Then there are the Hassidim, mostly men, they’re allowed mobility more than their wives, she’s noticed. They’ve got places to go, people to see, while the women seem to have children to raise, maybe some grocery shopping here and there, shuffling around the neighborhood, but it’s the men who are free to fly throughout the city on short-term missions like homing pigeons, across the bridge and back again.
When Sarah sits behind them on the bus she stares at the backs of their heads, on occasion pulling out her sketch pad to draw them. She is mesmerized by the ruddiness of their skin, grubby stubble on the back of the neck and sometimes higher, how the folds of flesh (they are almost always overweight) bubbles over in layers on the collar of their shirt and jacket, like the lower part of her belly does onto her upper thighs after she has eaten too much pasta and drank too much wine. She has dozens of drawings like this, grainy black textures on heads of wavy pavement, all leading toward a stopping point, a block of black, the hat. Those thick black hats, conduits to their God, but also, she feels, protection from the world around them. They wear them to let everyone know they’re in a posse, don’t mess with them, because there are more, and they will take vengeance. Like gang colors, she mused. But there is only one color. Sometimes you only need one color.
3.
IT IS COLD. She blows on her hands to warm them, hugs her arms close around herself. She has been cold for days in her cursed sublet. There are three huge windows in the loft, and they face the East River, so early in the mornings and late at night the wind blows off the water and turns the apartment into a giant icebox. During the day it’s better. There’s sunlight, and it streams through the windows like a golden river.
4.
SARAH LEE goes where the sublets take her, she has for the last decade. Up and down the West Coast, starting in her undergraduate days at art school in Oregon, and then back up north to Seattle, down to Eugene, wherever she could find work, mostly as a seamstress, and a quick-and-easy furnished place to live. Everything she owns she could fit in a few boxes with the exception of her sewing machine and her sketchbooks and other artwork, much of which she still keeps in three storage units outside Portland. (Besides her cell phone, that’s her only regular bill for 387 a month. Everything else she pays up front.) She briefly lived with a man in Mendocino, a hearty crabber who had moved down from Alaska, for one lost summer of love, but when winter came and he headed back to work, he told her she’d need to move on or start picking up the rent herself. He’d be on his boat most of the time, and even though he’d be back on occasion, he didn’t anticipate wanting to see her.
“I can’t just have you staying here for no reason, can I?”
Why not? she thought. Why can’t you take care of me?
Good for the summer, but not for the year. She’d heard it before.
She didn’t mind this life at all, she liked the freedom, of course, but sometimes she thought about settling down in one place. She didn’t even have a plant. She took care of other people’s plants awfully well. Maybe if she had her own it would grow twenty feet high like in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” If she had the time she could make things flourish. If she had the space.
But sublets were so simple. She didn’t need to do a credit check, most of her moves were through word of mouth, so the references were covered, and she often didn’t need to put a deposit down. The rent was never exorbitant—most folks just wanted someone who would take care of their stuff, their animals, their plants, their record collections, who would somehow even leave their house better than when they left it. Sarah sometimes stitched up tears in blankets, or sewed loose buttons back onto shirts or coats. She had hemmed a few curtains. Simple, easy fixes. Her references came easily. And then there was always someone who needed to sublet a new place. There was always someone on the go, waiting for a reliable young woman like Sarah Lee.