Mildred Morris
Geography The renovators woke Sylvia with their saws, sledgehammers, and terrible laughter. Dishes rattled. A picture fell. She lumbered over to the window. Gripping the sill- Sylvia could get vertigo just peering down from her third floor bedroom window-she saw two workmen lug an old fashioned sink-washtub over mounds of tarnished snow. They tumbled it into a dumpster, jeering as it hit bottom with a ringing thump. Sylvia looked across the courtyard for the wagging head ofThelma Bergman deploring the decline of 770 Avenue P from behind parted kitchen curtains. But Thelma had fled long ago. And now, more fully awake, Sylvia remembered her "friends" and fellow holdouts, Hal and Naomi, had defected yesterday, masking their betrayal with misty kisses. She was the only tenant left. Well, she wasn 't going anyplace. After fifty-five years, she had arranged the furniture just right. She took a moment to curse the day she had let Hal and Naomi into her immaculate apartment, then went from room to room assessing damage. Rings on the coffee table. Long, black hairs in the bathroom, one especially revolting strand wound around a bar of soap. Paint streaks on her daughter Judy's floor. She pulled the stained, musty spread off her bed and opened the windows wide. What she would do was what she had always done. Resume her schedule: Monday floors, Tuesday furniture, Wednesday windows and mirrors, Thursday kitchen, Friday bathrooms. Her future gleamed in the spray from a white plastic bottle. She loved polishing surfaces, and. there was something stirring, even spiritual, in the names Joy, Dawn, Pledge, Jubilee, and Fantastik. Sylvia marched into her kitchen, filled her kettle, broke two eggs in a bowl, beat them vigorously with a fork. When ready, she hlll#21
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