Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“What railroad?”

“There were railroad tracks running just a street away, surely you remember. And I’ve never told you this, but every night, after you’d fallen asleep, I stayed awake for hours listening to the freight trains go by. They were so loud, like huge metal boxes being dropped again and again and again. Of course, you slept through everything. But every time one of them rattled by, I wanted so badly to wake you up. I imagined us dressing in the dark and sneaking outside and hopping on one of the cars together, leaving all our luggage behind, not even bothering about the final destination, because anywhere out there would be new, anywhere would be thrilling. I never did wake you, though—I didn’t want you to think I was disappointed. But maybe I should have. I mean, who knows where we’d be now if we had really done it… Paul, are you even listening?”

“I’m sorry, honey, I’d love to reminisce, but with this work crisis, my mind just isn’t…” He had finished surveying his clothes and was now pulling shirts and jackets off hangers. “Besides, take it from me, travel is overrated.”

“Wait—are you packing your bag?”

“Honey, I’ve just explained to you, I have to go to Texas tomorrow, back on Friday… Shall I fix you another drink? I’m going downstairs to make one for myself in a minute. If ever I needed one—or three—”

“Sure,” she said after a moment’s pause.

When she stood, the taffeta pooled stiffly around her feet, making her stumble.

He looked up, seemed to take in her drab maternity bra and the unzipped skirt for the first time, and said smiling, “Maybe you should buy yourself some nice new clothes while I’m away. Something… custom-fitted.”

She winced and opened her mouth to reply and closed her mouth again.

“One vodka tonic coming right up,” he said, already walking away—and then Celia wailed as she always did, without any warning: asleep one instant, rending the air with bloodcurdling screams the next. In the blink of an eye Mrs. Caldwell wiggled out of the skirt, tossed it onto the hanger, threw on her robe, and was flying out of the closet. In the doorway she heard a faint metallic rustle and, glancing back, discovered the skirt crumpled on the floor, the hanger, bereft of its weight, swinging lightly; but she did not return to pick it up, vanishing instead around the bend of the hallway.

The woman on the other side of the mirror stared after her thoughtfully. It was sad, she considered, what some lives came to when all was said and done; yet in truth, she failed to muster much sadness on behalf of Mrs. Caldwell. She moved her eyes around the closet shelves, studying the haughty lacquer of red-soled pumps, the soft sheen of cashmere shawls, the dry luster of snakeskin clutches. What if some catastrophe erased at one go all the cushioned comforts of that woman’s oblivious life—some devastating natural disaster or, better yet, a bloody revolution? Her husband would be one of the first to get shot, and she would have to rely on herself alone to feed her brood of starving children. She would have nothing left to her name but a pile of expensive trifles, shards of a beautiful, idle life that could no longer be imagined in the new world of military fatigues, food rations, and sudden death; and she would have to trade each ruffled gown, each jeweled bag, for a crust of bread, for a spoonful of milk, for a sliver of life-giving medicine. There might be a poem here, she thought, happy as always when things shimmered with potential in her mind; but as she glanced again around the closet, she decided against it, already bored with the meaningless clutter of the costly ephemera—bored with Mrs. Caldwell. She picked up her notebook, rubbed the bridge of her nose in a small gesture she had inherited from her father, and left to search for ideas in the wider world.

“And don’t argue with me, child,” her grandmother said in that habitual tone of disapproval Mrs. Caldwell remembered so well. Whenever she lifted the cigarette to her unevenly painted lips, the pale, expressionless cameo women on her bracelet clattered down her mottled arm. “Your life is unhealthy, I tell you. At your age, you need to meet people, go places, have experiences. You need to be greedy .”

Again Mrs. Caldwell did not answer, hoping that such a demonstrable failure to uphold her end of the conversation might put a stop to the tedious dream. She did not remember falling asleep. She remembered herding the children to bed and mixing drinks and feeling better after the first martini and worse after the second. She remembered Paul, who had again returned from work in a foul mood, lecturing her about the state of the economy, asking whether she had not, of late, spent much too freely, carrying on unintelligibly about mortgages, budgets, overheads and underwrites, or was it overheaders and underwriters, then glancing at her waistline mid-sentence, and glancing away just as quickly. She remembered setting her jaw, making a silent, angry resolution, abandoning her barely touched third martini to change into her workout clothes, and stumbling downstairs to the exercise room. She even remembered plopping down onto the weight bench to tighten her shoelaces—but after that there was a disconcerting blank, and now here she was, running on the treadmill, just as she had intended, except that her late grandmother was sitting on the treadmill’s handlebars, wearing her old purple robe of faded velour and felt slippers the color of dusty roses, and, in turn, lecturing her about life, pulling on her cigarette between admonitions.

“Let me tell you something, child,” her grandmother began anew. “A woman arrived among us recently, and not an old woman either, not a day over sixty—”

“Arrived where?” Mrs. Caldwell interrupted, forgetting her decision not to encourage the unnerving apparition. “Heaven?”

“Never you mind where,” her grandmother replied with irritation. “Anyway, this woman, she spent the last fifteen years of her life lying in bed. Nothing wrong with her, mind you, she just didn’t feel like getting up. Had a live-in nurse bring her meals and clean her messes and tend to her bedsores. Now she’ll be stuck where she is forever. You have to pay to move up, you know, and the currency is memories, stories of your life you must give away, like a kind of scouring, a gradual peeling of onion layers, do you see, to reveal the core within. And no, before you start to argue, there is a world of difference between memories and fantasies. But anyway, this woman, she is like a potato instead of an onion, all bland and mealy inside, so she has nothing to give, nothing whatsoever.”

“Oh, is it like purgatory, then?” Mrs. Caldwell panted, curious in spite of herself.

She had finished the first mile, and was doing the second mile uphill.

Her grandmother ignored her question. “There is an even sadder case, a woman who sat on her toilet for years, refusing to stand up, until her skin actually grew around the seat. Mind-boggling, it is, but I tell you”—and she stabbed the glowing cigarette perilously close to Mrs. Caldwell’s face—“this is exactly where you are heading if you are not careful. Can’t you just stop this senseless trotting in place and listen to me? No matter how fast you run, you won’t run away from yourself, you know.”

Mrs. Caldwell clamped her lips tight, and furtively increased the speed and the incline of the treadmill, hoping that her grandmother might fall off; but the old woman held on.

“It’s not healthy, I tell you,” she repeated. “You need to learn how to drive, you need to get out of the house, you need people around you. And by ‘people’ I don’t mean anyone below the age of ten, or anyone whom you pay, either. Otherwise, before you know it, you’ll start talking to yourself or imagining things that aren’t there, or worse, not being able to tell the two apart. You’re too young to spend your life within four walls.”