October 22 - I come from luxury

The woman’s body camouflaged so well against the brown-sided building that at first you didn’t see her. At first. Her clothes were the same brown, her hair, too, and this last so thick and matted it matched her wool sweater. But once you noticed her, you couldn’t stop, because the woman was hideous. What might have once been her features were now hidden under wrinkles and crevices so deep they looked like fabric pleats on her face. Her lips were nearly white, her eyes too, the small blue irises shrunk to a clear, milky foam. Her back was bent so she stood nearly doubled over, like a man caught by a stomach pain, a woman by a contraction, and all day she stood there, blending into the building and coughing out to the unnoticing passers-by: “Spare change? Spare change?”

Once you noticed her there, you couldn’t stop noticing; you tripped on your way past her, telling yourself it was from the uneven sidewalk, knowing really it was from guilt because you didn’t reach into your pocket for a spare dime, a dollar bill. Because of course any one of us walking past could have heeded her plea; don’t we always have pennies that annoy us more than they help us, longing to get rid of them, sprinkling them like candy over the check at a café as an extra tip for the server, not out of any magnanimity but because they annoy us when the clink in our pockets, or fall out on the floor when we undress at night, or end up on the bottom of the washing machine and create a tinny dissonance? So I cringed whenever I walked past her, because I could spare change, but I didn’t, thinking to myself, “My three pennies won’t make a difference,” or “I’m in a rush; I’d stop if I wasn’t hurrying off to meet so-and-so,” or simply just telling myself, “Next time.”

Next time. Next time. Summer isn’t so bad, because she is warm against her brick-sided building there, and people feel good about themselves in the summer, so they’re a bit happier to drop a penny into her open palm – careful not to touch her grimy flesh, their fingers twitching involuntarily away from her blackened fingernails – which meant I didn’t have to feel as culpable if I wasn’t that person. Fall isn’t bad, because the air is still crisp and her sweater looks warm. Winter. Winter hurts to walk past, but I’m so cold with my chin muffled in my scarf and my gloved hands shoved in my pockets, so who has time to fish for frozen pennies on a frozen sidewalk for the woman who has stood there every day as long as I have lived in the neighborhood coughing out, “Spare change? Spare change?” Her cough sounds a little bit harsher, now, in the January wind.

Spring, and I feel that added spring to my step, the one that comes on the first warm day, that says, “Hey, maybe I’ll meet the love of my life in a bar tonight! Someone to grow old and comfortable with, snuggling under a blanket on a cold night, and walking around hand-in-hand on the first warm day of spring like this one.” I cross from one sidewalk curb to the next, think about whistling, but before I can purse my lips I hear that rasp coming from about chest height, and only then do my eyes make out the indistinct human body that stands against the wall. I have been in such a good mood that I have almost not noticed her, for the first time in months.

“Spare change? Spare change?” she wheezes.

And I stop. I fish in my pocket and come up with a quarter, two dimes, and four pennies. Would it buy her anything? How much did she get in a day? Enough for a slice of pizza, a place to sleep? Or did she stand here even in the dead of night? I shudder.

“Here you go, ma’am,” I say, doing like everyone else, dropping the coins like her palm was a wishing well, and I don’t want to get my fingertips wet. Her fingers snap around the coins convulsively and I start to walk away but she lifts her head.

“Thank you,” she says, the first time I’ve ever heard her say anything different, her milky blue eyes boring into my own. I nod, frozen there.

“I’m sorry it’s not much,” I falter. Suddenly I feel like a tight-wad. I can feel the twenty dollar bill in my wallet. “I hope it helps.”

She makes a sound that might be laughter. “I come from luxury, you know.” I shake my head; I don’t know. “Oh yes, luxury, that was my childhood. I had a pony, we had teatime every afternoon at four, my parents lunched at the country club in town, and our summers were spent at a second house on the shore.” She lets out another, croaking chuckle. “Not as fine a summer cottage as the Rockefellers, mind you, but my father had done well.” The blue eyes became the sea she had left behind. “Well, first my father lost it all in the market crash. My parents tried to make do, but I could tell it was hard to feed five mouths and I was the oldest, so I ran away from home. To the City.” I could hear the capital. “Acted, danced. Oooh, the boys loved to take me dancing.” One eye winked from its cavern. “Made all that money back on my own, that’s what I did, but never sent any home to my parents, who were still hoarding sugar cubes and saving pennies in a tin jar on the floor of their closet. I thought of it, but they had never been very kind to me and I thought…” Whatever she thought, she didn’t say. “And then my children, my children…” The hideous lips part in an unhappy smile. “I never could hold my liquor. My husband filed for divorce before that was the thing to do and a judge took my crying children out of the courtroom, and I was too liquored up to understand what was happening until I went to put them to bed that night and couldn’t find them in the house.”

“I really should…” But how do you pull yourself away from a blind stare?

“Tried acting again after that, but I was old. Ha! Old, they said, at thirty-five. Washed up. No one had roles for me anymore, and anyway, if I did make a show, I missed rehearsal for my hangovers, and the boys stopped wanting to take me out dancing, so I danced in my living room. Until my landlord kicked me out for not paying rent, and then I danced in Central Park next to the polar bear in the zoo, you understand? I used to sit in the zoo all day, watching those caged animals, thinking how nice it must be for them that someone was paying their room and board and they never had to be hungry for a moment.”

“Right,” I try, uncomfortably, picturing this woman hunched over in the zoo, frightening the children. She lowers her head again.

“Just you remember, young man. I come from luxury.” I trip as I walk away. Bump in the sidewalk, I tell myself. Uneven paving.

“Spare change?” I could already hear her voice rasping out behind me. “Spare change?”