Don’t Be a Stranger

Each day they were up by six-thirty. Sometimes in the night Nicky would have crawled into her bed and be a unit of heat beside her, arms flung out, mouth parted, his foot tucked under her knee, or into her elbow.

Article continues after advertisement

They would get Nicky dressed first. Then he would sit in front of his cereal or English muffin or dry granola at the kitchen table while she dressed around the corner, talking to him.

How come Dad is a poop head? Nicky would say.

Is he?

Yes.

Well, people are who they are, I guess.

Can I get some more Legos today—?

We’ll see.

Does we’ll see mean yes?

It means I haven’t decided yes or no, Ivy said.

I think it’s yes, or you would have just said no. Right, Mama?

I guess.

Why do you always guess everything?

Because I’m not always sure.

You should be sure, Nicky said. You’re a mother.

*

Then they walked to school, Nicky taking three steps for every one of hers. School was an eight-minute walk. She’d seen other parents with children boarding the bus, but Ivy thought how if they were still living in Tanzania, they’d be walking everywhere, so they walked each morning, first down the red sandstone steps of their brick building with 1885 stamped above the doorway, past the stoops and iron grating and town houses to the corner. They crossed Sixth Avenue amid speckles of rain. She would hold the umbrella over them. He would hold her hand. The trust with which he accepted that she was the person whose hand he ought to hold never ceased to amaze her. The bus whizzed by them, pulling air. On Christopher Street they walked by the store windows, boutiques with well-cut dresses on mannequins, earrings hung on a pyramid display, carefully placed expensive boots. The small shops never had a customer inside. They were spaces for people with money and refined choices. Across Seventh Avenue came smaller stores—the head shops with the glass pipes and Native American feather-dripping dream catchers, small S & M establishments whose male mannequins in captain’s hats had muscled torsos in corseted leather or gold jockstraps. Nicky hadn’t seemed to notice any of it till one morning he stopped and pointed to a small figurine of Superman carrying a lifeguard. Look, Mama, he’s saving the man.

At the brick school building they would enter one of the three blue doors and go up two flights to his classroom where Ivy would leave Nicky in the care of others.

Returning home she took a different street, past young people walking briskly to work, returning from exercising. She stopped at her coffee place with the red circle on the glass and waited in a small wooden room in a short line. Now and then the line was long, crowding the stools by the mirror and the worn beam counter salvaged from a barn. She eavesdropped on conversations, the mother instructing her child in a stroller, girlfriends discussing the night they’d each had. This was her daily contact with adults. The coffee place fit four small tables, and an uncushioned window seat. Nearly every morning the same three men and one woman were there, reading their papers, talking to each other. They took up two tables and talked across the room to each other, about the political headlines, often about what she couldn’t tell.

One morning she overheard two women sitting facing each other, hands around paper coffee cups.

One said, She didn’t want to believe he was a murderer.

The other: She doesn’t think he did it?

Well, she does now. He’s serving life.

On the wall were black-and-white photographs of coffee fields and canvas bags which looked as if they’d scaled Everest. A vintage pastry display held coiled croissants, dark muffins with nuts, scones with red currants and green donuts the color of moss. Ivy glanced out the windows to the people passing. A flock of strollers was pulling into the day care next door. A woman’s hair billowed like a spinnaker. Ivy often found herself looking out windows, as if answers might be passing by and she didn’t want to miss them.

Out the creaking door, she carried her lidded cup of latte past the children being herded into the day care, past the fire station. She could still see the wave of flowers spilling across the sidewalk years ago in front of the station where none of the firemen responding to the call on September 11 had come back. It was a memory like no other one, historic, wide and shared with nearly everyone.

She had the day to work. She had held off applying for a teaching job till the following fall. She wanted to work, but dared not teach without more solid coverage for Nicky. When he was a little older, she’d be able to juggle that more easily. If she had to work and was not available to him, who would take over? No one. So for now she would make do with the articles, ones she pitched or was asked to do, while continuing to work on her next book.

*

She spent the day alone. While Nicky was in school, her concern for him was suspended slightly; that is, she didn’t have to be one hundred percent alert. Theoretically this was the moment allowing her the time to write. But it was not always easy to focus; it was not easy always to believe it worthwhile. When engaged in her work, she was absorbed and everything else around her disappeared. When she was not engaged, a quiet resentment rose up like floodwater in a basement, that her life was not more productive, not more worthwhile, not more intense. The feeling was mortifying and she swatted it down internally. Once when she’d started to describe the dissatisfaction to a sympathetic friend she immediately stopped herself. Out loud, she heard how spoiled it sounded. Look how lucky she was for God’s sake.

She sat down at the end of the kitchen table farthest from the sink and the stove, as if to distance herself from the domestic. She once had a separate room to work in—the narrow quiet back room—but that was Nicky’s bedroom now. She also once had the feeling she could write all day, words spilling in a waterfall, both foamy and clear, pouring into a green pool, out of her pen onto the paper. The only thing then which kept her from writing constantly was the nervous recognition that she’d miss the things other people were doing and become even more separated from life than she already felt herself to be. To stay so much in the world of writing she would not learn about the world, and she had a lot to learn. How could she write without learning how to live. The netherworld of writing offered a suspension in reverie, but she was just as interested in engaging, watching people in action, seeing new places, studying whatever was in front of her. She’d learned that if she didn’t make the effort to engage with that world, she’d lose her connection to it, lose her ability to be with the people in it and to love them, and possibly vanish in a mist.

*

The day after the dinner with Ansel Fleming she found her attention being drawn away from the table in front of her and back out into the world. She typed his name into the search space.

She had not gone onto this new-to-her site Twitter. Her one visit to Facebook had been instigated by an encouraging friend who offered to set up an account for her. She watched over his shoulder, when within seconds of registering, a message came, a hello from a man she’d met once at a wedding—a person she barely knew!—causing strong heart palpitations. It was as if she had bored a hole out into the world, a tunnel which might pour poison back through it. Panicked and ambushed, she’d immediately canceled the account.

She understood about YouTube, because that was like a miniature movie theatre, and movies did not frighten her, movies she loved.

In these eerie places she was able to find out more about this Ansel Fleming. The weirdness of it was exciting and maybe a little discouraging. It was a cheat, to engage with a person’s information without them having to be there. But there he was, at the end of her fingertips, singing on YouTube. She could watch and listen to him speak more than he had during the evening she’d spent with him. She could listen to him talk about prison, about the kindness of people he worked with. He used the whole name of the boarding school where he’d gone, Adams Emerson Academy, which Ivy had always heard referred to as simply Adams.

There was a clip from nearly two years ago, just after he’d been released, of him performing outside. His hair was pulled back in its usual tangle but she could see it was much shorter. A dark T-shirt was snug around his upper arms holding a guitar; he was sitting on a chair on a platform at the edge of a park. A loose crowd stood in front, wind blew across the microphone, Ansel looked uncertain. He played a lovely song, tentative. Each time she heard his songs she liked them more. She noticed his mouth slanted slightly to the side as he sang. Could she trust that mouth? There was something in it both arrogant and sincere, something stubborn and vulnerable. She couldn’t read him, but he didn’t seem to be a lying sort of person—much of what he’d said to her so far had been almost startlingly sincere. In a black-and-white clip he sang at a club, the frame close on him with a black background and a guitar tucked under a round shoulder. This time his singing seemed to be focused inward, not out, giving it an extra power. After short clattering applause, he made a self-deprecating comment and laughed with a glowing expression.

That Monday Ivy arrived early for Nicky’s 2:50 P.M. school pickup. Unusual. Usually she arrived on time, or a minute late, to avoid standing around with the parents in the garagelike room where the third graders were released. You were not to go upstairs to the classroom for pickup. The dark green painted room doubled as a gym, so the brick pillars were wrapped in wrestlers’ padding. To Ivy’s distress, this public school did not have any sports programs, another frustration that Nicky could not run endlessly around as children needed to do. The people waiting for the children were either family members or minders. Young babysitters sat propped against the wall, while older more maternal minders, nearly always with brown or tan skin, chatted with each other, or stood apart. The minders did not have the same look of expectation you saw on the family members’ faces. Mostly family members were mothers, but there were a few fathers, this neighborhood having a bohemian and international streak. Some waiting were young grandmothers, some were older grandmothers. Soon the children would burst out of the stairwell door, having come slowly down—one step at a time—from the third floor, a stream of small people dragging coats and backpacks spreading out into the room like an alarmed school of fish. In the first year here after the split, Nicky had met his mother’s arrival with a low brow and angry stony eyes. Ivy had tried to ignore it and be chipper. But Nicky was fuming. Where was his father? Far away. Sometimes she would address his mood. Is something bothering you, my angel? Immediate response: Yes, you.

Often after pickup they would go to the park. Often his classmates were there too, swinging on the monkey bars. Nicky would wear himself out, but not, Ivy noted, from running on green grass under green trees, but by jumping around on rubber and concrete. The walk home afterward, if he’d gotten too tired, could be harrowing. Nicky would throw himself down in a fit of rage and refuse to move, legs stiff and resolute as a sit-down striker. It was these moments when Ivy would feel as if her head was being microwaved, so keenly was she aware of both their misery, and she had to scour herself for scraps of patience. She wanted to sit on the ground and cry, too. Then a strange paralysis took over and she’d be overcome with waves of homesickness. People passed by ignoring them till a woman—it was always a woman—would smile knowingly, amused at the boy scissor kicking his heels on the gum-blotched sidewalk. Ivy wanted to scream it was not funny. The fact she was unable to be amused or at least see the stupidity of letting it undo her only added to the frustration and fury. She was incompetent and weak and at the end of her rope; she was letting down her son; she was in hell. The doors opened and the children burst out. Seeing her child after nearly six hours away from him still gave her an emotional charge. Today Nicky came running to her, his mouth open in a smile. He practically threw her his backpack, confident she’d take it. We’re going to the park, he said, and ran past her. Oscar and I have a contest with Izzy! Her nerves relaxed; he was happy and engaged. The relief, the blessed relief.

She got an email.

Dear Ms. Cooper,

I was passing through your neighborhood yesterday and looked around for diminutive blondes but didn’t see you. I hope you are well. You have hosted me at your place so maybe you would allow me to do the same.

AF

Dear Mr. Fleming,

That would be very nice. I am free next week after Monday so let me know what night would be good. We could go out and get a bite or maybe see a movie? I look forward to hearing from you.

Ivy

__________________________________

From Don’t Be a Stranger by Susan Minot. Used with permission of the publisher, Knopg. Copyright © 2024 Susan Minot.