Park Lane South, Queens

Claire gulped down her coffee, paid, and staggered into the street. There was no reason for her to feel depressed and so she wouldn’t. She’d find something to shoot, by golly. Looking at the filthy gutter, she was surprised at how improbable that prospect seemed. Nothing romantic there. Just like any other dirty place the world over. Impatiently, she walked up the avenue, past her father’s still-unopened hardware store, past Gebhard’s Bakery and its buttery smells, when she happened to catch her whole profile in the store window. She’d never seen anything like it. Not on her. But this was her mother’s silhouette, not her own! She sucked in her gut and kneaded the inch of new blubber that encircled her waist. All these American delicacies. Claire remembered herself, not too long ago, eating everything she wanted, everything in sight, really, and never putting on a pound. Her models used to watch her enviously as she’d polish off the remains of their pasta. Well, those days were gone, it seemed. She was back in Queens with no real money, no real plan, and a very real belly. She stopped suddenly and wondered if this was it? The doubts that had haunted her throughout her life … was this to be the realization of them?

In Europe, during her jetsetting years, she’d always thought, oh, if only she could get away from the superficiality of her life, the whole frivolous life-style, and find a quiet place, a gentle place where she could meditate and become herself, everything would be all right. Then, when she finally had made the break and found herself in the Himalayas, there were moments when she would fathom that that was all nonsense, too, all of it, from the filthy Europeans traipsing downheartedly off to their gurus to the gurus themselves. Trying so hard not to try. And she’d thought that what she really should do was go home, back to her parents and Queens and all the things she’d tried so hard to leave behind. If she could just get back there and make an honest life for herself in the place she was put on earth to surface out of, she might put some order to the chaos. She even thought she’d get back here and all the inspiration would miraculously fall into place. Well, here she was, and what if her fears proved true afterall? What if there was only so much she had had to give and it was already gone? Perhaps she just should have moved to the city. There is a certain solid difference between Manhattan crazy people and Queens crazy people and 111th Street had a few perfect specimens of these walking up and down it. Here, if the old folks talked to themselves they would do it under their breaths, not out loud like in the city. And they didn’t wear glamorous cast offs worn to shreds. These people had bought their own clothes with their very own pension checks and they wore them with a differential smugness, hunched into twelve-year-old shiny polyester shirts … old white people who found it cheaper to eat out (six rolls in a basket and crackers) and certainly easier than waiting on long lines at Key Food. Everybody hated Key Food—the confusion, the fluorescent lights, the unsatisfiable hunger it emptied into you, and the waxed, unbelievable fruits plump with gas that left you with nothing more than mealy tongue.

No, let’s face it. You couldn’t beat where you were from if you were after sorting yourself out, untangling the web of who you were, beneath the influence of all the world. Hadn’t Swamiji told her just that when he’d seen her off at the bus depot? They’d sat together and scarfed down three or four masala dosa between them. Swami had licked his fingers and bobbed his head this way and that with pleasure and they’d both drunk still another nice black tea. It had struck her as so absurd to see him sitting there in the dusty hubbub after the tinkling quiet of his small walled garden, but then he was a very unusual swami, not megalomaniac at all like the others she’d investigated. He was a good little swami. Kind. A little bit of St. Francis what with all the broken down animals he had recovering at the ashram. Which is what might have accounted for his lack of popularity with the Western truth seekers. They tended to go more for the well-swept ashrams. No, he was not grand at all except for deep in his heart. Rather a catholic sort of swami, if one looked at it in the old Mediterranean way. Gee, she missed her dear, smelly little fellow with his magical eyes. She wondered what he’d make of the murder. “Well, well,” he would say, “veddy bad. But would it be better if we did not know about it? No. Certainly not. And if we know, must we not do something about it? Certainly. If only to pray. Well, well. And so we shall pray.”

Mary Anne Kelly's books