14
WHEN THE NEXT DAY CAME, I GOT UP THE SECOND NATE TOLD me to, was ready quickly on his command, and followed him to the subway. Sometimes, if I was nervous enough and the occasion rare enough, it could work that smoothly.
But not for long.
The subway station was packed. I’d only been on one of them a few times before, with Dad, always on off hours, never having to carry anything else. I didn’t remember it so crowded, so many people squeezing down the stairs at once. Was anyone moving?
I began to sweat, the heat rushing to my face while I pictured myself being smacked to the ground, trampled on.
“How will all these people fit?” I said. “There’s no room. Isn’t that a law of physics or something?”
“There’s always room,” he said.
At the turnstile, he handed me a card and showed me how to swipe, but he went through so quickly I missed it. I tried using the wrong side. Then I had it upside down. Then the screen said “too fast.” Then it didn’t say anything. I was caught, holding everyone up behind me. “Nate?”
“Like this,” he said, trying to show me with a hand gesture from across the way, but I still couldn’t do it.
“Come on!” some guy said.
“You come on!” I said.
“Can I do that for you?” he said.
I considered it, but I couldn’t tell if he was sincere, so I stepped out of line. “Nate?”
He pushed through the door to come back around to help.
I focused on his easy glide.
“That’s what I did,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Now, walk through.”
I assumed that would be it and the train would be in front of us, but to get down to the platform, we had to make our way onto a massive escalator. It was steep. I concentrated on my feet for balance.
The train was arriving as we were descending, but we managed to cram ourselves into the last car. There was no place for us to sit, so we leaned near the door. I wasn’t a practiced leaner. I kept swaying over, losing my footing, falling into Nate.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Me too,” he said as I stepped on his toe.
Dad had been on a train like this one every day of his adult life, to get to whatever meetings he needed to attend. I couldn’t see him doing this in recent years, handling his bum knee in this kind of traffic. But he would’ve loved riding with us then, all of us acting like adults on our way to work. I imagined he was watching us from some secret spot we couldn’t find, beaming at the image of the two of us squashed together.
Neither of us spoke until the final approach toward our stop.
“Watch the gap when the doors open,” Nate said. “We can’t afford any more accidents.”
AFTER HE LED ME to the office, Nate wished me luck on the welcome mat before rushing off. He handed me his old phone and told me to call if I needed anything.
“You can do this,” he said.
I nodded, though I was pretty sure I couldn’t. After he left, I stood outside the glass doors for a while on my own, watching the waiting room through the entryway. My feet were sore from the funeral shoes; they were too narrow, and stiff, and I didn’t want to sit in there. Not on a hard, armless chair with people who matched the décor—black and white lines and angles, leather satchels and shiny hair.
But as much as I felt compelled to walk away, as many times as I’d done it before, I couldn’t do it then. I had to try for Nate. That was our agreement. And for Dad, who would’ve been so proud to see me there after I’d blown off that last interview—in matching shoes, at a reasonable hour. Maybe I could manage to fool these people long enough to hire me.
In the waiting room, I zeroed in on a chubby guy with bifocals and marked him as the least intimidating seat neighbor. His shirt wasn’t tucked in, his hair was poofy, wet from sweat at the roots, and there was an empty space next to him.
I realized how sticky I was myself as soon as I sat down and felt the back of my shirt pressing against me. Everyone besides me and Poofy seemed like a friend of Nate’s—crisp, clean, and pressed—blessed with Supercool powers, ease in the way they shifted legs, crossed feet, placed hands on other hands for emphasis. They all seemed to be members of a secret club.
When they weren’t conferring, they were writing things down, reviewing papers, studying things. I took an art class once where we didn’t have a textbook. Instead the professor showed slides. He made startled sounds sometimes or cried if the image moved him enough. Still, moments before the final exam, everyone was flipping through pages, reading and scribbling. What are you studying? I said. They didn’t answer. I realized then that during the slide presentations they had all been taking notes. I passed the exam because I took everything pass/fail, and because I understood those slides intuitively. Art, I didn’t have to study. People, I did.
What are you writing? I almost called out to the rest of the people in the waiting room. I took out a piece of paper and thought about sketching the Supercool Friends, but then I noticed Poofy’s résumé and realized I needed to find my own from my tote, not that there was much on it. Dad had helped me create it. It listed my education and some volunteer experiences I had exaggerated (the afternoon at the Humane Society, a couple of evenings at the soup kitchen, that one time I’d visited the old-age home). I had packed it the night before on Nate’s advice, but it was buried at the bottom of my bag, so to get to it, I had to extract everything else—a few fliers I’d picked up for lost pets, my sketchbook, pennies covered in something syrupy, crayons. It was crumpled on the bottom, a coffee spot in the corner. I tried to de-crease it as I waited for my turn. And then I looked up and saw it was time.
The woman who called me into her office, a woman with an unusually small head and unusually large curls, barely scanned my wrinkled résumé, or me as I contemplated her mane. If she gave me just a cut of that hair from the bottom, a few locks she wasn’t using, and I were somehow able to stick them onto my head, I would be brimming with styling possibilities. I could be someone else.
She shook my hand and gave me a disapproving once over. Before I had time to check myself to see if it was a specific stain or detail she was noticing rather than an overall impression, she began the interview.
“Do you know Word?” she said. “Excel? PowerPoint?”
No, I didn’t.
“Can you type?”
One finger at a time.
“How are you with filing?”
I pictured myself hiding folders, stashing them behind drawers, underneath storage bins, in the crevices between the cabinets, through the garbage chute. My head banging against hard corners over and over again.
“I’m not very good at organizing,” I said. I wasn’t good at lying either.
“I see.” She looked at me. “And what were you expecting to find here? Because you know this is office work, correct?”
“Yeah, I guess I was just . . . my brother said you—” What was I expecting? “I don’t know.”
“I see.” She returned her attention to her computer. “Well, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t seem your qualifications lend themselves to our services.”
It should have been a relief; I wouldn’t have to sit in an office for the rest of the day, or the week. It wasn’t a surprise. But it was her tone—the condescending callousness, the judgmental speech patterns—that stung the most.
Because somehow I had let myself think, if only for a second, that this woman with the mane might have said something else. That she might have said: Office work might not be for you, but there is this one thing I have that just might be a fit . . .
There was that school principal in an interview for a permanent sub position a few years earlier who’d said that she liked me based on grounds she couldn’t put her finger on. She said I was a “stitch” when I told her how much I liked graham crackers, and she mentioned a positive aura around me that gave her a “warm” feeling. Halfway through the interview, she gave me this look as
if she were seeing some quality in me that nobody else had seen, a look that made me believe that I could actually be somebody.
It turned out that getting up every day at the same time, early enough to meet the kids at the door, was something I couldn’t do in the end. I also had trouble sticking to a set curriculum. I kept losing the lesson plans, and my train of thought when I was trying to explain things to the students, and the students themselves when I took them out for recess. If I was in charge of just one or two kids, that might have worked out, but this was a class of twenty-five. At the end of the week, the principal didn’t have to tell me I wasn’t welcome back. I knew before the conversation began. I was just glad she didn’t yell at me or tell me how disappointed she was. Ultimately, when she told me she was sorry, she said it like she meant it.
It was that fleeting moment of hope she had given me that I was searching for in the temp office. The woman with the hair had taken it away.
“Fuck.” I thought I had said it under my breath.
“Excuse me?”
“I have to go now,” I said, scraping my knee against the underside of the table.
I rushed out, head down, as the burn began to set in.
I HAD TO get away as quickly as possible. Nate had pointed to Central Park on the way over. I should have paid more attention when he did that because I knew it had the zoo, and the zoo was filled with real animals—not Harry-like animals. At his core, Harry, with his white, socklike paws, was an old man who was afraid to leave the house. I often pictured him in a bathrobe and slippers. He wouldn’t last a day in a zoo.
But I had fond memories of this zoo. Memories of both Mom and Dad, memories of escaping into a different domain, memories of Gus. I needed to go back. I didn’t think. I just started going, first in the direction not facing the sun because it was really hot. Then the other way when that seemed wrong, but then I wasn’t sure which way that was, only that I had been walking for too long, and the blisters between my toes were growing.
I called Nate from the phone he gave me.
He didn’t pick up. So he was busy, or else purposely not answering, and I didn’t want to bother him with a message that would come out broken and dramatic, so I called back.
Again. And again. Four times, until finally—
“Lucy?”
“Oh, hi,” I said. “Is it you?”
“What’s wrong?” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Can you tell me how to get to the zoo?”
“Where are you?”
“In front of a building.”
“That’s not helpful. Are you still at the agency? What happened?”
He was annoyed. This was why I didn’t want to call.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“Don’t hang up. Are you all right?”
“No.” I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I didn’t want to cry or scream, but, “I don’t know what to do!”
He sighed.
“Do you see a bodega anywhere?” he said.
“One of those little shops? There’s one here.”
“Great. Now, go inside and buy a water with the twenty I stuck in the front pocket of your bag. Then ask the person at the counter for directions. You’ll be fine. Call me back if you need to, but only if it’s an emergency.”
I was hesitant to ask for directions because I didn’t want to hear that I was slow, or that I didn’t seem dressed for the zoo, or that it wasn’t anyone else’s job to direct me.
“Do you know where the park is?” I said finally.
The man at the register didn’t look at me. He pointed directly behind me.
“That? I was walking beside it the whole time?”
He didn’t answer.
“Is there a zoo in there?” I said.
“Central Park Zoo,” he said.
“Where is it? I mean, where’s the entrance, for the tickets?”
He pointed behind me again.
After a mistaken loop around the entrance, I made it to the gate. Seeing it there in all of its glory, was, I imagined, like stumbling onto the Fortress of Solitude. Here was the place that could guide me toward inner peace. I had found it, on my own—sort of—and I knew everything would be okay.
I WENT FIRST to the penguin house, where I stood in the corner beside the A/C vent. It was the coldest room in the zoo. I waited for the freezing air to dry my sweat as I took in the scene, pressing against the railing to get as close as possible. I watched the penguins totter from rock to rock, alternating between clusters of socialization and bursts of swimming. They would stand regally for moments at a time, with their flippers back and beaks pointed high, before plunging into the tank and starting over. It seemed like they were content to have their fish fed to them, their partners and friends predetermined. Did they know it was all ice and mirrors? Did they care?
When I was sufficiently cool, I found the Polar Circle, home of Gus. First, I looked for him from the outside. I stood before the bridge and scanned the rocks for a sign. As soon as I caught a glimpse of him diving into the water, I went below to get a better view.
I kept my eyes on him from the window—his energy, his motion, the whir of his coat—and I focused. He caught my gaze, and he paused. For a split second, it was as if his whole demeanor changed mid-lap. It wasn’t a real grin, but his leathery gums crept upward so that I could spot an enormous tooth. He looked straight at me.
My mind relaxed enough to lock out the noise. I grabbed my sketchbook and began to draw, following the charcoal as it glided across the page. It was as if I began flowing into his head, he into mine. I didn’t have to think, or reflect, or work. I just followed his lead until he began to emerge on the page as clearly as any portrait I’d done.
When I was finished drawing, I had no desire to leave, so I just sat and watched. I could have watched for days.
“You know they’re not actually white,” a woman said. Her voice was deep but cheerful.
I turned to face her. Her hair was long and wavy, in a way that seemed to match her figure. She looked like she was in her thirties or forties, though I wasn’t sure because she wasn’t wearing any makeup or accessories beyond a digital watch. I appreciated that she didn’t seem to have time for trifles.
“Pigment-free, I know,” I said. “It’s just the reflection of the light.”
Her name was Sally. It was printed on her name tag, on her zoo shirt, which matched her khaki shorts that were pulled up to her chest. She seemed surprised that I knew what I was talking about.
“We’re closing soon,” she said. “We need to start heading to the exit.”
I nodded my thanks to her, and then she peeked at my drawing.
“Well, that’s very good!” she said, smiling and squinting at me like I was a child.
“No,” I said. “I mean, it’s not much, but—you work here?”
“Going on fifteen years.”
“Wow.”
“As a matter of fact, I started as a volunteer,” she said. “Now I lead the whole squad.”
A volunteer? Really? How do you do that? I could’ve asked a hundred questions, but Sally was already headed to her next stop, and I didn’t want to pester her.
As I was leaving, I kept picturing the wide smile that stretched across Dad’s cheeks, the eager eyes. See? he was saying. Doors opening.
IT SHOULD HAVE TAKEN about forty-five minutes to find my way back to Nate’s, but that night it took me two hours. First, I had to roam around for a while to find Columbus Circle. I still didn’t get the difference between East and West in the park, and I wasn’t sure anyone else did either. It seemed like people were pointing me in the wrong direction each time I asked. Then I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for: a literal circle? A metaphorical intersection? An upscale mall was the easiest way to mark it. But then I went downtown instead of uptown, and then accidentally got on the red line instead of the blue line, and then the local instead of the express. I got yelled at by two women for blocking the d
oor, squeezed out of an elevator, and, alongside a group of snotty teenagers, serenaded by a mariachi band. I’d nearly cried twice, almost tried to get out of a moving train once, and had to sit down on the floor on the final stretch because I thought I was going to faint.
But whenever I was tempted to scream, I closed my eyes and imagined myself swimming with Gus, the penguins at my side. I examined the sketches I drew and in my mind returned to the zoo.
I wasn’t sure what time it was when I made it to the apartment. It took me a while to unlock the door—I kept relocking it—but I was comforted by the sight of Harry’s gleaming eyes greeting me in the darkness.
As I crashed on my sofa, I realized that I’d seen more people that day, more people since I’d moved to the city—hundreds, maybe thousands—than I’d seen in whole years at home. Here, I realized, I might have the chance to lose myself in an entirely different way. Not that I would necessarily want to—that prospect was terrifying—but for the first time, I could see the appeal of that freedom. There were so many trains here, so many streets, so many different options for moving in different directions.
Maybe for a second, that didn’t seem too daunting. Maybe for a moment, it even seemed to open possibilities. Why couldn’t I be someone here? Maybe I could be someone who worked at the zoo.
I passed out fully clothed and didn’t move again until morning.
15
LIVING WITH DAD, MY ROUTINE HAD CONSISTED OF A COUPLE of naps a day, and maybe one activity every other day—a drive to a store, for example, or an appointment with a therapist or headache specialist. Occasionally, there was a trip to a museum or park. But nothing could compare to my day at the zoo. My muscles ached in places I wasn’t sure I had muscles—in my feet, and at the bottom of my spine. My shoulder too was strained from carrying my bag all day, shooting pain into my neck.
Nate found me in my pajamas as he prepped for his morning commute. “You just rolling out of bed?”
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