Metamorphosis Read Free Page A

put his hand on the knob and opened the door wide, stepping out into the bright sunlight, just in time to see a zeppelin, its tiny propellers whirling, disappear beyond the peak of a nearby, orchard-covered hill.

P-38
     
    [with Brittany Cox]
    T HE SUN CAST dusty afternoon shadows on the sidewalk, and Anderson occasionally glanced back to see if his own shadow was still there. It was looking faded today despite the cloudless sky, as if it had been washed and hung out to dry so many times through the years that it had grown as thin as old muslin curtains. The air was cool, the leaves already falling from the trees and the Bermuda grass getting thin and scraggly in front of the French Street houses. It came into his mind that something had gone out of them in the declining years, and it was certainly true that back in the fifties when he had grown up here things had been different—cleaner, brighter, the shadows sharp and clear on the sidewalk. The air had simply had more oxygen in it back then. A person could really breathe. He tried to recall the names of the persons who had lived in these houses during his childhood, but the memories were as faded as everything else, and anyway nobody was left except him.
    He stopped near the corner at Tenth Street and looked at an old bungalow that badly needed paint. He had played in the house as a child, but he couldn’t remember much about it except that the kitchen had been white, hung with wallpaper decorated with cherries. That had appealed to him. He remembered that much. The stone foundation of the front porch had sunk into the ground at one end, and the eaves sagged overhead, following it down. Collapse wasn’t imminent, but it was inevitable. Abruptly he remembered the porch swing that had hung at the edge of that porch and the wisteria vines that had wrapped through its chains, putting out clusters of purple flowers for a couple of weeks in spring. He wondered whether any departed memories would return to him if he could step inside and have a look around.
    He realized abruptly that someone inside was peering out at him through the window, and he waved and moved on, not knowing whether they had waved back. At the corner a street vendor pushed a cart past him on the sidewalk, selling fruit and plastic-wrapped cotton candy and homemade ice cream bars, heading into the neighborhood to make his rounds. Anderson walked up Tenth Street toward Main, passing bodegas and taco joints and a Chinese takeout that also rented videos. There were plastic representations of egg rolls and noodle dishes in the window, dusty and flyspecked. Too many stores were simply empty. Where the book store had been there was a wedding shop, the signs in the window in Spanish, and beyond that, in what had been the old drugstore and soda fountain there was a bar now, dark inside the open door, mariachi music on the jukebox and the smell of spilled beer and some kind of pine-scented floor cleaner.
    Wind scoured the sidewalk, kicking up leaves, and he found that he was standing outside the hobby shop, which had clearly been his destination, since that’s where he had ended up, here at the edge of the neighborhood, with nothing ahead of him but the traffic on Main Street. He pushed in through the door, in among tables of what was mostly unidentifiable electronic junk. An old, hand-painted sign over the counter read “Anderson’s Model Airplanes and Hobby Shop,” and under his breath, he muttered, “Hey,
I’m
Anderson,” which was true, although it wasn’t all that funny, largely because it was no coincidence. In the distant past the hobby shop had belonged to Anderson’s father.
    The old man behind the counter, a party by the name of Miles Buxton, nodded at him, but didn’t show any enthusiasm. A couple of months back, when Anderson had returned to the neighborhood after the death of his father, he had been surprised to see that the hobby shop was still up and running, the lone remnant of bygone days.