SEPARATE WORLDS

The girls were bored and had been squabbling all morning, before, after and even during church, stopping only to eat the thoroughly undeserved ice cream cones their parents bought them as an incentive to be good. By the time they got to the apartment, their parents were close to the end of their tether, what with the heat of the day and the girls’ endless bickering.

Their mother seemed particularly unhappy, though the middle girl was the only one who registered this.  Sensing her mother’s mood, she may have been a little quieter, a little gentler with her mother that day, but a shove from one sister or a jibe from the other was all it took to make her forget.

Once they were in the stairwell leading to the apartment, however, hostilities were suspended. The girls loved staircases, living as they did in a modern ranch-style house without them, so even before they entered the apartment, they were enchanted. This one was particularly impressive with its wreaths of cobwebs and rough concrete walls.

Opening the door to the basement apartment, the children were in awe. It was perfect. True, it smelled a little funny, but it was dark and old and quirky. The kitchen was the room they liked best. It was just the right size: you could walk across it in two kid-sized giant steps. If they all three stood together holding hands, they easily spanned its length. It had a tiny refrigerator with nothing much in it, three narrow shelves stocked with a few cans of soup and an almost-empty packet of oatmeal, and a miniscule stove with two burners.

The woman they were visiting wasn’t someone they knew very well: an old lady from church. Their parents had been asked to visit her to help her sort things out. Why she needed anything sorted out was a puzzle to the girls, but the ways of adults were mysterious – or just plain boring – and they saw no need to question this.

Their parents and the lady talked about adult things in low, quiet voices. The lady had sparse white hair, a hoarse voice, and a hobbly, jerky old-lady walk. In one liver-spotted, purple-veined hand that made all three girls think of blue earthworms, she clutched a walking stick. When the middle girl, the clumsiest of the three, tripped over her untied shoe-strings for the third time that morning, the old lady said Come here, I want to teach you a trick. The middle girl was a little leery at first, but the old lady showed her how you could spit on your shoelaces before tying them to make them stayed tied. The middle girl was impressed, though she and her sisters giggled nervously when the old lady spat on her shoelaces.

For some reason, the apartment did not impress their parents as much as it did them. Their parents seemed subdued, unusually quiet. They chatted politely with the old lady, but expressed little enthusiasm over her narrow bed or the dazzling network of cobwebs which spanned the tops of her basement windows. Even her little collection of many-colored plastic swans in the tiny bathroom failed to charm them.

The girls moved from room to room, exclaiming happily. How wonderful it would be to have a cozy little apartment like this, the older sister sighed. To be able to live all by yourself undisturbed by others, surrounded by your own knick-knacks. To come and go as you pleased and eat what you wanted to eat when you wanted to eat it.

Don’t touch anything! their parents scolded, but the old lady laughed. Go on – what harm could they do? She seemed to think that they were fine, clever children. She offered them tea with sugar and stale cookies.

When it was time to leave, the girls had forgotten their previous grievances. They climbed the grey cement stairs into the blinding sunlight outside, talking about nothing but the wonderful apartment.

Their parents walked ahead of them. Even though the girls were no longer quarrelling, their mother seemed saddened and dejected. Why? the middle daughter wondered fleetingly, but then she and her sisters found a dime on the ground and, because they were getting along so well for a change, agreed to share the spoils.

‘We move towards this, not away from it,’ they heard their mother say to their father in the car on the way home.

Huddled in the back seat of the car, giggling, the girls spat on their shoelaces and pulled on them to see how much force it took to undo them. It was surprisingly hard: the spit trick obviously worked.  ‘One day,’ their mother said to their father, ‘that might be you. Or me.’ The girls laughed and pulled at each other’s shoelaces. They heard their mother talking, but her words washed over them like river water over hard pebbles.