She waited.
A loud knock broke her concentration, a thing that is so hard to keep. She looked at her front door almost as if the door had made the sound itself. She rose cautiously and tiptoed quickly around all of the creaks in her floor. She snatched an umbrella that had been sitting near the coat rack as if an attacker would be threatened by it. She peered through the peep hole and almost let out a small gasp. A man, yes a man, stood at her doorstep. He didn’t look tough or mean or even that he had a gun. He had ratty brown hair that seemed to just sit plainly on his round head. His eyes were large and gentle looking. They were blue. They were stormy sea blue. The best kind of blue. His eyebrows, however, were dark and scary and made him seem just as such. His lips were hidden beneath an off putting beard. She imagined they were like his eyes, gentle. He wore a sweater that had stripes. Granted, they were pinstripes, but stripes just the same. She could tell he biked because his helmet was in one hand. The other held a mediocre looking pie and one of those things you put on wood so a hot dish doesn’t burn the tables or in this case his hand. Feeling no immediate threat from this harmless creature, she opened her door. He smiled. His lips were gentle.
She waited.
A husky voice said “Hello.” He sounded like an evergreen. Not like a Christmas evergreen, an evergreen you’d see in a forest or when you hike up a foreign mountain.
She said, trying to sound forceful but sounding man-ish instead, replied “Hi.”
He looked at her and walked right into her kitchen. Does he not have any manners? She certainly didn’t think so.
“Excuse me but – “, she began.
“For you”, he interjected. Expecting the seemingly average pie, he handed her that cozy thing. She took it and realized it was a book. How silly of her. Scrawled on the top was The Hours by Michael Cunningham.
“What is this?”
“You’ll like it. Trust me.” He turned away from her and searched through her cabinets until he found plates she only used when she was alone and microwaving pre made dinners when she was binge-watching House of Cards.
“No”, she said, “Not those ones. Here. Let me.” She went to the cupboard below him and grabbed two gorgeously embroidered dessert plates. They were handmade in France. She purchased them on her second anniversary to Europe. She had her first croissant and returned every year since then.
“I think I can manage with paper for tonight” he said as he grabbed her precious glassware and put them neatly back on the stack. “But just this once.”
He sliced the pie into eight unequal, and frankly huge pieces. He placed the biggest on his own plate, of course, and the smallest on hers. She wondered what if she had wanted the big piece.
She waited.
She would stare at the tiles perfectly aligned at her feet. They squeezed up against each other like personal space was nonexistent to them. They just shone through their closeness with obnoxious sneers and stared right back at her. Mocking her with quiet insults. No matter how hard she tried, and she did try quite hard, she could not seem to pull her eyes away from the pristine grid. After ten minutes, she knew how to make ten different pies, and Julia Fay, her neighbor from downstairs, was having an affair with the next door widower. Her stove would then make that sound that old, rusty stoves make when they’re old and rusty.
She waited.
Silence can be the most terrible sound in the world. You can have a million and one conversations happening around you and still have that sensation of being in a plastic bubble. A recipe that would usually make your husband very happy is now a muffled sound. A new stove is now a mere whisper. She heard this lack of noise. She heard it when she went to the Saturday morning farmers market and picked up her red onions and chives. She heard it when she went to her midnight diner where she’d order a BLT on wheat and a side of curly fries and read Mrs. Dalloway until her eyes bled. But she heard it the most when she sat in her apartment after her scheduled dinner parties every other Sunday.
She waited.
They sat at her table, eating the mundane pie and not speaking. She didn’t know his name, but didn’t really need to. She decided he would be Ezra. Yes, Ezra. He seemed like an Ezra and that’s what she’d call him. He needed a name and now he had one. Ezra looked up at her every once in a while and smiled. His beard moved cartoonishly with every small movement. They sat there together, Ezra and Elisa, enjoying the magnificent silence. The old, rusty stove made that sound that old rusty stoves made and he told her how he had made his extraordinary pie using canned raspberries and boxed pie crust and that his neighbor had never had an affair with a widower.
They waited.