Her hearing isn’t what it used to be, but Gertie can still hear the knock at the door, even from upstairs. She doesn’t like to be bothered, likes to keep to herself. When the phone rings, she lets the answering machine pick up. And at church—her only destination these days besides the doctor’s office—the First Baptist church where she sen es as a deaconess, where she has hardly missed a Sunday in fifty years, she shakes hands during the sharing of the peace and lingers afterwards for coffee, but doesn’t go out of her way to say much except, “Lovely day,” or “Lovely to see you.” So when she hears the knock at the door, she goes to the window of her bedroom, pulls aside the lace curtain, peers down at the front porch.
Nobody knows about her troubles. Nobody asks how she is getting along, and even if they did, she likely wouldn’t tell them. She has never
been one to complain. Not about the arthritis chewing at her fingers and not about the cataract that fogs over her left eye and not about how badly she misses Harry, how empty the house feels without him. And not about the crooks—though she d like to give them an earful, maybe crack them over the head with a can of soup—who convinced hei to take out a 30-year, 6.4 percent mortgage for $37,000, along with a $10,000 line of credit.
She and her husband had owned the home since 1951, had raised their son here, his height still faintly sketched in the kitchen cupboard door, the pencil marks like the broken blood vessels that trail down her legs. She couldn’t keep up with the payments. Over and over the writs of possession have been posted on her door. Over and over she has ripped them down and folded them in half, and in half again, and again, until they are tiny white squares she places at the bottom of her garbage can, as if the dark truth contained in them might decompose along with the coffee grounds, dissolve like a communion wafer on her tongue and absolve her.
On the porch stands the policeman—no, a woman, Gertie realizes, when the figure moves into a slant of sunlight, peering into the living room through the bay window, a big woman with the haircut and bowlegged stance of a man. She knows Gertie is home—her Buick is parked in the driveway. The policewoman isn’t going away this time. She isn t going to post another notice and clomp down the porch and grumble away in her unmarked car. She hammers at the door again and then forcefully tries the knob, so that Gertie imagines she can feel the force of the hand on her, shaking her, strangling her.
Gertie withdraws from the window and the lace curtain falls slowly into place like a spider’s web. Her husband is dead. Her son is dead, too. So many of her friends and neighbors. Everyone is dead. She says this out loud—everyone is dead—her voice a metallic rasp as she pulls open the drawer of the night table and pulls out the revolver, the .357 her husband kept around the house for security. It is heavy—she holds it in a two-handed grip, the muzzle drooping, aimed at the floor between her legs. She sits on the edge of the bed. The springs moan. The policewoman hammers at the door again—and then yells something, Gertie doesn’t know what.
She can’t recall if Harry ever took the gun to the shooting rang or out to a gravel pit to blast pop bottles. As far as she knows, it has never been fired. She wonders vaguely how old the bullets are, whether they can expire, when she brings the muzzle to her breast—not her mouth, that
would be too much trouble to clean up, too much ugliness to look at for whoever found her—and pulls the trigger.
9 .
Sammy can’t dwell on the sad stories. The family that moved into their van The man who says his store has been empty ever since the second Wal-Mart opened up. The woman who says her husband has cancer, says their insurance dropped them, says they had to put all their medical expenses on their credit cards. The rank piles of laundiy in the comers, the stained pizza boxes and crumpled soda cans decorating the
floor, the child wearing a T-shirt as a dress, clutching a one-armed teddy bear. 7
Sometimes she wishes she lived in a world without doors. There’s too much hurt out there, and every time she opens a door, she opens herself to it, their collected voices, their collected failure—all powered by voices that scream and whine and blame and beg and reason—punctuated now by a gunshot on a summer afternoon.
She does not want to open this door. She does not want to pound up the stairs. She does not want to face the body she knows is waiting for her inside. She drops the eviction notice and it flutters to the porch like a bioke-backed bird and she stares at it for a long time before stepping out from the shadow of the porch, into the sun, heading back to the car where she will radio an ambulance before roaring off to the next neighborhood, the next address, the next door to drag her knuckles across, dreading what waits for her.
Nominated by Virginia Quarterly Review, Bret Anthony Johnston
ON A SPRING DAY IN BALTIMORE THE ART TEACHER ASKS THE CLASS TO DRAW FLOWERS
by MARY SZYBIST
from THE KENYON REVIEW