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To The Meadows, Again

C. Covey Mason

    Louise was sure this one would be different, as she was every time.
    The woman had accompanied the band on their tour, and now it was over. Louise wanted to spend just a little longer with the guitarist—the one whom she had been sleeping with for the past two months in many uncomfortable locations. She asked him if he would mind taking the train up to Bethel to see the house she grew up in.
    He didn’t want to go, so he told her that he wouldn’t go.
    She continued to ask him, again and again. Louise had not seen the condominium of her childhood for seventeen years, not since she was sixteen-years-old when her parents had divorced. After the split, she had lived with her mother in a studio apartment in Boston, sleeping on the couch for the rest of high school. When she agreed to pay for the train tickets, he said fine.
    It was a short train ride, less than an hour, and the guitarist slept most of the way. They arrived in Bethel just after noon. She guided the guitarist down the platform and into Eddie’s Grocery to get some coffee and eggs. They drank the coffee and ate the eggs, paid, and left.
    Louise was nervous that she might see someone who she knew from high school as they walked down Main Street. They turned right on Spring Street, across from the elementary school, and then turned left onto Exeter Street. After a half-mile, they arrived at a series of culs-de-sac. They walked on for a while and turned into a figure eight neighborhood of identical condominiums: The Meadows.
    Her feet ached in her many strapped shoes. She wore a white dress with a deep V-neck and arm holes so low she needed to wear a tank-top underneath to cover her breasts and sides. She wore a black one.
    There were no people or cars or children’s toys in the lawns of the houses. This was very different from Louise’s memory. The two walked across the center of the first loop, filled with dry dirt and islands of brittle grass. They moved to the second loop, then to the first house on the right.
    Louise and the guitarist stood in the small front yard looking up at her childhood home.
    The front lawn was mostly a sickly brown with small clumps of dandelions coming through in different spots. Where there used to be shrubs in front of the home, there were now their skeletons.? The off-white vinyl siding was stained with dirt and water, ignored for a long time. The siding had begun to fall apart where it met the roof, looking like grafts of dead skin. One of the second floor windows was broken, the first floor ones boarded up. The plywood was spray painted: the one on the left with a large penis in red paint; the one on the right had?This Is A WindoW?written across it in black.
    The guitarist lit a cigaret and laughed at the graffiti.
    Louise felt very sad looking at the abandoned, degraded house.
    The guitarist said, Let’s go in.
    She said, I don’t know.
    He said, Come on. It will be fun.
    He walked to the front door and pushed on it with his shoulder. She told him to stop, but he slammed into it three more times, then called the door a fucker, and then kicked the door by the doorknob, which snapped the rotted door jamb and swung open. He turned to Louise and swung his arms into the house, waving her forward with a knowing smirk on his face, the lit cigaret between his off-white teeth.
    She walked across the threshold and was overwhelmed by the smell of mold and decay. The air felt thick, dense inside. She stood on the carpet landing just inside the door; stairs led directly up to the living room and kitchen, and down into the basement. She stuck her head down the stairs to the basement and the stench grew stronger, wafting over her and causing her to vomit a little in her mouth.
    She pivoted and walked up the carpeted stairs, and they creaked and squished underneath her feet. Following her, the guitarist coughed, then made a guttural sound with his throat and spit on the floor. She turned to him and scrunched her eyebrows, and then she turned back to what used to be the living room. The carpet was a similar shade to the exterior off-white of the house. One of the corners was pulled up, waterlogged plywood shown underneath. In the far corner, there was a door to the kitchenette. She walked toward the kitchen and inside found a fridge duct-taped shut. The stove was rusted on the electric burners. A couple of the tiles on the floor were cracked. One of the cabinet doors dangled on one of its hinges, but the rest of the kitchen was how she remembered it—only with more dust and black along the edges of the counter.
    Then she turned back around and walked up the second flight of stairs
    The stairs led to a hallway. The room at the end of the hallway had been hers. She walked toward it, and it took ages. The paint peeled everywhere, and bubbles descended from the ceiling. She felt a pain and nausea in her stomach, and she continued to step forward, each step causing the floor to moan in tired agony.
    She stepped into her room and had trouble swallowing. Along the edges of the room, the dirt colored carpet was black with mold. Looking up, the ceiling sagged and the paint peeled, little square flakes speckling off the edges, some having fallen onto the floor, mingling with the edges of the carpet. The walls had greenish-black ovals in several spots that looked like large tear-drops descending down the wall. She moved over to one and touched it with her hand. The softness of the patch of wall repulsed her.
    Moving back to the center, Louise took in her room and choked a little in her tightening throat. The guitarist came behind her, paining the floor with each of his steps. He entered her room and said, Fuck. What a shit hole.
    She turned to him and fell into his shoulder, crying, pulling her arms into her body and up to her face. He backed up, and she staggered forward a little. He flicked the cigaret butt onto the floor, and she stomped it out. She scrunched her eyebrows and made a look at him to show him how angry she was and how he better not do that again—but he was already looking out the window. Then he went back into the hallway and to the bathroom, and she stomped after him.
    To her surprise, the bathroom was relatively clean, the tile not looking much different than it did when she lived there, except for the dust that had collected on the surfaces. The guitarist dusted off the edge of the sink, opened up a little baggy, and dumped a couple of pills on the counter. He turned to Louise and asked her if she wanted any as he prepared one. She stood just outside the doorway, her feet sunk into the carpet—it felt like they were sinking deeper and deeper. She lifted her feet just to show herself that she could, that she wasn’t trapped.
    She looked down the hallway into her room, and then back into the bathroom. She stuck her lower jaw forward, and looked at him inviting her with his wide eyes and dirty smile. She said, Fine, to herself, threw her arms down, and walked into the bathroom.
    She took one of the pills, already wrapped in a tissue, and swallowed it dry. She swayed back into the hallway knowing that soon everything would feel much better. It would be all right. After a moment, he approached her in the hallway and pushed his hips into her, moving has hands down to her backside and kissing her neck. She put her hands on his biceps and started to push him away, but she had no strength.
    Nor did she really mind any more. He led her down the path of the hallway into her old bedroom.
    She was lain on the floor and her underwear pulled down below her dress as she examined the beautiful pattern of chipped paint in the corners of her bedroom ceiling. It was like a very intricate spiderweb, she thought, feeling warm and tingly all over her body—she barely felt the weight on top of her; it was just a warm, fuzzy pressure that felt comforting and safe, though somewhere, she thought it probably wasn’t.
    Looking into that spiderweb, the girl began to feel like she was floating, like the soft carpet beneath her was a cloud bringing her upwards toward the ceiling and away from everything. It all felt so wonderful up there above the rotting floor. Louise smiled in a far off way and was weightless, only barely, somewhere far away, sensing her body being rocked back and forth.
    But after a little while, she looked back down at that poor girl on her back in such a clean, white dress on that dirty, off-white carpet, and she felt very sad—she pitied her and felt so bad for that girl. It was such a shame, to end up here again.

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