Madeleine at the Window

Madeleine was at the window looking out over the noon crowd that moved in and out of the street with the awkward, persistent desire to be somewhere they weren't.

It was noon and the university in the distance stood white and clustered around the green corroding tower against smooth, low and brown hills. There were blocks of great solid buildings; replicas of ancient porticos, temples, agoras, squares and filled with a new generation ready to succeed to their dreams of authority. And it was hot this late spring because no wind came up out of the bay to the south of the city.

Madeleine held her head in two closed fists and stared at the large marks on the window sill of the poor hotel she found herself living in. It was one of those hotels no one notices among the shops and stores of the decaying section of the city. The first two days at the hotel she had cried out the window in the back which led to a maze of metal conduit and boilers and venting apparatus. She cried hard until someone on the other side of the wicked maze had yelled in no uncertain terms that if she didn't stop crying he would find where she lived and pull her onto the roof until she stopped crying or the man had yelled, 'sing at the very least’ and, in fact, she did quit crying only to begin again one half-hour later in mute solace with the window closed. She could laugh at it now because she knew she was going to leave the bitter hotel and move in with her new found friends who lived in the south of the city. Half of her belongings were already in the house she was moving to while the other half were packed in orange crates and shoe boxes and dress boxes piled one on top of the other behind where she stood at the window.

They would come and take her away in an hour or less that was for certain. That's what he had said. She liked the man but he belonged to Susan. She didn't want to upset the delicate balance of her position. Perhaps, in six months, things would change. But it was enough for the time being to simply get out of the old hotel and go on to new kinds of friends though she couldn't quite be sure but yes, they were friends. She was still able, maybe more than at anytime, to distinguish qualities of friendship.

There were differences for sure. And in the new living arrangement there would be no more tension. She couldn't stand for anymore tension at having to adapt to others adjusted to their scheme of things. That first meeting they were sitting around the large oak table laden with good food and soft music in the background and she could feel the silence of the strange eyes follow her until a tingle of dim recognition fluttered in her heart. This is where she is. Say a clever thing she could nearly hear them say. What have you been doing with yourself? Not in the accusative tone but rather the tone of curiosity that is communicated in a fine, articulate answer such as that fine written paragraph in her mind she wrote as the bus rolled into the downtown station, She knew her father would be waiting and wanting an answer which tumbled over a curious gesture of her hands.

She finally told them what she imagined they wanted to hear but did not forget the feeling of tension. Now, she felt a bit tired. She had slept late. It was embarrassing to sleep late when others were round about. At the moment of awakening she heard the traffic noises drifting and pulsing up from the long avenue and into the crack of her window and it set off a train of images of strangers doing a thousand things she would want to do but already would be too late now that she had gotten up at this hour. To do anything would necessitate a break in what was being done already and it would be a great useless fight to do such thing. What else could she do but pretend that they were little fishes in the caves of a great reef- it was that television show she'd seen. Now she remembered. And how the light of a divers lamp in the night sea became a cloud of plankton. And that-what did they call it- that symphony of the natural worlds that no one knew about but a few rough and ready deep-sea divers. A world of its own the announcer had said. What a wonderful and stirring idea! No- it was a fact- in the sea somewhere or along the great coastline where the living matter was just like life in this city and the other cities she had known.

So she lay in bed for a few minutes and while listening to the imperturbable sounds of the traffic she saw it all moving as the natural world of a small tide pool. So she got up and dressed and finished packing the few remaining items before he came and took her to her new residence. She had half-looked for him from the window three stories above the avenue. Where she was going was decidedly more quiet and mellow. Children had dogs and arching elm trees moved shadows over the street. And it was walking distance to the Marina and that pier that ran out half a mile into the Bay where the poor people fished. The poor black kids would get on the bus downtown all smiles and excitement with their poles and buckets in hand and fish the whole day, come back during commute with stinking fish in their pail, laughing and subdued at turns. Then on week-ends the road perpendicular to the pier would fill with the cars of the poor-old broken down Chevrolets, black Continentals with bashed in doors etc. and the poor families, the Mexicans, black and white families would clamber over the rocks into the bay water or find a niche along the pier.

So she waited. It would begin again when she was settled in the new place. She would pay more attention this time to what people actually said and demanded of her. It was necessary under the circumstances; a part of the bargain. Oh, they truly were nice people she would do nothing to disappoint them. The more she thought about it she realized she was in the process of getting rescued. One more day in this hell world and I'll go mad she had thought. Last night, that crazy fellow on the stairs who turned as she followed him and stared at her with those spooky eyes-all knives and confusion. And then that fellow who yelled at her for crying.

Her drift into the hotel had been necessary. Below it was the porno book store where the creeps and at-the-edge rapists gathered and the guy who owned it had his daughter working for him and he seemed about the lowest of the low. And even out away from the hotel and porno book store there was nothing but an array of buildings, shops, and crowds wandering dazed it appeared to her though she knew that wasn't the complete truth of it. But from where she stood it seemed as though they were all dazed and tricked into necessity so moved foreign to their own nature. The campus seemed far away. She felt good about going there and buying a bag of peanuts to feed the squirrels by the stream, under the oily smell of the eucalyptus. Sometimes there would be lovers on the banks of the stream pressed up against each other, huddling against the cool falling day and smoking a cigarette between them. Or a man walking with his small daughter, she laughing gleefully after the squirrels who had become tamed and expectant over the years.

But it all seemed far away from her now. It was the objects in front of her; the passing faces and vehicles and sad looking cafés and strange creatures she had come to know over the past few years. These drew her attention, fastened into her and she was glad she was leaving it. She would leave it and some day wake up and it would appear a dream to her and she would see the same people, the same buildings, streets and it would only be a memory tugging on her new sensibility. She would even laugh at it and laugh at their little part in it and go on.

The man came and they took her boxes down to his car parked along Shattuck Avenue. He was average height, broad shouldered with a bushy mustache. He spoke pleasantly to her. She was flustered in the beginning but as they drove down Dwight Way and through the residences of the flatland she began to open up and ask him questions about where she could shop, where the bus stop was etc. etc. He laughed, 'Now, wait a minute, we have to get you settled first. We'll have a big dinner tonight and then we'll talk.'

She was remembering the room now; how it had smelled like urine and how the old guy retched all night into the sink and how she imagined his germs were coming through the walls so she dug her head into the pillow and as the old man coughed and hacked into the sink she was confused about what to do; whether she should go and help him or wake the manager and see if he was all right. And how she was afraid of the bathrooms so would wait until she was on the street and go into the restaurant across the way and then go down to the YWCA and take her showers.

Ah, she was through with her self-pity! Away with it, no more! From now on, she dreamed to herself, I am part of the grand motion of things. 'I will identify, even, with the planes that fly overhead.

She did not realize it but at that moment at least eight people were thinking of her, of her future and how she would turn out. She did not realize she was being observed and commented on in places she did not even know existed. Had she known of the monstrous rivalries she would be embroiled in, the petty jealousies, the deathly stares, the gamesmanship as people attempted to disillusion her of all she thought was true and perfect maybe she would not have gone down to the corner of Shattuck and University as the students milled and turbaned east Indians unlocked gas stations. In the end she would have gone to placate her curiosity; to give herself another option. But, then, there was likely to come a day when driving past these old haunts she would have an unrequited feeling that something magnificent was lost that day. She would remember one book left unread in the unopened box of paperback books she had collected from jaunts to Moe's and Shakespeare's. That one book revealed the path not taken; the self not assumed. But when she returned she noticed that one book had been carefully, almost surgically removed from the box as if it had never existed. 'The world is this way,' she thought before she had a chance to get angry. The contents of the box were exactly as she remembered them and when she removed the top layers of books to find the one book it was gone. 'But I did not even remember the author's name. Is that important?' So now she stood in front of the large bay window before the quiet, elm lined street not observing the two dogs playing in the street or listening to the soft piano music in the background or the door closing to the bathroom but picturing the book hovering above the street, illuminated by the minds desire to find any vehicle of escape until the afternoon vision became painful and oppressive to her and she turned and walked back toward the shadows of the house.

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