“Look,” Pam says, pointing to a marquee a block away. “There’s the theater.”
“Thank God,” Andie replies. “If I had known we were going to do this much walking, I would have worn different shoes.”
I thought I’d read in the Weekend section of theTimesthat there was a 2:45 showing, but I was wrong. The next one is at 3:15. Pam bemoans the seven-dollar ticket cost, and Margaret, ever sensible, says to compare it to the price of a Broadway ticket (at least twenty dollars!) so it won’t seem like so much.
“Do we really have to do this?” Andie asks.
“Just consider it a stop on the way to Chinatown,” Noah tells her.
We stand out on the sidewalk, waiting for the earlier showing to get out. Andie refuses to stand with the rest of us because we’re on top of a subway grate.
“I’m scared of those things,” she explains from a few feet away. “I always think I’m going to fall right through. It happened in New Haven, you know—my sister told me about it. I thanked her a lot for that one. Now I get soaware—not just about falling through but also that something could drop out of my bag, or my contact lens could pop out. I mean, I get that the subways need ventilation. But do we really have to stand on top of it?” She sighs and glares at the theater. “When do you think they’ll let us in?”
“Soon,” Pam answers. “And, yeah, the city is full of things to be afraid of. You’d better not stand too close to that building ... a safe might come falling down.”
“Don’tmake fun of me. You’re the one who’s afraid of heights.”
“That’s a valid fear.”
“Yeah, right.” Andie turns to Noah and Margaret. “One night I took her to the roof of our dorm, our silly three-story-high roof—”
“It’s four stories high.”
“Whatever. So anyway ... she refuses to look over the edge. She won’t even go near it. So I push her a little, joking, and she starts screaming like it’s aFriday the 13thmovie and Jason’s just shown up.”
“I think I remember hearing that,” Margaret says.
Andie loves getting a chime-in. “Of course you heard it—everyoneheard it!”
“She almost pushed me over the edge!” Pam says. “She’s making it sound less scary than it was.”
“It wasn’t even close to scary.”
Pam turns to Noah, as if he’s presiding over this trial. “You would have been scared too.”
And I appreciate that he says, “Probably.”
This only revs up Andie more, so before she can say something else, I jump in to change the subject.
“What areyouafraid of, Noah?” I ask.
He looks at me, then says, “I don’t know.”
Andie snorts. “You have to do better than that.”
He is still looking at me. I can see an answer fall into place. I might not know Noah, but I can at least read him a little.
“It’s so funny,” he says. “I used to be scared of windows. I just couldn’t figure it out—how could you trust something that broke so easily? God—this goes back to when my parents were together—we had this seventh-story apartment, with these really big windows. This is at least ten years ago. I wouldn’t go near them. Not to water the plants, not to see what was going on when there was honking and yelling on the street. My mom used to coax me, telling me it was alright, pointing outthat she—who was an adult, who was much bigger than me—could touch the glass and even lean on it without anything bad happening. My dad had less patience, especially as I got older. He was the one who put bug repellent on my thumb so I’d stop sucking it. He told me it was babyish to avoid the window. One day—it’s so strange that I can remember this. One day I was rolling my Matchbox cars—we didn’t have a rug, so the floor was perfect for racing. One of the cars went right against the window—it must have flown off the coffee table or something. And I was so amazed when the window didn’t shatter. It set things straight for me, although I will confess that I still avoid glass elevators. And where my mom and I live now, there are bars on the bottoms of the windows. Very New York City. But you have to love it ...”
As he talks, Noah starts to grin, a grin to accompany his gestures, which include the Matchbox car’s trajectory and a grabbing of the window bars. All these gestures, including the grin ... I think I am more aware of them than he is.
“Look,” Andie says. “Time to go in.”
She waits until after we’re off the grate to join us. I turn to Noah and say, “You were a thumbsucker? I was a thumbsucker too.”
“We need a secret handshake then. Wait—I know!” Then he sticks his thumb in his mouth, pulls it out, and offers it to me for a shake. I accept the challenge, stick my thumb in my mouth, take it out, and our thumbs curve into each other. It’s strangely satisfying to share something so bizarre. We both laugh, and Andie and Pam say at the same time, “Boys are gross!”
We get in the line and file forward, as if the ticket taker is a military inspector. Pam has the tickets, so she goes first. Noah turns from me to head in, and Margaret comes to myside, nudging me forward when I stop to dry off my thumb on my pants.
