Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Going down this downhill block was so slow, what was reversed? One night she had found fresh bricks under her sandals and the bricks tilted, so the ground had moved while the construction men with helmets and king-tall cans of beer were laying them, laying these cheap, brittle-looking surface bricks in ignorance of the vanished armory with its Palazzo Vecchio tower. Now the bricks were smooth. She thought she didn’t like going downhill. She rode a bicycle in the country. Was it the steep curve uphill after the low gradual run down from her parents’ cottage? She was thirty-five with a family, what was she doing riding a bike at her parents’ cottage? If she were going uphill past the new office high-rise and not downhill, she would still be ignored by everyone, but she wouldn’t stick out.

A person of consequence — the words were on the tongue — she sought them but they didn’t come. They were going home, and she had one for each, a word for each person, they were going home, and she wasn’t — or this was what she felt. Because she lived here in the middle of Manhattan and they lived in Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx, many of them, if they were truly going home. She didn’t have fat that shook; it wasn’t as if it was blubber, though she called it that to Gordon and the girls, and was glad the top half didn’t not belong to the bottom half like the woman who’d come into the office in pants today. She would have worn a beautiful dress, full and un-gathered. No, she stuck out because she was trying to think, and she had a headache in her lower back and a backache in her head, with nothing in between except a puffiness in her stomach as if she’d eaten salami — or, no, nothing in between the head and the lower back but this thought that should make her better, the thought that she was not dependent.

It came to her as if she came to it sometime in the future, but not like the thought of a son, the event never to come. Instead, it was the future, which meant that it itself was what it was coming from. The Neighborhood Council — which her peers and others were always saying Oh yes, they thought they’d heard of it — was turning her job into a paying job; she’d done a good job and she had to take the consequences: it was going to be real, and she hadn’t asked for this to happen — which, then, was how good things happened, when, here, she’d been trying to feel a neighborhood up and down these midtown largely business streets around Murray Hill for years. She wanted to say to herself the number of years, it was the age of one daughter Annie, two less than the other daughter Nancy’s, whose periods were the same as her own to the day, so maybe if she could say to herself what her weekly pay would be she could say to herself these other numbers, they were holding her back, the loud voice and calm body of Annie, and the silence and fidgetiness of Nancy were not holding her back.

But putting her feet one then the other down along the new squares and intersecting diagonal areas of brick sidewalk laid to extend the plaza-like pavement around the huge sandstone-colored building that she was escaping to her left, she knew in her back and her hips that the salary she was to deserve was no more why the thought of not being dependent had come to her than the bottle of wine was a sign of it taken home to Gordon — to Gordon’s knowledgeable face and voice.

The high-rise was bigger and bigger, she got down to the next corner. The height of the building broke into depth along this block’s downward slope, and if she looked up, this office tower pivoted eater-cornered, like the insane thought of the architect who doubtless was a man who knew what he was doing, she would see it sliding like an elevator into the ground but driving down before it even further down and away than she felt it now, the Renaissance stronghold it replaced.

National Guard armory. Regiment temporarily unknown. Renaissance Italy.

Where Gordon had taken her to the antiques show and to the cat show and to see Rod Laver play tennis. The Rocket was what Gordon called him, just like the retired hockey player from Montreal, he said. Yet to the antiques show had not Gordon been taken by her? A Frenchwoman that night of the tennis asked haltingly where at that hour her husband could find — what was the name? — razor blades, Norma had translated — and Gordon gripped her arm and said, "Speak to them."

But she didn’t have to now. The armory was gone. The quick grip on her arm, the command to perform — it was like Let’s go to bed, the way he sometimes said it.

But she didn’t have to.

It had come to her, like the new zest of stomach hunger she could live upon. And she didn’t have to give it back. Not at 11:25 p.m. after the News and Weather with Gordon getting up out of his chair. And not at rush hour going home, other people’s rush hour.

At the corner she saw across the street by a green newsstand three angry people pointing at an invisible monster on the sidewalk. She made herself look left at the base of the new building, for she had known what she would see. A woman in sneakers. This woman was often four, five blocks down from here walking right up the middle of Park Avenue traffic, or up on the island curb yelling to make them not pay attention to her but to the direction they were walking in. She yelled at air, sometimes at Norma. The woman was doing something at the bronze plaque. She was lining the raised letters one by one with lipstick — Seventy-first Regiment. Had Norma ever seen any color in her face. She had stolen the lipstick — no, found; for these women didn’t steal (why did Norma know that?). No color but the warm wash of grime and exposure-tan which smeared up into the woman’s scalp where the thin hair sprouted like new-grown fuzz; but on her legs it was different, it wasn’t this anointing color, it was dirt on white, her bagged stockings looked as if they had once been rolled below the knee; they had fallen around her ankles so that against the dark veins darting through her calves the skin was pallid and sooty. And Norma turned right to look away west across Park into the wild cavern of sun filling the far end of this Manhattan cross-street so that above the Jersey cliffs the Hudson River overflowed into the sky, and she saw a nice-looking boy from her building, late teenager, nice-looking, dark, standing next to a phone booth, she didn’t know his name, he had young, friendly-looking parents.

She had to think. She had to go from here to there. She had to get out of her clothes, the backache made her not fit here, crossing the street; but no one around her saw the backache — she was a gray pants suit, a woman of maybe thirty-five, making her way flat-footed across Park at Thirty-third Street or whatever the street had now become, into the sunset far off above Penn Station and New Jersey, with good news and a new thought. But drawn home so she didn’t have to make the motions herself. But she damn well did have to. And thinking and not thinking what she was going to do tonight that she had never done before in her life. Such a small, real thing but she wanted not to think about it, or only about Consciousness, not the other part that was a rule of the workshops which were held after all in a warm, carpeted room without furniture, and now she felt as unfitting as the cop on horseback (a huge-haunched horse whose haunches were the cop’s too, who) near a hydrant below the drugstore looked calm observing the people going home like a parade. But the people in front — check the two bicyclists cutting through them — could see her puffed tummy, she was thinking. Before I go there I better do something about it. But she had to think, since if she didn’t, the thoughts would find her. She felt Gordon was home, and he might have been home all day after what he had said in the dark. So she didn’t know how she would find him.