Mrs. Washington wasn't married, but perhaps by the sheer nature of her aura she gained the honorific. Perhaps no one knew what else to call her. "Ms." seemed inappropriate for a woman her age--what was she: 80 or 90? No one called her Betty. Betty Washington. Betty: a name from the middle of the previous century. A name that knew black and white television sets and civil rights movements. If you met a Betty today you would think, oh, that's quaint, your parents are nostalgic. Something like Edith or Peggy. When I got to the village I received a message from Arthur. "Could you, uh, knock on Mrs. Washington's door," he said in a somber tone, "I think she's dead."
It was a clear but windy day, and when I called Arthur back to tell him I wouldn't be back at the apartment until late that night, I had to duck into a doorway to protect the phone from the noise of the errant gusts. How does he know she's dead? If I was home, what would I do? Break down the door? Would I have been the first to see her dead body? How does a person who lives alone die? Does an old lady who rarely leaves her house, who's television can be heard at all times of the day die sitting on a couch, or does she collapse on the way to the sink to get a glass of water? Is it a slow process, does she know she's going to die, and sit on the sofa, listening to CNN ("She's a CNN junkie," Stephen told me once), awaiting the final breaths? Or is sudden, like she didn't know what hit her?
Each breath comes in pairs, except for the last and the first. In this way, the first inhale of a newborn pushed freshly from the womb is finally completed upon the last exhale of a dying body. At least, one assumes. The somber mood of the possible death of my next door neighbor put me in no mood to go to the first party. What good making conversation with people I didn't know when death was at hand? Not just death, but the smells of a corpse finding their way through the floorboards and under the cracks of doors. It was the night Mrs. Washington died, but since she was alone, it's quite possible she died a few days ago, maybe even a week ago. Someone reported strange smells.
When asked if I had smelled it, I said that I did smell something. However, this building is so often filled with smells. Even my own apartment greets me with a new smell every time I enter it, as though it's not my own. From the entrance of the building to my doorway, on the staircase, especially, smells are constantly shifting. The first level of the building is a restaurant, and depending on what they are cooking that day, the smells will change. Sometimes I smell a combination of old banana peels and the way the last sip of a glass of lager beer smells. Once I was sure that they were cooking salmon all day. Sometimes I smell damp wood planks. Other times it just smells like garbage. Sara said it smelled like a European apartment--that made me smile. To be honest, I don't know what a putrid corpse smells like, and I don't know if I'd know it if I did smell it. I smelled something when I got home that night, but I wasn't sure if I was smelling what I thought I smelled.
I didn't know Mrs. Washington well. The first time I met her, I ran into her at the doorway of the apartment. I always made a point of telling her to have a nice day, and from her voice she seemed to respect that. It made me feel good, but in a way it was probably empty. Stephen always was very generous to her. Sometimes I could hear him talking to her in the hallway. He would get her groceries when we went out shopping. Once, I helped her bring her cart of groceries up the stairs. Another time I found her struggling on the staircase and I didn't know what to do. She was out of breath, and she hadn't even left the building yet. Should I lift her? Carry her downstairs? What good would that do. I didn't bother that time to tell her to have a nice day. It would seem like a mockery in that situation. I asked her if she needed help and she said no.
I didn't go to the first end-of-the-year party, but I went to the second one. I had to wander the village for an hour before I felt comfortable showing up. I talked to people I didn't know well, about our projects, about school, about professors that we had academic crushes on. Most of it was meaningless. I didn't say anything about Mrs. Washington, and thinking back on that night, I had forgotten that she may be dead. It's funny how something that I know to be grave--namely, a corpse in the room next to mine--seems to slip my mind in the time of socializing. I almost want to rebuke myself for forgetting that she was dead, but maybe the mind purposefully let's go of a thought, depending on a situation, maybe it was best that I had forgotten about her, at least just for the moment. This wasn't the time to think of deaths; rather, it was the time of thinking of a different valence of an ending.
Arthur was there when I got home, coming down the staircase. I knew that Mrs. Washington was dead. He said they were removing the body. It was still in the room. The cops were there, otherwise, Arthur said, he would have taken down a whole army of joints, because he was loaded.
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