First published in Confrontation, Issue 124, Spring 2020
When Susan woke, the bedroom was dark and filled with the fumes of varnish. The house, with its newly refinished hardwood floors, was a human terrarium when the windows were closed. But better to suffocate in the heat of July, Susan reasoned, than get murdered in your sleep. The screens in their one-story cape offered no protection against would-be assassins. You could slit them with a butter knife.
Her husband, Jason, had tried reasoning with her. “This is a good neighborhood, Sue. And Boston’s a safe city.” Jason didn’t worry about details like murderers and robbers. He had lives to save, now that he was a surgical resident, and he was too exhausted by days’ end to think about much besides sleep. But adjusting to one-story living was hard for Susan. She had slept the whole of her twenty-six years above the first floor. So after Jason went to bed at nine, she quietly closed the windows. The kitchen and bedroom windows, nearest to the ground, were first. The windows in the second bedroom were last. The living room was still so stacked with boxes and packing materials that she never opened those windows at all.
Susan listened to Jason’s breathing and tried to match it. If she couldn’t fall back asleep in twenty minutes, she would have to get up. She hated these first minutes of insomnia, the uncertainty, the loneliness. Sleep was like death: you could not follow a person into it. Some nights Susan made noise, rustling the sheets and fluffing her pillow, in the hopes that Jason would wake up. Some nights she even turned on the bedroom lamp, the small Tiffany knockoff Jason had bought her for their first wedding anniversary. But she did that only when she was desperate. She had played the role of the intern’s needy wife the previous year in New York. This year she was the resident surgeon’s wife: confident, capable, independent.
After half an hour, Susan took her phone and padded down the hall to the second bedroom. It was just past two-thirty. In the dark, she found her way to the dining chair positioned near the closet. She sat with one leg folded under her, looking at the bare windows. She visualized them with shades and then blinds and then drapes, until her leg fell asleep. If she got a nanny job, she and Jason would be able to afford window treatments, and Susan could turn the lights on at night and not feel exposed.
Susan tried to read the news. The resident’s wife was well informed, and current events gave her and Jason something to talk about besides home furnishings and surgery. But it was too late for politics and wars. Susan opened Facebook instead and scrolled through the new baby videos that her high school classmates had posted. The new videos were variations of the old baby videos—babies smiling, babies kicking, babies rolling over onto a sea of beige Midwestern carpeting. Susan couldn’t help but feel a little envious. The carpeting likely was new and came with a new house and central air and an upstairs and three and one-half baths.
In contrast, the New York interns, most of whom had stayed on in New York for their residencies, weren’t even married. They posted photos of themselves or their dinners or the latte art on their cappuccinos. Susan “liked” a sushi boat dinner, a latte panda, and several photos of the High Line before she came to Glamorous Natalie’s post. She should have kept scrolling. She had seen Natalie’s new cover photo already. But some habits of the intern’s wife died hard.
In the photo, Natalie, the perennial debutante, was wearing elbow-length gloves and holding a martini up to the camera. She was smiling as though someone had just made her laugh. Probably they had. Natalie laughed easily. There were already more responses to Natalie’s photo than Susan had friends. Susan looked for Jason’s response. “Cheers!” he’d written. “Miss you guys.” Natalie had responded, “We miss YOU.” He’d fit so effortlessly into their world.
At four Susan began opening the windows so the house would air out some before Jason’s alarm rang at four-thirty. The dark was thinning and she was ready to sleep again. On her way back to the bedroom, she passed the living room, where the edges of the boxes were too delineated to ignore. She paused. There were still twenty-five, maybe thirty, to unpack.
As Susan stood in the doorway, she heard a faint crackling sound. It was so quiet that she wasn’t sure it was real at first. It could have been water deep in her ear. She leaned forward. The noise was more pronounced farther in. It was almost a snapping, popping sound, a faucet dripping outside, maybe. She rotated her right ear slowly toward the far corner of the room to pinpoint the source. It seemed to come from the window there.
Susan’s fatigue began to lift. She crept into the room until she reached the boxes. She stopped and listened again. The sound definitely seemed to emanate from the corner. She strained her ears. Now it was vaguely human. She held her breath and stood perfectly still. It sounded quite human. It sounded a lot like someone trying to walk very quietly outside her living room window. Her fatigue evaporated. In her mind she tried turning the sound into an electrical noise or a bird scratching—even a mouse would be preferable. She hadn’t truly believed there were prowlers outside, had she? But the threat seemed suddenly real.
Then her eyes focused on a large tangle of packing tape in the far corner. The movers had used the tape, yards of it, to secure moving blankets around the furniture. And when they’d unwrapped everything, they’d left the used tape in a giant ball by the window. That was it. The ball was slowly unsticking itself. That was exactly the sound. Susan breathed out. In the lightening sky she would be able to sleep.
Jason was long gone when Susan woke at eleven. She took her cereal out to the back yard to eat rather than sitting in the kitchen at the table crowded against the wall. Their house was nine hundred square feet and spacious compared with their New York studio apartment, but it felt oddly claustrophobic. The studio had been just a rectangle with a kitchen and bathroom and the bathroom right off the living space where everyone could hear you pee, but there were always the sounds of other people in the apartments around her. Susan missed that. Sometimes this house got so quiet that she even missed the buzzing of overhead fluorescent lighting.
Susan sat halfway down the slope to the neighbors’ fence, where she could see onto the next street over. The imagined threats from the night before were at least as far removed. She watched a little old man with a derby hat and cane walk slowly by. Susan had observed him other mornings. Despite the heat, he wore dark dress pants and a cardigan buttoned up like a suit jacket. He had the physical proportions of a brick—short and wide.
The man limped heavily down to the corner and eased himself onto a stone retaining wall. She could just see him in between the houses, with his cane planted in front of him and his hands on the knob. He would rest there for maybe quarter of an hour before walking back. He was always alone.
Some days a woman came out with her young son after the man left. Susan guessed the woman was older than she—people on the East Coast didn’t have children until their thirties—but they might have things in common. Susan would eventually have to make her own friends. Jason’s residency was five years and she couldn’t depend on his colleagues this time; the year in New York had been long. The interns had always included Susan, but they hadn’t really known what to make of her and her Midwest ideas, and the conversation frequently rerouted past her, cut her out, as if she were an oxbow stream.
As Susan rose to go in the house, she noticed the little man with the derby hat leaning on his cane and looking up the hill. He was in a line directly below her. Susan glanced around to see what might have caught his eye: a hawk or an airplane, something airborne. Then it occurred to Susan that he was looking at her. On a whim, she raised her empty cereal bowl. He bowed in response. He was smiling.
It had been almost three weeks since Susan and Jason had moved in but they’d met few of the neighbors and the introductions had been awkward. The interaction with the man felt perfect somehow, like a bridge thread, a single strand that Susan could connect a whole web to. She felt a tentative, kindling optimism in her chest, and the day suddenly looked fresher and greener. It was opening like a flower. Susan could see the boxes in the living room from where she stood. Even that task felt approachable.
The buzzing optimism spread to her limbs and Susan managed to unpack three large boxes before she tired of it. Three boxes was enough to impress Jason anyhow, and Susan looked around for something else to occupy her. She ought to go to the store and get something for dinner or read the news she’d started the night before. Or look for a job. She settled on pruning.
At the hardware store their first week in Boston, Susan had purchased a pair of polka-dotted gardening gloves, a trowel, and red-handled pruners. Most of the houses in the neighborhood had flowers in their yards and nice landscaping. Susan and Jason’s yard had shrubs that were ten years’ overgrown. The broker had apologized for the state of the exterior, but Susan was secretly pleased. The plantings were there; she could see that. Susan just needed to uncover them and nurture them back to health, like the little girl in The Secret Garden.
Susan tried on the gloves and practiced squeezing the handles of the pruners. Her hand looked just right, like a real gardener’s hand. It made a funny picture, and she snapped several shots at different angles. The photo where she held the pruners like a cocktail glass, like Natalie and her martini, was her favorite. She uploaded it with the message: “Here’s to gardening.” Even the New Yorkers would understand it.
When Susan’s phone rang, she half expected it to be someone calling about the photo. But it was Jason. She felt the tiniest pinprick in her mood. She began to lose her buoyancy. It was five o’clock, the time Jason called to tell her he was going to be late. She held her finger poised over the phone. If she let the call go to voicemail, she could listen to the message later. She could postpone the disappointment. It rang. It rang again. Surely the resident’s wife didn’t fall into despair over minor changes in schedules.
Susan pressed accept. “Hi.”
“Hey . . . Sue B. I didn’t think you were going to answer.”
“I was in the other room. Unpacking.”
“Oh. Great.” He sounded surprised.
“You’re going to be late?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. It’s going to be at least nine. Maybe ten.”
Susan heard him pull the phone from his mouth and talk to someone. It was dark by nine. Susan pictured the hard, reflective windows.
“Suze? Are you there?”
“I am. I’m sorry you’re having such a long day.” And she was sorry.
“Mondays, you know. They’re usually like this.” She heard him talking in the background again. “They’re heading into surgery,” he said when he returned. “I gotta go.”
“All right. See you when I see you.”
She must have said it perfectly because Jason started crooning. “Suzie-Q . . . I love you.” He was off key, completely tone deaf, but it didn’t stop him from singing.
She laughed. “Bye.”
Susan ate dinner slowly and showered slowly and checked how many responses she’d gotten to her photo. Most of the likes were from family and friends in the Midwest, but that made sense. The residents, like Jason, were still working.
She was just about to start a movie when she remembered it was garbage day in the morning. Jason had promised to take it out. There’d been a raccoon going through it and scattering the garbage all over the yard. He could do it before work in the morning, she argued with herself. But leaving it for him carried the whiff of helplessness. She was the opposite of helpless and unafraid of a raccoon and a little garbage.
As she approached the trash barrel, she felt less confident. The orange bungee cord Jason had stretched over the cover to secure it to the trash barrel was in tact, but there was a large hole chewed through the cover and into the barrel. The stench was impressive, and scattered all around the barrel were dirty pizza crusts, microwave dinners, and chicken bones that had been gnawed clean. Susan saw several of her used pantyliners and flushed in embarrassment. No doubt the neighbors had seen those.
She stuck a plastic grocery bag on her hand and used it to pick up the trash and put it in a fresh garbage bag. She dragged the bag and barrel to the curb. As Susan unfastened the bungee cord, she caught a glimpse of white through the hole in the cover. At first she thought it was a trash bag ruffling in the breeze, but it was flat against the side and high up, like staticky packing peanuts. She didn’t remember throwing styrofoam peanuts away. Maybe Jason had. She removed the cover slowly so they wouldn’t blow out. She didn’t want to be chasing them down the street.
But they didn’t blow out. Rather they crawled. Susan opened her mouth in slow motion. A mass of white worms was inching its way up the insides of the barrel. It was a scene from a horror film. Maggots was the word that came to her, though she’d never seen them before. Something so vile couldn’t be anything else. There were hundreds of them, some right around the rim. Susan looked at the trash barrel cover in her hand and turned it over slowly. There were more maggots dripping from the underside.
She let out something between a scream and a gasp and flung the cover onto the driveway. She stepped back and back and back again, shuddering and brushing at her shirt and arms, until she was standing in the street. The maggots were coming over the edge now. They were lemmings jumping from a cliff.
She heard footsteps behind her. Some neighbor was coming to witness the onslaught. Susan didn’t want to turn around and face them. If she kept perfectly still, maybe they would simply pass by. But the footsteps didn’t pass. They stopped beside her.
They belonged to the man in the derby hat.
Susan nearly wept when she saw him. She put her hand to her throat. “I think . . . there are . . . ”—she could hardly say it—“maggots in my garbage.”
The man looked from her to her trash and raised his eyebrows.
“Isn’t that what those are? I’ve never had them before. In our apartments, we put the trash in a dumpster or in the trash chute. It didn’t get . . . bugs. We never saw it again. How was I supposed to know?” She looked up and down the street at her neighbors’ placid-looking barrels. Should she have known? She couldn’t stomach the possibility that this was her fault.
“We put our trash in trash bags. We recycle. We’re very clean. We didn’t even have cockroaches in New York.” Which was a small lie.
He was listening carefully. He didn’t appear to be disgusted. He seemed almost amused. Susan let some of her anxiety bleed away. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe it was normal. Even preventable. There was a spray, a maggot repellent, she could buy and it would never happen again.
The man put a finger to his chest and opened his mouth. “No ingles. Albania.”
For a moment she thought he was joking.
“No ingles. Albania,” he repeated.
“You don’t speak English?”
He pointed at her. “Americana?”
Susan nodded dumbly.
“Ah, Americana.” He looked mildly disappointed, as if she’d confirmed what he’d already suspected. Susan was American, with American trash and American maggots. The man shrugged and wandered up the street.
Susan stared after him until he disappeared. She felt very much like a child pressed against a screen door watching her mother leave.
She was no longer hysterical when Jason got home at ten but she wasn’t speaking. She had sent Jason several texts telling him what had happened and making it clear that Jason was responsible for cleaning up the mess. She sent the texts in full caps, which he hated—it felt like she was shouting at him—but Susan didn’t care. The resident’s wife had her limits and maggots were it.
Susan wanted to throw the trash barrel away but she wasn’t certain how one went about doing that. Jason, the environmentalist, wouldn’t hear of it. “It’s ridiculous to throw away a mostly perfectly good trash barrel.” He wouldn’t even use bleach to clean it out. He used tea tree oil. When he was done, their trash barrel smelled like a yoga studio.
The next two nights Susan woke from nightmares about worms in her hair and in her kitchen and the Albanian man and yoga. For once, scrolling the Internet and checking Facebook didn’t help. Susan needed something more to fully distract herself from the horrors of home ownership. She needed to feel useful.
She dug Jason’s headlamp out from the box of tools, pulled it over her head, and turned the light on. It was bright enough to illuminate the contents of a box, but not enough to expose Susan to the outside. She began quietly unpacking, just the easy stuff, but by morning she had compiled a respectable stack of empty boxes.
Susan spent several more nights like this. During the day she caught glimpses of the Albanian man walking along, but Susan wasn’t ready to face him. Even Glamorous Natalie, she was sure, would have been embarrassed. Even Glamorous Natalie, who greeted everyone with cheek kisses as though she’d known them for years, who never pulled back too early or missed someone’s cheek the way that Susan did, would’ve been embarrassed.
The man was never with anyone. Susan didn’t think he was married, but he had to live with someone, a son or daughter that had encouraged him to move away from Albania for a better life here. And now they spent all day working, leaving him to fend for himself. She wondered if he was bitterly disappointed with the arrangement.
The crackling from the tape ball got more noticeable the closer Susan got to the corner and by Friday afternoon she couldn’t stand it suddenly—she needed total peace and quiet. She marched outside and dumped the tape ball into the garbage. But when Susan returned to the living room, the noise was still there. Puzzled, she examined the space where the packing tape had been. It was bare.
Susan knelt down and put her ear to the outside wall. The noise was fainter there. When she stood it was louder. Susan played this listening/standing game until she reached the corner window. The noise was loudest there, along the bottom trim.
Susan opened the window and pushed up the screen. She stuck her head out and examined the siding. She saw nothing unusual. Inside, she listened again. There, with her ear pressed tight to the molding, the noise resembled chewing. It sounded remarkably like tiny jaws chewing at window trim.
Susan felt a pinpoint of light pierce her as she slowly pushed on the molding with her fingernail. The paint instantly gave way. There was no wood left behind it. Susan stared at the half-moon-shaped crack she’d made. She watched as it begin to reform itself into a thin black antenna. And then into a second antenna. And then into the black head of a carpenter ant.
The pinpoint of light grew into a small nuclear ball. There were carpenter ants living in their living room window. The ant retracted its head and disappeared. Susan blinked. She had the strangest inclination to try to follow it. She had seen it, she was sure. But it was nothing now. The crack could be just a loose black hair. Susan slowly reached her finger forward again. She pressed the pad of it flat against the surface. It was soft. She moved her finger farther along. It was soft and pliable the entire length. The whole sill was infested.
Susan was shaking so badly she could hardly text Jason. “OMFG. Carpenter ant nest in the living room window. What should we do?” And then she thought better and deleted the OMFG.
His response was fast. “Exterminator? I’ll call you.”
Susan carried a chair to the living room doorway to keep watch while she waited. If the ants started coming out, she needed to know. She would have to kill them somehow. She went back for the fly swatter in the kitchen. It was lucky that she had unpacked it the night before.
Jason would call soon. It was an emergency. Surely Jason’s superiors would understand the situation. Maybe they would even excuse him for the day. But the hour wore on and then an hour and a half and then two and her phone was silent.
Susan’s mind picked up speed. Jason was right. Ultimately they would need an exterminator. She checked the time. It was three and tomorrow was Saturday. If Susan didn’t call soon, she might not get someone that day. She might already have waited too long. She double-checked her messages. Nothing. The resident’s wife needed to take matters into her own hands.
The exterminator arrived at six in a rusting minivan with commercial license plates. His name was Jeb. He was young with a belly that significantly challenged his belt. His dark brown collared shirt and peanut butter–colored pants made him look vaguely like a safari guide. Susan had called five companies and Jeb’s was the one that responded. She was still in the living room, watching for the ants, when he rang the doorbell.
“I think there’s a lot of them in there,” Susan whispered. Her eyes felt overly large and protruding. “I can hear them chewing.”
“It’s okay, ma’am. I’m a licensed professional.” A spray can was his only visible weapon.
“There might be thousands.”
Jeb laughed. “Don’t you worry. I’ll take care of them.”
Jeb knelt down and poked at the window sill with a pen. Susan pictured the ants pouring out en masse, burrowing into the walls, crawling across her face as she slept. Did they nest in people’s ears like cockroaches? “Here,” Susan said. She couldn’t stay there, even though she was the homeowner. “You might need this.” She held out the swatter. “I’m going . . . I have to go.”
Jeb tossed the fly swatter behind him. He winked at her. “I’ve got this.”
Susan stopped at the bottom of the front steps and then decided that was too close and moved to the sidewalk. Birds twittered and the sun shone and for a moment she pretended everything was fine. Then Jeb let out a high-pitched yell. “Holy shit!” She heard the sound of the spray can and then the sound of the fly swatter and then the sound of the spray can alternating with the fly swatter alternating with Jeb swearing. “Shit. Shit. Holy shit.” Susan crossed her arms and legs and formed a pretzel twist.
“They keep coming!” Jeb cried.
A few late commuters walked past. They smiled hesitantly but didn’t stop. It probably seemed impolite given the language coming from the house. Something unsavory was happening inside.
Susan was so focused on Jeb’s rantings that she didn’t notice the Albanian man walk up. He was just there suddenly, smiling and nodding. He was a full head shorter than she. He gestured at the house like a command, the tapping of a wand. Tell me about this.
“I have an ants’ nest in my living room,” Susan said too loud, as though he was deaf.
The man looked confused.
Susan searched the sidewalk. She pointed to a carpenter ant near the grass. “Ant. Nest. House.” The man shook his head, uncomprehending. But Susan had a sudden determination to communicate. She needed him to understand. She crouched down and pointed at the ant. “Ants.” She looked up at the Albanian. “Ants. In house.” She pointed at her one-story cape, the first home she had ever owned, and started to cry. The carpenter ant scurried away. Susan tucked her head down. The tears fell to the concrete and onto her legs until they worked their way into the crease of her knees.
The Albanian man’s loafers were a blur. Any minute she expected them to pick up and leave, embarrassed for this Americana who couldn’t control her emotions. But instead, the man reached down and patted her shoulder.
After several minutes, when she started slowing down, he grabbed her arm and gently pulled her up. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, okay.” His grip was surprisingly firm.
Susan wiped at her eyes and nose and tried to smile. The swearing and slapping had ceased, she noticed. It was quiet.
Jeb poked his head out the front door. “Uh, have you got a vacuum? There’s a lot of carcasses here.”
Susan swallowed hard. She nodded. Then she turned and smiled at the Albanian man. “Thank you.”
He blinked.
“Thank you,” Susan repeated, slower.
The Albanian put his index finger firmly on his chest. “No ingles. Bulgaria.” Then he pointed at her. “Americana?”
“Yes. Americana. Thank you.”
“Ah, beautiful, beautiful.”
Susan’s eyes were dried out and swollen from the crying. She had to blink to keep her vision clear. The man tipped his hat and left her.
“Ma’am?” Jeb asked. “Vacuum?”
“Sorry.” She paused. He’d said Bulgaria, hadn’t he? Not Albania. She shook her head in frustration. She had been so focused on her reply that she missed what he was saying.
Jason came home with flowers and a bottle of German riesling shortly after Jeb left. The fumes from the ant killer had supplanted the smell of floor varnish and Susan had all the windows open except the one above the ants’ nest.
“I’m sorry, Sue. I was in surgery and I couldn’t call you.”
She didn’t cry when he hugged her. She was calm and dignified. She had the Bulgarian man to thank for that. While she closed the windows that night, Jason took out his harmonica and played the Carpenter Ant Blues. Susan slept until morning.
It rained all weekend, but she found herself energized instead of depressed, as though the crying had flushed something toxic out of her system. On Sunday Susan unpacked the remaining boxes and positioned the sofa in the corner to hide the blown-out window sill. She didn’t complain about Jason’s sleeping until one. She understood. She had a deep well of understanding.
On Monday, with no boxes left, Susan wandered around the house with her coffee. She considered starting her job search, but she had too much energy. She needed to spend it. Halfway through her third cup, Susan had a brilliant idea. If the Bulgarian man couldn’t speak English, Susan could learn Bulgarian. The man must be terribly lonely. In Bulgaria he probably had parks to go to and people to play checkers with and discuss politics. At night, there would have been the local tavern, where everyone knew him. But here, he couldn’t even communicate.
Susan looked up the translation for “Hello” in Bulgarian. Her enthusiasm dimmed slightly when she saw the result: “Здравей.” It wasn’t even in a familiar alphabet. But she forged ahead. She listened to the pronunciation and wrote the word down phonetically. Then Susan found a YouTube video by a dark-haired woman with an accent and practiced with that, too.
When she sounded nearly like the woman in the video, Susan looked up the words “I am Susan,” Аз съм Susan, so she could introduce herself. Then she practiced the whole phrase, “Здравей. Аз съм Susan,” until it started to come naturally. Until she started to believe it. When Jason came home, she greeted him with it.
“It’s Bulgarian.”
Even when he was exhausted, he tried to seem cheerful. “Why are you learning Bulgarian?”
“That man on the street that walks with the cane. He’s Bulgarian. I thought if I learned a little of his language, it might help him speak more English. He seems lonely.”
Jason went into the bedroom to change. “I thought he was Albanian.”
Susan winced. “No. I heard it wrong.”
“Oh.” He didn’t say more. “I saw you took out the garbage. No . . . bugs?”
“No.” During the week now, Susan kept the full garbage bags in the chest freezer until garbage day. But she hadn’t told Jason.
“Well, that’s nice.” Jason came back out and kissed her. “About the Bulgarian. You’re making friends.”
Tuesday was beautiful. The Bulgarian man would be out walking. Susan went to the back yard at ten to practice pruning. At noon, she still hadn’t seen the Bulgarian man, and the pruning was giving her a headache. She was starting to feel nervous. Maybe it was a stupid idea. She wasn’t good at languages. She had nearly flunked high school Spanish. And what if the Bulgarian man didn’t want to be communicated with? But she was sure that wasn’t the case.
Finally, at five-thirty, she spotted him. She was sitting on her front steps when he rounded the corner. He was moving slowly, and she had several minutes to contemplate her approach. She could greet him from where she was. Or she could meet him standing and then walk down the street with him. She stood.
Susan waited until the man was stopped in front of her before she extended her hand. “Здравей. Аз съм Susan.”
He looked at her blankly and left her hand where it was.
“Did I not say it right?” Maybe the woman in the YouTube video pronounced it wrong. But she had seemed like a native. Susan tried again. This time it came out a question. “Здравей. Аз съм Susan?”
The man’s face brightened. “Ahh. Ah. Very good.” His accent was heavy. “Very good.” Laughter escaped from the deep part of the Bulgarian’s throat.
Susan exhaled.
“Americana. Beautiful, beautiful.”
He waited for her to continue. But she didn’t know any more. “All right.” She turned to go.
“Albania,” he said.
She looked back. “Albania?”
He pointed to himself. “No ingles. Albania.”
She bit her bottom lip. “Bulgaria. I thought it was Bulgaria.”
The man blinked.
“I was sure you said Bulgaria.” But it was like talking to a baby. He didn’t understand.
He pointed down the street with his cane. He was going that way. Then he muttered something.
Susan’s face burned and she called Jason the minute she walked in the house. The intern’s wife had called Jason daily. But the resident’s wife didn’t call unless she was dying or the house was on fire or she’d made a supreme fool of herself. Miraculously he picked up.
“Everything okay?”
“He is from Albania. I made a total ass of myself, trying to speak Bulgarian to him. He had no idea what I was saying.” She took several deep breaths. There was silence on the other end.
“Are you talking about that guy with the cane?”
“Yes! The one that’s from fucking Albania. Where the fuck is Albania anyway?”
More silence. “Close to Bulgaria.”
It was too much. How the hell was she supposed to know where all those little countries were? Who even went to Albania or Bulgaria or Hungaria or whatever?
“Can I call you later?” Jason asked.
“What time are you going to be home tonight?”
“Suze—you know I don’t have any idea . . .”
“Right. Great.” She wanted to throw the phone across the room. “I gotta go.”
“Okay. You’ll be okay?”
“Fine.” She cut him off before he could say goodbye. She was not going to look up Albania. Or Bulgaria. She hadn’t needed to know where they were for the first twenty-six years of her life and she didn’t expect she would need their locations again in the next twenty-six.
That night while she waited for Jason, she saw fireflies behind the house. They came up from the fence at the bottom, two flashes at a time. She nearly missed them. It was only when one floated high enough for her to notice it from her chair in the second bedroom that curiosity drove her to the windows overlooking the back. There was just dusk when she looked down over the hill, and dark grass. And then the fireflies started up again, one, two, five, twenty. They moved in little waves of blinking lights toward the house like shooting stars. Susan’s heart softened. She clicked her phone on. Albania and Bulgaria were separated by one country: Macedonia.
She watched the Albanian man walk back and forth, unsmiling, for the next week, but she avoided him. If she saw him when she was out eating breakfast, she moved. When she brought their trash and recycling barrels to the street, she checked three times to make sure he wasn’t coming. At night she resumed her schedule of insomnia.
Susan noted daily that the Albanian man was moving slower. He leaned more heavily on his cane and kept his bad leg straighter. He rested at the corner longer and longer. He was worsening. Susan couldn’t help but attribute the lapse to unhappiness. Jason had described to her the studies on the mind/body connection. One’s mental state greatly affected one’s healing ability. The man must be deeply unhappy. What if Susan were the cause? The timing couldn’t be coincidental.
That night after Susan had exhausted her social media accounts, she opened Google Translate to Albanian and typed in “What is your name?” Out came “Si e ke emrin?” Albanian felt harder to pronounce than Bulgarian and even after two hours it didn’t sound completely right. The next morning she practiced it again over breakfast. It was better. Maybe passable. Then she looked up Albanian names to see what name the man might give in response. Alban, Loran, Ervis, Imer were possibilities and seemed easy enough to understand, but others—Xhelal, Xhevat, Xhoi—seemed too challenging. Those didn’t really fit him, though, she decided. She liked the name “Alban” the best for him. It meant “the Albanian.”
When she saw him sit down on the corner wall, she put on her sneakers and locked the house. She would pretend that she was going for a walk. She would speak to him as she casually passed by. She would show him that he had a friend in the world.
As she approached the corner, Susan plastered a smile on her face. “Good Morning.”
“Eh.” His voice was raspy and old sounding. He struggled to stand.
“How is your leg?” She pointed to his leg and his cane together.
He shrugged. “Americana.”
“Yes.” She pointed back at him. “Albania.”
“Beautiful, beautiful.”
She took a deep breath. “Thank you.” She didn’t want to rush and seem as though she was trying too hard. She spread her hand on her chest like she was reciting the pledge of allegiance. “Soo—zun,” she said very slowly.
He nodded.
“Soo-zun,” she repeated to make sure he understood. He nodded once more. She was making progress.
Susan took another deep breath. “Si e ke emrin?” she asked. And then she repeated it in English. “What is your name?”
This part he didn’t get. He shook his head. Maybe the English had confused him.
She slowed it down. She thought about the Google pronunciation. “Si e ke emrin?” Then she slowed it down again. “Si . . . e . . . . ke . . . emrin?”
There was a light in his eyes, a sign of recognition. “Ah.” And then a rumble of laughter.
Susan flattened her hand against her chest. She felt like laughing herself. “My name is Soo-zun. Soo-zun.” Then she pointed at him and raised her eyebrows. “Si e ke emrin?”
He shook his head. “No ingles,” he said. “Armenia.”
Susan squinted at him. “Armenia?” She felt anger rise. “No. No Armenia. Albania. No ingles, Albania.” She pointed at him with short little jabs. It was Alban. Alban the Albanian.
The man shook his head. “No ingles. Armenia.” They stood like that for minutes: his face transparent, hers clouded. She hadn’t misheard him all these times. He was changing it. He sat down on the wall and stared straight ahead.
Susan had intended to return to the house after she finished talking to him. She was going to pretend that she’d forgotten something on the stove or a load of laundry in the drier. But she couldn’t go back there to the trash barrel and the window sill and the kitchen that fit only three chairs. Something was wound up and stuck inside her and she needed to work it loose.
She went up a block and then turned right onto a perpendicular street. She had no money. She had left her phone at home. She just walked and walked until she’d gone far enough to break a bridge thread. Then she turned mid-block and started back again. It must have looked strange, her just reversing direction like that without reaching a destination, but she didn’t care.
Five minutes from her house, she saw a figure ahead. She slowed down. The figure looked like the Albanian man. She moved close to the trees planted along the sidewalk. Half a block more, and she recognized the cane and the derby hat. But his head was to the ground. He might not have noticed her yet. She could still turn around or cross the street or take some other evasive action. She paused, too long. He looked up.
To turn now seemed unnecessarily rude. Her only option was to walk past him. But she wouldn’t smile when she passed by. She would nod in acknowledgment and keep right on walking. She didn’t know what game he was playing, but he clearly had no interest in her. Or he was crazy. Or both. Susan fixed her eyes to a tree three blocks away and set her course for it. A couple of minutes later the man was in her peripheral vision. She looked at him sideways, without fully turning her head, and gave him a curt nod. To her surprise, he motioned for her to stop and he held out his hand apologetically.
He seemed so eager to speak with her that she put her anger aside for the moment. She tapped into her empathy. Depression made people do strange things after all. And wasn’t it good that she was running into him this way? It would relieve the awkwardness the next time she saw him and she wouldn’t be left brooding on the situation. Susan took his extended hand.
Though he looked to be at least sixty, his grip was very strong. He grasped her hand tightly and raised his eyebrows. Then he puckered his lips and pulled her toward him, as though he wanted to kiss her on the cheek. But as she passed her cheek close to his lips, his grip got stronger. He pulled her in closer. His face was cold with sweat and bristly from being unshaven. He twisted his head and kissed her directly on the lips. She felt his tongue slip into her mouth and along her front teeth.
She jerked her head back, but he held her still, his hand tightening until she felt her fingers collapsing together and her hand start to ache. She tried pulling away, pushing against his chest with her left hand.
“Thank you, thank you, Americana.” He smiled. “Beautiful. Beautiful.”
Slowly Susan slid her wrist from his grip. Then came her palm and then each finger. It was as though her hand was being reborn. She tried to reason with herself. He was harmless. She could outrun him. Kick him in the bad leg. Take his cane.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said.
Susan stepped beyond his reach. She was shaking. She tried dismissing the incident. He was just a dirty, lonely old man. A rascal.
The man pointed at his chest. “No—”
But Susan cut him off. “No ingles? Armenia?”
The man tilted his head. He started to laugh. “Ah.”
“Or is it Albania? Or Bulgaria?” She pronounced it as he did: Bul-gahr-ia.
“Americana.” The man puckered up and made kissing noises. “Eh?”
“No.” Susan put her hands on her hips, then down by her sides, then crossed in front of her. “No. I don’t know who you think you are. . . .” She left the sentence open.
His eyes were pulling away, losing interest in her. He held out his hands—What are you going to do? Then he smiled and continued on his way. It wouldn’t have surprised Susan if he’d started whistling.
“Аз съм Susan.” It came out before she realized she was saying it. He kept walking. “I am Susan. Susan. Soo-zun.”
She knew he could hear her. She made sure he could hear her. She was nearly shouting.