I’m in Brooklyn for the first day of my trans-continental adventure. The apartment where I am staying is in Crown Heights, which meant nothing to me until I was walking from the subway to discover it and realized that the street names and the scenery are all familiar. Dean Street, Nostrand, these are the stomping grounds of Dylan, the main character in Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. He described the neighborhood with potent accuracy. I feel as though I’ve been here before. Also, Last Exit to Brooklyn. The beloved Selby. My introduction to Brooklyn by way of literature has been helpful in making me feel more comfortable, at home.
After getting settled in the apartment and learning that my hosts are a young lesbian couple (had no idea, so apropos), I ventured out with a restlessness I can’t describe except to say that I’ve felt bored with the predictable and sane events involving normal people in society. In this new place, this somewhat foreign place, I wanted to see what would happen when I move against the grain of what’s expected of me and my behavior. Both from myself of myself and from unwritten social rule. So I set out to cause a ruckus. What would I do? Something shocking. Something so not normal.
I emerged from the subway in Manhattan and took on the first, simplest rebellion—the one against my own expectations of myself. What could I do that I’d never done before? That I’d never imagined doing? It was a challenge. The mere act of deciding what to do created an expectation and immediately ruled it out. Unexpectedly, I went into a flower shop. Walking around, eyed by the clerk listening to talk radio, I surveyed my options. Just when I was about to abandon the place, I saw some yellow daisies behind a mass of red and orange wildflowers. I grabbed the bouquet because it reminded me of miniature suns on stems and I did it. I bought myself flowers. Completely unlike me.
Whilst walking down the sidewalk dense with smells and bodies, I caught my reflection in a window. I looked like a hoodlum boy in my winter had, zipped up leather jacket, and hoodie. If not for the yellow suns, I would have been utterly unfeminine, something I typically, for reasons I can’t explain, enjoy. Only this time it felt different, accompanied by a slow, tugging melancholy. So I peered into my reflection in the window, seeking out the delicate features of my face. They were there, but what I noticed were my hands. Made feminine somehow by the soft, curved shapes they were made to handle—one wrapped loosely around stems, the other hanging unused at my side. My hands, unconflicted. I was suddenly overcome with a confusing gratitude for them, for all the myriad painful, beautiful, perverse things they’ve touched and allowed me to feel.
My mind jumped then to pondering what I might do for my pubic spectacle. Pretend like I have turrets and scream obscenities accompanied by jerks and twitches? Maybe lay on the sidewalk and laugh? Or cry? Or both?
My eyes sank through my reflection to focus on a martini glass meeting the lips of a woman. The liquid was orange. Sweet, I imagined. Cloying, even. I watched the woman sip and I felt the burn in my own gullet. I felt it warming my gut, softening the edges of everything sharp, blurring unpleasant thoughts away. And just like that, with every cell in my body, I wanted to drink. I think I even physically leaned in toward the glass, tugged and pulled from my core.
“That’s not for you,” he said. A deep voice behind me, close. Too close. I turned and lifted the flowers (that had been hanging listlessly in my hand during my reverie) to my chest, between me and this man. He looked at them and smirked.
“How do you know what’s not for me?” I said, defensive, cautious.
He laughed and looked past me through the window. His hair was gray, his eyes were gray. He was slender in his peacoat and tall with a striking face. A familiar face, I thought.
“Do I know you?” I said, squinting up at him over the daisies. People were bumping by us, pushing us closer together. I stepped back and scowled at a woman who just shouldered me as she barged past. I felt him staring at me and looked up again, guarded.
“You are beautiful,” he said. He emphasized the “are,” like he was agreeing with someone rather than stating an observation. I was caught off guard, so I smiled. It was the last thing I’d expected him to say. I thanked him, I think. He stood there. I didn’t know what to do, so I pulled a daisy out of the bouquet and handed it to him. He laughed and took it.
“Enjoy,” he said, and turned to leave.
“I’m Elizabeth,” I said, calling after him to urgently introduce myself. He paused and looked back.
“Andy,” he said and waved, hurrying away.
There is no facet of strangeness that encounter lacked. Nor does anything need to be said about it.
I made my way back to the subway with my flowers. In it, there was an agitated man sitting across from me, randomly calling out “boom boom.” I looked around, but nobody looked. Nobody took the slightest notice of him. It occurred to me then that I could convulse and scream on the floor and garner no response whatsoever in this setting. It would be right in line with a typical day’s scenery in New York City. So what I did instead, which in retrospect I think was the right thing to do because it was genuine (whereas faking some grotesque outburst would be inauthentic, and somehow, that didn’t seem right), was turn to the guy sitting next to me who appeared to be sleeping, and who’d, by the look of his mud-splattered pants and boots, obviously worked all day in construction, and place the daisies in his lap.
He squinted open his eyes and jumped a little at the sight of them, then looked mean and cold at me from under his heavy, brown sweatshirt hood. I smiled at him. He looked down at the flowers again, moved them off of his lap and onto the seat between us, shifted away from me, and closed his eyes, resuming his nap. Others around us looked suspiciously at the flowers, like they might contain a bomb, and equally suspiciously at me, like I might not be human. Embarrassed, I got off at the next exit, even though I had a long way to go before my stop.
The unexpected happened and I am a little changed by it, although I don’t know quite how. I feel a sense of sharp beauty as well as desolation. There is something beneath the surface, beneath the appearances of things that choreographs our moves. This seems certain, yet I don’t know how it can be. Still, its presence lends to my life a quality of relentless, small hope.
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