The Dancer

When I show. up at her place the next day, the swirling patterns of the janitor’s mop shine wet on tile floor in the harsh fluorescence of the hallway.  It is all quiet and I smell no food or coffee smells from the apartments near hers.  It is early.  I woke in the dark.  4:23.  Sleep is no real cure for anything.  Bits of dust left in corners, under the radiator wait for some puff of air to swirl them into motion.

I knock twice, and quietly, because I know well she would already be up.  It is one of her cleaning days.  She answers as I raise my arm to knock a third time.  Hi- she says, or something quickly.  Her head hangs.  It is as if she’s speaking to her torso.  I mumble just as she had -good morning, and walk into the small studio we’d shared some time.  I never kept clothes there.

Everything that could be is up off of the floor.   There will be more mopping, and no dust left behind.  Even her bed, a single mattress on a cheap, painted plywood frame, is tilted up, leaning against the wall below the crucifix hung there.  Ammonia scents the air.  There never was proper room for two on that bed.

-Did you bring money? she asks.  I tell her no, not until next week.  -I do need it, she tells me.  I nod, and know that she has already paid with money borrowed somehow.  Neither of us is much with money, making or keeping it.  I see the long scabs on the parts of her legs not covered by the nightgown hanging from her shoulders.

Razor thick in width, the scabs are fairly regular features for her.  She has to have it off all the way, to be smooth and clean according to some standard I neither share nor understand.  If she showers after cleaning, and she will, she will shave most carefully around those new cuts, drawing maybe just a bit of new blood.  I’ve seen this.   Some people bite their nails.

-I came to grab the TV, I tell her.  -It’s broken, she tells me.  -It stopped working last week.  I just unplugged it and left it alone.  Maybe it was the storm, I don’t know, but it just stopped working so I pulled the plug.  You can take it and maybe fix it.  She is speaking quickly, looking again at her belly, or around at nothing and not at me, and I want her to look maybe at me.

It is an old TV, black and white, encased in cracked black plastic.  The set never produced a clear image, not when we watched it anyway.  Edges blurred and caved in, details vanishing.

She picks up a rag, dabbing at the mirror over the desk. Pushing past her, I sit at the desk before her pile of books.  She walks from the room into the toilet and I try not to notice the envelope on the desk, the clinic’s name, all of that. I study the books arranged in pyramid fashion-dance, photography, Renaissance history and a home medical advisory.  She walks back into the room smoking a cigarette and I want one very badly.

I had quit when I started sleeping home.  I coughed a lot after that.  On the second or third night after stopping, I had a fit of coughing in the middle of the night.  With the wastebasket next to my bed table to spit out the mucus.  So much work for so little product.

I stand and walk to the TV, where it sits on the floor below the shelves.  Her empty wastebasket is on top, empty, spotless.  I grab the cord and push the televison’s plug into the he wall socket and there is a low sound, a quick hum of life.  The screen is dark before a silverwhite dot pops at its center, then  winks out.

-I thought it might explode.  It smelled funny, you know, she says from behind me as I kneel on her floor.  I just pull plug from the wall without bothering to turn it off.  -I have to go, I tell her.  -How about the money?   she asks.

Something about next week comes out my mouth as I stand and walk to the door. Accidentally, I kick her mop bucket and water splashes to the black white tiles tiles.  I am outside and a door closes.  She’d asked me to take the TV, to fix it maybe.  She was trying to be nice, I think, but we both know it just doesn’t work anymore.