Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking

by Aoibheann Sweeney

  “I can never get enough coffee in these teacups,” Robert mumbled, standing up to refill his cup.

  “I think the coffee’s a little weak,” I said, without thinking.

  For the first time since I had arrived, he smiled at me. “I know! It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it’s—”

  “Walter keeps saying it’s too strong. But I’ve told him,” he said, sitting back down beside me. “I might as well be talking to a wall.”

  “Do you want me to make another pot?”

  “Oh no,” he waved his hand dismissively, smiling. “I’m just complaining. I like to get my espresso later in the morning anyway.” He handed me my toasted bagel and passed over the cream cheese, watching as I spread it with the knife.

  “You don’t have to do all that typing, you know,” he said. “We were supposed to get a grant for it.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t really have anything else to do.”

  “I imagine you’ll find plenty to keep you occupied,” he said.

  I bit into my bagel, realizing that I hadn’t once thought about what I would do when I got here. My father had said I had a job and it had seemed then that that was all I needed to know. But I hadn’t thought about what it would be like not to be home, not to have breakfast with him, not to get in a boat to start my day. And certainly I hadn’t thought about the institute, with its strange cluttered kitchen, my bedroom, and the long stairway my father must have gone up and down. I had seen the door to the library he had spoken of off the foyer.

  “So you’re opening your school today?” I said after a while.

  Robert rolled his eyes. “It’s just a few after-school classes, really. I had no idea they’d get so popular. I had to hire that graduate student to help me and he’s very pretty but I have a feeling he’s dumb as a post.”

  I was about to ask if he was referring to the man I’d met the day before when suddenly he appeared in the hallway, cheerfully striding toward us.

  “Ah ha,” said Robert. “If it isn’t Mr. Stoddard.”

  Mr. Stoddard laughed and generously introduced himself to me again as Nate. He was dressed in khakis and a crisp shirt, an outfit not unlike Robert’s. He dropped casually into Walter’s vacant chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “How was the club?” he asked.

  “It was alright,” Robert said. “Full of old farts. We should take you there sometime so that everyone can have something to look at.”

  Nate laughed, evidently used to this kind of compliment. He was pretty, I thought blearily, the way the summer people in Yvesport were handsome—like garden flowers—tanned and well-tended-for.

  “How’s your sister?” Robert asked him.

  “She’s on a diet,” he said, “so she can fit into my mom’s wedding dress.”

  “Hasn’t she heard of a tailor?”

  “Supposedly it’s almost a perfect fit—my mother’s taller, but all she has to do is take up the hem. I think they’re sort of competitive about it.”

  “They’ll have to let it back down when you get married then, won’t they?”

  Nate hesitated for a moment and then laughed again. “It’ll probably be awhile,” he said, with a blush. “I wouldn’t want to upstage her.”

  Robert raised his eyebrows. “Neither would I,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee. “And I’ve only met her once. What does she do again? Isn’t she in fashion or something?”

  “She works at an art gallery,” Nate said. “You should come see it sometime,” he said, turning to me. “It’s actually pretty cool.”

  “Miranda’s going to be very busy, unfortunately,” said Robert. “She’s come all the way to New York from Maine to put our library card catalog on a database.”

  Nate looked at me, his big gentle eyes trying to gauge my response. “I bet there’s some pretty interesting stuff in there,” he said encouragingly.

  “It’s actually her father’s collection,” Robert said a little irritably, getting up to put his cup on top of the pile in the sink. “He used to go on book-buying trips in Europe every summer with Arthur.”

  “No kidding,” Nate said, glancing at me, a little bit pleased to have hit a nerve with Robert. “Sounds like a pretty good gig.”

  “Well, Miranda,” Robert said, changing the subject, “I’m sorry it’s raining for your first day in the big city. But I suppose your father’s given you directions to all the most tedious museums.”

  “I don’t mind the rain,” I said, realizing I was being dismissed. I got up and took my cup to the sink.

  “I’m having lunch with my sister tomorrow,” said Nate, “if you want to come. We can check out the place she works.”

  I could feel Robert watching us. “Thanks,” I said. “That would be nice.” I turned to Robert awkwardly. “I guess I’ll see you later,” I said.

  “I guess you will,” said Robert, getting up for yet another cup of coffee.

  Nate was the kind of boy Julie would have liked, I thought as I climbed the stairs. He was the kind of boy she hoped she would meet in college. I could hear Robert teasing him from all the way upstairs. I shut my door behind me, feeling as if it had already been days since I had been alone. I had put the money envelope my father had given me under the mattress, and when I pulled it out it seemed remarkably thin. But when I opened it the bill on top was a hundred. I looked at Benjamin Franklin’s friendly face, not unlike Walter’s, and I remember thinking that this was the currency here—the currency of New York City.

  My jacket was on the banister where I’d left it, heavy and musty, and I put it over my head gratefully, like a coat of armor, and then put the hundred-dollar bill into the jacket’s front pocket and pressed the rusty snap shut. It was warmer outside than I had expected, and as I was going down the steps I could tell I would be too hot. I kept going anyway, walking down the street the institute was on until I hit Eighth Avenue, full of people in perfectly pressed clothes with perfectly tailored raincoats and umbrellas, walking carefully around the puddles at the end of each sinking block. They seemed to feel as if the weather was meant for someone else, or somewhere else. I thought of my father—his fussiness, his half-distracted, half-purposeful walk, his mild hurry.

  I walked across a bigger avenue and the shops extended as far as I could see: I walked past restaurants and bars, rows of small tables under dripping awnings waiting to be filled, shops with their doors open, bookstores and beauty parlors and supermarkets. Before I knew it, the neighborhood had changed again, and I was passing a tall white building, gigantic as a factory. I rounded a forlorn corner and realized it was a hospital. Inside people in white coats walked down shining, empty halls. It seemed to me as out of place as the weather, that amidst all the shops and restaurants and things city people did, they could get sick.

  A siren screamed through the air, and an ambulance careened around the corner. A few bored attendants in green outfits came outside under the awning to meet it. I watched as it pulled into the dock and a stretcher was handed out the back. It disappeared with a knot of people through the swinging doors. In Yvesport when there was a siren it meant that someone at the nursing home was having trouble, and the next day nearly everybody knew who it was. I almost collided then with a man walking a very large dog; he looked at me as if it was my fault.

  I was looking up the street, thinking I ought to turn around, when I spied an aluminum cart near the hospital entrance, its little awning sticking out over the sidewalk, with COFFEE written down the side of it in big enthusiastic letters. It looked familiar, like a boat pulled up at the dock, and I headed straight for it, as if I had come to the end of my journey. Someone was bending down behind the shelves of donuts. As soon as he saw me he straightened up and came to the window, his face flushed, rearranging his cap to cover a few loose curls.

  “Can I have a cup of coffee, please?”

  “Regular?” he said, plucking a paper cup from the top of the ridged stack beside him.


  But he had a woman’s voice, not a man’s. His eyes were soft—her eyes were soft, a dark chocolaty brown. She was looking at me expectantly.

  I had forgotten what she had asked. “Sorry?” I said, beginning to blush.

  “Regular?” she said again, with less of an accent, thinking I had misunderstood her.

  “Oh. Yes.” I had no idea what she meant but my face had begun to broil. I tipped back my hood.

  She reached for the plastic spoon she’d planted in the pail of sugar beside her and then dumped a heaping spoonful into the empty cup before she lifted it to the spigot. Her forearms were taut and muscular. Her other hand flipped open the valve on the big tank of coffee in front of her. When it was full she turned and hefted a full gallon of milk, bringing the contents of the cup to just below the brim in one splash.

  I watched her press down on the plastic lid with her stout brown hand and when she asked if I wanted anything else I could think of nothing to say. I looked vaguely at the shelves through the gray Plexiglas.

  “Bagels, rolls, donuts, muffins,” she said, following my eyes. “For donuts I have chocolate, jelly, plain—and those ugly ones.” She leaned out the window and pointed to a few of them, sitting on the shelf. “They don’t have holes.”

  I laughed. They were ugly—ridged and shapeless, the dough a blotchy mix of chocolate and plain, thickly coated with glazed sugar.

  “They’re called crullers,” she said, resting her elbows on the sill, looking at me. “And I don’t recommend the honey glaze. A little soggy at this time of day. Chocolate’s a tiny bit crispier.”

  “Oh!” I said. “Chocolate then.”

  “Your choice,” she smiled. She reached for a square of wax paper to take the donut off the shelf and then put it neatly into a paper bag with the coffee. She watched as I rummaged in the pockets of my jeans, and then I remembered my stupid hundred-dollar bill, tucked in my coat.

  “That’s a nice coat,” she said as I pulled out the bill and gave it to her. She stretched it open, giving it a quick glance before she reached into her own pocket and pulled out a thick wad of cash. “Looks like it keeps you dry,” she said.

  “It’s kind of hot,” I said, sweltering now.

  She nodded, counting the pile of change onto the window sill. “You should try it in here, with a tank of coffee next to you. The rain sucks for business, but at least it’s cool.”

  “I’m from Maine,” I said, ridiculously, when what I meant was that I wasn’t used to the heat.

  “That’s in the north, right?”

  “On the coast,” I said.

  “Bet it’s nice up there.” I could see her breasts, I realized now, underneath her white T-shirt.

  I nodded. “Well, it’s—different,” I said.

  She handed me my change. “Don’t spend it all in one place,” she said with another smile.

  “Thanks,” I said, shoving it my pocket. Something had happened: The noise and confusion of the city settled inside me, like a flock of birds.

  “You just visiting?” she said, looking at me.

  “Yeah,” I said, surprised at how purposeful it sounded.

  “I’ll see you around, then,” she said.

  I smiled back nervously and turned away, the paper bag in my hand. I walked quickly, trying to get out of her line of vision, and as soon as I was around the corner I stopped to get the coffee out of the bag. I took off the lid and took a sip. I was used to having my coffee black, but this was milky and sweet, like dessert.

  I wasn’t sure which street led back to the institute, but I didn’t really mind. I had forgotten to put my hood back up, and the rain fell gently against my skin and on my hair, on the city all around.

  13

  That night when Walter and Robert didn’t come home I found myself cleaning up the newspapers and clearing the sink of cups. I was hungry but not certain if I should go out at night alone. By the time I gave up and went to bed I had resolved to get the stove working again so I could cook my own dinner. In the middle of the night I heard them coming up the stairs, quarreling. It would be several weeks before I learned that the middle of the night was hardly very late for them, and that quarreling was little more than a conversation. I turned over in my bed and listened, though I couldn’t make out any of the words, and before I knew it I was asleep again. In the morning they were downstairs again as if nothing unusual had happened, and Walter went merrily off to the university.

  Though Robert still seemed intent upon emphasizing how unnecessary my work on the card catalog was, he brought me into the library as soon as I was finished with breakfast to show me how the computer worked.

  It was a beautiful room, with three arched, diamond-paned windows facing the sunny street. Books were packed tight along the other walls, their spines glistening; the bookcases were ingeniously fitted with two rolling ladders that reached the top shelf. I thought of the living room at home, the stepladder always stacked with books, new piles of them growing up around my father’s desk like weeds. The ceiling was high as a cathedral’s, or felt that way, and when I looked up I saw that it was painted with a delicate map of mythic constellations.

  “Just like Grand Central!” Robert said when he saw where I was looking. “And over here we have, as you can see, the entire Loeb classical library, and over here we have, let’s see, more classical libraries! And in this section? Books about Rome.” He seemed to think it was all a joke. “Oh, and this wall is all Ovid: Amores, Heroides, Ars Amatoria. One gazillion editions of Metamorphoses.” I wandered over to stare. Some of the books I recognized, of course, but it was hard to believe how my father had managed to leave any of these behind.

  “Arthur used to have wonderful parties in here,” Robert was saying. “Drove your father crazy.”

  I smiled blankly, unable to picture my father having anything to do with any party. I wished I hadn’t called him the day before with nothing to say but that I had arrived—now I wanted to tell him I’d seen the library. But neither of us were used to the phone. Even when Julie had been interested in calling me he’d kept the ringer turned off, and now that I’d gotten in touch he might just turn it off again.

  It turned out the task involved typing information from the cards in the card catalog into tiny boxes on the computer screen called, obscurely, “fields.” I didn’t tell Robert I hadn’t been on a computer before, except for the one in the library at school. The keyboard wasn’t any different, anyway, from the typewriter, and I could tell he was impressed at the speed with which I typed in the first card. He didn’t say another word about my not bothering with it; he left me to it and told me he’d be in his study if I needed anything. I typed until lunchtime and then went upstairs to change.

  Robert emerged just in time to see me coming downstairs in Julie’s blue dress. “All dressed up for lunch?” he said, making me regret it instantly.

  I waited for Nate on the steps. The weather had cleared up, and the sun was all over the place. I clutched my arms, noticing suddenly how pale my shoulders were, and thought of Julie in her bikini. When Nate came to pick me up he didn’t say a word about my dress: We marched rapidly down the block, already late to meet his sister, Liz, who was several more blocks over. She didn’t like it when he was late, he explained.

  Liz was waiting for us on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Thirteenth Street, digging intently in her handbag, and her hair, which hung in a soft curve in front of her face, flashed with sunlight. The object of her search was a black metal case containing black sunglasses, which she slid on just as we got to her. She was wearing a pearly white button-down shirt that opened at her breast, showing her delicate, richly tanned collarbone. “I’ve been doing the wedding stuff all day,” she said as Nate gave her a kiss.

  Nate introduced me, and she nodded, her lenses reflecting the street behind us. “It’s really bright, isn’t it?” she said.

  Before I could answer she was digging in her bag again.

  “I thought you quit,” Nate said whe
n she got out a pack of cigarettes.

  “Not with all this wedding stuff,” she said, pulling one out and lighting it. She exhaled prettily. “What are we eating?”

  She seemed used to having people watch her smoke, I thought, used to having people watch her do most things. Julie was like that too, but it always seemed to me that Julie was also listening. At least it looked like she was, even if she was thinking about herself. Whenever I drifted off into my own thoughts I tended to look sad, and once in a while someone would ask me what was wrong. I would glance up in surprise and Julie would laugh affectionately, in my defense. “You’re so spaced out!” she’d say.

  “I don’t want to have anything fattening,” Liz said, checking her watch. “Have you figured out if there’s any good salad around here?”

  “She just got here,” Nate said, before I realized she was speaking to me.

  She paused, I thought, to look over my dress. “Oh, that’s right.” She smiled. “From Maine, right?”

  “We were thinking about falafel,” Nate said.

  “Thanks. The perfect diet food.”

  “She’s never had it,” he said as we moved up the sidewalk. There wasn’t room for three of us, and I walked behind, awkward and tall. Nate towered over her, though I guessed, by her offhand cruelty, that she was the older of the two. None of the girls in Yvesport were as small as she was and still so bossy.

  People streamed out of the subway exit on Seventh Avenue like ants from a crack, and Nate and his sister walked smoothly around them. I tried to keep up, bumping into passing pedestrians, turning to go sideways between briefcases. They stopped to wait on the corner for a light and a man pulled up next to me on his bike.

  For a minute he balanced miraculously on his pedals, his calf muscles braced, sun soaking into his dreadlocked hair. When the bike finally tipped he put his foot out to brace himself against the curb. He saw me looking at him. “Hot,” he said, adjusting the canvas strap over his shoulder.

  I smiled timidly back at him, glancing over at Nate and his sister for help, but they were too engaged in conversation to notice.