From “Double Exposure”
by Greg Johnson

Her hair smelled bad.

The day we came to visit Mr. Thomas, that awful February, she happened to come downstairs—“just checking the mail,” she said, with a half-apologetic smile—and after collecting a few envelopes she stalled a moment. That’s when I noticed the smell, and focused my attention on the oily mane of darkish-blond hair through which, I imagined, she had splayed her fingers many times. Though ten years old, I was an observant child, and passing my gaze downwards I saw that her clothes looked cheap and not very clean. Her fingers had stains on them as of dark ink, or ashes.

My mother, with her middle-class American politeness, shook the woman’s dirty hand without hesitation. From the smile she gave, she might have been meeting the queen. The woman kept looking back and forth between us, smiling eagerly, as my mother launched into a needlessly detailed explanation of our presence outside Mr. Thomas’s door. He was the great-uncle of a pilot’s wife my mother had befriended while we still lived on the base, and Mrs. Fellowes had insisted we stop and meet the old man, since we were going to be his neighbors. The day before, my mother and I had moved into our own flat in the next block of Fitzroy Road, and though we hadn’t finished unpacking she’d resolved that morning to fulfill her obligation promptly. She called it an “obligation,” but I knew my mother was hungry to meet people—even a British woman’s elderly uncle.

While my mother explained all this I stared at the woman, whose name was Sylvia. It struck me that Sylvia was just the kind of person my mother needed at that moment, for she was an intense, compassionate listener, expressing no impatience with my mother’s volubility. That was the first time I guessed that Sylvia was lonely, too.

My mother kept talking. Within minutes she had told Sylvia the story she’d been giving everyone we met (our new landlord, neighbors she encountered in the hallway, even the elderly woman who owned the greengrocer’s shop on the corner). The main details were these. Her husband, my father, was in the Air Force—which was true. He was stationed in London for another six months, at which time his term of service would end—also true. Though we’d been living on the base in quarters provided for married airmen, the U.S. government instead had provided a tiny flat in the Fitzroy Road for my father’s dependents—a disappointing but temporary arrangement, my mother added quickly, for we’d all be returning home together in six months’ time.

This last part was not true. The truth was my parents had split up, and my father had told us both, in separate, difficult conversations, that when we returned to America he planned to file for a divorce. My mother had moved us to the Fitzroy Road flat supposedly because she wanted, now that we were here, to “experience a different culture.” It would be a fine learning experience for me, she said. We would stay in London (where I would follow a reading list sent by my fourth-grade teacher back in Atlanta) until August, when we’d have to return to America and my school. But the real reason we’d stayed in London, of course, was that my mother couldn’t accept the separation—my father had met another woman—and was lingering in the hope that she’d get him back.

She hadn’t told me this, in so many words, but I’d known what would happen in the way intelligent children know such dismal things. Perhaps I knew before she did, months earlier when my mother was still pretending to herself we were a happy little family about to conclude its British adventure.

Standing there in the freezing entryway with my mother and Sylvia, I’d begun fidgeting. I wanted to return to our flat, which at least was well-heated, and help my mother unpack, then read until dark and in that way make an end to another day against the time when we could finally return to America and a semblance of normalcy. But I fidgeted quietly; I was a polite boy. There was a baby’s pram, empty, there in the vestibule, and I held the bar and moved the pram forward and back, forward and back, as though soothing an invisible child.

When my mother finally stopped talking, Sylvia related in a few swift, efficient sentences how she’d come to be here, occupying the two floors above Mr. Thomas’s flat. He was such a nice and helpful man, she said; she knew we’d like him very much. By now, however, Sylvia told us that Mr. Thomas had gone out for the day. He worked for an art museum, she said, and was an artist himself.

“Oh, really?” my mother exclaimed, as though delighted by this news.

Sylvia, ducking her head mischievously, cupped her mouth and stage-whispered, “But ringing the bell won’t do, you know. He’s deaf as a corpse.”

“Oh, is he?” my mother said, sympathetically.

Sylvia laughed. “You have to bang and bang,” she said, miming the action against Mr. Thomas’s door. “Like you’re trying to wake the dead. Literally.”

My mother gave her most forced and gracious smile. “Really, I’ll have to remember that.”

Neither my mother nor Sylvia seemed to sense any awkwardness in their eager, serendipitous conversation here in this foyer—I saw that Sylvia was cold, too, the tips of her nose and ears a waxen pink—and now Sylvia was exclaiming over her “luck” in meeting another American woman living just a block away. They were about the same age, weren’t they? She hoped they’d become good friends. Her babies were napping, or she’d have invited us upstairs to meet them, and make us a cup of tea.

“I’ve taken up all the British customs,” Sylvia said, in her nasally half-Boston, half-British drawl. “I imagine you have, as well?”

My mother agreed because she was always agreeable, though she disliked tea. She swerved onto another subject, a tactic she often used just after committing a lie, then feeling her insincere, polite guilt about it. She latched onto another bit of information the woman had offered.

“You know, we’ve never met a real poet before,” she said, admiringly. “Have we, honey?” she added, glancing down on me.

Uncomfortable beneath the gaze of the malodorous, poorly dressed Sylvia and my genteel-looking, perfumed mother—whom no one would recognize as a woman plunged into raving despair—I glanced away. I kept playing with the pram.

“No,” I said quickly, fearing what would come next, as it did.

“You know, my son has written quite a few poems at school, back in the States,” she said. “He goes to Catholic school, and the nuns read them aloud to the class." ...

Ontario Review #57