Small Change Read Free Page B

wasn’t in a place. I was the place. I felt populated by old friends. They lived in my head amid my various broodings. Here they met again, going through the same motions and different ones. Here they coupled in ways that hadn’t occurred really. And here was I, disloyal but faithful, occupied by people I didn’t want to see and didn’t want to lose.
    September came and went, October came and went, winter didn’t come. It rained in November, it rained again in December. In January a little snow fell, then more rain.
    Winter came when I was asleep. One morning I looked out at frozen puddles dusted with snow. It was very cold. I stepped carefully into the street and this is what I saw. I saw the landscape of friendship. I saw Sunday at four in the afternoon. I saw childhood panic. People looked familiar to me, yet they didn’t say hello. I saw two people I hadn’t seen in fifteen years, one seated in a restaurant, the other skating by. I looked at them keenly, waiting for recognition to burst upon them, but it didn’t.
    Strangers claimed to recognize me. They said they had seen me before, some said precisely where. “It was at a conference two years ago.” Or, “I saw you walk by every day with your husband last summer. You were walking quickly.”
    But last summer Ted and I had been somewhere else.
    The connections were wistful, intangible, maddening. Memory tantalized before it finally failed. Yet as much as memory failed, those odd, unhinged conjunctures helped. Strange glimmerings and intense looks were better than nothing.
    The last time I saw Maureen, she was wearing a black-and-white summer dress and her teeth were chattering. “Look at me,” she said, her mouth barely able to form the words, her lower jaw shaking. “It’s not that cold.”
    We were in the old neighbourhood. The street was dark and narrow with shops on either side, and many people. I was asking my usual questions, she was doing her best to answer them.
    “Look,” she said again, pointing to her lips which were shaking uncontrollably.
    I nodded, drew my jacket tight, mentioned how much warmer it had been on the way to the café, my voice friendly enough but without the intonations of affection and interest, the rhythms of sympathy, the animation of friendship. In the subway we felt warm again. She waited for my train to come, trying to redeem and at the same time distance herself. I asked about Danny and she answered. She talked about his job, her job, how little time each of them had for themselves. She went on and on. Before she finished I asked about her children. Again she talked.
    “I don’t mean to brag,” she said, helpless against the desire to brag, “but Victoria is so verbal.”
    Doing to her children and for herself what her mother had done to her and for herself.
    “So verbal, so precocious. I don’t say this to everyone,” listing the words that Victoria already knew.
    She still shivered occasionally. She must have known why I didn’t call any more, aware of the reasons while inventing others in a self-defence that was both pathetic and dignified. She never asked what went wrong. Never begged for explanations (dignified even in her begging: her persistence as she continued to call and extend invitations).
    We stood in the subway station — one in a black-and-white dress, the other in a warm jacket – one hurt and pale, the other triumphant in the indifference which had taken so long to acquire. We appeared to be friends. But a close observer would have seen how static we were, rooted in a determination not to have a scene, not to allow the other to cause hurt. Standing, waiting for my train to come in.

The Fire

    I t’s late. When snow falls at night this room is lighter because falling snow brightens the streetlight and again afterwards because the moon comes out and shines on the new snow. Movie sets use Styrofoam panels to extend the day. The same principle applies: a pulsing between two sources of brightness: