It’s late autumn now, and the gathering darkness feels expectant, like the voyeuristic excitement of sitting in the theater when the lights go dim. On my walks, there’s one special window I always look through; I love its garish Van Gogh-yellow light, the high-backed wooden chairs, the opulent vase with its spray of winter flowers. The table’s set, as if waiting for me: a plain linen runner shows off the rippling rosewood underneath, the way a pulled-back sleeve enhances the flesh of a wrist.
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When I think of looking through windows, I’m reminded of those Sunday matinees I went to with my mother. Between the curtains, the raw gape of the stage. A room with a missing fourth wall, like a body with the skin pulled back so surgeons can peer inside. The heat and glare of the Klieg lights, with their tyranny of focus. And the darkness—like the darkness when I listened to the nighttime enigma of my parents battling in another room. How like that child I still am, whenever I watch the players, a bit monstrous in their costumes and slap. The truth is, I want it for myself: that moment of being seen. Everyone’s eyes trained on me as I recite my well-turned lines. Exes chalked on the boards to show me where to stand.
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I know how it feels, those first moments when we walk into a room full of strangers, or even friends, before the mingling—whatever that is—has taken place. The space inside the room, between us and the others, is like the space of the stage before the play has begun, been scripted even. Its size indefinite, mathematically incalculable. We are like actors who are not yet cast, and thinking this, our bodies feel unformed, like elements still in their liquid state.
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I watched a friend, once, enter a room late. It was a gathering of maybe twelve people, already heavy into conversation. And before he entered the door—he was a few feet in back of them—I saw him do something odd: he stomped one foot down hard on the threshold. After this sly interruption, this small violation of our space, everyone was suddenly silent and turning his way.
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I always see it first, in the famous optical illusion test, that goblet of space between the two opposing silhouetted profiles, its configuration both voluptuous and exact. It demonstrates how objects are shaped, not by their boundaries alone, but by the intervening emptiness.
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One day I knocked on someone’s door, and it opened just a shoulder’s width; behind it, a disheveled stranger who was once my best friend. In the musty half-light framing him, I saw a sofa, and on it the lumpy ghost of an afghan where his body had lain. Door light an open book.
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We use the word transparency now, meaning easily viewed or seen, therefore honest. A bared soul in bright light. But I remember when it meant easily seen through. As if we’ve forgotten the medium, the through, the glass, which can’t help but take sides.
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I remember the bathroom window in my childhood home. The Woolworth tieback curtains of buttery yellow. A summer evening. I was about fourteen, and had just taken a shower. The window was cranked open part way to let out the steam. As I cleared the glass with the flat of my palm, there on the other side were my neighbors, mother and son, staring in at me. Did I jump, look shocked, cross my breasts with my arms, as women do in the movies? I can’t remember—though I’ve remembered my whole life their laughing faces leering through the glass. Not shame or nakedness, but the way my mind flew out of my body like a bird—flew into their gaping mouths.
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I live in a house with no curtains now. I want my windows brave. When they darken, I can see myself looking back; I can see strangers walking by, watch them as they look in.
Jeanne Wagner is the winner of the 2016 Sow’s Ear Chapbook Prize and the 2015 Arts & Letters Award, judged by Stephen Dunn. Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry, Alaska Quarterly, Shenandoah, and Southern Review. She is the author of five collections. Her latest book, In the Body of Our Lives, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2011.