Where was Declan? Had he gone to buy the tickets? Was it already the season for the cabin and the red-and-white-checked tablecloth and chicken salad and watermelon? Edith scanned the little vendor windows, their gratings’ gilded curlicues familiar, the counters still marble. That, at least. But his shape was nowhere, and the shoes on her feet had two strange straps that did not buckle, that just stayed somehow. Her elbows had pasty folds and the skin on her hands looked as if it would tear. Not one of them was someone she could imagine knowing!
And then she was or had been yelling “Declan,” but she had stopped because he always said if they lost each other in an urban sea to root herself just like a tree. She looked through the glass at the moving dark tunnel and knew many truths about her life at once: that Jenny practicing spelling on the kitchen table while she steamed spinach was what she liked best, that when she sat upright in her wooden school desk she could feel the sixteen-year-old boy behind her thinking of undoing the button at the back of her neck, that she liked math for its clear-cut authority and always found test days reassuring. That her father liked to braid her hair when the chores were done and the chairs were on the porch with their familiar groan and the smell of biscuits drifted outside. That when she was particularly well behaved her mother would place her on her lap, let Edith steer the big round leather wheel and look through the windshield at the people lining up for the matinee under the marquee the town got together to pay for.
But then there was a new set of competing facts: This train moving fast. The woman next to her, with a cloth over her breast, nursing a baby of indeterminable gender. And the sounds that must be coming from her body, words that didn’t come together in the way she needed them to, where and stop and Declan and Jenny and Declan and stop. The mother of the baby had vanished and there were several faces around her asking, asking, asking, and Edith said, “You fucking people, I don’t know any of you fucking people, not one.” Later, in the back of a police car, made frightened by the cage that divided front and back, she practiced a small form of weeping, determined to keep any more of herself from them. When they pulled up at the brownstone she and Declan had bought to fill with their life and future, they insisted on walking her in. She flinched at the policeman’s light touch on her elbow, thanked God and heaven none of her tenants were descending the stairs. When she went to retrieve her keys, she saw that the hands that couldn’t be hers were reluctant as abused animals, and the broad-shouldered policeman moved to place the brass in the lock and she hissed, “I don’t need your help.” Finally in her chair, the scalloped velvet worn in the seat and arms, she rocked a little, but the motion didn’t soothe. She waited to recognize the place around her, the room growing dark as a well, her life crouching somewhere nearby, hiding from her.
ADELEINE RARELY CONSIDERED the ventures at which she had failed in the days when she was able to leave the house, and instead threw herself into the task at hand every day, grateful for any paycheck.
She had met the woman by the 59th Street entrance to the park, by the swan pond and the stone bridge that arched over the passing reflections of families, the New York Adeleine felt she could still love. Settled on a bench in the fading autumn light, which appeared to stir its colors in protest of evening advancing, Adeleine had wished for the winter, which would forgive her, cradle all her could-nots. The woman at the other end of the painted green planks snuck glances periodically before finally remarking on the rarity of Adeleine’s hat, dark blue felt with a netted veil that hung over her face and fluttered like a hesitant wing when she sighed.
“I used to have one just like that,” said the woman. “In fact, my father was a milliner. One of the largest in New York.”
“That must have been wonderful,” said Adeleine, “watching someone you love make beautiful things with his hands. I often think if I’d had more of that, I’d be someone else.”