Signs and Wonders

by Rebecca McClanahan          

Artillery sounds wake me: car alarms screeching, beeping—you know the drill—and a jackhammer breaking open the sidewalk outside our window. No, not our window, I remind myself. The window of the apartment we’ve been subletting this past year, and the lease is almost up. Another year? My husband is leaving it up to me. Donald could live anywhere, he’s that kind of guy. Easy, adaptable, like the ducks in the park. Things just roll right off his back.

When we first moved to New York, we couldn’t believe how cheap the flowers were. “What a city,” we said. “We can buy flowers every week, fill the apartment with them, the bathtub. What a city!” Then we went to the grocery store, and when I saw the prices I started to cry. “How can we possibly afford . . . we’ll have to give up . . . oh my God,” I shrieked, “what will we eat?”

“We’ll just have to eat flowers,” Donald said.

Last week, I would have signed a hundred-year lease. I was just coming off one of my New York highs, the kind that hits when you least expect it and suddenly it’s like first love again, first lust, and you wonder how you could possibly live anywhere else. Then a steam pipe bursts, the couple in the apartment above you straps their steel-heeled boots back on, you step in a puddle of urine on the subway platform and some guy with three rings in his nose calls you Bitch and spits on you because—who knows?—you look like his second grade teacher, or some president’s wife, or his mother, and you think, Live another year in this jackhammering, siren-screaming, piss-puddling city? In someone else’s apartment, in someone else’s bed? With someone else’s plates, forks, spoons?

Maybe it’s the wrong day to decide. Maybe I need some air. Maybe I need a sign. So I go where I always go when I need a sign—to Central Park, and oh look, a day so beautiful you’d gladly pay if the universe were charging. The leaves on the ginkgos are falling, gold coins upon gold coins. And there in the pond are my ducks, how I admire them. Look, one is passing up breadcrumbs to catch a blossom. He’s eating flowers.

         Along the promenade are the inline skaters in their T-shirts: Kickimus Maximus Assimus. Are you talking to me? Fun loving criminal. One guy is skating backward, a small compact man so graceful he doesn’t need skates—his hip joints are on ball bearings, rolling in one smooth movement. But I know it’s harder than it looks. Isn’t everything? If you peek beneath the surface of the water, you can see the ducks’ tiny paddle-wheel feet working, churning. It breaks your heart: little New York ducks have to keep moving all the time.

I stop at a bench beside a raggedy guy in a black hat, his shopping cart plastered with handmade signs. New York is a city of signs: Curb your dog. Curb your dogma. Love your neighbor, your neighbor’s dog. His signs are bright red painted on cardboard: Society of Jesus Christ. Society of Disabled Artists. Call me Ray.

“So, Ray,” I say, “you’re an artist?”

He rummages in his cart and pulls out a painting of a bonfire, flames breaking into bloom.

“Have you ever seen a flame like that? I ask. “Or is it imagination?”

“I like to think about Moses,” he says. “I was seeing the burning bush.”

“God spoke to him in the fire, right?”

“That’s right.”

“In words?” I ask.

“Through him. Spirit.”

I tell him I used to be in a gospel choir, but I was only a lowly backup singer.

“Never call yourself lowly,” he says.

Closer now, I can see the face beneath the hat: almost handsome. But the smell is ripe, and I won’t be staying. Besides, it’s his bench; I’m just subletting. A lowly subletter, I think for an instant, then stop myself. But it is his bench and I should respect that. I don’t like it when people come to my gazebo. It took me months to find it, the most beautiful place in the park. There’s even a place to fish. I can lean my back against the wooden slats, put my feet up, watch the geese forming their predictable V pattern. It’s good to have something to count on, like the gondola that glides through about this time of day, sliding under the Bow Bridge, the gondolier always singing badly “O Sole Mio,” which seems a crazy choice for New York: O sole mio, oh my sun, my ducks, my forks, oh my anything. When so much of New York is about we: O sole wio.

 Still, it’s a beautiful spot, my gazebo, and I’d tell you where it is, but what if word got out? A few weeks ago, on my birthday no less, I couldn’t even get a seat. It hadn’t been a good week; the odometer of my life was clicking too fast. Birthdays can do that to you, especially in the city. Especially when you do what we did—wait until middle age to move here. “Like, isn’t that backwards?” one of my nieces had said. “I mean, like, don’t most people go to New York when they’re young?”

So I really needed my gazebo that day, but some guy was stretched out the whole length of it, beside a grocery cart with a handmade sign sticking out of the top: I’m at the peak of my life. I wondered if the sign was meant for me, if it was trying to tell me something. A few more clicks on life’s meter, and I’ll be one of those ancient women sharing a park bench with another ancient woman, the two of us leaning together over a bag of peanuts.

Oh, the partners we make, the families we create in this city of strangers. Like that big guy on Ninth Avenue—big as a truck, I know you’ve seen him, riding that little bike with the basket on the front. Inside the basket is one of those Cabbage Patch dolls that were popular a decade or so ago. The doll is always dressed for the weather, secured with a homemade seat belt and a miniature helmet. Such care. And yesterday, beside the carousel, I saw a teenage boy strapped into a wheelchair, his head lolling, brown eyes rolling up to the sky, his mouth opening, like a bird’s, for a spoon lifted by a large, dark woman. The two were facing each other—he in his wheelchair, she on the green bench. Their knees were touching. Steam was rising from the thermos of soup. First she dipped the spoon in the thermos, then put it to her mouth and tested to be sure the soup was safe, that it wouldn’t burn him.

When I see things like that I want to break into lullaby. Sing someone to sleep in this town that never sleeps. Adopt an artist, a duck, the whole Cabbage Patch family. Look, there’s a family now, spilling out of my gazebo, with their fishing poles, their buckets and bait, their beautiful children—black eyes, black hair, dimpled hands—the kind of children you want to touch but you can’t, of course, especially in New York. The little boy is wrestling a bright red carp the color of the fire in Ray’s painting, and now his sister is catching the carp in a net. Don’t they know it’s against the rules posted all over the park? Catch and release. Look but don’t touch. Enjoy for the moment, then let it go—the fiery carp, the brilliant day, the black-eyed children with the dimpled hands, the coins on the ginkgo trees swirling down, down. Our lives are sublets anyway, and too quickly gone at that. And what better place to live out our leases. Curb your dog, your dogma, love your neighbor, your neighbor’s dog. We’re at the peak of our lives. O Sole Wio. Catch and release.

---from In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays (Red Hen Press, 2020)