Joy
by Eva Konstantopoulos
There is a picture of her, maybe twenty or twenty-two, on the wall in the corner. She stands in a blue leotard with a huge crooked smile on her face, a man with a tall hat beside her. They're both beaming in front of this shiny trampoline with the skin stretched back. Before I know it, I've asked her what this is all about. She puts down her pencil in the middle of writing our receipts and wets her cracked lips. Her voice is shaky. I just loved to bounce, she says. Bouncing was my love. We were the type of people to do everything together. Absolutely everything. He was the type of man who could think of something funny to say in any situation. He died of a heart attack three years ago...
Joy is sorry I asked that question. She is very still beside me, a smile plastered on her face. She wants to leave, she just wants us to have a place to live for the next year, but the trampoline lady looks so peaceful when talking about bouncing. It makes me wonder why she ever decide to be a realtor at all. She met her husband, fifteen years her senior, when she was young and immature, and later on, when she was more mature, she used to ask him, she used to say, what did he ever see in her?
And he would smile. I saw a diamond in the rough.
She tells us this when she is filling out the receipts for the credit checks. Thirty dollars each. She tells us she fell in love with bouncing, she calls it bouncing, not jumping. Jumping is for amateurs. She used to walk five miles every Wednesday. Her brother told her it would be there, in the gym when the others went home, and she kept asking her brother, she kept asking, is it still going to be there? And he said yes, and she kept asking him, is it still going to be there? And he said yes, and they would walk, miles and miles, but her brother wasn’t lying, because the trampoline was there, and she would take off her shoes and gleefully bounce, twirling in the air and spinning, her arms outstretched in front of her, above her, to her sides.
When we leave Joy is still smiling her panicked smile, but slowly the muscles on her face relax. An orange and white cat runs through our legs and follows us as we maneuver through the rusty gate. He watches us walk along the sidewalk, his shiny eyes reflecting off into the darkness so that I think I can still see him, even when we're too far away to know for sure.