners, the wind whipping their fine long hair around in circles.

When Matilda and Louise turned sixteen, Ms. Dean passed, and Matilda was deemed fit by the courts to take care of herself. This meant that the house would continue to deteriorate. Having had a loving yet ultimately free-thinking upbringing, fixing up or maintaining the house was not on her list of priorities. During those years, Louise took it upon herself to mop the kitchen floor and dust the furniture in the drawing room, as Matilda slept until noon. She also made sure Matilda took her meals, and frequently invited her to her family's house around the corner for dinner, or she brought her a minced meat pie, her mother's specialty. Otherwise, she knew, Matilda would not eat. Instead of breakfast, she would go out into the dense and wild backyard of her house and catch sparrows and other wild birds and keep them in her collection of cages in the greenhouse. When they died, which never took very long, Matilda would bury them out in the back corner of the yard, next to the high brick wall, each with their own stone marker. It was a never-ending succession of birds that came there to die, however unwillingly, and by the time Louise left for college, there must have been twenty or thirty stones out there, all lined up in rows.

Matilda never made it to college. Not every girl attended college in those days, however. Most of the neighbors just said, "I hope she finds a good man." Louise felt bad leaving her there, but Matilda insisted she would be fine, and said she would call her by phone regularly, which she didn't.

The late autumn of their twentieth year of life was cold, the air permeated with the scent of burning wood. One Sunday morning, while Louise was still at college, Matilda dressed herself in her mother's silk wedding dress that still hung in the closet, and topped it with the moth-eaten mink. She carefully curled her hair and applied rouge to her cheeks. She looked the most beautiful she ever had. Her feet were too big for her mother's satin heels, so, barefoot, she strode out of the front door, leaving it wide open for the wind and leaves to rush through the hall and up the banister. She marched steadily past the neighbors who looked on in bewilderment from their windows. Down the hill she walked, steadily, assuredly, past the warehouses, down to the heavily polluted Gowanus canal, where, without pause, as if propelled by the inertia of her stride, she stepped off the concrete ledge into the freezing sludge, where, if she didn't drown, she was certainly poisoned by the refuse of industry.

When they found her, out behind the lumber yard, her frail and lifeless body lay face-first, the fabric covered buttons of her white dress peeking out from under a bright green frozen block of ice, scores of sparrows circling overhead.

Friday, October 22, 2010

peking duck

It was dusk, and someone somewhere was blasting Beyonce from their car speakers. The bass thundered down her little street, and Chloe could see Mrs Huang across the way, watering her plants in her kitchen window. She smiled and waved. Chloe smiled and waved back. She must be paying like 200 a month in rent.

Not that Chloe's rent wasn't cheaper than a New York apartment of similar size. It was rent-stabilized, which meant that her landlord would raise her rent every year to the maximum allowable percentage, in the effort to finally reach the magical two grand mark, at which point rent stabilized apartments are allowed to go to market rate. But the percentage per year wasn't too high, and she hoped that by the time it got anywhere near two grand she would be long gone to the Carolinas or some other mild-weathered state.


It was 6 pm and Mildred was late, due to a shoe shopping trip gone awry. She really didn't want Mildred to come over, but invited her over out of habit, or boredom, she wasn't sure which. Mildred had become sort of scrappy lately, succumbing to the societal pressures to get married and have babies before she hit forty and taking it upon herself to make sure she didn't "fall behind the pack." She had started wearing high heels and going on dates with guys like "Aaron from the art gallery" and "Tim from the coffee shop." She used to be more unexpected. Now she did the boring things everyone else in New York did, like go to Sheep's Meadow on Saturday afternoons and the Meatpacking district at night. It made Chloe sick to her stomach, and she had almost had enough.


At 6:25, the small bell rang outside her bedroom window. She had rigged it up when, after moving in, she realized there was no buzzer in the 100-year-old tenement building. So she hung a brass ringer from the 99 cent store on the rail outside on her fire escape, and attached a long, inconspicuous string that blended in with the parasols sold by the vendor in the downstairs storefront.


She ambled down the two flights of stairs, tipsy having now drunk half of the bottle of wine that she and Mildred were supposed to share.


"Hiiiiiiiii Chloe! How are you?," shrieked Mildred, giving her a hug.
Poor Mildred. She was well-intentioned, but offensively girly. Chloe faked a smile.
"Come up. Would you like some wine?"
"Sure!," she said. Hiking back up the stairs, Chloe wondered how to tell her, how to break it off.

Inside the door, Mildred plopped down on the couch with a large sigh, while Chloe resumed her place on the chaise. "So, how did the date go?"

"Oh! It was so lovely! The whole time I was thinking, This might be the one!"

Chloe set down her wine glass and felt she might gag. But she attempted a feigned excitement. "Ohhh, that's wonderful, what happened?," she forced out of herself.

Couldn't she tell she was faking it? That she didn't give a shit about this guy who seemed hideously boring. That she thought Mildred herself was hideously boring.

"Well! So he took me to Central Park and he had a picnic basket! He even thought of the blanket. So we sat there, in sheep's meadow, having a lunch of lemon curd and toast. I do love lemon curd. Just as soon as he brought out that jar, I knew he was the one."

There was a pause, with which Chloe didn't know what to do. It was awkward. She could tell her feigning was fading. Certainly Mildred couldn't actually be this superficial.

Well, enough was enough. Plus, the wine bottle was empty. Chloe stood up and announced that she was so sorry, that she must leave to pick up her Peking Duck for tomorrow night's feast at the mah jong parlor.

They gave each other kisses on the cheek, and after closing the door, Chloe heaved a sigh of relief, purging Mildred's putrid words out of her system. She changed out of her clothes and slipped on her silk Chinese robe. There was no feast tomorrow, and there certainly was no Peking Duck.


pungent sights

On a perfectly brisk yet sunny October Saturday, Chloe was inside selling overpriced but good croissants and coffee at Ceci-Cela on Spring. She thought it might be a fun thing, like a hobby, working in what would be the closest thing to a real Parisian cafe. Plus, it was just a few blocks north of her apartment. She imagined herself blithely tying on a cute apron and joyfully serving smiling, happy customers delicious pastries, chatting with the locals in between. Instead, it was all drudgery and belittlement. The customers, both tourists and natives alike, were downright rude, and the smell of croissants was now sickening. She was about to tell the manager she would like to quit when in walked a familiar face.

One look at his trendy new boots and she knew he wasn't the same. It had been five years, of course, and one was certainly allowed to change. But not for the worse. Not while still in your twenties. He reeked of expensive cologne, and he produced an iPhone4 from his back pocket.
"Really? An iPhone?"
"Yeah, aren't they great?"
"I wouldn't know. I though you hated iPhones." Chloe cast a jaded glance out the window over her right shoulder, then turned to face him again.
"I did, in theory. But now I don't live in the theoretical world. I live in the practical one."
"I can see that."

She motioned to the rear of the cafe, if you could call it a cafe. It was more like a claustrophobic hallway. Not more than one person could stand between the wall and the glass case. She walked out from behind the counter and followed him to a pair of rickety chairs set around a table still strewn with the remnants of someone's breakfast.

There they chatted about the usual things one chats about with someone from the past. Jobs ["Are you still at...?"], haircuts ["Your hair seems longer..."], apartments ["You've moved five times?!"], and relationship status ["So, how's Tara? Oh, I'm sorry to hear that."]. By that time, he had finished his coffee and croissant, and Chloe saw him on his way, ["It was great to see you. I'll see you around."], never to be seen again, in all his pungent, high-tech glory.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pungent


these were the days

Chloe secretly hoped that everything would turn out, but she secretly knew it wouldn't. These were the days of burnt toast and missed subway trains. Of sugared dreams and dashed hopes. The light at the end of the tunnel was dim, and the bats had taken over now. Gaining in number, they flew furiously through the long hallways of her mind, slapping against the walls, the rush of wings carrying her forth into nothing, something. She drifted in and out, here, standing in her kitchen without an oven. Staring out the window in night silence, she wondered when that goddamn tinnitus in her right ear would go away, or whether it would only get worse from here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinnitus

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

self help titles for the pessimist


"How to Lose Friends and Win Better Ones"

"What To Do When Your Dream Becomes Your Nightmare, and other impossible crises"

"Throwing in the Towel: Lessons in Giving Up"


Saturday, June 26, 2010

forgettable things

The ad man for whom Chloe worked a few summers ago was a forgettable man with a forgettable face. The only thing she remembered about him was that he liked to dress in pleated khakis and that he thought that The Most Serene Republic was the greatest band ever.....a forgettable band not forgotten by Chloe because she could not forget that unforgettable aspect of an otherwise forgettable man.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

twenty-five cent leeks

The bus doors clattered open, and Louise stepped out into the bright May sun, reflected tenfold from the sidewalk by her orange pumps. It was 5:08pm, and the day seemed still half-pregnant with the possibilities the morning had offered. She wanted to believe that, anyway, seeing as how all she had done today was sit at her desk at Ward Jenkins's Avian Pathology office where she answered four phone calls and filed ten papers.

Louise had not gotten off at her usual stop, which was still twenty blocks south, in order to complete a special errand: the procurement of fresh twenty-five cent leeks at E&H Local Market. She'd heard about the deal from her friend Olivia, who divulged the information on Sunday evening to her in response to Louise's complaint that she couldn't find fresh leeks anywhere in their "God forsaken neighborhood" on the north border of the cemetery, and that her cooking repertoire had suffered severely as a result (potato leek soup being, according to her friends, her best dish). "Oh yes!," Olivia had said. "Not only are they cheap, they are fresh and large and their leaves are the brightest green you've ever seen!"

Louise was still living on the high that this new and exciting information provided her, and visions of creamy potato leek soup danced in her head since she heard the news. The anticipation built as she neared E&H, now just half a block away. Holding her breath, Louise crossed the establishment's threshold which was marked by the sudden rush of air from a dusty industrial fan. Her eyes darted around, looking for that bright green bountiful pile of tender white bulbous roots.

It was then that she realized that E&H didn't sell fresh leeks. Not even old ones. Not even produce. It was then that she remembered the details of that conversation with Olivia, which had taken place in her sunlit kitchen, Louise drinking wine and leaning against the counter, and Olivia telling her about the leeks while holding her large, white, fluffy bunny rabbit which she didn't actually own, because had Louise had made it all up in her dream last night.

Monday, April 5, 2010

unsolicited correspondence

Dear Owen,

I heard all about the new girl. She sounds absolutely lovely, really. How did you manage to win that prize? And she and her dog already moved in, too? My, that was quick! It took you two full years to ask me. She really must be something! Especially if you still come home every night with that scowl on your face. By the way, I thought you hated french bulldogs? Anyway, really, congratulations on your new trophy / life. I hope everything goes just swimmingly.


xo,
Chloe

Sunday, February 28, 2010

grand street station: then and now

Chloe remembered their third date. It was the first time they rode the subway together; a bright and cold Sunday afternoon in an endless winter.

As they awaited the next train at the Grand Street station, they reminisced about the second date's merits and shortcomings, the former being the excellent food at the Ethiopian restaurant on Mulberry, the latter being his unfortunate, uncontrollable sneezing episode which rendered their conversation mute for a good five minutes. As he rehashed his haphazard theory that he must be allergic to red lentils, he pulled out a veritable deck of metrocards from his back pocket, shuffling them like kings and queens. He explained that each card was it own ride, its own trip with its own ticket. He rode the subway this way so that his life would be more a series of small adventures rather than one continuous blur provided by the monthly metrocard. This, of course, went against all reason and logic, the monthly metrocard being the most cost-effective and convenient. But she admired his principle, nonetheless.


And she imagined him standing there at the Grand Street station, explaining his metrocard theory for the second time, four years later, on a bright and cold Sunday afternoon in an endless winter, to a different girl: tall, like she, only skinner, with bigger breasts and a dark crease at the crown of her head where her bright blond hair betrayed her.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

a work/life continuum

Chloe sat there like some dumb animal, staring at the moss green wall of her living room. She sat straight up, her back against the weathered brocade fabric of her small couch, her legs in right angles with knees pointing forward. A row of holes in the plaster betrayed her endeavor last April to finally hang up the bunch of framed artwork and photos that had been sitting propped up against the baseboard. Recently, she'd had to take a few down, those works associated with her somewhat recent ex-boyfriend. She was sick of the reminder. A mere glance would open the floodgates to a rush of disgust and resentment for having wasted so much time, now having realized what a terrible mistake he was. At any rate, that was all over now and in the past few months she was was able to shut the floodgates relatively quickly.
She turned her gaze to the window, where the creepy-crawly vine had had its way with the window frame, tangling itself around the old moldings and basking in the warm November sun, which at this time of year, only shone in on her apartment directly between one and three in the afternoon.
Looking out at her neighbors' clothes hanging on the line, bright against the sky, she sat there pondering the questions of her universe. Why was it that, more often that not, she would arrive at a subway station only to just miss the train? Didn't subway karma dictate that just-misses would more or less even out with spot-on arrivals? Or, why was it that whenever she was late to work, her boss was always there, sitting in his glass-walled office, his eyes following her every move? And when she was early, he was never there to see it? Furthermore, why for god's sake could she not fall asleep before midnight, then suffer dizzying tiredness all day, only to revive just when it would be an intelligent, appropriate time to go to sleep, say, 10pm? If she had it her way, the days would be 36 hours long. (That would put an end to the ridiculously uneven work/life ratio so common these days, whereby the 9-hour-a-day worker, toiling away with the end goal being to continue fattening up the bank accounts of her superiors while they sit in their corner offices drinking whiskey on the rocks, spends the majority of her waking hours making just enough money to fund the few remaining ones.) Then she'd have some time to actually do some worthwhile things like paint that cabinet in the living room, or play the Moonlight Sonata on the piano. Then she could maybe retire to the chaise with Summer by Edith Wharton, pass out, and wake up 8 hours later, refreshed and bright eyed, to the sound of the garbage truck making its morning rounds.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

cannibal carpet

Louise dropped onto the soft carpet of grass that covered the hill on the southern face, letting the folds of her white eyelet lace dress land gently about her, which contrasted nicely, she thought, with the saturated green of the ground. She gazed about, her eyes level with the tops of the few hundred gravestones of fallen civil war soliders that stood at tired attention in roughening rows, casting diagonal repeating shadows. The sun shone down on her face, the warmth kissing away the pervasive chill in her bones. A fact unknown to her, this was the highest point in Brooklyn, and when the sun shone in November, the warmest.

Louise had been coming to this spot regularly ever since Ward Jenkins had gotten married and went off on his African tour honeymoon with his socially ambitious and, she opined, commonly pretty new wife. It had been three months now since they left, and Louise was charged with the general upkeeping duties of the office as well as the house, including the feeding of the three macaws, two cockatiels, one african grey, and that damned loud cockatoo that always sounded like it was being tortured.


Aside from the cockatoo's screams, it was lonely and dark in the first floor office. She looked forward to the afternoon light that would stream in through the stained glass windows in the foyer. Her days and nights melted into each other eventually, and sometimes she didn't speak to a single soul for a few days, in the back-and-forth from her apartment to Ward Jenkins's. It got to the point where in the mornings, when she unlocked the front door, she would pretend that things were going on exactly as before, with Hilda the housekeeper bumping noisily around in the kitchen and Ward sitting contentedly at his desk eating his daily breakfast of grapefruit halves with the serrated spoon. That was when she decided she'd better get out, and one day, found herself on the hill in the cemetery.


She imagined, with a revolting, leadened feeling in her stomach, Ward and his new wife touring the pyramids, smiling and happy and sickening. And his wife was just so... boring, thought Louise. At any rate, Ward could be so self-centered and moody, and maybe they deserved each other. He'll probably make a terrible husband, she thought, as she brought her gaze down to the ground, picking at the little blades of grass, tearing their innocent, young bodies in half in undeserved cruelty and throwing them back onto the earth where, certainly, the soil would swallow the dead matter and the grass would grow strong from feasting on itself.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

trials

Every year around the same time, Chloe made the trip down to Miami to visit her parents. She only saw them once a year, owing to the fact that if her family was to maintain some semblance of, well, family, the duty rested upon her shoulders to show up for Christmas. This was because her parents never came to visit her in New York, for all of the five and a half years she had lived there. Her father detested the city, having grown up among palm trees and sunny open spaces in Florida, and also having developed a severe case of claustrophobia crawling through pyramids on an Air Force tour in Egypt in the 60s. Her mother made verbal promises to visit, but unfortunately she had that dreadful combination of being a persistent procrastinator and non-commitant.
As such, every year, the month of December meant having to arrange for the trip: buying the plane ticket, shopping for "New York gifts" of which her family members were fond, but which had to be non-liquid, unbreakable, and not too heavy, stuffing said items in her suitcase, and then the pleasant experience of LaGuardia Airport on December 22nd.
She dreaded the whole process every year, but she had to admit that once she landed at Miami Airport and the doors of the baggage claim slid open before her, the rush of warm and humid air signaling that she was home for Christmas, it was worth it.