The Window Myth
by Tricia Friedman

We are the stillness in this hallway.

Like a stubborn constellation, or boys at a dance, she and I hold ground. A squall of door slams and a choir of hinges sing sad songs. Frantic footsteps offer a rhythm reminiscent of newsroom days when typewriters marched on white battlefields.

Our tour group rushed out to the clothesline. A murky afternoon turned malicious and within mere moments many a sweater were soused. I wonder which tempests wear on souls more: those that fall inside our cashmere camisoles, or those that leave our jackets dripping down the hallway?

“A sky turns green before a tornado,” she said as the delayed thunder rushed after his lightning.

This isn’t the peanut butter and jelly sort of small talk, I thought.

“Have you ever been to Iowa?” she continued.

I hadn’t.

She looked at her feet. I took the opportunity to examine her profile for any characteristics seeming ‘Iowan.’ I’m not sure what such characteristics would be (tattoos of corn?). As if sensing my odd investigation, she spoke.

With memory threading through her, she carefully crocheted sentences.

I had never seen a tornado, and my virginity therein spoke through curious eyes.

“There was a big one this June. I was home from Mali less than a week.” Leaning back into the wall she loosened considerably. I wonder what about Mali has the ability to lengthen her laces so quickly, but I know that trail of the story must wait.

“I had on this ridiculous thing I bought there. A troop of cub scouts were hiking near our home, and we all had to wait out the storm in my basement together. Me in bright Malian boubou, and these little boys being forced to sing ‘Kumbaya’ by my mother. There was one boy I noticed trying to cover up, he pissed himself when the train sound planted itself in the living room above.”

A small, poignant pause left room for a passerby to speak some insignificant comment. Isn’t this always the way with life? A week starts getting good, and then Wednesday does something foolish.

Who knows, maybe the musicals have life right, and we need an intermission to break up the drama. I like to think of most things as binary anyway. I remember thinking as a child over my plastic lunch-boxed meal how noon was the top spot, and how every hour after the zipper would slowly pull down on the day.

“And that would be the beginning of the hardest summer of my life,” she said, cutting the second act off short. There are two types of relationships in which you know better than to slide questions across the desk of dialogue: immediate family and strangers. We said early goodnights.

I looked at my socks where I slung them across the end of the bedpost. They looked like they were fast asleep, having been made drowsy off the heat of my body.

I left my book for the sounds of a dying rain. Nothing remains dormant. Even wind can pick itself up from a horizontal nap to a vertical position of absolute rage. They used to say that you should open your window if a tornado was coming. With my reading lamp still spraying saffron, I almost fell asleep before I silently nodded to my knowing better. There is no tricking of winds, be them April breezes or tangled typhoons. There is only hiding.

 

TRICIA FRIEDMAN currently resides in Morocco, where she volunteers with the Peace Corps. She originally comes from the same birthplace as Rutgers, incredible summertime traffic, and The Sopranos. She’s worked in education for the past seven years in the inner city of Paterson, as well as in Bangkok and Xiamen.

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