the jackson issue: Us and Them by Anne Hays

Us and Them by Anne Hays

When you stand at the second floor balcony and look directly ahead, you see a massive, four-story-high wall of individual windows, each a four-foot square of glass, held together by slim black metal wiring. Beyond the glass lies a majestic traffic circle, the center of which is lined with marble benches and a swoop of arched fountains spraying arm-thick individual lines of water, each equidistant and precisely angled. There’s the hum of traffic, and beyond, the muted green of tree leaves crowning the arced edge of Central Park. Columbus stands on his pillar pointing west—he normally towers but now he’s freakishly on eye level. Your heart pounds and you stand so still you think you can feel the wind rushing through your ears. You decide to stand here until you stop feeling dizzy. When you look down you can watch the pedestrians in the mall below walk in and out of shops with bags. Some are couples, some alone, some with families; all are well-dressed; all seem rich, European, or gay. You decide to watch until your heart stops pounding. You can’t help but invent their life stories as though it’s obvious where they’ve been and what they’re up to next. You do it out of habit. When you worked here, three years ago, in the retail store downstairs, you did this without being able to stop yourself. It’s an autistic brain tick, this ability to project your own hopes and desires onto others as quick as a math problem—2x-1x =… Some things are just obvious.

The thin, attractive man with the tucked-in rugby shirt has health insurance. His partner waters the lawn and gets along very well with the man’s mother. They have a home in Paris. They still have sex. Neither one of them moved to New York City with a girl they’re no longer in love with but are convinced they must be, because the alternative is too wearying, too destabilizing, too disrupting to his concept of himself as a feminist capable of making sustainable life choices; certainly not. Everyone walks fast down below, not to make up for something, but because they have places to go, things to buy. There’s a group of young men, perhaps from Germany, whom you understand to be cultured, and individually self-sufficient. They each have dental plans and aren’t currently suffering from vaginal infections. They still put creamer in their coffee; they like it that way and haven’t thought better of the price of the $1.50 per half-pint. They still buy six-packs of beer, even though technically speaking a certain 1.5 liter bottle of Australian red wine is cheaper per ounce. They own calculators, but those live in some bottom, untouched drawer. They still love Christmas and gather around gaily singing Mitch Miller’s best hits, which are, one has to admit, pretty good.

The first time you set foot in the Time Warner building, you were checked in by security guards. You wore your most unflattering jeans and a “painting the apartment t-shirt” which was probably sloppily too big for you, and perhaps featured a slogan. You were given a rubber mallet and a map, and sent to the enormous back stock room to build the shelving which would later hold the most astonishing arrangement of import teas, truffle-infused olive oils, almond, apple, or other flavored butters, All-Clad cookware, Shin knives, Apilco dishware arranged in ascending size, order, and— kitchen candles ordered not just by smell but by the color wheel, all arranged meticulously in tag-facing-out perfection.

You found certain things about the store beautiful. You marveled over the idea that a man who once visited Paris and became enamored of the cookware then traveled back to the states and opened one singular store on the outskirts of San Francisco which spawned the legend over decades that lead to this very store, the store you built in your worst jeans and t-shirt, with a box cutter and a mallet. This man was either smarter or dumber than you, but you did spend your junior year abroad in London—people do this sort of thing nowadays—and took many a trip on the Channel Tunnel to Paris to meet a certain desperate love interest, a girl you’ve never forgiven for breaking your heart. When he tasted French cooking he opened a corner store that turned into an empire. How amazing! And yet—

On a subway ride you witness a woman hugging her two squalling children close to her and chastising them mildly. But you’re certain she can afford her rent and doesn’t feel that she’s letting her girlfriend down. Even if the woman on the subway only moved here because her girlfriend is getting her PhD, she probably didn’t threaten to break up with her girlfriend if she had chosen the free ride and rent at Vanderbilt, her girlfriend’s #1 choice. The woman on the subway clearly doesn’t have panic attacks every night before falling asleep when her girlfriend asks, tenderly, “Are you worried you don’t have a job?” She wouldn’t pretend to not feel stress, because this woman actually has it under control. Everyone experiences short periods of doubt. Remember how David Sedaris once painted houses? You look down, keep reading your Ms Magazine and convince yourself that reading is training, for something.

When your dad calls, you explain that it’s going fantastically, and can you talk to your mom? When your mom calls, you convince yourself she’s easier to talk to, more forgiving. And anyway, you’re both women, which makes it a “women’s thing.” So when you tell her you’re scared, that you’re applying to graduate school, but you’re worried you won’t get in, she tells you you should feel worried, that this is your penance for never working hard for anything before in your life. You agree with her and hang up. You cry and think about how the ground below your window isn’t far enough to leave a dent.

Your downstairs neighbor has started screaming at night. He’s an actor, apparently a very good one, who went to graduate school to learn the craft and is now a waiter in Manhattan. You’ve already heard the story about how he gave Sallie Mae the resident fax number, which means she is always dismayed when she calls. He languishes outside your window and screams because he’s drunk and misses his girlfriend. He broke up with her, and yet—

You’ve noticed your girlfriend becoming closer with both the screaming man downstairs and another one, whom you’ve understood is gay except that actually he’s hitting on your girlfriend, and your girlfriend has explained she finds the situation “confusing.” Having been raised by republicans, nothing is confusing to you: either she does or she doesn’t find him appealing. Either she will or she won’t keep talking to him. And yet—her favorite movie is “Father of the Bride” and isn’t there some sense that the best way to rescue her would be to marry her? Wouldn’t that be romantic?

At work, you wear a green apron. You welcome people into the store. You explain the difference between anodized aluminum and stainless steel, the latter of which also contains a thick layer of aluminum, the second best conductor of heat. People seem to expect a lot from their cookware. Or, they sadistically demand a high level of chemistry knowledge from you. Either that, or you expect this from yourself. You remember the periodic table of elements. But more than that, you remember the woman who taught them to you. She left your class mid-year to journey across an uncharted mountain range with her boyfriend, whom she proposed to. She became your idol for doing this even as you suffered the loss of her. You would have loved to grow up to become a woman like that, or date her.

On the night you consider slitting your wrist, your girlfriend receives bad news from her best college friend, and then stalks downstairs without a word. You follow. She has a confessional session with that guy you thought was gay, who is apparently not gay, who spends the evening holding your girlfriend’s hand and talking about his dead mother. You drink as many beers as are in the fridge and idly watch them experience their moment of intense connection. They’re staring into each other’s eyes like actors in an epic love scene, which you find impossible to look away from. You can’t tell if you are supposed to stay the course because that’s what awesome partners do, or leave and let her hook up with him. You no longer care, except that you’re desperate to do the right thing. You can’t move. You fantasize that your arms and legs have been cleanly chopped off with a kitchen ax. Later, as you walk upstairs, you crack an unkind joke about her new love interest, and she tells you she’ll never forgive you for saying something so mean at a time like this. You’ve let her down, she says. She repeats this statement again, as though she isn’t drunk. After she’s gone to bed you sit alone in the kitchen with your back against the humming refrigerator and start slicing, very slowly, your left wrist with a Wustof pairing knife, but find that you can’t continue—the activity horrifies you. You pass out.

As you stand there, now, looking down on the lobby of the mall in the Time Warner building, you start cataloguing other people’s successes without being able to stop yourself. That woman down below, who must be a model—you’ve never seen women that tall or that thin outside your TV screen—must have health insurance, you think, before remembering that so do you. That sleekly dressed businessman probably—but something interrupts the thought. You concentrate on breathing steadily and ponder your own outfit, a brilliant turquoise silk button-down shirt with deep brown, lightly pin-striped trousers. The echoing silence of the building, accented by the hollow clacking of designer shoe heels, resonates in your chest. You relax your grip on the banister. You’ve never noticed that the light cresting over the trees in the park filters in through these windows and basks the lobby in an ethereal blue-green glow. The trees are domed by golden late-afternoon light. Now, you frequently go running in the park on the weekends. You work in an office in a brownstone on the upper west side, and you take your lunch breaks in this same park, half a mile north of here. While you eat, you watch the squirrels fight one another for territory along the branches of a large oak, which yields the most delightful speckled shade. A group of homeless men sit on the same lawn and occasionally you overhear them discussing US foreign policy, or the best way to overcome a three-day drinking binge. You love watching the squirrels fight, and you always root for the little one, the one panting and hiding just out of sight of the other on the lower side of the branch, clutching an acorn. Now, the trees through the window sway slightly as a mass, though in the light you can make out each individual leaf’s dance. You never noticed how beautiful the view is from the second floor balcony because you’ve never walked up here before and because you couldn’t see the shoppers as “us” but only as “them.”