Read Online The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick - Free Book Online Page B

“This is the best cheese Danish I have ever eaten.”
    We leave the diner and walk to the bus stop. “Let’s stand here,” she says, pointing to a spot a few feet beyond the sign. “It used to throw me into a rage,” she explains, “that the driver would always pass the sign and stop here. I never understood why. But now I realize that it is actually easier for him to lower the step here for people like me than it is at the sign.” She laughs and says, “I’ve noticed lately that when I don’t get angry I have more thoughts than when I do. It makes life interesting.”
    I nearly weep. All I had ever wanted was that my mother be glad to be alive in my presence. I am still certain that if she had been, I’d have grown up whole inside.
    â€œImagine,” I say to Leonard. “She’s so old and she can still do this to me.”
    â€œIt’s not how old she is that’s remarkable,” he says. “It’s how old you are.”
    *   *   *
    A month ago, I passed a middle-aged couple on the promenade at Battery Park City. She was black, he white; both had gray hair and wavy jawlines. They were holding hands and talking earnestly, their eyes searching each other’s faces for the answers to questions that only lovers put to each other. I realized, as I looked at them, that the city now contains a considerable number of middle-aged interracial couples. I’d been spotting them all over town for more than a year now, black men and white women, white men and black women, almost all of them in their forties or fifties, clearly in the first stages of intimacy. It moved me to be reminded once again of how long it is taking blacks and whites to become real to one another.
    *   *   *
    At ten in the morning, as I am standing on line in my branch library, waiting to check out a book, a frail-looking woman about my own age suddenly grasps the edge of the checkout desk and remains standing there. I lean forward from my place in the line and call out to her, “Is everything all right?” She glances wanly in my direction, then screams at me, “Why the hell are you asking me if everything is all right?”
    At noon, waiting on the corner for the light to change, I look down and see a pair of shoes I think beautiful but complicated. “Are those shoes comfortable?” I inquire of the young woman wearing them. She backs off, looks at me with suspicion in her eyes, and in an alarmed voice says, “Why are you asking me that?”
    At three in the afternoon, I pass a man who is yelling into the air, “Help me! Help me! I’ve got four uncurable diseases! Help me!” I tap him on the shoulder and cheerfully confide, “The word is incurable .” Without missing a beat, he replies, “Who the fuck asked you.”
    The randomness of life being what it is, a few days later I have another “who the fuck asked you” day.
    I’m sitting in an aisle seat on a crosstown bus. A man—black, somewhere in his forties, dressed in jeans and an oversize yellow T-shirt—is standing beside me, speaking very loudly into a cell phone.
    I catch his eye and make a motion with my hand that means, “Lower your voice.” He looks amazed.
    â€œLower my voice?” he says incredulously. “No, madam, I will not lower my voice. I paid my fare, I’ll do what I damned please.”
    â€œYour fare entitles you to ride the bus,” I reply. “It does not entitle you to hold the passengers hostage.”
    â€œWhy, you bitch,” the man cries.
    I leave my seat and go up to the driver. “Did you hear what that man just said to me?”
    â€œYes, lady,” the driver says wearily. “I heard him.”
    â€œAre you going to do anything about it?” I demand.
    â€œWhat do you want me to do? Call the police?”
    â€œYou bitch, you white bitch,” the man