Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen

  “You ladies seen Ricky?” George called from halfway down the block. Linda and Nora both stared at him as he approached. He was wearing what appeared to be a baby carrier, the kind of front pack in which Nora and Charlie had once carried the twins, switching their respective burdens back and forth because carrying Oliver was like carrying a sack of flour and carrying Rachel like carrying a bag of ferrets.

  In the baby carrier was George’s newest rescue pug, who stared balefully at Nora with its bug eyes. Nora thought all pugs looked baleful.

  “She’s got an issue with anxiety,” George said, looking down at the dog “The vet thought this might help.”

  “Really?” said Linda. One word, and Linda could effortlessly communicate skepticism and contempt. She must be hell on feckless lawyers.

  “If George upsets Ricky, I will snatch him bald-headed,” Linda muttered as he walked away.

  “That is an expression I haven’t heard in years.”

  “I’ve always thought it was a good one. I wish there was a way I could use it in court,” Linda said, a cab pulling up next to her. “Share?”

  “I’m walking,” Nora said.

  Nora walked to work nearly every morning, and had for years. People always acted as though it had to do with staying fit, but the fact was she found it an almost spiritual exercise. When Nora was nine her mother had brought her in on the train for lunch and the Christmas show at Radio City. They had stepped out of Grand Central onto the street and Nora had turned to look up at the façade, and the statue of Mercury perched at the center of the roofline seemed to be looking back toward her. When they got home her mother had slipped off her black pumps in the living room, an angry red line encircling her narrow insteps, and breathed, “I am exhausted,” before she went upstairs. Nora had never felt more alive in her life.

  She’d never been entirely sure of what to do with herself. She had had a poem in the high school literary magazine, but then she had submitted two short stories and the poem to a legendary seminar at college and gotten them back with “NA” on the front. Not accepted, not good enough. She had taken a prep course for the law boards but her mind kept wandering, and she felt as though graduate school would take forever. The one thing she had always been certain of was that she wanted to move to New York after college, and she had.

  That had been a different New York, different from the one she had visited that first time with her mother. Nearly all of the people on the block had come to the city just as it was digging itself out of a deep hole of insolvency and crime. Yet they had wanted desperately to come there nonetheless, despite the need to hold keys thrust between their fingers as makeshift weapons, the need to have a blood test after a night of so-so sex. Then, slowly over the last two decades, New York had become safe, cleaner, and then impossible for anyone who didn’t have a lot of money. Times Square, once a tattered circus sideshow of women in hot pants and plastic heels selling themselves cheap, of hunched, half-crazy homeless guys pushing leaflets for peep shows, of all-hours coffee shops that served pancakes to junkies at three in the morning, was now a fever dream of neon and virtual-reality billboards, so thick with tourists that New Yorkers avoided it at all costs. The city had become like that edgy girl in college, all wild hacked hair and leather, who showed up at reunion with a blow-dried bob and a little black dress, her nose-piercing closed up as though it had never existed.

  All this had made the future seem impossibly out of reach for the young. During the summer she and Rachel had driven to a spa in Massachusetts for massages and nature hikes, and that night she had let Rachel have a glass of wine with dinner. It had loosened the floodgates of late adolescence. “Sometimes I’m really afraid,” her daughter said, her cheeks pink from either the rejuvenating facial or the Chardonnay.

  “Oh, honey, of what?” Nora asked.

  “Of not succeeding and not making you and Daddy proud of me,” she said, her eyes filling.

  “We’re proud of you no matter what you do.”

  “Mom, honestly, I hate it when you say that. It’s like those trophies everybody used to get at day camp for just showing up. You don’t want someone to be proud of you for nothing. You want them to be proud of you for actually doing something to be proud of.”

  Next morning Rachel had been her usual self, making faces all through barre class and insisting that having her armpits waxed had to be more painful than natural childbirth. “If I have kids I’m taking the drugs,” Rachel said.

  “It’s a labor of love,” Nora said.

  “Spare me,” said Rachel, but she leaned in and kissed her mother as she said it.

  Nora’s walk to work was a kind of labor of love, too, of that love for the city that occasionally wavered or dimmed but had never gone away. She tended to see always the same people, the Sikh bicyclist with his two small children in a seat on the back, the man who ran while nonchalantly juggling three fluorescent green tennis balls. It was as though they all knew one another without knowing anything about one another, so that if for a week or two Tennis Ball Man did not appear Nora would find herself wondering if he was on vacation, or had moved to another neighborhood, or something worse, a broken hip, a heart attack.

  Change was the leitmotif of New York, and yet there was an unvarying fabric for most New Yorkers. At the halfway point of her walk Nora almost always passed the old woman who threw pieces of baguette into the water for the geese and the gulls. Sometimes she wondered about the genesis of those baguettes, perhaps delivered too late for the restaurant’s dinner rush because of traffic, cannibalized in part for croutons and bread pudding, the rest junked in the dumpster and rescued by the old woman and loaded into the wire cart she always pushed. Or maybe, Nora thought, the woman was someone with a nice pension and no relations who spent all her disposable income on bread for birds. Nora said good morning to her every day. The woman always ignored her.

  She loved this part of her day, even in the worst weather, when the wind, abetted by the open runway of the river, ripped at the spokes of her umbrella and rattled the nylon overhead. Even with the pale scrim of snowfall or fog, she could see the skyline of the New Jersey towns, what always seemed like a halfhearted attempt to echo their triumphant cousin across the Hudson. Charlie tolerated New York City, but was prone to spreading his arms and crooning, “Ah, smell that air,” when he found himself anywhere from her father’s house in Connecticut to an inn in the Tuscan countryside. Nora liked those places, but her relationship to the city was primal and chemical. There was a great immutability to the Hudson River, broad and gray and dappled like moiré taffeta, and a certain democracy to those she passed going to and fro, who, in workout clothes or the coat thrown on to walk the schnauzer, could be schoolteacher or CEO.

  Occasionally she passed the walk-up building where she had lived for two years after college, sharing a one-bedroom. She and Jenny had flipped a coin to see who would sleep on the living room futon, and Nora had lost. Actually, Jenny scarcely needed the bedroom since there were many nights when she did not come home, and Nora lay awake wondering how long she should wait before calling the police. Then just after dawn, with mascara-ed raccoon eyes and pantyhose in her purse, Jenny would tiptoe through to the kitchen, and coffee.

  She was getting her doctorate at Columbia then and stayed on to teach there, although when the time came she was almost denied tenure. She had expanded her thesis on matriarchal societies into a popular book that had gotten a lot of attention and landed Jenny on several television interview shows, which worked perfectly because she looked like an actress playing a young and beautiful anthropologist, all curly hair and big eyes and bohemian clothing. This led the chair of the department to refer to her as a “popular” academic, with the word popular used as a perjorative. But two weeks later the chair of the department had died of a stroke, and the week after that the provost’s wife invited Jenny to speak to her book club, which was convenient
because all its members were the wives of administrators or professors. There were no other women in the anthropology department, and the university was being investigated for gender bias, and Jenny got tenure and then, later, an endowed chair. “Just a series of lucky breaks,” she always said with a grin. “Especially that stroke.”

  Every once in a while, when she had a meeting, Nora would pass the narrow windows of the bar at which she’d met Charlie. Fourteen Carrots, it was called now, with its vegan menu, but then it had been The Tattooed Lady. Nora hadn’t wanted to go that night, she remembered. She’d had an unremarkable romantic life in the city compared to that of her other girlfriends, which was to say it hovered between pathetic and disastrous. She had arrived in the city still deeply in love with her ex-boyfriend from college and had had the bad fortune, on an early date with a broker who had been attractive and not at all obviously psycho, to see James at a table across the room, laughing, combing back his wavy, dark hair with one hand in a gesture she knew as well as she knew the alphabet. Nora had wept over the crème brûlée on the dessert menu, which had been their dessert, hers and James’s. (“Who has a dessert?” Jenny said the next day. “A song, okay. A place. But a dessert? And the most boring dessert. Okay, maybe rice pudding is more boring, but, Jesus, Nor, at least cry for lava cake.”) Of course the broker had never called her again.

  Nora had lost track of all the ones who came after, and in retrospect she blamed herself. Her great love affair had ended under such an improbable cloud that she was suspicious of virtually every man she encountered. Every first date was second-guessing. There had been what seemed like a really nice lawyer, who brought a picnic to Central Park and took her to the Cloisters, and who for several weeks she thought might be in it for the long haul. Then he disappeared, and her friend Jean-Ann, also a lawyer, heard his name and mentioned that in her circle he was called The Phantom because he wowed every woman he wooed and then vanished without a trace. And Nora’s distrust only deepened.

  It was Jenny who had insisted she come to The Tattooed Lady. There was a TA at Columbia Jenny wanted Nora to meet, not, she assured her, for a real relationship, but for reliable sex. Jenny always liked to say that she didn’t date, she slept with people, and once she had had a couple glasses of wine, slept with was not the term she used. Earlier that day she had helped Nora pick out her first leather jacket, and she made her wear it and wear her hair down, too. “What the hell with the ponytail, Nor,” she’d said, pulling the elastic loose. “You’ll be losing your hair by the time you’re forty.” Forty had sounded then like another country, like they would need passports and language lessons to live there.

  The Columbia student was attractive in that peevish, elfin way that for some reason Jenny favored, and he wore ironic clothes, a vintage varsity jacket, brown-and-black saddle shoes. Charlie was his sort-of friend from Bowdoin, who, the Columbia student made clear in a series of asides, he had had to bring along after they’d run into each other unexpectedly. The TA chatted with Jenny while sizing up Nora sidelong, his index finger held in front of his lips in a way that looked disapproving. But Charlie bought Nora a drink and told her about a case he was working on pro bono, a school that was being dispossessed by the church in which it held classes. He’d just come from the office and he opened his briefcase to show her a drawing the first grade had made: THANK YOU MR. NOLLAND FOR HELPING OUR SHUL. “It’s a Jewish school?” Nora said, but Charlie smoothed out the drawing with his hand and said, “No, they’re kids—they can’t spell. My name is Nolan, one l, no d.” He had a Band-Aid on the bend of his arm, and when Nora asked about it he pulled it off and balled it up, said, “I forgot all about that. Company blood drive.”

  Charlie still gave blood once a year, maybe because Nora had said, a couple of months after that night, that the blood donation was one of the reasons she had given him her number. She couldn’t tell him that, after all the bright young men who had talked about themselves manically as she nodded, the ones who were well and truly pissed that she wouldn’t sleep with them in exchange for coq au vin and Cabernet, the ones with whom she had slept, including the guy who had given her an STD she now had to mention on almost every damn medical form even all these years later—after them all, Charlie one-l no-d Nolan, literal, guileless, all the things that would eventually make her sometimes want to scream, on that night, in this city, made her feel like that moment when you walk out of the waves, teeth chattering, gooseflesh from shoulder to ankle, and someone wraps you in a towel. That towel is just a towel, ordinary, humdrum, but at that one moment it feels like fur, better than fur, like safety, care, the right thing. Walking her back to the minute first-floor apartment into which she’d just moved, in a deeply unfashionable but not horribly dangerous neighborhood, Charlie had stopped at her corner and said, “You are great.” When Rachel had rolled her eyes at the story, Charlie said it had never happened, but it had.

  You. Are. Great.

  Of course it now seemed forever ago. What had happened to all of them after they left behind those shabby little apartments, with the DMZ of boric acid showing white at the borders of cabinets and closets to ward off the roaches? When Nora had first met him at that bar Charlie had planned to practice environmental law, had instead been seconded to a junior partner in the corporate area, had traded in a job representing finance types for becoming one himself. Nora had meandered her way to something that might be called the top, she supposed, with her job at the museum.

  The identities of everyone they knew were illusory: they considered themselves New Yorkers but all of them were from someplace else. And many of them had become people who loved to hate the city where they lived. But Nora had never stopped loving it. She still liked the sound of someone ranting on the street, someone screaming at a person who hadn’t picked up after a dog, someone fighting over a parking space that two cars thought they had claimed with their blinkers, or someone simply spouting random crazy talk, although now, with cellphones, it was sometimes hard to tell. In the old days a person speaking on the street was either a delusionary or an actor rehearsing for an audition; now it could be someone taking a meeting through an earpiece. Nora still found it all oddly soothing, the idea that she was safe and warm and drinking a cup of tea and reading The New Yorker and outside some woman was screaming at her boyfriend that he never, never, paid attention to what she was telling him (which had made Nora want to throw open the window and yell, “Duh!” into the raw and rainy night). She liked that she could hear the woman and the woman could see the light in her window and yet they were separate, unacquainted.

  But even loving New York as she did, Nora sometimes felt it was like loving an old friend, someone who had over the years become different from her former self. Of course, Nora and Charlie had become different, too. It was as though, as the city had prospered and become less dirty, less funky, less hard and harsh, the Nolans and their friends had followed suit, all their rough edges and quirks sanded down into some New York standard of accomplishment. The price they had paid for prosperity was amnesia. They’d forgotten who they once had been.

  Nora sometimes thought that if, through some magic of the space-time continuum, which she didn’t understand but had heard Oliver and his geeky friends discuss through an entire year of high school, she might run into her younger self on her walk some morning, the two of them would scarcely recognize each other. The old Nora would have contempt for the new. The former Nora would be buying a hot dog with the works at the hot dog place on the corner of Broadway near their house, an outpost of sanity in a five-dollar-latte world, and the now-Nora would trudge by after picking up a salad, thinking of nitrates and acid reflux.

  “The best hangover cure on earth is one of those dogs with cooked onions,” Oliver had said his senior year in high school.

  “Excuse me?” Nora said.

  “Wake up and smell the mustard, Mommy,” Rachel had said. Every time Nora walked past the hot dog p
lace she remembered that, exorcising the nitrates. Wake up and smell the mustard. Or the pickles outside the last old deli on the Lower East Side, an area that had improbably become cool, as had the deli. Or the gyros that marked the moment when she turned onto the block where the museum hunched over the narrow street. The gyros were sold from a truck that played tinny Greek music starting at ten in the morning. Nora nodded at the guy at the truck window as she went by.

  “Here she comes,” called Phil, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk. His sleeping bag was a dirty brown, his T-shirt gray, his sign, black marker on tan cardboard: VETERAN NEED SOMETHING TO EAT GOD BLESS YOU. The sky was as gray as his blanket.

  “They’re predicting rain this afternoon,” Nora said.

  “The driver for the big boss told me,” he said. Bebe was the big boss. Nora was merely the boss.

  Nora couldn’t complain to Charlie about the poop bags on the stoop because she knew he would once again talk about leaving the city, which had become his answer to everything from the clogged drain in the parking lot to the rise in real estate taxes to, she suspected, her meeting with Bob Harris. “When you start your new job,” he would say sourly sometimes, no matter how often she said she had no intention of leaving the one she had. Charlie clutched his grievances close. He remembered every co-op building at which the real estate person had been high-handed, every restaurant at which they’d sat at the bar for too long while others were led to a table.

  So Nora mentioned the poop bags only at her women’s lunch. She should have known the others would be somewhat unsympathetic. All of them lived in apartment buildings, with doormen who would make short work of anyone trying to leave a tissue on the sidewalk in front, much less a bag of dog leavings. “Not while we’re eating, for Christ’s sake,” Elena said when Nora was talking, waving her hand in the air.