Seven

An old, umbrellaed woman comes, wobbling on the uneven wood chips beneath her feet. She grows blurrier as she moves, less and less distinct from the pouring rain around her.

Near the slide, she bends stockinged knees, leans on her cane while left hand reaches for the ground. She folds her legs, twists a little to sit. Hands behind her shift her back, along the rough mulch, underneath the slide.

Rain pelts the aluminum, gathers its splashing self into drops, runs gullies down the corners of the slide. Beside it, the woman has left the umbrella, open and up, catching rain, pooling water, reflecting dimpled gray. There were dimples in Grammadame's cheeks.

Greta, swinging, up, down, stomach dropping beneath wet shirt. Rain hits harder when you move. Watching, staring, wet, red eyes.

Beneath the slide, the shape , rocking, slowing like breath. Slow. Slow. Rhythmic. Slow. Wind whips as breath dies. Death coming, pooling in an umbrella, preparing to tip.

The woman stops rocking, stretches prostrate in the slide strip of dry, almost invisible. Blurry like memories, wet, uncomfortable. Still. Still.

Had her grammadame crawled beneath a slide? Had anybody seen? Could the man from L'Royale feel it pelt like rain when you move, sink in, soak?

Greta flew, jumped from the swing, walked, bent beneath the slide. This was the face on the poster in the lobby of the apartment building. A teller of fortunes, future, future, what would come, future. So old, past, past, future with past.

Greta bent to kiss her.

Six

The woman I called Grammadame never hinted that she knew I wasn't cut out for the stage. In every way, she treated me like a star. She called me "dahling" and the scripts I wrote "mahvelous."

Behind a vinyl curtain strung between lamps with chairs in front, I cast her as the lead, and spent most of the show watching. I never guessed that she knew I belonged behind the stage or in front, not on.

She took the scripts I wrote and threw herself at them. I saw her as an icon on a nineteen-forties poster: perfect in blocks of color with bold words surrounding her. There was war everywhere but L'Royale Theater.

Five

In one hand, Greta held the phone. She continued the story, pretending she was telling about someone else. That was the best way to lie.

"No. Haven't met the neighbors," Greta answered.

In the other hand, there was the picture of her grandmother in front of L'Royale.

Another question. Greta answered. "Lot's of places -- dinner, grocery store."

There was an old cashier at the grocery. She wondered if he'd been here long enough, had ever gone to L'Royale to see a show, a petite woman on stage called Miss Emerson.

The man at the theater had just called her Emerson. His voice failed when he said the word. He blamed smoking, not the word.

Greta listened to her mother's voice again. "I forgot the camera. Sorry, mom."

She looked like the woman in the phone, not the one in the snapshot, Greta thought. Not the one she'd always wanted to be. She lacked the stage presence, the charisma. This was why she'd always cast her grandmother as the lead.

The man never asked if she was dead, how she'd died, where she'd gone when she left his life, who the father of her kids was, why Greta had come.

Words babbled in the telephone. Greta thought of the man's gravelly voice. "Emerson," he'd said, "had a voice for telling stories. I recognized your voice before the name. Before the picture. Just like she were calling me. You put words together like she did. I wish I could keep those somehow."

"I wish you would write," her mother said.

She'd started, Greta thought, but her words had failed her. Maybe if they weren't her words, she could do it. Maybe if they were her grandmother's.

Four

The shower in Greta's apartment had no curtain. Above, curtain rings dangled from the rod like white bangles on a skinny white arm.

Once, from behind shower curtains, her grandmother and she had performed plays, complex creations of a small child, written for the two-part harmony of old body and young.

Greta undressed, stepped into the tub, uncovered, exposed, and cleaned herself.

Outside, a man stood on top of the failing bank and threw words that ricocheted off the apartment building and assaulted Greta's ears. Bearded, arms outstretched to Greta's stiff shoulder, he shouted about love.

She moved past, turned the corner at a bookstore, and arrived at the coffee shop. With coffee and a warm bagel, Greta sat at a round, two-person table next to a wall covered with cork and pinned with layers of printed, typed, handwritten posters.

A man entered, dark, bearded, with eyes that roamed and captured what they landed on. He mumbled something to the woman at the counter, then huddled in a corner, stared at Greta. She moved her chair so her back was to him. She didn't want anyone watching. This was confusion, not performance. She wasn't familiar with the plot, she'd forgotten to memorize her lines.

On paper wavy with humidity, Greta wrote:

The old man asked why I came.

She paused, drew curling spirals, cycles, on the edge of the page.

I gave her tangibles: biscuits, hats, poems. She gave me intangibles, and when she died, her memory could be anchored to nothing concrete. No place, no thing. That's why I came here. To find an anchor for my grandmother, for her past, my future.

Three

The whine of a siren woke Greta and chased the dreams from her mind. She pulled at them fiercely, knew they were important, but they fled and she was left with memories instead: slapping raw fingers against frozen glass until the old man answered; he knew her grandmother, following the red-orange burning cigarette to a dressing room painted green, a yellow fluorescent that soured Greta's skin and stomach.

Then words, hours of words, a book of words, and only the tiniest sliver of a life.

She'd come home through the cold and dark to a colder, darker apartment. Distracted, she'd watched roaches scurry across the blue rectangle of light from the window and crawled into am unfamiliar corner to hide.

Now Greta pulled herself from the corner, encased in the cocoon of her comforter, but uncomforted.

For a moment, she stood before the one window, then she raised it and leaned out. When she opened her eyes against the wind, Greta found a woman staring up at her from the alley below. She held papers in her hands and words in her eyes, Greta thought. For a moment, the woman held Greta's startled gaze, the she moved down the alley.

Greta withdrew inside. She had some sorting to do: of belongings, purposes, emotions, memories.

Two

Only one corner of the snapshot was creased. The rest of it was crisp: glossy sepia in a white border with scalloped edges. The building before Greta, L'Royale, was neither crisp nor glossy.

At the door, Greta tapped hesitantly, then again, more urgently. When no one came, she slapped her palm against the glass in desperation, rattled the dark pane. Still no one. Greta gripped the snapshot in both hands. Her breath accelerated, lurching in, rushing out of her lungs. The skin under her fingernails turned white with pressure against the snapshot. Then she slipped the photo into her breast pocket and cupped both hands to the dark pane. Peering between them, she found yellowed eyes staring back.

Greta started, inhaled a clipped gasp. The face that surrounded the eyes was palely yellow too: old man cheeks and forehead, bulbous nose. Where lips were once, sunken skin gathered itself in converging wrinkles, pointed to the lack of teeth.

Below the face, a bolt unlatched, knob turned. The face moved backward so the door could swing in. A wheelchair revealed itself beneath the face. Smoke unfurled out of the mouth and through the open door; Greta exhaled.

Silence.

Old eyes waited for an explanation. A hand carried a cigarette butt, glowing in the dark, to the sunken mouth; lungs filled with nicotine air. Greta gave her name in pieces. "I'm Greta. Emerson." The man waited. "Moore." She added the third as a side note: quieter, less important. From inside her jacket she withdrew the snapshot. The man took it in the hand without the cigarette. He held it close to dull eyes.

For a moment the man froze. Then, in one motion, he thrust the snapshot toward her and shoved his chair away. His hand jerked toward the door to send it hurling back to it's frame, then stopped, extended in mid-air.

"Why do you have that?"

"The woman in the picture is my grandmother." Greta could summon no greater explanation than that.

"Grandmother." The man extinguished the cigarette on the arm of his wheelchair. He seemed to cave into himself, sink further and further. In the dim room behind the man, Greta saw a woman emerge from the shadows: short, aproned, Asian features.

Greta waited for a few minutes, then began to turn away. The man lifted his head at her movement. "Wait," he said.

"The man next to your grandmother was me."

One

The bus decelerated, wheezing, before a imposing building and pair of waiting figures. Greta watched the pair carefully as the bus approached. The man, in stained diner smock and navy windbreaker, held a double-folded paper in two fists. His eyes, in a head that drooped forward a little, were trained an inch or two above the top of the paper.

Two or three feet down the bench sat a woman, perhaps younger than the man, but not young. Every part of her (knees, feet, hands, elbows), thought Greta, was carefully contained -- except her eyes. Her eyes wandered over the street, into the sky, onto the man.

Inside the building, Greta gave her name to the manager, a woman in an ill-fitted skirt suit who sat behind an empty desk and flipped through a celebrity gossip magazine.

"Can I leave my bags here for a little while?" Greta asked.

The woman pointed to a corner of the grubby office. "I'll be back soon. I'm just going to L'Royale Theater."

The woman raised her eyebrows and scanned Greta's jeans and jacket. "L'Royale, eh?"

Greta nodded, puzzled. "Actually, could you tell me how to get to the theater?"

The woman pointed to the street beyond the grubby window. "You came in off Rouse. That street there on the side is Polaski. Walk a block down that and you'll hit Main. You can only turn left. The, uh, theater will be on your right. "