This time, the young girl, a Puerto Rican, stepped out of a vestibule on 127th. Alone. A swagger to her. Shadows from a fire escape crisscrossing her. She held a knife in under her own chin. A drugged-out shine to her eyes. I had seen that look before: if she didn’t slice me she’d slice herself. Her eyelids were painted bright silver.
“The world’s bad enough,” I said to her, using my church tone, but she just pointed the blade of the knife at me.
“Give me your fucking bag.”
“It’s a sin to make it worse than it is.”
She looped the handbag on the blade of the knife. “Pockets,” she said.
“You don’t have to do this.”
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” she said, and pulled the handbag high on her elbow. It was as if she already knew from the weight that there was nothing inside but a handkerchief and some photographs. Then, swiftly, she leaned forward with the knife and sliced open the side pocket of my dress. The knife blade ran against my hip. My purse, my license, and two more photos of my boys were kept inside the pocket. She sliced open the second side.
“Fat bitch,” she said as she walked around the corner.
The street throbbed around me. Nobody’s fault but my own. The bark of a dog flew by. I pondered the notion that I had nothing to lose anymore, that I should follow her, rip the empty handbag from her, rescue my old self. It was the photographs that bothered me the most. I went to the corner. She was already far down the street. The photos were scattered in a line down the pavement. I stooped and picked up what remained of my boys. I caught the eye of a woman, older than me, peeping out the window. She was framed by the rotting wood. The sill was lined with plaster saints and a few artificial flowers. I would have swapped my life for hers at that moment, but she closed the window and turned away. I propped the empty white handbag against the stoop and walked on without it. She could have it. Take it all, except the photos.
I stuck out my hand and a gypsy cab stopped immediately. I slid into the backseat. He adjusted his rearview mirror.
“Yeah?” he said, drumming away on the steering wheel.
Try measuring certain days on a weighing scale.
“Hey, lady,” he shouted. “Where you going?”
Try measuring them.
“Seventy-sixth and Park,” I said.
I had no idea why. Certain things we just can’t explain. I could just as easily have gone home: I had enough money tucked away under my mattress to pay for the cab fare ten times over. And the Bronx was closer than Claire’s house, that I knew. But we wove into the traffic. I didn’t ask the driver to turn around. The dread rose in me as the streets clicked by.
The doorman buzzed her and she ran down the stairs, came right out and paid the cab driver. She glanced down at my feet — a little barrier of blood had bubbled up over the edge of my heel, and the pocket of my dress was torn — and something turned in her, some key, her face grew soft. She said my name and discomforted me a moment. Her arm went around me and she took me straight up in the elevator, down the corridor towards her bedroom. The curtains were drawn. A deep scent of cigarettes came from her, mixed with fresh perfume. “Here,” she said as if it was the only place in the world. I sat on the clean unrumpled linen as she ran the bath. The splash of water. “You poor thing,” she called. There was a smell of perfumed salts in the air.
I could see my reflection in the bedroom mirror. My face looked puffed and worn. She was saying something, but her voice got caught up in the noise of the water.
The other side of the bed was dented. So, she had been lying down, maybe crying. I felt like flopping down into her imprint, making it three times the size. The door opened slowly. Claire stood there smiling. “We’ll get you right,” she said. She came to the edge of the bed, took my elbow, led me into the bathroom, sat me on a wooden stool by the bath. She leaned over and tested the warmth of the water with her knuckle. I unrolled the hose from my legs. Bits of skin came off my feet. I sat at the edge of the bath and swung my legs across. The water stung. The blood slid from my feet. Some vanishing sunset, the red glow dispersing in the water.
Claire laid a white towel out in the middle of the bathroom floor, at my feet. She handed me some sticky bandages, the back paper already peeled off. I couldn’t help the thought that she wanted to dry my feet with her hair.
“I’m okay, Claire,” I told her.
“What did they steal?”
“Only my handbag.”
I felt charged with dread: she might think that all I wanted was the money she had offered me earlier to stay, to get my reward, my slave purse.
“There was no money in it.”
“We’ll call the police anyway.”
“The police?”
“Why not?”
“Claire…”
She looked at me blankly and then an understanding traveled across her eyes. People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don’t. There’s no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self.
I bent down and put the bandages on the backs of my heels. They weren’t quite wide enough for the cut. I could already feel the sharp sting of having to take them off later.
“You know the worst of it?” I said.
“What?”
“She called me fat.”
“Oh, Gloria. I’m sorry.”
“It’s your fault, Claire.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s your fault.”
“Oh,” she said, a tremble of nerves in her voice.
“I told you I shouldn’t’ve had those extra doughnuts.”
“Oh!”
She threw her head back until her neck was taut, and reached out to touch my hand.
“Gloria,” she said. “Next time it’s bread and water.”
“Maybe a little pastry.”
I leaned down to towel my toes. Her hand drifted to my shoulder, but then she rose and said: “You need slippers.”
She rummaged in the closet for a pair of felt slippers for me and a dressing gown that must’ve belonged to her husband since her own wouldn’t have fit me. I shook my head, and hung the gown on a hook on the door. “No offense,” I said. I could live in my torn dress. She guided me into the living room. None of the plates or cups had been cleared from earlier. A bottle of gin sat in the center of the table. More emptiness than gin in the bottle. Ice was melting in a bowl. Claire was using the lemons we had cut instead of limes. She held the bottle high in the air and shrugged. Without asking she took out a second glass. “Excuse my fingers,” she said as she dropped ice into the glass.
It had been years since I’d had a drink. It felt cool at the back of my throat. Nothing mattered but that momentary taste.
“God, that’s good.”
“Sometimes it’s a cure,” she said.
Sunlight shone through Claire’s glass. It caught the color of lemon and the glass turned in her hands. She looked like she was weighing the world. She leaned back against the white of the couch and said: “Gloria?”
“Uh-huh?”
She looked away, over my head, to a painting in the corner of the room.
“The truth?”
“The truth.”
“I don’t normally drink, you know. It’s just today, with, you know, all that talking. I think I made a bit of a fool of myself.”
“You were fine.”
“I wasn’t silly?”
“You were fine, Claire.”
“I hate making a fool of myself.”
“You didn’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”