Edgar Doctorow - All the Time in the World

She stares through the windshield. She says: Stupid goddamn mill hand. Making his play with the teacher. Look at that, with his party wine in a sack. I can’t believe it.

She jumps down from the cab, runs around the truck, and up the back steps into her kitchen. She slams the door. There is silence. She waits in the kitchen, not moving, in the dark, standing behind the table, facing the door.

She hears nothing but her own breathing.

All at once the back door is flooded with light, the white curtain on the door glass becomes a white screen, and then the light fades, and she hears the pickup backing out to the street. She is panting and now her rage breaks, and she is crying.

She stands alone in her dark kitchen crying, a bitter scent coming off her body, a smell of burning, which offends her. She heats water on the stove and takes it up to her bath.

ON MONDAY MORNING the teacher waits for her children at the front door of the school. When the bus turns into the drive, she steps back and stands inside the door. She can see the open door of the bus but she cannot see if he is trying to see her.

She is very animated this morning. This is a special day, children, she announces, and she astonishes them by singing them a song while she accompanies herself on the autoharp. She lets them strum the autoharp while she presses the chords. Look, she says to each one, you are making music.

At eleven the photographer arrives. He is a man with a potbelly and a black string tie. I don’t get these school calls till spring, he says.

This is a special occasion, the teacher says. We want a picture of ourselves now. Don’t we, children?

They watch intently as he sets up his tripod and camera. He has a black valise with brass latches that snap as he opens them. Inside are cables and floodlamps.

Used to be classes of kids, he says. Now look at what’s left of you. Heat this whole building for one room.

By the time he is ready, the young teacher has pushed the benches to the blackboard and grouped the children in two rows, the taller ones sitting on the benches, the shorter ones sitting in front of them on the floor, cross-legged. She herself stands at one side. There are fifteen children staring at the camera and their smiling teacher holding her hands in front of her, like an opera singer.

The photographer looks at the scene and frowns. Why, these children ain’t fixed up for their picture.

What do you mean?

Why, they ain’t got on their ties and their new shoes. You got girls here wearing trousers.

Just take it, she says.

They don’t look right. Their hair ain’t combed, these boys here.

Take us as we are, the teacher says. She steps suddenly out of line and with a furious motion removes the barrette fastening her hair and shakes her head until her hair falls to her shoulders. The children are startled. She kneels down on the floor in front of them, facing the camera, and pulls two of them into her arms. She brings all of them around her with an urgent opening and closing of her hands, and they gather about her. One girl begins to cry.

She pulls them in around her, feeling their bodies, the thin bones of their arms, their small shoulders, their legs, their behinds.

Take it, she says in a fierce whisper. Take it as we are. We are looking at you. Take it.

WHAT I’VE NOTICED: HOW FAST THEY PUT UP THESE BUILDINGS. Cart away the rubble, square off the excavation, lay in the steel, and up she goes. Concrete floor slabs and, at night, work lamps hanging like stars. After a flag tops things off as if they were all sailing somewhere, they load in the elevator, do the wiring, the plumbing, they tack on the granite facing and set in the windows through which you see they’ve walled in the apartments, and before you know it there’s a canopy to the curb, a doorman, and upstairs just across the street from my window, a fully furnished bedroom and a naked girl dancing.

Another thing: how people in the street are pulled along by little dogs on the leash. Usually a little short-legged dog keeping the leash taut so you know who’s in charge. He sniffs out the place to do what he does, does it, and then he’s ready to go on, leaving his two-legged body servant to pick it up. They are royalty, these dogs, they stop to nose one another, they wag their coiffed tails, they’re on their outing, with their shiny coats and curled ears and glittering eyes and the leash a band of leather, taut as a spinal cord, as if this is one creature, oddly shaped, with four short legs and a brain in front, and two tall legs and no brain in back.

And when it rains in this city? It might be just a few drops, but out floop the umbrellas. People holding these things that are like hats on pikes. It is funny, the simple cartoon logic of it. But when it really rains, wind and rain together, the umbrellas blow out, and that’s even funnier, people lifted off their feet.

You can bet they don’t avail themselves of umbrellas on the meadows of Mongolia.

TO AVOID THE BENT old ladies and their carts of groceries and their walkers and canes and black women helpers taking up three-quarters of the sidewalk, I run in the street. I mean cars are less of a problem. In typical traffic they are standing still as I run past the horns blowing their dissonant mass protest, and so I wear my earmuffs and I’m fine.

But I run, really, because I don’t know what else to do. I have not believed in where I am for a long time. I mean why, outside of every movie theater I run past, are people standing on line waiting to get in? What or who has persuaded them? And the movie theaters themselves with their filmed stories that I am supposed to worry over? Sitting in the dark and worrying over actors acting out stories? And the need to buy popcorn before you do this? To buy popcorn in movie theaters like you light votive candles in cathedrals? The obligation to eat popcorn that you don’t eat at any other time while watching moving pictures that you have to worry over is a peculiar, anthropological custom for which I have no reasonable explanation.

I don’t belong here. I am outside this realm. If I were inside this realm, I wouldn’t feel this way. I wouldn’t remark on these things. Why do girls see an apartment in a new building as the occasion to dance naked? And the people on leashes holding umbrellas over their heads. And the cars that can’t move, bleating their mass dissonance as if they were Mongolian sheep?

And how can I help thinking everybody I see on the sidewalk is as friendless and alone as I am, that we are total anonymities, talking importantly on our cell phones as we walk along like actors in movies that everyone has to worry over.

OF COURSE ON A closer look we can be told apart. I am a trim, sinewy fellow, I am that way from running. I run. I don’t know what else to do by way of filling my lungs with carcinogenic particulate. I could climb up the stairs of the apartment building across the street and knock on the door of the naked girl dancing, but I don’t. I run over to the park and then run with the other runners around the reservoir.

This fellow with the T-shirt that says THE PROGRAM IS RUNNING! sometimes comes up and lopes along beside me. I never know when he’ll appear. Sometimes there are two or three of them with that logo on their T-shirts like they can’t just run, it has to be a cool team thing so that everyone else can feel left out. You run pretty good, the fellow says with an ungrammatical smirk, and with no effort at all he glides past me and bounds away. At such times I feel that my feet are not hitting the ground, but pedaling air.

And then the female runners who run in pairs with their shoulders back and their chins up: they don’t have names printed on them, they are like long-legged birds stepping along in their tights and with their sweaters tied by the sleeves at their waists and rippling like little flags over their backsides.