Don't I Know You? by Karen Shepard Page A

a useful trait in the face of two- and three-year-olds and their parents, the liberal white pioneers of the Upper West Side. The children had liked her instantly, tumbling and fizzing around her like bubbles up the sides of a still glass. The parents had not, at least not instantly, watching their children’s enthusiasm for this quiet woman with confusion and a small sense of betrayal. There was only one parent whom Lily herself didn’t like. Sally Grossman. Sometimes she’d turned the name over in her mouth. Sally’s daughter, Ruth, was a blond girl with a round head and Who-from-Whoville blue eyes who had started last fall. Ruth had spina bifida. When they’d interviewed, Sally had closed the interview by saying, “She won’t be any trouble. She can’t walk.” And Lily had decided she disliked Sally Grossman. And it was hard, once Lily had made up her mind about something, to find a way to change it.
    On days when she’d had to talk with Sally more than she liked to, she allowed herself a beer at the bar a few blocks away from school. She’d gone there once or twice as a student and felt, falsely, she knew, comfortable walking in there alone. She always sat at the corner of the bar nearest the bartender, just as she always sat in the conductor’s car on the subway. Livingalone, she’d learned some tricks: Put a pair of construction boots outside the door. Next to them, a big dog chain and a water bowl. New York could be perfectly safe if you lived by certain rules and took certain precautions. Since the murder on her block the summer before last, this had been a harder belief in which to maintain faith. Of course, there were murders all the time in New York, but not all of them were two houses down, and not all of the victims had a child in the upper grades of Lily’s school.
    That woman, she’d decided, based on no real knowledge, must not have had clear enough rules, or must not have stuck to them well enough. After that there’d been the Son of Sam killings, and the blackout rioting and arson, and she’d had to work hard to resist feeling as if the woman’s murder had been the beginning of some kind of horrible slide.
    One day in September, more than a year after the murder two houses down, someone had spoken to her while she sat on her stool, in her corner.
    It was Nikolai, though he introduced himself as Nick. Nick Belov, he said, and because of his odd mix of Russian and New York accents, Lily thought she heard Belove , like some archaic form of Beloved . She would learn that his accent came and went depending on the audience. The longer he spoke with you, the more he sounded like you.
    He was a big man, older than she by ten or fifteen years. His brown hair was layered and already graying. It brushed his shoulders like a feather duster. Everything about him was oversized: his nose, his chin, his cheekbones. He gestured as if on a second-story balcony overlooking a grand piazza filled with thousands of hispeople. His eyes were olive green and they swept the room as if on lookout. Behind the movement, she imagined a vast sadness.
    That night he wore a beige dress shirt with French cuffs and cuff links with a crest that featured crossed swords. His pants were dark brown and speckled with small stains. He’d saved money on his shoes. He gesticulated so dramatically with his right hand that it took Lily a moment to realize that he was missing the index finger from his left.
    â€œOh,” she exclaimed, surprising herself by reaching out and touching the wrinkled nub of the joint.
    He didn’t pull away. He took her finger and pressed it gently but firmly around the place where his finger should’ve been. The topographical maps of elementary school came back to her.
    â€œThe price I paid for the rudeness of pointing,” he said.
    She had no idea what he could mean.
    He told her about the orphanage in Russia where he had been raised