Town and Gown
Peter Grimes
The widow rose from her chair, restirring the dust, and padded down the hallway toward the jiggling at her front door. Each step released a plume of mold from the carpet. With Frank dead from drink these many years, she had no one, nothing but the warm decay of the once-stately house, its frowning facade, its imminent dispersal like the spores of a puffball mushroom. Her town-near-a-college had become a college town, and the house now shivered on Greek Row aside old homes painted in appalling oranges and blues, yards littered with beer cans and unmentionables. No one knew the widow; no one ever came by.
Through the peephole she saw a shrub and the edge of her railing in the feeble porch light. The jiggling had ceased, yet she heard a moaning, a scuffling near the doormat, a few curse words and then retching. She recognized the scenario. Frank. How often on Fridays, then Tuesdays and Fridays, then Tuesdays and Fridays and Sundays, he'd have trouble getting in the front door. He'd make sick on the rug, lose his glasses, sleep on the linoleum where she'd wake him with a squirt bottle and lead him up to his bed beside hers.
When she opened up, a young man—twenty at most—lay sprawled at her feet in his sickness. He wore a pink bikini, and his hair foamed with shave cream. She heard the dull pump of rock music at the men's house next door. Alpha Gamma Gamma, or Delta Delta—she couldn't recall which. Perhaps the young man had wandered over by accident. Leaving the door ajar, she retrieved the squirt bottle, never emptied from its days of service with Frank, and knelt to spray the visitor's face. Either his cheeks were filthy or the water had discolored over time, because a rivulet of black ran down into his mouth. He smacked his lips and uttered a profanity he couldn't mean.
"You poor dear," the widow said. A man drunk is past blame, past reason—one might as well tell a dog its faults.
Forever slight, the widow knew just how to shift her weight, when to use a hip for leverage, how to make a drunk take a little of his own weight. She maneuvered her guest off the floor, down a crooked hall, and onto the parlor couch. She covered his indecency with a tattered quilt and then, determining he needed nothing so much as sleep, retired. Upstairs in her own bed she thought of Frank where he lay at Spring Lawn, body amolder. So often in life he'd slept in his clothes that he probably hadn't minded carrying his habit over into eternity. Although she didn't like to imagine him too closely—stewed brains between pink ears, the poison he'd lived on blackening his nails—she'd found that holding in her mind the smudge of his form, recumbent in its coffin, warded off the house's crackling that kept her awake nights.
Her guest had vanished by morning—leaving his bikini top draped over the fire poker, the bookshelf soaked with urine—but he returned several nights later with a lady, both of them soused. The lady wore albino-blond hair, a strapless gown. She spoke in a Southern accent as the boy wrestled her through the door, past the widow.
"Clay, this doesn't look like your frat."
Clay leered at her before stumbling over a disintegrating footstool.
The widow decided these darlings were in no condition to reseek home, so she led them upstairs. Clay more or less sleepwalked, bleary eyes monitoring one step ahead. His date studied the dark fuzz speckling the widow's walls. In the guest room, the furniture looked bearded, but the couple didn't seem bothered. They shut the door in the widow's face, and she heard them creak onto the bed. Ah, youth! When she and Frank were teens, and the town was still its own, they'd stroll beneath the lindens out front. Now the lindens were light poles peppered with strange messages, the avenue a stream of faces.
Around noon she scrubbed growth off two additional table settings. She made her guests a hearty breakfast to soak up the everlasting poison that had tricked them. When they at last ventured down, they took one look at the snowflake-sized motes already powdering the waffles and eggs, and scurried out the door. Although she'd hoped to spend the afternoon in their company, the widow didn't let it get to her. Frank. Frank. At the end he'd been so much worse than they, in ways she couldn't help now but recall. That voice he took on. I am The Alcohol, he'd say like a demon. My job's to fuck Frank up. He smelled of cinder, as though his veins held not blood but heat. But there'd been sober times too. She'd have to remember. Leaving the food in case her guests returned, she went up to change their sheets. She found blood clots and feces tangled in the cotton, sickness in one corner of the room. Always a loving, patient woman, she cleaned.
The holidays arrived, vacuuming the town of students, and the widow spent many a blustery eve scouring her rooms. She coaxed a pillow of orange tentacles from under the bathroom sink with a butter knife. She lanced the bulbs growing in the closet, mopped up the fluid that seeped out. She bleached the barnacles on the basement floor, the ones that threatened to shred her slippers. The cleaning felt like something a long time coming, something she'd been preparing for without knowing. By the time Alpha Gamma Gamma reopened in January for a party, she could hardly recognize her own rooms. She sat by the hearth listening to the pulse of music and tinkle of voices next door. Soon. Soon he would return. The readiness of her home guaranteed it. Toward midnight she dozed, dreamed a world full of sleeping men, come home.
Sirens woke her. Banging at the door. A lurid glow through the curtains drew her to the window. She saw a wall of flame where the men's house had been. The students must have been careless with a candle. Or maybe it was old wiring. Something they hadn't known about, couldn't be prepared for. Firefighters hosed the structure to little effect.
The knocking at the door grew more insistent. It would be, she thought, the fire department warning her to abandon house, that the fire would surely spread. Drawing close her robe, she opened up. Men stood on the porch, but none wore the shiny helmets or flame-retardant coats of firefighters. Instead, they wore tuxes, carried bottles of champagne and canted in unruly postures. They were young, a whole fraternity of souls. Their bodies shivered in the winter bite though the widow suspected they were too far gone to realize. At least they were safe. In front, right on the doormat, stood Clay, so drunk he looked through her.
"Oh, you poor dears," the widow said. "Not a place else in the world to go." She stepped aside as Clay pushed his way in.