Sometimes in the afternoons when the mothers are out shopping and the
youngsters have not yet returned from school our block looks so deserted
and wind-swept and dull. The houses are so much alike. They all sit
there in a row with their poker faces like close-mouthed Yankees
refusing to divulge any secrets. But from the bow-windows where I
sit and type, in spite of their silence the house fronts have become
individualized into so many human stories.
I never stop to look out but somehow the stories get in through the
window. For instance, I would not be so rude as to stare at the family
washing which once a week is hung on the flat top of a neighbor’s
garage, but those clothes up there have a way of flapping in the wind so
conspicuously that I cannot help see. There is the man of the house and
his, shall I say garments, kick themselves about like some staid old
deacon having his fling. Then there is the middle-sized bear whose
bloomers, billowed by the wind, become a ridiculous fat woman cut off at
the waist. And the little bear’s starched clothes crack and snap while
the revolving tree-horse whirls about like some mad dervish. I often
wonder if the family know of the wild actions that take place on the
roof.
It is a very respectable block inhabited mostly by grown-ups except
one lively house where a dog lives with some boys and their incidental
parents. The door of that house continuously bangs, and other boys with
other dogs are always hanging around whistling under the windows.
Most of the windows are only used to admit light except one that is
used to look out of and is inhabited by an old lady who sits all day and
knits for her grandchildren. It must not be so bad, I think, to look
out of the window upon life instead of always rushing off to catch a car
that takes one into the thick of it.
Out of the window of my kitchenette I can look into the window of a girl
in the next house. Every morning I get my breakfast by her dressing. My
coffee I start as she begins to unwind her curls from their steel cages.
I have a suspicion that she also dresses by me. If she sniffs my coffee
first, I imagine she hurries with her curls. She is usually fixing her
eye-brows to my toast and by the time I sit down she is doing her lips.
After that she goes off for the long day and so do most of the people in
the block. Then at night they all return, drawn by some tie of love or
habit or despair, each to his right place in the long row of houses,
which have been sitting there all day with their poker faces, waiting.