First Draft 803

Yikes. The basement is even more revolting than I expected, but hey, I’m getting paid, so I shouldn’t mind a little nastiness. Singing along with my ipod as I work, I stack boxes and shovel up old magazines. Mom told me to be done by dinner. She and Aunt Marieta went out together to talk about Nana. It’s odd, since they’ve met up weekly for years and have spent every moment trying not to talk about Nana. Now that she’s dead, I guess they figure they’re pretty safe: neither one can suggest going to talk to her. The whole thing makes me sad. I never really knew Nana. She had a falling out of massive proportions with my mom and my aunt when I was about two. No one ever mentions it, and for years I never even thought about Nana. Now that she’s passed and I’m in her basement, though, things are different. I see old photographs of my mom, and pictures of Pop and his fishing boat, and vintage nineteen thirties dresses that half my friends would kill for. It all makes me wonder what kind of woman she was. Finally, I see a black and white photo of Nana herself, wearing a string of pearls. And then I see a door.

Unexpectedly glaring out at me from behind a pile of old hunting jackets, a red wood door stands brazenly, old, rigid, and intricately beautiful. The door is a piece of the past, and was, even when Nana moved here in 1931. Its dusty details speak of centuries gone by. So what’s it doing in a mid nineteen thirties, stoic, outlandishly dated little farmhouse?

My curiosity officially peaked, I grip the handle. As soon as I do, the sights and sounds of Nana’s basement fade. The music from my ipod spirals lower and lower. Intuitively, my wrist spins and I pull. The room beyond the door is dejectedly black, empty and also so completely silent. I feel as if I had been deaf a thousand years after only a few seconds within it. I fumble for a light, but find not even a wall. Somehow no light from the rest of the basement penetrates into this room, though the door is still wide open. I step in, feeling that I should speak, but somehow knowing I cannot and should not. The quiet seeps into my soul. I walk deeper into the darkness, and gradually I feel warmth, like I am walking closer to an oven or a heater. Then----a light flickers like the beginning of an old movie projected onto a wall. In front of me a small black and white room drifts into existence. In it, a girl near my age stares out the window, smiling, her lips moving in a silent song. The film speeds along and I see her looking older, wearing a full red skirt that seems charcoal in this black and white world. For an instant, I glance down at my palms and see that they too are white, stained with the old-timey appearance of Mayberry, North Carolina. Deep down inside I know I should be freaking out, but I don’t. It is like in a dream when you know that you’re dreaming, and yet ignore the fact and continue acting as if everything is real. I feel the world of olden days creep into my skin. The girl in the room in front of me is laughing now, talking with a woman. Their lipstick smiles are sweet. But in a moment, the woman is gone and the girl cries alone. She grows older and older, and smiles again, but her freckled grin is tinged with sadness. By and by I see her rocking a baby, then holding the little girl’s hand as she plays with her in the old room. Another baby girl slips into the picture. The young woman grows thinner, her hair gets shorter, and the little girls spring taller. The room stays the same. I begin to recognize the woman as my Nana. The second little girl is my mother. Then the time comes when the woman rocks another little baby in her arms, while her daughters speak angrily from the corner. My mom takes the baby back in her arms, that baby who is me, and leaves, forever it would seem. At last the woman sits across from me on the creaky ivory framed bed, an old woman with white hair and tired blue eyes. Somehow I know they are blue. Like mine. She looks out the window and smiles.

Just like that, the room flickers into darkness again, and I’m left standing in the echoes of the past. The door calls me, and I walk quietly out into the light of my Nana’s basement. Behind, I hear as the door closes firmly. But when I turn, there is only the flowered paper of the basement wall and a pile of old hunting jackets.