There was a little family that lived in an apartment in an old, old building circa 1910. Their apartment was pretty small and the woman learned a larger apartment with a better view had opened up in the front building. The woman went to look at the larger apartment.
The larger apartment was significantly larger and that was the main interest. It would mean having walking space again and not stumbling over each other and everything continually. They would be able to get a fourth chair for the dining table. The son would be able to have a bedroom that wasn’t the size of a closet.
There were two sets of french doors with leaded glass panes.
The wood floors of the larger apartment were not anywhere near as nice as the wood floors in the present apartment. In fact, the floors were pretty ratted out, the wood heavily worn and mottled and stained and couldn’t decide, from inch to inch, what color they wanted to be. There wasn’t a hint of wax left. The floors likely hadn’t seen any wax in a couple of decades. At least two boards were in dire need of being replaced, not to mention the entire floor in the hallway. It sounded like the landlord might have plans to replace one of those boards which was in a primary walkway, which was closer to being a hole in the floor than a board.
The primary walkway was between the connecting living room and dining room, separated by french doors. When open the two rooms were effectively one room. Just the kind of floor plan the woman liked.
“I wouldn’t want to show up at the emergency room with a splinter the size of a pencil having mangled one of our feet,” the woman said. “I really would want this board replaced.”
The woman wouldn’t sand old wood floors herself and knew no sanding would be done. But the landlord said they would be waxed.
There were two sets of french doors with leaded glass panes.
There would be wall space again for hanging many of the woman’s paintings which were then in storage. Not that this was a big issue as the woman’s paintings were all fairly depressing to look at. But she would have room to put up prints of more recent works.
There was a view out the front window. It was on the street and you could see people walking past and lots of rush hour cars going past and buses and the like which the woman found much more favorable than her present apartment’s view of trash cans. Indeed, the woman liked watching the rush hour cars and the buses. She liked the bright lights shining off the rain soaked streets in the dimming early evening light. She thought it might be nice to write, looking out on the traffic. If she got back to writing again.
The landlord was just finishing painting the two main rooms an ugly beige called Navajo White whereas the rooms in the present apartment were plain old eggshell white.
The woman hated Navajo White.
There were two sets of french doors with leaded glass panes.
Despite treatments, the larger apartment had significant termite damage and the pest control guys were being called back in.
There were two sets of french doors with leaded glass panes.
The hall floor was in such bad shape that plywood would need to be laid over that and something whatever over the plywood.
The woman stood and looked at the apartment, at its better size and view, at its floors. She considered the cost of moving and putting in a new line for DSL and Direct TV. She considered the cost of moving and putting in a new line for DSL and Direct TV and switching utilities would mean not having the money to paint over the Navajo White that was so wildly popular for apartments and tract homes in the 1970s. She didn’t think her son’s few cheap, tourist Kachinas would give the Navajo White desert appeal. She wondered if maybe she painted some of the white doors in turquoise blues and reds and oranges or greens if that would make the Navajo White walls less unappealing. Or maybe those big paintings of hers would distract from the Navajo White.
All the apartments were named based on who the longest tenants have been.
The apartment the woman was living in was the “old nurse’s” apartment. A nurse had lived there for decades. After she retired, she started drinking and had a lot of problems from never doing anything but drinking, but then she started back to work again and worked for a while and then returned to her home town to die.
The larger apartment was the “Cuban refugee” apartment. The long term tenants had been a family who had fled Castro.
A lawyer had lived in the apartment the last six years. Six years was not long enough to be long term.
The woman ignored the fact of the lawyer and considered that residual Cuban spirits were a tinge more romantic than the spirit of a nurse who drank herself into liver disease then returned to her home town to die.
The woman guessed the paper on the shelves in the pantry and in the kitchen cupboard had been there since the time of the Cuban refugees.
She wondered how long it might take to make the larger apartment feel like “home”. Probably not until there was money for paint and rugs.
The woman looked again at the walls as the landlord pointed out to her the signs of termite damage (apart from the gaping holes in the wall that had been made for inspection). The walls in the room with the termite damage had yet to be repaired. The landlord pointed out the cracks that looked like they’d been thinly lined with mud.
“I think we have termites,” the woman said.
“No, you don’t have termites,” the landlord said.
“Come take a look,” the woman said, having just realized that she did.
On the way out the door to the building she noticed the awning over the door was half gone. She wondered if she could ever convince the landlord that replacing it would be a good idea as it would spruce up the facade a good bit.
The landlord went to the woman’s apartment. He took a look at a crack in the living room wall above the bathroom door, which was there when the woman and her family moved in, but now had two weird little brown things sticking out of the crack about the size of a pin head. The woman had only noticed these the past month.
“Oh, you have termites again,” the landlord said, sounding very depressed.
“Again?” the woman said.
Seemed the apartment had termite problems before the woman and her small family had moved in. They had gotten into the walls “here and there and there and there”, the landlord said.
The woman’s son excitedly showed the landlord all his recent toy sculptures. The landlord still looked rather depressed and not all that interested.
The woman was feeling kind of depressed too, because now she had termites and she hadn’t even moved yet.
“I don’t really understand all these new toys,” the landlord said. “What’s the story? What characters are these?”
“He made them,” the woman said, “but some of them are based on characters he’s seen in games or cartoons.”
“He made these?!” the landlord said. “I thought they were toys he got from a store! He made these?!!”
Now the landlord listened with interest to the boy describing all his sculptures.
“How do you do it?” the landlord asked.
The woman went back up to look briefly at the bigger apartment and thought about the cost of moving and the lousy economy and all the economists she’d recently listened to who talked about waking up in the middle of the night worrying the world was entering an economic collapse worse than the Great Depression, and she thought about the cost of moving and the lousy floors and the two pairs of old french doors with leaded glass panes and the bigger rooms and the awful Navajo White and the termite damage and the larger rooms and the cost of moving and the beautiful lights of the buses and cars on the wet streets and the lovely activity of that busy street as compared to the garbage cans and then she thought again about the lousy economy and the fact she too now had termites and she hadn’t even moved an inch.
In the front room of the larger apartment was her old living room rug. She had tossed it the previous spring, replacing it with a new, cheap but better looking rug from Ikea. The landlord had retrieved the rug from the trash then let it lie over a fire escape railing throughout the summer then had cleaned it off some but was unable to get rid of faded line running down the middle of the rug from where it had been lain over the fire escape railing. Not liking to see anything thrown out, he had placed the rug in the front room of the empty larger apartment. And so there it was. Her old living room rug in the apartment she was thinking about moving into.
“The floors are bouncy,” her son said. “That’s scary.”
“We’ve been living on concrete the past five years. You’re used to wood over concrete,” the woman said. “These floors aren’t on concrete.”
“The floors are bouncy.”
“We’ll cover them as best we can with Ikea rugs. They’ll feel less bouncy with rugs on them.”
“You’re sure it’s not because of termites? We won’t fall through will we?” the son asked. “Let’s go home. These bouncy floors scare me. I’m scared of termites.”
“We have termites.”
“But we don’t have bouncy floors.”
The woman called her husband and said, “I looked at the other apartment. I like it that it’s bigger and has a more fun view and a pantry but I worry about the wood floors being possibly impossible to take care of and getting splinters in everyone’s feet. And I worry about the persistent problem with termites despite treatments.”
“I know. I don’t know either,” said the husband.
“But then we have termites as well,” the woman said.
“No, we don’t have termites,” the husband said.
Sigh.
“Yes…we…do,” the woman said.
She continued her slow sprint toward Thanksgiving, deep cleaning her apartment for guests, putting out new pillows on the futon sofas, corralling clutter into new baskets.
She stared at her perpetually clogged kitchen sink and wondered if the kitchen sink in the larger apartment had better drainage.
The woman cleaned the steadily piling up black mass of dead ants by the kitchen door, an influx begun two days before, due to the rain, which she’d dealt with by spraying orange oil on the floor. The orange oil had trapped all but a few who were wandering around the counter in front of the microwave.
She looked at the goldfish tank, still bubbling air. But with no goldfish. The last one had died that morning.
“I don’t want to move into the other apartment,” her son said. “It has bouncy floors. And termites.”
“We have termites.”
“We don’t have bouncy floors.”
“It is bigger. You’d have room for your toys and all your art projects.”
“I don’t care that much about extra room any more.”
“It has a better view.”
“From here I can see dad walking up the street from the car. I wouldn’t be able to there. And it has termites.”
“We have termites.”
“I bet we don’t have many. It has holes in the floor and walls from the termites.”
“They’re going to have the exterminator in again. And they’re going to fix the walls and the floor.”
“I’m scared of termites eating the floors.”
“If you’d never heard the apartment had termites, would you want to live there?”
“Yes.”
The woman looked up termites on the internet. She was hoping to find out whether she would be moving into an apartment which she could reasonably expect, with further treatment, not to fling hoards of swarming termites at her in the Spring. But then, she considered, she now had her own termite problem and come Spring she just may be faced with hoards of swarming termites anyway.
The woman happened onto a web page which had a weird story that read like those email spam stories that show up on Snopes as bogus but are emailed around like crazy by people who…well, y’know, think it’s a courtesy to email around hysteria-inducing spam of stories guaranteed to best tantalize frantic thirteen-year-olds. It was a story about a young woman who went dancing at a club, who met some great guy with whom she danced all night, who ended up taking him home and having great sex with the guy with whom she thought she was madly in love and who had told her he loved her. She woke up in the morning to find he was not in bed and thought surely he was making breakfast for her as he was the perfect man. She found instead the man was gone and had left her a wooden flower with a note saying the flower symbolized all the thousands of termites he’d released into her apartment, which would eat all of it and all her furniture and destroy her life! All because of a one night stand!
“Don’t let this happen to you!” the story warned.
The end.
P.S. The woman wondered how in the world a wooden flower could conceivably symbolize termites.
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