THE APARTMENT

THE APARTMENT

He had threatened her and she was afraid.  So she gave him back his security deposit and let him walk away and leave behind so much filth that she thought she would have to have the apartment completely redone, costing her maybe more than what he paid in rent all the time he was there.  It was an injustice she was forced to swallow because she was afraid, and he knew he could get away with it.  Worst of all, though, was his leaving behind that heavy gold chain. 

     When she began to examine the apartment, she was revolted by the mire and scum she found on the appliances in the kitchen and on the counters and the sink and, worse, on the walls and ceiling, too.  The little hall and bedroom stank with an odor she couldn’t identify.  The smell was so noxious that she literally had to hold her nose.  But the odors of urine and feces she could identify, and these subtly invaded every corner of the small apartment.  She had pulled a drawer from the sink cabinet, and found it so filthy inside that she continued to pull it out and off its runners, with the idea of just throwing it away.  When it hit the floor, out fell in a swampy clump of greasy hair and rusted steelwool and black syrupy-lumpy stuff a heavy gold chain.  It was filthy and smelly and she was afraid to touch it.  Thinking it was costume jewelry, she resolved to throw it away with the gunk in which it was embedded. 

But common sense returning, she hobbled up the stairs and fetched a bottle of ammonia and an empty mayonnaise jar and, winded as usual by climbing, came down slowly, taking the steps one at a time.  Using the edge of the broom, she pushed the chain into the jar and filled the jar with ammonia.  In no time at all, it was clear the chain was gold.  It was very big and had to be expensive!  She was sure it would almost cover the cost of refurbishing the apartment, perhaps cover the cost and leave something over.  She felt a covetous twinge of greed as she looked at it and was immediately ashamed.  It was an unexpected windfall, she thought, holding the jar tightly in both hands, that’s all, a timely one.  But then he came back, dressed, as usual, in wrinkled black slacks and a faded black shirt, his black, greasy hair hanging on his shoulders, and his face red and blotchy, and threatened her again, saying that he knew she had the chain, that she was a sick old thief, and he was going to get a lawyer and in time he would own that house and she would be out living on the street.  His face was frighteningly violent, and he pushed it into hers as he growled at her.  In the closeness and the heat of it, she could smell his breath, which reminded her of the noxious fumes in the apartment.

She was too terrified to admit she had it, so she told him she would look for the chain and if she found it, she would send it to him.  He said she’d better, or else.  So after a few days, she sent the chain to him.  It cost her six dollars!  She sent it registered mail with return receipt to his mother’s address, so she would know he got it and couldn’t claim she stole it.  The receipt came back, and that was the last she heard from him, even though she asked him in a note to reimburse her for the cost of mailing.  He never did, and she was both glad to be rid of him and angry that he cost her six more dollars. 

She depended on the rent from the basement apartment to eat and pay her utilities.  Now, it was going to be a long time before she would collect rent again.  She wasn’t quite aware of how desperate her situation was until one night, unable to sleep, she lay on her back staring at the ceiling, and it all came to her.  What was she going to do?  She had no savings, having just enough income to pay her monthly bills.  And she had no family support, her two sons long ago abandoning her, moving away and dropping out of touch, and, in the end, no longer even sending Christmas cards.  She couldn’t even blame their wives, because they were gone before either of them married, and she knew of their weddings only because they sent her notices, hoping for cash.  It was like they didn’t exist anymore, for she was uncertain that they did.  How would she know if they died of accident or illness? 

She was alone, living on her husband’s Social Security and the rent from the basement.  These two incomes kept her together, body and soul.  Now, one was gone.  At first, she didn’t understand how desperate she was, but now, it dawned on her, and as she lay in bed, she began to cry, wondering what would become of her.  Since her girlhood, this was the only home she had known, having lived in it for forty-nine years.  What came to her with a blankness of fear was the certainty that she was going to starve.  Starve!  Either starve or sell the house for what she could get and move into some senior citizen’s apartment.  But the condition of the basement, she knew, would make it difficult if not impossible to sell the house.  It dawned on her that the nursing home was going to be her future, and she dreaded that with a dread that made her lose her will to live.

Starve or sell the house!  She could hardly imagine either possibility.  “How could this be?” she kept asking herself.  “Could that dirty, disgusting man have done so much harm to me just by living in the apartment?  It isn’t fair,” she thought.  She rented in good faith and never intruded upon him.  But he lived worse than an animal.  He lived amid such filth that she was dismayed.  As she closed her eyes, she could see his threatening face and could smell his breath and was afraid! 

In the morning, she went downstairs and let herself into the apartment.  The smells nauseated her.  “I must try,” she said to herself.  “Maybe I can clean it enough, fix things enough.”  So she assembled a bucket and some Playtex gloves and the bottle of ammonia and a gallon jug of bleach and scouring powder onto the kitchen counter.  Her husband had told her, when he built the basement apartment, that they must never hire out cleaning or repairs because the apartment was illegal.  The house was listed for tax purposes as a single family dwelling.  If it was known that they had the apartment, their taxes would go up higher than the income the apartment could earn. 

She lived, thus, all the years since her husband died in dread of being found out, and she began to feel that what happened to her was punishment for the lie.  She shuddered and felt she was touching the retributive filth of hell as she scrubbed the walls and racks inside the refrigerator, washing away grime and filth so thickly packed that the metal shone like bright gold when she revealed it.  And as the metal shone, it came to her there on her knees that she was a sick old thief.  That filthy man was right.  She was a liar and a thief, living illegally, and this was her punishment—the shiny brass-coated tin edge of the refrigerator rack confirmed this in her mind as she scrubbed and wiped and tried to see her progress through the sweat that ran into her eyes.

But what can a body do? she thought.  She must live.  Wasn’t the house hers?  Did ownership mean she must live in hardship and guilt?  Why?  We are all guilty for living, she thought.  That’s why.  Ever since Adam.  When her husband died, didn’t she know it then?  The guilt—the guilt for living?  This just added to it.  Who isn’t guilty? she asked herself out loud as she rested on her haunches in front of the opened refrigerator, panting from lack of breath.  She wiped the perspiration from her brow, accepted her fate, and went back to work.

She spent all morning on the refrigerator.  When it was done, she stood aside and felt proud, looking it over with a discerning eye, touching it up here and there with a sponge and a cloth.  Finally, she put her hands on her hips and looked around the kitchen.  Her feeling of accomplishment vanished.  The stove was worse than the refrigerator, the sink and counter as bad as the stove.  The walls were saturated with grease splatters, and dirt and dust had clung to the grease, making the yellowish-brown spots look like scabbed-over wounds.  The grease on the ceiling had a white hairy mold growing on it, which made her flesh crawl and which made her once again feel like the apartment had become her hell.

A weariness filled her deep down inside that made her feel worn and useless.  But through a stubbornness of will that came from desperation, she got on a chair and began to scrub the ceiling.  She gasped and whirled, feeling faint each time she reached up, and whirling when she lowered her arms.  But she continued, dipping her scrub brush and sponge more frequently than she needed to for the respite from reaching.  She dripped large amounts of ammonia water onto the floor and made puddles everywhere, and when the floor became too saturated, she mopped it, and in this way cleaned the ceiling and the floor at the same time.  Then she went to work on the walls, and by dark, she had the kitchen clean enough to live in.  She put away her stuff for the night and went upstairs famished, for she had not eaten all day.  She made herself a very small meal, thinking that was all she could afford, and afterwards went to visit her neighbor next door, another elderly widow, hoping she would serve coffee and cookies or a piece of cake—something they did regularly when they visited each other—and so rest and get some additional calories.

Sipping coffee at the kitchen table, the other woman said, “But Anna, what have you been doing?  Your back looks straight as a rail.”

“What do you mean straight as a rail?  I feel weary like I never have before.”  And she told her friend about the tenant and what he left for her, they having no secrets between them.  She cried out her grief and her cares and felt better for it when she went home and undressed for bed.  Her neighbor was older than her and could offer  sympathy but not help—but sympathy was a balm she desperately needed.  “Straight as a rail,” she said to herself as she climbed into bed.  “Straight as a rail,” she smiled wearily as she fell asleep.

When morning came, she rose with an unaccustomed eagerness to get back to work in the apartment.  She was all aches and pains, but she charged, nevertheless, into the bathroom armed with ammonia and bleach and did battle with the forces of decay.  That night she went again to visit her neighbor, and, sipping coffee and nibbling cookies, her friend remarked how rosy her complexion was and how bright her eyes.  Before going to bed, she looked at herself in the mirror and saw looking back a woman decidedly healthier than she had been accustomed to seeing for some time.

Once again, she woke eager to get to work, feeling less achy than the day before and more energetic.  Today, she would attack the bedroom.  She had been reluctant to go in it because that was where the noxious odor was coming from.  Curious, now, what could be making it, she covered her face with a handkerchief and went in, armed again with her ammonia and bleach.  What she found was terrible beyond her imagining and frightened her nearly to death.  The odor was thickest and most nauseating at the closet, and before opening its door, she cracked the basement window as far as it would open and went upstairs to get a fan, which she placed in the bedroom doorway and aimed up at the window.  After allowing a few minutes for what seemed like a gas to disperse, she went in and opened the closet door.

All over the floor were large pieces of meat, rotting and crawling with maggots and covered with buzzing green flies.  The stench that flowed out knocked her backward, and she ran from the bedroom, across the kitchen, and outside, where, under the little roof of the back porch, she gasped for air, her heart pounding rapidly, knocking against her chest like it wanted to get out of her body.  What she saw confused her, for the pieces of meat didn’t look like anything she had seen in the markets.  They seemed like chunks of meat hacked out of an animal by someone who didn’t know what he was doing.  Where could that nasty man have gotten them?  Why did he leave them there?  Is the grease from those odd chunks of whitish flesh what she had been scrubbing off the walls and ceilings?  She felt sick.  Her knees were wobbly and her stomach was turning.  What was she going to do?  She was frightened and uncertain and all her growing confidence was dispelled.  Should she call someone to look at those pieces of meat, just in case?  “In case, what?” she thought.  But she didn’t have the courage to answer.  How would she explain the apartment?  Could she invent a lie?  Did she have the courage to lie?  She didn’t know.  She didn’t know if courage was what she needed so much as the resolve to be dishonest.

She quitted the work for the day and went upstairs dispirited.  She took some tea and lied on the couch to take a nap.  She knew no one who could help her.  She lived alone.  Ever since her husband died, she lived independently.  Her friends were all women like herself, mostly widows, though some had husbands who clung to life precariously and whom they waited every day to bury.  It was time, she thought, to bury her.  She would welcome it.  She felt that life was too much for her and that people had changed too much, and she didn’t understand the world anymore.  Rotten meat on a closet floor!  Rotten meat, chunks of white, sickly looking meat, rotting, oh, how awful! on the closet floor.  She didn’t know what to do, so she cried, cried and cursed--cursed herself, cursed life, and cursed that man.  She lay on the couch till noon.

Her legs were stretched out and her back propped against the pillows.  Looking through tear-blurred eyes, she was aware that someone was standing just beyond her feet.  It was a man, dressed like her tenant in faded black, with the same long black hair.  The man’s face was hidden by shade, for the sun rayed through the living room window across his knees and abdomen, which made his upper body look like a heavy dark shadow.  And then there was the odor, weak and barely detectable, like his breath when he threatened her about the gold chain.  Her heart began to pound.  She rose upon her elbow and began to scream, loud, hoarse, hysterical screams, one after the other.  As she became winded and out of breath, she saw that there was no one at the end of the couch, and she jumped up and hobbled crookedly through all the rooms, checking every closet, then went outside and limped around the house, and finally, after a rest sitting on the front steps, she overcame her fear and went into the basement apartment.  She had to hold her nose, because she had left both the bedroom and the closet doors open, and during the morning the odor had permeated the whole apartment.

She was not asleep.  She was confident that she was not asleep.  She had seen him.  Her flesh crawled, her hair tingled, and her hands shook.  She went to the mirror in her bedroom, well lighted now by noontime daylight, and looked carefully at herself.  Her cheeks were not so pale, they had color, like Inez said.  Her back was straight as a rail, like Inez said.  She drew herself up, made a fist, and shook it at her image in the mirror.  “I’m going to clean that bastard out of my house,” she said out loud with all the determination of a seventy-eight-year-old, frail, emphesemic woman.

She went into the corner of the yard where her husband used to keep the garden.  She hadn’t put a garden in now in over five years.  But the space where it had been was grassed over, mostly weeded over, but one could tell the garden had been there, for there were still humps and hollows, mounds and furrows, where her husband had planted different kinds of vegetables.  She had taken a shovel from the garage and began to dig a hole.  She couldn’t make it very deep, because she couldn’t stoop too well with the shovel and lift the soil.  So, trying to remember how many chunks of meat there were, she made one hole for each.

Then she screwed herself up, went into the garage and came out with a carton of black thirty-gallon lawn bags with their tiebacks.  With these she went into the basement.  But at the threshold, she stopped, realizing that she needed two more things.  Panting and nearly fainting from the exertion, she climbed the stairs once more to the house and sat down in her own kitchen.  In the cabinet under the sink she had a box with old Playtex gloves in it.  She selected two of these and then went into her bedroom, where she kept a vial of holy water.  She had kept this at her bedside ever since her husband died.

Back in the basement, she put on the gloves, went into the bedroom, opened a bag, and, holding her breath, stooped over head first into the closet, reached down and lifted a chunk of meat.  The flies buzzed in protest and maggots fell squirming to the floor.  It must have weighed thirty pounds!  With a tremendous strain on her back, she lifted it and dropped it into the bag, raised the bag’s sides around it, put a drop of holy water on it, and tied it up.  The meat looked like nothing she had ever seen.  She was very frightened by what she thought it might be.  Brushing flies away from her face and arms, she put, one at a time, all the pieces of meat in bags.  Then she dragged the bags across the floor, too tired to lift them, and hauled them one at a time up the basement steps and across the yard, and, finally, with a prayer, dropped the last one into its hole.  Standing there at last, she dropped the gloves into the hole and put her hands on the small of her back and stretched herself backward and upward, getting out the kinks caused by the lifting and dragging.  Then, with a little ceremony in her heart and words of righteousness such as she heard at her husband’s funeral, she filled the holes. 

But she wouldn’t rest.  She was possessed by an urgency that drove her into fits.  Without taking time to eat, she cleaned herself, dressed, and left for the market.  She drove quickly, like a teenager, and had to slam on the brakes when she approached a changing traffic light too fast.  Impatient, she wheeled into Grand Union, feeling good to be out among people, and bought bug spray and deodorizer and enough carpet cleaner to do the apartment’s wall-to-wall carpet in the bedroom and living room five times. 

 “I’m going to be rid of him,” she said to herself as she drove home, “before I go to bed tonight.  I’m going to clean him away.  The filthy creature.  The nasty man.”  She trounced on the gas peddle and sped recklessly through a yellow light.  She didn’t want to wait even one minute.  Pulling into the garage, she left the car door open in her haste.  She sprayed the closet and bedroom with Raid, filling the air with mist, watching the flies fall and die.  She sprayed again and again.  Then she got her vacuum and swept them up, hundreds of them, many still alive and crawling on the carpet.  She turned on the fan and vented the room.  But the odor lingered, for it was embedded in the carpet on the closet floor.  So she sprayed that floor first with the carpet cleaner, and then sprayed the bedroom and living room.  After the time required to let the foam work, she vacuumed and did it again, and then she did it again. 

It was getting late, the evening’s twilight turning to dark, when she filled the whole apartment with a deodorizing mist.  There was still much cleaning to do.  All the walls were filthy and needed scrubbing like she did in the kitchen.  There were cobwebs in the corners and on the ceilings.  The windows were greased over with a disgusting film.  And the radiators were clogged with dust and grime.  But all of this was easy work by comparison.  The apartment didn’t stink anymore.  She felt triumphant.

Back in her own house, she made herself a light meal.  Afterwards, she was too tired to visit her neighbor, and her breathing was labored, so she went to bed.  In the morning, she thought, she would call the real estate agent who found tenants for her and tell the woman she was ready for another one.  She closed her eyes.  Her breathing came in quick little pants.  She stretched out, lying on her back, her hands folded on her belly, and imagined that terrible man.  She saw him vividly as though in a dream.  Under trembling eyelids, she saw him fade, become more and more transparent as her will strengthened.  He tried to protest, angrily waving his hands, pushing his disappearing face into hers, until, in one transcendent moment, he ceased to exist.  She felt exultant, triumphant, with a woman’s power—an inexhaustible will—a power so great, she felt she could ward off death.