Dumpster Ire

Marjee Chmiel

Word Count 1600

During the 14th spring in my neighborhood, I noticed the trees had finally gotten tall. Their leaves —unfurled and broadened — provided canopy over a narrow intersection and my view finally matched the artist rendering I fell in love with years ago — the watercolor vision of urban infill living that I hastened to secure with our life’s savings.

But the artist didn’t render the southeast corner of my view, where the street dead-ended into a large apartment building. Next to that apartment, there was a fence, and within that fence, dumpsters overflowing with post-mortem IKEA furniture and unsutured bags of trash. The gate had been broken, the dumpster view, wide open.

That’s what it is like to live in such a seasonal city, I tell myself, so many residents in the DC area turn over in spring. Mess gets left out of artist renderings. There’s no need for colored-pencil mirror shards scattered into iridescence.

The daffodils fade into green and school children spend their days shrieking in the pool. The warm evenings bring out People doing Stuff and I watch them from my terrace, lost in their activities, like a kid flipping through those Richard Scarry Busy, Busy Town! books. The ones where all the cats slay in suit vests and pocket squares on the way to office jobs. Rabbits drive carrot-shaped trucks. Police smile through sweet snouts, waving at everyone with their split hooves. Their uniforms punctured at the tush to accommodate exposed, curly tails.

In my real-life Busy, Busy Town!, I watch rescued good-boys lead the way with leashes, cyclists deliver pho, and this one old man who ends his evening shuffling his wife northward in her wheelchair.

I wonder if I’ll still be living here when I’m old.

I wonder if that stupid gate will still be broken. I picture my husband wheeling me, my walnut-textured face, gaze fixed on that fucking dumpster.

In Richard Scarry books, there were handymen — hedgehogs, and sanitation workers — little bears, probably not cubs because of child labor laws. In Richard Scarry books, someone would have fixed that goddamn gate, taken care of that trash, and I would not have to look at the rickety baby swings. I would not have to guess at the stains on the mattresses that no one even attempted to hoist into the overflowing dumpster. Busy Busy Town! convinced me adulthood would be so chill and fun, but I am ruined now, chasing an impossible standard of walkability and civic life.

The sky begins to darken when the old man shuffles southward. His wife holds a bundle of wildflowers. She is staring ahead, a serene smile, enchanted.

I freaked out when we first signed those binders of paperwork and saw the property tax difference between our old home in Virginia and the new one in Maryland. Some ancient programming from my Catholic and Republican parents coursed through me. This feels like I’m doing something really bad, I confessed to my husband, like I did a sin.

Oh, yeah, that’s what’s great about it, he reassured. We won’t live near the kind of assholes who bitch about paying taxes.

We’ve been together for years at this point but I’m always surprised at how he does this. How he blurts out the most positive thing, the most cheerful thing, the sunny-sided thing.

The glass thing, half-full. Sometimes these words are so strange to me, but I don’t even care if he’s right. Something new happens inside of me every time he does. It’s a kind of sorcery.

Our Pomeranian sneezes too much so we change our bedding. We install air quality monitors and air filters. We place charcoal bags throughout the house. My husband worries he is emitting volatile organic compounds. I don’t think that is the case. But she keeps sneezing, so we try everything and more. We do a deep clean of a storage room.

My husband says, It looks like a haunted house back there!  " about one recessed corner and I say “yup,” morally conflicted as he cleans it out. I see the spider-spun curtains all the time but I refuse to disturb the silky edifice. It was their home as much as it was mine. They paid no mortgage. They paid in time and calories. I wasn’t going to bind them to the rules of capitalism. That was something we made up. Their home was real.

#

Well into summer, the dumpster continues to overflow out in the open. I listen to political podcasts. I like hearing someone else say, Everything is stupid and Very Important People keep acting like everything is fine.

I walk my dogs and take photos of the dumpster. I am thorough. I take pictures all of the days of the week, all of the times of the day, like Monet with his haystacks, if Monet seethed every time he looked at the haystacks. If Monet wondered whether the visibility and accessibility of the haystacks was even legal.

It occurs to me that all of this probably isn’t even legal and pose this question to Google but Google responds in Gemini and Gemini responds with a useful and creepy degree of detail: links to localized, municipal statutes, council member contact information, and templates for a friendly-yet-professional sounding request to the building management.

I’m freaked out by the surveillance, annoyed by evidence of the chatbot’s convenience, and newly powerful as a master of The Law. Now I am fluent in the language of code numbers and force majeure or whatever lawyers say. I’m not just some passive consumer of political gossip, I tell myself. I am an actor, an Agent of Change. With this resolution in reach, I will fell Big Flock. I will vanquish data centers. In my kitchen, I download the link to some municipal app Gemini surfaced. I navigate a dropdown menu and submit a ticket. The next day, I receive a confirmation of receipt. “This will be fixed in 48 hours,” the message assures.

My storied political career begins thusly. I am in my Erin Brockovich era.

#

Jupiter and Venus met in the sky and later parted once again but the gate remained broken, the dumpster remained exposed. Cicadas scream louder and louder over the next seven hundred and twenty hours. I ride my bicycle and stop to chat with a neighbor outside the playlot. She watches her kid scream like a pirate through the sound tube that abuts the slide and tells me she’s been trying to get someone to fix the damn gate for years now.

My eye twitches. I will go full Yellow Wallpaper, I think. I will rattle about the garbage to the end of my days, and rearrange the buffalo wing bones and discarded Teemu halter tops. The spooky spirit of DC’s streetcar suburbs.

I call the apartment building’s management company during business hours. The call goes to a recording that asks me to leave a message because you have reached us outside of business hours.

I try all the hours.

I try different voices. I’ve seen children playing out there, I tell the recording, climbing over the recycling, poking each other in the eyes with busted broom handles. I may have heard something about a nasty infection, I say because I just wanted to be neighborly. I’m just looking out for my local real estate conglomerate.

When I speak, I am calm, I am hinged.

I scroll through Amazon as I talk, and evaluate the rubber rat selection. I put the most realistic ones on a wish list along with a bunch of books I really wanted in 2016.  I research sanitation codes and plan a rubber rat photoshoot. I will pose them at night behind shattered flat screen TVs. I will operate outside of surveillance, dressed all in black like a cat burglar.  All for the greater good, I think. All so I can stop getting so aggravated when I look outside, when I stand on my terrace to admire how much more those trees have grown.

#

Over dinner, I tell my husband that everything is rigged and the worst of us have won. Nothing is working the way it is supposed to. He says something that I believe is meant to cheer me up but it's too hard to believe. When he talks, it sounds like interest rates and escrow.

The next morning the political streams are so angry they’re laughing. Our food is poison! Salad is giving people the shits! We’ll all be forced to eat cubes made of raccoon meat and other country’s garbage.

I believe they are right.

#

When the year drew her first breath of fall, I made a new rule about walking after dinner so we don’t get diabetes. Goddamnit, I say, staring at the broken gate. The overflowing dumpster. My husband offers his glass-half full, gently, Maybe tonight, don’t look at it.

The words are so strange to me but I’ve practiced understanding. Some spells work slowly, or by repetition. It doesn’t matter if he’s right. He takes me by the hand, past the playlot overrun with pretend pirates, past the bureaucrats dressed in shorts, flinging disks to labradors, past the free little library bursting with military histories, diaspora memoirs, and worn Goosebumps.

We walked past a family processing their freshly baked pizza like some delicious, cheesy infanta. The aroma escapes cardboard confines to linger on the path.

Now, the planet has reclined on its axis. The dumpster is obscured by night and dissolved into long shadows, the ones cast by promised trees. It disappears, as if by sorcery. I stare ahead, serene and enchanted.

Marjee is a writer, researcher, and documentarian in the Washington DC area. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Masters Review, BULL, Maudlin House, and others. She is a social media co-director for Split Lip Magazine and the Presidential Fellow in fiction at George Mason University. You can read more at marjee.org or follow her on Instagram @marjeec