Empty Walls
I was having coffee at an old friend’s house yesterday. Doreen and I go back to when we both drove school buses on the island some 35 years ago. Doreen’s husband and she divorced years ago so it’s okay to visit now that the paranoid yahoo’s out of the picture, good riddance, we both agreed over our mugs. Doreen had the TV on when I arrived and left it on while we sat at the kitchen counter, some morning talk show with folks I didn’t know interviewing folks I didn’t know about personal subjects it was impossible to imagine anyone caring two cents about.
Doreen had aged since our Bluebird bus days. Not that I look like a high school yearbook photo, but she looked particularly haggard. Too many years of two pack a day cigarettes, hard liquor and hard living. Life on the South End isn’t a bed of lilacs for all of us, hate to be the one to crack the idyllic image. “So how’s things?” I asked anyway, wishing I’d declined her invitation at the grocery parking lot, old friends or not.
Doreen’s house leans back into the woods of the island’s interior, skirting gone green with gutter-splash mold, curtains drawn in the daytime, and it gave me a whiff of depression before I rang the doorbell. “Making do, Skeeter,” she answered. “Just hanging on day to day.” Lives of quiet desperation, I guess. We clinked cups. The coffee was bitter but drinkable.
Out in the livingroom the TV was laughing, things were good, folks were happy. Not a single painting hung on Doreen’s walls, just empty drywall, a dull pallor in lamplight. Her bookshelf was nearly empty, just a couple of paperbacks standing sentinel, a Library for the Uninterested. The sink was full of yesterday’s dishes, pots and pans crusted, glasses unemptied. An ashtray sat on the counter, full of butts. She dumped it in the garbage when she got our second cup. By then we’d exhausted our shared memories, the colleagues who had died, some still around but lost to us now after three and a half decades.
“Good to see you again, Doreen,” I said. “Anytime, Skeeter,” she answered. Both of us knew we’d settle for parking lot hellos here on out, but I was probably the only one who felt bad about it.
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