Last night my dad hassled me about staying out late every night this week and only working part-time. I said it’s August, I’m in training. I run every evening and I hang out to unwind. I get up early to run again, and I can only handle so much. So twenty-five hours a week washing dishes is all I can stand right now. He said I was a pussy.
So I was lying in bed thinking of how all we do is disagree anymore. And I thought about Grandpa, and how he used to show up every Sunday when we were little, laughing and joking and carrying pies and rolls from the bakery, and he’d give me and Devin money and take us bowling and out to Pizza Hut. And when I was eleven and I did a crappy job painting his porch and I knew it and I cried about it, he called me the next morning and told me to come back and see how great it looked now that the paint had dried and smoothed itself out. And we both knew he’d touched it up himself, but we never said so. He just made me feel good about it.
My grandfather died four years ago. One afternoon soon after Grandma had sold his building, we were in there putting things in boxes and sending his desk and other office furniture to an auction house and cleaning up for the new owner when I came across a key in one of the filing cabinets with a piece of brown cord tied through the hole.
I was twelve, so I went around fitting the key into keyholes to try to find a match for it. Turned out it was for the back door. I slipped it into my pocket and took it home.
In my grandfather’s time he sold insurance on the main floor, just him and a secretary and a phone and a typewriter—no computer or fax machine or anything like that.
Upstairs was a one-bedroom apartment he’d left vacant for a year or so since the ninety-seven-year-old previous tenant had moved to her daughter’s. Grandpa said she’d been costing him more in heat than he made in rent, which he hadn’t had the heart to raise in twenty-six years. Old ladies never seem to be warm enough.
Above the apartment is a little slope-ceilinged attic area where Grandpa stored paperwork and broken lamps, and a tinier bathroom with a medicine cabinet above the sink where he kept a toothbrush and mouthwash and a razor and a photo of his only child, my mom. There was a bigger bathroom on the main floor, of course, but he left that for his secretary to use.
Grandpa’d been doing business more or less the same way for over forty years. The end came suddenly—shoveling snow in his driveway at home.
The building, on Ninth Street just down from Main, is brick and small and shares its walls with a dentist’s office and a barber. It has a tiny backyard—mostly cement, but with just enough dirt for a decrepit old apple tree and a decorative metal pedestal that might have served as a table some generations ago. You can only get to the yard by going out the back door or by cutting through the bank’s parking lot and climbing over a green picket fence.
They’ve got a 1907 photo of the building over at the Sturbridge Historical Society and it doesn’t look much different.
These days a mortgage broker operates out of the main floor, and the apartment upstairs has been converted into an accountant’s office. Entering the back door after midnight does not yield access to either office, but it does permit you to take the narrow staircase to the attic. From all appearances, I am the only one who ever goes up there.
Last night I couldn’t sleep after the argument with my father, so I got up and sneaked outside and walked along Church Street to the bank’s parking lot and looked around. It was one-thirty; no one was out. Grandpa’s building was dark, as usual. So I hopped the fence and looked around again. And then I unlocked the door and walked upstairs.
There’s always a chill in the attic and spiderwebs in the corners. The ceiling is thick wooden beams and planks; fat nails hammered partway in here and there. There’s one bare sixty-watt bulb with a pull cord in the center of the space, but I’ve never dared to see if it works. I always carry a flashlight and mute it with my hand.
I’ve tried the bathroom water and it still comes on, coughing and sputtering at first and running a rusty brown for a minute. I don’t touch the toothbrush or the razor, just look at them and at the photo of my mom at about thirteen taped to the inside of the cabinet. There’s a radiator my grandfather painted silver the summer before he died, but the rust is showing through.
The attic and bathroom have been undisturbed in the years since he left, unused by the new owner. Fat guy; can’t see him climbing all those stairs. This was Grandpa’s domain for almost half a century, and I think it still is. But how long can that last? When I miss him the most I come here.
I taped a poem for my grandfather next to that picture of my mom, just eight short lines about him being the nicest person I’ll ever know.
I stepped out of the bathroom and flashed the light around the attic, hitting the shutters leaning against the bricks, a couple of ancient screens for the downstairs windows, and a heavy white door lying on its side, coated in dust, FOR BETW. UPSTAIR BEDRM AND BATH penciled on it in Grandpa’s block printing.
And then the light caught something I’d never noticed before, sticking out just slightly from the eaves. I reached up and pulled down a fat old magazine and immediately saw it was a Playboy. Old. December 1965. It was in pretty good shape. I wiped the dust from the cover with my sleeve and rested the magazine on the floor, kneeling with the light in my left hand while I turned the pages with my right.
I wondered, When was the last time Grandpa looked at this? Back in ’65? Or did he make regular visits? Maybe there were some others stashed around up there.
I kept turning pages, and soon I came across an unmistakable face. No question about it. Ginger. From Gilligan’s Island. Good and naked.
I laughed a little and stared. Kept staring. There were other photo spreads, but I kept going back to that one.
I had to share it with the boys.
I’ve seen every episode at least six times; the reruns are on continuously.
So I took it with me; it was the first time I’ve removed anything on any of my late-night visits. And I had it with me when I went over to Kevin’s house the next night, and I had it with me when we went down to Turkey Hill.
Tony always said he’d take Mary Ann over Ginger any day if he’d been cast away on that island. I tended to agree with him, but Kevin was a hard-core Ginger fan. He went nuts when I showed him the photo spread, and I had to push him away to keep him from slobbering on the pages.
“Not bad,” Tony said when confronted with the evidence.
“Right,” said Kevin. “You’d rather sleep with the Skipper.”
“Don’t think so.”
“Or Mrs. Howell.”
Other guys came over and we eventually voted 6–3 in favor of Ginger, based primarily on those photos. I got pissed when the cover ripped as this jerk Alex grabbed for it and Kevin wouldn’t let go. I said, “Enough already. This is valuable.”
“The women in that magazine are like a hundred years old now,” Tony said. “Remember that when you’re under the sheets tonight, Ron.”
“Nice math,” I said. “They aren’t even retired yet.”
“Where’d you get that, anyway?” Kevin asked.
“Used-book store over in Hawley,” I lied. “They got lots of ’em. Now give me that,” I said, taking a firm hold on it and bonking him with my free hand. “Assholes. Leave it alone.”
I left the bench soon after that and walked along Church Street by myself. It was only quarter after ten, too early to sneak into the attic. But I was going to put it back there that night. None of those jerks would ever get their grimy hands on my grandfather’s stuff again. I shouldn’t have messed with it, either.
So I went home and went up to my room and lay on the bed with the radio on softly and stared at the ceiling in the dark.
I dozed off, but I’d set my watch to beep at one A.M. When it woke me I put on my running shoes and a dark sweatshirt and quietly left the house with the magazine held against my skin.
And as I took those stairs I felt scared for the first time; scared that I’d get caught maybe, that I’d spoil this scene for-ever and they’d clean up Grandpa’s domain. So I climbed the stairs even more slowly than usual, careful not to let them creak, and cupped my hand more tightly over the flashlight’s beam.
I put the magazine back where I’d found it, but I hid it better than he had. And I looked around the attic for a good long time, seeing it as I always did, but more clearly maybe, more aware.
And I went in the bathroom and picked up the toothbrush and turned it over in my hand and touched my mother’s photo, smelled the razor, touched the faucets.
I took a couple of deep breaths and whispered, “Sorry I disturbed things, Grandpa. I love you.” I turned and made my way down the stairs.
And I feel kind of empty now as I walk toward home, the river gurgling a block away, the lights of Main Street the same distance away on my other side. I’ve got a crystal-clear picture of the attic in my head, and the smell of the place to go with it. The pattern of rust in the sink and the white linoleum peeling up around the toilet, the old knob-and-tube wiring stapled to the beams, the single hook inside the bathroom door where he used to hang his shirt while he shaved, the yellowed bristles of his toothbrush, the crud on his razor, the dead flies in the corner, the silence.
How long can a place remain the same? Maybe forever, if you leave it alone. I’ll keep the key, but I know I can’t go back.
I know I can’t risk it again.