Irene and Henry

They lived on the right side of the tracks, but just barely.  Irene and Henry had bought their house fifty years earlier, back when this was an idyllic little town, before crack and meth had made their appearance.  Four blocks down Hammond Street, across the railroad tracks that divided the city, prostitutes now walked the magnolia lined streets.  Behind the tattooed, exhausted-looking hookers were enormous brick colonials, once grand, but now boarded up.  Cracked foundations and black plastic covered windows.  That decay had crept slowly over the railroad tracks.  Even Mrs. Joyner's house next door, the For Sale sign sitting out front for over a year, had dry rotting curtains hanging in the windows.



Nevertheless, Irene and Henry took great pride in their home.  They were the first homeowners in their families and among all their siblings their house was the biggest.  Irene had spent a half century carefully maintaining the old hardwood floors, scrubbing porcelain tubs and sinks, cleaning the baseboards and crown moulding.  Now, she sat at the base of the steps, her brush running over the smooth wood, over patches worn from children and grandchildren running up and down.  Her silver hair, curly, was matted to her head with sweat.  The elastic waistband of her pants was digging into her middle, softer now than when she had first moved into this house.  She was thinking of the phone call from her son, earlier that day.



Mark, her youngest, had surprised her by calling.  Irene never meant to be resentful, but she couldn't help noticing how infrequently Mark called after marrying Kim.  Irene only saw their children on holidays or if Kim's mother was unavailable to babysit.  She had actually assumed that he was going to ask her to sit for the children. 



“Mama,” he'd said.  “Richard and Nancy and I have been talking.”  Richard and Nancy were Mark's older siblings.  “We've been thinking about you and daddy, and we're really worried about you two all alone in that big old house.  We think you might be happier somewhere smaller.  There are some really lovely condos being built on the other side of town, and I picked up a couple of brochures for you.  Do you think the kids and I could drop them off for you later today?”  He sounded stiff, artificial.  He had obviously rehearsed this speech.



Not wanting to put him off, Irene humored him.  “Oh, of course we've considered downsizing!  It's so kind of you to think of us, we'd love to see the brochures.”  But now, waiting for him to come, the pit in her stomach had grown so large that not even the promise of seeing her grandchildren helped her ignore it.



She gazed through the french doors that separated the formal and informal sitting rooms.  Henry sat in his rocking chair, green plastic tubing from his nose, winding around the chair, to the oxygen tank behind him.  His gruff, deeply wrinkled face was set in a permanent pout, frowning with his lower lip out.  He wore a flannel robe, open, his pot belly sticking out slightly between his white t-shirt and pajama pants.  He cleared his throat, then, sputtering, alarmingly loud, he coughed, ten times at least, until at last, mercifully, he spat out a clump of mucus.  On the cheap plastic tv tray next to his chair he kept an assortment of pills and vitamins, tissues to catch what came up with the coughing, a styrofoam cup of sweet iced tea, and the remote control.



Once upon a time, Henry had been unable to sit still at home.  He and Irene would pile into their car, armed with Pepsi and cigarettes, and ride all day to some distant farm stand or orchard to buy Amish butter or home-canned peaches.  They would drive for hours to walk on a pier on the bay and eat fried shrimp at the first restaurant that called their names.  They would cross the state line to buy scratch off lottery tickets and then giddily scratch them all in the car, laughing as they won (or, more often, lost) a few dollars, daydreaming about the day they'd hit it big.  Now, he sat in that chair day in and day out, dozing, coughing, staring glassy eyed at the news.



She really ought to discuss this condo business with him before Mark arrived with the children.  Henry, her once spontaneous Henry, hated being surprised.  She knew he wouldn't react well to being put on the spot.



Though he denied any difficulty hearing, Irene wryly noted that there was no possibility of him hearing her over the din of the television.  He had the news blaring at full volume.  She didn't know why he bothered watching- it was all armed robberies and endless drug busts, depressing.  They could witness as much a few blocks down after dark any time they pleased.  Irene's eyes moved from the old box set to the wall above, noticing again the old brown puckered stain, the remnant of a leak earlier that year.  She still hadn't found the time to paint over it.  The dust had collected on the crown moulding in that room, a quarter inch thick.  She would have to get out the ladder and clean it off with a brush.  She combed her sweat damp hair back with her fingers as the doorbell rang.



She opened the door for Mark.  The children were standing slightly off to the side, uncomfortably staring at the ground, shifting their feet.  They entered and dutifully gave her a kiss apiece, then ran back out to the car.  Mark handed her a stack of brochures and, walking back to the door, said, “Sorry, mama, can't stay.  Emma has dance in 15 minutes.”  He shrugged his shoulders and smiled, holding his hands up as if to say “What can I do?”  and they were gone.  Irene stood watching as they pulled out from under the carport.  She waved and smiled.  A haggard woman in a leather jacket, bleached hair teased and sprayed, a cigarette dangling from her lips, nodded at Irene as she stepped over the cracked, buckling concrete sidewalk.  Across the street was the boarded up school, abandoned years ago for a more modern facility a few miles away.  She could hear shouting.  More teenagers had broken through the fence and were fighting on the old playground.



Irene closed the door and looked back toward Henry.  He was still staring at the television, jaw set, face stony.  She lay down the stack of brochures that their son had left and picked up her brush and her bucket,  the water now murky with dust and dirt, only a few soap bubbles remaining around its edge.  She carried both into the kitchen, where she emptied the dirty water into the old porcelain sink, using the brush to push any stray bits of dust down the drain.  She looked down at the once fashionable linoleum, now hopelessly out of date.  It hadn't seen a wet mop in weeks and bits of dried food were stuck on near the stove where she prepared their meals.  A stream of gravy had spilled down the oven door the day before and had formed a yellowish crust.  Irene turned her back on it, suddenly longing for a shower.



Upstairs she undressed in the green tiled bathroom.  She stood barefoot on the cool white linoleum and looked at herself in the full length mirror.  Her body, wrinkled and leathery.  The stretch marks on her soft abdomen, varicose veins on her legs.  Everything sagging: jowl, flabby upper arms, pendulous breasts, her round belly.  Gravity, over the years, seemed to be steadily willing her body into the ground.  A deep purple bruise the size of a tennis ball had formed on her forearm, but she had no memory of injuring it.



Out of the shower, she dressed in clean underclothes and a thin house dress.  She set her hair in rollers and walked back downstairs.  Henry had dozed off in his chair, his head tipped back, mouth open, snoring loudly with an occasional mucousy gasp.  Irene sat in her armchair in the formal living room.  She fingered a hole in the worn upholstery, orange and white floral on brown. 



Mark had left 5 pamphlets.  All were advertising newly built condominiums located on the other side of town, far from the railroad tracks, where businesses were still opening and buildings didn't stand vacant with boarded windows.  Each community boasted a pristine swimming pool, tasteful, modern clubhouse, access to a weight room.  The available apartments were indistinguishable from one another.  Off white walls, baseboards, and carpets, oak cabinets.  Beige on beige on beige.  Open floor plans made the kitchens seem more spacious, and tiny balconies replaced lawns as outdoor space.



She set the pamphlets aside.  No children had ever spilled Kool-Aid on those carpets or climbed atop those counters to fetch a glass.  There were no scuffs on the baseboards from horseplay, no stains in the sink from decades of use, unlike her own porcelain apron sink, which had been worn slightly gray from years of family dinners, holiday gatherings, thousands of dishes washed over the years.



Henry was coughing again, awakened by the fit that had seized him.  Irene sat near his chair and waited for him to finish.  She averted her eyes as he spat into a tissue.  Then she handed him one of the brochures, chosen at random. 



“What's this?”  he asked, glancing at it briefly before returning his eyes to the TV.



“The kids think we should downsize.  Mark brought some brochures by.”



“Hmph.”  Henry reached for the remote, knocking a bottle of vitamins onto the floor.  He turned up the volume of the television, signaling the end of the discussion.



Irene went back to her armchair.  The sound of sirens wailed in the distance, growing louder and closer.  The sun was setting and a symphony of crickets and cicadas played outside the windows.  She imagined herself in one of those sterile little condos, the lack of space forcing her and Henry together.  She imagined them sharing a single bedroom, rather than sleeping on separate floors as they did now.  Henry couldn't breathe well enough to walk up the stairs, Irene was restless and couldn't sleep for his snoring and coughing.  In a condo, he could sit in the living room with the television on and she could see him, talk to him, even while she worked in the kitchen.  And they'd be closer to the children.  Maybe they would even visit more often.



Hours later, Irene started awake in her chair.  She must have dozed off, she supposed, as it was now pitch dark outside.  She could hear the sound of Henry's snoring, the hum of his breathing machine.  She stretched her limbs, rubbed her neck.  She would try to talk to him about the condo tomorrow morning.  She reached for the brochures, to tuck them away until she was ready to approach him again, only to realize that they were gone.  She checked the chair cushions, under the furniture, but they were not there.  She searched the entire room, and then the den, the office, the kitchen, where she finally found them, in the trash, beneath some wadded paper towels and an oatmeal crème pie wrapper.  She understood.  Her eyes fixed on the grimy vinyl floor.  Vowing to mop it in the morning, she turned out the lights and slowly made her way up the stairs to her bedroom.