a clear midnight

The sun rises by four just as we have found our way to becoming a slack pair of spoons. I can see the sky through my closed eyelids, pressing past the curtains and the balcony. The trucks are rumbling along the river. Teenagers are still out in mufflerless cars screaming and careening down the highway with throaty approaches that drift off, leaving us back to our pillows.

N turns, dragging my arm across her shoulder. The bed jiggles a bit, like the soft wet yolk in the center of a sunny side up egg.

The sheets are twisted around our hips. N's breathing is steady, calm. I smell the burnt toast smell of diesel exhaust. I hear the bark of the neighbor's tiny dogs. 

I stare at the ceiling.

I can remember a million things at this hour. I can walk lucid through history in this half-light. 

The tv is on, a miniature black and white screen in beige plastic. It sits in the corner of the room. Outside, I can see the treetops, Garfield place, a seltzer man working his way down the block. Charlie Chan is on, solving mysteries in thirty minutes or less. I sit on the bare wood floor, legs crossed.

"Admitting failure like drinking bitter tea." He says.

I really want an ice cream.

I see E, but grown up now. She is tall, her hair long and wild. Laughing, taking photographs of a friend, she moves with a sort of grace I could never predict. The sun is low in the sky. We are by the ocean. I feel my toes in the sand but will not look down. If I do, this will all disappear. I stare at her, at her round cheeks, her giant eyes. This is my child. This is what she will look like someday. Her fingers are long, covered with cheap rings, a clump of necklaces on her neck. The light haired gypsy. 

I squeeze my eyes closed. It is six now, but looks like eleven.

The smell of oranges and lemongrass wash over me. I see nothing, just sense a warmth, maybe of smooth wood around me, heavy, oiled, massive. There are candles here I think. I hear the crackle of a fire. I am suddenly hungry for sour apples.

Sleep comes. N throws one of her legs across me, pressing against my side. I turn my face into the pillows. I try to match her breathing, to find her secret recipe. I rest my palm on the two dimples at the base of her spine. 

The bottom of her back is like a tiny ocean. 

she had freckles

Even in winter, she had freckles. More than handfuls, a constellation spread across her cheeks as she sat at the next desk her pencil held perfectly. Her small mouth has a constant half-open pucker, lips pressed forwards into the air a few millimeters closer to the chalkboard and our lesson.

Alexandra wore a very short green dress, a sort of jumper with yellow bric brack on the edges, Mary Janes, white socks. Her auburn hair in a soft bob edges flying in the air whenever I poked her, bothered her, disturbed her silence. She would turn to me, not angry like the other girls. 

No, Ali had grace.

I hounded her for years, hoping to secretly hold her hand in mine, maybe put my arm around her tiny shoulder or feel her warm breath on my ear as she whispered something wise or funny to me, only me.

I liked how she elongated words to make them her own.

“Yooouuuuuuuuuu.” She would say when I dropped a pencil to the floor or papers so I could mess up her socks or knock her desk crooked.

We took a field trip to a prison, the walls thick with layers of lime green paint. She stared at me once in the cel that afternoon.

A slow exchange beyond the simplicity of words. 

Two eight year olds scared out of their minds.

Later we ate our brown bag lunches on some grass the sun pushing through the Maple trees, splashing our legs with white light.

When we graduated she was already in a different class, already distant. Sixth grade ended with some free ice cream and a school bus full of crazy kids juiced up on sugar and chocolate, stinking of warm soda ripping our clip-on ties and shirts off, tearing our notebooks into shards of makeshift confetti, whipping papers in the air and out the windows.

I never saw her again.

She had freckles. More than handfuls, a constellation.


Ali E. 1968-2010

streetlight people

We stumbled upon a street festival in my old neighborhood, a steady drizzle dampening nothing but cockeyed rows of folding chairs. A handful of twelve year olds were tuning instruments and checking microphones. N looked at me knowing I would want to watch for at least a little while. Surrounded by excited parents we sat in the back and held hands. 

The perfume of grilled meat and smoke curled around us, crackling in the wet air. I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. If I still lived here this is exactly where I might be, I thought to myself. 

The band transitioned from tuning to thumping away, launching into the first song. Feedback howling, sound levels running wild, they kept playing. A scrawny girl with white sunglasses propped on her forehead and a sheepy boy in a tight leather jacket sang together.

Just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world 

She took the midnight train goin' anywhere 

Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit 

He took the midnight train goin' anywhere 

The drummer lost the beat completely as the song tumbled out, a spastic train on rubber band tracks. The girl stared out at the crowd, a smile plastered across her face. The boy grinned at her, one leg stomping out a rhythm for the two of them to follow. 

Strangers waiting
Up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searching in the night
Streetlight people
Living just to find emotion
Hiding somewhere in the night

A surge of feelings swarmed inside me. My stomach turned. I thought of E singing her heart out in the bathtub, in the street with me, on the playground. Everywhere. I thought about how she could be this skinny girl, singing in the rain on 5th street in the East Village. I thought of her banging away on a piano in an empty room, singing for her dolls. 

N squeezed my hand. She knew everything. I closed my eyes for some time. The cool, miniature drops of rain were collecting on my head, rolling down my cheeks and into my ears. 

The city was doing the crying today. 

Don't stop believin'
Hold on to that feelin'
Streetlight people

The song ended abruptly. The boy and girl struck poses as their parents went wild. 

Someone came out and talked for a while about the program. My stomach was empty. N looked at me, staring deep into my eyes. We rarely need to say certain things these days. Everything is understood.

I tried to call E, to hold my phone out to the music for her to hear what was going on. The phone was turned off in Moscow as it often is. 

The rain came down harder and we walked. 


We walked for miles, as lightning burst in the sky, as thunder rolled through the valley of Times Square, as the sky grew dark.

 

(we are all) Coney Island Babies

Leaving for the airport, we watched a few Tajiks ripping all of the lilacs down. They bundled them quickly in the late morning light with stoic faces, then shuffled down the street to sell them. 

This single act - one among millions, remains with me days later. The lack of respect or compassion or sense of space - all eclipsed by desperation, by greed, by absolute simplicity. I remember their faces. If you ask me, they have no souls. 

We try to enter the cathedral on 93rd street just off of Central Park. No one answers the door bell. I look up at the vaulted ceilings through the windows, seeing the angels behind the reflections of the city. I remember the crisp white hallways, the string of rooms connected by great staircases all too well.

I brought E here in a sling when she was little. I stood in services with incense swirling around me, crying. This was the place her mother told me she was taking her from me. Here, I burst into tears and a sweet man next to me took it for a religious epiphany. I found myself running outside to the sidewalk, my child grabbing at my fingers from inside the swath of fabric I carried her in. My imagination ran wild then. I was lost.

The second Russian cathedral a few blocks away is dark, foreboding. They answer the doorbell. N goes first, as we pass narrow hallways and then up a few stairs. The door opens onto the side of the great room. Only a handful of candles are burning, suggesting the ceiling, the walls, the balcony. You must imagine them in the dim light. We pay for some candles. She stands for some time. One for her grandmother who died on this day last year.

I stare at a strip of carpet running along the center of the room, a small dais. E was baptized here, screaming the whole time. She took a shit in her white dress after being dunked in the basin before there was time to get a diaper on her. She was angry that day.

A few months later, I was baptized by the same priest. I had to bring two white shirts, the first I would never wear again, the second still hangs in my closet. I saw a red bird flying through Central Park that day. A profound omen, I am told.

I became a cook in the kitchen in the basement for some time. While Sunday services went on, we paused occasionally to recognize a small icon in the corner of the room, then went back to peeling garlic, roasting peppers, chopping onions.

The D train rumbles along, shooting up from the darkness of the tunnel at one point. Here, graffiti creeps past the windows. Lush green vines hang low in the late morning light.

We are going to Coney Island to press our toes into the sand. N wears a little beach skirt and looks at Brooklyn for the first time, swishing past the windows in its early summer glory. There is no place in the world where peeling paint and crumbling bricks hold more emotion for me. Ancient signs, the smell of slow-cooked onions, the ramshackle rooftops littered with lawn chairs and hibachis. There is a magic disorder here, where balconies are piled on top of garages, where the makeshift has become permanent, where generations grew up playing in the street, where a pink Spalding was a real prize.

A string pulls inside me. I am sorry E only saw this place once, when she was one. She has no memory of it. I took her here for myself I guess, stood in front of Nathan's and promised to buy her a hotdog here someday, trotted along the boardwalk and told her "It's beautiful here in the wintertime, you know."

We are asleep within minutes, the sounds of the water lapping the shore, children laughing, and the boardwalk games all compressed into a tiny symphony. Maybe a lullaby. The sun is going behind the clouds, it is cold. N has goosebumps all of a sudden. Two different people might roll up their beach towels and go home. But we stay, shivering a bit, our hands touching, our heels digging into the warm sand.

I dream of Coney Island, the survivor of fires. Coney Island that never surrenders. Yes, some things have changed. In truth - a lot has changed. I pray it is here for E someday, to show her where she came from.