She lives on the stairway. On step #22. There are exactly 43 steps that lead up to the front door of my apartment, and each step is about a foot wide.
Why does she live on the step that’s in the very middle of the stairway? Does it make her comfortable knowing there’s an equal number of steps stretching out above and below her? Or is she oblivious to being at the center of my daily ascents and descents. Is it chance that her dirty little toiletries are scattered all over step #22? I ask myself these questions all the time, but I never pose them to her. And I probably never will.
She has a flattish nose and jet black hair and her eyes are two coin slots. But she isn’t Asian. More like elvish. Her skin is very white (although not albinistic) and her ears are a little pointy on top. And her fingers look like anemic sticks of asparagus.
She’s severely short. Not a dwarf — her body’s proportions aren’t abnormal in any way. But her body is small all right. Can’t be more than three and a half feet, this lady.
The limbs beneath her wrinkled, ragamuffin clothes are skinny, but not to the point of emaciation. She has a skinny upper body, too, with forgettable petite breasts. Her backside, on the other hand, is nice and fleshy. Looks like she swallowed a small sack of mashed potatoes that somehow eluded her stomach and took refuge in her ass.
She smells. Worse than b.o. Worse than cow manure, than rotten eggs, than a dead animal. She smells so atrocious, I can barely comprehend it. Usually I plug my nose when she’s in the vicinity. Sometimes, though, the sadomasochistic side of me forces my nose to have a little sniff. Jesus. Once one of those little sniffs made me dry heave with such gusto, the blood vessels around one of my eyes popped.
Hissing noises. The lady makes hissing noises, too. And farting noises. And whenever she sees me, she curses. I don’t do anything to deserve it, except for being a functional social subject. I guess that’s enough. My presence wakes her up to her degradation. She resents the way my image opens her eyes.
And I let it slide. I ignore her. Pretend she doesn’t exist. I let her continue to live on step #22 of the stairway that I own, that I pay for with my hard-earned money. One phone call to the bum squad is all I have to make and that’ll be the end of her. But I never make that phone call. And I probably never will. I don’t know why. I can’t stand the lady. She doesn’t have a redeeming bone in her body. And yet I allow her to go on antagonizing me every morning when I leave for work and every evening when I come home. Antagonizing me with her presence.
And with her nail file.
It happens at least twice a week. I return from whatever bar I decide to go to after work, four or five scotches to the wind, and stumble up 22 steps. Her hisses and lip-farts and mumbled obscenities grow louder as I near her. And then, as I try to step over her, she attaches herself to me. To one of my legs.
I keep climbing. It’s slow-going, but she’s small enough that I can still make headway with her clinging to me like a Koala bear on a eucalyptus tree. And even though I trip a little when she yanks off my shoes and socks and throws them down into the alley, I still keep moving up, up, one step at a time, trying to bring my semi-blurred vision into focus.
“You grimy effing barstid,” she croaks. “I hate your guts, you foul smelling pile of dung.” I don’t know if she’s talking to herself or to me. And I don’t care. I just want to get to the top of the stairs, get to the door, get on the other side of the door, inside, safe, sound, alone, alone . . .
The nail file she uses on me is this crappy, nasty thing that looks more like a rotten dog bone than a file. But it works. My heels are exquisite: smooth, healthy-looking, completely callous-free. I don’t know how she manages it, filing my heels so masterfully when the heels are in motion and she’s clamped to my leg. She manages it all right, though, moving that file back and forth across my heels with the speed of an electric toothbrush turned on full blast. It’s disgusting. And pleasurable. Here is this diseased, stinking little maggot dirtying up my lower half with her crummy, clinging, fat-assed little body while making snowflakes out of my feet . . . and I like it. I like it a lot.
Still, I prefer not to have this person go to town on my heels whenever the mood strikes her. It would be nice to come home drunk and not have to worry about getting molested. I appreciate what she does for me, I really do, especially since I’m usually too lazy to take the time to file the callouses off of my own heels. Hell, I’m too lazy to take the time to cut my nails, sometimes even to brush my hair and teeth. So it’s nice to have good-looking, good-feeling heels. What isn’t so nice, of course, is the way they’re made good-looking and good-feeling.
I need to learn that, in this world, all that matters is the finished product. But I’m not a very good learner. Even if a lesson is spoon fed to me over and over again.
By the time I get to step #43, I’m exhausted. So is the lady who lives on step #22. As I struggle to stick the right key in my door lock, she looses her grip on me and falls off, then allows herself to tumble back down to her step, bitching and swearing and going “Ouch!” the whole way. I continue to ignore her. And I don’t thank her for the pedicure — I didn’t ask for it, why should I have to answer for it? Once I get my door open, I just stumble inside and shut and lock it behind me. Then I either throw up in the toilet and pass out, or I eat a bowl of cereal and watch a talk show. It all depends on how badly she reeks that night, and how many scotches I put away.
On the nights that the lady has her way with me, there’s always a knock on my door around 3 a.m. It takes me a while to get out of bed and answer it. Sometimes I don’t even bother. But I usually do.
Neatly positioned on the 43rd step are my shoes. They’ve been polished, and each one of them contains a neatly folded sock. Between the shoes is a tiny tube of white cream — therapeutic foot balm that, according to the directions on the tube, “should be massaged liberally all over the feet, particularly over areas that have recently been modified.”
As I lean over to pick the items up, I glance down at step #22. Normally she’s curled up in a foetal position, faking the snore of a sick hog. But sometimes she’s awake, glancing back up at me with her tongue sticking out of her mouth.
I return the gesture as I slip back inside and gently close the door.
Copyright © 2003 by D. Harlan Wilson