October 26 - What goes without saying

I had ordered my usual Americano, asking for it black because I secretly brought along a vial of my own milk – I hated places that thought they could approximate exactly how much of the substance a customer would want, splashed liberally in the bottom of your paper cup – a vial that I extracted once I was seated, surreptitiously poured in a dollop, then replaced in my purse. It was difficult to pretend to read the headlines of the newspaper today; nothing seemed able to hold my attention. I was embarrassed, because today was the first day my server acknowledged what a creature of habit I was.

“The usual?” the guy behind the counter asked when I walked into the coffee shop, before I even opened my mouth. I recognized him, too, of course, since he was there three out of four days that I wandered in, with his oversized glasses and his short-cropped hair and a slim, artistic, slightly fée build. Guilty as charged, I thought with a grimace. I had become so predictable it was unnecessary to voice it.

I nodded mutely.

The espresso machine made a pleasant hum as my shot of espresso was prepared, then he poured hot water on top, and placed the double-cupped beverage on the counter. “Careful,” he warned, as always, “it’s scalding hot.”

“Thanks,” I said, leaving two extra quarters in the tip jar to back up my words, but I slinked quickly away from the counter.

So now I felt agitated as I sat at my usual table – the second from the left – in my usual coffee shop. I liked this place because it had a European air about it, white plastered walls with wooden lattice, and bottles of wine lined up in smart rows on the shelf that ran in a circle around the room, just above head-height, looking like so many butlers at the ready: “Yes sir, very good sir, pop my cork, sir,” I imagined them saying. Normally, I felt comfortable here, could slip into anonymity, but it galled that the server had ferreted out my routine ways.

Sighing, I feigned a read-through of the paper, as usual. The woman next to me – a striking black woman in a coral-colored business suit – was definitely reading hers carefully, each page creased neatly between thumb and forefinger and then flattened on the table before her. Then, she would bend her head low over the article, her neck waving back forth like a person watching a tennis match as she scanned each line. As for me, I really only glanced at the paper so that I would know enough to cover my bases in social situations. When I went out to drinks with my co-workers, I needed to be able at least to sound smart on burning Buddhist temples and which presidential candidate had put his (or her, now) foot in his (or her) mouth at a stump speech yesterday. But really, I was not so much paying attention to my own business as I was trying to eavesdrop.

I was far more interested in the conversation of the two women next to me; it always seems to happen that way in coffee shops. Perhaps it is the proximity of the small wooden tables, one to the next, perhaps the intimacy suggested even among strangers by the fact that we have all clearly escaped our private domains, our kitchen counters, and chosen instead to sip our coffee – in whichever of the myriad ways it can be ordered – surrounded by other people. Coffee shops practically begged one to eavesdrop.

These two particular women were French, or at least, spoke French with flawless, lilting accents. They both, I noticed sourly, were wearing tights even though the temperature had dropped alarmingly in the past few days, as if French fashion were impervious to something as trivial as the weather. One ordered a large hot chocolate in a clipped accent, which annoyed me further. I couldn’t imagine her being so controlling of her environment as to bring along her own vial of milk stashed in her purse. “Yes, a large,” she agreed, bored, when the server asked what size she wanted. She didn’t care; it wasn’t going straight to those Gallic thighs no matter what size it was.

“A double espresso,” the other said politely. How French, I thought with an eye roll, then was mad at myself for being so bitter. They seemed perfectly amiable; their conversation was in high, chirping tones, and they smiled back and forth at one another across the table. I could admit to myself that I was annoyed because I didn’t comprehend more of their conversation despite six years of high school and college French. All I understood was a, “Oui, c’est cool!” here and a “D’accord, d’accord!” of agreement there, but beyond that, their subject matter alluded me.

I went back to pretending I understood the mortgage catastrophe in the business section.

I looked up in relief at the sound of the door opening, combined with a blast of cold air and with Valerie’s entrance. Valerie had a way of breezing into a place, quite literally. She shook off her umbrella with an expression that said not so much that it had been raining on her, but raining for her, for her delight to dance about in the droplets, and to grant the rain the privilege of falling upon the sleeves of her jacket. She smiled at the server, but didn’t even look guilty that she wasn’t placing an order, just here to keep me company. I folded the newspaper gratefully and placed it on the table, rising to hug her hello.

“I’m glad you made it,” I said truthfully. She was fifteen minutes late for our rendezvous.

“Of course I made it, silly,” she said with a grin. “Sorry I’m late. I hope you weren’t bored in my absence.”

I gave a guilty shrug. “Actually, I was listening to the conversation of the two women next to me,” I confessed in a whisper.

Valerie gave a quick glance, an unconcerned shrug. “That goes without saying,” she said casually.

“What’s that?”

“Everyone eavesdrops in coffee shops.”

It wasn’t only me then!

“What? What’s so funny?” Valerie asked. I erased the smile from my lips, leaning in to begin our weekly catch-up chat. The man with the spectacles who held his report out a good foot and a half from his nose; the couple in the corner with their fingers wrapped around their coffee mugs, both staring off into space; the businessman who had just come in and booted up his laptop. I wondered at that moment which ones were eavesdropping on us.

October 25 - Small scrapes and bruises

Sabrina danced for a living. She wished she could say it was ballet that she danced, up a-tip toe on pink slippers that squished her toes to half their size while she wore a sparkling tutu and a jeweled tiara on her hand. Or wished she could say it was tap; not even up on a stage, but rather, her heels a drum beat on the hard platform of the subway station. She wouldn’t mind that kind of living, a cap out on the floor in front of her for errant pennies, the only heat coming from the lack of air, there, below ground, not from hot male eyes. She wished, even, she could say she was a modern dancer, gyrating to strange choreographed steps while lights flashed and the theatre director tried something outré and bizarre because every year the troupe needed to delight an ever-more demanding well-heeled crowd.

Sabrina danced against a pole, but she squeezed her eyes shut and imagined herself at Lincoln Center, the Boston Ballet, even an outdoor summer stage in Central Park. She tried to pretend the pole was a tango partner. It would have been easier to pretend if the men didn’t have wandering hands, hands that pinched fiercely, leaving behind welts of purple, hands that scratched, the nails unkempt. Those were the bachelors. The men with wives had neat, trimmed fingernails. In the dressing room, she examined her wounds.

“Small scrapes and bruises,” Monica said, waving one hand through the air dismissively while she reapplied lipstick with the other, a screaming, burnt orange color like a fire roaring wild in California. Sabrina nodded, and pulled up her bra, hiding the welt that ran from nipple to armpit. A bachelor, that one.

The words brought her back. She was a child, on the playground, nursery school. She was laughing, and someone was throwing a ball her way. She caught it, tossed back, caught in the back and forth rhythm, synchronicity, something in it for everyone. Catch, release. The ball came back, but this time the throw was off and she made a dive across the cement of the playground. Her fingertips brushed lightly against the ball like an artist’s brush on canvas, a lover’s caress on a tit, but she couldn’t get her palms around it. It skittered off into the bushes and she in turn landed, knee first, against the hard pavement.

It didn’t even hurt. But she looked down and she saw the blood cascading over her knee, and the blood scared her.

“Waaah,” she remembered wailing, that sound that only a child’s throat can produce.

She tugged on the sleeve of the teacher put in charge of recess, known derogatorily as the “lunch lady” among the children.

She pointed at her knee when the lunch lady turned to regard her coldly with a measured, “Ye-es?”

“I fell.”

The teacher’s eye took in the bleeding knee and the otherwise safe and sound child.

“Small scrapes and bruises,” she said dismissively. “Go down the hall to the nurse’s station. She’ll have a band-aid.”

Sabrina’s little eyes welled up with tears. Diligently, she did as told, but the knee burned as she limped down the hall, the blood pooled along the cut, even though it was only a few layers of skin deep, pebbling it with dots of red like little bloody islands surrounded by the otherwise healthy flesh. Bits of cement and dirt made coral reefs around which the blood had to swim. It wasn’t the pain that made her cry; it was the sight of all that frightening red. No one band-aid could staunch that flow.

She was whimpering when she reached the nurse, who leapt from behind her desk, rubbed at the wound with a soft, sure hand until only pink, raw flesh showed, dutifully produced three, overlapping band-aids that hid the shameful blotches.

Sabrina wished for a band-aid now, but rifling through the makeup kits of the other girls in the dressing room, she found all manner of rouges, lipsticks, blushes, mascaras, condoms, lubricants, and nailpolishes, but no band-aids. None of them would admit to their hurts.

Sabrina limped back to the stage.

She was alone in a private room. He wore a suit. The corporate type, well-groomed, neat hair, trimmed beard only now showing the five o’clock shadow, now that it was half past nine. His fingernails were neatly clipped, his smile charming, his eyes dead.

“Why don’t you bend over for me,” he purred.

She complied, and his hand found one cheek. She slapped it away.

“You’re allowed to look,” she reminded, “not touch.”

The hand kept coming back, more insistent. She told him there were cameras. She told him she could shout for security without raising her voice, realizing her words contradicted one another, and he sensed her unease and the smile grew feral. His hand reached out and she panicked. Her high heel found him directly in the groin; the soft squishing sound of the impact coincided with a satisfying popping of his eyes.

He clutched at himself, his mouth opening and closing like a hooked fish, until he produced one word: “Bitch,” he wheezed in a voice as high as a tot’s on the playground.

Sabrina smiled at him. “You’ll hardly have a wound to show for it,” she consoled sweetly. “Small scrapes and bruises, maybe. No more.” She swayed from the private booth. She knew she’d be fired of course; the cameras were there; that much hadn’t been a lie. They didn’t handle her too roughly when they deposited her out on the sidewalk, though her makeup kit was thrown to her feet. She watched the contents spill onto the pavement, roll a ways. A lipstick found its way into a gutter. Let a rat have it, she decided, picturing a subway rat wearing red paint and proud of how beautiful it looked compared to its ratty friends.

She didn’t have anywhere to go tonight, so she started walking. She had come through worse than this before, and she’d pick her way up again. “A small scrape,” she decided out loud, and ignored the way her heart rate sped up in fear. The night was cold, and she shivered.

October 24 - There is a place called Eden

There is a place called Eden. They say. Anyway. But see, I don’t like apples, and snakes always seemed to be my friends. I jumped across one, once, as a girl, innocently sunbathing itself on the doorstep, and I was eager to make it to the car, so I leaped right over it and only then did I hear Mom’s frantic cry of, “Oh Oh Oh!” Not understanding, scared she had seen something dangerous, I leaped right back over the snake to her arms, at which point, startled, it slithered off into the grasses of the garden, but he never hurt me, see, and I never understood he was the creature that could elicit such a cry.

And the apple. Mealy in summer, sour in winter, only evoking that just right “aah” in the warm early fall when the streets smell of golden hay and the sun beams are golden, only then is the crisp bite of a Macintosh just right against my rotting teeth. There is a fine season to it. So the apple, no; it hardly seemed right that such a simple, unassuming bulb of red could evince such excitement, or danger, or purgatory even. The pomegranate, perhaps; that felt more apt. The sensuous curve of the outer skin, the sweet red individual seeds within, each begging to be popped with a swirling tongue, puss-filled cavities of sweetness bursting into orgasm between my teeth. There, there, was sensuous. Sexual. The kumquat? The quince? The mango? Mangoes entered her fantasies, once, drizzled in honey. Surely a mango could set off four thousand years of punishment.

So there is a placed called Eden, and there was a girl in this Eden, and she let her hair grow down to her buttocks because she liked the way it tickled the flesh when she threw back her head in exuberance. And there was a boy who saw her dancing naked in her hair, and neither boy nor girl was ashamed, because when they tickled one another on the dew-damp grass it felt good to shriek out giddy screams that lay between pleasure and pain, and both of them wanted it exactly thus. He hand-fed her mangoes. Yes; that’s the way the story goes. And they didn’t jump in alarm at the snakes that slithered by in the grass.

This is paradise, paradise, she sighed into his skin. Heaven, heaven, he moaned against the honey she held in her cup.

But it is not the boy and the girl who were the problem, see, because their elders deemed them too young, while secretly what they wanted to say is they were too happy. Instead, they shook their heads in sorrow and said, “Puppy love, puppy love, it’s only that, you know,” and the dogs who had followed them faithfully for years without asking a single bone in return lowered their heads and their ears drooped and they sighed against their paws, realizing how trivial they were in the eyes of the ones who wanted to be called Master.

Puppy love was not allowed to have such lust. Her first blood on the grass, staining green red, this was something shameful, the elders said, though the boy and the girl knew differently. It didn’t hurt at all, she promised, and she wasn’t lying; he had slithered and slinked in between the soft downy fuzz and she had hardly felt a thing.

Fireworks bursting on skin, this was dangerous, the elders claimed. A woman was supposed to give forth life in shame and agony, and here was this woman moaning in orgasm as she squatted in the bush and brought forth new birth. She waved away the doctors who came to usher her to their metal tables and their medical lamps, and she squatted on her hands and knees and the boy massaged her back and her feet, and the elders moaned and held their heads in their hands and scratched at long gray beards; the hairs had been around for so long they were collecting moss.

It has never been done this way, they muttered, and they plugged up their ears with cotton balls to drown out the woman’s moans of pleasure and the silence of the happy baby she brought forth into the world.

Out, out, the elders said then, seeing this dangerous emotion within their midst, this copulation that was not tinted with shame, this walking about with fingers entwined, the glowing looks they passed back and forth by moonlight, their complexions damp like honey in the comb when they smiled at one another, this they had never seen before, and a new word was whispered among the flowers in the garden.

Love? Love? What is this love?

Eva and her mate tickled one another in the grass, while their baby lay sleeping.

Out, out. The demands grew more insistent, the voices louder, and the bodies were stripped of their clothing in an attempt to shame them from lifting their faces. Eva looked at him and he looked at Eva and they laughed; hadn’t they danced with one another exactly thus so many times, clad only in their flesh and their sweat and each other’s blood? Oh yes, they laughed, and the elders shrieked at the insolence. Out, out, they screamed at the top of their longs, flailing at the naked legs with twigs and branches and whips. The dogs slinked into the corner, self-satisfied. This would teach them to have puppy-love, they smirked. They panted for the bones.

So out, out, they went and a legend grew that forgot the true story. It was not their shame at all, thought the elders, years later – centuries, dare we suggest? – when all had gone wrong, and they saw the error of their jealous ways. Their human jealousy had rent apart the only earthly pleasure that equaled the meaning of life.

We see, we see, the elders sighed, as they died alone in their grasses, and somewhere, far away, answering their cries, was a woman in a desert, on her hands and knees, moaning out the pleasure of birth.

October 23 - These are the lies that I told you

It had been years since they’d last seen one another. The one walked into the restaurant wearing black high heels, the kind that screamed sex, a cord tied about an ankle, the kind that made a distinctive clicking on the floor like an impatient woman’s fingernails against a desktop. Her legs were sheathed in nylons, her body encased in a tight black ensemble that left little room for breathing and none at all for eating. The hair was coiffed, the makeup applied by a pro at a salon – she didn’t leave these things to chance – the fingernails lacquered. No doubt – had they been visible – the toes would be painted to, the pubic hair trimmed and stenciled into a design, nothing out of place. You didn’t notice that the nose was slightly too bold, a bit crooked on one end, wouldn’t have noticed if you didn’t see these things mirrored in the face of the woman she came to meet.

The other looked ordinary under normal circumstances, but next to the new comer she looked a bumpkin, a yokel brought in from pumpkin picking on the farm who now happened to have wandered, lost, into this New York restaurant. She wore jeans, and a solid colored boat neck shirt that she had been sure was appropriate when she left her apartment, but now wasn’t of as firm an opinion. She reached up in dismay, because she had forgotten earrings, and her lobes felt naked. She wanted to swing her head back and forth and have flittering chandeliers tickle her neck, too. Don’t get things wrong; it was not that she was unattractive, or unkempt. She had showered that morning, but she air-dried her hair – always; she had been a college co-ed the last time she lifted a heating device to her head – so it was always a little frizzy about the edges. She never used perfume, nor makeup, beyond a swipe of all-natural lip gloss that didn’t contain any earth-heating cancer-breeding chemicals. She was very proud of these facts, on a day to day basis, but they felt very small and unimportant when the new comer breezed into the room.

“Hello,” said the one to the other, crisp and purposeful. “Hi,” said the other back with a sigh of relief that she hadn’t been stood up. She reached in for a hug, then found herself awkwardly bumping noses as her twin sister went for the European kiss-kiss on the cheek instead. “I wasn’t sure you would come.” She meant it as chastisement, waited for Michaela to look in guilt at the hands of her silver Rolex, but Michaela did nothing of the sort. She laughed.

Michaela’s laugh was like a wind chime. Men’s heads turned, but then, they had been turned since before the chimes began to tinkle in the breeze. “You, my dear, always did show up early. Nothing’s changed, I see.”

Kelly sat back down and replaced the napkin that had been on her lap. As if her jeans needed protection from sauces and wine. She watched Michaela arrange herself – arrange was truly the only word for it, the purse tucked at the foot her chair, her hair swept back over one shoulder, her arms held out at a ninety degree angle with her wrists resting on the white linen tablecloth.

She looked around at the restaurant. “I appreciate you coming all the way to my neighborhood. It wasn’t too far for you?”

“Michaela, it’s Manhattan,” Kelly said. “Nothing is more than half an hour from me. I took the subway.” Michaela’s eyes popped.

“The subway? Kelly, you’re joking. It’s filthy down there.” She shuddered as if she truly believed this.

“It’s…” Kelly let it slide. She wasn’t about to tell her sister what a slice of life she saw when she rode the subway, how she told herself this was the ideal place to gather inspiration for her artwork. Instead, she picked at the bread in the bread basket, noticing that Michaela didn’t reach to do the same, and broke off a bit of the fleshy part to deposit in her mouth. “I was surprised you wanted to see me.”

“You were?” Michaela sounded genuinely confused.

“It’s been five years,” Kelly reminded her. Michaela laughed as if she truly didn’t remember. Her expression changed, her eyebrows drew down. She leaned in across the table.

“I felt like I needed to see you. I wanted to tell you how things are with… With Rick.”

Kelly cringed. Rick. It was a storybook marriage that Michaela had, with the broker husband and the Upper East Side apartment, the dinner parties out and the galas thrown at home. There was the requisite summer house in the Hamptons, cruises taken in the Mediterranean at least once a year. Kelly had watched the glamour of her sister’s relationship for the first three years – before Michaela abruptly announced she was “taking time off” from her family members – and had told herself she wasn’t jealous. That wasn’t the kind of man she wanted, after all. She wanted an artist, a free spirit. Only Kelly had never been lucky in love. She told herself she was an independent woman, and enjoyed having her weekends to herself to tour the vineyards on Long Island, or ponder art at the Met. The lie had a way of sneaking up on her when she lay in bed at night and watched the Late Show and laughed to her friends the next morning that Dave was the only love in her life.

She always hummed along to the opening theme when the show came on.

Kelly coughed around her bread, now. “How so?” she asked, fearful of accounts of torridly lusty nights or some new $20,000 jewel he might have bought her.

“They’re bad,” Michaela hissed, looking around as if fearful someone had heard. She needn’t have worried; the few men who did seem to have caught her words were not looking at her with pity, but rather had shifted their chairs an imperceptible inch closer, sensing opportunity. That was how it looked to Kelly. A waiter hovered a foot from their table, two menus tucked under his arm, but Michaela waved him away. Kelly sighed; she was hungry. She ate another chunk of bread.

“How so?” Kelly stammered around her mouthful. “Things look so wonderful with you two. Looked,” she amended after a moment. It had been five years since she’d last seen his fingers snake through hers at a restaurant dinner table.

“Wonderful.” Michaela tasted the word. She leaned back against her chair and her face changed. Oh the burgundy lipstick was still there, the blusher that made her cheekbones even sharper than reality, the severe liner replacing the eyebrows that had been plucked of every hair. But something changed in that face, so that Kelly saw her own features mirrored back at her, the flesh naked, for a moment.

“It looked wonderful, didn’t it?” she mused finally. “Let me tell you a story.” Cue the lights and podium, Kelly thought. Michaela loved being the center of attention. “Six months after we started dating, I wanted to go see a film with a friend. Rick got jealous. Not even a male friend! Just an old girlfriend from college, but he said he didn’t want anyone else sharing my time. I tried to leave and he grabbed my wine glass right from my hand and upended it on the carpet of my apartment, to ‘show me how angry’ he was, he said.” There were no wind chimes in this laugh. “Started kicking everything in the apartment – the walls, the door, everything. Then the pipe under the kitchen sink. And then bam!” Michaela didn’t notice the heads that swiveled around as she clapped her hands together in one, staccato note. “It burst, just like that, a geyser exploding everywhere, and it ran through the floor and caused water damage in the ceiling of the apartment below, and the landlord was furious, and the neighbors called the police to report a domestic disturbance, and… all that.”

“I would never have known,” Kelly interjected. “Rick doesn’t seem the type to have a temper.”

Michaela waggled a finger back and forth in the air. “That was only the first time, Kelly. You see?” She lifted back the sleeve of her dress to show the fat bruise on her upper arm. Only then did Kelly make out the smaller one by her eye, cleverly hidden by the layers of face paint.

“But Michaela, why didn’t you tell us? You always told us all you were so happy. You always looked so happy!” Exasperation. “You cut off the rest of your family!”

“Because Rick didn’t like the rest of you. He made me cut you off. Or he promised more of… this.” She tapped the bruise, then smiled thinly. “Which he did anyway.” She sighed. “I can’t take it anymore; that’s what I said to him the other day. Enough, enough. But then I get scared. So I thought… I thought maybe I could call you. I always envied how happy you looked.”

Kelly gaped, not trusting herself to speak. Michaela was jealous of her? Michaela must have seen something in the blank stare, because her words tumbled out. “So free, always. Loving your art, loving your single lifestyle, you always projected such strength and happiness to the world. And I thought… I want that. Peace and quiet and bohemia.” Her eyes fell on the bread basket. “Is that food?” she asked. “I’m famished.”

She ate a piece of crust.

“But why didn’t you tell us before?” Kelly asked again. “Why did you lie and tell us you were happy?”

Michaela nodded as if her sister’s words were statement, not question. “Yes. These are the lies that I told you. They’re easier sometimes, you must understand that.” Her eyes seemed to take in Kelly’s appearance for the first time. “You do understand that,” she amended. “God, are you really hungry? What are we doing in this restaurant? I’m not. I think… Oh gosh!”

The chirping of a bird began from somewhere down hear Michaela’s ankle, and became louder as she extracted her cell phone from her purse. “Oh gosh,” she groaned again. “It’s Rick. Look, he doesn’t know I’ve been to see you. Look, I wanted to tell you, but maybe it’s too soon. I really should…” Whatever it was she should do, Michaela didn’t say. She gathered up the purse, pushed back from the table, and bent to deposit a kiss on Kelly’s cheek, leaving a perfect rosebud of lipstick behind. She clipped from the restaurant as poised as when she entered. Kelly stared after the retreating figure, unsure which version to believe.

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?”