maggie upstairs

jocelyn royalty

We have a lot of rain in April. The sky hisses like an open mouth, long tongue lapping across all of New Orleans, down rows of shotgun houses and side streets that become canals, through flooded squares that seep and squish. In the year I lived below Maggie, I watched her wade into Brechtel Park, mud caking her shins, and smile wildly up at the sky.

“Grace!” she had shouted, so loud and wide that I caught a glimpse of her silver molar. Her voice caught on the diced-up wind, my name coming at me from all directions. “It’s raining!”

I was huddled in the entryway of Laura’s and my apartment with the dog, watching the storm come down in sheets. It slapped to the ground like the water I gathered in my hands when I showered, droplets pooling in the cup of my palms before crashing down onto porcelain.

“Sure is,” I called to her. She spun, near-balletic in the mushy ground—barefoot, I noticed with a shock—with clumps of waterlogged grass and roots tangled between her toes. She seemed satisfied by this acknowledgment. I watched her twirl away, arms outstretched and covered in strands of Spanish moss.

As soon as I stepped inside, Laura rushed towards me, tattered towel in hand, the kind we devoted only to wiping our feet and pets on. She caught the dog as he tried to wiggle away.

“Oh no you don’t,” she mumbled to him as she cocooned him in stained terry cloth, meticulously drying his ears, his paws, the stringy hair under his belly. “You were out for so long,” she said, and I said, “I was watching Maggie.” Laura sighed. Three months prior, Maggie had moved into the studio above us, and since then it had been a non-stop onslaught of strangeness and the smell of incense through the vents. She came downstairs often, sometimes to offer us her “signature” pralines, which were baked into lopsided shapes (I had once compared them to turds, resulting in hours of yelling on Maggie’s part, and a subsequent threat to “never bring baked goods again,” which was lifted a week later with a plate of doughy beignets). Other times, she wanted to dance, or to play her new viola, or to show off the opal ring that her grandmother had sent from Phoenix for her birthday.

“What’s she up to tonight?” Laura asked. She let the dog loose, and he bolted from her arms, nails clacking against the hardwood floors before skidding to a stop at the stairwell.

“Truly, Laura,” I said. “I have no idea.”

We sat together at the kitchen island for a while, and I pointed at Maggie’s outline through the window. She was just barely visible. She had given up her spinning in favor of sitting directly in the mud. I wanted to ask Laura the things I always asked her about Maggie, just to hear her say the answers: Do you think she’s crazy? Oh, without a doubt. Not anything really wrong, right? No, just quirky, I’m sure. Do you think she’ll move out soon? I can only hope. In a marriage, there is an amicable script written between two people, a rhythm that one falls lovingly into. Should we check on her? Oh no, I’m sure she’s fine.

A week later, Maggie wanted company. She wanted to sit on our new IKEA sofa and drink wine and watch Big Night, holding the dog in her lap while all of it was going on. She told us this as she stood at the threshold of our door, an empty glass clutched by the stem in her stocky fingers. Laura, who is a schoolteacher and therefore very patient with such out-of-the-blue demands, took Maggie in willingly, and we sat in front of the TV, Maggie cross legged and petting the dog’s snout, Laura and I stiffly in the corner, each of us with a shallow glass of sangria.

“Stanley Tucci is so hot,” Maggie said. Her face had a sort of odd lilt to it, one eye slanted upwards and the other down, like someone had cut out all of the features of a Picasso painting and tried to rearrange them back into a normal face. She had the wildest hair I’d ever seen: peach-colored and gnarled around the sides of her face. She was overgrown. I told this to Laura later that night, while we lay in bed and looked out at the city. She narrowed her eyes.

“Hey! That’s really mean.”

I said I was sorry. I was always saying the meanest things about Maggie without meaning it. That night, she downed her wine at the speed of light. She looked thankful. She suggested we put a record in the tan Victrola that I received from my grandmother’s estate, the one that hulked in the corner, untouched and used mostly as decoration. As a child, I had stared into the stereo of that record player, convinced that I saw a face: two bulbous eyes where the knobs were and the grinning, thousand-toothed mouth of the speaker. Looking at Maggie, I saw some resemblance between the two.

As Laura slotted a vinyl Buena Vista Social Club album into the player, Maggie began to cry. She swayed slightly to Chan Chan as she sobbed—she would tell me later, once she’d calmed down, that this was the most beautiful song she had ever heard. Her tears started suddenly, and Laura went to her in that kind way she has, draping a blanket around her shoulders. I stood back, cautious, the same way one might regard a magazine-wielding Jehovah’s Witness on the street. This was a very Maggie sort of thing, the bleeding of emotions quickly into their reciprocal: happy flooded into sad, angry into peaceful. Tonight, it was her ex, Jordan, and the cat that were making her weep.

“He took her,” she sobbed, the words exploding from her mouth in a whirlwind of tears and spit. “My Lucy. My little baby Lucy, my cat, he left me and he took her and he called me crazy and I don’t care that he left me, but I want my cat back, Laura.” 

Laura nodded wisely. Outside, for the first time in days, the rain had slowed slightly. It was as if Maggie had taken all of it for herself.

I think often, after Laura has fallen asleep and I am staring across the water at the neon-lit aquarium, of what I wish I’d done that night. On the biggest party days of the year, sometimes I feel as though I can hear whole conversations carrying across the water from the French Quarter—drunk girls consoling each other, saying, It will all be better. Let me look at you. I love you, stop crying. You will get better soon. I wish I had given Maggie my cardigan. Another glass of wine. I could have indulged her, asked who was hotter, Stanley Tucci or Tony Shalhoub? Instead, I backed into the kitchen while my wife held Maggie’s trembling shoulders against hers. I did anything else: filled the dog’s water bowl, scratched him behind his floppy ears. I cleaned out the fridge. I waited for her to leave.

We saw less and less of Maggie. I bumped into her once at the record shop while I had been taking the dog for a walk, and she shouted at me, waved me in.

“You won’t believe what I’ve found,” she told me while I double-knotted the leash to a nearby stop sign. I followed her inside.

The wood floors heaved under her boots, that same clunky leather pair that she was always wearing—I had noticed, lately, that her steps seemed heavier. I watched as she leafed through vinyl albums, clumsily picking past The Beach Boys, The Beatles, Bob Marley.

“Here it is,” she said. And there it was: an authentic 1996 Buena Vista Social Club album, Havana-printed, not like the knockoff that Laura and I had.

“I like the little man on the front,” she said, and then opened the cover.

The scent of old ink floated towards us, mildew mixed with saltwater and years of sun. I started to respond, but before I could her eyes glazed over and she looked past me, somewhere out towards the horizon. It was like watching ice cover the Gulf, that once-a-year phenomenon where still water crystallizes near the docks.

“Maggie,” I said. “Maggie.” I clapped my hands in front of her face. She continued to stare.

I took the album from her hands—I noticed they were tremoring slightly but brushed it off as an overabundance of Maggie-esque energy—closed the album and slotted it back in with the rest. I wasn’t scared, not exactly, but I contorted my face into the most worried expression I could conjure so that when she snapped out of it, she’d feel guilty for worrying me so much. I do the cruelest things without meaning to. Laura is always telling me. The dog yipped outside and that seemed to jolt Maggie back to life.

“Oh, Pablo!” she exclaimed.

She gathered the hem of her dress and rushed outside, crouching by him and petting his head. She did it too aggressively. I wanted to show her, take her hand by the wrist and guide it softly along the fur like instructing a toddler, but I was afraid. I realized this with a start: that I didn’t want to touch her.

“She won’t break, you know,” Laura told me that evening. We were on the balcony. She had a pile of papers in her lap, half of them graded in purple gel pen. The temperatures had swelled in the last week, and with them the humidity. It felt as though the whole world was pregnant with water.

“That was weird,” I said. “Was that weird? Should we be worried?”

“It’s a little weird,” Laura offered. “But that’s just Maggie, you know? And it’s been rough lately. This week would have been her anniversary with Jordan.”

I understood. She and Jordan had only been together a few months, but he was all she'd talked about. (“He's perfect, just perfect," she'd told me the night of their first date. "Such a gentleman. He wore the nicest cologne. It smelled like a campfire. ”)  We weren’t sure why they had broken up, only that one afternoon we had found Maggie sobbing in the stairwell, clutching a pen with the insignia of Jordan's law firm printed on the side. We speculated: maybe she was too clingy, or she had too much energy. Maybe Jordan had cheated. The most likely solution seemed to be, though, that Maggie was simply Maggie. She left little space for coexistence.

From the balcony, Laura and I watched trees rustle like muffled laughter. The light filtered through and for a moment Laura was dappled in it, all golden and camouflaged in the city. She was beautiful. I loved her. These were the things I knew.

The next time we spoke to Maggie was in July. She had taken an unexpected vacation—to Borneo, she’d said. For three weeks we went without seeing her. Secretly, we liked this. For three weeks there was no off-tempo tapping from above (recently she had purchased a flamenco board in hopes of becoming an alluring, red-rosed maiden) and no need to be on-the-spot therapists or confidants to anyone but each other. We made pralines, perfectly oblong. Outside, it was springtime and sugary. All of Algiers smelled of damp earth and saltwater.

And then she was back, Maggie in a long red-and-white polka dot dress, Maggie as loud and happy as before, but something was off.

“It’s like she’s hiding something,” I told Laura the night that she returned. Maggie had been glad to see us but vague about her vacation, mumbling something about the beach and skinny dipping. She rushed upstairs, and we heard no thump-thump of the flamenco board, only a nauseous silence. My hands felt tingly.

A week later, we heard a scream coming from the apartment above. Both of us took off running, up the stairs, down the hallway towards Maggie’s room. It had been her voice, I was sure. For a moment, my brain flashed with nightmares of Maggie abducted, hurt, in agony. She didn’t answer the door. Laura stooped down by the doormat and plucked an iron key from underneath (she would tell me, after weeks had passed, that Maggie had alerted her to its location in case Jordan ever returned with the cat when she wasn’t home and needed to be let in). Laura opened the door. Through the crack, we saw Maggie kneeling on the floor, mouth askew in a soundless wail. Laura rushed to her. Maggie kept touching her temple, saying nothing, and it was this way that we learned of her tumor: word by word over the course of an hour, lapses of sobbing in between.

Maggie’s apartment reeked. That was all I could think about. It was funny—for all the times she’d come to our place unannounced, she had never invited us up. I saw why. Piles of laundry rose like anthills all around, dirty dishes stacked in Tower of Pisa-like configurations in the sink. Only the flamenco board, polished and perfectly situated in the middle of the room, was clean.

When Maggie left for the hospital, the stink wafted down and into our place. I told Laura, “I swear, when she comes back, I’m going to clean top to bottom and show her how to do it, too.” Laura, who had been chopping onions too meticulously at the counter, put down her knife and lowered her head. She swayed back and forth. She said, “Grace,” and I said, “I’m right here,” and she said, “Grace,” and I said, “Laura,” and I grabbed her by the shoulders. It felt as though the whole building began to waver. We could have lifted clean out of the foundation, toppled into the ocean, if I hadn’t caught her.

“Grace,” she said,  “Oh my God, Grace,” and I knew what this meant.

The next week, we would see people we’d never met—family members, we assumed, maybe distant ones—filing upstairs and retreating with armfuls of Maggie’s things. Some of it they marked to be discarded: her mattress, oily from years of no bed frame, her DVDs of The Devil Wears Prada, Joe Gould’s Secret, Road to Perdition. Other things they marked as “repo” with a red sticker. The last thing to be carried out of her apartment was the flamenco board, still slick and smelling faintly of incense (“healing smoke,” Maggie used to call it—I remember this like swallowing a pill wrong).

We have a lot of rain in April. In our bedroom, I slowly open the blinds when I’m sure that Laura is asleep. She hates all of the light and the cold feeling of the glass. We get a lot of rain in April and right now it is April and raining, again, and last July, Brechtel Park was paved over to stop the mud from flooding. I think that someday soon Algiers will sink for real, and all of us with it, my wife and I, the dog, the plasticine modernism of our apartment complex. We could go unmissed by the mainland. It is so quiet upstairs. A boy moved in last month, a junior at Xavier. He is polite and perfect and smokes one of those new E-cigarettes. I hate him. I don’t know how much more rain this place can take. 

I wonder, heavily, if Maggie is missed by the mainland. Across the room, I can see the square shadow of a dusty album, authentic, 1994 Havana-made. I had gone back and bought it for her on a whim, weeks ago. I was keeping it for her birthday. This is a secret that my wife will never learn. It’s too kind of a thing for me to have done, too friendly.

I almost wake Laura, tell her that I feel like my hands and head are being unscrewed, that I am afraid I’ll float away, but before I can say anything I have already been filled with helium. I soar way up above our building, above New Orleans, above the cloud cover, past planes carrying passengers to Borneo, into the stratosphere, where I hear soft flamenco music and taste undercooked and over sweetened dough. Maggie, my Maggie; I want to think she is in heaven dancing with Secondo and Primo in a vast tiled kitchen. But Laura’s hand, half-asleep on my chest, pulls me down, light and piercing as a blade of grass. Downstairs, the dog yips, a sharp, grief-soaked noise that carries up to me and across the water. From somewhere distant, I swear I hear a faint meow in response. 

“It’s raining,” I say to my silent room, to the Buena Vista Social Club. Laura tosses slightly in her sleep. “It’s raining.”