Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Ming Holden

The beauty of a gem depends primarily on its optical properties. Gem durability depends on resistance to cleavage. The physical properties by which gems are distinguished from one another include presence or absence of cleavage. Other distinguishing factors: type of fracture in stones without cleavage; luster; and transparency.

Roeser’s doesn’t exist anymore. Thrifty replaced it, then Rite Aid. We didn’t even boycott it. I don’t know when it happened. It happened after I looked at the green and orange and black lipstick in the Halloween section. It happened after I collected semiprecious stones, which I did sporadically from ages eight to thirteen or so. Roeser’s was one of my favorite places to peruse. I’d sit cross-legged on the floor at Roeser’s, the bins of semiprecious stones prescribed in a row the same way those delicious candy smorgasbords are set up: silos of sugared orange slices next to caramel in cheerful wrappers, delicious gleam after delicious gleam. And how they felt—the tiger-eye and hematite, especially—smoothed. I remember late afternoon, more specifically, its light on the stones. I remember saving my allowance. I remember my breasts were long in coming. I remember one very special plastic box with compartments for beads of quartz, aquamarine, topaz. I got fishing twine. I strung them together. They got lost easily between the large, soft nubs of our off-white carpet. The amethyst wandered over to the tiger-eye and mingled there. I kept the box for years, and also spent three dollars on a large, hard-edged piece of rose quartz that awakened my whole palm, all of my fingers.

Rose quartz and I got along well, which is odd since pink and I did not. I lost my heart necklace in Oregon. I still, thanks be, have not lost my heart earrings. They belonged to a beautiful woman, Deena, who married a close friend of my father’s. The friend, Harry, gave them to me when he became her widower. I wear them often, they are my most elegant jewelry, they somehow give the face whose lack of my mother’s jutting cheekbones pains me a somehow heart-shaped softness; though I look nothing like Deena did, the earrings look nice on me. I somehow think this is Deena’s doing, and I wear the earrings to anything she might have liked: a concert, a dinner, a romantic walk somewhere. She, like the stones, like the memory-whitened sunlight, is other, elsewhere, ethereal and the result of something compressed into bead and shine. “A gem,” is how my father described Deena, alive.

I would like to say that the origins of these stones, their place in the steamy inner workings of the mantled celestial body, their former life as cogs in the groaning, close sprockets of the turning planet, fascinated me. I would like to say I ran home, looked up the hexagonal structure of their molecules, and drew their chemical bonds with educated relish. I did not. I was not romanced by the iron oxide, the vertically striated prismatic crystals. Rather I merely held them in my hand; it was their smoothness, manmade, my affinity for sparkles and pretties, also arguably manmade. It wasn’t their history and identity as inlays of the great, shifting vertebrae of the world, it was that they seemed in their splendor to be not of this world. It was their impossible smoothness, it was their weight in my sweaty palm; I would angle them on my eyelid as I laid on my back, I would line them up on my belly and one would sink below sea level into my navel.

What can I say? Quartz is the most common mineral on the face of the earth. The first time I saw the earth heave it was actually a red rug, and it was 7:30 a.m., a red rug pulsing and heaving, and I was thirteen years old, and hoped in my adolescent outsider fragility that this meant the world was beginning to speak to me, that I was like the girl with the silver eyes. I was in English class. I loved English class, and no one loved it with me, and sometimes even now the ceiling or floor will churn in quiet seriousness. It is as shadowy a thing as my ability to account for how it feels to have breasts and know that they weren’t always there. Roeser’s does not exist anymore, and Deena does not exist anymore, and the respective effects both have on me are as mysterious as the strange compressions of the planet and the heaving it does at odd points, despite having learnt something of geology and chemistry, even of the biological facts of death. Somewhere ghosts are not transparent and their bodies are holdable and striped, luster ebbing pain. Deena’s skin turned yellow from the cancer. I scavenged crimson, rubbing with my girl fingers the beady eyes of wonderful beasts.

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by Katherine Cooper

It’s Mother’s Day and we’re eating Japanese food at a Chinese restaurant on the south shore of Long Island. The restaurant is the centerpiece of a quiet stretch of stores—a nail salon, a bank, a bagel place. They’re all closed and dim on Sunday evening. The restaurant is elaborately decorated—even the outside with its tilted Asian-styled roofs and red paper lanterns dangling beside the doors. A long, multicolored dragon is painted on the wall and spans the entire length of the place.

My family and I are sitting at a big circular table and passing around bowls of those greasy, fried noodles and trying not to eat them. My brother is drinking a magenta-colored drink with a fluffy paper umbrella and we’re talking politely about Israel—about an op-ed in the Times the other day. But then someone starts telling a story they heard about a dog who accidentally ate his owner’s psychedelic drugs and it’s so sad because it seems like he never really recovered. I ask what it was—mushrooms? Acid? Something else? My dad wants to know what difference it makes, is there even a difference? He doesn’t know. I’m distracted by the ten-day-old infant who’s at the next table to us—her parents and grandparents blowing delicate streams of air into her face, watching as the tiny brush of hair on her forehead flies up. We order way too many dishes and try to convince my grandma to taste some sushi but she won’t budge.

And then, out of nowhere, a man, situated right in the center of the restaurant, starts screaming. Not yelling, but crying out in this primitive way as though he’s being tortured. I’m in agony, I’m in agony! He looks like he’s in his forties, but he’s thin and frail and holding onto a gleaming metal walker, clenching his fists around the handlebars.

His mother, probably in her seventies, is standing beside him. She has choppy red hair and a navy leather clutch at her side. She seems infinitely younger, healthier, more composed. She hurries to a waitress who then presumably calls 911. Her son keeps crying, It’s my hips, they’re killing me! She tries to soothe him, It’s okay, it’s okay, but he seems exasperated, urging her away.

Outside the streets are mostly empty—there are a handful of cars parked in the lot, and a teenage couple leaning against a mailbox, examining each other’s fingers. The sky is bare, an easy backdrop for the chaotic flashing lights of the ambulance. It seems to arrive impossibly fast, but the paramedics walk in slowly. They hold wide stances and look like cowboys as they stand and appraise the scene. The man is still crying out and trying to catch his breath, he’s saying something about his hips popping out. He has replacement hips and they’ve popped out and he just can’t move. Just settle down, they tell him, it’ll be okay.

A few tables away, a party of about ten or twelve is singing happy birthday loudly and exuberantly. As if they have no idea a man fifteen feet away is howling in pain and being lifted away on a stretcher. His mother standing by his side, promising him it’ll be alright. Like nothing has changed since he was a small boy. Maybe it hasn’t. The song seems to go on and on, as the birthday girl squeals with pleasure, her face aglow in red and orange light.

One of the paramedics—a guy with thick shoulders and a silver mustache—heads over to the hostess. He laughs and elbows her in a flirtatious sort of way. Hey, you guys gonna charge extra for all this entertainment?

She shakes her head and stares at him blankly. I’m sorry. I don’t understand. Can you say again?

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by Liz Mathews

For two years, back when I lived in Park Slope, I would see Grandpa on a near daily basis. Sometimes in the early dark mornings of winter, after I’d finished my run, I’d stretch outside our building and watch as strange men would help Grandpa into a van to take him off to wherever older men spend their days when not at home. He was a fragile-looking guy, and though he was probably only 70 at the oldest, Grandpa looked about 89 or 95, so while lifting him into a van wasn’t necessarily a feat of strength, it was a careful process in the morning moonlight.

Other times I’d spot him several blocks from our building, and excitedly point him out to whomever I happened to be with. “That’s the old man from my building!” I’d exclaim. “And far from home!” My friends never seemed that impressed, but would humor me with an, “Oh, huh,” and steer conversation back to what we’d been talking about before.

Most often, though, and on Saturday mornings in particular, Grandpa would be sitting in a lawn chair in the entryway of our building, a forty of Olde English at his feet and a cigarette between his gnarled fingers. The door to the street would be tied open via a rope mechanism that I could never figure out how to use myself, and anyone going in or out of the building would inevitably get caught in a conversation with Grandpa because his chair took up the whole doorway.

“HiiiIIIIIIIiiiiii!” Grandpa would start off, and follow it with his signature toothless grin. “How are you?!” Typically I’d tell him I was doing good, and ask him the same. “I’m fine,” he’d say, trailing off, his voice becoming much, much quieter and more despondent. But then, “Have a good day!” he’d finish, his moment of self-reflection seemingly forgotten.

Sometimes there would be more of a conversation. On the day many Americans voted for Barack Obama, Grandpa was waiting around in the building at 7:30 a.m. when I returned from voting. “I tried to cast my vote,” he told me, “but the line was too long. My legs couldn’t take it.” Another time I ran into him in our building on Mothers’ Day. “I wish I could visit my family,” he explained as we stood on the second floor landing, “but they live in Atlantic City. And no one has a car.” We related over being far from our loved ones, and I went to my apartment. Later on my roommate Mackenzie came home with the news that Grandpa had wished her a Happy Mothers’ Day in the hallway just moments before. My other roommate, Chris, and I wondered if Grandpa knew something about Mackenzie that we did not.

It’s been well over a year since I moved from Park Slope and last saw Grandpa, though I understand he’s still doing all right. A few weekends ago while I was out for a friend’s birthday, Chris sent me the following text with a photo attached:

“Ummmmm… Guess who’s at Southpaw? Listening to funk and smoking Marlborough Reds?”

Mildly intoxicated and not sure if my eyes were playing tricks on me when I looked at the picture, I texted back, “Who? Where? What?”

“Grandpa! From our old apartment!”

He seems to be doing all right, indeed.

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by Katherine Cooper

My grandmother had fallen several times, her dry and brittle bones snapping easily, and so she spent the last year or so of her life in a nursing home in Queens. It was low and flat, a slab of muted green concrete in the midst of a lively Korean neighborhood. The facility was surrounded by a couple of community centers and lots of Korean grocery stores displaying varieties of pickled vegetables in flimsy plastic containers.

The last few months of her life were mostly spent in bed. She was weak and passive, her cheeks sunken and her skin gray and waxy. Yet she was still very much attuned to the activity going on around her, concerned about women arguing over poker-keno games or men yelling at their aides, vehemently refusing to get their toenails clipped. My grandma’s next-door neighbor suffered from some sort of paranoid psychosis and each night he’d line his floor and window frames with silver duct tape. Often he’d insist that his furniture and belongings had been replaced with nearly identical replicas, like his flat-screen TV that was the same except for the size of the red metallic power button on the side. He would come and talk to my grandma several times a day—she was the only resident with unconditional patience for his worries and who always seemed to be brimming with warmth.

She had been like this my whole life—effusive with her affection, extremely talkative and often verging on sentimental. At grocery stores she’d stop and talk to cashiers, raw chicken rapidly defrosting as she asked questions about their lives and boasted about her own children and grandchildren. She was also dutiful about correspondence and would send holiday cards to dozens of people—couples she’d met once on a cruise to the Caribbean in 1976 or a particularly kind usher who’d helped her at the theater.

My grandmother and I saw each other infrequently throughout my childhood, but she was insistent on intimacy when we did. Hold my hand, she would say, as she told me stories about her youth or the myriad of students she had taught over the years. She often told me she loved me and wanted to hear the same, always urging that I call and write her more.

But of course, as she grew sicker she was quieter and sometimes delusional—speaking of her daughter (who had died nearly twenty years earlier) or even her mother and father in the present tense. I came home from college one damp and windy weekend in October to say goodbye, though my dad had warned me she was mostly already gone. She was mumbling every so often, but had not really spoken or been alert in days. I worried that I would be stiff and awkward at a time so tense and plainly sad, but when I got to her room, I was flooded with some innate and simple loss, both hers and mine. She was slipping in and out of consciousness but was mostly asleep as I talked to her and held her hand. Before I left, I pressed my lips against her soft and clammy forehead and I told her I loved her. I hoped she felt the subtle pressure of my hand against her own or perhaps she could intuitively sense my presence. As I was walking out the door, I heard her mumble something and then call my name. I turned around, my face stinging and wet.

Yes?

All of the sudden she seemed so oriented and alert—a momentary breath of clarity.

Well, she said, adios!
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by Liz Mathews

Before Rosie’s couch became mine, it was known as the dead lady’s couch. We called it that because that’s what it was, though we also called it that because deep down, Rosie’s couch made us uncomfortable. Or at least it did during those months that my friends owned it, in between Rosie’s passing and my possession of the pink, floral-patterned piece of furniture.

When my friends still lived on Crescent Street in Astoria, Rosie was their landlady. They lived in the apartment above the old Greek woman, and despite some of her old-fashioned, non-PC views of society, memories of Rosie continue to warm their hearts. After all, it’s hard to find a good landlord, and the little lady with the gap between her front teeth was just that.

The morning of her death, then, was a sad one. And though there was no reason for them to feel this way, my friends felt a smidge of guilt about her passing, as if they could have prevented it somehow in the way they’d lived above her as tenants. When her couch was offered to them, they accepted it but never sat on it, placing it in their living room and allowing the rest of us callous jerks to bounce on its cushions and joke about how they’d killed their landlady to own her couch. I can understand why they were happy to offer it to me several months later.

And I was happy to take it, since I needed the seating, and since I hadn’t known Rosie outside of my friends’ hilarious imitations of her “Yeah! Yeah, yeah!” staccato response when she wanted to be agreeable (and she was often agreeable). So now Rosie’s couch sits in my living room.

I sit on the couch everyday, and normally I don’t think about its history—yet its battle scars and triumphs are there. The couch has lost a few inches since it was Rosie’s: it was a tight squeeze up and down that old Astoria staircase and the feet just had to go. One of the armrests has been mended with pink thread after a moving mishap tore a gash in the fabric. The couch has served as a stepping stool when some friends attempted to fix the track light above it during a party—a vain endeavor since the light continues to only work occasionally. On Saturday afternoons the couch is a makeshift drying rack when I return from the laundromat, its back the ideal place to drape damp sweaters. It’s played a bed to travelers from as far away as Germany, and is the perfect nap spot when sleep overwhelms my attempts to watch DVDs.

Since Rosie last saw it, her couch has dutifully held hundreds of backsides in both its second Astoria home and its current location in Brooklyn. And though a piece of furniture is little in lieu of a human being, and though I never knew her in person, I think Rosie would be pleased to know that something of hers has gone on to serve others so well. In the background right now, via the voices of my friends, I hear Rosie agreeing with “Yeah! Yeah, yeah!”

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by J.B. Staniforth

Part two.
Read part one.

Steve used to come into my store with a pleasant blonde woman whose name is lost to me now. She might have been called Catherine. One Saturday afternoon, the two came in drunk and giggly. They called me over to help them pick a movie, and got more and more distracted the longer they hung around. They must have been there an hour, joking with me and not really trying to leave, before Steve said, “That’s it, I’m going to close my eyes, stick out my finger, spin around, and walk to the wall. Whatever movie I’m touching is what we’re taking.” They did it that way, and as they paid, Steve said to me, “It’s a beautiful day outside, we’re drunk, and we’re going to go home and make love.” He cackled. Catherine feigned shock with a large grin, shoved him, and said, “You jerk! You don’t have to tell everyone!” They left arm in arm.

The last time I saw Steve, he hadn’t been in for a while and he explained that he’d pitched an idea to the city whereby he’d teach homeless youths wood-working skills, and they would make and fix benches and public furniture in return for a paycheck and a trade. The idea had been accepted and he was thrilled about it. In his off-time, he was making mouldings, bookshelves, and balustrades for one of the early dot-com millionaires and said he could probably live for years off of what he was being paid. He had the idea that he was going to return to Japan to learn a new carving specialty and look for his son.

It was a few months later when I saw Catherine for the first time in ages. I asked how she was and had she seen Steve lately, to which she replied with a look of horror and puzzlement.

After a moment, she said slowly, “You didn’t hear?”

“Hear what?” I said.

“Steve’s gone,” she said.

“He went back to Japan?” I said.

“No. Steve…” Catherine trailed off. “He passed on. He died.”

I was stunned. I was now seventeen, but still had only known grandparents and great-aunts and uncles who died. No one close to my age, or even my parents’ age. As I understood it, they just… didn’t. My face hung slack with astonishment as I asked her how.

“He was feeling sick, so he went to the doctor, and they told him he had an aggressive form of cancer. They gave him six weeks to live and he died two weeks later.” Catherine was crying now.

“God, I’m so sorry,” I said.

“So am I.” She removed a wadded Kleenex from her leather-tassled purse and wiped her eyes with it

She didn’t get a movie that day. As she left, she gave me a hug, and said, “Take care of yourself. Stay well.”

Until then, I hadn’t realized I might have to.

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From: Ian King
To: C.A.B. Fredericks
Date: Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 9:29 AM
Subject: “License to Drive” reappraisal???

Dude, I know my blogs usually go up on Wednesdays, but if you want to run an obit profile of Corey Haim today instead, I heartily endorse it! Dude was in “The Lost Boys,” all respect is due.

*I

—
From: C.A.B. Fredericks
To: Ian King
Date: Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 9:35 AM
Subject: RE: “License to Drive” reappraisal???

Can I run specifically this e-mail, verbatim?

—
From: Ian King
To: C.A.B. Fredericks
Date: Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 9:44 AM
Subject: RE: “License to Drive” reappraisal???

Yes! But I ask that you also add an asterisk or something that expresses how shocking it is that Haim went before Feldman.*

Could you also please please tweet what Ashton Kutcher tweeted when Brittany Murphy died, “2 day the world has lost a little piece of sunshine.”

*I

*[It's very shocking that Haim went before Feldman. —Ed.]

by May Wilkerson

I brought home a pint of Ben & Jerry’s for my roommate because his grandmother was dying. It was Phish Food, his favorite flavor—a mixture of chocolate ice cream and marshmallow, inundated by chocolate-covered goldfish. It sat there on the counter, this mighty amalgam, yet such a feeble substitute for flesh and blood.

That was the day before my own grandmother’s ninety-third birthday.

I impulsively bought a bus ticket to Boston for the weekend. I made the arrangements to surprise her over dinner at a Legal Seafood restaurant in Cambridge.

***

At 6:15 as planned, my parents usher her in, one on each side like bodyguards. My grandmother does possess certain movie star qualities. She is tiny but statuesque, her head supporting a spherical perm of white hair. She never allows her lipstick to fade. When she sees me, her mouth forms a perfect scarlet circle. It remains like this for a few seconds, frozen in one of those rare moments when expectation and reality collide.

Lively and sharp, she doesn’t appear a day over eighty. It is almost eerie, as if she has figured out some way to pause time. “I counted again this morning,” she says, “just to make sure.” I picture her at the kitchen table in her small apartment, mapping out the years of her life with a fountain pen, on a napkin or the back of an envelope. She hates to waste anything.

We fall back into familiar narratives. She orders the crab cakes, agonizing over portion size. “But how big?” she asks the waitress, holding her hands wide apart like a cocky fisherman. When the meal arrives, she reels back in horror. “I’ll never finish these!” But she demolishes them, slowly, majestically, in tiny, graceful bites. It is miraculous to watch, this triumph of the human spirit over nature.

At the end of the night, after the waiters have sung, the desserts devoured, and the conversation is winding to a lull, she reapplies her lipstick, and we go home.

I return to Brooklyn the following evening. The Phish Food is still in the fridge, half-eaten and frosted with freezer burn. It is a comfort, just to know it’s there—behind the ice trays and the frozen spinach—the promise of a rich and impermanent sweetness.

by Liz Wyckoff

She doesn’t look happy to see you, or the old woman to your right. Funny, you think. Helping people to see is her job. Think about that some more, though, and you realize it’s not true. The optometrist helps you to see. She’s just in charge of the diagnosis.

“This first one is for colorblindness,” she says, when she gets you into the testing room. She’s young and tall and looks like one of those sassy nurses from a television series. You can tell she’s dying to see something else. A boyfriend, maybe, during her break. Or an issue of Cosmo. Anything other than your hazy black pupils. Her voice is a lazy monotone: “When you’re ready please tell me what numbers you see.”

You stare into the screen full of blobs—pebbles in a streambed, a dish of mixed nuts, Dippin’ Dots: the ice cream of the future. You once read that the dessert was invented by a cryogenic scientist, which makes you think about your life, not just fifty years from now when your vision will be gone like that woman in the waiting room, or eighty years from now when you may be freeze-dried in some storage unit, but two hundred years from now when you may be youthful again, with perfect eyesight.

You call numbers out into the room like lottery powerballs: “Five, forty-two, sixty-seven, nine.”

“Which of these circles stands out?” she asks to test your depth perception. Now you’re leading a square dance: “Left, left, middle, right.”

“And this,” she says, “is for visual acuity.” It’s the standard vision chart with letters arranged in a pyramid—the old friend you’ve grown distant from after all these years. Without your contacts, you can’t even distinguish the E.

She leads you back out to the waiting room and delivers you into a chair. “The doctor will see you shortly,” she drones. On the flat-screen TV, a video provides information about glaucoma, “The Silent Thief of Sight.” A speeded up portrayal of the disease shows black shadows hovering around the periphery of the screen, then stretching in smoothly, like the gloved hands of a burglar, until everything goes blank. That’s when she takes the hand of the old woman next to you and leads her down the hallway. They get smaller and smaller until, finally, you can’t see them at all.

by Liz Mathews

According to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) website, the average weekday ridership is somewhere around 8,739,680 people. Almost 9 million people, riding the 2,056 miles of track, the 3,912 miles of bus route. For the most part, the MTA goes from point A to point B and then is forgotten, until it’s time for us to go somewhere else. For the most part.

But then there are mornings like November 19th, when the F and G trains were not running for a significant stretch of Brooklyn because, it came through the grapevine, someone had been struck by a train at 7th Avenue. By the time I left home, crowds were walking away from the train station and toward the nearest bus stop, where every bus that went past was already packed. I’d get to work when I got there.

When I did, Gothamist was the only source online with any news about the incident, and the article didn’t say much more than I’d already heard. But the reader comments were revealing. Although we do not generally speak while we commute together, the anonymity of the internet presents the ideal sounding board for all the thoughts flickering behind the eyes of our fellow riders.

The first comment: “Yes, it was a pain in the ass today.”

Followed by: “Tragic: for the jumper, the desperation; for the train conductor, the guilt; for the riders, the delay.” This second person then took a less thoughtful approach: “Hundreds of Park Slopers were forced to walk three blocks to the 4th Ave. station. Most passed the time by using their Crackberries as they walked, making for a not-so-pretty sight of weaving and bobbing bodies trying to walk and text at the same time.”
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