Katie Yee
The Carols
The Carols didn’t much like each other, but that was none of my business. It’s been several years since I last called that place home. They had both lived at the same address on Midwood Street for several decades. They had both made a point to tell me as much. (Who’s to say who had seniority in this situation? It seemed like they had always been there, like there was no time when that building was standing and the Carols didn’t occupy it.)
The Carols used to live on the same floor: 4A and 4C. The Carol in 4C was the first Carol I met, so to me, she will always be the one true Carol. She liked vodka, dogs, smoking cigarettes in the hallway, cooking fish that her husband caught. Carol would tell me often that she’d been in that apartment for 40 years. Carol would tell me often that her sister died in the building, on the second floor.
The Carol in 4A was sort of the opposite of the Carol in 4C. She liked staying inside the building, ordering from Amazon, feeding the neighbors’ dogs vegetables (despite their obvious disinterest), telling everyone about her exercise equipment, giving people packaged food she had too much of. She was always alone and seemed to want to save me from my aloneness. I guess I looked like somebody who needed looking after. She was always telling you where she got things, like she was letting you in on a secret. She was always calling my boyfriend “your husband.”
The husband of the Carol in 4C liked: catching fish, eating fish, Carol. Carol’s husband was sick. Sometimes they’d be in and out of the hospital, and they’d ask me to bring in their mail.
Sometimes Carol drank. Sometimes she drank a lot. She didn’t like dogs so much then. You would hear a dog bark, and then you’d hear her bellow after it, filling the building with her echo.
Yes, the Carols lived on either side of me, in 4B—perched on my proverbial shoulders.
* * *
From the outside, the building we lived in looked just like any other. It was four stories high. Just an old brick building with a rounded burgundy awning to shield you from rain while you looked for your keys. The kind of place that might protect you in small ways.
After I signed my lease but before I moved into the building, I would go seven blocks out of my way to stand across the street and look up at the dark, empty windows on the fourth floor. Gaps in a row of teeth.
Our building was just down the street from the local church. The local church had bells. The bells were supposed to chime every hour, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. I guess what you did with the other hours—the hours shaded with night—were not counted by the church. (It felt like an intentional turning away, a small kindness.)
Well, the bells were supposed to chime every hour on the hour, but for some indiscernible reason, they did not and could not be reset. Instead, the bells fell somewhere between ten minutes to a quarter after the hour.
They were authoritative, as is the way of the church. The church decided to conduct itself as though the bells were correctly timed. For all the years I knew it, the church existed in its own time zone.
The Carol in 4C loved going to the church. Every Sunday—it was something you could count on. It was something someone did count on, as it turns out. One Sunday, when she came back from church, she found the door to her apartment open. Nothing was taken. The mystery was never solved, but Carol had a pretty good idea who was to blame.
The Carol in 4A told me from day one that the Carol in 4C had some marbles loose. Carol in 4A was always doing this thing where she would mix up two sayings. It was a habit I found increasingly amusing during my time on Midwood Street. During my first encounter with her, it was all a little alarming. It was early summer when I moved into the building. The stairwell had a large window, which was always open, and a timid breeze came in as she caught me in the hallway, moving a large box of ceramic mugs. “Watch out for that one,” she said, gesturing to 4C. “She’s got some marbles loose.” She turned back and said, “Welcome to the building.” And then Carol retreated into her den.
Both Carols were older, so I suppose it was conceivable that Carol had merely forgotten to lock the door to 4C behind her. Since nothing was taken, the matter was dropped by all. It was the kind of shrugging off that comes with age.
The inside of the building resembled all others. (Look, you’ve been inside cheap old apartment buildings in Brooklyn before. It looked like that.) But there was one notable exception. Something about the way the light hit the walls at some late hour of the afternoon made my walls look a little pink, like they were blushing. I pointed this special thing, this thing I loved, out to the boyfriend, who responded only with eyebrow raises. I knew what he meant, and I relished being one of those couples.
Exhibit B: when it was moving day, the boyfriend and I were carting my stupid portable air conditioner upstairs when the Carol in 4A caught us in the stairwell. (“Like a jack-in-the-box, that one,” the boyfriend used to say after deadbolting the door.) She started talking about her cooling units, her whole summer system, the number of windows in her unit. We were off to the races! I gave him a look that said Sorry and also My grip is slipping and What! Carol said something about a Sears blowout sale on Dyson cooling towers, which made a light go off in both of our memories and he gave me a look that said Do you remember the time we nearly got locked overnight in the Sears parking lot last summer and—well, it doesn’t really matter now anyway.
There was one apartment on the first floor that was a mystery to everyone. No one had ever seen its inhabitants, but there always seemed to be objects sitting by the door with a loose-leaf sign, one word in neat hand: FREE. It gave the impression that someone was in a perpetual state of purging or moving out. Yes, that’s it—it always gave the impression of leaving. The items appeared like offerings at an altar, varying in usefulness. They gave nothing away, really, about their former owner(s). Was it an eclectic family? A person afflicted with multiple personalities? Someone slowly contemplating suicide, who felt the need to give away all their possessions first? Perhaps it was a hoarder whose daughter visited daily to help expunge the mess, only to have the empty spaces filled.
The objects were always so random: a metal cake pan, a pair of barelyworn red running sneakers, streamers for a kids’ birthday party, disposable New Year’s Eve paper plates from several years ago, too many dusty glass vases to count, a humidifier, a simple standing lamp from Ikea, a nameKatie brand makeup bag that undoubtedly came free with a purchase of $150 or more.
The super, I’m sure, did not enjoy this ongoing giveaway. Because it was the super, after all, who was going to have to get rid of everything in the end. I would often see the same objects, once carefully placed in the building hallway hopeful for a new life, thrown haphazardly into the trash alley we shared with the adjoining building. It made me sad in a way I can’t explain. Like when you fall asleep before you’ve had the chance to take even one sip of the tea you made before bed and you wake up to a full cup of cold tea beside you. That kind of sadness.
The super was a fastidious man. No matter the hour, I felt like I was always seeing him in the lobby, flinging dust and dog hair from the hallway mats or mopping up or out front with the hose. He didn’t make eye contact with the residents. He was always fixated on the thing in front of him, which made him a good super but also a little bit of a ghost. He would wave politely with his neck bent down.
It can’t have been easy cleaning up after the lot of us. And then there were the roaches. The first time I found one in the kitchen, with the boyfriend in the next room, I did not scream. I squashed it under a piece of cardboard and disposed of it quickly, too full of shame at the apparent filth of my home to say anything. I was a woman who lived in a building infested with roaches. I didn’t want him to see that in me. If you found one belly-up on your landing, I quickly learned, it was customary to just sort of keep kicking it on down, door to door, down the stairs, until it got low enough that the super saw it and took care of it. It was a building where the dead linger.
I was perpetually torn between a perverse curiosity about what went on behind everyone else’s doors and utter shock when they flew open. Every time I bumped into someone in the stairwell, I would say, “Sorry—hi!” Several times a day I said this. I was always in someone’s way. I was always coming up the stairs at the exact moment when someone else was leaving, and looking right into their messy front hallway with their kid’s shoes everywhere and the dog trying to bust out.
I only went into 4A twice. The first time, Carol knocked on my door, needing help adjusting her drawing table. As I followed her down her long front hallway I had the thought that she could kill me if she wanted to. You hear horror stories, don’t you? And it’s always the most chilling when it happens right next door, someone you saw every day, someone you thought you sort of knew.
The boyfriend didn’t like that I lived on this block. He said it was a bad area. He insisted on walking me to my door. (I think I would have felt this paranoia anywhere, though. The first time I slept with this boyfriend, I had the distinct thought before going to sleep that he was so much bigger than me. He could probably overpower me if he wanted to. This fear usually creeps in after sex—something about having seen the animal let out. But not always. I fear being murdered by plenty of other people, people I haven’t slept with. It’s just a thought I have about most people I’m in a room with when it’s just the two of us.)
My best friend told me once that she doesn’t think of me as a fearful person. Here’s what I think it is: Other people scare me. The parts of them that we don’t know. The parts of myself that I don’t know. There was something about the concept of neighbors that embodied this fear I have about inaccessible corners of the mind. The rooms with the lights off, that are marked PRIVATE. You consider the whole building home, but you only know what happens in the rooms you run through.
Carol, on the other hand, was always inviting me into her apartment to look at her plants. There was a jungle in 4C, a veritable jungle. Plants in generic terracotta pots covered nearly every flat surface. Even the gate of Carol’s fire escape had small vines grasping the metal bars.
Each time Carol pulled me into her apartment, she would tell me about a different plant. The sinister monstera grows slits in its leaves to take up more surface area, to snuff out the competition. The buds of the burro’s tail will fall from their stem and start again. Happy succulents flower. Air plants still need to be watered, best done with shot glasses. “Same as me,” she said, winking. The snake plant asks very little of us, even thrives in dark corners. Peace lilies, by contrast, will droop dramatically when they are thirsty.
“They always tell us what’s wrong. We just don’t know how to listen,” she said, when she told me about the peace lilies. She was removing the crinkled brown edges off of a leaf with a small scissor for cutting children’s hair. Her husband wasn’t home.
The boyfriend wasn’t there that night, either. Not yet. We were going through a rough patch, as they say, as though a relationship was a kind of skin.
That night, she had caught me coming home from the grocery store. The bells had sung the day’s final song; it was sometime past eight. I had a few cans of minestrone soup in my tote bag, making that awful sloshing metal can noise when I moved. I remember trying very hard to stand very still. She was sitting on a small stool, not looking at me while she worked. I wasn’t sure if I should stay. As if on cue, she said, “Watering can is in the kitchen. Make yourself useful.” I put the tote with the soup cans down on the floor. Carol’s watering can was plastic and the kind of yellow that made me think it was once white. When it was full, it had a heft that surprised me. Carol is a small woman, just over five feet maybe, came up to my nose. The kind of woman who was always looking up.
I started with the big plants by the window. The lift and fall of the soil was satisfying. The act released a wild, earthy scent into the air. Everyone gets their turn with the watering can. To be held like that, attended to like that. The singular point of focus. It must feel better than the sun.
“Not too much,” Carol cautioned. “Move on to the next.” She stood by me. There was that fear impulse again. The corners of the room darkened. She pointed out a yellow leaf, told me that could either mean dehydration or overwatering. Plants are tricky. Sometimes the signs of too much and too little look the same.
The husband of the Carol in 4C loved to sit just outside the building, so you could usually tell when he was home from the hospital. He would schlep his fold-out camping chair to the first floor and just stay out there for hours, until the world dimmed around him, until night came for us. Often I would pass Carol smoking in the stairwell, holding court and raising hell, and then there at the bottom would be her husband.
Whereas Carol was a spitfire, her husband radiated an almost unsettling calm. I couldn’t tell if it was the sickness in him, or maybe an arrangement set at the beginning of their relationship, as if they had divided up the sounds: whole notes and rests. In all my time on Midwood Street, I only heard him speak once. It was one of many nights I watched him watch the world go dark. The last camper around the fire.
I wish I could tell you he said something profound, something that echoes, but here’s how it went: I had been approaching the front door, key in hand. There was a giant cockroach waiting there, pacing in a line. Carol’s husband stood up from his post, stepped on the roach, said “Got it,” and sat back down.
It haunted me. It haunts me still. A man who says only what he needs to, only what he means. I admit it’s a dumb thing to fixate on. This happened around the time I suspected something was going on with the boyfriend.
When a relationship ends in a way that could be construed as amicable, something some people say is “we drifted apart.” Drifting would not be the word that comes to mind here. For one thing, it implies closeness as a starting point. For another, it conjures a kind of ghost in the room of the relationship. A weakening. To me, he never lost his realness. In my mind, he lays there right beside me in bed—a solid, impenetrable lockbox.
(Maybe the problem was that I never offered the boyfriend a key. I gave my spare to my best friend instead.)
The second time I was inside apartment 4A was because Carol caught us coming home in the hallway just a few hours before, ecstatic about her new As Seen On TV what’s-it. “What’re you doing tonight? Come for dinner!” she said, all one breath, so we couldn’t hem and haw. “Seriously, the Whole Foods guys just came.” In her voice we heard the tin echo of loneliness. We found it hard to say no. “Say, seven-ish?”
At seven-ish, we presented Carol with a bottle of reasonably priced wine from the shop around the corner. We left it in the paper bag, so we wouldn’t have to have a whole conversation about where it came from.
She led us into her living room. The boyfriend made some comment about the differences in apartment layouts, the directions the windows face. We sat on her Ikea couch and ate Whole Foods cheese and crackers that she had spread out on Fiesta plates all over her Wayfair coffee table, drinking the wine out of little glass goblets from the flea market by Borough Hall. We learned where most of her things were from: Marshalls, Ikea again, a gift from her sister-in-law, a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Greece, Amazon, Amazon, Amazon. There was something almost Biblical about it: Adam naming the animals.
I wondered what an obsession about where things come from says about a person. It’s not so much the brands or the name-dropping, the way she did it. More like a public service announcement. More like she might be hoping you’d leave and go and pick up the same exact thing.
But this evening was most extraordinary for something that happened over the pasta salad, the course we moved on to next. Carol was telling us about this new diet she had heard about. She had decided to take only the things she liked out of it, but one of the things was cutting out whatever it is that real pasta is made out of. She had gotten this chickpea pasta at the fancy grocery store on Lincoln. She hoped we were enjoying it. She kept insisting, “You can’t even tell the difference, right?”
I could, of course, tell the difference, but the relieving thing about dinner company like this is it excuses you from having to say anything. All you’re on the hook for is a few nods with a cursory Hm, or a “That’s interesting!” thrown in every so often for variety. But at some point, Carol said something that prompted the boyfriend to give me a look. A loaded look. A look like a gun.
Gun to my head, I couldn’t tell what the look was supposed to convey, or even what it was in reference to.
The boyfriend widened his eyes and tightened his features, so I knew that whatever the look was about, it was still happening. I had no idea what I was supposed to be picking up on. I realized then that he had a whole internal monologue I had never heard before.
And what of me? Who, exactly, did the boyfriend think he was dating, falling asleep next to, signaling to? Was there a part of me he knew that I didn’t? What sort of stench was I giving off without meaning to? What did I look like to him?
I didn’t realize I was touching my face so much until Carol offered me a reusable linen napkin from the Package-Free Shop. She leaned in close, cocked her head, and said, “You’re clear,” passing the pasta salad.
The last time the boyfriend stayed on Midwood Street with me, there was the smell of Carol’s cigarettes in the stairwell. We had walked through the smoke. Carol had company that night, a few friends from the neighboring buildings. She sat in a chair that propped the door to 4C open. They sat staggered on the steps, circling around her. Carol’s son had offered us a pour, but we turned in for the night, as usual.
I had really grown to appreciate the din of conversations I wasn’t a part of. I kept my windows open to the street and took in the lives around me this way. That night, their chatter, like the smoke from Carol’s cigarettes, expanded to fill our space. I was grateful for their small sounds: the clink of a glass on a step, Carol yelling at the barking dogs downstairs, the group’s low laughter. Then we heard a door opening, voices with an edge to them.
Inside 4B, our conversation halted. We weren’t sure how close a watch to keep. This had happened before, occasionally. We listened better. We took turns at the peephole. Through its warped eye, we saw Carol towering over Carol. They got so close in their yelling that, on mute, they could have been mistaken for lovers. We heard something breaking. Then everyone retreated to their corners.
The thing about living in these apartments, listening the way I did, is you get to wondering what stories everyone else has pieced together about your life. What did they hear, on the other side of the door that night? It was one of those breakups that start by accident. You press the person on what they’re really thinking during a moment when the frozen pond feels still. But if you don’t distribute the weight evenly, if you lean a knee too hard, you fall right through and everything is soggy and you feel your blood go cold.
After it ended, the Carol in 4A started bringing sweets over. Well, chocolate-covered matzo. I got the feeling she ordered too much from Whole Foods, but it was a welcome gesture all the same.
The Carol in 4C began gifting me little plant clippings. She never had any grandchildren, but there was the hope of propagation. Something to tend to, something to remember about, to check in on. Maybe she noticed I had been alone more. I never potted them. I put them in empty Bell’s Two Hearted bottles and let the roots grow long and untethered. They started to fill my flat surfaces.
I became adept at the art of keeping things out. Whereas the roaches had embarrassed me before, they now started to drive me mad. My eyes would glaze over a knot in the wooden floor or a smudge on the wall, and my mind would assume it was one of them. And there were more than there used to be. It felt like it coincided with his leaving, but I think it was just that time of year. I should have heeded the warning.
It happened most at night. I would see one scurry out, and I’d spend the next 40 minutes on my hands and knees, fixing Raid gel into corners. You have to know where all the cracks are, all the ways in.
The boyfriend had been fascinated with religion. While I was raised on the unknowability of the universe, he was clearly someone who had been given clear and certain answers as a child. He was someone who walked the earth believing he knew something not everyone else did. He thought it might be good for me. Faith and fear, he said, were two sides of the same coin. They both rush in to fill the gaps in what we don’t know.
We talked about attending Sunday services all the time but could never seem to make it out of bed on the weekends back when we were still naked and happy. (I have found that the relationship is pretty much over when the other starts putting on clothes to go to bed—when, after the act, you find yourself reaching for the T-shirt, covering up as though ashamed and shrinking back into a manufactured skin.)
It had been a little while, but it was him I thought of when the church caught fire.
Because of course it had to be a fire at some odd hour that drew us all out. Terry-clothed and without hard rubber soles, some of us without the simple protection of shoes. We had to see it for ourselves. Pressing up against the window did no good. So we stood there, metaphorically naked, and in a sense it was all kinds of beautiful. I mean, once in a while, maybe a few times in a lifetime, something will happen to draw everyone out of hiding. Even the mystery tenant made an appearance. She looked like the kind of woman you might see lost in the gardening section of Home Depot, disappointing in her utter normalcy. And then there was the super, showing his face. It was the first night I had looked him in the eyes.
Later, it would be deduced that the fire had been caused by a lone standing candle at the memorial held in honor of Carol’s husband. (Why didn’t you tell us, you’re thinking, that Carol’s husband had died? I’m telling you now. That’s how it goes, in big, echoey buildings like those.) The nice firemen said it had been forgetfulness or recklessness. Really, most fires are started by a forgotten spark of light in a corner where there usually is none. For that night, everyone was forced out of their foxholes. Everyone was a little scared. There was no putting on airs. There was barely air to breathe. I found Carol clutching the humble burro’s tail. It was such a sweet sight, I nearly cried. Our building was fine, but still she took that small life in her hands. The simple thing that promises, the regenerating kind, something that encourages starting again.