Exercise 5, Wendy

Forty years ago it had been painted beige, now it was just painted dirt. The stairs were chipped concrete, littered with trash and the banisters were not what you wanted to grab onto if you were losing your balance. It was shelter, but it wouldn’t ever be home. Home is where there are folks who care about each other.

“Got pink slipped today.” Joe said as shouldered open the door and crossed to the fridge. He didn’t notice the loose handle, the dents in the avocado green door, or the lack of shelves inside. He twisted the top off a beer and swallowed half of it without taking a breath. Buzzing and crackling from the overhead fluorescent complemented the silence that followed his announcement.

Across the torn linoleum and visible from every angle the small gray screen flickered with inane motions of inane people. It didn’t matter that the volume was muted; they weren’t saying anything important anyway. “What the hell did you do that for?” Samantha complained.

“I didn’t do shit, they laid off lots of people. There will be another job; crap work anyway.”

“You can’t even keep a damn lousy job!” she whined. “You always have an excuse. Should’a listened to my mama and never hooked up with you. Why don’t you ever do anything right? What a loser.”

“Shut up!” Turning abruptly, Joe threw his beer bottle against the wall. The crash of breaking glass was somewhat muffled through the two layers of sheet rock and two by four framing of the common wall.

Furious he stalked into the bathroom, slammed the door and turned on the shower.

Staring at the shattered glass and foam of beer sliding down the wall she thought, ”Whooee, he sure has a short fuse.” Her eyes widened as she realized that beer foam was dripping from her hair. Reaching up she swiped at her face and found a trickle of blood from a small cut. With growing temper she waited for Joe to come out of the shower. He wasn’t going to get away with throwing crap around.

After a while the yelling stopped and silence settled in. It wasn’t clear if it was a good sign or a bad one.

She slid out of bed at the incessant klaxon of the cheap alarm. They hadn’t exactly slept together, each on their own side of the mattress, never relaxing or spooning together.

Joe noticed first the sour smell of sweat and dirty sheets, next the empty bed. Damn, what was he going to do now? Pipes clanged in the wall as the shower ran in the room next door.

The quiet knock on the door made the Anna startle. She thought about pretending she wasn’t home. Instead she shuffled over the worn linoleum, opened the door and let Samantha in. Sam didn’t look too bad, bags under her eyes from lack of sleep, long sleeves to hide the bruises, if there were any, and a cigarette hanging from her mouth. Nervous drags on the cigarette indicated her state of mental calmness. Making a beeline for the dinette table, she poured herself some coffee and sat down.

They sat and sipped for a minute. Reaching to the ashtray Samantha ground out the butt and started to tap her fingers on the table.

“I should leave the bastard. Can’t even keep a job.” she said.

Anna raised her eyebrows in what she hoped was a neutral response.

“He loses his job, and then he yells at me for it! Like I have anything to do with it. He got laid off, stupid jerk.” Downturned mouth, squinting eyes and bared teeth provided a visual accompaniment to her words.

Silently tilting her head to assume a listening position Anna’s faded blue eyes looked at her, gently pursed lips surrounded by soft wrinkles

“What do you think I should do?”

The dreaded question Anna thought. What do you think I should do? The one thing she had learned in eighty years of life was that she didn’t know squat. It never worked out to tell someone else what they should do. Sighing, she got ready to avoid giving advice.

“What do you want to do?”