Читать книгу Six Metres of Pavement - Farzana Doctor - Страница 13

— 8 —

Nearly Naked

Ismail saw Lydia’s mother again, a week after he caught her looking at him from her window. He was on the front porch wearing only a bathrobe, the late autumn winds lapping at his bare legs. He was searching for his Toronto Star, which the delivery guy invariably tossed anywhere but within easy reach from his door. Finally, Ismail discovered it wedged precariously between two porch steps, threatening to fall beneath. He reached down with both hands and yanked the heavy roll out from between the steps.

Unfortunately, the effort left him unarmed against a sudden gust of wind that lifted his terry-cloth robe high above his skinny, goose-pimpled thighs. He pulled the thin fabric around himself with one hand, held onto his beloved paper with the other, and rushed back into the house like a self-conscious schoolgirl. Before closing the screen door, he scanned the street to check that no one had witnessed the spectacle. And there she was, peering at him through the clear glass of the living room window. After their encounter the previous week, Ismail wasn’t terribly surprised to see her there. Their eyes met for a moment, and then his peep-show audience let the curtain fall from her fingers and she disappeared from sight.

Ismail mused about what the widow had seen in the immodest moment before he’d run back inside. Studying himself in the hallway mirror, he imagined himself a brown, male, middle-aged Marilyn Monroe caught over the gusts of a sewer grate. Did the lady notice his knocked knees, veiny legs?

Ismail patted down his wet-from-the-shower hair, straightened his robe, and looked in the mirror again. He’d never considered himself a handsome man, but didn’t think he was all that bad, either. Crow’s feet sprouted around his eyes, fine lines that implied he smiled more often than he did, but he was otherwise mostly unwrinkled. He proudly surveyed his full head of hair with its distinguished-looking grey flecks at the temples. Sucking in the slight paunch around his middle, he decided that he was still slim. And he only needed reading glasses when the light was poor.

Ismail locked the door, and soon forgot about his neighbour, allowing the fat Saturday paper to consume his thoughts.

— * —

“Come on, Mãe! Do something! You’ll feel better if you do something. You’re making yourself into a depressed old woman!” Lydia chided. She did not like her mother’s habit of sitting by the front window.

Celia did not have the energy to be offended by the comment, and anyway she did feel like a depressed old woman, even though she’d just turned fifty. She nodded as though she were listening, and promptly returned to her post by the window, which caused Lydia to sigh loudly.

Lydia never knew what her mother was looking at, and even if Celia told her, she likely wouldn’t have approved, anyway. She nagged about her eating and sleeping habits, whether she had gone out that day, if she’d washed her hair that week. She constantly asked her when she was going to stop wearing black, had even brought up two boxes of her regular clothes from the basement. Celia understood this to be her daughter’s way of caring for her, and not so different from the way she, herself, had raised Lydia or cared for her own mother. But now that she was on the receiving end of this treatment she found it disconcerting, their roles reversing in a clumsy dance; neither really knew the steps, and Celia wasn’t sure she wanted Lydia taking the lead.

Celia disregarded her daughter’s entreaties to join the family for breakfast. She smelled the scent of biscuits wafting warm and sweet, but didn’t have much of an appetite those days, and besides, she was involved in something far more interesting.

She was watching the man across the street, who at that moment was standing in the cold, wearing a striped bathrobe. She stared at his chicken legs, uncombed hair, and smooth chest. Celia felt a twinkle in her eye, and mischievous thoughts crackled through her melancholy, surprising her. It had been some time since saucy ideas had come to mind, so at first she didn’t know what to do with them.

Marco came and sat in her lap. He watched a tiny spider — barely the width of a fingernail — construct a web in the window pane: Look, Vovó, a spider! She smiled at his four-year-old sense of glee and then pursed her lips at the insect, blew into its web, frightening the spider and delighting her grandson. You made it windy for the spider!

While she listened to Marco’s laughter, she looked up to see a sudden autumn wind blow under the neighbour’s robe, its terry-cloth stripes transforming into exclamation marks. High into the air they went, revealing bits of man flesh that Celia hadn’t seen in much too long. She giggled at the sight, stroked her grandson’s hair, and recalled a walk on a cool autumn’s day, and the warmth of her dressy burgundy coat. She peeked through the curtains again, watched the man’s retreating back, and saw a flock of Canada geese cross the blue sky over his house.

Memories are like roving magnets that attract others along for the ride. As the Canada geese honked at her from the past, ambulance sirens pulsed fear through her body. The taste of too-sweet chocolate cake brought bile to her throat. She felt her palms pushing against a heart, willing it to beat again, and saw empty eyes, a spirit already displaced. She watched arthritic fingers make eyelids close.

Celia felt Marco scamper to the floor. She had a feeling that he’d been talking to her, but his words blurred in her mind. She wiped away wetness from her cheeks and then saw that his were wet, too. Lydia called him away and he ran into her waiting arms.