Terrace
THE OLD WINDOW GAVE A GRAND VIEW OF YELLOW TREE,trunk to branch. They called it Yellow Tree even though the ginkgo was yellow for only about a week each year, its fan-shaped leaves rustling to the ground at the first suggestion of a breeze. Annie and Edward held the baby to the window and said, “See? Yellow!” But she was too small to say “yellow” in response. She just looked and watched and touched the glass. They wiped her fingerprints from the window and kissed the fingers that made the prints. Then the leaves fell, and the scenery changed. Some views show less than half of what needs seeing.
When the rent became unpayable, they went in search of a more affordable living situation. What’s your living situation?Annie turned the phrase over in her mind, the situation of their life. They had not saved nearly enough for a broker’s fee, let alone a security deposit.
“It looks smaller than it really is,” Edward said, leading Annie around the new apartment. A dimly lit lopsided square. “Give it some time, it might grow on you!”
“You mean it might literally grow?” Annie asked.
At the new apartment, there were no views of Yellow Tree. The introverted windows were gated and clasped and huddled around a central shaft that Edward dubbed Pigeon Tunnel. Edward and Annie liked inventing proper nouns for their world. Yellow Tree, Pigeon Tunnel, Closet Mystery. Closet Mystery was Annie’s term for the mystery of their single, overstuffed closet. Upon opening, what would catapult forth? It was a bona fide enigma. Edward and Annie picked a proper noun for their baby too. Her noun was Rose.
Annie strapped Rose to her chest while she unpacked, stuffing diapers and deconstructed boxes into Closet Mystery, keeping an arm around her, holding tight, in case the fabric of the sling happened to unfurl like a scarf in a gust of wind, loosing the baby onto the ground.
“Careful,” she said to no one but herself.
Someday, Edward said, they would have a bit of outdoors all their own. A square of grass for playtime, a pot for planting herbs. They had said that at their last apartment too, and at the apartment before that, and they continued to say it even still, though perhaps with less conviction. They were cramped, Edward said, but in a way that felt familiar and warm, no? Yes, Annie agreed. Secretly, she felt that their lack of space probably signaled her lack of promise, a final judgment on her poor priorities and half-hewn choices. But it was a judgment that, in her deepest heart, had grown commonplace and comfortable, only jabbing its elbow of discontent at moments that found her particularly low. They were lucky in so many ways. They were healthy and happy and fine. They had spent every penny saved on moving in and moving out, even the coins from under the sink. Now there was a new sink, and an empty jar for fresh, shiny coins.
The building was closer to Edward’s work, which offered day care. When Annie’s unpaid maternity leave ended, she took the bus to her office and met Stephanie on the steps outside. Stephanie had covered Annie’s clients while she was away.
“The prodigal mother returns!” Stephanie said.
“Where’s my marching band?” Annie asked.
“Oh, the drum majorettes are upstairs. But wouldn’t you know it, the flute section is out pregnant.”
“All of them?”
“Toutes des flûtes,” Stephanie said.
Stephanie walked Annie through the lobby and guided her from floor to floor, which Annie found strange, until she realized her keycard had been deactivated while she was away. They visited reception to get a new one.
“Let’s have lunch today,” Stephanie said. “I see a pastry in my future.”
“Hey, did they move the copy machine?” Annie asked.
“No, they moved your desk.”
They ate BLTs with bags of chips and talked about the reshuffling of the marketing team; the new, luxe chairs in the conference room; the water fountain that was still out of order. Annie was looking for an update on her clients, some distress call that signaled she was still needed.
“What can I say?” Stephanie said. “You missed nothing.”
“Come over for dinner one night, why don’t you?” Annie said.
“Oh no, no,” Stephanie said. “I don’t want to get in the way.”
“Get in the way. We need to assemble our table. You can be the excuse.”
Annie came home and told Edward they needed to buy a table. They put it on the credit card. Annie cut cloth napkins from old fabric, laid out the glasses, the forks, the recently unpacked dishes from her grandmother, each plate painted with a tiny gold animal.
“I brought wine!” Stephanie said, shoving through the front door and shaking Edward’s hand. “Oh, and who on earth are you?” she asked Rose. Rose responded by handing Stephanie a toy.
Annie’s first instinct was to explain the size of their new home. The neighborhood, his office, the day care, what a steal! And then she would nudge Edward to apologize for the lack of space, so cramped, the amicable kind of cramped, the colorful balls and bags and dolls on the floor.
But it was Stephanie who spoke first. She said, “Should we eat outside? It’s such a beautiful night.”
She opened the door that normally led to their closet and revealed a terrace, decorated with strings of twinkling lights. Knotted vines gathered around the edges, forking and blooming and racing up the sides of the apartment.
The terrace was news to Annie, and also news to Edward. Had they simply overlooked it this whole time? No, it wasn’t possible.
“What?” Annie said under her breath. She settled Rose against her hip and peered out onto this terrace (her terrace?), which was equipped with a table and four chairs, a grill, and the kind of sturdy umbrella one could shove open on a sunny afternoon. Everything looked glossy and expensive, as if just purchased or just invented. She felt like she had found a missing pair of glasses sitting on top of her head.
“Closet Mystery indeed,” Edward said, coming up behind her.
“Real Estate Mystery,” Annie whispered. They looked at each other and walked through the terrace door at the same moment. (That’s how big the door! That’s how large the terrace!) They were unharmed, unchanged, and caught in the embrace of a warm autumn evening.
Stephanie was admiring a view that did not match the position of the apartment. No sight of Pigeon Tunnel, not anywhere. Straight ahead, they could see the remnants of a sunset, even though their side of the building faced east. Stephanie did not seem to notice the faulty geography.
“Shit, what a great space,” she said.
“Imagine our luck!” Annie said, bringing forth the wine.
They sat on the terrace for hours, refilling their glasses and plates. In fact, the longer they stayed on the terrace, the more solid it felt underfoot. Edward let Rose fall asleep in his lap and kept her there for fear of waking her when standing. There was a sharp tension, followed by a sense of overwhelming calm. The two emotions alternated for Annie until both expired and were replaced with the achy, snoozy joy of a morning spent running around a playground. It was an outdoor kind of joy. She could certainly move her arms and legs, but she chose not to. They were weighed down and happy. Oh, and the way the breeze felt on her forehead, the way it brought a soft campfire smell up and over her face.
At the end of the night, Stephanie helped them carry the dishes and utensils to the kitchen, and they showed her down to the street.
“What fun. Especially this girlie,” Stephanie said, tugging at Rose’s foot.
“Thanks for making the trip,” Edward said.
“Next time, you come to me!”
“Of course we will,” Annie said, wrapping Stephanie in a hug. She couldn’t wait to have the terrace all to herself, alone with Edward, with Rose, her family. She thought maybe they would sleep outside that night. How wild! Just to prove it was real.
When they had made it back upstairs to their apartment, the terrace was gone.
Annie opened the closet door and closed it, over and over, hoping for the kind of outcome that had already lodged itself beyond reach.
“Maybe it only appears when we entertain guests,” Annie said.
“Or maybe it was just this one magic time!” Edward said, tossing his jeans in a pile on the floor, next to the crib, next to the stove, next to the table, for which they really did not have enough space, neither in the apartment nor on the credit card. “Tonight was the best,” he said. “Tonight we had a terrace. We’ll talk about it forever.”
“Still,” Annie said into the pillow.
“Still,” Edward agreed.
Edward and Annie never went to Stephanie’s home for dinner, because she did not invite them. Instead, they invited over family friends, their old neighbors, their roommates from college. They had a nice time catching up with all the people in their lives, introducing them to Rose, hearing their current stories. But there was no terrace with Dan and Patricia, not with the O’Neills, and not with Liza and Sunny. For each visit, Annie would set the table in just the same arrangement, with a mug of pollen-shedding flowers and the collection of gold animal plates, and then she would try to reveal the terrace. Instead of releasing the glow from a setting sun, the closet would cough up a stray bag of diapers.
“Maybe you have to turn the knob a certain way,” Annie said, trying her hand at terrace sorcery. “Maybe it’s all in the wrist.”
The proper noun for this period was, as Edward put it, Sadness Home.
Annie wandered the apartment in a state of perpetual frustration, Rose hanging from her breast, the dishes gathering in the sink. She even missed a couple days of work. She dug through the mess of Closet Mystery and pressed her hands against the back wall, looking for a trapdoor or secret hinge.
She woke up early to feed Rose and paced the kitchen, imagining that the terrace might be tethered to cycles of the moon. Or perhaps the apartment was haunted by the terrace, an unruly architectural ghost that only visited when disturbed. Rose, for her part, did not seem troubled by her surroundings. She was still too young to be enchanted by a magic terrace, and perhaps Annie was too old. Annie looked into her daughter’s eyes and almost remembered the magnitude of their puny, gorgeous life. But she slid across the surface of the thought, into a new and compelling theory. Rose reached for her mother’s collar and stretched it wide.
What if there’s only a terrace when Stephanie is here? Annie wondered.
She was right, of course. When Stephanie returned for a Sunday brunch, the terrace returned too. It was resplendent in the afternoon sun, the wooden slats dappled with light and strewn with acorns, gold and orange leaves underfoot. Annie didn’t expect that you could yearn for a place so terribly after visiting it only once. There were other places she missed, treasured territories lifted off the earth, shuttered, gone. But the terrace arrived upon her with the relief of a long-awaited reunion. Annie felt a chill, because it was a reunion with herself. She had been accommodating some unknown injury for years, and it had silently joined the daily landscape of known feeling. Now, standing on the terrace, she woke to find her forgotten wound healed.
“You guys need a good sweep, huh?” Stephanie teased, kicking some leaves through the bars of the terrace and watching them float down to the street.
They spent the whole afternoon outside, plying Stephanie with drinks and snacks, and boards of cheese, and then a giant mug of steaming cider.
“I’m never leaving,” Stephanie said, her overlarge sunglasses lolling down the bridge of her nose.
“Fine by me!” Annie said. She spread a blanket on the terrace floor and sat with Rose in her lap, ...
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