Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith

Author:Zadie Smith [Smith, Zadie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

A WOMAN WITH A LITTLE DOG

The funny thing about Barbara is she has a little dog who she insists is a well-behaved dog but who, in reality, either barks or tries to bite pretty much everyone who comes near—except Barbara. New residents—grad students, adjuncts—sometimes believe Barbara and bend down to pet him, but we got with the program long ago and speak to Barbara only, giving Beck a wide berth. Barbara lives alone, she’s coming up on seventy, surely, and she smokes the way I used to: with great relish and evident satisfaction. Perhaps because of all the cigarettes, she is slender and often seems somewhat frail. In the past ten years her tall, elegant body has become a little more hunched over and sometimes she uses a walker, but not always. She has a tendency to list rightwards these days, like a willow, and her bone-straight hair, that swishes like a young woman’s—and somehow always makes me think of Barbara as an ex-dancer—likewise now lists and seems permanently swept over one shoulder. Like so many downtown women, she hasn’t gotten older in the traditional feminine way, that is, by becoming in some manner less visible or quieter, less apparently confident, less abreast of what just opened at BAM or the Joyce, or what over-hyped musical just shit-the-bed on Broadway. . . . And if you ask her in a concerned tone “what she’s doing for the holidays”—because you want to consider yourself a great neighbor and maybe deliver her a pie, or, more realistically, because you plan to sigh sympathetically when she says “nothing”—you’ll find she’s just booked a solo walking tour up in the Catskills, or she’s meeting with her radical women’s group to discuss the writings of Anaïs Nin. She has a broad New York accent the precise borough and decade of which I can’t identify, except to tell you few people in Manhattan seem to have this accent anymore.

I used to think her little dog, like our little dog, was immortal—that it would be the last designated New Yorker—but then it did die and was seamlessly replaced by an identical dog with an equally bad attitude, and Barbara continued on her slow, smoking walks around the block and we continued to bump into her. Sometimes, if I’d published a piece in a magazine that day, or a book of mine had just come out, she’d start shouting at me from six feet away, repeating some small, unlikely detail of whatever it was that had struck her, but without any further commentary, complimentary or otherwise. So, I’d be dragging shopping bags back from Morton Williams and suddenly hear: “Myron likes his disco! Yeah, I saw that one. Me and my girlfriends, we read that one. You having a good day? They say it’s gonna rain later.”

There is an ideal, rent-controlled city dweller who appears to experience no self-pity, who knows exactly how long to talk to someone in the street, who creates community without overly sentimentalizing the

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