American Innovations: Stories Read Free

tallest building in the neighborhood. Thinking of it as a courtyard—I guess that was a fantasy on which my husband and I had subconsciously colluded. I do see something glinting in the midday sun; it proves to be a silvery gum wrapper. There’s not even a coin on the ground. Bear suit, I’m thinking. It starts to drizzle. Then I remember: doormen are more than just people one feels one has failed to entertain. If I were in a so-called courtyard, and I found a band of gold that didn’t belong to me—
    Between the doorman and me, there at his desk, are two women. The women are dark-skinned; they are both wearing brown; they are wearing, I realize on delay, UPS uniforms. One of them is also wearing a fleecy brown vest. “The guy was totally whacked,” the vested one says.
    I feel somewhat bad because I find I am staring at these women’s asses (I think of that word as the most gentle and affectionate of the options) and I feel somewhat good because both of the asses are so attractive, though they are quite different: one is juvenile and undemanding, and the other is unembarrassedly space-occupying and reminiscent somehow of gardening—of bending over and doing things. The pants are nicely tight-fitting. I do know that I—and really everyone—am not supposed to think this way about women, or for that matter about men, because, I guess the argument goes, it reduces people to containers of sexual possibility. But I’m not sure that’s quite what is going on. Maybe I just think these women have solved the getting dressed problem. “I think that was his friend,” one of them says, “writing down the license plate number of the truck.”
    “Was someone bothering you guys?” I find myself interjecting. “This is a weirdly rough neighborhood. Even as it’s kind of a nice neighborhood, it’s also sort of a rough one—”
    “Every neighborhood is rough today—”
    “It’s iPhone day—”
    The UPS women have turned and opened their circle to me.
    “They’ve ordered two million iPhones—”
    “Someone in my neighborhood already got stabbed over a delivery.”
    “I hate phones,” I offer. “I really hate them.”
    “There’s no Apple in Russia,” the doorman says. “You can sell the phones to a Russian for fourteen hundred dollars. You buy them for six hundred; you sell them for fourteen hundred.”
    “Delivery must be terrifying,” I say to the women. “You never know what’s up with the person on the other side of the door. It’s like you knock on your own nightmare.”
    “People love their iPhones,” the vested deliverywoman says. “My daughter says it’s like they would marry their iPhones.”
    I keep not asking about Boo’s ring. “I’ve never seen a woman working UPS delivery before,” I say. “And now here you are—two of you at once. I feel like I’m seeing a unicorn. Or the Loch Ness monster. Maybe both, I guess.”
    There’s a bit of a quiet then.
    “They don’t normally travel in twos,” the doorman says. “It’s only because today is considered dangerous.”
    “There’s at least a hundred of us,” the unvested woman says, shrugging.
    “Not too many, but some.”
    “Good luck,” the doorman is saying.
    The women are walking away.
    Now it’s just me and the doorman. I am back in the familiar world again. I feel compelled to hope that he finds me attractive, and I feel angry at him, as if he were responsible for that feeling, and I find myself unzipping my husband’s raincoat and pushing back the hood, like one of those monkeys whose ovulation is not concealed. I’m looking for, I imagine myself saying to this man, a wedding ring. Oh, he says, You’re all looking for rings.
    There was no ring there. But you saw a unicorn today, I remind myself. That’s something. It’s all about keeping busy. We can just buy another ring. Why didn’t we think of that earlier? The old ring cost, maybe, three hundred dollars. We could buy a new one, nothing wrong with that, no