Under One Roof: How a Tough Old Woman in a Little Old House Changed My Life. Barry Martin

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СКАЧАТЬ wearing expensive sunglasses were drinking coffee outside the India Bistro. Dads and kids with bicycles that had shock absorbers in the front were riding past Shakti Vinyasa Yoga across the street.

      “It sure is different,” I said. “I still like it, though. I’ve always liked how everything’s so close together in Ballard.”

      “You can get from anywhere to anywhere in about five minutes,” she said, and as if to prove it, she added, “Here we are.”

      It had, indeed, taken all of five minutes to get from Edith’s out-of-the-way house to the hair salon in the middle of Market Street.

      Everybody in the salon knew Edith, and she seemed to know everybody. She greeted each of them by name. If anyone seemed surprised to see Edith with an escort, they didn’t say, and she didn’t offer any explanation. She just asked them how long they thought she’d be there, and they told her about forty minutes. She asked me where I was going to go.

      “Well, everything’s about four minutes from here, Edith, so wherever I am, you all give me a call when you’re five minutes from being done and I’ll be here.” I handed my card to the woman who ran the shop.

      “Well, all right then,” Edith said, and tilted her head to regard me with a clear, direct look. “Thank you, Barry.”

      It was a little early for lunch, but as long as I was on Market Street, I figured I’d continue down to the Totem House. That’s one of the places that had been there a long time. It has a big, corny totem pole out front, and they sell a great seafood chowder. I picked up an order, and decided to drive down toward the beachfront.

      A train was passing over the railroad trestle about a quarter-mile down the road. Just beyond that were the locks; by the flow of the water, it looked to me like they had just been opened. It’s kind of amazing, when you think about it – down here, just west of downtown, is salt water. It’s actually the other end of the canal from Edith’s house, just five minutes away, and that’s fresh water. The locks are what connects them. If they just opened the locks, I figured, a boat should be showing up here pretty quick. I like the locks – they have a viewing window down there, and when the salmon are running you can go in and watch them.

      I drove past the marina, past the hundreds and hundreds of sailboats – that’s one thing about Ballard that hasn’t changed: They do love their boats. Just beyond the marina, there were a good hundred people sitting on benches and lying on blankets all over the beach. Nobody was in bathing suits, because it was still too cold, and besides, the water’s about 54 degrees that early in the season, but a beach day is a beach day and everybody was out there with picnic lunches, only no bathing suits. Shirts and pants and beach balls. Kind of a funny scene.

      It was just a few minutes after I got back to the trailer that my cell phone rang. Edith was ready to go home, so I jumped back in her car. She was waiting for me at the door of the salon; as I helped her back into the car, I got a big whiff of hairspray, one of those things that just transports you into another time, another era. I guess my mom must have used that kind of hairspray, or something, when I was a kid. It occurred to me that with everything else going on that morning, I hadn’t really taken a moment to consider that here’s this woman, well into her eighties, living a pretty solitary existence, and still going to the trouble of getting her hair done on a regular basis. It says something about her, and about her generation, I guess. For some reason I remembered those pictures you see of men at baseball games, years ago, in shirts and ties and fedoras. There was something a little more proper and formal about the way they went around in the world; it seemed like a measure of respect for each other, and for themselves, I guess, that’s kinda been lost as time goes by.

      When we got back to the house, I walked her to the front door. I still had never been inside the house, and I was kind of curious about how she lived in there, all alone all these years, but I wasn’t going to find out this day.

      She turned and smiled. “Thank you again, Barry. That was very neighborly of you.”

      “Not a problem. Let me know if you need anything else. Say, Edith?”

      “Yes, Barry?”

      “Your hair looks real nice.”

      Over the course of the next few weeks, I had more visits with Edith, always in the front yard. But one morning, she wasn’t out where I expected to find her, so I knocked on her door, and she called from the kitchen for me to come in.

      I will never forget that moment I stepped inside. Never. The first thing I saw was the end table. It was the table from my childhood. It was that classic fifties style – a plastic-laminate end table, dyed light tan to look like wood, small and rectangular, with a second shelf, half the size of the lower table, raised above it on two thin wooden side slats. On the higher shelf sat a lamp, and when I saw it I about fainted right then and there. Not only was the table the same, but this was the same exact lamp my family had when I was a kid as well. Same color and everything. It had a pink ceramic base shaped like an inverted vase, with little gold rods protruding from its top, and little gold metal balls on the ends of them. It was topped off with a wide translucent yellow paper shade, rimmed with a spiral metal edging and decorated with little brown palm fronds.

      Looking at that table and lamp, this whooshing sensation came over me, like I was being transported back in time. And I was, really. For a second there, I was a kid again, walking into my mother’s house, half expecting to get offered a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or get hollered at for not wiping my feet.

      When I got my bearings back, I took a moment to look around. I couldn’t believe how much stuff there was – all the books and records and CDs and figurines and photos – but still how very neat and tidy it all looked. Everything in its place.

      The sun glinted off a metallic etching that was hanging on the wall. There were four of them, not quite gold, not quite silver; all street scenes from Venice. I wondered what the story was behind those.

      When Edith came back into the room, I asked her about the etchings, but all she said was, “It’s an interesting story. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.” A very polite way, I guess, of saying “None of your business.” So we moved on to other topics. She told me her friend Gail had stopped by earlier that day. Turns out Gail was just a kid growing up on the block when Edith first met her. In fact, Edith used to babysit for Gail and her sisters a lot. Gail had gone off to Alaska for a long time but came back a few years ago and now stopped by every now and then, and brought pictures of her and her sisters, all grown up now, and all of their children, all grown up as well.

      It was nice to hear that her friend was still coming by after all these years, and, frankly, that Edith had some company besides me.

      When I got back to the trailer I was surprised to see how late it had gotten. I’d wasted a good part of the morning with Edith, yakking about everything and nothing. I was finding it easier and easier to talk with her. Driving home that night, I thought about why that might be. What was it that was drawing me to her? You know how your kids spend an overnight at someone’s house, and they come home, and the parents tell you how well-behaved and polite and helpful your kids were, and you think, “Are you talking about my kids?” There’s something about kids, I guess, after a certain age, that they can relate to other people better than they can to their own parents. Maybe you’re too close, or maybe it’s their need to rebel, or something. Well, it never occurred to me that the same thing could still happen to you when you’re all grown up. Somehow, I was already finding it easier to have conversations with Edith than I ever had with my own mom or dad. I guess there were two reasons for that. For one thing, I felt like Edith didn’t take things personally the way my own folks would. I guess that’s just natural. СКАЧАТЬ