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The Attic
Theresa Lee
It was one of those days when the air outside is so thick and heavy that one could feel it against the skin - a cold dampness that presses against the body, filling the insides with a coldness where the rain had failed to reach. She walked through such a day, through the gray air and white mist, on a Sunday morning that frowned down upon the mundane inhabitants of a little, typical suburb.
It wasn’t long before she reached the front door and stepped in from the dampness of the weather into a house that was ripe in its normality - a house that really could have been anybody’s house. It was a house that could have been her house, or perhaps her friend’s house, or a neighbor’s house. But it was her parents’ house that she stood in now - with the typical whitewashed walls decorated with a few photos, a few paintings here and there - with the sofas and the TV set in the family room, and a kitchen that was simply decorated with patterned wallpaper and a throw-rug. Not to say that it wasn’t cozy or that it was an uncomfortably bare house. No. It was the ideal, American home that everyone dreamed of having. It was the home that she had, the home that her friends had. It was the home that everybody had. And that was good. She liked this house. Really, she did.
But it was a house that her parents no longer needed. Her father had been living alone in it for the past five years and now he no longer needed it either. His funeral three days ago had been an uneventful thing - with the usual flowers, the caterers, the prayers, and the priest. She remembered seeing them close the casket - the way they had lowered the lid over what was inside, fastening the securely so that no one would ever again peer within, making it so that everything that once was will one day be forgotten into a convenient oblivion - a darkness obscuring his memory just as it was and will forever be obscuring the remnants of his body. She had watched as they closed the casket and made him disappear.
She walked up the flight of stairs that led into the cold, cramped space of the attic - a dusty place with the rusty smell of faded memories. It all got into her lungs and made it hard to breathe so that she staggered to the window coughing. She had to struggle to break the window free of its staleness before lifting it open to let in the cold freshness of the damp air outside and only then could she inhale deeply and feel comfortable enough to look around.
There were the typical things found in the typical attic - old furniture, dresses, suits, boxes - all covered beneath a thin layer of dust. She walked over to a pile of photo albums and began looking through the yellowed pages. For awhile, she stared at those images of people who no longer existed - her eyes lingering particularly on a young image of herself. She used to be a vibrant young girl with a head filled with wonderful dreams. For a moment, she paused there and wondered what had happened to that girl.
She turned and took off her coat, hanging it on an old rack before kneeling down in front of a worn and heavy chest on the floor. It looked familiar - and then, memories began slowly to fade into her mind. It was the chest she used for the storage of many of her personal possessions throughout her childhood, an old thing that she had used ever since she was in elementary school. Gradually, she had used it less and less until she married, moved away, and had kids - then she stopped using it at all.
Blowing off the dust, she worked at the locks before the chest’s lid finally heaved opened. Then she reached inside and pulled out one of the books - a thin, blue-gray volume with the big bold letters spelling “BACH” on the front cover. It was one of her old piano books - she used to be quite the pianist. She was an especially proficient Bach player. But the last time she played was long ago. She didn’t take lessons anymore after high school - they were too expensive for her parents to pay on top of her college education. Music was more about helping her get into college than about helping her to enrich her life, anyway. So after high school, she seldom played anymore and after awhile, she didn’t play at all. She opened the book and looked at the notes. She’d be lucky now if she could even manage to hammer out the first line. It used to be so easy for her.
She put the book back in the chest and rummaged through the other contents. She came across an old picture that she drew when she was in elementary school. The paper was old now, and felt as though it might crumble in her hands at any instant. She turned and held it up to the shaft of light that broke in through the windows. The crayon colors were faded but she could still make out the childish picture. It was a picture of herself as an artist, grown-up, wearing a white smock and holding a scribbled paint pallet. That little Crayola figure of her was bearing a big smile and standing outside of a black-outlined house on crayon-green grass with a dandelion sun hanging in the corner of the picture. It was such an idyllic picture that brought her to smile. She remembered how she had loved art - wanted to be an artist for the longest time.
She remembered how she used to tour museums in those early years of her life. She would walk though the galleries, envisioning her paintings on the walls. She had developed a love for Impressionism in her early years of high school and had dreamed of someday creating her own Impressionistic style - a style that might be seen in museums someday. But it was a day that never came. She used to play around with colors and paints on canvas in her spare time - bring her imagination to life there within her paintings, giving her dreams form and color upon canvas - but as she grew older, spare time began to run out; and as the years went by, she painted less and less, until she didn’t paint anymore. Now there remained only these sketches - she pulled out a few yellowed and wrinkled sheets of paper - drawings she had made in high school of ideas for paintings she hoped she might one day paint. But through the years that followed, painting didn’t make it very high on her long list of priorities. There was always something else that was more important and had to be done. And so painting became something that she seldom, and then never, came to do anymore.
Besides, painting pictures wasn’t practical - it wasn’t going to put bread on the table, her parents had said to her when she was in high school. Painting could be a good hobby, her parents told her - something to do in her spare time. And as for school, there never really was much chance to do art in school once the serious academics got under way. So she had done what was told to her by all the adults - her parents and teachers and counselors - and concentrated on math and the sciences. She got straight As, went to a good college, graduated to pull in a hefty salary every month - and now she wondered if she could draw anymore. She put the pictures back in the chest. As she did, her hand brushed across another book. She pulled it out and flipped through the pages, tilting it so that the faint light struck across the written words.
It was one of her diary books she kept in high school. She didn’t have time to keep diaries anymore. She bent towards the light and briefly read the page she had flipped to. It was about the greatest love she had known in her life - a young boy named Erik whom she thought she would marry. He was a wild boy with wild hopes and wild dreams – who liked parties and having fun, who didn’t obtain the best of grades, but did enough to pass. He had hopes of seeing the world, traveling and becoming a nature photographer. His hopes were wonderful – and his life, a unique adventure. In many ways, he was perfect only to her - and she had loved him with all her heart.
But if she married Erik, her parents said, it would be a marriage built on hopeless hopes. Erik wasn’t good for her, and they all knew what was best. They wanted her to have a safe and stable home in a stable neighborhood with a stable man who had a stable job - a safe and stable future. It would have been an impractical marriage with Erik. So she never saw Erik again after high school. It wasn’t what she wanted. It was just the way things turned out.
Later on, she had met James in college. He was the perfect student with perfect manners. He was the perfect gentleman who became the perfect doctor - and her parents had all said he would be good for her. And so she had married James. She didn’t hate James - she just didn’t love him the way she had loved Erik. But now, with James, she had her stable home with her own stable family - she had the perfect house with the perfect husband, two perfect kids, and a steady, well-paying job. It was the American dream she lived now - a dream that her neighbors lived as well, and the neighbor of her neighbors, and the neighbors after that. It was what was best.
She looked at that page of her high school handwriting - a page of her diary that bemoaned the loss of Erik. Clipped to the back of the page was a brittle photo - Erik’s senior picture. She looked at it now - worn and faded, eaten by dust and decay - and as she knelt there, with the rain still pattering outside the open window, she tried to remember what it was like to be with the young man in the photo. The pages had wept, despairing the loss of “a presence that had lent meaning to my own.” She tried to remember. She looked at the picture for a while, but she couldn’t recall the feeling. Only a faint hint of emotion flittered past her mind for an instant - and then it was gone. She read the page over once more, but could not bring herself to sympathize with the sad girl who had written that page more than twenty years before. She sat there and wondered what feeling it was which could have caused that young girl to write such sadness upon the tear-stained page. Again, she looked at the faded photo and tried to remember Erik. But the young boy shown in that image seemed far and distant to her. They had been from far and separate worlds, and she wondered how, once, she could have felt so close to him. Perhaps, she was just young and foolish.
She closed the book and put it back into the chest alongside her drawings and piano books. She was to go back on the job tomorrow, continue on her life as a pharmacist the way her parents had always dreamed. It was what was best. A brief thought fluttered across her mind - what if she had become an artist, what if she had married Erik? Then she would not have the typical, ordinary, safe and secure life that she had now. She would not have this normal life. She would not have this dream that everyone else dreamed. A sadness touched her then that she could not quite understand.
Sighing, she touched the chest and lowered the lid over what was inside, fastening it securely so that no one would ever again peer inside, making it so that everything that once was would one day be forgotten again into a convenient oblivion - a darkness to obscure memories and dreams, just as it obscured the contents which held them so potently within. She stood up and walked towards the window. A light drizzle came in and hit her lightly upon the face before she struggled with the window and shut it once more. Walking past her coat, she took it off the rack and draped it over her shoulders. As she turned, her gaze fell upon the photo album that still lay open, and for a moment, her eyes lingered there upon the rusted image of a faded girl. The sadness touched her again and she reached over and closed the album.
Her steps took her down the flight of stairs and she walked out into the falling rain.
