Pregnancy & Maternity
“And settle into,” he said, with a quality of significance that told me he had not forgotten what I’d said about the unpacked boxes.
I helped him carry things down to the van on the moving day.
Not much — he had rented a van with a friend, and I carried a lamp and two bags of bedding down the stairs, which was exactly the level of contribution appropriate for someone who has known someone for seven months and whose relationship exists primarily in lifts and landings and a handful of kitchen-table conversations.At the van he held out his hand.
I shook it.
“The next person up there,” he said. “Whoever moves into 4B.”
“I’ll give them the card,” I said. “The maintenance numbers and the recycling schedule.”
“Tell them about the woman downstairs,” he said.
“I’ll tell them she’s reasonable,” I said. “As long as they are.”
He laughed.
The van drove away.
I stood on the pavement for a moment in the August morning air, watching it go.
There is a new person in 4B now.
A woman about thirty, who I met in the lift on her third day, who is friendly and slightly overwhelmed and accepted the card with the maintenance numbers and the recycling schedule with the gratitude of someone who had been hoping somebody would appear with exactly this information.
She has a herb garden on her balcony.
I can see the pots from mine, just the tops of them when the light is right — little green things, basil and rosemary probably, the cautious optimism of a person planting things in a new place.
Nothing has come over the rail.
I sit out on my balcony in the mornings with my coffee and I look at the city and I think about eleven years and twelve and what comes next, and the balcony is entirely, undisputably mine: the chair, the cushion cover that doesn’t quite match, the plant pots that have been there since the second year, the morning quiet that I defended not by shouting but by knowing exactly what I had available to me and using it precisely.
That is the story.
Not a dramatic one, in the end.
The most satisfying resolutions rarely are.
I was talking to my friend Carol last month — Carol who I have known for twenty years and who responded to the full story with the laughter I expected, culminating in: “You sat down there in your coat at seven in the morning just waiting.”
