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ISSUE 1 December 2000 MILKWOOD REVIEW

OTHER WORK: "A Dream of Dying Fish," "Trout Fable," "Spider House," "Serial Dreamer."

BRIGHTER

Recently in New York I noticed a tiny, old woman walking in front of me, the bright white cap of her hair getting brighter as the sun broke through the clouds. She seemed to get smaller as I watched her, from 5'1" to 4'9" to 3'1" to almost nothing at all: a woman so small and frail I could have put her in my coat pocket and taken her back home to Omaha like a rare cuckoo, with booties the size of thimbles. Her height seemed to drop every step she took, the pool of her shadow shrinking to an ink spot in the street. We crossed Lexington at 79th together, she shuffling a few feet ahead, I cautiously taking up the rear. People flowed past us in a long braiding stream as I followed her for awhile, just to see where she would take me. It was like becoming a child again after waking from a powerful dream; it was like rowing across an ocean of waste, only to land in a clean white stretch of beach in the sun.

I had been wandering around New York in a kind of daze, thinking of the imminent divorce to my wife of eight years--the only woman I had ever been with, high-school sweethearts--when I ran into this other, diminutive woman. She stopped me in my tracks, or rather got me moving in a new direction, one where I became like a faithful dog, wanting to follow at a safe distance. I wanted to hear her labored breathing as she ascended a walk-up step by careful step; I wanted to see her veined, withered hand drop bread into a toaster to fend off light-headedness after hours of bargains. It was a shy curiosity that bade me follow, as her tiny figure seemed like a husk of light hidden in her drooping trench coat. I swear she was no more than 3'5"; I swear she kept shrinking even as I watched, not in shriveling or crippled weakness, but something brighter and denser than I could name, a kernel essence that would someday burst into flower. Maybe in another life she had been a humming bird, her blurred wings a translucent bruise tasting the air like hot breath after tea. I felt huge by comparison, monstrous. However you cut it we were there, and I was supposed to notice her among these throngs of people, moving at a snail's pace through the traffic. I had come to the city for a play of mine that was being produced by a small Off Broadway theatre, but in truth I couldn't summon any real enthusiasm for the project; the play would only run six nights, playing on Sunday through Tuesday nights. It had no chance to go anywhere, would in fact be swallowed up again as so many of my plays had been, its brief life in New York shorter than a fruit fly's. But maybe I had really come to New York to mourn, to grieve the loss that was suddenly mine. The night before I stood in the rain munching a brownie in the West Village at a pay phone, inexplicably holding the receiver to my ear as I listened to the dial tone. I went from bar to bar, walking in and walking out after my token drink. I was lost, a haunted ghost walking around New York to assuage an invisible pain. I had to keep moving to alleviate its slow IV drip, its tom-tom sadness.

Most days I spent like this one, walking nowhere in particular block after block, sitting at different park benches to study the water towers around Manhattan in their lovely Chinese hats. I love these water towers and the way they suspend water and time. I love the way they dot the cityscape up above like human need contained in metal huts. No matter what happened below--business deals or muggings, street vendors pushing their carts, or my own drawn-out melancholy--the water towers stood fixed as lonely sentinels of need, waiting to be depleted, waiting to be filled up. These thoughts gave me strange comfort and peace, like the old, tiny woman I had started to follow. They worked together to make New York intimate, to show me something about its gentle secrets. So I followed my peculiar old woman, followed her into the breaking sun. I never saw her face, just a clipped profile of it; her hair was short, almost like a man's, her nose curved and severe like a hawk's. But her eyes (or one eye) were piercing, seagull blue, like Samuel Beckett's, or some other austere saint. I swear her shadow was darker than other shadows, a diminishing pool of black water that wound tighter and tighter around her like the centripetal force of her body. Could she know I was there? Could she sense me ten feet back, waiting for her to lead me? I let her go after two more blocks, the trance of her slow, careful walk something to contemplate for a day, a week, a life.

As I watched the small, lonely hump of her back fade around the corner like a moving ant hill, I became aware of a deep privacy the city ushered in. The privacy was hushed and soft, delicate petals that brushed my inner ear until I couldn't feel them anymore. For a moment peace descended on me unlike any I could remember, something that mixed freely with blowing litter and my own beating heart. I let her go, but I was grateful for the one-sided encounter, the opportunity to remember her. I didn't question the import of her passing. And really she was so small she could have navigated a mouse trap, or perched on my arm like a wise old parrot. Maybe after all we were just two souls brushing past each other in the middle of a busy day, both susceptible to the beauty of sunlight breaking into brightness. But for me it was more than that, a fleeting recognition of something very quiet and real, the changing calligraphy of the clouds, the arrangement of water towers and the tiny old lady making her way to another part of the city. I do not mean to suggest her smallness was weakness: only that it was purer and sturdier than anything I ever remembered in coming to New York, stronger than subway graffiti, lighter than the flight of pigeons bursting from just inside Central Park South. I took her for what she was, someone so small and getting smaller that her tininess was a virtue in the great city, the arches of her brown walking shoes no bigger than the cleft of a baby's chin. She did not know I followed her, or what my thoughts were; she did not know how much I suddenly needed her in my own loneliness.

After that brief encounter, the city wasn't the same to me--nor would it ever be again. I choose to see it now in its subtler aspects, in hidden, interior lights so small they give off only a faint glow or echo of something felt rather than seen--how a tin can can catch a gleam of light and fill your whole stomach, how certain facades radiate their ledges like stone-waves tumbling into daylight. She could never know what she was to me in those brief moments, that I loved her as a stranger. Who was watching over us after all? In some human encounters, the fleeting touch or recognition becomes a lighted corridor we walk down toward a whole new way of life; we believe and remember. Later that day the water towers watched me walk to the Port Authority on West 42nd, their circumference of shadow wheeling round like points on a sun dial. The busy streets below were full of quiet joys and sorrows, and sudden peace that revealed itself only after rain, in streams that shined in run-off, in puddles that held the memory.