Pizza, on the corner of Eleventh Street, Iâm dripping in sweat. I order a Coke and a slice and snag one of the few tables. The air conditioner is blasting, but every time someone comes through the door, they bring a gust of hot air in with them.
I take your Polaroid from my bag and place it beside me on the table. I want to show it to someone, even to the strangers at Rayâs. I wish Gabriel were with me. I think of the friends Iâve lost touch with since Iâve been with him, and identify the ache I feel as loneliness. When an incoming gust sends your picture flying, I make a grab for it, and put you away safely in my pocket.
Outside, the sky grows dark through the plate glass. A skinny weed-tree blows back and forth. By the time Iâve finished my pizza, itâs pouring out, the kind of teeming rain that only happens in the extreme heat of summer. I pull up my collar and make a run for the subway.
Once, when I was about fourteen, after a fight with my mother, I ran out of the house into a summer storm like this one. It was just getting dark outside. I donât recall the argument itself, or my motherâs shrieking voice, which surely would have demanded I return at once. What I remember is running barefoot, as fast as I could, rain pouring down, the sound of my rapid breath, the slap of my feet on the black tar street. At the end of a dead-end road, there was a high Cyclone fence that overlooked the expressway, and I started to climb it. Cars were rushing by. I was crying so hard, I couldnât tell the rain from my tears.
All of a sudden it occurred to me that the hurtful things my parents said didnât matter. I hung there listening to the sound of the rain in the trees, watching the red taillights speed away, and thought about how it was powerful, natural forces that ruled the world, not my parents, and that one day I was going to be free of them and everything would be different.
Now I bound down the subway stairs dripping wet. On the train, I find your picture in my pocket and dry it off with my inside sleeve.
There you are, Minnow. Proof.
Fourteen
T he new apartment is in the back of a town house on West Seventy-first Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue. It has a nice kitchen, with a small butcher-block island, that takes up a whole wall of the main room. Through a Dutch door in back thereâs a garden thatâs not a garden, exactly, but a yard full of broken concrete and rocks. The narrow bedroom has a window with a view of a scraggly sapling, the only tree in the yard. The whole apartment is probably no more than five hundred square feet in all. Still, itâs twice the size of the Seventy-eighth Street studio. It feels like a real home to me.
I move in August, with no furniture except for the crib, changing table, and other baby things. I set up the bedroom for you as a nursery, make curtains for the window, paint a mural of the solar system on one wall and a girl flying a kite on another. Maybe youâll dream of flying, as I did when I was a girl. Itâs been a long time since I could fly in my dreams, but I can clearly recall the way it felt to lift off, and up, to glide over the rooftops of my neighborhood. Imagine what it would be like to fly over New York City? What views! The Metropolitan Museum of Art glowing next to the dark trees of Central Park, sailboats on the East River, the bright lights and billboards of Times Square. Iâd like to fly over it with you.
Here on earth, I paint and clean and fix thingsâdoing it now because soon Iâll be too pregnant, and it will be impossible. Iâm right on schedule. Your Baby says now is the time for making the nest.
I pick up the rest of the furnishings at the flea market on Twenty-sixth Street and Sixth Avenue. I find an old wicker daybed, a walnut dresser, a long table with three pine boards, and a red rocking chair. I face the rocker toward the window and place a soft blanket on its
I take your Polaroid from my bag and place it beside me on the table. I want to show it to someone, even to the strangers at Rayâs. I wish Gabriel were with me. I think of the friends Iâve lost touch with since Iâve been with him, and identify the ache I feel as loneliness. When an incoming gust sends your picture flying, I make a grab for it, and put you away safely in my pocket.
Outside, the sky grows dark through the plate glass. A skinny weed-tree blows back and forth. By the time Iâve finished my pizza, itâs pouring out, the kind of teeming rain that only happens in the extreme heat of summer. I pull up my collar and make a run for the subway.
Once, when I was about fourteen, after a fight with my mother, I ran out of the house into a summer storm like this one. It was just getting dark outside. I donât recall the argument itself, or my motherâs shrieking voice, which surely would have demanded I return at once. What I remember is running barefoot, as fast as I could, rain pouring down, the sound of my rapid breath, the slap of my feet on the black tar street. At the end of a dead-end road, there was a high Cyclone fence that overlooked the expressway, and I started to climb it. Cars were rushing by. I was crying so hard, I couldnât tell the rain from my tears.
All of a sudden it occurred to me that the hurtful things my parents said didnât matter. I hung there listening to the sound of the rain in the trees, watching the red taillights speed away, and thought about how it was powerful, natural forces that ruled the world, not my parents, and that one day I was going to be free of them and everything would be different.
Now I bound down the subway stairs dripping wet. On the train, I find your picture in my pocket and dry it off with my inside sleeve.
There you are, Minnow. Proof.
Fourteen
T he new apartment is in the back of a town house on West Seventy-first Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue. It has a nice kitchen, with a small butcher-block island, that takes up a whole wall of the main room. Through a Dutch door in back thereâs a garden thatâs not a garden, exactly, but a yard full of broken concrete and rocks. The narrow bedroom has a window with a view of a scraggly sapling, the only tree in the yard. The whole apartment is probably no more than five hundred square feet in all. Still, itâs twice the size of the Seventy-eighth Street studio. It feels like a real home to me.
I move in August, with no furniture except for the crib, changing table, and other baby things. I set up the bedroom for you as a nursery, make curtains for the window, paint a mural of the solar system on one wall and a girl flying a kite on another. Maybe youâll dream of flying, as I did when I was a girl. Itâs been a long time since I could fly in my dreams, but I can clearly recall the way it felt to lift off, and up, to glide over the rooftops of my neighborhood. Imagine what it would be like to fly over New York City? What views! The Metropolitan Museum of Art glowing next to the dark trees of Central Park, sailboats on the East River, the bright lights and billboards of Times Square. Iâd like to fly over it with you.
Here on earth, I paint and clean and fix thingsâdoing it now because soon Iâll be too pregnant, and it will be impossible. Iâm right on schedule. Your Baby says now is the time for making the nest.
I pick up the rest of the furnishings at the flea market on Twenty-sixth Street and Sixth Avenue. I find an old wicker daybed, a walnut dresser, a long table with three pine boards, and a red rocking chair. I face the rocker toward the window and place a soft blanket on its
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