The Girl in the Window up on Tenth

No.376 in 'A Story a Day for a Year - and then some!'

THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW UP ON TENTH

There’s this apartment up on tenth, situat'd in a redbrick block that is dirty with the years, and the windows of the apartment is all the same 'cept for this one window and it was always open, like it was stuck, and the girl in the apartment played music real loud so it spilled out onto the street. She’d got taste in music that girl and sometimes I saw old men tapping their feet on the sidewalk ‘neath her window. And old women laughing and swaying a little and making like they was dancing, holding someone invisible and dear in the crook and cradle of their arms. And not just the old dancing, but I see'd young ‘uns doing the same.

The police came once – least that’s what I heard – and they told the girl she had to keep it down a little. They said they was real sorry for calling, and they removed their hats and called her ma’am. But there’d been complaints from the neighbours, they said.

It didn’t make no difference though, she still played her music how she played it.

And some days, when the air was sticky and breathless still, she’d sit in the window to get cool, wearing nothing but her underwear and her knees drawn up to her chest. She was maybe twenty and pretty as fuck – or pretty as peaches and cream. And boys'd call up to her, offering her their fool hearts, and I seen some girls do the same. That’s the fucking pretty that she was. And she was curled up like a cat in her window and I reckon as if you was near enough you could hear her purring like a cat, too, the whole goddamn street purring.

Her apartment wasn’t exactly on my way to nowhere, but I made a point of passing it almost every day just so as I could hear the music she was playing and maybe catch sight of her in her underwear. I reckon as I wasn’t alone in doing that. People up on tenth was always looking to the sky and smiling, and walking tall and with a skip in their step. It don’t take much to make a difference in the world, I reckon.

And if’n she wasn’t there in her underwear or the music was so quiet it wasn’t even a whisper, well there was still the stuck-open window and the hope that she’d be there on the way back or the music’d be playing at least. And there aint almost nothing so happy as hope, ‘less maybe it’s getting everything you hope for.

All of that was years back now and I still pass by her apartment sometimes, like if I believe it hard enough she’ll still be there. ‘Course it aint her apartment no more. She’s moved on and someone else lives there now, someone quiet and plain and not even known. Shit I’m not even sure of the window when I look, cos all the windows just look the same and all of 'em closed fast or open just a crack. And I was looking one day, just standing in the street opposite the redbrick block, and trying to work out which window it was exactly, and this old woman came up to me and just stood beside me a while, the both of us looking up.

Then she turned to me and she touched my arm, soft like she knew me, and she said in a slow and sad voice as how the girl didn’t live there no more and she said as how she missed her, too. And fuck if she didn't start dancing – like only the old and the crazy can do, and she laughed, and maybe there was music in her head like there was in mine when I saw her dancing. And the street all about us just stopped and smiled, and shared in the memory maybe.