Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Naomi Solomon

It was a Sunday night and we were sitting in Beth’s backyard, sipping iced tea and goofing around with her two young kids. Cynthia, Beth, and I used to work together in a small and hectic nonprofit, and I couldn’t remember a time when the three of us had just sat down and talked: no phones ringing, no meetings about to start, no urgency. It was nice to relax and focus on things like making the kids scared of their own backyard (who knows what’s making that noise! It’s probably your neighbor’s air conditioner, but sure, it could be a ghost!) and what foods, if any, it is unacceptable to pair with cheese.

“Look, there are stars out! Look!” squealed Samantha, Beth’s towheaded four-year-old. We craned our necks and squinted through the trees and haze, and sure enough there was one star. One blinking, moving star.

“Sammy-pie,” Beth said after a moment, “I don’t think that’s a star. Stars don’t usually, you know, move. Can you think of something else it might be?” Being the unhelpful person I am, I ambushed this gentle parent-explaining-the-universe-to-her-child moment.

“Oooh, Samantha, do you think it’s an alien spaceship?”

“Aliens aren’t real!” Samantha declared matter-of-factly, fluffing her tutu.

“I’m not so sure,” I teased.

“I’ve seen UFOs,” Cynthia volunteered. “Twice.” Beth and I made the appropriate spooky ooh-ing noises before Cynthia continued, “The first time, I was driving up to Connecticut along the coast, and there was this steady light that appeared over the water, going south. When it passed I us, I could see this big spinning disc in the middle of it.”

“Did they beam you up?”

“Did they fire laser beams?”

“No,” Cynthia said. “The second time, it was New Year’s Eve and I was up on a rooftop in Manhattan with some friends, and I saw the same thing again, flying really low over the buildings. I might’ve thought that it was a news helicopter, or maybe the police, but it had the same spinning parts and it was moving waaaaaay too fast for a helicopter.”

“So, uh, did it look like the flying saucers from cartoons?” Beth asked.

“Yeah, it totally did! And I checked with my brother’s girlfriend’s roommate, who worked for CBS at the time, and she said that no aircraft had clearance to be there at the time, but they’d gotten lots of calls about it,” Cynthia concluded triumphantly. There was an unimpressed pause.

Cynthia had always seemed like a reasonable person. Emotional, yes. Awkwardly enthusiastic about superhero action figures, yes. Susceptible to punctuation-less emails and animated emoticons, yes. But always reasonable. So either she was really, really bad at telling scary stories, or she was sincere and I was going to have to develop a sudden credence for UFO sightings or chalk another attempted friendship up to oh-the-weirdos-you-meet-in-this-city-itis.

A moment later, Samantha fell down and blamed her brother, and they both started crying, and there was a muddled rush to get the kids inside and to bed, to get the leftovers from dinner cleaned up, to get the ketchup off someone’s special teddy. The subject of UFOs was dropped, and Cynthia and I headed off to our separate subway stops before I could decide whether I wanted clarification, or whether Beth would appreciate a whispered remark about adding Cynthia to the (e)X-Files.

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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 Ian F. King

Five days into living in this apartment, I woke up on a Sunday around noon after a very late night, with the midday sun pouring uncomfortably over me. Across the apartment, it sounded like my new roommate was up and watching television. It seemed to get louder, and after a couple of irritating minutes passed I recognized it was the song “Car Wash.” There was no getting back to sleep, so I went to get a glass of water and a handful of aspirin. The living room was empty and the television was off. I went to the windows that look out over Fifth Avenue and saw an entire street fair I wasn’t expecting, including the DJ booth right below my window, now blaring Biggie’s “Juicy” which they would do at least two more times that day.

Since that morning, the annual Fifth Avenue Street Fair, a Park Slope tradition of bouncy castles and overpriced lemonade and sausage stands as far as the eye can see, carries mostly negative connotations for me, triggering an uncomfortable claustrophobia, a feeling like I can’t escape it. Which I can’t—even with all the windows shut, hiding in my room on the quiet side of the building, there’s no peace anywhere in my home for eight solid hours. But not every time has been bad. I spent one Fair so newly and wildly in love that I almost adopted a cat. In hindsight, the cat is probably lucky it didn’t happen, wherever it is.

This past weekend, the presence of the Fair rang in another year for me in the same apartment, and I had every intention of avoiding it, which of course didn’t happen. Everything was the same. The same food stands were right where they always were. The same Beatles cover band was playing a few blocks up. The bouncy castles might have been different, but they looked the same too, at least as far as I could tell. And the same DJ booth was right outside my apartment. However, right in front of the DJ booth was the only thing different I have seen at the street fair in the four times I’ve been. I’m pretty sure they always have a break dancing square, but, this time, one of the kids in the break dancing crew was wearing a full chicken costume.

Obviously, as soon as we saw the kid, there was no way we were going to walk away without watching him dance. Unfortunately, the crew was on “break,” and only a couple of them were doing spontaneous warm-up moves. Then, one of the overweight break-dancers (of which there were two) announced the “show” would start in three minutes. It was closer to six minutes, but once they got going, they were pretty good. The two overweight ones might have been the most impressive, but that might be because you don’t see too many overweight break-dancers. Of course, when the kid in the chicken suit finally put his chicken head mask on, the crowd tensed in anticipation. Turns out we were all waiting for the chicken to dance. The pressure was seriously on, and the crowd couldn’t fault the kid if they ended up being underwhelmed by his reserved and basic performance. The costume looked fairly restrictive, and the mask part of it was surely prohibitive as well. The life lesson he was giving us all was: you show up in a chicken suit, you get an A+ just for being there.

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by Liz Mathews

Recently I spent some time in Iowa with my family, and was in the car with my mom and sister when we happened past an ice cream shop called Evs. Only open in the warmer months, Evs features such ice cream flavors as raspberry, lemon, vanilla, chocolate, peppermint, and so on, depending on what week of the month it is. Perhaps due in some small part to its limited availability, we like Evs a lot.

Since it was a Sunday morning, and since we were about to go home and have the large meal of the day, followed by some kind of dessert, Mom swerved into the Evs parking lot and gave my sister a wad of cash.

“Get a quart of raspberry,” Mom told her.

“Do you think lemon would be good?” I asked.

“If you want to try it, go ahead and get a pint of that, too,” Mom answered.

Cash in hand, Katelyn got out of the car and I followed suit. The same man as always was standing at the ordering window when we walked through the door. My sister requested a quart of raspberry.

“Anything else?” the man asked us, though only really looked at Katelyn, who is five years younger than me but possibly slightly taller.

“Should we get a pint of lemon? That’s smaller, right?” I asked my sister, knowing damn well a pint was smaller, because it cost less on the menu board. She shrugged. The man looked at her as she folded the money between her fingers. Obviously she was in charge.

“We’ll also take a pint of lemon, please,” I forged ahead. Katelyn gave a nod.

For the first time, the Evs man turned to me. “Would you like a lid or a spoon?”

A lid or a spoon, a lid or a spoon. Neither I nor my sister answered. It seemed early for just a spoon—it was still Sunday morning. Mom was probably wondering what was taking us so long. A Lid or a Spoon? Then both our reveries cleared. “Lid. A lid, please,” I answered, and Katelyn indicated her agreement with another nod.

Katelyn paid, and we went back to the car and our mother with the ice cream: a quart of raspberry and a pint of lemon. I assume my sister gave Mom the change.

“This is kind of big to get a spoon and no lid for,” I said, looking at the pint of lemon as Mom started the car. We told her the story of the question we had just been asked. “Well, some people would only get a spoon, sure,” she suggested.

The three of us mused on who these people might be as we sped toward home. And by the time we hit our driveway, we’d decided that maybe a spoon and a lid would make some kind of sense.

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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 Liz Wyckoff

You are on the bus. But the woman in the opposite seat makes you feel as if you’ve walked into a scene from Snow White—you glance to the side, expecting singing squirrels and bunnies to jump out from behind the plastic benches. At any moment, birds might swoop down from the steel poles to tie bows in her hair.

You have never seen anything like the top she is wearing. The material puckers in spots and then falls into a series of lovely drapes and folds around her waist. It is water burbling delightedly over a stone before spilling through the air in a smooth, white sheet. It is nature interpreted through cotton.

You say something obvious, like, “I like your top.”
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by Katherine Cooper

When I meet Roosevelt, he is seventy-seven and just recently retired. He’d been assembling parts at the nearby Ford factory in Lorain, Ohio, for about fifty years. In addition to health insurance and a steady pension, Ford is now paying for Roosevelt to enroll in some classes.
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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 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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