“Why do we always glorify things that are dead?” I pose to Tara.
“Still no contact with Chris?” she guesses, no transition needed.
“Nope.” I don’t bother to sound unbothered. “I thought about stopping by his apartment, but there’s really nothing to say.”
“Sometimes silence is more powerful than words,” Tara says. “I’m sure he can hear it.”
I do like this idea, but I can’t let my mind go there or it’ll get jammed in a broken motor, the blades spinning but going nowhere. “It’s not like he was even that great in bed,” I say. “I’m just replaying it because I know it’s forbidden. That’s how my home-wrecker mind works, you know that.”
“You’re the opposite of a home-wrecker,” Tara says. “Youcreatethings, not break them. Just look at this place.” She gestures around us, to the Inn with its vivid walls, its slit windows, its calligraphyquotes from Hal that still show through the thin coat of cover-up paint. “It wouldn’t exist without you. Neither would the Redstockings.”
She’s right, of course. I found the listing to this apartment way back when, just like I was the one who built our friend group into the formidable unit that we were.
“Existed,” I correct, the suffix catching in my throat. “Past tense now.”
Leaving Tara on the couch, I head outside, my thrift-store moccasins absorbing the dampness of early spring Bushwick. I wonder who owned the moccasins before I did. Maybe a woman who ran out of an abusive marriage and traveled the world solo in a hot-air balloon. The story doesn’t soothe or inspire me. It just makes me feel like more of a failure, like I haven’t done anything in these shoes for the next person who wears them to really look up to.
I reach the Williamsburg Bridge without realizing that’s where I’m walking. Sitting down partway across it, I stay in the middle of the path so the pedestrians and cyclists have to go out of their way to avoid me. It feels like the only power I have left in this world.
Night has hit and the Manhattan skyline is a jagged wall of lights, the kind of thing that strikes you with awe until the awe has ebbed and all it does is strike you raw. Millions of individual hands have to flip these light switches, night after night after night. What’s the point, really?
When I first came to the city, everything felt big, endlessly big. I was sure that I’d expand to its size. But now the scale of this place seems to be mocking my smallness, reminding me how many other people are vying for the same exact things. Everyone wants to be the next great playwright; everyone wants to start a revolution. Except there aren’t enough slots and I wasn’t born into money or connections and I’m abysmal at social media.
I’ve always thought that I was bursting with potential, that I’d tap it someday. But now I wonder if the only things I’m bursting with are excuses. Maybe I don’t have any potential at all. Maybe I’vespent so many years trying not to try that now I can’t even try when I actually want to. I’m a flawed product of my own head games.
Maybe I just keep deluding myself that my big break will happen someday, but the only thing breaking is my own body. The body I’ve tried to wash by bathing in mud, and now the mud is dried and cakey and won’t peel off.
Scooching to the edge of the bridge, I let my feet dangle over just a little. No one stops to see if I’m okay. Taking my shoes off, I get ready to hurl them over the edge, like I did with that apology note Chris sent me so very long ago, or so it feels with how time is bending and extending.
I throw one moccasin, then the other, with as much force as I can muster; it’s not much. They fall with an elegance that hurts to watch. I can’t hear them hit the river, but I imagine I can, and I imagine they’ll float down the gray water and someone meditating along the rocky riverbank will pick them up and wonder who wore them. I picture that person looking for clues, swabbing the insoles for fingerprints, anything to try to find me. It comforts me a little until I remember it’s not real. None of it is.
I’m barefoot on my walk back to Bushwick, trying to cut my feet wide open, trying to step on every broken bottle I can find. Anything to break my skin open. But I already have so many calluses that my feet are just fine. I hardly even feel anything and that’s a good thing, I guess. It proves I’m not hurt.
Chapter 32
Tara is all out of sorts because she hasn’t landed a role in a while, so she throws herself into this theater audition. It’s a play about the first female African American pastor. Jarena Lee was her name, back in the eighteenth century.
“Jarena preached during a time called the Second Great Awakening,” Tara tells me one night when we’re ambling around Bushwick together, wearing the stringy and saucy remnants of our Tony’s pizza dinner on our chins like matching tattoos. “It sounds like a predecessor to the Redstockings’ liberation movement, doesn’t it?” Tara’s all spunky in that way she only is when a fresh audition is coming up, when there’s still hope that everything might turn out bright gold. “Apparently Jarena was a tortured soul, suicidal before she found God.”
Tara wants the Jarena part more than I’ve seen her want anything in a while, but she’s worried the casting director will be able to tell that she’s got no religious background whatsoever.
“Will you come to church with me? Just for a method acting exercise,” she says, seeing my scrunched-nose veto. “I found one in Harlem that’s the same denomination as the one Jarena converted to. I’ve got to study up and I don’t want to go alone. I’d feel so awkward.”
Usually I’d shoot it down right away, but I’m glad to feel needed by Tara and agree to tag along, just once.
“What’re you bringing a pillow for?” Tara asks that Sunday as we make to leave the Inn. It’s the earliest I’ve woken up in who knows how long.
“To sleep, obviously,” I say. “The one good thing about church is how it cures insomnia. I’ll be in REM within seconds.”
Tara shoots me a disapproving scowl, but there’s no time to argue so we get on our way, taking the L train to the 2, getting off at 125th Street. Harlem is my favorite neighborhood in Manhattan by a long shot. There’s this levity to it that you don’t find anywhere else in the borough, like the residents have seen enough heavy shit not to let the little things sag their shoulders or their spunk. It’s hardly even springtime but they’re celebrating like it’s the solstice. Barbecues and picnic blankets packed into slivers of grass that pop up between the concrete, high schoolers playing basketball on hoops without nets. No one seems to mind; they’re too busy winning to notice the holes.
Tara walks fast, hating to be late, steering me up to Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. “Everyone just calls it Mother Zion,” Tara says. “Isn’t that a perfect name?”
“It’s not bad,” I admit, lagging a few paces behind. I thought my church days were safely behind me, and my senses are rejecting the prospect of regressing now.
“Mother Zion is the oldest African American church in the city,” Tara prattles on, suddenly a tour guide. “Another name for it is the Freedom Church because it was an Underground Railroad refuge. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were actually members back in the day. How amazing is that?”
Church insanity aside, it’s good to see Tara getting more in touch with her Black roots. She got screwed over being raised by white foster parents who thought themselves very charitable for taking in a Black kid, teaching her their ways.
