Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by May W.

Will wore a three-piece suit every day of the week, even on exceptionally hot days when sweat would pool in dark arcs under his arms. Although vague on the subject of employment, he was always headed somewhere important—a business meeting, a work-related trip. He existed in a state of constant movement. He was tall and wiry, of East Indian descent, with a graying beard that lent suspicion to his professed age of twenty-nine. He lived one floor above me, in the same duplex apartment. He was my roommate and my boss, and the most ambitious individual I had encountered during my few months in the “real world”. The notion that he was destined for greatness was a truth that I immediately accepted without doubt or consideration. His name alone meant conviction.

When we first met, I told him that I was a writer. It was a word that felt like bubblegum in my mouth—sweet and inauthentic. He was ecstatic, jumping up from the couch to exclaim, “Perfect! I’m starting a magazine. It’s going to be huge. You can be my business partner.”

I eagerly accepted the position as Will’s devoted subordinate. He had the experience and smarts and business savvy, while I had the energy, and what Will called “potential”. He called me “Tiny Boston”, shortened to “T.B.” His optimism was contagious. There was a professional energy between us that seemed guaranteed to propel us forward and up. I soaked in our schemes and plans, voraciously.

I was always learning new things about Will to shock and amaze me. He had lived in seven countries, and had been “banned” from several, including Thailand and China. He had called off three engagements to three separate women, all at the last minute. But he was, deep down, a romantic. He had smoked opium and spent time in brothels. He was immune to mosquito bites because they hate the taste of gin.

For weeks, I devoted my nights to the magazine. We often brought our laptops to bars—Will preferred to write when he was drunk, but I found that my ability to form sentences disappeared after the first gin & tonic. Will rarely slept, and I mimicked him, typing until six or seven in the morning and sleeping all day. It was discombobulating, this lifestyle. I found myself constantly exhausted and unfocused, mulling over the same paltry sentence for hours. In two weeks, I produced less than three pages of content. Will seemed thrilled with my work, his optimism unflinching. “You’re doing great, T.B.!” He would heap me with praise and order another round. There was always a bartender around who knew Will’s name, would slap him on the back, refill his glass.

Of course, it began to dawn on me that none of this was real.

One day, Will returned home after a four-day disappearance, unkempt and haggard and reeking of booze. He postponed paying me for my work, offering plea bargains in the form of small vials of drugs, half-empty bottles of wine and, once, a coupon for a free haircut. What finally convinced me was the spoon. At the time I struggled to recall the exact details of its context or application. I was on the couch with friends at four or five in the morning, drunk, my mind swimming against the tide of sleep. He was there, splayed out on the floor, focused. Through my haze I thought I saw a knot of rubber, and a spoon, and something else that filled me with a sense of dread. I woke up the next day, dazed and uncertain. But when I went to the living room, it was as I had remembered, there on the floor—a spoon—a little mirror that turns your world upside-down.

[img via]

by Naomi Solomon

There are twenty-three people on a grand jury, and that is the only grand thing about it. Otherwise, it is an unfortunate tangle of fluorescent lights, tightly spoken formalities, and older men chewing gum too loudly in the swivel seat to your right. Sometimes the younger man seated to your left falls asleep during the proceedings, and you are embarrassed by the situation and can’t decide whether to wake him. Sometimes the court reporter is helpful and explains confusing procedural points while you wait. (Always the court reporter is a woman. Almost always, the entire grand jury is waiting for something to begin, or end, or be clarified.) Sometimes a crime victim is questioned, and you want to cry. Sometimes you sit waiting for an hour and the warden won’t tell you if there are any more hearings scheduled that day, and you want to cry. Sometimes an Assistant District Attorney makes a joke, and it is almost funny. Often the joke is about the coffee machine near the elevator, or about the too-sweet, not-very-hot beverage it produces.

The room ebbs and swells with waves of camaraderie and hostility, the general mood switching from annoyance to joking ease frequently and without warning. The group is full of characters, not least of them a short, plump woman in her mid-thirties. She has black hair cut very short and plastered to her head with some kind of indomitable hair product, and speaks with a crisp Caribbean accent, peaks and valleys of emphasis distributed liberally in every sentence. She is prone to talking elaborately to herself under her breath, in the no-man’s-land between too loud to ignore and too soft to take as an invitation for discussion.

It is the second day, and she stands observing the court reporter’s equipment between cases. “Better get back to your seat before you get in trouble for poking around where you don’t belong!” the secretary, randomly chosen from the jury pool but excitedly authoritative, calls out.

“I don’t have to sit down,” the black-haired juror challenges. “I’m on a grand jury today. There ain’t nobody gonna tell me what to do today. Shoot, if I had a car I’d park it right there in the lobby today.” To prove her point, she continues to nose around, standing showily on tiptoes and emitting various mumblings—oh wow, so that’s how… Oh, I see…—for far longer than she could possibly be interested in what she’s seeing. When the ADA finally enters the room and asks if the group is ready to convene, she picks her way over to her assigned seat slowly, breathing short loud huffs out her nose as she waits for knees and feet to be tucked in out of her way. When she is seated, she pokes the sleepy young man next to her, hard. His eyes appear from beneath the brim of his down-tilted baseball cap. “Wake up, man. You was snoring so loud the lawyer got mad and stopped everything.” He raises his eyebrows, probably aware that he has not been snoring.

“I’m just trying to save your ass, my man,” she protests in the face of his annoyance. “They always watching, you know. The warden told me there’s hidden cameras in here.” He rolls his eyes, just slightly, probably aware that the grand jury’s deliberations are confidential. By now, the ADA is beginning in earnest, and you have to wait until his presentation is over and his witness has left before you can tell conclusively, without reasonable doubt and under the terms of the law whether the young man is truly annoyed, whether you fully understand the charges as they have been presented to you, whether the black-haired juror will try something more ridiculous soon, whether to indict or dismiss, whether you will laugh or cry with the next case, whether you can take another eight days in this room.

[img via]

by Liz Wyckoff

Judy Chicago’s 1979 art installation, The Dinner Party, is a triangular table with place settings for thirty-nine women who significantly contributed to Western Civilization, from prehistory to the mid-twentieth century. The artwork begs us to consider how these women would interact as contemporaries, and what they would be like if they were alive today.

Trotula, as her friends say, is a little “crunchy granola.”

She’s healthy, polite, fond of bird-themed items. She wears one of those headbands with a plump, speckled feather glued onto the side, as if she’s just returned from a walk in the woods where she befriended a Guinea fowl.

Trotula passes on the wine. She sneaks off to the kitchen, stealthy as a hen, grabs a fistful of ice cubes from the freezer, and drops them into her white goblet. Back at the table, in her seat among the other guests, she fills her cup from a bottle of sambuca. Trotula cares deeply about hygiene, cleanliness, sterility.

She’s an OB/GYN. She wears printed scrub tops with flowered patterns and pulls her hair back at the nape of her neck—bundles it there with a rubber band. A real rubber band. When she takes her hair down at night, the band makes a ripping noise. Always, there are splintered hairs pinched between the cracks of stretched rubber.

Trotula is tough. She has walked through a wall of protestors on her way to work, parting them like a sea, or a pair of legs.

She knows intimate details about these women, her friends, sitting around her. She’s chatted with Hildegarde von Bingen about the female orgasm, supported Eleanor of Aquitaine through her unpleasant divorce, detected the lump in Amazon’s right breast. She knows that Sappho loves women and that Artemisia Gentileschi was raped as a young girl. She meets Margaret Sanger at the park on Saturday mornings and they jog by the river, holding passionate discussions about reproductive rights.

But at the dinner party, Trotula is quiet. Reserved. She’s a good listener. She leans back in her chair and breathes anise out into the room in a fiery chill. When she gets home, she will wash her face with oatmeal soap, brush her teeth with fluoride-free paste, place the feathered headband on her bedside table, and quietly turn out the light.

[img via]

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!
[img via]

by Ian F. King

1.
On a Sunday afternoon I was in my friend’s car, driving to a nearby Montreal-style Jewish deli in Brooklyn. At the base of 4th Avenue, the visage of the Williamsburgh Savings & Loan building rose prominently from the otherwise flat surroundings. My friend remarked on its priapic nature. This was the umpteenth time I’d heard this comparison. Not from him alone, but also from a wide swath of the local population over time, including the occasional person on the subway, gazing on it coming into view as the above ground part of the line bends around the Smith & 9th Street station. It finally struck me why this building in particular, seemingly more than any other in New York City, reminds people of the male organ: it stands alone. The similarity can’t just be its shape. In the bigger picture, there’s really nothing that makes this building more like genitalia than any other. However, no one looks out on the Manhattan skyline and says, “wow, that looks like a big bunch of penises.” Yet there they are, rows of giant phalli filled with the lifeblood of our society, thrusting heavenward.

2.
When my parents recently visited from thousands of miles away, on the other coast of this country, the third place we went on their first day here (after the park and then brunch) was the Gowanus Canal. My father, a photography enthusiast, was eager to take pictures. We saw a dead rat floating in the water, unidentifiable filth drifting along the banks and collecting against the pilings that hold up the stubby two-lane drawbridges. I told them the famous anecdote about the canal testing positive for gonorrhea. My mother and I leaned on railings as my father snapped shot after shot of the graffiti and detritus. There are a great many decaying and decrepit areas in our home city as well, including the Duwamish River, which was itself declared a Superfund site in 2001. They spent the week taking a pass on many of the city’s most famous tourist destinations, skipping the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, among others, mostly because the lines were long. On the morning of their last day I asked them what they wanted to do with their final hours in the Big Apple. “Well, your dad really wants to go back down to the canal,” my mom said.

3.
Before going in to the City Reliquary, I wander down Havermeyer almost to the bridge and weave my way back north through the cross streets, stopping once to go into a corner store, and twice to peruse a menu posted outside though I’m not hungry at all. The museum, no bigger than an average living room, is wall-to-wall clutter with a collection of what basically has been in the homes and garages of New York City residents at some point during the past one hundred years. There’s an old subway token residing under glass that is identical to the one I’ve kept on a thin strand of ball chain in my desk drawer since 1999. In the “special exhibition” room there’s a temporary show about old signage that used to be a defining element of the neighborhood, featuring a foam bull’s head, a foam water tower, and some other fake objects made out of foam, that all used to hang from store facades, but now hang from the Reliquary ceiling. This was a world that no longer lived there, and I had no idea it was missing when I was out walking around those blocks just minutes before. Decades from now, where will they hang our dog bakery and baby yoga supply store signs?

[img via]

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!”

[img via]

by caitlin macrae

You hear about the L.A. River like it’s a sasquatch or a chupacabra, something mythic and mutant, a lie to keep children from going too far past the sidewalk in front of the house. And it’s basically just like that, a weak and scary thing, in parts, but mostly worse in your imagination: a trickle of liquid meandering around islands of upturned shopping carts and the shredded remains of plastic bags. It’s the image everyone knows, on the million contact sheets of a million amateur photographers looking for something gritty and teeming with metaphor, but it’s still true. Somewhere upstream there are river stones and swimming ducks and a riverbed not made of concrete. A river river, with green things, something that looks less like an aquatic memorial to an unwon war. But that’s all pretty far from us. When most of Los Angeles was a giant flood plain, the L.A. River used to connect to the Ballona Creek, which used to have wetlands, which are now a tiny swampy patch run through by the 90 freeway. Now Ballona is its own thing, sort of the L.A. River’s lame little brother, which is basically the worst fate to which a body of water could be resigned. Same islands of misfit refuse, fewer green things. There’s a bike path that runs along the creek, a series of steep drops and hills at impossible angles, punctuating long stretches of not much at all.

Gar used to take his family there on weekends sometimes, their fifteen-year-old hatchback Honda teeming with bicycles, everyone competing with fast food wrappers and barnacles of loose change for legroom. He had just moved to Culver City, had just gotten married again, had just bought his first house since the house in the valley with his second (now ex-) wife, the one with the red door that was sold in the divorce. Two of his five children come to his new house every other weekend. They are going to be a family, come hell, high water, or horribly drawn out group therapy sessions; therefore, families ride bikes. So.

So on Saturdays in the blistering California summer, a row of partially related people like ducklings draw themselves in a line along the pavement next to the water, flying down hills and crawling up hills while the small fake river shimmers and reflects promises of under-eye sunburns. The littlest one’s legs whirl with hummingbird speed but he is always farthest behind. The girl hates everyone around her and this stupid bike, hates Gar especially but gets worried every time he pedals out of sight. The rest triangulate up front, longer legs and outdoor bodies. They all take turns being first and last, a family that is not quite family, water that just barely passes for water.

[img via]

by J.B. Staniforth

“When I was seventeen,” said Marie-Line, “I had this job babysitting. The guy who was the father, he was a deejay at a swingers’ club, and his girlfriend would go to the club with him—I guess that was better than sitting at home, bored.

“The way it worked was that I would stay the whole night, and I’d get paid to be there until noon the next day.”

“So they didn’t need to worry about looking after the kids when they got home?” I asked.

“Basically, yeah,” Marie-Line said, “but mainly so they could stay up all night and sleep late the next day. Sometimes they’d bring people home with them, you know? Swingers?”

“Right,” I said.

“And this one morning,” she went on, “I walked into the living room just as this couple on the couch was waking up. It was clear that the woman lying there had no idea who the man was, but what was even clearer—the look on her face, I mean. I have never in my life, before or since, seen such a look of revulsion.

“I remember she had just a bit of mascara smeared by one of her eyes, and this look of absolute disgust. Maybe with herself, maybe with the guy—I don’t know. But she got up right away, put on her clothes, and walked out without saying so much as a word.”

“Nothing?”

“Seriously,” she said, “she didn’t even say goodbye.”

“Wow,” I said. “She put her clothes on? Was she naked when you came in?”

“She was wearing, like, a tank-top. That was all. Anyway, it was nudist house.”

“Amazing.”

“For sure it was,” she said. “That was my first exposure to real regret. Adult regret. I wasn’t even seventeen!”

“How on earth did you find that job?” I asked.

She laughed, closed her eyes, and slowly shook her head. “I got it through Girl Guides.”

[img via]

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.

[img via]

by Katherine Cooper

Most of the stores were closed as May and I walked south on Kingston Avenue last Saturday afternoon. The dry cleaners, the handful of delis, the supermarkets and liquor stores, all with their metal grates pulled tight to the sidewalk.

Crown Heights is notable for a diverse population—specifically the juxtaposition of Carribean and African-American residents with Hasidic Jews. And on this particular afternoon, religion seemed to govern the quieted streets. Handfuls of men, tall and pale, in black suits and black hats, strolled the sidewalks. They mostly surrounded the synagogue and brand-new Chabbad center. The shops were mostly closed for Shabbat—their windows dim and grey. Families sat, crowded on the porches of ornate and old-fashioned brick homes; the girls in long skirts that hung by their ankles and the little boys in vests and navy trousers.

May and I kept walking south and then stopped momentarily at a playground. It was maybe the first real spring weekend, the air cool and fresh, the sky a perfect sheet of blue. There were plenty of people around, mostly teenagers playing basketball, and a handful of kids on red metal jungle gym. We watched as a Hasidic man guided a trio of boys (who appeared to be his children) along the monkey bars, the strings of his tallis swaying by his sides. Two black boys, four or five years old, stood and watched as the grown man seamlessly wove his way through the course. One of the boys watching squealed in delight or jealousy, I couldn’t be sure. After he helped his sons through the bars, the man jumped down and eased the other boys onto the bars. And afterward, for a moment, the five boys all played together, climbing through a tangled plastic dome.

We walked toward the train and the houses became sparse and the storefronts lit up. We passed a unisex salon and one of those take-out Chinese restaurants with bright photographs of pork dumplings and chicken thick with sauce. We saw a couple of Baptist churches, pale yellow and blue, and one tiny, square synagogue. A cop car idled in front of the 2 train and an officer poked his through the window. You girls lost? I shook my head, told him we were just walking to the train. You better, he said, You look like you’re on the wrong side of town. Get out quick.

[img via]