Alternate Side(33)

One day Nora stopped in front of Phil, the faux-homeless man, who had a new sign: NO ROOM AT THE INN. MERRY XMAS.

“You are completely shameless,” she said, and he grinned.

“Come on—I’m creative, admit it,” he said.

“Does it help?”

“Hard to tell,” he said, blowing his nose. “Everybody says you take in more between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

“The holiday spirit,” Nora said.

“Guilt,” Phil said.

“You know there’s a man at the other end of the block now?” Nora said.

“Yeah, I know. It’s fine.”

“Is he a real homeless person?”

“If you mean does he live in a shelter, then, yeah. If you mean does he spend all the money he makes on booze, that, too. If you mean that you would prefer that I be that kind of guy, I’ll pass. You have to ask yourself why you care about that so much.”

“Authenticity?” Nora said.

Phil snorted. “We’re in New York,” he said. “You want authenticity, move to Des Moines.”

“You think people are more authentic in Iowa?”

“Nah, not really. That’s just one of the things we tell ourselves, right?”

Nora looked up the block. The man at the far corner looked like a pile of old clothes someone had put out for the trash. You could scarcely tell that there was a person inside the heap of sweatpants, flannel shirts, jackets, and hats. “He’s going to freeze to death,” she said. Nora looked up at the sky, which was the color of an old T-shirt, the kind Charity turned into a cloth to oil the furniture. Looking up at the sky was an effort. You had to search for an opening—cranes, water towers, high-rises, cornices…ah, there it was.

“It’s not really that cold yet,” Phil said, “and he’s got a good down jacket. It has a little rip in it but he put some duct tape over it. You people throw out a lot of good stuff.”

“You people?”

“Yep.”

Charity thought the same. Twice a year she muttered about how crowded the basement was getting, barely room for a person to move, hard to iron things right. This was Nora’s cue to stack up clothes that were no longer needed, usually hers, usually because they had been a mistake in the first place. She often wound up wondering why she ever thought she would wear something pink, or pale blue. It was as though, from time to time, she imagined herself a completely different person, not who she really was, in her black and occasional gray. Even her dog was black and gray, with the dolor relieved by the odd patch of white. She had always been the same weight, a little slender, a little hippy, so that her blouses were a size smaller than her pants, and she had worn her hair the same way for three decades, shoulder-length, cut blunt, ponytail or bun. Once, years ago, she had gotten a shorter, layered cut, and when she went to pick Rachel up at school Rachel had burst into tears. She never made that mistake again but she somehow continued to buy clothing from time to time that would have been perfect for someone else living somewhere else, somewhere where people wore pastels.

Charity took these misguided purchases to her church, which apparently was unusually active during Christmas week, and where apparently everyone loved a lively yellow or a horizontal stripe. Charity was agnostic about most holidays, even Thanksgiving, but she always took off the last two weeks of December. Before she left she would bring them two of her traditional fruitcakes, which had been percolating in a closet somewhere in her apartment for the entire year, the process of making them beginning as soon as the preceding Christmas celebration was done. Once a month, a jigger of rum was poured atop and then the cake put back into hibernation, and while Charity insisted that the alcohol “got gone fast,” as she liked to put it, the aroma of the cakes was so strong that once they arrived, the kitchen smelled like a tiki bar for a week. The great Christmas lecture the Nolans had had to give their children, along with the warning that if they revealed to their younger cousins there was no Santa there would be terrible consequences, was that they had to tell Charity how good the fruitcake was, although after the first year, when Charlie and Nora had tasted it and spit it back onto their plates, it had gone directly into the garbage disposal. Not the garbage, since Nora invested Charity with magical powers and believed she would be bound to find the garbage bag with the cake inside.

“What if we brought the fruitcake to the Fenstermachers’?” Charlie had said the first time they were invited to the holiday party across the street, and Nora had said, “Are you insane?” Now every year he said it as a joke.

“And so another year has come and gone,” Alma said, standing at the foot of the mahogany banister in a green velvet dress with a bejeweled holly brooch on one shoulder, opening her arms. Her hair was always freshly done in a style that hadn’t been popular for thirty years and yet looked fine on Alma. Nora’s mother had had an expression: “She looks like she just stepped out of a bandbox.” Nora did not know then and had never learned since what a bandbox was, but she was certain Alma looked like she’d just stepped out of one.

It was funny, how different it was seeing people you saw every day on the sidewalk at a party instead. There were air kisses, some one cheek, some two. People who had grown up in Kansas City greeted one another in New York as though they were Parisian. There was even a man in Charlie’s firm who kissed three times: cheek, other cheek, original cheek. You never knew what you were going to get.