Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

My mother gave advice — I still can’t remember a single thing she said — and then my new husband whisked me away.

I looked across at him and smiled and he smiled back, and we both knew instantly that we’d made a mistake.

Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you’re lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who’ve been around awhile know it’s just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it’s never even there in the first place.

Our honeymoon was a disaster. The cold sunlight slanted through the windows of a rooming house in a small upstate New York town. I’d heard there were lots of wives who spent their wedding nights apart from their husbands. It didn’t alarm me at first. I saw him curled, sleeplessly, on the couch, trembling as if in a fever. I could give him time. He insisted he was tired and spoke gravely of the strain of the day — I found out years later that he had spent absolutely all of his family savings on the marriage ceremony. I still felt a strong residue of desire for him when I heard him speak, or when he called me on the phone to tell me he wouldn’t be home — it seemed that words had an affection for him, the way he spoke was magical, but after a while even his voice began to grate and he began to remind me of the colors of the walls in the hotel rooms in which he stayed: the colors leached into him and took him over.

After a while he didn’t seem to have a name.

And then he said — in 1947, after eleven months of marriage — that he had been looking for another empty box to fit inside. This was the boy who had been the star of the Negro debating team. Another empty box. It felt as if my skull was being lifted from my flesh. I left him.

I avoided going home. I made up excuses, elaborate lies. My parents were still clinging on — what use was it to hurt them? The thought of them knowing that I had failed was coiled up inside me. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t even tell them that I was divorced. I would phone my mother and tell her that my husband was in the bath, or down at the basketball courts, or out on a big job interview for a Boston engineering firm. I’d stretch the phone all the way to the front door and press the bell and say: “Oh, gotta go, Mom — Thomas has a friend here.”

Now that he was gone he had a name again. Thomas. I 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.

I caught glimpses of people’s rooms: a white enamel jar against a window frame, a round wooden table with a newspaper spread out, a pleated shade over a green chair. What, I wondered, were the sounds filling those rooms? It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.

A small blade of pain shot through me each time I stepped, but I could handle it — there were worse things than a torn-up pair of heels. A pop song traveled across my memory, Nancy Sinatra singing about her boots being made for walking. I had it in my thoughts that the more I hummed the less my feet would hurt. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you. One corner to another. One more crack in the pavement. That’s the way we all walk: the more we have to occupy our minds the better. I started humming louder, not caring a bit who saw or heard me. Another corner, another note. As a little girl I had walked home through the fields, my socks disappearing into my shoes.

The sun was still high. I’d been walking slow, two hours or more.

Water ran down a drain: up ahead some kids had opened a fire hydrant and were dancing through the spray in their underwear. Their shiny little bodies were beautiful and dark. The older kids hung out on stoops, watching their brothers and sisters in their wet underclothes, maybe wishing they too could be that young again.

I crossed to the bright side of the street.