The Understory by Pamela Erens

Author:Pamela Erens [Erens, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935639862
Publisher: Tin House Books

Ten

I awakened at dawn on Christmas Day after a broken sleep and looked out onto the empty street, anxious to go out. The snowplows had been through, but on the cars and balconies the snow still looked unexpectedly pretty and fresh. My eyes stung and I coughed blackened flecks into a tissue. Coffee seemed only to intensify the taste of ash. When I shut off the kitchen tap there was perfect silence in the room, in the entire building, and yet I had the uneasy sense that somewhere the walls were still secretly smoldering, still issuing smoky poisons. I brushed my teeth twice, then bathed.

Central Park West was bare of pedestrians, the air cold but less dry and bitter than the air inside my apartment. There was something hospitable in the atmosphere, an invitation. I could see thirty blocks north to Morningside Heights and twenty blocks south to Columbus Circle, where an electronic display atop a tall building blinked out the temperature and the time. Except for an occasional car jolting past, it was quiet. Holiday mornings—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s—always had this feel about them for me, as if overnight the people who lived in the apartment buildings had been stolen away and only the caretakers were left: the doormen shoveling snow, the garbagemen claiming bags. I walked downtown enjoying this feeling of emptiness, lazily studying the salt-whitened surface of the road, the dirty stone facades, a banner advertising a show at the New-York Historical Society. I rolled a lemon drop over and over in my mouth. When I reached the southernmost entrance to the park, Merchants’ Gate, I finally turned toward the green. Merchants’ Gate, Scholars’ Gate, Farmers’ Gate, Engineers’ Gate: the names are carved into the stone wall circling the park, Olmsted’s tribute to the people whose labors built the city. Olmsted fought for the simplicity of these entrances, mere gaps in the wall, against the artists and politicians of his day who lobbied for grand, ornate portals. He’d had to battle such embroiderers, such meddlers, from the beginning. No one, it seems, wholeheartedly loves a simple thing. No one can resist trying to improve on it.

Two men approached on the path, laboriously pushing a baby stroller past a pair of ginkgo trees. The baby was immobilized in a snowsuit, its arms sticking out like a stuffed bear’s; a wrapped box had been balanced on its puffy lap. A heavily made-up woman walked a dog sporting a wilted red bow. “All alone?” she whispered. “Want to come home with me?” I moved past her quickly. In the Ramble the paths were largely unmarked by footprints, the understory shrouded, the larger trees outlined with thick brushstrokes of snow. Disoriented, I walked from place to place, trying to remember how everything had looked two days ago, suddenly afraid that I might never see it all disrobed again. But why should I think that? Gradually the map reassembled itself in my mind. I found a bench nearby and brushed it off with my hand, then sat and lifted my face to the weak sun.

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