Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (33 page)

^{i went straight}
on up Park and made it to 116th Street, at the crosswalk, and had begun to ponder just how exactly I was going to make my way across the river. There were always the bridges, but my feet had begun to swell and my shoes were cutting the back of my heels. The shoes were a half- size too big. I had bought them that way on purpose, for the opera on Sundays, when I liked to lean back and quietly flip the shoe off, let the cool take me. But now they rode up with each step and cut a little trench in my heels. I tried adjusting my stride, but the flaps of skin were beginning to come away. Each step dug a little deeper. I had a dime for the bus and a token for the subway but I had insisted to myself that I’d walk, that I’d make it back home under my own steam, one foot after the other. So, I kept on north.

The streets of Harlem felt like they were under siege—fences and ramps and barbed wire, radios in the windows, kids out on the sidewalks. Up in the high windows women leaned out on their elbows like they were looking back into a better decade. Below, wheelchair beggars with scraggly beards raced each other to cars stopped at the lights: they took their chariot duel seriously, and the winner dipped to pick a dime off the ground.

I caught glimpses of people’s rooms: a white enamel jar against a window frame, a round wooden table with a newspaper spread out, a pleated shade over a green chair. What, I wondered, were the sounds filling those rooms? It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.

A small blade of pain shot through me each time I stepped, but I could handle it—there were worse things than a torn- up pair of heels. A pop song traveled across my memory, Nancy Sinatra singing about her boots being made for walking. I had it in my thoughts that the more I hummed the less my feet would hurt.
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.
One corner to another. One more crack in the pavement. That’s the way we all walk: the more we have to occupy our minds the better. I started humming louder, not caring a bit who saw or heard me. Another corner, another note. As a little girl I had walked home through the fields, my socks disappearing into my shoes.

The sun was still high. I’d been walking slow, two hours or more. Water ran down a drain: up ahead some kids had opened a fire hydrant and were dancing through the spray in their underwear. Their shiny little bodies were beautiful and dark. The older kids hung out on stoops, watching their brothers and sisters in their wet underclothes, maybe wishing they too could be that young again.
I crossed to the bright side of the street.
Over the years, in New York, I’ve been mugged seven times. There is an inevitability to it. You can feel it coming, even if from behind. A ripple in the air. A pulse in the light. An intent. In the distance, waiting for you, at a street garbage can. Under a hat, or a sweatshirt. The eye flick away. The glance back again. For a split second, when it happens, you’re not even in the world. You’re in your handbag and it’s moving away. That’s how it feels. There goes my life down the street, being carried by a pair of scattering shoes.
This time, the young girl, a Puerto Rican, stepped out of a vestibule on 127th. Alone. A swagger to her. Shadows from a fire escape crisscrossing her. She held a knife in under her own chin. A drugged- out shine to her eyes. I had seen that look before: if she didn’t slice me she’d slice herself. Her eyelids were painted bright silver.
“The world’s bad enough,” I said to her, using my church tone, but she just pointed the blade of the knife at me.
“Give me your fucking bag.”
“It’s a sin to make it worse than it is.”
She looped the handbag on the blade of the knife. “Pockets,” she said.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” she said, and pulled the handbag high on her elbow. It was as if she already knew from the weight that there was nothing inside but a handkerchief and some photographs. Then, swiftly, she leaned forward with the knife and sliced open the side pocket of my dress. The knife blade ran against my hip. My purse, my license, and two more photos of my boys were kept inside the pocket. She sliced open the second side.
“Fat bitch,” she said as she walked around the corner.
The street throbbed around me. Nobody’s fault but my own. The bark of a dog flew by. I pondered the notion that I had nothing to lose anymore, that I should follow her, rip the empty handbag from her, rescue my old self. It was the photographs that bothered me the most. I went to the corner. She was already far down the street. The photos were scattered in a line down the pavement. I stooped and picked up what remained of my boys. I caught the eye of a woman, older than me, peeping out the window. She was framed by the rotting wood. The sill was lined with plaster saints and a few artificial flowers. I would have swapped my life for hers at that moment, but she closed the window and turned away. I propped the empty white handbag against the stoop and walked on without it. She could have it. Take it all, except the photos.
I stuck out my hand and a gypsy cab stopped immediately. I slid into the backseat. He adjusted his rearview mirror.
“Yeah?” he said, drumming away on the steering wheel.
Try measuring certain days on a weighing scale.
“Hey, lady,” he shouted. “Where you going?”
Try measuring them.
“ Seventy- sixth and Park,” I said.
I had no idea why. Certain things we just can’t explain. I could just as easily have gone home: I had enough money tucked away under my mattress to pay for the cab fare ten times over. And the Bronx was closer than Claire’s house, that I knew. But we wove into the traffic. I didn’t ask the driver to turn around. The dread rose in me as the streets clicked by.
The doorman buzzed her and she ran down the stairs, came right out and paid the cab driver. She glanced down at my feet—a little barrier of blood had bubbled up over the edge of my heel, and the pocket of my dress was torn—and something turned in her, some key, her face grew soft. She said my name and discomforted me a moment. Her arm went around me and she took me straight up in the elevator, down the corridor towards her bedroom. The curtains were drawn. A deep scent of cigarettes came from her, mixed with fresh perfume. “Here,” she said as if it was the only place in the world. I sat on the clean unrumpled linen as she ran the bath. The splash of water. “You poor thing,” she called. There was a smell of perfumed salts in the air.
I could see my reflection in the bedroom mirror. My face looked puffed and worn. She was saying something, but her voice got caught up in the noise of the water.
The other side of the bed was dented. So, she had been lying down, maybe crying. I felt like flopping down into her imprint, making it three times the size. The door opened slowly. Claire stood there smiling. “We’ll get you right,” she said. She came to the edge of the bed, took my elbow, led me into the bathroom, sat me on a wooden stool by the bath. She leaned over and tested the warmth of the water with her knuckle. I unrolled the hose from my legs. Bits of skin came off my feet. I sat at the edge of the bath and swung my legs across. The water stung. The blood slid from my feet. Some vanishing sunset, the red glow dispersing in the water.
Claire laid a white towel out in the middle of the bathroom floor, at my feet. She handed me some sticky bandages, the back paper already peeled off. I couldn’t help the thought that she wanted to dry my feet with her hair.
“I’m okay, Claire,” I told her.
“What did they steal?”
“Only my handbag.”
I felt charged with dread: she might think that all I wanted was the money she had offered me earlier to stay, to get my reward, my slave purse.
“There was no money in it.”
“We’ll call the police anyway.”
“The police?”
“Why not?”
“Claire . . .”
She looked at me blankly and then an understanding traveled across her eyes. People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don’t. There’s no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self.
I bent down and put the bandages on the backs of my heels. They weren’t quite wide enough for the cut. I could already feel the sharp sting of having to take them off later.
“You know the worst of it?” I said.
“What?”
“She called me fat.”
“Oh, Gloria. I’m sorry.”
“It’s your fault, Claire.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s your fault.”
“Oh,” she said, a tremble of nerves in her voice.
“I told you I shouldn’t’ve had those extra doughnuts.”
“Oh!”
She threw her head back until her neck was taut, and reached out to touch my hand.
“Gloria,” she said. “Next time it’s bread and water.”
“Maybe a little pastry.”
I leaned down to towel my toes. Her hand drifted to my shoulder, but then she rose and said: “You need slippers.”
She rummaged in the closet for a pair of felt slippers for me and a dressing gown that must’ve belonged to her husband since her own wouldn’t have fit me. I shook my head, and hung the gown on a hook on the door. “No offense,” I said. I could live in my torn dress. She guided me into the living room. None of the plates or cups had been cleared from earlier. A bottle of gin sat in the center of the table. More emptiness than gin in the bottle. Ice was melting in a bowl. Claire was using the lemons we had cut instead of limes. She held the bottle high in the air and shrugged. Without asking she took out a second glass. “Excuse my fingers,” she said as she dropped ice into the glass.
It had been years since I’d had a drink. It felt cool at the back of my throat. Nothing mattered but that momentary taste.
“God, that’s good.”
“Sometimes it’s a cure,” she said.
Sunlight shone through Claire’s glass. It caught the color of lemon and the glass turned in her hands. She looked like she was weighing the world. She leaned back against the white of the couch and said: “Gloria?”
“ Uh- huh?”
She looked away, over my head, to a painting in the corner of the room.
“The truth?”
“The truth.”
“I don’t normally drink, you know. It’s just today, with, you know, all that talking. I think I made a bit of a fool of myself.”
“You were fine.”
“I wasn’t silly?”
“You were fine, Claire.”
“I hate making a fool of myself.”
“You didn’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“The truth’s not foolish,” she said.
She was swiveling her glass and watching the gin swirl in circles, a cyclone she wanted to drown herself in.
“I mean, about Joshua. Not the other stuff. I mean, I felt very silly when I said I’d pay you to stay. I just wanted someone to hang around. With, you know, with me. Selfish, really, and I feel awful.”
“It happens.”
“I didn’t mean it.” She looked away. “And then when you left, I called your name. I wanted to run after you.”
“I needed to walk, Claire. That’s all.”
“The others were laughing at me.”
“I’m sure they weren’t.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever see them again.”
“Of course we will.”
She let out a long sigh and threw back the drink, poured herself another, but mostly tonic this time, not gin.
“Why did you come back, Gloria?”
“To get paid, of course.”
“Excuse me?”
“A joke, Claire, joke.”
I could feel the gin working under my tongue.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m a little slow this afternoon.”
“I’ve no idea, really,” I said.
“I’m glad you did.”
“Nothing better to do.”
“You’re funny.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s not?”
“It’s the truth.”
“Oh!” she said. “Your choir. I forgot.”
“My what?”
“Your choir. You said you had choir.”
“I don’t have choir, Claire. Never did. Never will. Sorry. No such thing.”
She seemed to chew on the thought for a moment and then broke out in a grin.
“You’ll stay awhile, though? Rest your feet. Stay for dinner. My husband should be home around six or so. You’ll stay?”
“Oh, I don’t think I should.”
“Twenty dollars an hour?” she said with a grin.
“You’ve got me,” I laughed.
We sat in happy quiet and she ran her fingers over the rim of her glass, but then she perked up and said suddenly: “Tell me about your boys again.”
Her question rankled. I didn’t want to think about my boys anymore. In a strange way, all I wanted was to be surrounded by another, to be a part of somebody else’s room. I took a piece of lemon and slid it between my teeth and gums. The acid jarred me. I guess I wanted another sort of question altogether.
“Can I ask you something, Claire?”
“Of course.”
“Could we put on some music?”
“What?”
“I mean, I suppose I’m just still in a little bit of shock.”
“What sort of music?”
“Whatever you have. It makes me feel, I don’t know, it calms me down. I like having an orchestra around. Do you have opera?”
“Afraid not. You like opera?”
“All my savings. I go to the Met every chance I get. Way up in the gods. Slip off my shoes and away I go.”
She rose and went to the record player. I couldn’t see the sleeve of the record she took out. She cleaned the vinyl with a soft yellow cloth and then she lifted the needle. She did everything small as if it was extraordinary and necessary. The music filled the room. A deep, hard piano: the hammers rippling across the strings.
“He’s Russian,” she said. “He can stretch his fingers to thirteen keys.”

i was happy enough the day my second husband found himself a younger version of the train he was riding towards oblivion. His hat had always been a helping too large on his head anyway. He upped and left me with three boys and a view of the Deegan. I didn’t mind. My last thought of him was that nobody ought to be as lonely as him, walking away. But it didn’t break my heart to close the door on him, or even to suck up the pride of a monthly check.

The Bronx was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. My boys wore brown hunting caps with earflaps. Later they threw the caps away and grew up into Afros. They hid pencils in their hair. We had our good days. I recall one summer afternoon when all four of us went to Foodland and raced up and down the frozen- food aisles with our shopping cart, keeping ourselves cool.

It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine.

I asked Clarence one day why he was going and he said one or two things about liberty, but mostly he was doing it because he was bored. Brandon and Jason said about the same thing too when their draft cards were dropped in our mailbox. It was the only mail that didn’t get stolen in the houses. The mailman carried around huge bags of gloom. There was heroin all over the projects in those years and I thought maybe my boys were right, they were getting themselves free. I’d seen far too many children slouched down in the corners with needles in their arms, little spoons sticking out of their shirt pockets.