It was the first time Trudy had gone outside since the funeral. With a lack of confidence in her limbs the narrow staircase of the five story walk-up had to be navigated slowly. She doubted her knees still knew how to bend without buckling and the knuckles of her hands ached with whiteness where they gripped the banister as she inched down the two flights. Sideways, foot over foot, hand over hand, and relieved that the little tenement didn't have a stoop, Trudy made her way onto the sidewalk.
Across the street, was the small, gated park Trudy saw from her window, and behind it The Rupert Towers. Trudy craned her head back to see the tops of the buildings, so much taller from street level. When framed by her windows they were cut off at the 23rd floor and were merely the backdrop for tree branches. Standing in her doorway she watched people going in and out of them, too many people for such narrow structures. The city seemed so vertical, so unstable, held up merely by the bodies stacked inside the buildings. Her body and the bodies of all her neighbors seemed to be keeping the doorway she stood in square. Trudy shuddered at the precarious situation. At eighty seven years old, Trudy couldn't bear the weight of the building alone. Again her body felt threatened by the stones and metal surrounding her. In a city like this, with everything touching, everyone would be flattened. Trudy ventured out among the teetering structures.
Walking south down the wide corridor of Second avenue Trudy's shawl continuously slipped off her broad shoulders and gray wisps of her hair stung her eyes, tangling inside her mouth. She appeared large and unsteady, tugging at her clothes and shaking her head as she walked. Yet, Trudy's posture was stiff and erect compared to all the people rushing with their heads down. Trudy wondered if she was witnessing a city-wide search for something in the sidewalk cracks. She wondered what could have gone missing, wondered if it was just her that was missing something. But Trudy was just too old to bother with looking for that important thing.
Trudy didn't make it to her destination. By the time she reached 86th street she noticed the butcher's shop had changed into an office supply store and the supermarket was a pet supply store. Most of the places she and Bill used to go didn't even have signs saying where they had moved. Turning a disorienting one hundred and eighty degrees Trudy walked the four blocks back to familiar and alone.
Not twenty minutes before, when Trudy had left, the apartment felt cluttered and musty. It was almost impossible, in an apartment so small, not to be cluttered. The must, however, was a sign of age. A sign of life that had come and gone but remained as the haze of memory. But now Trudy didn't notice the clutter. What she noticed was the space. The space where Bill's body was not. Instead of the frame whose photo was shrouded by dust-covered glass, Trudy noticed the depression in the cushion of the over-stuffed arm chair opposite her own. Rather than the comb whose teeth left lines of wood under them if picked up, she noticed the collapsing entrance to the caves inside his slippers, lined up at the edge of the yellow linoleum of the kitchen floor. Where twenty minutes ago there had been a pocket watch on top of the dresser whose only remaining tick was a tendency for the lid to pop open, its latch loose from too many years of flicking; now there was no longer his body as an obstacle to move around to reach the dresser whose drawers had a hard time opening up.
Trudy looked over the dresser and the objects on top of it, standing absurdly still inside a city whose pace Trudy could not keep. She would never need to open those stubborn drawers again. Trudy was not going to mourn the death of her only companion by pushing her face into mothball scented clothes. It was enough to know. The knowledge that if she wrestled in knuckle-whitening grasps with the handles and wedged the drawers open, everything would be as it had been. As it will continue to be. Keeping his belongings provided continuity in a random world. Trudy's memories of their life together lived in the reliable stillness of these relics.
Going outside had been an exercise in alienation, so she stopped doing it. Instead, everyday Trudy passed the places where Bill's body was not. When they had shared this space, barely big enough for two, it had seemed quiet. As if their shared silence was the smallest of sanctuaries inside this biggest of cities. Now the only silence Trudy noticed was her own. And it was deafening. Paralyzed by the roaring quiet, Trudy spent a number of unmoving days sitting across from Bill's empty chair, attempting to be alone.
She no longer found her own voice familiar when she called out, "Hallo?" thinking she'd heard the shuffle of slippers in the kitchen. "Wer ist dort?" Trudy worried. Speaking her native tongue was to acknowledge that she'd thought it was Bill. He was the only person, beside the long-gone butcher, that Trudy spoke German with. He was her only person.
At first Trudy stopped speaking German. But, besides the necessity of calling the grocery store, she had no reason to speak at all, German or otherwise. If not for hunger, those first stagnant days would have dissolved her voice box in the steep solitude of death. Trudy spent hours looking in the mirror thinking about her body as nothing more than a burden, something fragile just waiting to collapse and decay. If she sat still for long enough, Trudy imagined she could witness herself aging. In the mirror her eyes became wooden and she watched the barely perceptible detachment of her muscles from the bones of her face. She was scared of dying, but could think of nothing better to do.
The walls became thin. The weeks started to take form out of days full of nothing but sensation. The approach of a truck coming down Second Avenue reminded Trudy of her country's invention during the war; the headlights stretching out over the ceiling, announcing its arrival before the rumble of 18 wheels over potholes. The honking on the avenue outside was louder, the shrieks of children across the street could have been either laughter or injury. Trudy felt more foreign in her surroundings than she had as an immigrant fifty years before. But back then she'd had Bill. They'd had their home in each other. Now all Trudy had were thin walls. The whole building became more and more porous.
The same way Trudy had been able to tell if her cooking agreed with Bill's stomach by the smells in the bathroom, she began to know which tenant had just flushed the toilet by listening to the pipes. She knew who was coming in at three in the morning according to the creaks elicited from the stairs, the way she'd known if Bill was melancholy by the sigh of cushions as he sat down. For two weeks Trudy paced from end to end of the apartment in her bathrobe. The hall carpet revealed its age, worn thin from listening.
The Werner family across the hall from Trudy was the only apartment in the building with children living in it. They were the closest to her. That her neighbors managed to fit three children in an apartment barely big enough to house her memories made Trudy wonder if her husband had tried hard enough. He had seemed so content with his slippers always where he left them. More than two chairs in the tiny living room would have crowded the space he needed for the trunk he'd brought across the ocean with him. Any more legs brushing the piles of papers sitting in yellowing stacks along the edges of the hallway running the length of the apartment would have upset him. Now that Bill was gone and Trudy was left behind, she realized he'd taken for granted that one of them would eventually be left alone in life.
The chaotic corral of the children in the morning always began with alarming news. The radio news-casters blasting Pat and Erich out of bed and on to spilling cereal, "Wake up, breakfast!"
Door banging, misplaced school books, and running late, "Ch-Ash-Hans! We have to go! What are you doing in the bathroom? Ashley, can you grab the stroller?"
"I already did, Chelsea and I are ready."
"Hans, shoes please!"
The sounds of every morning, "Hans Evan! Ashley, I have to go. You have to walk Hans. Where's the baby? Okay, goodbye, I love you. Hans, go change!"
The school hours were hardest on Trudy. With nothing but death to stay alive for, Trudy spent the hours playing out the end of her life. She had decided it would be easiest if she died alone in her apartment and soon. She wasn't interested in the life support that had been given to Bill after his heart attack. They had done that so they could continue their lives together. Without a life to share, Trudy had concluded her best option was to slip into her last days as quietly as she passed her present.