She’d buy a pack of cigarettes. That’d be a thing to do, a new prop to hold—one that would be less ugly than the suitcase and the keys—some kind of shortcut to poise or personality. This was a thing the living did—smoked. It was a way to know you existed as a person in the world: blackening up your lungs with nicotine and tar.
As a kid she’d had nightmares of witches. She would wake up and smell them on her pillow, a sour yellow reek. Loneliness, too, had a smell, she thought, and it was almost the same, that witchy reek. As she walked out into the world she feared she was trailing it behind her.
In the deli on the corner Beyoncé was singing on the in-store radio and a young man was grabbing a beer from one of the chiller cabinets, a practiced, swinging ease to the motion. As she touched an enormous bag of pretzels, pretending to be interested in it, some shift happened, some subatomic shuffle. She looked up before she could think.
A girl was standing in front of the counter, peeling off dollars. The bleached and frayed denim cutoffs she wore were butt-skimmingly short, cut high on the outer thighs and belted tight at her waist. A loose black top hung low from her shoulders, the upper part of her back gleaming with sweat.
“American Spirit,” she said. Her voice made Kate think of caves, their smooth, dry walls. “Yellow.”
As the man reached up behind him for the cigarettes the girl tilted her head and swept her hand across her hair, twisting it into one rope that she slung around her shoulder, a movement so fluent that Kate understood it to be habitual to the point of definitive. There was a worldly impatience to it, as though this length of hair were a wearisome but welcome thing. Kate thought of the way a mother hoists her kid on her hip, proprietorial pleasure humming through the sigh of it. She could almost feel it, the luxury of gathering up those black lengths, a musky smell rising from the weight of them.
A line of muscle stretched the length of the girl’s brown thigh, and it strobed as she cast her weight onto her right hip and began tapping her foot. She was shoeless! And the piston-pedal made by those tensed and naked toes scandalized Kate. To be barefoot, in a shop—store—to walk across all the hot dirt of the city on the skin of your soles.
The tapping of her foot seemed less like agitation and more like an expression of optimism and energy, a hunger for things. Its regularity seemed almost practical, as though this foot pedaled the engine that powered the girl’s world and she was simply keeping it going, pushing it forward, an impatient maintenance.
Kate stared, her fingers going a little slack around the pretzel bag. Maybe she was overthinking again.
But the girl’s jawline, the silhouette of it, somehow had the same merciless quality as the skyline seen out the window of the cab a few hours earlier. It was this detail in particular that drove a new conviction in Kate: if she were ever to get to know this girl, she’d fail her. She saw the girl throwing a basketball at her, blam, fingers outspread from the center of her chest as if to mime an explosion—catch it!—but instead of catching it Kate would flinch, fumble, drop it. She felt her blush begin to rise at this imagined incompetence.
And then, finally, the girl turned her head and looked straight down the aisle at her, black rounds of sunglasses set on a symmetry so perfect that it induced a kind of terror. Kate’s stomach fell. The girl began to withdraw her sunglasses with a sort of poisonous languor, and Kate jumped back to the pretzels before eye contact. This start, she knew, only underscored the gawking it was meant to conceal.
“Happyforth!”
Kate couldn’t have responded anyway—stones choking up her throat—but the girl was already walking out the door, giving rhythmic slaps to the base of the cigarette packet with the heel of her hand. The bottoms of her feet were filthy; every step was a flash of grimed black sole.
It had been, what, nine seconds? Nothing. It was the black-bottomed feet that filled her mind now, the sight of them as she’d walked away. A wolfish pang of wondering where she was going. The pretzels were still in her hand and she looked at them. An enormous bag. She put them back.
At the cooler cabinet were something like a hundred different waters. Fluoro-crystal-colored ones, glowing in the spaceship hum of refrigeration. Ones to energize you, ones proclaiming “Focus” and “De-stress,” infusions named Immuno-defense and Activate and Balance. There was even, my god, Arouse. And yet no one, as far as she knew, had managed to manufacture and market a water that would tell you who you were and what you should do and where you should be in the future. No isotonic called “Drink This and You’ll Know If Your Relationship Is Over and How to End It.”
At the counter, she parroted the girl’s words: “American Spirit.” The guy made an irritable wince at her and she repeated herself, repeating the girl, but the stones were back, throat-cluttering, and the words came out tremulously.
“Eh?” he said.
She swallowed, blinked, indicated the packets behind him, and made her third attempt: “American Spirit cigarettes? Those yellow ones?”
He dropped his wince and laughed. She had no idea what was happening. Finally, she realized she was being teased. He chuckled, reached for the cigarettes, and slapped them down on the counter with the lovely largesse of a bet well won. With a pinch and a flourish, he added a lighter to the pile—bright yellow, the same shade as the cigarette packet. “American Spirit for English girl!”
She thanked him.
He seemed to expect a little more, a chat or a joke.
She smiled weakly and could say nothing. His joy faded. With his palms on the countertop, he seemed to recede into himself.
“Thanks,” she mumbled again, pocketing the cigarettes.
When he slowly raised his hand to wipe sweat from his brow there was something mournful in the movement. It was a kind of sad salute goodbye. He continued to look at her, wordless, as she left.
She walked to Tompkins Square Park, which that evening was still nameless for her, just a park that smelled of scorched grass and dust and hot air threaded through with notes of marijuana. A low-slung sun burned all the day’s dirt into gold. There were so many faces here that for a moment Kate felt she was trespassing on a party. There was a consensus to their leisure, she could feel it, luminous and weird, a common sentience, as if all these people might turn in unison, any moment now, to look to her silently with wondering frowns—not exactly hostile, but certainly puzzled—that would ask who she was and what she was doing here. Friends and strangers were enacting their social lives all over this public space.
A trio of African American teenage boys, popping and flexing beside a miniature portable sound system, began to draw a crowd who clapped and nodded with an expansive, self-congratulatory indulgence, a great open willingness to be entertained. She became one of the crowd too, put her body between the shoulders of other people, one of the spectators watching torsos jerking, arms jolting out of sockets and swinging lifeless, eyes rolling back in heads. The performers’ faces displayed exaggerated expressions of astonishment at their own virtuosity. The crowd cheered again. Kate moved away.
Across the park a tiny old woman, humpbacked and sinewed, was shadowboxing and jogging feebly on the spot. She was dressed in Barbie-pink satin boxing shorts and a bomber jacket, and a blond wig bounced on her skull, threatening to jerk itself loose. To Kate she was unignorable, spectacularly so, and yet everyone ignored her.
Kate followed the park’s paths, the sensible curves of them prescribing the way. She had no idea how to be a body in space, of where to put herself and how and why. Along the benches homeless men were stretched out shirtless, heaving as they snored. Time had faded their tattoos and sun had darkened their skin so much that the two—inked flesh and unmarked flesh—were almost indistinguishable. Beyond them, on the grass, small groups of young white women in sunglasses and scanty floral dresses had arranged themselves around mini-picnics of hummus pots and carrot sticks, and even the prostrate among them seemed to have configured themselves in ways that would flatter them in photographs, on their fronts with their chins in their palms