years.
In the center of my room I stretched my arm out. Iâm my grandfather, at the Gramercy Park gate, in 1945. Itâs autumn, and the sky is steel-gray, just before dusk. Children play in the park, their coats folded on schoolbooks on the benches. I look out over their heads, over the fallen leaves in the park. I want to feel my muscles drawn into place around some emotion. My grandfather looks out past the gate into the network of color and movement that makes up the city, but he sees the horizon of Sioux City, Iowa: uniform and yellow gray.
I myself see, at this moment, a pair of extravagantly, surpassingly gaudy shoes. I give up on my grandfather and put them on.
They are the highest heels Iâve ever worn, and the minute I stand in them, my body conforms to their dictates: my ankles tilt forward, and every other bone leans back to balance them. I stretch my arm out, bring the other to my mouth with the imaginary pipe, and I am indeed a ridiculous figure. I walk confidently in these shoes, taller and more fluid, and I cannot possibly move like my grandfather now. I stand straighter than I ever have, my breasts thrust forward against the cloth of my shirt, head back, almost thrown back. If I were to laugh right now, it would be a strong but not derisive laugh that I think my grandfather would attend: the laugh of someone who understands what he looks for and what he sees.
Nonchalant
Kate closed Buddyâs up early because of the snow. It took all her strength to pull the door shut against the wind, and she felt herself very slight, almost weightless, her hair blowing to mix with the storm. She wore the red scarf she had knitted for Michael, which he hadnât taken to New York with him. He had said then that heâd be back before the cold, but he no longer spoke of returning. Evidently, fiddle players were much needed in New York; Kate hadnât thought he would get enough work to keep him a month, but heâd left in September and it was nearly Christmas now.
Kateâs own work kept her in Chiverton. Buddy said she was the best cook heâd ever had, and at Buddyâs she could do things according to her mood, serve coq au vin one night and meatball subs the next, boil an egg if someone was allergic, bake a cake if someone was sad. Only Michael had escaped her ministrations, though his name was still on her mailbox and she was still watering his plants.
So let him stay in New York. Carson had a formula for it: If someone has lived away from you as long as theyâve lived with you (and if the distance is one hundred miles or more), you canât consider yourself in love. Kate tried to be nonchalantâMichael had been mostly a pain in the ass anyway, schlepping home from some womanâs apartment with a camellia for Kate, his confessions so detailed he seemed not so much penitent as nostalgic. He had invited her to come to New York with him, but so halfheartedly it would have seemed importunate to accept.
Even in the light of the evening snow, Chiverton was a dingy town, whose tinseled storefronts still displayed the galoshes and baby dolls no one wanted last year. Three blocks east and Kate would be home; three more and the town subsided into fields until the valley sloped up into the hills again. The wreath on the door of The Shamrock, where Michael once played three nights a week, obscured most of the neon Schlitz sign, and Kate peered through the letters, thinking she might find Carson or someone else whoâd want to walk with her, but there were only a few kids playing Pac-Man. They spent all their aimless force on the machines, unconcerned with the snow, which sifted through the pools of streetlight onto the little spruces along the sidewalk. Watching them, Kate knew she was absolutely lucky to be here, alone, in a red scarf. Carson would say she was feeling negative ions rather than joy, but the snow tumbled freely out of the pure blue above; science had nothing to do
In the center of my room I stretched my arm out. Iâm my grandfather, at the Gramercy Park gate, in 1945. Itâs autumn, and the sky is steel-gray, just before dusk. Children play in the park, their coats folded on schoolbooks on the benches. I look out over their heads, over the fallen leaves in the park. I want to feel my muscles drawn into place around some emotion. My grandfather looks out past the gate into the network of color and movement that makes up the city, but he sees the horizon of Sioux City, Iowa: uniform and yellow gray.
I myself see, at this moment, a pair of extravagantly, surpassingly gaudy shoes. I give up on my grandfather and put them on.
They are the highest heels Iâve ever worn, and the minute I stand in them, my body conforms to their dictates: my ankles tilt forward, and every other bone leans back to balance them. I stretch my arm out, bring the other to my mouth with the imaginary pipe, and I am indeed a ridiculous figure. I walk confidently in these shoes, taller and more fluid, and I cannot possibly move like my grandfather now. I stand straighter than I ever have, my breasts thrust forward against the cloth of my shirt, head back, almost thrown back. If I were to laugh right now, it would be a strong but not derisive laugh that I think my grandfather would attend: the laugh of someone who understands what he looks for and what he sees.
Nonchalant
Kate closed Buddyâs up early because of the snow. It took all her strength to pull the door shut against the wind, and she felt herself very slight, almost weightless, her hair blowing to mix with the storm. She wore the red scarf she had knitted for Michael, which he hadnât taken to New York with him. He had said then that heâd be back before the cold, but he no longer spoke of returning. Evidently, fiddle players were much needed in New York; Kate hadnât thought he would get enough work to keep him a month, but heâd left in September and it was nearly Christmas now.
Kateâs own work kept her in Chiverton. Buddy said she was the best cook heâd ever had, and at Buddyâs she could do things according to her mood, serve coq au vin one night and meatball subs the next, boil an egg if someone was allergic, bake a cake if someone was sad. Only Michael had escaped her ministrations, though his name was still on her mailbox and she was still watering his plants.
So let him stay in New York. Carson had a formula for it: If someone has lived away from you as long as theyâve lived with you (and if the distance is one hundred miles or more), you canât consider yourself in love. Kate tried to be nonchalantâMichael had been mostly a pain in the ass anyway, schlepping home from some womanâs apartment with a camellia for Kate, his confessions so detailed he seemed not so much penitent as nostalgic. He had invited her to come to New York with him, but so halfheartedly it would have seemed importunate to accept.
Even in the light of the evening snow, Chiverton was a dingy town, whose tinseled storefronts still displayed the galoshes and baby dolls no one wanted last year. Three blocks east and Kate would be home; three more and the town subsided into fields until the valley sloped up into the hills again. The wreath on the door of The Shamrock, where Michael once played three nights a week, obscured most of the neon Schlitz sign, and Kate peered through the letters, thinking she might find Carson or someone else whoâd want to walk with her, but there were only a few kids playing Pac-Man. They spent all their aimless force on the machines, unconcerned with the snow, which sifted through the pools of streetlight onto the little spruces along the sidewalk. Watching them, Kate knew she was absolutely lucky to be here, alone, in a red scarf. Carson would say she was feeling negative ions rather than joy, but the snow tumbled freely out of the pure blue above; science had nothing to do
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