Sarah Banse
Mario, the landlord, a short thick man with a heavy Italian accent, rehabbed the apartment before we moved in. The wood floors gleamed with varnish. We felt blessed to find an apartment on the 304 bus line, that would expedite my new husband’s commute. The second bedroom provided a grown-up luxury, as if we would have guests someday soon. We didn’t know Mario had bought the building from Olivia, the old woman who lived downstairs. Later, we found out Mario had met her at church, and when he heard she had no family, in an act of Christian charity, he bought her house and promised to take care of her. He planted tomatoes in her yard and her on the first floor then renovated the second.
We were the first tenants.
Most days and some nights I pretended I didn’t hear her incessant moaning. “Mario,” she wailed drawing out the “o.” Sometimes my husband acted like he didn’t hear it. Sometimes I didn’t ask if he did. Home alone, I’d make sure that the stereo was on to drown out her voice. I tried to convince myself she wasn’t in trouble.
One day, no amount of music would hide Olivia’s wailing. I knew she wouldn’t (perhaps couldn’t) come to the door, so I sprinted the three blocks to Mario’s neat house with his shaved shrubbery and the Madonna on a half shell in his yard. His wife answered the door and when I said that Olivia needed help, she told me, she just does that, you know, yells Mario’s name. The next time Mario brought me tomatoes from his own yard, I told him that it sounded like she needed help. “The nurse takes good care of her,” he said. But I never heard the nurses.
My new husband said to leave it be; it wasn’t my business. I was learning that his business was to be my business. What’s for dinner? That’s what I should be thinking. If it didn’t bother him, why should it bother me? He said, “We have a nice apartment, and I have a good job. We are good.”
Four months later, when even Mario couldn’t deny that the old woman was suffering, he renovated the apartment around her. She lay in bed while he and his crew painted the walls and sanded the floor underneath her. He hired two young Irish girls to mind her for free rent. I wasn’t sure if the renovation was for the girls’ sake or the rent that would be garnered on Olivia’s death. When the girls moved in, they introduced themselves and brought me in to look at the bedridden matron. She wore a yellowed nightgown, once white; a long gray braid hung down her back. She had no idea who the girls were. I wondered how they could live like that, with the old lady lying in her hospital bed in the living room, but I supposed the free rent provided a certain security.
Just like marriage.
Sarah Martin Banse’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Harvard Review. Essays and reviews have been published in Ploughshares, The Boston Globe, and The Sun, among others. She is the mother of four and is really going to finish that book now that her nest is empty. https://sarahmartinbanse.com/. Instagram: @sarahbanse.
