Six Metres of Pavement. Farzana Doctor
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when all was quiet in the neighbourhood. It happened only after the children were called inside, the neighbours stopped yelling out to one another from their porches and locked their doors, and the murmurings through the shared walls went silent. That’s when Ismail was left all alone with nothing but his remembering brain. Eventually, it would grow tired of the exercise, or alcohol would slow it down, and he could finally fall asleep.
— 8 —
Nearly Naked
Ismail saw Lydia’s mother again, a week after he caught her looking at him from her window. He was on the front porch wearing only a bathrobe, the late autumn winds lapping at his bare legs. He was searching for his Toronto Star, which the delivery guy invariably tossed anywhere but within easy reach from his door. Finally, Ismail discovered it wedged precariously between two porch steps, threatening to fall beneath. He reached down with both hands and yanked the heavy roll out from between the steps.
Unfortunately, the effort left him unarmed against a sudden gust of wind that lifted his terry-cloth robe high above his skinny, goose-pimpled thighs. He pulled the thin fabric around himself with one hand, held onto his beloved paper with the other, and rushed back into the house like a self-conscious schoolgirl. Before closing the screen door, he scanned the street to check that no one had witnessed the spectacle. And there she was, peering at him through the clear glass of the living room window. After their encounter the previous week, Ismail wasn’t terribly surprised to see her there. Their eyes met for a moment, and then his peep-show audience let the curtain fall from her fingers and she disappeared from sight.
Ismail mused about what the widow had seen in the immodest moment before he’d run back inside. Studying himself in the hallway mirror, he imagined himself a brown, male, middle-aged Marilyn Monroe caught over the gusts of a sewer grate. Did the lady notice his knocked knees, veiny legs?
Ismail patted down his wet-from-the-shower hair, straightened his robe, and looked in the mirror again. He’d never considered himself a handsome man, but didn’t think he was all that bad, either. Crow’s feet sprouted around his eyes, fine lines that implied he smiled more often than he did, but he was otherwise mostly unwrinkled. He proudly surveyed his full head of hair with its distinguished-looking grey flecks at the temples. Sucking in the slight paunch around his middle, he decided that he was still slim. And he only needed reading glasses when the light was poor.
Ismail locked the door, and soon forgot about his neighbour, allowing the fat Saturday paper to consume his thoughts.
— * —
“Come on, Mãe! Do something! You’ll feel better if you do something. You’re making yourself into a depressed old woman!” Lydia chided. She did not like her mother’s habit of sitting by the front window.
Celia did not have the energy to be offended by the comment, and anyway she did feel like a depressed old woman, even though she’d just turned fifty. She nodded as though she were listening, and promptly returned to her post by the window, which caused Lydia to sigh loudly.
Lydia never knew what her mother was looking at, and even if Celia told her, she likely wouldn’t have approved, anyway. She nagged about her eating and sleeping habits, whether she had gone out that day, if she’d washed her hair that week. She constantly asked her when she was going to stop wearing black, had even brought up two boxes of her regular clothes from the basement. Celia understood this to be her daughter’s way of caring for her, and not so different from the way she, herself, had raised Lydia or cared for her own mother. But now that she was on the receiving end of this treatment she found it disconcerting, their roles reversing in a clumsy dance; neither really knew the steps, and Celia wasn’t sure she wanted Lydia taking the lead.
Celia disregarded her daughter’s entreaties to join the family for breakfast. She smelled the scent of biscuits wafting warm and sweet, but didn’t have much of an appetite those days, and besides, she was involved in something far more interesting.
She was watching the man across the street, who at that moment was standing in the cold, wearing a striped bathrobe. She stared at his chicken legs, uncombed hair, and smooth chest. Celia felt a twinkle in her eye, and mischievous thoughts crackled through her melancholy, surprising her. It had been some time since saucy ideas had come to mind, so at first she didn’t know what to do with them.
Marco came and sat in her lap. He watched a tiny spider — barely the width of a fingernail — construct a web in the window pane: Look, Vovó, a spider! She smiled at his four-year-old sense of glee and then pursed her lips at the insect, blew into its web, frightening the spider and delighting her grandson. You made it windy for the spider!
While she listened to Marco’s laughter, she looked up to see a sudden autumn wind blow under the neighbour’s robe, its terry-cloth stripes transforming into exclamation marks. High into the air they went, revealing bits of man flesh that Celia hadn’t seen in much too long. She giggled at the sight, stroked her grandson’s hair, and recalled a walk on a cool autumn’s day, and the warmth of her dressy burgundy coat. She peeked through the curtains again, watched the man’s retreating back, and saw a flock of Canada geese cross the blue sky over his house.
Memories are like roving magnets that attract others along for the ride. As the Canada geese honked at her from the past, ambulance sirens pulsed fear through her body. The taste of too-sweet chocolate cake brought bile to her throat. She felt her palms pushing against a heart, willing it to beat again, and saw empty eyes, a spirit already displaced. She watched arthritic fingers make eyelids close.
Celia felt Marco scamper to the floor. She had a feeling that he’d been talking to her, but his words blurred in her mind. She wiped away wetness from her cheeks and then saw that his were wet, too. Lydia called him away and he ran into her waiting arms.
— 9 —
Sweeping
Ismail’s next widow sighting was from behind the cloak of his living-room drapes. It was a cool December day, and she wore only a long, dark cardigan over her dress. A plain black cotton kerchief covered her mostly grey hair. Ismail squinted through the streaked glass, trying to determine her age. She swept the sidewalk in front of her house, her stooped posture and slow movements making her seem much older than he guessed her to be.
At one point, she straightened up and peered in his direction, perhaps sensing his presence. Ismail stood back and after a moment, he parted the fabric again. He saw that she was no longer looking in his direction, her attention being diverted by someone calling out to her from the doorway. She replied in Portuguese and gesticulated crossly at her daughter, Lydia, who strode out of the house, carrying a black woollen coat in her arms. Ismail drew closer to the window again, and opened it a crack so he could hear better, too.
Ismail didn’t know much about Lydia, except that she seemed a friendly enough woman. She, her husband, and young son had moved in a few years ago. He noticed they hung a Liberal candidate’s sign on their fence during the previous federal election (Ismail also voted Liberal, but preferred not to advertise this), built a new porch, and planted flowers out front that bloomed well into the cold months. Earlier that year, Ismail had admired the size of Lydia’s Black-eyed Susans.
Lydia’s voice rose, penetrating through the crack of his window, distracting him from all matters botanical. “Mãe, it’s cold out!” she yelled. In the same scolding tone, she said something in Portuguese and draped the coat over her mother, who tried, unsuccessfully, to wave her off. Lydia took hold of her mother’s arms, struggling to coax them into the sleeves and after a bit of pushing and pulling, Lydia won the battle, and her mother admitted defeat, standing obediently, like a preschooler, while Lydia fastened each big button from her mother’s knees to her chin. How the young treat the old. What insolence! Let her be! he protested silently from his post. There was something in how the widow allowed her daughter to dress her that told him her acquiescence had chilled her more than any late autumn winds could.
Lydia marched back into the house, blowing warm air into her bare hands. Only then did Ismail notice that she was dressed in a thin T-shirt, jeans, and bedroom slippers. The widow turned away from her daughter and looked across the street toward him. Beneath her tired