Alternate Side(20)
In the baby carrier was George’s newest rescue pug, who stared balefully at Nora with its bug eyes. Nora thought all pugs looked baleful.
“She’s got an issue with anxiety,” George said, looking down at the dog “The vet thought this might help.”
“Really?” said Linda. One word, and Linda could effortlessly communicate skepticism and contempt. She must be hell on feckless lawyers.
“If George upsets Ricky, I will snatch him bald-headed,” Linda muttered as he walked away.
“That is an expression I haven’t heard in years.”
“I’ve always thought it was a good one. I wish there was a way I could use it in court,” Linda said, a cab pulling up next to her. “Share?”
“I’m walking,” Nora said.
Nora walked to work nearly every morning, and had for years. People always acted as though it had to do with staying fit, but the fact was she found it an almost spiritual exercise. When Nora was nine her mother had brought her in on the train for lunch and the Christmas show at Radio City. They had stepped out of Grand Central onto the street and Nora had turned to look up at the fa?ade, and the statue of Mercury perched at the center of the roofline seemed to be looking back toward her. When they got home her mother had slipped off her black pumps in the living room, an angry red line encircling her narrow insteps, and breathed, “I am exhausted,” before she went upstairs. Nora had never felt more alive in her life.
She’d never been entirely sure of what to do with herself. She had had a poem in the high school literary magazine, but then she had submitted two short stories and the poem to a legendary seminar at college and gotten them back with “NA” on the front. Not accepted, not good enough. She had taken a prep course for the law boards but her mind kept wandering, and she felt as though graduate school would take forever. The one thing she had always been certain of was that she wanted to move to New York after college, and she had.
That had been a different New York, different from the one she had visited that first time with her mother. Nearly all of the people on the block had come to the city just as it was digging itself out of a deep hole of insolvency and crime. Yet they had wanted desperately to come there nonetheless, despite the need to hold keys thrust between their fingers as makeshift weapons, the need to have a blood test after a night of so-so sex. Then, slowly over the last two decades, New York had become safe, cleaner, and then impossible for anyone who didn’t have a lot of money. Times Square, once a tattered circus sideshow of women in hot pants and plastic heels selling themselves cheap, of hunched, half-crazy homeless guys pushing leaflets for peep shows, of all-hours coffee shops that served pancakes to junkies at three in the morning, was now a fever dream of neon and virtual-reality billboards, so thick with tourists that New Yorkers avoided it at all costs. The city had become like that edgy girl in college, all wild hacked hair and leather, who showed up at reunion with a blow-dried bob and a little black dress, her nose-piercing closed up as though it had never existed.
All this had made the future seem impossibly out of reach for the young. During the summer she and Rachel had driven to a spa in Massachusetts for massages and nature hikes, and that night she had let Rachel have a glass of wine with dinner. It had loosened the floodgates of late adolescence. “Sometimes I’m really afraid,” her daughter said, her cheeks pink from either the rejuvenating facial or the Chardonnay.
“Oh, honey, of what?” Nora asked.
“Of not succeeding and not making you and Daddy proud of me,” she said, her eyes filling.
“We’re proud of you no matter what you do.”
“Mom, honestly, I hate it when you say that. It’s like those trophies everybody used to get at day camp for just showing up. You don’t want someone to be proud of you for nothing. You want them to be proud of you for actually doing something to be proud of.”
Next morning Rachel had been her usual self, making faces all through barre class and insisting that having her armpits waxed had to be more painful than natural childbirth. “If I have kids I’m taking the drugs,” Rachel said.
“It’s a labor of love,” Nora said.
“Spare me,” said Rachel, but she leaned in and kissed her mother as she said it.
Nora’s walk to work was a kind of labor of love, too, of that love for the city that occasionally wavered or dimmed but had never gone away. She tended to see always the same people, the Sikh bicyclist with his two small children in a seat on the back, the man who ran while nonchalantly juggling three fluorescent green tennis balls. It was as though they all knew one another without knowing anything about one another, so that if for a week or two Tennis Ball Man did not appear Nora would find herself wondering if he was on vacation, or had moved to another neighborhood, or something worse, a broken hip, a heart attack.
Change was the leitmotif of New York, and yet there was an unvarying fabric for most New Yorkers. At the halfway point of her walk Nora almost always passed the old woman who threw pieces of baguette into the water for the geese and the gulls. Sometimes she wondered about the genesis of those baguettes, perhaps delivered too late for the restaurant’s dinner rush because of traffic, cannibalized in part for croutons and bread pudding, the rest junked in the dumpster and rescued by the old woman and loaded into the wire cart she always pushed. Or maybe, Nora thought, the woman was someone with a nice pension and no relations who spent all her disposable income on bread for birds. Nora said good morning to her every day. The woman always ignored her.