The story below is for my class this week. As my habit, I'll comment at the end of the story. It seems long in blog format, but really only 1500 words.
-
The Sound of Falling SnowI’ve been sitting at this window for as long as I could remember.
Just before dawn the plow had driven by, scattering the white coverlet into distinct sections. Road and snow. Black and white. Man and nature. At six the cafe boy walked up the street, unlocked the shop door, tried to scrap off his boots, and went in. He reappeared at six-ten with a shovel, and cleaned the sidewalk next door as well as his own. Good boy. The used bookstore’s owner was a bent old man, with delicate silver frames and a lion-headed cane, and would not come downstairs from the apartment above his shop until nine thirty. At six-thirty the first customers at the cafe appeared: black wool coat, turtleneck, cashmere scarf, striped gloves. They each came out with a cup in both hands. Escaped steam from the cover slit curled in the early morning brightness.
And on it went, the coming and going of the street. Dogs, delivery trucks, mothers, schoolchildren, the postman. They exist only in the one minute they pass by on the street below.
The sky was fast falling dark outside, the last glowing vestige of the afternoon shrouded in a haze of gray. A man with brown hair and an elegant suit walked with long strides, a leather briefcase held over a shoulder casually. In front of the cafe, he paused, looking up at the sky. A woman with a trailing white scarf and a paper bag full of apples in her arms walked toward him. Her shadow was long behind her, and each prismatic fragment of her breath shone in the fading sunset.
* * *
I was carrying a bouquet, on my way to the theatre. Edward’s symphony was stopping in Philadelphia that night, and I hadn’t seen him since he left home. Father had begrudgingly given me permission to go into town, though he declared he was not going to see that good for nothing son himself. Father had not approved of Edward’s decision in music. Respectable young men go into medicine or business or law. Cello was a diversion, and artists a sham.
Mother longed to see Edward, too, I knew, but her needs were always dwarfed by Father’s gout and moods. She had stayed silent, and only gave me a tight smile when I told her in confidence that I would bring back a program for her.
The spring day was fine, and as I was allowed to be in town by my own, I had planned carefully. One never knew who one might meet at the theatre. I paused to check my reflection in a shop window. The white cap sleeve dress with lime green polka dots shone in the afternoon light. And as I turned to go, the cafe door opened and its bells jingled, and a man walked right into me.
He grasped my arm and stopped my fall, but the gossamer ribbon on the bouquet broke. The flowers scattered around our feet in a shower of petals and blossoms. He apologized and insisted on replacing the bouquet, and before I could respond or make sense of what happened, he was already guiding me back down the street to the flower stand. I stood a shoulder behind him awkwardly while he talked to the flower girl. The night wasn’t how I had imagined. My only thought was that perhaps he hadn’t noticed it was entirely my fault. Or at least, that he was too much a gentleman to point it out. Then I realized that the man was finished, and was holding the flowers with one hand, looking down at me with an amused expression. He gave me the bouquet, tipped his hat, and said goodbye.
It wasn’t until I got to the theatre doors that I noticed that he had reproduced the bouquet exactly: marigolds, English roses, strings of bluebell, dahlias, tipped carnations, amaryllis, white begonias, azaleas. In their midst was a single tulip. I pulled it out by its delicate stem and buried my nose in it. Then I pinned the snowy blossom on the bow of my hat. Maybe the day wasn’t such a disaster, after all.
Edward had given me a good seat, and smiled at me when the curtains came up. He looked happier than I last saw him, although a little thinner. The orchestra started on Beethoven’s 9th, and was halfway through the first movement before I was able to see anything else but my brother.
The man with the tulip was sitting across from Edward, his bowtie now even, a deep red violin in his hands. He was the concertmaster. And as he played, it seemed as if he wasn’t in the theatre, wasn’t watched by the audience in their stiff coats and glossy gowns, but instead on the edge of a sea cliff, feeling the sun and the whip of salty wind, looking into the glimmer on the crests of faraway waves.
After the performance, Edward came out from backstage and embraced me with a fierce happiness before I could hand him the flowers. “Emma, I’m glad you’re here.”
He called out to someone behind me, then said, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. He’s saved me many times since I joined the symphony. And I’ve talked about you so much, Emma, that I promised I’d introduce him to my little sister.”
I turned around, and there was the man with the tulip. He said his name was Leon, and took my hand as if we hadn’t met under embarrassing circumstances. He had brown hair that almost seemed black in a dark room, eyes of the sea, and calluses on his left fingertips.
He was twenty-eight, I was nineteen.
* * *
There was a blur of red on white. The man in the suit caught an apple before it tumbled into the ridge of dirty snow at the edge of the sidewalk. He crouched by the kneeling woman and dropped it into the bag. They looked at each other for a moment, and then rose together.
* * *
In the winters when I came down with the flu, Leon would cease his Shostakovich and his Mahler, and go out into the cold. After an hour, sometimes longer, he would return and hand me an orange from underneath his coat. I never knew where he went to procure these oranges, and they were never the same. One year it had a thick dimpled cover of fragrant peel and pith, and one year it was smooth to the touch and the oils on its surface made it almost waxy.
He would draw the curtains and lay me on the sofa. Then he sat in a chair next to me and played slow pieces on the violin, like the sound of falling snow. On my spot on the sofa I would peel the orange carefully to take it off in one sheet, then separate the fruit piece by piece, eat one, and lay the rest on a clean cloth over the radiator. I’d settle back into the pillows to watch and listen to Leon and his violin. Soft light beneath the cream curtains framed his silhouette in a halo of gold, and danced between his fingers as he played.
The orange would be ready when he got to Saint-Saëns: taunt on the surface and slightly dry at the corners, but plump and warm. Its soft flesh would pop from the papery skin. When he finished Paganini, he would smile like a little boy as I placed the last piece in his palm. He ate it with his eyes closed.
* * *
I felt a weight settle over me and opened my eyes. A young man stood before me, adjusting a wool throw around my shoulders. He smiled, and his dark hair made his eyes seem brighter.
“Did you have a good day, Grandma?”
He spoke so intimately that I didn’t have the heart to correct him. I looked down at my hands, stalling my response. They were brittle and creased. Veins crossed over tendons like little blue streamers. Someone else’s hands.
The man was still smiling down at me, his eyes expectant and familiar.
“Yes. I had a nice dream.” I said.
He went behind my wheelchair. “It’s time for dinner.”
I turned to face him. “Is Leon back yet from New York?”
He paused, then bent down close to me, and laid his hands on my mine. I could feel his fingers around my palms. His tone was gentle, as if I’ve asked this before. “No, Grandma”
“Oh,” I said. “All right.”
He tried to smile and held my hands for a moment before we went out together into the dining room. There were light calluses on his fingertips.
Outside, the street was empty, all shadows and pale light from warm windows and lonely streetlights. Snow started falling again. The flakes drifted down as if they were almost weightless, turning over in their slow, silent descent.
“Jack.” He turned, his eyes widened. The name came unbidden, but whether it was his name or not, perhaps it didn’t really matter. “Where’s my cane?”
-
In my initial drafts I didn't have the last paragraph. I think it's better to have hope at the end, otherwise the sadness of her dementia is too overwhelming, in addition to the realities of being old in our society. Also I changed the street scene to be more ambiguous.
Anyway, pretty serious story compared to DS. The main problem (plenty of other ones, as well, of course) with this story is my inability to execute the idea of making Emma's reality more complex and unclear, to contrast with the clarity in her memories. But it was very difficult manipulating my sentence structure to make that feeling come alive. This was disappointing, especially since I wanted to write this story because I love how
Flowers for Algernon and
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time manipulated narrative storytelling. (The latter's title is actually from Doyle's
Sherlock Holmes: "Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time." "That was the curious incident.")
