Who They Weren't

She’s watching me, watching us, he thought-felt. And why wouldn’t she. They were in her house, first guests she’d had in a full year, as she told them. When they’d tried the doorbell and heard nothing, no one coming to the door, then knocked, then knocked again, the second time louder, but not so loud as to rouse the curiosity or suspicion of neighbors, she’d answered in bathrobe and slippers as if just woken from a long refrain from life. Hello there, she greeted, glad to have you, come in. Her home required repair and she’d submitted an application for free assistance and the non-profit’s sole full-timer had brought along a pair of volunteers. Both of those were young men. Instantly at the sight of them over the full-timer’s shoulder she brightened then, remembering her appearance, lowered eyes, embarrassed, embarrassed maybe at the obviousness of her excitement before two handsome young men on the crew, withdrew into the house with an apology, the reason for which none understood. In their work they’d shared time with many people’s eccentricities. It wasn’t their concern, to understand their needs beyond the caulking of a windowsill or replacement of faulty piping beneath a sink. 

In her bedroom, where she sleeps, where no one sees, he thought again, following the feeling of the room around him. When they’d first entered, she'd pointed to the living room for first repairs, then excused herself toward the bedroom. A long ten minutes later she reappeared wearing earrings and rushed makeup and jean shorts and tank-top, the latter which advertised a bar in Malibu she’d surely never visited, given the state of the house and the neighborhood. But there were often surprises, he remembered, to the arcs of stories homeowners and renters would tell about the series of decisions and circumstances that had brought them to live where they'd landed. After she returned and cracked a beer, offering the men one, the men opting out, she mentioned the bedroom was most in need of attention, could someone begin there? Since their time was limited, she explained, since it was where she slept and in the colder months was draftiest of all the rooms. The full-timer, caught up with fixing a rotten windowsill, sent one of the younger men to be the bedroom, and it was he. Where she sleeps, he thought, he felt, the two indistinguishable from what he was seeing. Mounds of dirty clothes on a stained queen-sized mattress. Clothes bunched in islands across the floor. A flat-screen on a rickety wooden console. A nightstand piled with dishes and dirty crumpled tissues. This was her privacy and he was walking through it. 

Like the others, she was lonely. Like the others who lived in loose groups that resembled families or were families, she was perhaps suspicious. Curious, but uneasy to leave any one of them for too long alone, unobserved. Different people, unknown to one another, so similar, the room told him. For six months on the crew he’d crisscrossed the city, visiting houses or apartments, granted entry where he would otherwise have been denied, servicing the needs of a sample population that retired from their neighborhoods and city into untold interiors, most of which illustrated disorder and neglect within the people themselves, perhaps unrecognizable to them after a long process of habituation. These kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, having become indistinguishable from how they thought and felt, were unremarkable, as far as they could tell. Then when the men stepped through the door and took stock of what needed fixing, among many there was a change, an awakening of sorts, seeing the place as a stranger might, someone not used to living where they lived or feeling what they felt, day and night. There was also the hypervigilance of wounded pride, the poor person confronted with subtle appall or judgment of their surroundings. The full-timer, an ex-school janitor with gentle manners, soft-humored in his interactions with people, had coached volunteers to remain composed and friendly, regardless the state of the house around them. Never to offend; never to cause regret for having welcomed them. Many were isolated, hiding from real or perceived dangers beyond house or apartment; most of the isolated were, as the woman explained to him, sitting on the bed, watching as he spanned dimensions of her window with a tape measure, widowers. Cancer took her husband ten years prior, so she had shared the place with what family was left to her, two dogs. One had gotten sick like her husband, so she brought him to a vet to be put asleep. The other had kept her company until three nights ago, night of that big storm, she told him, remember? There had been a heavy storm, yes, he remembered. Out the very window he was repairing she pointed to the small yard patched with slimy dead grass, chainlink fencing boxing the perimeter except on one side, the side facing the street on which the crew had parked. There the fence had split off its pole and flattened, twisted and muddied on the ground. Her dog Bruiser had been outside when the storm began and, idiot that she was, she said, she’d left him in the yard to pee and poop before letting him back in for bedtime. She’d been in bed right here, she said, watching the news, viewing the storm as an animated Doppler report sweeping over the city. She’d somehow forgotten about the dog but when her mind came back to her, she was quick to the door to check on him. There she saw what he’s looking at right now. The fence torn of its links and trampled. Dog either scared from the yard or stolen. Stolen is what she believed, days later, dog unreturned. Honey, she called him. Honey, I’m sick from it. There’s a man lives down the way they say trains fighting dogs in his basement. It killed her thinking her Bruiser locked up in a basement, a German shepherd, a big dog, but in his case big but old. Stuffed in a cage barely the size of him, his snout duct-taped shut so he can’t bite. Dragged out for practice against some other breed raised for straight killing. If she weren’t so housebound she would’ve walked over the very morning after the storm and knocked on the man’s door and told him, If you haven’t killed him yet, gimme back my dog. Her distress was relayed with a certain sweetness of voice, common to people who were seeking sympathy they would soon play for their benefit. He was unsure there was a dog. He could only be confident of how she was saying a thing, not what she was saying. Sorry to hear, m’am, he told her. The sentiment was common and simple but carried a tone, which suggested: there would be no more favors he could fulfill except for repairs. No knocking on doors or asking after dogs. 

She’s enjoying watching, she’s talking to stretch time and create a reason to sit bedside watching me with back turned. And why not? Very presence of a man in a bedroom, you’ve seen it before, the loneliness leaves the room while you’re there and maybe someone that you bring, carry with you unawares, is left behind. Memory of a warm body unafraid of them watching and admiring and wondering. He had carried a roll of plastic into the bedroom when he entered, leaned diagonal against the wall. Before laying it on bedroom carpet, he asked her if he could clear space on the floor to unroll it. She had finished her beer, had tucked the empty can between sitting thighs. Of course, honey, she said, sorry for the mess. Kick any of that out of the way, as you need. After which she excused herself to other regions of the house where beer and further people-watching waited. 

Unobserved, he went about his work. With a boot edged bras and towels and t-shirts and jeans and panties to a corner, laid the roll to the floor. With tape measure and pen, marked the necessary dimensions, with box cutter and level slit straight lines through plastic. This would be sealed against glass, thinnest protection against threats beyond window. But covering cracks and sills and joints would keep warmth from leaving or cold slipping in more than it otherwise would. In summertime it would work the opposite direction, holding coolness within, keeping summer from fully entering the house. She would sleep with slightly more comfort after he left. The bedroom would be more airtight. 

And what else? People are more complicated than mirrors, but haven’t you noticed: here and elsewhere, even the bathroom, which you stepped into, door closed, to pee and flush, there were none to be found. Very few in such houses. Hadn’t occurred explicitly to you until now. What would the mirror show a person who had lived in such a room a long while? How different from what a newcomer, a visitor, would see looking back at him, pausing to watch or simply check himself? Always junk on floors and bad furniture and sinks full of moldy pans or dishes, but never windows that reverse the direction of their purpose to reflect back the external versions of minds and faces absorbed by them. There are reasons for this, conditional to each house and person. But look how often those conditions produce the same results: you creating a growing unease merely by your presence, you reflecting back much of what they feel but often don’t see, not until you splinter their habituations with your arrival. A mirror-in-the-flesh. Self-consciousness dividing them against their ease with such surroundings, for this is home to them, and here a stranger has changed their belongingness to home, merely stepping through the door to perform a duty and a kindness. Thoughts passed beneath the work of hands, which from repeated past efforts to accomplish a similar task, had become automatic. The window was winterized without any mental effort so for a time the room contained such extrapolations and maneuverings without any apparent change to its character. The room remained as it was, despite the work he would leave behind. He could hear the woman talking to the others in her living room. She was laughing hoarsely and with flirtatious energy. There were other younger men in the house and she had brought her curiosity elsewhere, to test the quality of reception that awaited it; whether the young man caught the energy that came his way and returned it. She was into her third beer, that he could count as first-hand witness, though from her looseness and giddiness maybe there’d been more before they’d arrived. She was talking of a youth spent in Chicago, of gang life there, her older brother a member of such trouble. A long while ago, this. And a long-lost crush in a friend of her brothers, one of the few white friends in their circle, a boy from the neighborhood, but handsome. “Blue-eyed devil,” she called him but not in disparagement, but in horny admiration. The volunteer was working alongside the full-timer to add a rubber runner to the front door and it was true as his eyes were blue as the woman was talking fondly of a boy from her past. His own eyes were blue also, so it would seem the past was all around her. Her youth in Chicago was fully alive in the house. It made sense the last item to fix in the house would be the door they would leave through. Every assignment ended with their doing so. If she could stand between us and the door, even now, while we were working on it, she would, he thought, amused by the truth of it but soon chastened by amusing himself at her expense. 

As they gathered their tool kits and materials, she was reminded of her dog again. She leaned a shoulder against a wall, hip cocked, beer in hand, begging. Would they help her find him? The volunteers knew to let the full-timer, the oldest and most seasoned defuser of awkward appeals, walk over to lead the woman’s interests elsewhere. Here, he said. Let’s have a look at the house now. He held a clipboard and on it was the list of items requested for repair. While the volunteers carried wares from the hallway, out the door, down the front walk to the van, the full-timer would lead her anew through a house they’d tweaked in minor but helpful ways. Living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, windows all around. Part of their care with a house was to return any item that needed moving to its original posture, and on his walk, the older man checked each item again off his list, more for the woman’s benefit than his own. In the bedroom he noted the job hadn’t been finished, for the blinds taken from the window had been laid on the floor and left there. Van filled and locked, the young men stepped into the house for their goodbyes. The woman leaned a head from the bedroom doorway, called him over. He paused, uncertain. She hadn’t said why. Then from the room he heard the older man ask him to come over for a moment, something to show him. 

The clipboard was lying on the bed and the older man was struggling to fit the top rod of the blinds into their plastic catches either side on top of the frame. He was shorter and often used a pup step ladder for such efforts, but all gear had been carried away. The woman seemed amused by the man’s efforts. She stood as tall as he and notably offered no help. And now watch, he noted, her eyes on him with a kind of sentimental gladness, taking the blinds from the older man with a nod, to work each end into place. There were hard plastic slips on the floor, left where he now remembered he’d put them, along the floorboard. These he wriggled into their joints until they slipped and clicked. From where the woman and full-timer stood he must have looked like a scarecrow hung in a rectangle of sunlight. He was facing the yard and the neighborhood and the leavings of the woman’s story about the storm and her dog, the man who stole strays to sacrifice to pit bulls kept in a basement. Beyond the glass the rest of the city was invisible for the neighborhood, one fixed unchanging view of it. Up or down, m’am? he asked her, holding the blinds string. Pardon? she asked. Her eyes were on him but it didn’t seem it was him she was seeing. Buzzed or something else. Uneasy and delaying the inevitable. Down if you can manage, Mr. Blue Eyes, she said, cloyingly but tired, surely aware her plays at flirtation would be unreturned, not even politely. He would pretend to not notice and this would leave her feeling tolerated. A tug on the string, string angled sharply out of catch, blinds fell cutting the daylight into slats. These he slimmed to bright slivers with repeated twists of the bar hanging from the top. No more yard or neighborhood or light arriving continually from a sun hundreds of thousand of miles from the bedroom. When he turned, she was sitting on the bed again, sulking. Is that it, she asked. You gonna leave me? Something else have to break before I call and you come back? The older of the two adjusted the bill of his baseball cap in a customary gesture of good mannered condolence. I’m afraid so, m’am, he told her. The younger raised a hand goodbye to the woman, who raised a hand palm-out, held it there. Come on back every day between now and New Years’, then, she said, I’ll find you something worth fixing. This was for the young man but he had already stepped beyond the hold of the room and turned the corner, leaving the older to pretend this also he hadn’t heard. She followed him to the door, held it open as if she might leave the house also, then paused, stood, as if the very thought of that was enough to change her mind. It was May 24th and sunny, no clouds in the sky. The ground shiny from rain. From the van window he watched her, surprised at the change that came over her when seen from a distance, in sunlight. She was either forty or seventy-four. Either fifty-three or sixty-eight. Wholly different from how she’d look once they’d left and she’d closed the door.