Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,147
wrote it in blue eyeliner on my bathroom mirror. I looked through it, beyond, at myself.
I should have gone back to Missouri, found myself a good job, settled back with my folks, maybe even uncovered a husband who wasn’t scared of the world, but I didn’t go back; I kept pretending I would, and soon enough my parents passed. My mother first, my father a broken man just one week later. I remember thinking that they went like lovers. They could not survive without each other. It was like they had spent their lives breathing each other’s breath.
There was a loss lit in me now, and a rage, and I wanted to see New York. I heard it was a city that danced. I arrived at the bus station with two very fancy suitcases, high heels, and a hat. Men wanted to carry my cases but I walked on, head held high, down Eighth Avenue. I found a rooming house and applied to a scholarship foundation but heard nothing, and took the first job I could find: as a clerk for a betting outfit at the Belmont racetrack. I was a window girl. Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it’s not a coat at all, it’s more like another skin. I was more than overqualified, but I took it anyway. Out I went to the racetrack every day. I thought I’d get out of the job in a matter of weeks, that it was just a moment, a blip of pleasure for a girl who knew what pleasure was but hadn’t fully tasted it. I was twenty-two years old. All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the ordinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past. Besides, I loved the sound of the gallop. On mornings, before the races, I would walk down among the stalls and breathe in all the scents of the hay and the soap and the saddle leather.
There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it. In New York, at the racetrack, I loved to see the horses up close. Their flanks looked as blue as insect wings. They swished their manes back in the air. They were like Missouri to me. They smelled of home, of fields, of creek sides.
A man came around the corner with a horse brush in his hand. He was tall, dark, elegant. He wore overalls. His smile was so very wide and white.
My second and last marriage was the one that left me eleven floors up in the Bronx projects with my three boys—and I suppose, in a way, with those two baby girls.
Sometimes you’ve got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.
—
I WENT STRAIGHT on up Park and made it to 116th Street, at the crosswalk, and had begun to ponder just how exactly I was going to make my way across the river. There were always the bridges, but my feet had begun to swell and my shoes were cutting the back of my heels. The shoes were a half-size too big. I had bought them that way on purpose, for the opera on Sundays, when I liked to lean back and quietly flip the shoe off, let the cool take me. But now they rode up with each step and cut a little trench in my heels. I tried adjusting my stride, but the flaps of skin were beginning to come away. Each step dug a little deeper. I had a dime for the bus and a token for the subway but I had insisted to myself that I’d walk, that I’d make it back home under my own steam, one foot after the other. So, I kept on north.
The streets of Harlem felt like they were under siege—fences and ramps and barbed wire, radios in the windows, kids out on the sidewalks. Up in the high windows women leaned out on their elbows like they were looking back into a better decade. Below, wheelchair beggars with scraggly beards raced each other to cars stopped at the lights: they took their chariot duel seriously, and the winner dipped to pick a dime off the ground.