Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Liz Mathews

Now that the Union Square theater has become one of the few in Manhattan without a reported bedbug infestation, I had little problem winding up there on a recent half-day Friday to view Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. But the movie and the theater have little to do with this.

Prior to the show beginning, I told the friends I was with to save me a seat, and dashed to the bathroom. Now, careful reader, you may recall the bathroom attendant I wrote of approximately one year ago, the one charged with standing in a bathroom without air conditioning, to direct a line of fidgety women. The one who was entirely positive even though her job left much to be desired.

At first I didn’t recognize her, this being one year later. Sure, I’d seen her a few movies ago, taking tickets and sweeping the lobby, and I was relieved yet somewhat saddened that she still had a gig at the theater. But now one emotion has settled in.

“Ladies, please take care to remember your valuables. Thank you for choosing the Union Square Regal Theaters. We appreciate your business and hope you enjoy your time with us,” the voice over the intercom in the bathroom sounded.

Except that there isn’t an intercom in that bathroom.

The voice was coming from the bathroom attendant, perched on top of a mobility scooter and moving slowly toward the sink area. As I washed my hands she moved past me to the bathroom’s exit, ever mindful of the other people in there, her voice still the canned one comparable to those featured on the new fleets of subway cars, or escalator safety reminders.

“Clear away from the entrance, please. Coming through. Please clear the entrance. Coming through. Step away from the entrance,” she sounded, back ramrod straight, all the way out the door.

And as I walked out after her, I thought of all the ways that people can change over the course of a year. And how, sometimes, the changes that occur are far from the ones we had hoped for.

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by Joa Suorez

Soak the day
until its soft colors
drain and only
an outline
of all we did
remains—a memory
new enough
we still see it
the same—a vague shape
against the sun
that evening
carries away.

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by Ian F. King

Like countless people across the planet, I’ve been trying to readjust to regular life after spending the past month wholly obsessed with the daily excitement and drama of the World Cup. Before I present myself as a knowledgeable soccer enthusiast, it’s important that I admit to unintentional bandwagon jumping. The thing is, I didn’t want to be obsessed, but a few minutes into the USA vs. England match, I became irreversibly so. A soccer fanatic had lain dormant in my heart since 2004, when I was living in a cramped mouse-infested flat in London and my Anglo-Zimbabwean roommate Kieran taught me how to appreciate the game during the Euro tournament that year. During this recent USA vs. England game, I reverted to that manic fan from six years ago, only ten times more so.

The problem was, after the first round of the finals, I was left with no one to cheer for. Being a USA fan first, and England fan second (England being the country in which I learned to love the sport, after all), the weekend of June 26th and 27th was not an easy one to bear. I was almost inconsolable when Germany got their fourth goal against England, and was still mildly despondent at work the next day. Orphaned, my allegiances began to shift wildly. I begrudged Germany their win (though couldn’t muster the same hard feelings toward Ghana), so decided I would cheer for their upcoming opponents Argentina, who also wore stylish jerseys and had Lionel Messi on their roster, a player of extraordinary talent who on at least one occasion has been referred to as “the Little Magician”.
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by Joa Suorez

We saw the way
you let love in,
the little door
you opened
when the light
began to change—
and night pressed
cool against your face.

When your heart
began to swell
the way the moon will
just before rain
we saw the wide world
in your eyes again,
that wild joy
love sometimes brings.

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by Liz Wyckoff

I recently visited my old roommate in Brooklyn. I don’t live in the city anymore, but she’s still there. Still next to Prospect Park. Still a short walk from all the things I miss: the backyard at The Farm, the muffins at Blue Sky, the polyester dresses at Beacon’s Closet. There are plenty of things about it that I don’t miss—that’s why I moved away. Only, now that I’m out of her life, my old roommate has moved into a new apartment—one so heavenly that I can’t believe how lucky she is to be rid of me.

“I haven’t seen a roach in two years,” she said off-handedly, as I opened my suitcase on her spacious hardwood floor. This seems impossible. We had bugs in both of the old apartments we shared. Maybe I did something to entice them out of the cracks in the walls and onto our kitchen counters? In our first apartment, we killed a cockroach by chasing it into the dishwasher, then running it through the rinse cycle with all our dirty dishes.

Now, in place of cockroaches, my old roommate has pots of flowers and herbs. She’s cultivating basil, heliotropes, and Vietnamese coriander. In the window, there’s a sensitive plant that curls its leaves inward like praying hands at the slightest touch.

Above the fireplace in our old apartment, a pocket of water once appeared after a storm—a belly of polluted rain expanding from the wall like a pregnancy. The layered skins of paint stretched until my roommate and I stabbed the bubble with a knife and watched the rusty juice dribble out. We’d painted the walls in that living room. All by ourselves. Now my old roommate knows better. She asked her landlord to paint the walls of her new apartment, and it was done before she moved in. The new walls are off-white. Clean and pure.

She says she misses me, my old roommate. But when I see her in that new apartment, I understand why she’s still living in Brooklyn and happy without me. It’s almost enough to convince me to try again.

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by J.B. Staniforth

Mawuko was from Ghana, a student at the international MBA program at which I’d found a job as a receptionist. We first met during the winter, which was, like most Montreal winters, ferociously cold. And like many immigrants to Montreal from warmer countries, Mawuko suffered it with a sense of humor, first amazed by the cold and snow, then tiring sarcastically of it as the novelty wore off, and finally amazed again at the wait for spring to come in May.

By the time spring came, we’d become friendly. My girlfriend also worked at the reception desk on alternating days, and Mawuko took to passing time on breaks by wandering over and chatting with us. He introduced us to his wife, who was also studying in town, and brought us Ghanaian chocolate after he’d gone home for a desperately-needed visit in the mid-winter.

As long as I knew him, Mawuko’s dress was standard business-casual, except for those days in the program on which he was required to attend a meeting or presentation and wore a suit. So I was enthused to discover that as the summer temperatures reached those to which he was more accustomed, his wardrobe widened to included dashikis, kaftans, and kufi-caps. Part of the fun of the job was encountering people from all over the world and asking them about the customs of home, and Mawuko took great pleasure in pointing out that there weren’t many people in Montreal with his sense of style.

Thus, it was in a brilliant purple kaftan that he appeared through the door during the third day of the first heat wave of summer. The city was living up to its meteorological reputation of “nine months of winter, three months of hell,” and as Mawuko staggered into the air conditioned office, I could see he was sweating mightily. A V-shaped patch of sweat darkened his purple kaftan nearly to the belly, while two dark u-shapes descended from his armpits. Upon entering, he paused in the air-conditioning to blot his forehead, temples, and upper lip with a handkerchief. Then he looked at the desk and saw me.

“Have you been outside lately?” he asked. In spite of his musical accent, his tone was accusatory, as though I was somehow responsible for the weather.

“No,” I said. “I got here early for the air conditioning.” That was true; I didn’t bother to add that my roommates and I had taped cardboard over all our windows in the hope of blocking out the cruelty of the sun.

“It is so hot outside,” Mawuko said. “I mean, it is unreal.”

“It does get hot,” I concurred.

“No, you don’t understand. It is hotter than Africa. Africa! And you know what they say about Africa? That it’s a hot place?”

“It’s the humidity,” I offered.

“You’re damned right it is! We don’t have humidity like this in Africa. It’s terrible.”

I shrugged; I couldn’t then, and can’t now, afford to live anywhere else.

“And in the winter,” he went on, “it is so cold. So terribly cold. What is wrong with this country? Why do you people live here?”

“I can only speak for myself,” I said, “but I stay mostly because the rent is cheap and all the insects are very small.”

Mawuko shook his head.

“You people are crazy,” he said.

The last I heard of him, he and his wife moved home to Ghana immediately upon completing their studies in Montreal.

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by Katherine Cooper

I went to New Orleans about four years ago with a group of kids from college. It was the January after the storm, but winter there is often warm and humid, the sun bright and persistent. We slept in sleeping bags on the floor of a beautiful wooden church. Next door were big houses with white columns and glistening lawns, sidewalks dotted with palm trees.

We’d drive this bulky white van into the devastated areas and gut entire houses. We carried it all out onto the sidewalk: oak dressers and glass tables, couches still swollen and damp, cardboard boxes filled with Christmas ornaments and full sets of wine-colored encyclopedias. Nail polish and splintered hockey sticks. We’d knock down walls, slamming our hammers and crowbars from dining room to kitchen, bedroom to bathroom. We dug tiles up from the mud—turquoise and coral—slippery with sewage.

Whole lives were emptied out onto their front porches and lawns. Sometimes people watched as we hauled out their belongings. Be careful with that antique frame and those ceramic mugs. But they quieted as we knocked down their houses, crowbars smashing through ceilings, fiberglass falling like pale, pink snow.

In a suburb west of the city, we found a sailboat tilted and positioned through the front door of a home and cars piled on top of each other. Mattresses still wrapped in floral bedding.

And now it’s four-and-a-half years later, and I’m here visiting Sarah, and all the furniture and clutter is gone. Most of the houses are still there—vacant and boarded up with pieces of wood across the windows. Sarah asks me what’s changed. When we were here before it was like an entire city had been taken away in the midst of a disaster, and now the evidence of that chaos is mostly gone. Though the orange spray paint on the doors is still lingering—a big X to say the houses had been checked for people. 9/4, 9/5, 9/6. One cat left and two dogs. Everyone else gone.

It is ninety degrees and we climb up onto the levees. The water looks so calm and harmless, like a drowsy monster waiting to rear its head. I keep thinking of this one place we saw that winter: a one-story brick house whose front door and windows had been blown in. There were a handful of branches sticking out through the empty door frame, and white numbers dangling beside it. In blue paint someone had written across the front: You Won, Katrina. I wonder where they are now. If they’ve come back, renounced that surrender. Or if they’ve abandoned this place entirely, their anger and frustration having ebbed away, drowned by the need to go on.

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by caitlin macrae

He shows up in my hallway out of mostly nowhere—the last I knew, he was in West Virginia, fighting Massey Energy with a camera and the kind of commitment to things you only see in people raised by extremely good or extremely bad families. Growing up, Jordan’s place always smelled sort of like patchouli, the things in his house the dim worn colors of a lived-in home, never the spotlessness of the kind of houses where people don’t really like one another, always the damp warmth of cooking food. The last time I saw him was at a funeral, on a boat.

He doesn’t ask me about much, mostly just plugs in his computer and talks about himself, which is fine. It’s been a long five years, and there are a lot of stories on his end; anyway, he’s already done the living-in-Brooklyn thing. He’s fighting a war, even slings around terms like PTSD. In another mouth these things would ring hollow, puffed-up little boy fronts, but with him it’s really kind of true. He lives in a different world now; he’s eaten bear.

Watching him smoke his Winstons, now, after a few beers and some shitty pizza, it is impossible not to remember him on his back patio; we were maybe fifteen or sixteen, I was probably younger. While the rest of us were sucking down Djarums and Camels and Marlboro Reds, Jordan would stand in the grass, arms and legs quivering and flailing while his face contorted, mirroring the effects of out stupid habit on our developing lungs. It’s probably as weird for him to see me shrugging off a cigarette as it is for me to watch him, and I can’t resist the urge, in the middle of the road on a Wednesday night. We pause there, on Franklin Street, twitch our bodies around on the pavement and make awful faces while his Winston burns out.

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by Ian F. King

1.
The IRS US Residency Certification division has changed the hold music on their call center telephone line. For at least the past four years, probably longer, when you called to speak to a representative there about US Residency Form 6166 or Form 8802 (which is the form you use to order 6166 certificates for an individual or company) or Form 8821 (which is the form you use to designate me as the person who calls the IRS US Residency Certification division and follows up on your 6166 certification status for you), the hold music was Gershwin. I’m not going to explain any of that for you, except to clarify that the hold music was actually two segments of two different Gershwin songs, two of the best known, one calm and one upbeat, which abruptly alternated every couple of minutes in a bizarrely pleasant looping mood swing that would sometimes be the soundtrack to up to ten minutes of my otherwise tuneless day. This winter, the hold music was changed to an indistinguishably mediocre slice of elevator music.
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by Liz Wyckoff

A month ago, with one week left to finish my graduate thesis, I started my first quilt. I had no idea what I was doing and I needed serious help. In more ways than one. That’s how I ended up at the Sit and Sew class with Geary, Ruth, Peg, and Vicki.

When I arrived at the quilt store, the women were already set up in the back. I rushed in and started pulling things out of my bag: rotary cutter, quilter’s rule, pin-cushion. The Quiltwork Patches flier read, “No project is too old, too undone, or too unusual.” I think that rule applies to quilters, too.

Peg—the oldest of the women—immediately wandered over to my table. “Lemme see whatcha got,” she said, frowning over my scraps. I took out the book I’d been working from and shyly pointed to my pattern, called Just Peachy. Then I revealed the squares of fabric I’d sewn so far; thread dangled from their edges. I’d created a pile of soft, flat jellyfish.

While Peg fingered the squares, my sewing machine sat quietly before me—the needle seeming to blink like a sharp, metal cursor. “Very nice,” she finally squawked.

“It’s wonderful,” Ruth added, “to have a young person here!” And the others nodded in assent.

After that, the women and fabric became a sort of insulation. Yards upon yards of cotton sheltered me from thoughts of my writing—floral patterns, animal prints, polka dots, paisleys, plaids.

Instead of literary characters, the women chatted about Sunbonnet Sue and Overall Sam. They oohed and ahhed over Peg’s grandmother’s quilts—the stained squares she pulled from dusty boxes. Vicki called them “kind of retro,” and Peg hollered, “Kinda what!?”

“Retro!” Vicki yelled, tossing her thumb at me. “This one here doesn’t even know the meaning of the word!” The women hooted. I envisioned my thesis, that flawed arrangement of words on my laptop across town. It’s hard, I thought, to know the meaning of words.

“Never again will I let them pick their own patterns,” Ruth clucked toward the end of the class, referring to the children for whom she’d been sewing quilts for years. “They don’t know how long these things take. They have no idea!”

She’s probably right. They have no idea. But I have a feeling she’ll keep on letting them choose. Sometimes, self-sabotage can be a means of survival.

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