Alternate Side(38)
“Good morning, Mrs. Pearl,” he said. “Nice morning.”
“It’s fucking freezing,” Bebe said, pulling her mink coat tighter around her midsection.
“Don’t you ever take a snow day?” Nora had said to Phil when she got to the office.
“I’ve got all-wheel drive,” he said.
“How did you wind up doing this in the first place?”
“Ah, you know—like most things, it was a confluence of events,” he said.
“A confluence of events?”
“What, because you’re homeless you have to be stupid?”
“But you’re not homeless. You have a home.”
“Maybe I have a home because I do this.” He grinned. “You gotta love a country where there are rules for being poor, and rich people make them.”
“I’m not a rich person,” Nora said.
“I’m inclined to take your word for that,” he said. “You’re one of the only regulars who makes eye contact. Even a lot of the people who give me money won’t make eye contact.”
“So what was the confluence?”
“A divorce, the economic downturn. Some medical issues. A problem with alcohol. I got it together, but it took a couple of years. When I first started, I was more, you know…like you think I ought to be.”
“That makes me sound terrible.”
“Nah, you’re okay. Like I said, eye contact. Plus, like, right now, you’re having normal conversation.”
“Don’t you ever consider…”
“What? I sit on the sidewalk with a sign. Maybe you think it’s humiliating, but it’s only humiliating if I feel humiliated, and I don’t. What did Eleanor Roosevelt say? ‘No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.’ And, by the way, everything on the sign is true.”
“?‘Need something to eat?’?”
“Hey, everybody needs something to eat. What about you? Don’t you need something to eat? You walk all the way downtown in this cold?”
Nora had. The garbage in the gutters was frozen into agonized attitudes as though the Cheez-It bags and drinking straws had died of hypothermia. Even George’s pugs stayed indoors in this weather, allowed to relieve themselves in the backyard because George insisted that they suffered terribly from the road salt that got into the tender creases of their paws. But still Nora walked, waiting for the cold to weaken and wane. When the weather warmed she would resent the bicyclists who suddenly reappeared, the runners who had been inside on treadmills while her earlobes were anesthetized by cold. But she always noticed that when the temperature warmed, she lived in the world more surely, looking at the buildings and the people around her. As soon as the winter wind began to blow up the Hudson corridor, her head went down and her shoulders up. It was not something she noticed, really, until she felt her body unclench sometime in March, although, this being New York City, people had even begun to pathologize the phenomenon. “He suffers from terrible seasonal affective disorder,” a woman had said about her husband, who was a poet and thus assumed to have enhanced sensitivities. (“He’s a pain in the ass even in June,” said Jenny when Nora mentioned the exchange.)
In the meantime she bought one pair of gloves after another, slapping her hands together as she came down the block to restore feelings to her fingers, seeing Linda at the corner in a gray coat waiting for a cab, wondering where Sherry was and whether she was away or simply avoiding the rest of them. There was an odd disconnect between their professional selves, in dress shoes and tailored jackets, and their everyday selves on the block. Those selves were the great equalizers, just men and women in sweatshirts wondering why the recycling guys always spilled half the plastics on the street, who it was who persistently refused to properly bag their garbage. (George had once said he would mount a spy camera, but either he hadn’t done it, it hadn’t worked, or he hadn’t caught the culprit.) They could have been anything: German professors, nephrologists, sculptors. Nora had discovered that Linda was a judge not during conversation at the holiday party or on the street while walking their dogs, but by reading a story about a sentencing in one of the tabloids. She was certain she had once had a conversation with Linda about getting out of jury duty, but Linda had in no way suggested at the time that there was anything wrong with that. It was as though each of them was two people, at a minimum. Once Nora had hypothesized jokingly that Alma Fenstermacher was a CIA operative. “If so, it’s the best cover I’ve seen yet,” said Sherry Fisk.
“Yet?” Nora had yelped.
All that was quite different from her own parents, who each was only ever a single person, as far as she could tell. Her mother was always a Connecticut housewife, partial to bridge parties and celery with cream cheese filling to serve at them, and her father, when at home, was not a different man from his work self but simply waiting to be that self again, like a windup doll whose key had been removed from its back. When his appendix had burst, he was confined to his bedroom for a week after he left the hospital, and Nora and Christine hurried by the half-closed door as though, if they raised their heads, they would see something shameful: Douglas Benson in pajamas on a Tuesday afternoon.
Their mother had always seemed to think of being a mother as a kind of pastime, like bridge or tennis. Most nights at dinner she asked them to describe the best thing about their day, and most mornings at breakfast she paged through their copybooks, although it was not clear what she was looking for except for conspicuous misspellings, which had to be erased and corrected on the spot. But sometimes when she was reading a magazine in the living room in the afternoon and they appeared, she would look up with a faintly puzzled expression on her face, as though they were neighbors she’d invited for coffee and then forgotten about.