Such a Girl by Karen V. Siplin

Author:Karen V. Siplin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Washington Square Press

Chapter 13

Doomp!

Amy opens my bedroom door, letting harsh light from the living room seep in. “What the fuck is that?”

This morning there’s the doomping I’ve almost become accustomed to. Loud and disconcerting. I stare at the ceiling and wait for it to stop. But it doesn’t. I sit up, look at Amy and concentrate. The kid upstairs is jumping off the staircase, running back up the stairs and jumping off them again and again and again. What the kid is doing jumping off stairs at … I check the clock … a quarter past four in the morning is baffling. But here it is. Happening above my head.

“Okay,” Amy says. “You need to go up there and do something about this.”

“It’ll stop.”

“It hasn’t stopped,” she says. “It’s been going on for fifteen minutes. It’s just getting louder.”

I don’t bother to get dressed. I slip on a pair of shoes and go upstairs in my pajamas.

The small area in front of my neighbor’s doorway is like a garage sale. I rarely have a reason to come up to the fifth floor, so I can’t say that it hasn’t always looked like this. But something tells me this is a Betty Blacksmith Special.

There’s a tacky white wall unit, circa 1985, holding up the wall, partially blocking the stairs leading to the sixth floor. A tall, dead plant is in the corner, sitting atop piles of yellowing magazines and newspapers.

I navigate my way through the mess and ring the doorbell.

It takes Betty about three minutes to come to the door. I wait. She fumbles with the locks—there seem to be at least seventy of them—and pulls the door open. Her hair is tangled around her face like a crow’s nest. She’s wearing a crumpled sundress.

“What?!” she barks.

I haven’t made a lot of friends in the building. I leave the making-friends-with-neighbors thing to Gary. There are a couple of women who have knocked on my door in search of sugar or flour or oil. We’ve talked about trivial things in the hallway, like books we’ve read or movies we’ve seen. We’ve discussed getting together for coffee or dinner but have never followed through.

Overall, I like it here. The people are pleasant, private, considerate.

Yet now, at half past four in the morning, I’m standing here, staring at the evil that is my upstairs neighbor. And here is the little kid, the rodent, the pest I want to squash with my bare hands.

“Your child’s jumping,” I say.

Betty rubs her eyes and jabs her hands through her hair.

“No, she isn’t.”

“Well, yeah, she is. I have company, and she woke us up.”

“You woke us up.”

I look at the kid. I’m sure she’s going to step in heroically any second now and explain how desperate she’s been for “mommy time.” How the jumping off the stairs at four in the morning, while admittedly a very bad decision, was a desperate cry for attention. How it won’t happen again.

The kid clutches her mother’s dress and stares up at me fearfully. Betty looks down at her.

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