by Suzanne Farah, SUNY Cortland
Posted in on Sunday, Nov 25
Sometimes they keep me awake at night. The decisions I have made. One resonates like smoke damage from a fire. Blackening the walls inside my head. Leaving behind a residue thick and sticky as tar. It takes me back to Queens. Back to you.
I know I misled you. I fooled myself back then. With the small town girl’s dream of marrying and moving to the Big Apple. Six months later you appeared, you on the white steed. I felt as though I had been sleeping for a lifetime waiting for your coming to awaken me. Even now, three hundred miles away, I still feel the pumping adrenaline rushing through me. The picture is living, breathing, illuminated, alive in my mind.
I step out from Penn Station into Madison Square Garden. My fingers tingle; my eyes alight on billboards as tall as the skyscrapers piercing the night sky. Taxicabs honk, brakes of delivery trucks squeak, people rush by me laughing, holding hands. Street musicians tell their stories in three-piece bands to small groups of people that stop to listen. I fall in love with the City.
I pocket every scent: the candied cashews roasting in the street wagons on the corners, the lamb frying at the gyro kiosks, the cigarettes and cigars and cloves that leave their sweet smell on my wool coat as I walk by the jazz clubs in Greenwich Village. The music dancing onto the streets, a rhythm I am walking to. When I shut my eyes I recount Times Square flashing fluorescent blue, orange and red like a strobe light, a giant disco ball suspended above the city. I see the souvenir shops with their miniature Statues of Liberty and “I heart NY” tee shirts in every size and color. The mannequins in the storefronts of Bloomingdale’s and Saks’s adorned with Gucci Italian silk scarves and Herrara evening gowns sparkling with sequins of copper and silver.
I try to carry Manhattan back with me holding its energy like a ball of fire in my small hands. The train takes me back, with you, to Queens. The overhead lights momentarily coming on and off, the train jumping and jolting from side to side as it switches tracks. Your face illuminating and disappearing as we put another mile between the City and us. As the high begins to fade, we get closer to Beach 42nd St. The excitement and rush of emotions slip through my fingers like grains of sand. The tighter I hold on the more escapes me.
Our new two family house is towering before us still smelling of fresh paint. It looks out of place among the rundown project buildings and the boarded up bodegas. Metal bars spread like ivy covering the front door and windows. I am struck by the absurdity of the steel bars, protecting a life, a home, unworthy of theft. A home with no foundation. A home as lifeless and unchanging as a picture in a realtor’s brochure. An illusion of smoke and mirrors. And I am the illusionist.
I never told you, but I think you knew. I dreaded your return home. I hoped you would be assigned overtime and I would have the house for myself. Without you there, it was easier to pretend I was happy, dutifully cleaning, decorating and rearranging the furniture, baking cookies and brownies, trying new recipes. And then, I would hear the click of the deadbolt, the pounding of your feet up the stairs, the sound of the refrigerator door opening and closing and the TV coming on and shutting off. My breathing became faster and stifled, a lump grew and swelled in my throat, my skin tingled with anxiety. The house warned me with each creak of the stairs and groan of the doors. This is reality.
I think about what I left there: merlot curtains laced with crushed velvet; crystal, long stemmed wine glasses; lilac flannel sheets trimmed with lace; a new Cuisenart blender, glass and stainless steel, still in its box; a table top, ceramic Christmas tree, evergreen and scarlet. And up the stairs in the master bedroom in one of its two walk-in closets still smelling of fresh Taupe paint is a small cardboard box full of artifacts. A time capsule never to be retrieved.
These thoughts weigh on my mind, still. Memories pale blue, ebony, bone white and fuchsia. I try to piece them together but they burst open like tiny pieces of paper fluttering in the wind, each piece dancing and swirling around my out-stretched arms. My clumsy fingers swipe at the air. What if I never left Queens? I retrace my steps back from Far Rockaway, through the dark tunnels of the Cross Bronx Expressway with its missing tiles and flickering yellow lights, over the George Washington Bridge stoic and mighty as Agrius, watching the Manhattan skyline fade into the darkness behind me.
With all the baggage I carried back to the winding country roads of upstate New York, I took only one photograph. Black and white, I am looking up at the tree in Rockefeller Center, eyes as wide and unknowing as a child’s gazing in amazement at the string of lights and thousands of ornaments dancing in the New York winter sky as if they were fireworks ready to burst open into the night. And you, behind the camera, watching, wondering how long this moment will last.
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