Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen

  At that moment it was clear to Nora that Bob Harris was thinking of making a play for her, and that Nora was thinking of finally giving in. But an expert on body language, like the ones who were always popping up on TV analyzing the president, could have told you by the rise and then the fall of their clavicles that almost simultaneously both of them thought, Nah. It was the beginning of what would be a wonderful professional relationship. In the years to come, they would feel that they might be the only man and woman in New York who had honest conversations.

  “You should be with that guy,” Jenny said when Nora described one of their interactions.

  “Why ruin a good thing?” Nora had replied.

  The city has informed residents that they will discontinue weekly baiting for rodent traps and will move to a monthly schedule. A firm has been retained to check traps and rebait when necessary to supplement the city plan. The cost will be divided among owners who agree to participate. NO TRAPS WILL BE CHECKED OR REBAITED IN THE AREA OF HOMES NOT PARTICIPATING.

  George

  Broom-clean, it said in the contract. The house was to be delivered broom-clean. Nora had smiled when she saw the words. Obviously the buyer’s attorney was unfamiliar with the body of work of Charity Barrett, who had snaked a vacuum hose into the heating and dryer vents, who had actually scrubbed the grout in Ollie’s bathroom with something just a bit bigger than a toothbrush, who had waxed the parquet so thoroughly that Nora was concerned the new owners would go flying if they walked quickly across the living room. In this operating-theater atmosphere, redolent of lemon, Lysol, and bleach, it was jarring to see a sheet of paper on the foyer floor. Her last George-o-Gram. Nora thought perhaps she should keep it as a memento, show it to the twins. Then she threw it in the last bag of trash waiting to go downstairs.

  She was surprised that she was still on George’s list. Perhaps he thought the newcomers were already in residence. The week before, Nora had solved the greatest problem she thought she was leaving the buyers of her house. She’d walked from her new apartment to the block just after dawn—she wasn’t sleeping well, but it would take more than insomnia to make her hit the sidewalk before first light, when rats might still be foraging—and seen a woman putting a plastic bag on her front stoop.

  “Wait just a minute,” Nora shouted.

  The woman froze for a moment, then pivoted with her hands on her hips. Nora couldn’t help but notice that she was wearing a pair of Small Sayings workout pants, the Thoreau capri, with “I stand in awe of my body” inside the waistband. It was a sentence that smacked so flagrantly of yoga studio and empowerment jargon that Nora had insisted Christine double-check that Thoreau had actually said it.

  “No, you wait just a minute. I am going to keep doing this until you stop letting your nasty little dogs go on the sidewalk in front of our building! I’ve stepped in it too many times to count, and I’m sick of it so I’m picking it up and putting it where it belongs, at your front door!”

  “My dog’s dead,” Nora said, and to her surprise she found herself in tears, as though saying it aloud had made it suddenly true.

  “What?”

  “My dog died six months ago.”

  “All of them?”

  “I only had one.”

  “Oh, come on. The doorman next door to my building said there were at least two, sometimes three. He said the man who lived in this house walked them in front of our building and never picked up after them.”

  “What kinds of dogs?”

  “Some little dogs with bug eyes. I always forget the name, the ones who look like some kind of space alien.” She raised her hands in the air. “I’m a cat person,” she said.

  Nora bent and gingerly picked up the bag. “You’ve been leaving these at the wrong house,” she said. “The person you want lives right across the street. The doorman gave you the wrong address.”

  “Are you sure?” the woman said. And as though conjured by a magic trick, at that moment George came down the ramshackle steps of his house with three of his rescue pugs pulling on their leashes in front of him. The woman stared, then snatched the bag from Nora’s hand. “Sorry,” she cried as she sprinted across the street. “Sorry sorry sorry.” Nora stepped inside and thought that George might never speak to her again, and hoped against hope that that would be the case, and then realized that it didn’t matter, that she was unlikely to run into George for the rest of both their lives.

  In that way that things sometimes happen, Nora was doing the last walk-through before the afternoon closing when she heard the doorbell ring. The house was completely empty. When she sneezed, it echoed. She had closed the door of Rachel’s closet, which still had middle school graffiti: RN AND AB (which boy was that?), I HATE YOU (probably a message for her mother), various hearts and stars. She had refused to let Charity scrub it off. She’d also decided to let the area behind the kitchen door stand, the one in which they had measured the twins every year on their birthday. Pencil marks on paint: Oliver and Rachel, twelve, she taller by several inches; Rachel and Oliver, fourteen, after a growth spurt that had pushed his height up an inch and his voice down an octave. In college Rachel had insisted she was still growing when Ollie topped out at six feet and Rachel was four inches shorter. “Dream on,” her brother had said, patting her on the head. Nora had taken a picture of the wall. Someday she would send it to her children, but not yet.

  The bell rang again. A man with black hair, brown skin, and khaki clothes stood at the door. Two other men, similar enough that no one on the block would ever be able to tell them all apart, stood behind him. All three were wearing backpacks. “Hello, missus?” the man who was obviously in charge said, uptalking like a private-school girl in eighth grade. “My name is Joe? I do home repairs. My men will clean the sidewalks and shovel snow. Good prices for you.”

  “What’s your real name, Joe?”

  “Joe.” He smiled, nodded. Nora noticed that he had no index finger on one hand, and as he saw her noticing, he curled his fingers into fists. “I work for Mr. George across the street? Also Mrs. Wooden?” Nora hadn’t met the Woodens yet, and supposed now she never would. They had just acquired a house near the corner. As far as Nora could tell, they had no dogs.

  “Do you have a card, Joe?” Nora said. “This isn’t really my house but I’ll pass it along.”

  That afternoon she had given the card to the couple at the closing. They’d paid five times what she and Charlie had. “You’ll need a handyman,” Nora said, as she signed paper after paper, first with her own name, then with Charlie’s because he had not wanted to be there and had given her power of attorney. Nora didn’t need a handyman, not anymore. She had a super instead. She lived now on the fifteenth floor of a new building, a white box with partial views of the river, along with an endless vista of wooden water towers and tarred roofs, that all-you-can-eat buffet of Manhattan aloft. Nora loved the light and the air. She loved not being known. She loved that there was no wainscoting, no molding, no charm, no history. She liked the nothingness of it, the blank slate. Wasn’t this what living in New York was supposed to be like, the skyline, the anonymity, coexistence without intimacy?

  “How did you sleep?” Nora asked when Rachel came to town and stayed in the guest room.

  “Good,” her daughter said. “It’s like staying in a really nice hotel.”

  “Ouch,” Nora said, making coffee in the tiny kitchen, which was just the right size for what she needed a kitchen for now.

  Rachel stood next to her, hip to hip. The night before they had watched trash TV with their legs entwined on the couch. Now Nora leaned into her daughter, feeling small and sad. “I like nice hotels,” Rachel said. She opened the refrigerator. “No plain yogurt?” she said as she took a banana from the bowl.

  “First-world problem,” Nora said.

  “Mommy, I love you, but no one says that anymore,” Rachel said
. She hoisted herself until she was sitting on the counter, her legs dangling, the way she’d liked to do when she was in middle school. “So how are you, really?” Rachel said. “And that’s not a rhetorical question.”

  “I take a lot of pleasure in having children who know what a rhetorical question is,” Nora said, carrying coffee mugs to the dining table as her daughter followed. The table was new. The cups had been around for a long time. Charlie hadn’t wanted much of the kitchen stuff. He actually hadn’t wanted much at all.

  She sat down and looked at Rachel and worked to keep her voice flat. “It depends on the day,” Nora said. “Sometimes I’m sad and sometimes I’m okay and sometimes I’m even a little happy and sometimes I think we made the wrong decision but mostly I think we made the right one. I spend a lot of time worrying about you and your brother.”

  “And we both spend a lot of time worrying about you.”

  “And how are you? Also not a rhetorical question.”

  “Nice deflection, though,” Rachel said, hugging her mug, biting her lower lip, shifting in her chair the way she did, all those little mannerisms that Nora knew so well. “I’m all right, in spite of everything. A year ago, not so much. I started feeling as though in my whole life I’d never really made a decision. Everything in my life just sort of happened. The guys I wound up with, my friends, they were just there. Like, even college, it was sort of, Okay, I’ve been here for reunions, it’s beautiful, it’s a great school, that’s fine. But making the decision to leave New York, to do something so different from what anyone else I knew was doing—it just felt so good, to decide something all by myself. I know you think what I do is kind of lame and random—”

  “I do not!”

  “But I made a big decision and now I make small decisions every single day, and they may only be decisions about whether a onesie should have snaps or a zipper but I’m the one making them.”

  “I can say from experience that whether a onesie has snaps or a zipper is an important decision. I vote zipper, babe.”

  “So did I,” Rachel said, and looked at her watch. “Oh, no, I’m going to be late for the Cotton Council meeting! And no judgment, please.”

  “You’re talking to a woman who once sucked up to the Gemological Institute of America. No judgment.”

  At the door, as she was leaving in her grown-up suit, Rachel hugged her hard and said, “I’m glad you’re here. It might be even harder if you were at the house without Daddy, or he was there without you. This is nice. It’s a nice place.”

  “It’s a nice place,” Jenny had said, too, following the long hallway to the bedrooms, opening the glass-fronted kitchen cabinets, looking down on the buildings below. “Did Rachel approve?”

  “She pretended to. There was a lot of pretending. I don’t know what was worse, the pain last year or the pretending now.”

  “It’s a dialectic. Wait for the synthesis.”

  “Thank you, professor.”

  “Really, I like this place. It’s a new you.”

  “Is it? Or is it the old me with new furniture?”

  “I like the new furniture. That white couch is great.” Jenny leaned in toward the view until her forehead touched the window glass. “That roof garden must have cost a fortune,” she said, looking down at the top of the brick building across the street.

  “I’ve literally never seen anyone using it,” Nora said, standing next to her.

  Jenny put her arm around Nora’s waist, and squeezed.

  “Should I get a dog?” Nora said.

  “It depends,” Jenny said. “Do you really want a dog, or do you think you should get a dog because it will make it seem like nothing has changed?”

  Nora sighed. “I’ve always wanted a white couch,” she said.

  “If you get a dog, get one who won’t jump on the furniture,” Jenny said.

  It was funny, Nora sometimes thought, how, after the shock of becoming a separated person, of losing not only her home but her entire way of thinking about herself and her life, she had woken up one morning and realized that she would survive, that her former life was like a dress she had loved but that no tailor could take in after all the weight she’d lost. She wasn’t stupid; she was working long hours at her new job, hiring staff, setting up systems, visiting schools, and instead of weekends only, she was running every morning through the park in the half-light. Keeping busy, that’s what they called it. She knew there was a chance that someday she would sit down at the table at which she ate breakfast and feel loneliness like a flu, hot and achy and terrible and everywhere, the kind of feeling that made you want to stay in bed.

  “Didn’t that happen sometimes even when you were still married?” Jenny had asked.

  Somehow she and Charlie had both wound up with what they hadn’t known they’d always wanted. One evening they had gone to dinner with Lizzie’s parents, along with Oliver and Lizzie, and it had been as though they were still together in some strange way, but better. Nothing had happened in the last day, or the last week, to make one annoyed with the other; there was no irritating subtext as they sat around the table, Nora talking about the foundation to Lizzie’s mother, who headed a small private school, Charlie talking about the market to Lizzie’s father, who was a hospital administrator. The only thing that made it odd was the end of the evening, standing on the pavement executing that dance of moving from saying good night to actually leaving.

  “That was a nice evening,” Charlie had said.

  “Really nice,” Nora said.

  And then it was cheek kiss, cheek kiss, and turn away in opposite directions. Charlie had headed east while Nora went north. Nora had glimpsed something, just for a moment, on her son’s face, and next morning, when the two of them had breakfast, she said, “Don’t let what happened make you relationship-shy.”

  Oliver smiled a little sadly. “Mom, I draw conclusions based on all available data.”

  “And if the data is contradictory?” she said, thinking of Lizzie’s parents, her mother’s arm looped through her father’s reflexively as they walked from the restaurant to the corner for a cab. Although who knew what that really meant? Charlie and Nora had looked like that to outsiders, so that when Nora had told her father they were separated he had said, “You’re kidding.”

  “If the data is contradictory I continue to study the subject,” Oliver said.

  That first Thanksgiving Nora and Charlie had gone together, as usual, to her father and Carol in Connecticut. “Always welcome, always welcome,” her father had said as he pumped Charlie’s hand. The food had been the same, and the conversation, too, although Oliver had gone to Lizzie’s and Rachel stayed in Seattle and had dinner with Christine. Nora assumed that next year Charlie would have Thanksgiving dinner with his woman friend, and the following year she might be his second wife, and so on and so forth. It was funny, how easy it was to predict the fine points of the future, and how the big things were incomprehensible until they were right there, on paper: Certificate of Dissolution of Marriage. Sometimes she thought about the block and wondered whether she’d wanted it because she knew it was what was wanted, whether life, at least in New York City, was an inchoate search for authenticity when imitation was always dangled before you like a great prize.

  “Your new job sounds amazing,” Suzanne said wistfully when their women’s group met for lunch. “There are only so many swatches you can look at before you feel as though you’re rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Thank God I’m done with that house downtown. Although I do miss seeing James. That man is to die for.”

  “Have people finally stopped with the leopard carpeting?” said Jenny, giving Nora a look across the table.

  Suzanne shook her head. “Ten years from now I will watch while every client decides to pull it out. If I’m even doing this ten years from now.”

  “One mistake I never made
,” said Jenny, leaning over her bowl of soup.

  “You used to say that about marriage,” Elena said, and Nora felt a movement under the table and realized that one of the other women had kicked Elena. “I mean that Jenny used to talk about how terrible marriage was, and now she’s married.” Kick. Kick. “What?” yelled Elena, and Nora started to laugh.

  “First of all, Jenny wasn’t the one who used to talk about how terrible marriage was,” Nora said, looking around the table. “And second of all, I promise everyone, I will not fall apart if you mention marriage, weddings, husbands, or even boyfriends.”

  “Is there a boyfriend?” Cathleen said, her eyes enormous, and someone kicked her, too.

  “She bought a white couch,” Jenny said.

  “You bought a new couch and didn’t ask to use my designer discount?” Suzanne said. “I’m hurt.”

  “You’re busy. I saw it in a showroom window and bought it on impulse. I’d forgotten how much I wanted one.”

  “It’s every mother’s fantasy piece of furniture,” Suzanne said. “You can tell who won’t let her kids in the living room by whether they order one. Some of them might as well have a velvet rope at the living room entrance.”

  “My kids are too old for jelly hands,” Nora said.

  “Have you lost weight?” Elena said. Kick. “What’s wrong with asking if she lost weight?” Kick. “I’m going to be black and blue by the time this lunch is over!”

  A block away from Nora’s new apartment was a nice restaurant where she sometimes had business breakfasts, before she headed uptown to her new office, a restaurant where they now smiled and led her always to the same table in the corner. It was there one morning that she saw Alma Fenstermacher across the room, reading a thriller and eating an omelet with quiet concentration. The seat across from Alma was empty, and Nora threaded her way between the tables to stand behind it. Alma looked up and the delight in her eyes was immediate and unfeigned. She took a ballet class two mornings a week—of course, she did, Nora thought—and the studio was nearby.