An Immigrant Woman

PART ONE I Slip-pilings on the Brooklyn littoral —the poles still tarry, flimsy; the ferry terminus with its walledup doors wan doorshapes on eroded sills. Downstream, the strutwork of the Williamsburg cable tower threw its cool shadow half a mile inland over tarpaper seams, gantried water butts, and splintery tenement cornices milled with acanthus and classical grasses of nineteenth-century dream-slum fantasy. We could see, from our rooftops, the endspan floating its ant-threads of traffic to the granite salients of the anchorage, and through its strands on the west the Financial District’s watery silhouettes. But it was our own foundations, crumbling in the sandy soil, that made us protest the drill rigs sounding for a wider bridge ramp to funnel the airport traffic over us into Manhattan. “Construction tremors will weaken our buildings”: from the over-roosted tenements clinging near the anchorage flew manuscript lists of signatures, block-groups’ painfully Englished petitions. But City Hall adoze, sleep-feeding, just flooded us II with chimerical figures and blueprints, wearing us down. Our own “block-leader,” Luz, a Guatemalan law student at NYU where I studied classics, distracted us more easily with her “pure language” or anti-Puerto Rican tirades. “Call that Spanish? Take my sitter— muy indio, still speaks some Maya mountain-language BUT the beautiful Spanish!” And so one evening this sitter, Pilar, came over—forty, perhaps, with a long fawn-tinted oval face, and read in low tones an archaic poem to the Madonna. “My daughter knows it in Quiché and English—” and she passed around, wistfully, a First Communion photo—flat cheekbones like her mother’s, long black braids, straight look. Luz told us Pilar had lost husband and son to the Violence; a machine-gunned death heap in the center of their village— “They killed all the men. But when my family came here, she came with her girl, we helped with the green card, and she’s a hotel maid now near the UN ...” Much realer, this, than our own bridge-inflicted, some-day disaster. And who knew but our bridge might metamorphose, as the City said (“Global cities draw capital”), into a river of money (“We’ll all sell cuchifritos on the ramp”), and anyway, mainly, summer III was running out, with its open evenings and windows. One Saturday, turning onto my block from the subway, I heard my name, crossed the street where twin buildings had area-ways. and saw you waving, the same, Pilar, from a window below the swag-bellied area railings. “Come have some coffee—go around in back.” I walked down the building-side, and turned in a trash-littered airwell by a door with multiple doorbells. You opened from a wooden hallway, unpainted, with padlocked doors. “See, the super’s cut up his flat for illegals. They took out an inside wall, so our room has a window—we all share the bath.” I entered a lime-walled room—chairs and table, sofa-bed. Your front wall was the building front, the three others drywall. On the bureau, a black-shawled prie-dieu : two photos; two candles in translucent, white-waxed sacks, and a polychrome Madonna with meeting brows. Through your window, car wheels, railings; and, above, my own second-story windows. “We saw you reading there,” you said from behind me, “when we moved in.” You sat me on the sofa, and formally presented your daughter (she moved her schoolbooks all to one end.) Near her, a shallow, linoleumed-over trench and a bathroom sink. You said: “I’m a widow from the mountains near Morache, very near the home-town of Señora Luz. My real work is hotel maid, and I’ve got a nice job, at a place called the Tricontinental.” Then you paused, and I felt how clearly you’d presented yourself, as Americans do, with your job, your état civil, and I said: “I’m a graduate student at NYU, where Luz studies, no, not married, no children ...” I tried to add something else at once, to leave this less ... definitive, but nothing came, so we ran through bridge-rumors, and soon we were hardly listening, waiting for our own next word, and laughing at our gabble. Pequita told us what the priest had said about the drilling; you spoke of Pequita’s First Communion, and none of us could stop finding striking things to say. Next day you came over to see my plants, and I came back for soup-supper, looking up at my windows, which in the easy half-yellow light of autumn looked oddly beckoning. As we ate, you leaned forward, with a sudden rogue’s smile, and mockingly proposed that we three walk across the bridge, “There’s a path up there. If the bridge is bad, we’ll tell off the Mayor—” (In what spirit, I wondered, had you listened to our committee?) And when I got home I looked down, and through your sheer curtains saw you cleaning up, and Pequita, at the table, reading. IV But next week, instead of the plank stair that zigzags up the anchorage-side, we wandered the riverside shipping alleys. From below, we could see overhead the under-arch of the bridge, and feel the resonant top-thrum of westbound subways and trucks. Then the riverside—I loved this part. A sort of post-industrial fenworld, with tiny terrace houses, big dredger-parts laid aside from the drillings, and abandoned wreckers’ lots filled with sea-floor light and trembling, long-awned panicles of switchgrass. Its timelessness soothed me—though ephemeral. Even that day, one freshly tuckpointed facade, and a pair of brandnew bronze Edwardian mermaid doorknockers. I could see our quarter five years from now, say—the withering discount chains, tentative boutiques, and mother and daughter figuring, to the upscale “pioneers,” as neighborhood indigenes, living on with strange literalness among them, supplying their just-permissible quantum of urban grit. You were ahead, and Pequita trailed us, rattling weed stalks with a stray lath. As we progressed in and out of the endspan’s slatted shadows, you turned and called me into a side-lot—sunken concrete, flask- green puddles, to a broken-off building wall. It had been interior, once—rows of soiled roomsized plaster squares trailing sawn pipes, with one high trembling toilet, like a pearl. In a lower square, fringed with ailanthus and barbs of gang graffiti, was a mural. Muy latino: the mountain dreaming the city: a terrace cafe with palm trees and a dancer shawled in black lace, with inward-angled castanets. And you lifted yourself on tiptoe, Pilar, to touch the lace, as you might have grazed Pequita’s cheek. I felt a pang, as if I already needed you sturdy inside your sturdy body, not this gesture as if, exiled within, you reached out— We stepped back, museum-wise, to contemplate, and you said: “Luz likes to say I’m some mountain-woman, but when my mother died, I lived with my aunt in the City—I only went back when I married.” I told her I’d lived in this city, with a stepmother, who’d divorced my uncle to marry my father; and beat me. “A stepmother’s a curse of God,” you said gently. And on the walk back, pointed out more wall palms, beaches, until New York seemed a dot in a belt of capitals high on the globe: world-cities, packed with immigrants, refugees, Gastarbeiter: a snowy latitude suffused with tropical nostalgia. V We were a threesome. Coffee, suppers, TV, Pequita at my computer—you’d asked me to teach her— or sleeping on my sofa, one bad month they moved you to night shift. Yet only that summer, I’d worked in my window like a scholar in a lamplit bay, the night filled with myriad noises, like Roman Juvenal, to whose ears “came ever the sounds of buildings collapsing.” Across, the two tenement-faces, florid, all bucrania, meanders, dusky trails of fire-escape bedding. And everything underlit by the sinister, slow-stopping car lights of our street. But now it was the dailiness of two from another hemisphere. Through snow-fissures, winds fluting on railings and building-flaws, Pilar in her low frame paced with armfuls of laundry, washed in the sink and hung to dry everywhere. The thousand stratagems of those who simply must not spend; and the tiny mother-decisions: though you preferred periphery, housekeeping around her, you’d make yourself interrupt her, to mop behind your sweeping. And Pequita—I saw her wrap you up on the sofa when you had flu, and bring you orange juice, as they’d taught her in school, for she loved you, she was the person who loved you— I saw too, that of what I wanted the university to be for me—a tiny model of the city with its own rules and subsets: “Tell me each day who I am”—you’d found your part in Pequita; I followed the shape of your day touching center as it funneled into her hand and moving pencil-point. VI For everything seemed natural to Pequita: the Credo, her photocopied choir music piled beside the tidy prie-dieu, our neighborhood of syringe-filled gutters, drug-stoops and pimps, her school’s turkey cutouts, metal detectors, backed-up toilets ... Our human wilderness, half-urban, half-surreal to her was a matter-of-fact Eden, like the picturesque ruins and laughably rococo grottoes imagined by the seicento as the Golden Age. —And I, I thought her whole world, it comes back— touching, as if her child’s paradisial will were there for my affectionate recreation, like our still faithfully, occasionally, typed-up and dispatched protests from the Ramp Committee to the Mayor. Slight effects of perspective, tiny human gestures giving point to the city’s vast, ironic beauty. PART TWO VII At a moment when no one was thinking about her, Pequita awoke. Perhaps she enjoyed the solitude, Pilar asleep, me asleep across the street. She got up and stood on the cheap oval bathroom rug before the sink. At seven the drills started, deeper-toned than ever before (they woke me)— and part of your ceiling fell in; a beam splintered, plummeting straight to the oval rug— The person screaming over the phone was Pilar. I thought it must be really all right, or she’d be crying not screaming, but when I’d called 911 and run over, Pequita was barely alive. Then the hospital corridors, me trying to close my winter coat (the buttons were off) on my nightgown, you on a bench, staring straight ahead. When they said Pequita was “gone,” you were utterly silent. I brought you to my place (though our street was a tangle of police lights and yellow tape), terrified of your fixed inner focus, as if you had a plan ... Next night I had Luz stay over, I slept at her place; the third I was back. You, thank God (I thought), were crying, and Luz had set up the service. She propelled us downstairs and to a tiny brick church I must often have passed without seeing it, two blocks inland. Egg-blue inside, it was, with a little green and gilt altar, dark Stations on the walls, and the statue of the Virgin of Guadeloupe placed oddly below the altar stairs, so that Pilar, after the death-mass, could kneel before her, praying straight into her face, while I on a kneeler buried mine in my hands. What would the mother live for now, the hotel, me, or Luz, already writing more endless mad letters? Yet only these had from the City real answers: they’d brace the drill site with vibration-absorbing piers; and they wanted her and her friend Mrs. Citrin to know “that no one else had been more than lightly injured.” VIII It was the end of winter, very dark. The building managers, nervy, had moved you to the first floor next door, till you found a new place (I knew you weren’t looking). Each day I saw you arrive from work, answer my call tersely, then pull down your blinds. A shadow showed rarely, flattened, shapeless; you lay on your sofa a lot. “Thanks Anne—I’m better without company,” or “please understand.” But often, later in the evening, you’d come down the stairs and turn inland. Then, one morning as I was passing with early groceries, you were leaving the parish hall in your black winter coat, heavily scarved, and we paused. Approvingly, you tapped one glove on my armload—you’d told me to cook more, dictated recipes. I asked if this had been Pequita’s choir-practice place; the sentence wavered, but you replied with grim joy, “She’s not practicing now. ” It took me a minute. Pequita was singing, this moment, in the Presence. Still what you felt most (it was in your face) was absence, absence, but from something bitter in your eyes, that seemed small and round with the cold, I felt your desire to exclude me and our old collusive ironies. What were such luxuries now, ironies, Anglo friends; and I thought you hated my mind that remembered the brownpapered books, the orange juice. I reached to touch your arm—to get past this, but no, you had to get home: “I fasted for communion”; and your eyes swerved away. All my laughable, my lovely, delusional studies, that I’d seen you sort through for Pequita, were now an affront. And yet I felt you moving behind your own mind, as if with something held in reserve ... IX But then you stopped answering the phone, went less often to church. What I thought was that you were angry (certainly I was). Perhaps I thought you needed to talk, and I’d visit you in Manhattan. So one morning in March, in the black coat I’d got for the funeral, I walked east from the forty-second street Lexington stop to the three-story, fairy-lit jungle atrium of the Tricontinental, and went to the seventh floor, where you started. There was a cart in the hall, a gleaming chrome maid’s cart half-projecting from a bedroom. On its sides were rows of glasses with lace sani-bonnets, gold- stamped mini-soaps and deodorants. It moved out, and you stood in the door with a sheet-load, looking fat in a starchy pink uniform monogrammed PILAR. When you saw me, you dropped the sheets and in pain, pressed both palms to your cheeks, and looked at me looking at you. When I started sobbing, you took my shoulder and backed me to the elevator. Pressed the button, stepped back, and then, to my surprise, gave me a sudden hug before pushing me in. X It had been always this half-connected and tenuous, our friendship. What light on my own isolation and need, that I hadn’t known. But you actually called me, that week, to propose our old joke, a bridge walk—maybe Saturday? Your voice in my ears sounded wobbly with tension, held-backness, so I got in first: a friend had wound up her doctorate and left me a minute Village studio starting June ... After that I could listen, somber, as you poured out your need to leave, Luz’s cousin, the possible hotel job “right in LA.” You added “Anne,” and broke off. “Well, I’ll tell you that later. Look, it may snow on Saturday, OK?” “I don’t care.” And before you hung up, I’d resigned you, given you up. We’d part, on my side in anger, on yours in oblivion. I met you at the foot of the anchorage stair (not the eastern approach, with its easy grade near the ramp site). We climbed through the snow, slowly, pausing at landings for different views of our old alley world. Like a museum of disused urban functions—we noted a bricked-over backyard privy arch, and from higher, roof-huts, inkily distinct, of old-style tenement dumbwaiters. The whole scene thrown out of drawing by one of those giant NYC cable-spools, charred at the bottom where some homeless had tried to burn it. The moist snow was sweeping through the cable tower when we clambered onto the path beneath it. As we moved, hunched slightly, onto the mainspan, the whole city abruptly whited-out to a monochrome geometry of vertical and stooping gray lines. I thought how Pequita would have loved it, and caught her mother’s eye. We went on cautiously, soon pausing to stamp our boots and look over the rail at the traffic lanes below us. “Anne, what I started to say before—this is it: I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you—you understand?” “Of course,” I lied aimlessly. But you, glancing sideways, “But I’m really sorry ...” “No, really ...” You shook your head slightly, then took my arm. “Okay then— what’s this thing?” pointing a snowy boot at a bolt as high as our knees, with a rusted-on octagonal nut: “It’s just a bolt.” You tapped your glove on a strut— “strut,” I provided. And you said, pompously, in Luz’ very intonations (in what spirit had you listened?)—“The tolerances just aren’t there. ” Then, feeling easier, we started naming everything— spikes, spun-wire vertical cables: English, Spanish, and then I heard you speak Quiché (words once for vines, for split trunks over gorges?) But everything on the bridge was shabby, neglected-looking; and you said soberly: “If anyone was supposed to look after this bridge, he’s forgot all about it.” We didn’t link arms again, but started back, pausing to throw a few loose snowballs on the Manhattan traffic below us. We’d go our separate ways—I’d go on delaying, skirting around my burnt-out places; you’d go where you could, forget what you could— some Job-like relinquishment of inquiry or thought; organisms tend to persist ... When we got down to the massive base of the anchorage, we managed a hug that took in our past, at least: one embrace of two black winter coats in the snow.