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Snow behind the Door
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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A n t h o n y Wa l l a c e 44 Snow behind the Door I MISS THAT LITTLE STREET,” I SAY TO MY GRANDmother overcoffee.“Imissthatstreetandallthosepeople. I can still remember their names and what they looked like.” We live at the seashore now, far away from the narrow Philadelphia street where I spent my childhood and where my grandmother lived her married life. Not long after my grandfather died she came here, to the Jersey coastal town of Limit. “Too many memories,” she told me when I came back from Boston to find her in a different place, a different life. “I had to go on by myself and I had to start fresh. I found a job making bedsattheDolphinMotel.Goodhardwork,goodgirlsworking there. I need the work and I need the girls, too. I made friends here, Phil. I made a life.” Her health these last few months has taken a hard left turn, and when I visit her she looks more puzzled than pained or tired, as if these things were to be expected in other people. Her right shoulder is two inches lower than her left and her back bent sideways, crablike, when she tries to walk. “It’s like I have a cast on my shoulder and a tie rod fastened tomyback,”shetellsme.“AtnightIwakeupsweatingandsick. Too many things go wrong all at once, you have to line the specialistsuparoundtheblock .Igotothedoctoratthecornerand he tells me, ‘Old age, Rose. Old age.’” “ 44 45 S n o w b e h i n d t h e D o o r “Cheer up,” I offer. “You’re doing better than many.” “Better than who, Phil, my dead relatives? And even that I’d debate.” “Take the pills,” I tell her. “It’s like they make you into a zombie, those pills. Last week I took too many and by lunchtime I was sitting in a corner, talking to my aunt Alfia. The one who died in 1953.” She shakes her head. “I want to be aware of whatever time I might have left.” “Take the pills, Rose. Humor me.” She takes two small blue Valium from a thin packet and washes them back with a swallow of black coffee. She smiles, her mouth closed, the upper plate removed. “I can still see their faces,” I say. “The way the light hit your door in the morning, the housefronts across the street in the afternoon.” “I’ve seen some of those people since, but not many and not recently. A handful of weddings and funerals.” She sips her coffee. Her hair is the same shade of auburn she has dyed it for the last forty years, her watchful hazel eyes and hawk’s nose, the same. The housecoat she wears is the same one she’s been wearing for over twenty years, and although she is in a different house, the furnishings are the same, the dishes, the aluminum coffee pot, the family photographs that line the walls. She is lighter, though, and unless it’s my imagination, maybe two inches shorter. Outside her kitchen window is no alleyway, no broken wooden fence, no stray cat or dog. High clean blue ocean sky. A tidy block of pastel bungalows by the sea. I work an Atlantic City casino job, mid-shift. Afternoons I walk the area called the pit, back behind the table games; I watch the customers, the action. Win, loss, table inventory. People laugh, [3.219.167.163] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:12 GMT) A n t h o n y Wa l l a c e 46 drink, win, lose, curse, praise, live. I write. Columns of numbers , individual slips of customers who will want something back, some return on their hard-earned cash or at least on the risk of that hard-earned cash. Gourmet dinners, luxury suites, champagne, limos, helicopter rides. So then I’m like a waiter, too,awaiterinthebigtopplacingorderswhilethecrowdgasps and the jugglers and clowns perform. Cocktail servers dressed in the period of Louis XVI float up and down the aisles, Marie Antoinette and Pompadour hawking coffee, tea, juice. The name of the casino is the Bastille, the irony of that name long since lost. Late evening I return from the noise of slot machines and bets called out and money won and lost, the riot of desperate fun and greed that is the casino business. I slide into bed and whisper to my wife, “I can’t take it anymore. I...