Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

“Bulbs.” Liza holds them up like precious eggs. Flora nods helplessly. “You keep them inside.”

“I’ve never once touched that flower box.” Flora is stunned at the way Liza just waltzed right in, and also by the fact that it never occurred to her to touch the flower box. “I’ve lived here five years and I never thought about it once.”

“That’s what neighbors are for,” Liza says primly, choosing to interpret Flora’s words as gratitude. “Which window is your favorite view?”

Flora does not answer. Of course it would be this one. Flora feels suddenly possessive of this window, this view that is hers alone. Liza’s face reminds Flora of a slim, long dog bone made of rubber — she saw the man with the lurching Great Dane holding one in his gloved hand recently. Her skin is smooth and glossy like that bone. Flora curbs the impulse to touch it.

“Have you ever been bored?” Flora asks, though what she really wants to ask is does Liza smoke. She knows the answer already. Liza has never been still. Even when she sleeps, she must sleep an active sleep, deep and invigorating but always flailing an arm or a leg or planning the next day, planning whole meals during REM, soup to nuts.

“Like wanting something to happen?” Liza digs her hands up to the wrists into the soil. “I’m always wanting something to happen. So maybe I’m always bored?”

“Do you want a cigarette?” Flora says.

“Oh sure, I love to smoke,” she says, like I love sports or I love this or that movie. “I never do around my husband, but I love to whenever I get the chance.” Liza gestures to the ceiling and rolls her eyes, indicating her husband’s disapproval, and accepts the pack Flora retrieves from the windowsill. “It always looks so good on people. I mean, just look at you. You look like a movie star.”

Flora inhales deeply, feeling suddenly and suspiciously fabulous. “You think?”

The phone rings and Flora just shakes her head, stilling her urge to jump for it, and blows a smoke ring. “I screen,” she says, though she’s never let the phone ring in her life.

She holds herself perfectly still as Rock’s voice thuds into the room. “Flora, Rock. I’m dizzy these days, from my head. I’m seeing a doctor, a specialist, about it and then I’ll talk to you about your floor. Later.”

Flora gestures with her head toward the hole in the kitchen floor the way Liza did to her husband upstairs.

“That’s a doozy, Flora,” Liza says, getting down on all fours to investigate. She sticks a long, skinny arm into the hole and wiggles her fingers as if she is retrieving something that has fallen in. Flora pictures her heart, still beating in Rock’s sink. “What is wrong with that Rock anyway? We can’t stand for that,” Liza declares. Flora suddenly has visions of a tenants’ committee headed by Liza. Bulbs in every apartment! She imagines Liza filling in the hole in her kitchen floor with a homemade concoction she read about in a magazine, made from spackle and gardening dirt.

Flora wants Liza to leave now. She doesn’t want to be on Liza’s committee; she doesn’t like the way Liza assumes something is wrong with Rock or the way she includes Flora in her we. Flora is certain that when Liza is through with her, there won’t be a thing Liza doesn’t know about Flora — her dreams about insomnia, her love for Rock, whether she believes in God. She senses Liza’s investigatory powers, the way she scans a room looking for clues.

Liza wanders into the living room, flicks on the TV to a cop show with heart, gunshots, and tender moments. Flora feels defenseless against this long, rubbery-faced woman bouncing around her apartment. A young cop is about to tell his partner a secret that he hasn’t even told his wife. Rock watches the same show downstairs, and the drama echoes throughout the building.

“I’ll stop by again soon, hon,” Liza says, though she is probably ten years younger than Flora. “Gotta cook the old man dinner.” She giggles as she says “old man.” She is a great appreciator of her own jokes. And suddenly she is gone, leaving Flora with the young cop’s secret. He’s had headaches, terrible headaches, dizziness, what should he do? He’s seeing a doctor, a specialist.

She runs to the hole, cups her hands to her mouth, and screams down at the single tile, “I know your tricks. Don’t you try it!” The silence after Rock turns off the TV has a pulse of its own. Now he’ll have to turn to her for solace. She will comfort him. He will see himself in her. The pulse grows louder like a heartbeat revived.

Flora climbs into her bed with her clothes on and falls asleep listening to the scraping sound of moving furniture above, waiting patiently. She can’t sleep in her dreams again. Instead she wanders down the cold, creaky wooden staircase of her building in bare feet gone numb with chill. It is snowing inside, large flakes falling from the ceiling, and Flora skirts the puddles to knock on Rock’s door. Maybe he has some wool socks he can lend her. She needs socks desperately, more than she’s needed anything in her life. A wind whips her dream nightgown up around her knees and she clutches at it to make it behave. She knocks and knocks, the large snowflakes wetting her hair and her nose, until finally, from behind Rock’s door, she hears the sound of bristles and scrubbing. The banisters are piled with snow, a river of snowy water running down the steps. Suddenly, the door flies open of its own accord to reveal Liza on her hands and knees, scrubbing Rock’s floor with a toothbrush. Flora wakes up, choking on snow — she swears flakes fly out of her mouth as she coughs in her pitch-black bedroom.

She stays awake all night — less exhausting than sleep — watching the silhouettes of bare branches shake in the wind, until it begins to snow for real outside. All night she watches large flakes fall quickly past the streetlamps’ light until everything is hidden under a perfect blanket of snow. The cars, the garbage cans, their lids blown into the street, an abandoned armchair that somebody put out on the curb yesterday, all the stray trash — discarded blue and white “We are happy to serve you” coffee cups, plastic wrapping, chicken bones that threaten to choke the Great Dane puppy. Her love for Rock is like that, hidden, and she realizes she has to find a way to show him.

In the morning Carol calls, though it’s not even a Sunday. “I wanted to make sure that you are warm enough, that your pipes haven’t frozen.” The pipes froze last year and the year before that, and Flora sees clearly the years stretched out before her. “Keep warm, Flora,” Carol says and, having gone above and beyond her duty, hangs up. After years of thinking Carol wretched and meek, a slave to the scripture of the self-help guru, Flora imagines her putting the kettle on the stove for tea and contentedly curling up on a soft couch with a book she has been meaning to read, grateful for the distance between them.

At work Flora can barely sit still, filled with the restless, urgent desire to capture Rock’s attention. Samson stops in to pick up his messages. He doesn’t seem to care about the missing eyesore. He replaces it with a small painting done all in primary colors — blue, yellow, red — with a tiny piece of newspaper collage. “It’s a gouache,” he explains to Flora. “Extremely Mondrianesque,” he adds in a hushed, important tone.

“Oh, shut up,” Flora says, desperate for him to go so she can leave.

“What did you say?” Samson asks. He seems surprised that she talks at all.

“I’ll shut up the store,” she says.

“Of course you will,” Samson says, a look of puzzled bemusement on his face. Flora sees the way he thinks of her, as another museum piece to observe and then sidle away from. He walks out the door backward, like someone robbing the place. “I’m not here,” he whispers. “I am a figment of your imagination.” “And I am one of yours,” she says. He laughs as if this were funny. Flora leaves as soon as Samson rounds the corner, leaving the phone to ring and ring, eager to get home to prove to Rock that she is not a figment of his imagination and to herself that she is not a figment of her own.