An Apartment

Sherry decides that she might have a Duane Reade Club Card, after all.  She thinks it is probably hiding in the bottom of the junk drawer, like all worthless things in their house.  She begins searching amid the rolls of every kind of tape, the browning 33-cent stamps, the fat pink erasers, never used.  She does not find the Club Card, but she does find an envelope from her first New York City roommate, Clare, an aspiring model, mailed to her years after Clare had moved back to Minneapolis.  Inside are four photographs.  The first is of Scott, the redhead from Vermont, Sherry can’t remember his last name.  Norwood or Norman, maybe.  He’d put on Clare’s prop wedding dress from a photo shoot and he could play the oboe, so why not, everyone had plenty of tequila and this was always where the nights went.  The second photo is of Scott with a mandolin, which he could kind of play, his fingers nimble and thin, and he played Woody Guthrie tunes, wearing what he said was his brother’s hand-me-down Joy Division shirt.  The third photograph is of Sherry, herself, laughing her shirt undone, her breast white and shining, reflecting the flash of the disposable camera.  In this picture you can see the tequila, the apartment looks full of adventure.  The rooms were more than Sherry can remember.  The last photograph, the one that has been chewed and licked by Clare’s now-passed-away cat, is of Jason and Sherry in bed together, arms across each other in some delicate way.  The wedding dress is on the floor by the piano, which, being an upright, Sherry and Clare pushed down Manhattan Avenue in the rain one day, covered in a tarp, boxes of their belongings stacked on top.  Each bump in the sidewalk was a barrage of notes, not a clump of them, but all of them, nothing like music, just noise.

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