The Narrow Door Read Online Free

definitely before she’s known as the singer Joni Mitchell, or given up a baby girl, Kelly Dale, for adoption. She looks and looks out the window, as if by sheer looking she can transform the landscape. The train that she waits for every night—she hears it first, an ominous but satisfying rumbling; then a sweep of light, lunar blue, as if the moon has turned up its wattage—roars by with the transformative power of an explosion. It cuts through the snow like a knife. It says Canada is just a place to be passed through, and for that moment there isn’t just a bed and a window frame, but a world out there. And the world inside—her father with his trumpet and his Harry James records, her mother with her school prep and mops—recedes. The train says that the world they’re in is not as big as she thought; these lives are as weightless as the flakes her friend shakes into her goldfish tank.
    Thirteen years after those winter nights, Denise stares out the bedroom window of a split-level on a cul-de-sac called Catalina Court, in Somerdale, New Jersey. She can’t take her eyes off the backyard at the house beside hers. Mad Dog is on a tear and nothing in this world is safe. Mad Dog is the name she’s given the woman next door, the mother who’s always fretting, always lashing out at her kids, whose infractions are nothing more than the usual kid kind: talking too loudly, stepping on new grass, leaving handprints on the foyer walls. Today Mad Dog has put her oldest son in a dress and has ordered him to march around in circles while she watches from the back step. The boy marches around the perimeter of the backyard with a calm, neutral face. The boy will not cry. The boy will not let his mother get what she wants. In an hour he’ll get this over with, and he’ll sit down and do his math homework, and maybe she’ll even reach into the freezer and give him a cherry Popsicle, his favorite. She won’t even mind if the red drips down his fingers onto his sleeve, where it will stain the fabric for good.
    Does Mad Dog know that a girl is watching her through the second-floor window frame? If so, would she make Denise come down to watch with her? Or would she put her in boy’s clothes? Denise does not feel any urge to call Joey, her brother. She knows if she does, he’ll start laughing, and she’ll probably start laughing with him. Maybe later they’d even bring up the story within earshot of Bobby. Maybe they’d even imitate his march in front of him: a boy putting on a girl’s hat—the teasing kids will do! Soon enough Bobby would be the laughingstock of the cul-de-sac, that paved bulb of a street where the neighborhood kids play kickball and tag. Denise wants to keep him her secret, she wants to live inside his pocket, where it’s warm and sweaty and a little sad. She steps round and round the backyard of her own imagination, engraving a shape that won’t ever let her rest.
    2009 |  No one is walking the halls of the bathhouse tonight. The floors are clean, the ceiling is clean. My sheets, towel, and pillowcases are clean, which should lift my spirit, but I can only think about Denise, with whom I’ve spent the better part of the day. She’s in her last hours. It’s early Friday night. Anyone who would be here is already off to Rehoboth Beach, Fire Island, New Hope, or Asbury Park, any of the gay weekend resorts within driving distance of Philadelphia. But I couldn’t bear the intensity anymore, all those faces turned toward Denise, waiting for her to go. She wouldn’t let go.
    My stare is vacant, deliberately vacant. I am performing it. I am perfecting it. Music thumps the speakers, music that’s working too hard to express transformation and joy. That is okay. I’m too stunned to feel, anyway. My mind is still inside that hospice room, the Joni songs, the nimbus of warmth and confusion surrounding that bed. Maybe that’s why I’m here. I thought I’d wanted to touch someone. I thought I’d wanted to