This day, a young woman fell apart.
Just yesterday, she would walk with her high school sweetheart on this street of clapboard homes, this street precious to her because it was his, just as time spent with him, doing nothing, or anything, was precious.
Today, he had cropped hair and wore a flight jacket. Today, they walked the streets slowly.
President Truman on the radio, war on the television.
Splatters of rain touched her forehead. He draped his jacket over her shoulders, because he always looked out for her. She smelled his cigarettes; she smelled him in the jacket’s heavy warmth.
She shrugged out from under the jacket’s heavy padding.
Headlong, crying, she ran to the city center, to where her mother worked in McAlisters. She wouldn’t see him again. She would lose him, but it couldn’t be like it was now, with the threads that bound them together fraying so agonizingly, with war news and deployment news and the slow dribble of loss and fear and aloneness driving them apart, not like it had been all this year.
All at once.
#
Anna Houghary’s parents met and married in Binghamton NY. Maurice, a big, handsome lout, was superintendent of a red-brick apartment building, new in 1960, one of many buildings soon to rise in the part of town above the curving Susquehanna. Celeste, in love with tomorrow, worked in the new building’s courtyard, planting and attending young rose bushes that were as delicate and lovely as she was herself. When their first child came, the couple chose the name ‘Annabel.’ The girl would always be known as ‘Anna.’
The loss of the name’s last syllable was due to a medical event. Anna was born with a neoplasm under her left ear, a rare vascular growth, the length of two pennies. In the year of her birth, 1965, doctors had the technology to quickly pronounce the growth benign, which understates the full story. The growth had a virulence. It infected two nearby minds. When her parents saw what looked like a plucked dead birdling clutching at their baby’s neck, they turned their faces away and grasped each other’s hands. They left it to the nurses to hold little Anna.
The birdling needed to go. Maurice abandoned his wife’s bedside to seek out the best, most skilled, surgeon. Of that kind, none were available, but a surgeon in attendance at the same hospital agreed to stop by. He cheerfully refused to operate. “Oooh, a remarkably ugly little bunch of cells, isn’t it? I can remove it. But not now. Not safe to operate on such a little one. Call me when she is three. Or four. Or five.” The second available, cheerful surgeon said the same. Celeste, hearing the news, felt God had forsaken her.
Because to date, she and her husband had accomplished, on time, in order, all the normal life milestones for men and woman as described in psychology texts. Their resolute normality was to be compromised now. Celeste, in particular, did not have the inner tools to handle this perfectly healthy child with her reptilian (but correctable!) tumor. The couple kept little Anna penned up inside their apartment with its red-brick exterior and bullet-shaped windows. They had a second child, another girl, whom they named Emily. They pursued their life milestones. They succeeded, except for the matter of the incarcerated child.
And Anna? Four years later, her tumor succumbed to a safe surgical procedure, leaving a red inchworm of a scar. A jubilant Celeste instructed the child, now a solemn-eyed preschooler, to hide the scar under a pageboy haircut. On the hottest summer days, little Annabel was not allowed to push her hair behind her ears. She did not ponder why. She had learned not to ponder.
#
Sometimes, the bombardier remembered that afternoon, that day walking with his girl, summer streets, the old-growth trees, his home, that day she ran away from him. He had run, too, his flight jacket in one fist, to seek her along the curving downtown of concrete facades and orange brick, but he could not find her, and then the war called him and he came here. Now, after a day’s work, the North Korean cities below looked like smudged sand, black slashes amid twisted-ribbon roadways, clouds of smoke 20,000 feet down. Namp’o, Haeju, Sinuiju. Finally, there was nothing left for his bombs to destroy. The bombardier received no letters from home. It took much longer before he, too, stopped writing.
#
Besides his job as building superintendent, Maurice found additional employment when city leaders decided to clear old buildings and build new buildings, which was called urban renewal, quite the push in 1960’s America. Busy earning money, Maurice tried to put the affair of his first child out of his head, mostly succeeding. But it was he who noticed that little Anna had a strange gait. “She walks like Yogi Berra,” he said. Celeste looked, and then she also perceived this appalling thing, which according to orthopedists she at once consulted, was called out-toeing, or more scientifically, femoral retroversion or less scientifically, ‘duck-feet.’ Celeste, already panicked about Anna’s upcoming school enrollment—the child was decidedly odd—argued feverishly with a new round of doctors. They remained unmoved. “Your little child will grow out of this very mild case. It does not warrant leg braces, certainly.” Celeste had waking nightmares of scars, imperfect profiles, and ugliness of all kinds. Anna, who had figured out her own worth, took it in stride. She turned five.
#
Later, the bombardier remembered the aftermath as abrasions on the North Korean countryside: scraped, burning land, destroyed cities below him, the wormy, convoluted blackness. At night, in bed, he felt that the abrasions were wounds on his skin and his fingers sought their rough stickiness. There was nothing on his skin. The wounds that marred the land in North Korea were transformed now. In real life, Pyongyang had been rebuilt with money donated partly from the communist Chinese government. The new capital city had boulevards, wide public squares and angular sandstone apartment buildings. Namp’o had homes and schools rising between ocean and green mountains.
#
All that winter, Maurice worked his trade. Celeste fretted about Anna. The couple’s second daughter, Emily, attended Sunday school and became her father’s favorite. The objectionableness of Anna’s femoral retroversion lessened only in the spring when doctors from the pediatric clinic diagnosed an unrelated disorder, hydronephrosis.
This term, Celeste was to learn—Maurice these days refused to learn any new words—described any condition that prevented a child from draining her bladder. Anna’s hydronephrosis was an artifact of her earlier hospitalization and wholly curable. Doctors recommended a urethral stent. “For a few months only,” they said.
Celeste was convinced the stent caused an odor. “I smell something,” she said at meals. Maurice shrugged. “There’s definitely something,” Celeste said, looking at Anna. “Maybe,” said Maurice. “Stinky,” said little Emily. Anna ate in silence.
Celeste worried what the neighbors would think. Maurice worried about hospitalizations and insurance premiums. He took these frustrations out on imperfect Anna. “The Kaminsky children don’t want to play with you. Why would they?” He didn’t explain this further. Anna, six years old, certainly understood. She was hideous. She was scarred. She smelled bad.
#
A block that once was lined with modest homes now had only scattered chunks of plaster and clapboard; the block had been cleared for the city’s ongoing urban renewal. A tiny birdling hopped amid the chunks, too young to fly, its little body attracting as if by tether its nearby hovering bird parents.
A child watched, mesmerized.
#
Anna’s stent came out. Maurice participated proudly in the groundbreaking of new downtown office buildings, reshaping entire blocks. He’d given up on reshaping his eldest daughter. For Anna and Emily, there were Christmases and birthdays with candy and presents, arranged by Celeste with studied fairness. Emily started kindergarten. Anna changed, not into a beauty, but into a clean, fastidious girl with good health. She had her mother’s grace and her father’s straight back and long limbs. Outside her apartment building, she darted away from people, especially anyone her own age. She disliked school and everyone at school. She often refused to attend. She chatted to herself under her breath.
Maurice bellowed at her, “What is wrong with you!” Apparently, he had no idea.
Little Anna had some idea. It had to do with the television set her parents bought on her tenth birthday for her to keep in her room. She loved this gift and quickly structured her life around it. She perched on her bed though summer afternoons, alone, her legs curled under her body, her head against her pillow, watching daytime serials. In this way, she shared the lives of people whose faces, personalities, and lack of body odor made them worthy of love, friendship, heartache and everyday conversation. These people had lovely kitchens and living rooms. Little Anna, Annabel who never was, imagined all these people smelled like soap and grass.
#
The bombardier’s uniform hung in the closet of his flat. He pushed his thoughts away from war even though wars raged on his planet. Nixon was President, Rockefeller was Governor. Five blocks away from where he lived now, a narrow house once stood, with brown clapboard siding, its sole second-story window amusing him so as a child, looking, as it did, like one eye staring. Down the alley behind the front porch, a side window once looked out from the kitchen, where his mother would busy herself. He turned his head. While he was not paying attention, someone had declared his childhood neighborhood blighted and they removed it. New and lovely structures were to be built here. But his house was gone now.
Across the street, a bird broke from a clump of grass and winged into the air. It flew tremulously, flapping and dipping, gaining speed. A solemn dark-haired girl stood on the sidewalk, watching the bird until it disappeared. She bent to her knees and dipped her head. In the far distance, traffic filled a new highway called the Brandywine.
#
Anna soon developed a swell-headed sense of self-righteousness.
Having no role model outside her parents, sister and her television, she had a simple worldview that made judgements easy. Judgements occupied her quick intelligence. They felt good.
“Ugly,” she muttered to any television actor she found even a little wanting. “Slut,” she muttered to most female TV characters. She entered her teenaged years.
Her parents left her alone. If she brought them little joy, she caused them few problems. At fifteen, of her own accord, she obtained a nighttime job at a bakery on the ground floor of a building five blocks away. She donated the money she earned to Maurice and Celeste or sometimes to Emily, since Anna disliked activities that required money. She always wore a tight hairnet and clean white coveralls at work. The bakery smell of cookies and donuts masked any odors she might have. She felt useful. She ignored the other people who worked her shift: Hector, sixty, who didn’t speak English and who understood that Anna wanted nothing to do with him, and Lilian, twenty, who wanted nothing to do with Anna. After her shift, if Anna skipped school which she normally did, there was television.
When she turned sixteen, she left school entirely.
#
He had served his country; he’d seen death in burned cities and downed planes. He’d seen men and children dead, and now his gut clenched like a fist near his heart and there was no one at home for him, and everything he remembered was gone. Rain on a barren street, empty lots, plaster chunks, a lone bird. He ran to his car.
#
And so, a pleasant five years passed for Anna. Maurice died of a heart attack at age fifty-seven. He left money for Emily, Anna and their mother. Emily married her high-school sweetheart and moved to Newark, Delaware. Celeste kept busy with church. Anna remained at home. She worked in the bakery. She lived in a dream. A crisis happened two summers later when a young man named Jorge joined the nighttime bakery team.
Jorge loved to joke and talk with Anna, apparently expecting her approval. Anna was aghast. She at once discerned that Jorge lacked good looks. He had a small chin. His big grin contained imperfect teeth. Anna, in her imperious way, ranked him at humanity’s nadir. She could not imagine why someone so imperfect would hang his upper body over anyone’s workstation, let alone hers, to dance his feet in white sneakers and call her ‘bella bella.’
“Bella, Bella, tell me about your day. Do you have a dog or cat? I have a bird. I named her Petey, but if I get another bird, she will be Bella, Bella.”
Jorge asked Anna to meet him for lunch. He asked her to go dancing. Anna never spoke to him at all.
Sometime later, she saw Jorge’s dancing feet by Lilian’s station, his skinny body balanced over Lilian’s partition. Much later, she passed Jorge and Lilian on a nearby street. They were arm in arm, laughing and kissing.
Anna watched them, flabbergasted. Lilian had no beauty whatsoever with her paunchy body and over-made face. Neither of these two unlovely people deserved love, certainly? If she didn’t, they didn’t, certainly?
She ceased these thoughts. Lilian and Jorge didn’t fit into her worldview, so carefully ingrained. Her worldview was stronger than Lilian and Jorge. This scene left her mind, left the dream she lived in. At the bakery, the two lovers became white-coveralled, hair-netted nonentities. Only Hector existed, and Anna never spoke to him.
#
He wore his flight jacket on Veteran’s Day and wondered at the community who came out to honor him.
A glimmer of another life, what might have been, danced in his mind. He returned the jacket to his closet.
#
After her mother died, Anna took over the apartment lease. Hector, Jorge and Lilian left the bakery, but new people came, and then they left in turn. Anna ignored them all. Only on odd occasions did she ventured beyond the blocks surrounding her apartment, always avoiding contact with others. She felt content. She had money and independence. She enjoyed television. She thought highly of her own opinions and thus of herself and she did nothing to test that self-assessment.
And nothing changed until one night near the end of her shift at the bakery, when Anna cut her thumb on a knife blade while emptying the utensil sink. The wound, she suspected, would need stiches. Always organized, she called her manager that very morning, got bus directions to an approved doctor’s office, and left at once.
#
Around a pavilion east of the Chenango River, towers and buildings of rectangular lines and clean, bright concrete facades rose to the sky. People walked with purpose, or meandered or stopped and chatted as if everything was right.
The airman looked around himself. Memories once lived here.
#
Pleased with herself after receiving her stitches, Anna decided on a rare treat. Her bus stop was a short walk from the entrance to a mall that she remembered had opened during her childhood. She hadn’t been back since childhood; she purchased everything she needed in the blocks near her home or from catalogues. But she remembered a food court. Checking the bus schedule, she made up her mind to go in.
The mall baffled her. A long corridor punctuated by store entrances, she’d expected. But today she noticed something she hadn’t as a child when following her mother from store to store: Lilians and Jorges.
Couples. People. People who were not just unlovely. People who were not just poorly dressed. But—like Lilian, like Jorge—unlovely, poorly-dressed people who were arm in arm, laughing and talking. Loving each other. Ugly children begging money from ugly parents. Happy, joyful, loving people.
She’d witnessed such scenes before: outdoor gatherings she’d failed to circumvent, holiday celebrations, afternoon school release. Following a stab of sadness and hurt so fleeting she could ignore it, her response was now, as ever, as it had been with the first Lilian and Jorge. The people in the mall corridors disappeared. They lived outside her world.
No people, no children. Only Anna. As it should be.
She purchased a lemonade and sat on a metal mall chair at a table to drink it. Tired after her night shift and busy morning, she closed her eyes. A small time later—she didn’t want to miss her bus—she stood to leave. On a chair near her table, perhaps six feet away, someone had left a jacket.
Someone had used this chair and left the jacket while she relaxed with closed eyes, or perhaps she hadn’t noticed it before. It was a flight jacket, she recognized, old, silky green, oversized with a soft ribbed collar and black cuffs and many zippered pockets. She reached out a finger. The silky material was faded but soft. She lifted it. The jacket smelled like men’s cologne and cigarettes. Although typically she disliked all odors outside that of soap, she found this odor pleasing. She associated it with war heroes and handsome men, and perhaps horses. Feeling no guilt whatsoever, she examined it. The lining seemed soft and inviting and of something arising from a different time, of fantasy and old movies. She slipped the jacket over her shoulders. With the silky material covering her body, she experienced as much human warmth and comfort as her limited nature allowed. She walked to the exit exulting in her find and in her solitude.
“Lovely jacket.”
Startled, Anna looked at the apparent speaker, a woman, perhaps forty, who approached her. The woman stopped and smiled.
Anna had never seen such a remarkable creature outside of television, certainly none that had ever smiled at her. This woman had flowing dark hair, soft-looking skin and red lipstick. Anna felt a frisson of excitement that harked back to her childhood when a gift of candy from Maurice and Celeste could thrill her. Her underused emotions told her: some gift was on offer here.
“Where did you buy this lovely thing?” the woman asked, her eyes bright and, it seemed, accepting of Annabel.
Anna’s imagination had never been faulty and her personality, although shared with herself only, had always been bold. She answered at once. “It’s mine. It was my fiancé’s jacket. He was… a soldier. He was… older than me. He’s gone now.” In Anna’s dreamworld, untruth was completely interchangeable with truth, no better, no worse. She liked this tale just fine.
“I’m so sorry about your fiancé,” said the woman. “His jacket is lovely.”
A young male shopper emerged from the fog that constituted the surrounding mall. Another gift on offer.
“Hey. It looks old and real,” he said. “It’s nice.”
Anna looked at him, his sensual mouth, his perfect dark skin, his sleepy eyes. She perceived friendly, everyday acceptance from this person, a willingness to exchange friendly, casual conversation. “Yes,” she said. “It’s real. It’s nice.”
Overwhelmed, she turned and hurried away.
At home, Anna sat on the edge of her bed, waiting to feel calm. With soft television voices to comfort her, she slipped her arms into the sleeves of the jacket. It smelled like comfort and felt like warmth, and she wrapped it around herself.
#
He’d lost the possessions of his youth in the tangled currents of life. What remained, he began to give away. He left the flight jacket behind one day, in a spot where something else once was, where she and he had walked once, amid trees and grass. It belonged there, not with him.
#
In 2025, two young men jogged near North Shore Drive, laughing and talking. They were artists whose work hung in a gallery in Binghamton’s new downtown arts district on the lovely, rebuilt State Street. As they jogged, they became aware of an old Korean-War style flight jacket that lay near nearby Route 434, in that section called Brandywine, seemingly discarded, the seeming detritus of someone else’s life.
One young man lifted the jacket from the ground. “Very cool,” he said. Holding the jacket in one strong fist, he jogged on.
–
Karen Chaffee has been published in Orca, Bending Genres, Does It Have Pockets, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine and The Disappointed Housewife.
© Karen Chaffee, 2025
Halfway Down the Stairs 