the open window

The office building where I work sits nestled shoulder to shoulder with the adjacent buildings in one of Erie's older neighborhoods. Here the structures consist mostly of grand old city homes built of brick in three stories with turrets, or office buildings designed to look like grand old city homes built of brick in three stories with turrets. (There's one across the street which I absolutely love. I've always wanted a round room in my house, as a study.)

In spots the neighborhood runs on the shabby side, the decayed glory of evaporated Gilded Age wealth, the spots where the houses have undergone interior partitioning to form apartments for the rougher side of Erie society. The house next door to the office is one of these. I don't find it particularly threatening on that account; after all, I lived in exactly that kind of house in a more dangerous neighborhood in South Bend; but two elements of this edifice render it rather creepy. First is the heap of lidless antique dolls staring balefully out of a first-floor window. Second is the second-story window which is always open.

The dolls would creep me out no matter where they were located. Even if they sat in polished splendor on carefully wrought little rocking chairs at miniature tables rigged with tiny china cups and pots of tea I would run screaming from the room. For only one summer of my life in my childhood I played with a doll, and that was mostly because I enjoyed designing accessories and cutting them out of heavy paper. Before and after that summer, I had nothing to do with dolls. I preferred stuffed animals, plastic horses, plastic dinosaurs and Legos. Even the tiny dolls that accompanied my dollhouse were a family of humanoid raccoons.

I find antique dolls, with their disgusting matted hair and yellowed lace collars and faded dresses and unblinking eyes, unbearably gross. They sit there like corpses, or more like the waiting undead. Unbenownst to the humans striding around in perfect oblivion, these ancient playthings, who remember the touch of hands that now grip the arms of wheelchairs in nursing home mummification or rest in the slowed decomposition of satin-lined caskets, watch in fixed calculation for their moment -- the moment they will all rise up from their moldered cushions and windowsills and cabinets and rocking chairs and kill us all.

Even less than the dolls do I understand the people that comfortably keep them around. I'd rather have a collection of shrunken heads than antique dolls. The first floor window of the house next door contains at least a dozen of these silent unchildlike minions of darkness flung carelessly into their deathly repose staring up toward the office's second floor windows. Fortunately I can't see them from the reception area. But I always know they're there, with their fake or real human hair wiring out from their skulls in wisps, watching.

But even that hasn't disturbed my mind's quiet like the open window. Cindy told me it's been open since at least last summer. Through every kind of weather, every season, the window yawns, screenless, inviting the elements to eat away at humanity's attempts at stability and permanence. The window frame has grown warped and streaked with rot, the paint has worn away, and it gives the house a look of dispossession. Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.

Worst of all are the sheer white curtains that hang there, blowing sometimes into, sometimes out of, the attic room. Seeing these scraps of fabric, which look older than the dolls, moving restlessly with the winter wind sends a sort of chill up the spine. I think it's the chill of betrayal. If the house sat empty and the entire dwelling sagged under the creeping weight of time, it would carry an overall air of old sorrows and desolation; but since only this window bears evidence of dilapidation, it's somehow insidious, a canker in the hedge, the traitor slipping off while everyone finishes dinner to lead in the troops of the oppressor. A window should make a dwelling more habitable -- let in light, let air in when necessary, keep air out when necessary. This one is the sheepdog ignoring the wolves closing in on the sheep.

My coworkers and I periodically assemble to look at that window and wonder who on earth would leave it open all winter. "Doesn't that make the house really cold? Who can afford to heat it? Isn't that wall almost destroyed inside?" As cold as this winter has been, you'd think whoever foots the heating bill would have noticed that there's a leak somewhere. But then, you'd also think that they would notice the deflated wading pool swampy with algae and the rusting remains of a swingset from approximately 1983 lurking in the backyard.

And yet, today Cindy noticed the miraculous: Now that winter is almost over, and after well over a year, the window is closed. The curtains still hang limp and scary on the other side of the streaked glass and rotten wood, and the room still breathes with hauntedness, but someone stopped the gap in the dam. The "brown horror" of humanity giving itself over in utter disinterest to the ravages of nature has dissipated.

Now if only someone would throw out those dolls.