Let the Great World Spin (48 page)

After a while he didn’t seem to have a name.

And then he said—in 1947, after eleven months of marriage—that he had been looking for another empty box to fit inside. This was the boy who had been the star of the Negro debating team.
Another empty box.
It felt as if my skull was being lifted from my flesh. I left him.

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I avoided going home. I made up excuses, elaborate lies. My parents were still clinging on—what use was it to hurt them? The thought of them knowing that I had failed was coiled up inside me. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t even tell them that I was divorced. I would phone my mother and tell her that my husband was in the bath, or down at the basketball courts, or out on a big job interview for a Boston engineering firm. I’d stretch the phone all the way to the front door and press the bell and say:

“Oh, gotta go, Mom—Thomas has a friend here.”

Now that he was gone he had a name again. Thomas. I wrote it in blue eyeliner on my bathroom mirror. I looked through it, beyond, at myself.

I should have gone back to Missouri, found myself a good job, settled back with my folks, maybe even uncovered a husband who wasn’t scared of the world, but I didn’t go back; I kept pretending I would, and soon enough my parents passed. My mother first, my father a broken man just one week later. I remember thinking that they went like lovers. They could not survive without each other. It was like they had spent their lives breathing each other’s breath.

There was a loss lit in me now, and a rage, and I wanted to see New York. I heard it was a city that danced. I arrived at the bus station with two very fancy suitcases, high heels, and a hat. Men wanted to carry my cases but I walked on, head held high, down Eighth Avenue. I found a rooming house and applied to a scholarship foundation but heard nothing, and took the first job I could find: as a clerk for a betting outfit at the Belmont racetrack. I was a window girl. Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it’s not a coat at all, it’s more like another skin. I was more than overqualified, but I took it anyway. Out I went to the racetrack every day. I thought I’d get out of the job in a matter of weeks, that it was just a moment, a blip of pleasure for a girl who knew what pleasure was but hadn’t fully tasted it. I was twenty- two years old. All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the ordinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past. Besides, I loved the sound of the gallop. On mornings, before the races, I would walk down among the stalls and breathe in all the scents of the hay and the soap and the saddle leather.

There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it. In New York, at the racetrack, I loved to see the McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 306

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horses up close. Their flanks looked as blue as insect wings. They swished their manes back in the air. They were like Missouri to me. They smelled of home, of fields, of creek sides.

A man came around the corner with a horse brush in his hand. He was tall, dark, elegant. He wore overalls. His smile was so very wide and white.

My second and last marriage was the one that left me eleven floors up in the Bronx projects with my three boys—and I suppose, in a way, with those two baby girls.

Sometimes you’ve got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.

—

i w e n t s t r ai gh t 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 char-iot 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.

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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 crisscross-ing 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 McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 308

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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 McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 309

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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 un-rolled 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.

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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.