A Room on Lorelei Street Read online

  Zoe appreciates Murray’s humor. She knows his dad. He comes in most Saturday mornings for hash browns and weak tea. He is a gentle, stooped man with a wobbly voice and an unstable gait, who announces his arrival by jingling the change in his pocket. Murray always saves the corner seat at the counter for him. He comes in less these days—his health failing—but Murray still saves the seat, just in case.

  “No problem, Murray,” she had said and left with the pie. She didn’t pay attention to the neighborhood overly much on her way. She delivered the pie to Murray’s parents and then headed for home. Home. Walls, floors, unpaid bills, dirty dishes, Mama, and nothing more. Home. Mama would either be unconscious or want to talk. Home.

  Her mind bobbed and weaved around the word, what it meant and what she wanted it to mean, so she didn’t notice the fig trees, the shaded parkways, the crumpled sidewalks, or the old but loved homes. She didn’t notice any of it until a tiny red sign high in a window wedged its way into her life.

  She turns off Carmichael onto the street whose name replays in her head over and over again, a background beat that everything else melts into. Six houses down she pulls her car to a stop at the uneven curb. She opens her door, then eases it closed behind her, careful not to slam it, severing the silence and maybe the dream.

  She walks around and leans against the blue car that she has come to call her own. Mama can’t drive because her license is suspended, so the Thunderbird has become Zoe’s. The chrome digs into her back and she shifts, but she won’t leave her viewpoint. She can’t. Mama herself has pinned her to this place. Daddy, too. Pinned and pushed with years of so much…nothing.

  One house away she can see the tiny red sign in the upper window. She checks each day on her way to work, and each day it is still there. Each day, she leans against her car and imagines what the house is like inside—what the room is like. The house is old, so the room must be old, the floors probably polished wood, a staircase that’s worn, with a smooth, burnished banister, perhaps teeth marks where a child has chewed it. A braided blue rug rests at the top of the stairs. A calico cat curls around a chest of drawers and disappears into a doorway. Carefully chosen paintings hang on the walls, and maybe pictures of family, too. Old pictures. Loved pictures. There are probably smells in the house, too. Smells she would like. Lavender. Blueberry muffins. Freshly squeezed lemons. Cleanser. Polish. She can almost hear a washing machine, churning, churning, washing away all the dirt that a house can hold. A radio plays lightly in the kitchen and jangled, cheerful humming comes from some other room in the house. What else would be in a house like that? She allows herself fifteen minutes every day to think about it.

  Beyond the short wooden fence that surrounds the property she has seen a woman stooped in the garden. The woman is old, small, and delicate-boned. Her hair is wild and her clothes mismatched. Today she is not there. Zoe wonders if she is a worker or maybe the owner of the house—the owner of the room.

  Her eyes are still turned in the direction of the house, but she no longer sees it. Instead she sees her pay stubs and adds them up. With tips she brings home about $210 every two weeks; monthly that’s $420. Knock off forty dollars for gas—what does she spend on cigarettes? Twenty, thirty dollars? She isn’t sure, so she will say thirty. About forty a week for groceries—times four is $160 a month. Lunches and other incidentals probably add up to another thirty dollars? She concentrates, trying to add it in her head. “Two-sixty,” she whispers. That leaves $160. She has little saved, maybe two hundred hidden in her drawer at home, and that is because she just got paid. Where does it all go?

  Mama.

  Mama always forgets to pay a bill and needs a little help. “Sugar, just run down to the utility office with some cash, will you? I’ll pay you back. I’m a little short.” But Mama always seems to find the money for other things.

  Zoe continues to work with her figures. She could cut back on her cigarettes and eat more at Murray’s. She should be able to come up with $180 left over. One hundred eighty. It sounds like so much, but—

  “You going to stand there, or you going to come up and take a look?”

  Zoe jumps, her cigarette tumbling from her fingers into the gutter. Pay stubs and figures disappear from her vision, and she focuses on the person who appeared out of nowhere. A brown grocery bag is in her arms.

  “Excuse me?” she says to the wild-haired woman she saw in the garden five days ago.

  “I’ve seen you here three or four times now. Guessed you were checking out the neighborhood. You must’ve figured out by now that we don’t have any roving gangs around here—a couple folks whose cheese has slid off their cracker, but that’s about it. So, you ready to see the room?”

  Zoe thinks the old lady’s voice doesn’t match her attitude. She is assertive, almost snippy, confident in a crazy, old-woman way, but she is smiling, and her voice is soft, lyrical. It reminds Zoe of a bird.

  “Is it your room?”

  The old lady snorts. “My house. So I guess it must be my room, too. Here. Let’s go.” She shoves the bag of groceries into Zoe’s arms and starts walking. Zoe follows.

  “But I really don’t have time….” Zoe tries to turn her wrist so she can see her watch, but the groceries prevent her. What is she doing? “Ma’am?”

  But the lady keeps walking. Down the sidewalk, up the drive, around to a side walkway, finally stopping at the bottom of a narrow stairway that hugs the side of the garage. She raises her foot to the first step and turns to Zoe.

  “Has its own entrance so you can come and go when you want—you keep crazy hours?”

  Zoe hesitates, trying to decide. Is midnight crazy on a weeknight? She doesn’t think so. Weekends are different, but she could change that.

  “No, not too crazy.”

  “Too bad. I’m up all hours—never could keep a schedule.” She chuckles, and takes another step up.

  “Wait!” Zoe stops her. “Shouldn’t I find out how much first? That is, what you’re asking for the room?”

  The lady turns, and combs her wild corkscrew wisps back with her fingers. “Two hundred a month,” she says.

  In an instant, Zoe feels the heavy, stale air of the hallway sweep over her and sees rumpled, dirty sheets. She smells the cold, never-eaten eggs in the kitchen and the sweet stench of burgundy-stained glasses drowning in soap bubbles. She knows she needs to say something, but no words come.

  The lady slaps her hand on the stair rail like she has just remembered something. “Leastways, that’s what I was asking, but seeing as I haven’t had any takers, I’m having a blow-out sale—today it goes for one-fifty. That includes utilities and a plot in the garden.”

  A sale? One-hundred fifty? That would leave her with thirty dollars to spare. A finger of wind ruffles Zoe’s hair and she smells the autumn crocus breezing up from the garden.

  Four

  The lady rummages through her pocket for the key. “I still have a few things in there, but I can take them out if they don’t ka-nish with your ka-nash.” She slides the key into the lock, and the door swings open. Zoe steps inside. The old lady takes the groceries from her arms and sets them on a small half-circle table next to the door. “This is it,” she says.

  Zoe’s arms prickle. She turns, trying to take it all in. A dull ache grows in her chest. It is not for her. It is too much. A real room with real floors and walls. A room for sleeping and reading and dancing and…in her imagination she has pictured the room, but she has never seen herself in it.

  Her shoes squeak as she turns on the polished wooden floors. The room takes up the whole space over the garage. On the opposite wall is a jukebox showing signs of age, parts of its chrome grill mottled with black and green splotches, with real 45s lining the back, waiting to be pulled forward by a poised mechanical arm. Next to it is a bed, a large four-poster with wood so dark it is nearly black, like the old oiled pews at Ruby First Baptist. The mattress is white-tufted bareness, waiting for someone…someone to cover it with a spread.
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  Her eyes continue to scan the room. A large-paned window that looks out on the street and driveway fills the room with shafts of late-afternoon light. A deep window seat with a hodgepodge of worn, colorful pillows lies below it. To the right is an old wooden dresser, the same coffee-black color as the four-poster bed. It holds a large brass clock in the shape of a panther, the time ticking away across its belly. The clock is reflected in the ornate carved mirror behind it, so two panthers creep in unison across the dark dresser. The reflection in the mirror draws Zoe’s eyes to the ceiling for the first time. She leans her head back to take it all in. It is deep indigo blue, like a rich velvet blanket to keep everything underneath safe and warm. It is as deep and dark as the Ruby sky on a moonless night. She can barely see faint luminescent spots scattered across the blue expanse. Stars, she thinks. This crazy, corkscrew-haired lady has painted stars on her ceiling.

  She lowers her gaze and continues around the room. In the corner, to the right of the entrance is a makeshift kitchenette, obviously new and added on. It has a tiny refrigerator, a small sink with a narrow tiled counter, and a huge wooden hutch that holds a hot plate and a coffeemaker.

  “What do you think?” the lady asks.

  She wants to say it is magnificent. She wants to run over to the bed and jump up and down on the mattress like a ten-year-old, reaching up to touch the ceiling and the stars and screaming and laughing, I will take it, I will take it, but she knows she needs to say something else.

  “It’s nice,” she says. “Why are you renting it out?” She is glad her words come out calm and even, like she has done this before, like she knows what to ask when she doesn’t.

  The old lady’s eyes meet Zoe’s, and for the first time Zoe notices their color—clear light amber with flecks of faded green. “Fair question,” the lady says as she pulls a package of red licorice from the grocery bag and rips it open. She offers a strand to Zoe then takes one for herself. “My tax man suggested it. Said it’s a way to ‘defray costs,’ a fancy way of saying it will help make ends meet. Guess he’s right. The damn house has been paid off for years, but taxes and licorice keep going up, and Social Security doesn’t.”

  “Oh,” Zoe says like she understands. Taxes. She twists the red cord in her fingers. She only wanted to make sure no one had been murdered in this room. It seemed like a reasonable thought, but now it is ridiculous, childish. A new feeling is spreading through her. Like there are too many things that she needs to understand but doesn’t. Will she have to pay taxes? Shit. Why am I here?

  “The bathroom is through there,” the lady says, pointing to a door next to the jukebox. “The kitchen wasn’t too difficult, but a bathroom was just too hard to add. It’s in with the rest of the house—just down the hall, and you have it all to yourself. That a problem?”

  A problem? Zoe doesn’t know. It suddenly seems like too big of a decision. A bathroom down the hall? Her excitement mixes with fear and she can’t think. She doesn’t know what to say. What do you think, Zoe? What? What? She takes a bite of licorice to give herself more time to think. She chews and swallows. “No, I don’t think it’s a problem,” she says, but she is not sure if that is what she wanted to say at all.

  “Opal,” the lady says holding out her hand. “Opal Keats.”

  Zoe takes her hand and feels papery skin and wiggling veins beneath her fingers. The hand is warm and small in her own. “Zoe Beth Buckman,” she says.

  Opal smiles and twists her head to the side like a sparrow, as if she is trying to get a better view of her. “You old enough to be renting a place, Zoe?” she asks.

  Zoe thinks. She is seventeen years old…going on a hundred. She changed more of Kyle’s diapers than Mama and Daddy put together. She has cleaned vomit from the bathroom floor more times than she can remember and has washed her own clothes since she was ten. She has tucked Mama into bed and kissed her forehead but can’t remember when Mama’s lips last brushed her own temple as she went to sleep. She has worked since she was twelve, first babysitting, then waiting tables. She identified Daddy at the morgue when Mama was too broken up and Grandma couldn’t be bothered. She has lived at least three lifetimes in her seventeen years. She looks into Opal’s eyes. “Yes,” she says. “I’m old enough.”

  “I can see that now,” Opal says, squinting. “I can see it in your eyes. You have an old soul.” There is a long pause. Silence. Not even the panther clock seems to make a sound. Zoe turns around once more, taking a last look at the room, seeing details she missed before, like the braided rug at the end of the bed and a life-size stone bulldog tucked under the table by the front door. She hears her thick rubber-soled waitress shoes squeak on the floor as she turns and then remembers that this was how she imagined it. Polished wooden floors. That much she knew.

  “Will you be taking the room, Zoe?” Opal asks.

  Zoe pulls her car keys from her pocket. She looks everywhere but into Opal’s eyes. She aches for the room, but a weight, a whisper, pulls at her…. What about Mama…what about Mama? She reaches down and brushes the head of the stone bulldog. “I’ll have to think on it,” she says, and she leaves not caring that, for the first time ever, she will be late for work.

  Five

  Zoe stops the car at the curb and turns off the ignition, but she doesn’t get out. It was a busy night at the diner and she is tired, more tired than she should be after a short shift. Instead of thinking on it as she promised Opal, she had tried to concentrate on other things, like orders of chicken-fried steak or peach cobbler, even school and Mrs. Garrett. All through her shift she battled to keep the room out of her head—the room she couldn’t possibly take—but instead the battle escalated into a raging war.

  “You okay?” Murray asked her when a plate of fries and a patty melt crashed from her arm to the floor.

  “Yes,” she said, but even as she helped clean up the mess, all she could see was a clock on a brass panther’s belly, ticking away seconds, months, and years.

  No peace is in sight, but she desperately needs some. She kicks off her shoes, rolls down the window of the Thunderbird and leans her seat back. She can’t go into the house. She still needs a few moments alone. Time.

  It’s a hot September night, but heat has never bothered Zoe. She hears Mr. Kalowatz’s sprinklers hissing next door, and from across the street a faint drone from the Fensters’ TV drifts through their screen door. It is so still, so calm, she thinks, and she drinks it in. Periodically a tree frog starts up a wave of chirping and then quiets again. And that she soaks in, too. All those things outside of herself that seem to have order. She lets them seep in.

  For a moment she forgets and is able to fall into the stillness. The gentle harmony of sounds cradles her, rocks her, and in the darkness, her tired faded house seems almost beautiful. She rubs her stocking feet together to push away the soreness and looks out the window into the glittered sky.

  The angels threw glitter up there just for you, Zoe, Daddy had told her. They celebrated almost as much as I did the day you were born. Every time you look up there you remember how special you are—so special the angels threw a big party.

  She rests her head on the ledge of the window and scans the billions of blinking stars sprinkled all the way down to the horizon. A party, she thinks. “I must have been pretty special, Daddy,” she whispers. The Hendersons’ dog two houses down begins barking, which starts a domino effect, and distant dogs throughout the neighborhood join in, until the sprinklers, the reruns of M*A*S*H, and even the shrill tree frog are a background rhythm. She smiles at how quickly calm can turn to chaos. Mr. Henderson comes out his door and yells for his dog to shut up, and soon the dog’s silence begins a reverse domino effect. The crescendo subsides, and the calm returns. It’s all connected in strange, mysterious ways, she guesses…the sprinklers, the M*A*S*H reruns, the tree frog, the dogs, even Mr. Henderson…all connected in ways they can’t ever know, ways only she can sense, because on this dark, starry night she is there to hear them. She is the
re to listen.

  Almost revived, she gathers her shoes and purse to go into the house—and to Mama. The chain-link gate groans its usual warning as she passes through, and she tries to ignore it. I have to go in, she thinks. When she reaches the steps, she sees a red tag hanging on the doorknob and she squeezes her eyes tight, trying to hold the battle in. She snatches the notice from the door and reads that they have forty-eight hours left before the power is cut.

  “Dammit, Mama!” she says under her breath as she opens the door. “Mama?” she calls. There is no answer. She walks to the kitchen and sees a gallon jug of red wine sitting on the table, half its contents already gone. She slaps the notice onto the table next to the jug. The dishes from this afternoon still sit in the sink, now covered with cold, gray water.

  “When is ‘later,’ Mama?” she sighs. She turns to go to her room, but a scrap of paper taped to the refrigerator catches her eye.

  Sorry, Sugar. Principal called. Had his mind set so I didn’t even try. No big deal. One-day suspension. Go to counselor’s office in the morning. Something about counseling during sixth period on Fridays, too. Sounds cushy and gets you out of class.

  Mama

  Zoe feels a hot rush in her chest. Yes, Mama, it is a big deal! I have P.E. sixth period! Tennis! But it will be a cold day in hell before you ever remember that! She rips the note from the refrigerator. “Mama!” she calls. She walks down the hall, past the bathroom, to Mama’s closed door. The note trembles in one hand, and she opens the door with the other. She stops when it is only open a few inches.

  Mama’s legs lie tangled in the sheets, but between them two larger, hairier legs move in a rhythm that make Zoe’s stomach wrench. She stumbles back from the door, leaving it ajar and fumbles for her own doorknob, searching for an escape. She falls into her room, closing the door behind her.