Tonight the Streets Are Ours

“But tonight is the only time that you’ll have me here to talk to in person. And I’m a lot more useful in person than I am reading your journal over the Internet. So, talk.”


“I don’t know,” Peter says.

“Peter, even if you can’t win her back, you’ll find another girl. Somebody who can be happy for you when your dreams come true.”

Peter grins. “Because I’m a catch?”

“Exactly.”

The smile fades off his face as he says, “I don’t understand how she can do this to me. I don’t understand how anyone is capable of just leaving someone they love. Unless they didn’t really love them in the first place.”

Arden opens her mouth to agree with him, but then she doesn’t. “I don’t know,” she says instead. “I just left Lindsey. And that’s not because I never loved her in the first place.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean you,” Peter reassures her.

But maybe he should mean her. Maybe she has just done something that Peter can’t understand, because even she can’t quite understand it. She’s never done anything like that before. All she knows is that she doesn’t regret it.

She wonders if this is how her mother felt when she walked away. This terrifying freedom. She has no one to report to. Nobody needs her. Nobody knows where she is. She can do whatever she wants right now.

And she realizes that she doesn’t even know what she wants to do.

She thinks again of her mother’s letter, those words that clutter her brain against her will. I only knew who I was in relation to somebody else. For years I was somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, somebody’s friend, somebody’s daughter. And for once, I wanted to be somebody for myself. Arden has a flash of understanding this because tonight, for the first time in her memory, she is being somebody for herself.

They come to a complicated intersection, with a half dozen different streets converging around a small patch of land that has an enormous cube-shaped metal sculpture in its center. “What’s that?” Arden asks, pointing at the cube, which is balancing on one of its eight corners.

“It’s a sculpture,” Peter explains. “It’s been here my whole life. Come on, let me show you something cool.”

She nods, and he leads the way across all the lanes of traffic. Cars swerve around them, every one of them honking, but somehow they make it to the traffic island still alive.

Up close, the cube looks even bigger than it did from across the street. Arden’s head barely reaches the lower corners. There’s a man who looks to be homeless lying down under a gray blanket on one side of the cube’s base, and on the other side three punk kids with green Mohawks and safety pins through their lips are sitting and sharing a bag of French fries.

“Excuse me,” Peter loudly addresses the crowd. Arden reflects on how much he’s had to drink and wonders whether he declaims at strangers when he’s not full of whiskey.

The three punks look at him with evident hostility. The homeless man doesn’t even muster up that much of a response. Arden wonders if the cool thing she is about to witness is Peter getting punched in the face. She hopes not. His is a face that deserves better than a punch.

“Arden here has never been to our city before,” Peter goes on. He pauses, as if waiting for the strangers to say Welcome, Arden! They do not. He continues. “So, since this is her first time, she’s never seen what this cube can do. Would you mind standing up, all of you, so that I can show her?”

For a moment nobody moves.

“I really don’t want to step on you,” Peter adds.

The girl punk shrugs. “What the hell.” She gets up, moves away from the cube, and stands there with her arms crossed, ready to return to her post the instant she’s granted permission. Once she’s up, her two friends join her, and, observing that he is the only holdout, the homeless man heaves a weary sigh and also moves aside.