at the cafe

At the next table, there’s a slump-shouldered girl looking impatient, fussing with a notebook, checking her phone. After what has clearly been too long a wait for her taste, her chubby friend saunters in, puts her little laptop down on the table. She wanders over to the counter and comes back with an iced something. She moves like molasses, slow and sweet. They lean close and chat for a few minutes, and then molasses opens her laptop and her face brightens.

The impatient girl asks, “Are you still talking to that other girl who doesn’t live here?”

Molasses looks up reluctantly from her screen, “God, yeah. About the long-distance relationship we’re not having. Until 4am.”

“Please, please tell me you talked about something more interesting than that for at least a little bit of your ridiculously long phone call.”

Molasses smiles, and the impatient girl’s face pinches, like she’s just noticed how brittle she sounds. She’s stuck for a moment, and then recovers herself, heading to the counter for a refill. Alone at the table, molasses leans into her little screen to read the message that was waiting there all along.

in front of the gallery

We’re standing around in front of the gallery in the soft, misty rain. People are smoking and talking with their hands. A very small woman in a curvy black dress is standing alone with her arms crossed, shiny black curls swinging around her bare shoulders. My friend says  hello to her, and then I do too, it’s a friendly night, here in the rain. She seems both relieved and dismayed to have been noticed as a person who is waiting for something. I ask her why she’s standing around.

“My friend is very very late,” she tells me, her shoulders rise and drop, punctuating her annoyance. She holds a palm up to the rain. She’s tapping her foot. She’s smiling through all of this. She’s performing something.

“You could wait inside,” I say, pointing at the massive plate glass windows that separate us from the party.

“Oh no,” she says. “I want to stay here and get even madder by the time he shows up.”

Now I get it. Now I’m interested. “What are you going to say when he does?”

She gives me a look that says, we’re in this together, we women, we know how this works, we know where the power lies. “I’m going to tell him,” she leans closer, “that he better buy me a drink before I’ll even say a word to him.”

We both laugh, and she whisks some of the dewdrops off her pretty arms. A taxi pulls up, a man in a nice shirt and nice shoes tumbles out. He seems earnest even in the way he unfolds himself from the taxi, eager and clumsy. It’s not what I expected at all. I look back at her, she winks at me as he brushes past me to greet her.

Over my shoulder, I can hear her. She’s not mad at all.

on the subway

It was that one day that felt like summer in the middle of the endless rain. The kids on the subway were bursting out of themselves.  A curvy girl in jeans and a skinny boy in school uniform trousers were sparring around the vertical pole, daring each other to take off articles of clothing, pretending that they might. She offered a seated boy a lap dance. He tentatively accepted, knowing there’s a catch here somewhere. She laughed at him, “No way!”

“I bet you all choke your chickens every single night,” she laughed again.

“What about you, huh?” Ventured the boy she refused to dance for.

“Not me, no way. I’d never do that.”

“Never say never,” said the skinny boy.

“That one I’m sure. Never.”

Then a boy who had been silent through all this said, “You’re what, 16? Say you live to be 90. It’s statistically impossible in all those years you’d never.”

“Statistics is for white people,” she spat back.

in the projects

There are two beat up cars and a van parked on the courtyard sidewalk next to one of the towers. Maybe a dozen men are standing around by the van, it all seems friendly enough. But there are small groups of people clustered around the courtyard, watching, keeping their distance. I get closer and I see what it is, an undercover in a football jersey is jangling two pairs of cuffs on his finger.

On the far side of the trouble, I walk past a man in a neatly tucked t-shirt. He’s talking to an old lady with a granny cart. “I didn’t know they sell drugs in that building.”

“Shit yeah,” the old lady says.

on the sidewalk

I have a neighbor who looks away whenever we pass on the sidewalk. He’s younger than he is old, and thin, and the thing about this man is the tremendous pouches under his eyes, sagging down to his sharp cheekbones. I imagine that he never sleeps. His landlady lives on the ground floor of his building, but it is him I see on the weekends tending to the things growing in barrels out front. Pulling weeds tenderly, pinching wilted flowers. Maybe he has made peace with his insomnia. Maybe the pockets beneath his eyes are filled with undreamt dreams.

on the corner

Tall guy says to me, “You’re a beautiful lady, you just made my day walkin’ by here.”

Little guy crossing the street says, “Mine too.”

Tall guy calls out to him, “Right? You work all day, you deserve to see something beautiful.”

Little guy says, “It’s like the icing.”

near the high school

Six antsy cops are guarding the corners against some dark potential I can’t perceive. The kids have been sprung for the day, milling around on the sidewalks. Somehow they’ve all grown great pillows of fat since I saw them last, it spills out of their tight clothes, and now their bodies take up as much of the sidewalk as their voices.

Around the corner on a sidestreet, some girls are jumping double dutch, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, “ice cream soda pop cherries on top / how many boyfriends do you got?”

on the corner

That guy who wanted to carry my groceries is back. He’s not looking so fine today, a grubby t-shirt and sweat beading up on the dome of his head. He’s pacing off some anger, punching the air. “He’s not even a citizen. What’s he talking about,” he grumbles to the guys by the bodega. He spits in the gutter. “Cocksucker.”

on the way home

I’ve got a grocery bag hanging from each hand. On the corner there’s a beefy guy with a shaved head and gold chains. He’s got sharp clothes and I’ve never seen him before. He says to me, “Hey beautiful, tell me those bags are heavy so I can carry them for you.”

“Oh, they’re not that heavy,” I say, but I’m smiling, it’s an easy day in the neighborhood, everybody spilling outside with the rain finally gone.

“My head is heavy cause I’m sad you said that.” He’s got his hand on his pleading heart, his forehead down.

Then a curvy woman crosses between us and says, “You head heavy because it’s big.”

at the post office

The line is long and slow, isn’t it always. The man in front of me is rocking a sleeping baby back and forth in a cheap stroller. He’s got the blackest hair and his skin is rosy brown. Finally it’s his turn, and there’s something a little frightened in the way he approaches the window. He’s holding out a tissuey paper, a carbon of some kind of official form. His words are soft and incomplete as he says to the clerk, “I need a photocopy. Can I do here?” She shakes her head. “No?” he asks, still a little hopeful. “I can not do that here?” The clerk waves him away.

He turns the stroller around and wheels it slowly toward the door. He’s looking at the paper in his hand. He’s navigating strange territory, things don’t work the way they work at home. He’s got the door open when a fat woman steps out of the line, clucking her tongue at the whole situation. “Over there,” she tells him, pointing out the window. “Across the street at the Arab store. They do it.” She patted him on the arm. “Just cross the street, honey.”

I swear he was about to cry.