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.