Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (14 page)

At that moment, standing in front of her stunned, sealed-off
parents, Harriet became aware that the room was tilting, and she was tilting with it. Her feet were growing out of the floor, the way a tree grows out of the ground. Yet, despite the difficulty of knowing where she left off and where the room began, she was separated from everything else in the world by a perfectly clear film. It was like looking up from the bottom of a pool, when you can see the surface from underneath. It looks silvery and substantial, but you put your hand through it and you can hardly feel when you’ve gone through the water and come up into the air. Your wet hand cannot feel the dry air. Everything is farther away than you think. You’re floating alone in your suspended world, where solid water pressing in leaves no space for flimsy, airborne particles of rage or sound.

Harriet was to spend Friday night with Carrie. The only other time she had ever slept over somewhere was when Adam had had pneumonia two years earlier, when Harriet was four, and she had stayed with her grandmother in her apartment for three nights. Gay’s chiming clock, a clock Gay called Ursula, as though it were an ancestor who had somehow been preserved in this form, had woken Harriet throughout each night. But Carrie wouldn’t have a fancy clock like that.

Harriet had never gone anywhere with Carrie before, and she couldn’t tell if Carrie really wanted her to go home with her. But after a rushed after-school snack of cookies and milk, which Harriet ate alone at the kitchen table while Carrie tidied things up, when it was time to leave the house and walk to the subway stop, Carrie held out her hand to Harriet and gave her a big smile, and Harriet suddenly looked forward to the adventure.

Carrie’s apartment was in the depths of Brooklyn; it was a long subway ride from Oxbridge Gardens. If they were to ride in the front car, they would have to walk a block more at the other end, but Carrie agreed to it, making Harriet’s pleasure complete. Carrie sat in the seat nearest the front door of the train, next to a Chinese man who had his eyes closed.
She faced the engineer in the little booth behind a windowless door; he couldn’t be seen from inside the train, but interested passengers could hear occasional bursts of squawky static on his radio, and his answering voice, and Harriet had seen him when the train had pulled into the station.

She stood with her nose pressed to the glass and swayed with the rhythm of the train, bracing herself against the door panel but not wanting to give the impression that she needed to hold on in order to keep her balance. The engineer made the train go slower or faster, but he didn’t have to steer. Harriet thought it was much more thrilling than driving a car, this business of making the train just go. What freedom. Sometimes she dreamed about gliding on a perfectly smooth track. It would curve up, and up, until she would be sailing through the air. Every time Harriet woke from this dream she was struck anew with the terrible realization that she could not fly.

The rails glittered in two sweeping curves as they sped through the grottoes of subway tunnels that seemed both sinister—the shiver and thrill when Harriet glimpsed a rat lurking beside a puddle—and splendid with grandeur and what seemed to be ancient meaning. The familiar Piranesi print in Gay’s foyer was, Harriet thought, a reasonable representation of the IND line.

Occasional lights of a local station flashed by as they plunged along importantly on the express track. A chain crossed the door on the outside, and the glass window was embedded with miniature chicken wire. There was no chance that a child was going to fall out of this door, especially a careful child who wouldn’t dream of touching the door handle, a careful child who was unusually cooperative (they always said that, a praising expression that served as a reminder of this expectation above all others), a careful child who didn’t have to be told things twice. She rocked on her heels and toes and peered at the hurtling gloom.

Carrie had her usual shopping bag between her feet, and her purse, along with Harriet’s overnight bag, stowed on her lap. From time to time Harriet turned to see her; she was always looking back and smiling. The child was relieved that Carrie didn’t think it was necessary to stand with her or for them to sit together. Harriet knew Carrie’s feet hurt and would have given up her place at the front of the train rather than cause Carrie to stand for the long ride. Over Carrie’s head was a sticker, illustrated with a cartoon drawing that reminded Harriet of an old book at Gay’s, about Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley. It said, “Little Enough to Ride for Free? Little Enough to Ride Your Knee.”

Harriet loved paying her own fare. On the three or four occasions she had gone “into the city” (which is what they called going to Manhattan, although Oxbridge Gardens was already part of New York City) with her mother since she had passed the age of ducking under the turnstile and riding for free, she would be given a dollar bill so she could buy her two tokens herself. In exchange for the dollar shoved under the window in the hollowed wooden scoop on the counter that Harriet could just reach, a hand, just a glimpse of brown knuckle, would shove back two dull brass tokens and some change.

Harriet would keep the two tokens and immediately drop one into the slot of the turnstile and lunge through, using all her strength to turn the paddle and process herself through to the other side, where she would arrive transformed into a passenger. The second token Harriet would keep in her glove for a while, feeling its engraved surface against her palm when she held tightly to a pole. Then she would give it to her mother to keep.

Carrie had produced two tokens from a change purse and had dropped them both into the turnstile slot; she didn’t know that Harriet liked handling her own token, because they had
never ridden the subway together before. Harriet had never seen Carrie away from the Roses’ house, except once or twice when bad weather had made it necessary for Harriet’s mother to pick Carrie up or drop her off at the subway station, and Harriet had gone along for the ride in the car. Now they were out among strangers together, both of them shy about it.

As the train raced on, with longer stretches between stations as they left Queens and headed into Brooklyn, Harriet realized that this was the ride Carrie took every morning when she came to work, and every evening when she went home.

Harriet turned around and looked down the subway car. There were fewer people now. At one point there had been so many people standing between them that Harriet had worried because she didn’t have a clear sight of Carrie, just a glimpse of her hands folded on her lap in front of the bags. All the people looked tired. Carrie looked tired. Her head was tipped back and her eyes were closed. Now, feeling Harriet’s gaze, she opened them, located the child, and smiled. She patted the seat beside her where the Chinese man had been. Harriet hadn’t seen him get off. She would never see him again. She wondered if he had thought something equivalent when he had gotten off the train at his stop: “Look at that little girl in the red sweater. I wonder where she’s going. I’ll never see her again. Good luck, little girl.”

The Chinese man who ran a little restaurant near Oxbridge Gardens always said “Good luck,” and Harriet had come to think that it was a particularly Chinese thing to say. The way he said it sounded more like “Good ruck.” His restaurant was called Lucky Garden, and when he answered the telephone, he said, “Rucky Godden.”

Harriet asked him once if he got a fortune every day, and he told her that Chinese people don’t eat fortune cookies. He had been eating behind the cash register, shoveling something
from a rice bowl quickly into his mouth with shiny black chopsticks, different from the plain wooden ones that Harriet’s father (and no one else) was using at their table.

“Only for people like you, missy,” the Chinese man explained, waving with his chopsticks in the direction of the table where the Rose family sat with the Antlers, who had just moved in next door. Harriet was embarrassed, and unclear about what people like her were like, and she ran back to the table with the soy sauce her father had sent her to fetch. They were the only customers in the restaurant, and it was to be the only time the two families went out for dinner together.

Harriet described what Mr. Lucky Garden had been eating. Mr. Antler said that the real food Chinese people ate was never on the menu, and Mrs. Antler giggled and pretended to bark like a little dog. Harriet’s father said, Oh, my God, and stood up suddenly, in order to fish his money out of his pocket so he could pay their share of the check. This would be another evening of early escape for him, when he would go back into the city to deal with the never ending postseason crises of Rose Lights, wholesale manufacturers and importers of Christmas-tree lights to the trade. It was the time of year that stores returned defective and unsold merchandise, and Simon Rose chewed Maalox tablets as if they were candy corn most of the month of January.

Harriet’s mother turned to Adam and began wiping at the sides of his face with a napkin she moistened in his water glass. He continued to chew the food in his mouth and swing his foot against a table leg in identical rhythm, oblivious to her ministrations. Today was a no-talking day, though Adam would always be willing to break his silence in order to read something, anything, out loud. Ruth had told him in the car that he wasn’t going to be permitted to read the menu to everyone—it was much too long—so he contented himself
now with a brief reading from the words on the paper packet in which Simon Rose’s chopsticks had been brought to the table.

“Please try your nice Chinese food with chopsticks, the traditional and typical of Chinese glorious history and cultural,” Adam read, with great animation. His relatively cogent delivery when reading was one of those mysteries, like the way stammerers can sing flawlessly.

“Thank you, Adam, that was very good,” Mr. Antler said graciously. Adam stared at him, then went on, “Product of China.”

“Excellent, very well done,” praised Mr. Antler.

“Packed for Well-Luck Co., Inc., Jersey City, N.J. 07139.” Adam knew to say
company
for
Co.
and
incorporated
for
Inc.

“Well done, you’re a very good reader, young fellow,” Mr. Antler tried again. Adam looked at him until he stopped talking, then looked down again at the strip of red paper in his hand.

“U.S.A.” Now Adam really was finished.

The Antler children, Barbara and Debbie, began to squabble over the last sparerib. Mrs. Antler sighed and put both hands on her belly; she was very pregnant with another little Antler, who would turn out to be Rachel, the third girl.

Harriet’s father stood beside the table and rested his hand on the top of Harriet’s head, and she sat very still. She sensed that he hated being there with all of them, but his hand on her head was like a sign that she alone was not a source of shame, and for that moment Simon Rose seemed to be including his daughter in his state of separateness from and scorn for these neighbors (whom Simon Rose regarded as vulgar and tedious, two words whose meanings he had explained to Harriet during the drive to the restaurant in the Roses’ beat-up old Cadillac that Simon Rose had accepted in lieu of payment from some down-and-out wholesaler; while listening to this vocabulary
lesson, Harriet had angled herself in the backseat until she could see in her father’s side mirror the Antlers, who looked as if they were singing, following behind them in their Dodge Dart), his wife (“Not a real woman,” he had confided more than once to his daughter, who wasn’t sure what he meant), and his son (whose strangeness left no evidence of early brilliance and felt to Simon Rose like a betrayal).

Harriet sat down next to Carrie in the Chinese man’s seat, and the housekeeper put her arm around the child. Her hands smelled pleasantly of hand lotion, and Harriet liked the pink of her polished nails. They were so long and tapered. Carrie always took care of her hands, and she wore thick rubber gloves when she scrubbed the Roses’ house.

“Are you tired, Rabbit?”

Harriet shrugged and gazed up at the advertising placards overhead.

“We get off at the next stop.”

Harriet read about a secretarial school, a hemorrhoid ointment, and a pill for backaches. There were instructions in English and Spanish about not getting out of the train if it stopped between stations. She hoped the train would not stop between stations. The brakes began screaming and a number of people began gathering up their parcels and newspapers as they were all first pressed forward with the motion of the train, and then, when the train halted, all flung back. The doors opened, letting in cooler air from the station. Harriet ran her hand over the hard orange seat and thought that she would probably never sit on that particular seat ever again, in her whole life. Carrie grabbed her hand and they were off the train and up two flights of stairs at a breathless trot, moving faster than most of the people around them, who all seemed headed in the same direction.

Harriet couldn’t have said what she had been expecting. In countless kitchen conversations, Carrie talked about “the project” all the time, but Harriet hadn’t ever realized exactly what she meant. Harriet knew it had to do with where Carrie lived, where other members of Carrie’s family lived, and friends she mentioned from time to time. Harriet thought it was something like a school project, or a meeting of some kind, a club. It seemed to be a community, she gathered that much, but she still held a vague mental picture of a group of people gathered around some sort of shared idea or activity.

Carrie’s project was none of those things. It was a sea of tall red-brick buildings. They were set on a flat plain of concrete, punctuated here and there by chain-link fences and concrete benches. She steered Harriet in the direction of her building, and swinging their clasped hands between them, they went in through a pair of heavy, scarred doors.

Harriet had anticipated an elevator, a fond association she made with the few apartment buildings in her experience. But no elevator was in evidence, and they began trudging up some dimly lighted stairs. After the first two flights, Carrie told Harriet it would be two more. Carrie was carrying Harriet’s overnight bag, and the little girl worried as she heard Carrie’s knee joints crack at every step.