Karolina Waclawiak - How to Get into the Twin Palms

Mary was waiting outside for me. She told me the ladder was in the garage. I told her I had never done this before. She said it was okay, her husband always used to do it and it was just a matter of getting up the ladder and balancing while you took out the leaves. Anyone could do it, really. The old man down the street, if she wanted him to, he’d do anything for her, she said. Anything. But, she wanted me to do it. I asked her if she preferred if I vacuum her rug inside. She thought about it for a moment and decided I could do that too.

“I like your hair but I looked better in it.”

I looked at her white. She didn’t look better than me anymore. I continued to climb up the ladder I had found in the garage, graying wood and water-damaged. I wasn’t sure if it would hold me.

“Should I wear gloves or something, Mary?”

“I don’t have any,” she called up to me.

There were shards of sharp, dry leaves in the gutters, dead bugs, sticks, candy wrappers, things I couldn’t even name. At first I took them in between my thumb and forefinger, dropping them slowly below me, on top of her, into her eyes.

“Watch it,” she screamed, and went inside.

She left before I could say sorry. I stared down the length of the gutter and knew taking pinches of the debris would keep me up here all day long. The sun was hot and burning on my neck and I leaned over to look deep into the gutters. Didn’t she have someone to hire?

“I’ve got some Indian nickels for you!” She stared up at me, smile wide, holding the faded nickels up at me. I thought about sending a pinch down into her eyes again and decided not to.

When I finished cleaning out the gutters I felt an itch on my arms and decided to ignore it. I climbed down the ladder and focused more on the burning on my neck and back.

Mary let me into her house. Her vacuum was already out, waiting for me.

“I gotta sit down, Mary. I need a drink.”

She shuffled into the kitchen and returned with a scotch on the rocks. “I didn’t know if you took one cube or two.”

I stared at her. Water is what I wanted, but scotch seemed to be the only thing she had.

“Did you see the shrine to my honey?”

In the corner of the kitchen stood her wedding picture. The front of her dress pulled up to show off her legs, her boxer-faced husband smiling at his red-haired siren. There were other pictures too. Him older, on a leather recliner with a plaid shirt on. I never wanted to see him as an old man. I wanted to keep the young, strapping man in my mind. I wondered why she didn’t want to keep thinking of him as the young man she once had.

I looked around her house. “What’s in there?” I pointed to the closed wood-paneled screen.

“His room. I haven’t cleaned it.”

“Where do you sleep?” I asked.

“In there.”

I stumbled over this for a moment. Why did she call it his room first? I wanted to see it but I knew she would never let me. It seemed sacred. It seemed like things happened in there that I would never be able to find out for myself.

“He treated me like a princess.”

I became acutely aware that my arm itched more and more. I looked down at it. Red bumps had started to form. I showed them to Mary. She waved them off.

“My love cleaned those gutters all the time, never a scratch.”

“I know, but maybe something’s up there.”

“Not possible.” She went into the kitchen with my glass and came back with a refill. “Two cubes. You look like two cubes.”

All I wanted was water but I couldn’t bring myself to ask so I gulped down the scotch.

“You have to sip, honey.”

“I’m sorry, Mary.”

“I get lonely here. No one gives a fuck about me.”

I wanted to tell her I cared, but my arm itched and the fear of what it was kept me from really, really caring. She did this to me. Her gutters. A man’s job put on me. I only knew her from bingo and I didn’t need this. I hoped she didn’t want me to vacuum too.

“Do you need a boom box?”

I thought about it for a moment. “No, I don’t think so.”

She looked around the room from her perch in the recliner, her husband’s recliner. “Do you know any men who need clothes?”

I only knew a handful of men, Lev, the desk clerk, and Room 214. Greg. I didn’t think they’d want to wear a dead man’s clothes.

“He had such nice clothes. I have to give them to someone.”

“Goodwill?”

“Then they could end up anywhere. You know what quality these pieces were? Suits like you’ve never seen. He kept things nice.”

I smiled and tapped my glass. “I bet.”

“Well, I’ll give you the boom box, if you want. But not the clothes. I need to know where they end up.”

I got up and asked to go to the bathroom. She pointed down the hall, past the room. I wanted to push in the screen but I knew better.

The hall had more paintings of horses and ships sailing, bad prints of bad paintings, old paintings, and I knew if I moved them the wallpaper would stand out bright against the rest of the fading paper. The walls faded from the sun and age.

“Oooh, my honey loved horses. He was buried with the best of the horse pictures. I only left myself a few. He loved the horses. I made him a wake that you wouldn’t believe.”

She sighed.

“He bet horses. He sure did. People were after him.” She waved her hand at me, screwed up her face. “You know. ”

“Oh yeah, Mary?” I said. She never talked badly about him. This was a first. She made a lip-zipping motion and I knew it wasn’t going to happen again.

“I spent my money, honey. I did it right. I didn’t burn him up like those fucks who live across the street. Catholics don’t burn their dead. We have respect. He said, he begged, ‘Don’t burn me up.’ And I didn’t, honey. I would never.”

She waved her hand at me and I thought about what she was saying. We laid out our bodies too. I walked into the bathroom.

“This is the house Jack built!” she yelled at me as I walked down the hall, away from her.

“What?” I asked, turning.

“This is the house that Jack built! It’ll be here long after me. They don’t make ’em like this anymore, honey. My father didn’t use one piece of cheap material on here.”

“I see that, Mary,” I said and disappeared into the bathroom. I could hear her talking about her father, Jack, as I closed the door.

Inside her bathroom nothing seemed clean, there was a yellow ring around the toilet bowl, dusty rose soaps in seashell shapes, a grime of white haze on the glass shower doors, spots on the mirror and fogging at the sides. It made my face look distorted and I knew why Mary drew her arched eyebrows askew.

It made me feel for Mary and I didn’t want to come out of the bathroom and face her. But I did and when I came out she had cobbled together a gift bag for me — a stuffed leopard, a perfume something by Coty — I couldn’t make out the faded label, and a three-pack of eye shadows. Long strips of blue and pearl pink and silver. The plastic cover was fogged up and a gold French-sounding name was engraved on the cover.

“The leopard made me think of you. Keep it.”

I thanked her and realized that she wanted me out. “Do you need help with anything else, Mary?”

“I need to do my exercises.” She shuffled past me and opened the wooden screen door to the bedroom. She creaked it closed behind her.

I heard her turn on an exercise video. A woman with pep called out to stretch your legs and shake out your arms. It was muffled behind the door but I could hear it.

I DROVE BY THE TWIN PALMS AND SAW LEVsnuffing out a cigarette on the sidewalk. He ground it down deep with the heel of his shoe and looked up at me, and I slowed down. He looked surprised, I decided, and happy. I rolled down the window and smiled at him.