began to feel pushed around at work. She did her best to hold him and the life we had together, but then his job disappeared. My mother told me losing his job was like a picture he kept folded in his wallet that he transferred from one outfit to another. Every time he paid for something, every time he’d think about what he was doing, where he was going, he’d see that picture.
It didn’t help that she liked classical music and stayed up half the night looking at images of art while my father spent increasing amounts of time watching crime series and the kind of talk shows that turn into brawls. As things ground gears, the volume cranked. I heard Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at earsplitting decibels while some sister’s boyfriend’s lover’s husband went down with a sonic boom before a live audience.
If relationships split along certain lines and we tend to fall out on one side or another, I knew my side. Sometimes in those days I got in bed with her and we watched a stream of visuals on her computer well past midnight, or drifted into movies, while he pitched about on the couch with his shows. We preferred stuff flooded with one brand of love or another, even airless romances that bring the wind back up into your throat, and the French films my mother adored where little happens.
It’s possible I was waiting for them to fail. By the time I was in seventh grade, somewhere between a third and half of my friends’ parents were divorced. Some should have been but weren’t. And statistically, I read in one of my mother’s magazines, half of the group that was left cheated, and half of that half felt they were doing more than their share of the housework and child-rearing or missing out on their real ambitions. Halve the last bit again and there was a small collection of funny people left to dodge inevitable heartache.
There were two couples. A friend named Deena who had two moms, both doctors, and though I didn’t spend a lot of time at Deena’s the moms seemed to be in decent sync whenever I dropped over. And Joe’s parents, the first to get a jumbo flat screen TV. We used to pile into their house on weekend nights. When we weren’t watching a movie or playing a game, pictures of the family would come up on the screen, the father’s arms around the mother, the mother’s arms around the father. They weren’t little people by any means. They liked to eat and have all of us for barbeque, baked potatoes with sour cream, garlic bread heavy with butter, and so many beverages stuffed in the icy cooler you could float away. They rarely raised their voices except to call out for more sauce or napkins. Even their kids said they just worked somehow.
When I realized I could only find two larger-than-life couples in the whole lot, I guess I lost faith in the idea.
At school the boys I knew were friends mostly and we traveled in packs with the girls I knew, and I watched them hook up and fall in love or the other way around. They broke each other’s hearts in the middle of movies, over cheap meals, on the phone, in fragmented texts, by ghosting.
My friends said I was too shy, that was my problem, but there was a boy who ran after me into Lake Michigan once and tried to tug my bathing suit off. Another one kissed me in a locker room as if I were a sport he had to win. I had crushes and months of sadness over a third guy but mostly I watched everyone else travel around fortune’s wheel, getting snagged and ripped on its nails.
When Nitro came along, things made their own kind of sense. I didn’t want to be a couple, at least on the conscious side, and neither did he.
That made it extra strange to wake up one morning curled in front of Ajay’s door in my pajamas. Mr. Kapur, his grandfather, stood above me. The morning light was coming up from the entryway. I had no idea how long I had been lying there.
I had mostly seen Mr. Kapur in passing, and he had one of those faces. Wiry and strong, he could have been fifty, but he could just as easily have been seventy or even eighty. He wore the same kind of jeans I had seen him wear each day on his way to and from work. His shirts were neatly tucked in and buttoned to his knobby throat. He was a welder by trade, and I sometimes imagined he and my mother might sit around talking shop.
His cowboy boots, in a state of high polish, were inches from my face. A sailing verbal assault began. “Get up, get up, get up! Do you have no shame?”
I worked my way to a seated position.
A crush of Hindi words followed as I brushed a layer of grit from my face. I asked him the time.
“What time is it? What time?” he mocked. “Six a.m. precisely. You would like the weather report now?”
“How long have I been here?”
“I am getting ready for work, going down to get my newspaper, and the girl from upstairs asks me this as if I have been standing outside my apartment all night long to see if some lovesick person will wander by and ask for a detailed report on conditions?”
“Lovesick?” I said with a laugh. I got up and took a seat on the stairs, too wiped out to make the climb to the third floor yet.
“My grandson is not a movie personality, and I am not the morning news station.”
“Your grandson is not … ? I don’t have any interest in your grandson.” It’s possible I reddened a little but if I did he didn’t seem to notice.
“What is wrong with you then? Making a spectacle of yourself.”
“Sleepwalking,” I said. “Sleepwalking is what’s wrong with me.”
He softened a little and said, “Then you have a nervous condition. You should see a doctor.” Leaving me for a moment, he went into the apartment and came out with a blanket that he draped around my shoulders.
I was going to say something about the uselessness of doctors but decided to drop the subject. Just then the low sun rolled further into the lobby and hit the hall window on the landing between the entry and the first floor, the reflection beaming directly into his face. I thought that’s why his eyes began to fill.
“Are you all right, Mr. Kapur?” I asked.
He looked disoriented.
“Mr. Kapur?”
Stepping out of the beam of light, he seemed to consider me anew. “Are you not the girl from upstairs? If you are going for your newspaper, you should wear a robe,” he said. “Did no one raise you correctly?”
“I …”
“It is a matter of common decency,” he said. Then he got his keys out and quickly disappeared into his apartment. I wondered if this was a one time incident or if his condition was progressive.
We rarely saw Lily, the woman who lived next door to us. She would leave her apartment once Lola and I were out of the house and Mom had gone on the clock with her phone sales. She returned before Lola’s afternoon pickup and long before I got home. It was almost as if she wanted to avoid us. Mom saw her figure from our living room window. She wore an old hat and coat and beat-in flats. She always had a camera with her and this made me think of the ghost images she must have inside. So far none of us had come face to face with her.
Though Mom often lost herself in her work, she was by nature gracious and warm. She liked to extend herself and offer help where she could with old people in particular and had volunteered at the senior center in Evanston for many years. Placing a plate of fresh baked cookies by Lily’s door one day with a short welcoming note, Mom hoped to strike up a conversation. The plate sat there untouched until Mom removed it, worried about drawing vermin.
One morning Mom got curious
