Page 75 of Still Me
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Saturday served itself up cold with a side order of gales. I hadn’t known quite how brutal the winds could be in New York. It was as if the tall buildings funneled any breeze, polishing it hard and fast into something icy and fierce and solid. I frequently felt as if I were walking in some kind of sadistic wind tunnel. I kept my head down, my body at an angle of 45 degrees and, occasionally reaching out to clutch at fire hydrants or lampposts, I caught the subway to the Vintage Clothes Emporium, stayed for a coffee to thaw out, and bought a zebra-print coat at the marked-down bargain price of twelve dollars. In truth, I lingered. I didn’t want to go back to my silent little room, with Ilaria’s news program burbling down the corridor, its ghostly echoes of Sam, and the temptation to check my e-mail every fifteen minutes. I got home when it was already dark and I was cold and weary enough not to be restless or submerged in that persistent New York feeling—that staying in meant I was missing out on something.
I sat and watched TV in my room and thought about writing Sam an e-mail but I was still angry enough not to feel conciliatory and wasn’t sure what I had to say was about to make anything better. I’d borrowed a novel by John Updike from Mr. Gopnik’s shelves but it was all about the complexities of modern relationships, and everyone in it seemed unhappy or was lusting madly after someone else, so in the end I turned off the light and slept.
—
The next morning when I came down Meena was in the lobby. She was minus children this time, but accompanied by Ashok, who was not in his uniform. I startled a little at the sight of him in civvies, rootling under his desk. It occurred to me suddenly how much easier it was for the rich to refuse to know anything about us when we weren’t dressed as individuals.
“Hey, Miss Louisa,” he said. “Forgot my hat. Had to pop in before we head to the library.”
“The one they want to close?”
“Yup,” Ashok said. “You want to come with us?”
“Come help us save our library, Louisa!” Meena clapped me on the back with a mitten-clad hand. “We need all the help we can get!”
I had been planning to go to the coffee shop, but I had nothing else to do and Sunday stretched ahead of me, like a wasteland, so I agreed. They handed me a placard, saying “A LIBRARY IS MORE THAN BOOKS,” and checked that I had a hat and gloves. “You’re good for an hour or two, but you get really chilled by the third,” Meena said, as we walked out. She was what my father would have called ballsy—a voluptuous, big-haired, sexy New Yorker, who had a smart retort for everything her husband said, and loved to rib him about his hair, his handling of their children, his sexual prowess. She had a huge, throaty laugh and took no crap from anyone. He plainly adored her. They called each other “baby” so often that I occasionally wondered if they had forgotten each other’s names.
We caught the subway north to Washington Heights and talked about how he had taken the job as a temporary measure when Meena first got pregnant, and how when the children were school age he was going to start looking around for something else, something with office hours, so that he could help out more. (“But the health benefits are good. Makes it hard to leave.”) They had met at college—I was ashamed to admit I had assumed they were an arranged marriage.
When I’d told her, Meena had exploded into laughter. “Girl? You think I wouldn’t have made my parents pick me better than him?”
Ashok: “You didn’t say that last night, baby.”
Meena: “That’s because I was focused on the TV.”
When we finally laughed our way up the subway steps at 163rd Street I was suddenly in a very different New York.
—
The buildings in this part of Washington Heights looked exhausted: boarded-up shop fronts with sagging fire escapes, liquor shops, fried-chicken shops, and beauty salons with curled and faded pictures of outdated hairstyles in the windows. A softly cursing man walked past us, pushing a shopping trolley full of plastic bags. Groups of kids slouched on corners, catcalling to each other, and the curb was punctuated by refuse bags that lay stacked in unruly heaps, or vomited their contents onto the road. There was none of the gloss of Lower Manhattan, none of the purposeful aspiration that was shot through the very air of Midtown. The atmosphere here was scented with fried food and disillusionment.
Meena and Ashok appeared not to notice. They strode along, their heads bent together, checking phones to make sure Meena’s mother wasn’t having problems with the kids. Meena turned to see if I was with them and smiled. I glanced behind me, tucked my wallet deeper inside my jacket, and hurried after them.
We heard the protest before we saw it, a vibration in the air that gradually became distinct, a distant chant. We rounded a corner and there, in front of a sooty red-brick building, stood around a hundred and fifty people, waving placards and chanting, their voices mostly aimed toward a small camera crew. As we approached, Meena thrust her sign into the air. “Education for all!” she yelled.“Don’t take away our kids’ safe spaces!”We pierced the crowd and were swiftly swallowed by it. I had thought New York was diverse, but now I realized all I had seen was the color of people’s skin, the styles of their clothes. Here was a very different range of people. There were old women in knitted caps, hipsters with babies strapped to their backs, young black men with their hair neatly braided, and elderly Indian women in saris. People were animated, joined in a common purpose, and utterly, communally intent on getting their point across. I joined in with the chanting, seeing Meena’s beaming smile, the way she hugged fellow protesters as she moved through the crowd.
“They said it’ll be on the evening news.” An elderly woman turned to me, nodding with satisfaction. “That’s the only thing the city council takes any notice of. They all wanna be on the news.”
I smiled.
“Every year it’s the same, right? Every year we have to fight a little harder to keep the community together. Every year we have to hold tighter to what’s ours.”
“I—I’m sorry. I don’t really know. I’m just here with friends.”
“But you came to help us. That’s what matters.” She placed a hand on my arm. “You know my grandson does a mentoring program here? They pay him to teach other young folk the computers. They actually pay him. He teaches adults too. He helps them apply for jobs.” She clapped her gloved hands together, trying to keep warm. “If the council close it, all those people will have nowhere to go. And you can bet the city councilors will be the first people complaining about the young folk hanging around on street corners. You know it.” She smiled at me as if I did.
Ahead, Meena was holding up her sign again. Ashok, beside her, stooped to greet a friend’s small boy, picking him up and lifting him above the crowd so that he could see better. He looked completely different in this crowd without his doorman outfit. For all we talked, I had only really seen him through the prism of his uniform. I hadn’t wondered about his life beyond the lobby desk, how he supported his family or how long he traveled to work or what he was paid. I surveyed the crowd, which had grown a little quieter once the camera crew departed, and felt oddly ashamed at how little I had really explored New York. This was as much the city as the glossy towers of Midtown.
We kept up our chant for another hour. Cars and trucks beeped in support as they passed and we would cheer in return. Two librarians came out and offered trays of hot drinks to as many as they could. I didn’t take one. By then I had noticed the ripped seams on the old lady’s coat, the threadbare, well-worn quality of the clothes around me. An Indian woman and her son walked across the road with large foil trays of hot pakoras and we dived on them, thanking her profusely. “You are doing important work,” she said. “We thank you.” My pakora was full of peas and potato, spicy enough to make me gasp and absolutely delicious. “They bring those out to us every week, God bless them,” said the old lady, brushing pastry crumbs from her scarf.
A squad car crawled by two, three times, the officer’s face blank as he scanned the crowd. “Help us save our library, sir!” Meena yelled at him. He turned his face away but his colleague smiled.
At one point Meena and I went inside to use the loos and I got a chance to see what I was apparently fighting for. The building was old, with high ceilings, visible pipework and a hushed air; the walls were covered with posters offering adult education, meditation sessions, help with CVs and payment of six dollars per hour for mentoring classes. But it was full of people, the children’s area thick with young families, the computer section humming with adults clicking carefully on keyboards, not yet confident in what they were doing. A handful of teenagers sat chatting quietly in a corner, some reading books, several wearing earphones. I was surprised to see two security guards standing by the librarians’ desk.
“Yeah. We get a few fights. It’s free to anyone, you know?” whispered Meena. “Drugs usually. You’re always gonna get some trouble.” We passed an old woman as we headed back down the stairs. Her hat was filthy, her blue nylon coat creased and street-worn, with rips in the shoulders, like epaulets. I found myself staring after her as she levered her way up, step by step, her battered slippers barely staying on her feet, clutching a bag from which one solitary paperback poked out.
We stayed outside for another hour—long enough for a reporter and another news crew to stop by, asking questions, promising they would do their best to get the story to run. And then, at one, the crowd started to disperse. Meena, Ashok, and I headed back to the subway, the two of them chatting animatedly about whom they had spoken to and the protests planned for the following week.
