Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen

  Joe worked for the families on the block now, and Alma said she had heard he was good, although perhaps not quite as good as Ricky had been. The people who’d bought the Nolan house were lovely, although the younger boy was said to be a bit of a handful; the couple who had bought the Fisk house were doing a renovation and hadn’t moved in yet. Nora told her that Oliver was preparing to apply to graduate school, and that Rachel had gotten a promotion and was helping to oversee Christine’s new line of clothing. “It’s called Smaller Sayings,” Nora said. “It’s the same thing she did with workout clothes, but for children.”

  “The future is now,” said Alma.

  “Oh, my goodness,” Nora said. “That’s their biggest seller. Apparently they can’t keep up with the demand. That, and ‘Sleep tight.’ Both of those are Rachel’s.”

  “I bought them both for a baby shower last month,” Alma said. “Does Rachel like living there?”

  “I think she’s just happy to be away at the moment. If she says one more time that people are so real there, I’m going to scream.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Alma Fenstermacher, who had children in St. Louis and Chicago. “The much vaunted western authenticity.”

  “Not like New York.”

  “Not a bit,” Alma said, buttering her toast. “Perhaps they’re right about that. I knew a woman here who talked ceaselessly about her years at Wellesley. How happy she’d been there, what a wonderful classical education she’d received, how beautiful the campus was. I was actually with her at a tea when she ran into two women from the same class at Wellesley. They both said they remembered her. One even said they’d been in a seminar on the Lake Poets together. I won’t go into chapter and verse about how I came to know this, but the closest she’d ever been to Wellesley was a secretarial school on Twenty-third Street.”

  “Oh, that’s so sad.”

  Alma smiled slightly. “I admired her when I found out. What a production, to create a life from whole cloth. Although maybe that’s what we all do. Tell me about your work. From what I can gather, that horrid woman never deserved you.”

  The schools she visited, the projects she was thinking of funding, the kids who had so little and needed so much: Nora wouldn’t have gone on so long if Alma hadn’t seemed so interested and even ordered another cup of coffee. She told her about the first grant she’d made, creating a computer lab at a school that had been relying solely on a pair of aged desktops, and how the principal had started to cry when she’d seen the room finished, the students sitting at the new computers. Nora had started to cry, too, because after all those years of asking rich people for money she realized how much more pleasurable it was to give it away where it was really truly needed. The thing was, Bob Harris had come with her for this inaugural gift, and he’d wept, too. “Thank you,” Nora had said to him when they came out of the school building onto a littered street with a cracked blacktop basketball court. “Let’s get these people some decent playground equipment,” Bob had said.

  She didn’t mention to Alma the day that she had realized she was in the neighborhood and had steeled herself to stop by Ricky’s apartment. When she knocked at the door, a tiny girl in denim cutoffs with an infant on her shoulder and a toddler wrapped around her shin answered. “Oh, they’re gone,” she said. A young guy buying lunch in the corner bodega said, “Ricky? He won the lottery, man. He got so much money now, he can’t spend it. He’s got millions.”

  The old man outside by the hydrant in the folding chair said, “That fool inside don’t know what he’s talking about. Millions, millions—anytime anybody gets some money around here, they say it’s millions. Ricky didn’t win the lottery. He got money from some big lawsuit. A lot of money, but not millions. Maybe four, five hundred thousand. It’s a nice piece of change, I will say that. The man limps, but come on. I’d limp for a couple hundred thousand dollars and a nice house. You want a Dr Pepper, miss? I got a whole cooler of them here.”

  “Where’s the house?”

  “The DR. The Dominican Republic. That’s where Nita’s mom lives, her sisters, a couple of cousins. They opened a restaurant.”

  “That’s a good way to lose a lot of money.”

  “That’s okay. He’s got a lot of money now. Not millions, though.”

  “I heard it was a million,” said the young guy, coming outside with his sandwich and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “He should have gotten that guy that hit him. He should have made him pay instead of letting him off.”

  “He made him pay, fool,” said the older man, cracking a Dr Pepper with a hiss. “He made him pay with cash money. You got a choice between putting the guy away and taking his money, I’d take the money every time.”

  “Both,” said the younger man.

  “You’re dreaming,” said the other.

  Alma Fenstermacher finally asked for the check. “I wish I could stay all day,” she said, as though she meant it. “I miss you. I miss Sherry. You should visit.” She saw the look on Nora’s face and said, “No, I suppose not. That was unthinking. Has anyone told you that the lot is gone?”

  “It’s gone?”

  “It’s sold. Someone finally made an offer that was simply too large to turn aside.”

  “So Mr. Stoller agreed to sell?”

  Alma leaned in and smiled kindly at Nora, the way someone smiles at a child who has been good about putting her napkin on her lap and using her fork. “I will tell you a secret,” she said. “Sidney Stoller has been dead for years.”

  “Are you certain?”

  Alma sat back. “Absolutely certain. I’m his daughter.” Then she laughed, a throaty laugh. “Oh, Nora, the look on your face.” Nora’s mind was clicking like a Geiger counter, going over all the assumptions they’d made on the block: Greenwich, finishing school, one of the Seven Sisters colleges, even a debutante ball or at least a big society wedding. And she realized that, unlike the Wellesley woman, whose story had obviously been proffered publicly for her own reasons, Alma had never provided any of it. The decor of her home, the timbre of her voice, the cut of her clothes: all of them had assembled her biography from the way she was in the world.

  “Someone is building a home there,” Alma continued. “The Landmarks Commission has led them a pretty dance with their plans, and the end result is that they’re obliged to build a kind of ersatz Victorian townhouse. I feel a bit sorry for them, actually.”

  “And what about the people who parked in the lot?”

  “Oh, goodness, they’ll find someplace else. I have to say, the greatest pleasure of the entire transaction, other than the size of the check involved, was listening to George complain. Although of course I didn’t tell him that we were the ones who were selling. The bank sent him a letter about the sale. I didn’t feel there was any point in shattering his illusions.” Alma Fenstermacher kissed her on both cheeks. “I hope we run into each other again soon,” she said to Nora.

  “My apartment is right around the corner.”

  “Well, then,” Alma said, shrugging into a navy-blue jacket. “You’ll receive an invitation to the Christmas party, as always.”

  “That will be nice,” Nora said, and the way she said it, and the way Alma smiled, told them both that Nora wouldn’t go, that she would leave it to her successors, that leaving the block meant leaving the party, and the barbecue, and all the rest. A tiny dead end leading nowhere.

  She felt it, felt the weight of all the goodbyes she’d been part of in the last year. “I brought you a farewell gift,” Phil, the spurious homeless man, had said on her last day of work at the museum, and he’d handed her a battered Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, the red cloth binding frayed and faded to a pinkish color. On the flyleaf was an inscription in beautiful handwriting: For Arthur Billingham, on the occasion of his graduation, from his fond parents, June 1939.

  “I like reference books,” he said. “No surpri
ses in them—know what I mean?”

  “I won’t even ask where you got this,” said Nora, letting the tissuey pages riffle through her fingers.

  “Like I keep telling you, a lot of good stuff gets thrown away in this city.”

  “I’ll cherish it,” she said.

  “I know the big boss wanted to get rid of me. I appreciate that you didn’t let her. Maybe the new person will try. Maybe I’ll move on. There’s a side entrance to the Morgan Library I like.”

  “You could try the Met.”

  “Nah, the big showy places are bad,” he said. “The cops are always moving you along. And there’s a lot of competition. Those Good Humor guys, it’s like, you want to buy a strawberry shortcake or you want to give a guy a buck for a sandwich. Most people go with the ice cream, the hot dog. It’s hard to blame them. Some of the nice ones buy you food, you know, but I won’t eat that stuff. I mean, street dogs? Come on.”

  “I’ll stop by sometime and see you,” Nora said.

  “Nah,” Phil said. “That’s not how it works. Maybe sometime you’ll see a guy on a corner and you’ll think of me, and maybe sometime I’ll talk to some lady on the street and I’ll think of you. But we’ll never see each other again, probably.”

  Nora laughed. “You’re the only one who has been honest about that. The people here, the people on the block where I used to live, everyone says, Oh, we’ll get together, we’ll have dinner, we’ll have coffee.”

  “Yeah, that seems like what you ought to say. But it doesn’t happen, right?”

  “I guess people say it because it’s too sad to say what you said, that that’s that.”

  Phil shrugged. “New York is a city of the mind,” he said. “I’m in yours, you’re in mine.”

  “Who are you, really?” Nora said. “A city of the mind? Come on. Are you doing a book on New York street life and this is all research? Am I going to show up in some college course about interactions between the homeless and the people who give them money?”

  “You’ve never given me money.”

  Nora reached into her wallet and took out a twenty. “If I do, will you tell me who you really are?”

  He grinned. “Nah, I wouldn’t take your money. And I’m Phil. You know that. I’m Phil. Enjoy the dictionary. You’ll remember me when you use it.”

  Nora kept it on her desk at work, with a plaster vase Rachel had made in second grade and a paperweight that was Oliver’s handprint at age six. She didn’t have anything that Charlie had given her; she’d put her wedding band in the bottom drawer of her jewelry box months ago, when she noticed that Charlie had stopped wearing his. That was the day she and Charlie had met to sign some papers and had started to talk and all of it had come pouring out, his feeling that he’d always been her second choice, that he’d taken the wrong turn in his work, that his life somehow felt like a rented house whose rooms were half empty. She thought back to that weekend in Asheville. “New York isn’t the real world,” he’d said. Someday soon he’d decide to move south, work as a financial adviser for some wealthy clients, play a lot of golf. They’d known people who’d done the same, and Nora had always discussed it with contempt, but Charlie had always just kept quiet, and she knew now that he had been thinking her contempt was not only for that life but for the life he wanted, the life he thought would make him happy, for him. He would marry the nurse and take her away from the daily grind. Nora would have to remind Rachel to be nice.

  Everyone would move on in ways that would make it seem as though their lives were much the same, perhaps even better. Ricky and Nita had their restaurant in the Dominican Republic, George a new crop of residents to insinuate himself with and then to annoy. Before long everyone on the block would forget that anyone but Joe had ever snaked out their back drains or washed their windows. Even the story of how Jack Fisk had lit into someone with a golf club, sensational as it was, would begin to dim. Sherry, Linda, Oliver, Rachel, Charlie, Nora: they would all just go on, with resilience or denial or just the right combination of both. People go through life thinking they’re making decisions, when they’re really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all. And along the way, they get a little damaged, lots of tiny cracks, holding together but damaged still. Ricky would walk with a limp for the rest of his life. “Hell, I’d use a damn cane if there was enough money in it,” the man in front of the bodega had said. Nora wondered if that’s how Ricky felt.

  Sometimes she would think of an alternate reality in which Charlie had worked for Legal Aid and she had gone to social-work school and their children had gone to public school and they’d had to turn the dining room into a bedroom because they’d only been able to afford to rent a smallish place. Would that have been so bad? Would that have been so good? The alternate reality she couldn’t allow herself was the one in which she never went to The Tattooed Lady, never met Charlie Nolan and married him, although she knew that there were alternate realities without him that might suit the Nora she was today better. But once there were children, you couldn’t zig where you had zagged. It was nothing but a parlor game, once you had children.

  Sometimes Nora wondered, too, about that alternate universe in which Jack Fisk didn’t need to get his car out that particular morning, in which Ricky went about his business as usual, Sherry Fisk didn’t move, the Nolans stayed married, no one got a windfall and moved to the Dominican Republic. It was a little like watching a version of It’s a Wonderful Life starring herself. But it also assumed that everything else remained in stasis. Was that what her life had consisted of, a game of statues in the center of a city that changed in ways big and small every single day, even Sundays and holidays, even Shavuot and Ascension Thursday?

  Landed on her feet: that’s what everyone would say of Nora. “Still young,” her friends whispered, which meant still young enough to marry again. Running the foundation, furnishing her new place, starting fresh, except for Richard. He had followed her from the museum, gone from temporary to permanent. “That’s more my speed,” he’d said when she described the foundation, and it was. When they received applications for grants, he divided them into two piles: sketchy and not sketchy. Sometimes she took him on visits with her. She had rented office space on 125th Street, a part of the city she never knew before but which was growing more desirable every day, as every place seemed to have done. The areas of New York that were once shorthand for danger were changing one by one, until she heard her children’s friends talk about renting in places she would never have dared to walk, places in which, if she had gotten off the subway accidentally, she would not have left the station. “You’re saving me a ton of money in rent,” Bob Harris had said, “but be careful. Even poor people figure you get what you pay for.”

  “In ten years there won’t be any poor people in that neighborhood, trust me,” Nora said. “I don’t know if there will be any anywhere in the city.”

  “The Bible says they’re always with us,” Bob said.

  “Yeah, pushed into places we don’t want to live.”

  “Now, don’t you go getting jaded on me,” he said. “You were right for this job because you weren’t, not a bit.”

  Nora’s walk in the morning was different now, north instead of south, east instead of west. When she went downtown to visit another foundation, or to look at a charter school, she encountered new pieces of her past, her former self, her ancient history. The tired white-brick office building where she had once interviewed with a Princeton alum who had apparently been unimpressed; she had been rejected. The school where she had once been considered for a position as director of development; they had hired instead a very slick young man who later was indicted for writing checks for warm-weather vacations and bespoke suits. A restaurant where she and her sister had once had lunch and Christine had spelled out the plans for her new business; a Christmas party at another restaurant when she was pregnant with the twins and had thrown up s
hrimp puffs in a dark restroom that had an unpleasant smell. The beautiful building on Fifth Avenue, its paneled lobby seen only as a glossy sliver from the street, where she had spent a weekend with a college classmate who had briefly been a friend. Every time she passed it, two thoughts crossed her mind. She wondered how Missy was, and she recalled how, entering Missy’s parents’ duplex from an elevator that opened directly into it, she had seen the living room with its pale-yellow sofas and apple-green drapes, Central Park a decorative accent through the enormous windows, and thought, This is what it is like to live in New York. She’d laughed once, recalling it to Christine as they split a bottle of rosé in the living room, how she had thought life in the city would be so grand when it ended up quite different from how the Landis family had lived. But Christine had raised one brow and said, “If that’s an invite to a pity party, I’m not going.”

  Phil was right: New York was a city of the mind. It was a ghost city, and one of the ghosts was Nora Nolan, young, not so young, single, pregnant, mother, married, not. Somewhere there was the apartment where she and Charlie began, the hospital room in which the twins were born, the office where she and Charlie had met with the mediator. Somewhere there was the goose woman, the juggler, the men playing dominoes, the cooler of Dr Pepper, the aluminum house, George walking his pugs past the place where there had once been a parking lot. New York City was all the strata of the earth. The old was covered over but it never disappeared. Somewhere in the bake shop (gluten-free) was a flyer for the old pizza parlor, and the shoe repair place that was there before that, and the kosher deli, and so on and so forth, down to the rocky remainders of the creek that once flowed through midtown before there was a midtown, before there was an America, that lay now beneath concrete and tar and earth. The price so many of them had paid for prosperity was amnesia. They’d forgotten where they’d come from, how they’d started out. They’d forgotten what the city really was, and how small a part of it they truly were.