Visible City (31 page)

Nina closed the bedroom door and went into the living room where all the lights were off. She walked to the window, the city lit before her under the full moon. In windows above them and below, she saw the dazzling, dizzying array. All these people, all these lives. In the window one down and two across, Leon sits alone on the couch. Then he is gone, and Claudia sits in the same spot by herself. Loneliness emanates from that window, but then, it had always been that way.

Nearby in a suburb, on a block, in a house, Wendy has driven out to take a look at what will soon be her home. Alone in the car, alone in the dark, she is bothered by the silence. Except for the all-night Super Stop & Shop, the stores have been closed for hours. Within a year, she was told, all this will seem normal. In two, it will feel like home. She will send back happy dispatches from a land where the grocery stores are huge and the parking is plentiful. In the meantime, she gets out of the car and walks across the backyard to the adjacent soccer field of the nearby elementary school. There are no hockey rinks, not this close to her house, but even in the dark she can see the white goalposts and the nets rustling in the air, and then, in the light of the moon, something else.

A caravan of silver Honda Odysseys pulls up at the field. From a distance, they look identical to those that exist everywhere, but as they approach, Wendy sees that each of them is emblazoned with a racecar’s streaks of fire. From the drivers’ seats the soccer moms emerge. They come from work and from home, from PTA meetings and board meetings. They put down their purses and briefcases, they pin up their hair, pull out their cleats. While the kids sleep and the husbands clean, while the moon and the headlights of their cars illuminate the night, they run. For this one hour it doesn’t matter that the kids’ homework has been left undone, that rotting under the car seats are the remnants of month-old chicken nuggets, that rotting in the kids’ unbrushed teeth are the remnants of month-old gummy bears. For this one hour, there are no rules, no worries, no constraints. They run until their feet lift from the ground, run until they become the wild, unfettered girls they once were, the fearless, confident women they’d always believed they would become. They run until the stroke of midnight, when from somewhere far away, a whistle that sounds suspiciously like the cry of a child blows. Out of breath yet surprisingly awake, the sweaty, elated moms throw their arms around one another as they meet for a huddle and congratulate each other on a game nicely played, a job well done.

In a rent-controlled apartment on Broadway, an elderly husband sits beside his elderly wife, clutching her hand. Having screamed at each other in public all day, it’s easier now to sit in silence. Behind them, the back wall of their living room is yellowed and bulging. The super has promised to plaster and paint, but now it’s too late, because soon they will have to move out of this apartment in which they’ve lived for over thirty years. After a lifetime of renting, their red brick building is being torn down to make way for the young and rich. They have nowhere to go. Instead of making a decision, they fight. He thinks they should refuse to leave; she worries they will be put out on the street. If they were younger, he says, he’d buy a sledgehammer and hack through the wall, past the pipes and the wiring. Were he to do so, he’d find, sandwiched between his building and the one next door, a window unlike any they had ever seen, one that would make them rise from the couch and gape in awe.

Underneath twisted piles of metal, inside storms of dust, a woman dressed in shades of sapphire, topaz, and garnet is still trying to gain entry to the apartment in which she once lived. Several times each day, she’d circled past all the buildings that could be hers, but for reasons she still doesn’t understand, the doormen always refused to admit her. If she stood for more than a minute, trying to locate the window that used to be hers, she was told that it was time to move along. But now she doesn’t have to worry about the eyes that stare at her, people everywhere glancing maliciously at her or feigning smiles to hide their derision. Now she doesn’t have to yell at those who look, because now no one can see her. She is set free from the eyes that create pinpricks of pain on her skin.

As her body ceases to belong to her, in her mind at last she returns to the apartment that was once hers and at last she sees the window. The colors are even brighter than she’d remembered, the light more abundant. The garlands of flowers and the children’s faces come to life, opening her eyes to the shifting, shimmering world that lived inside. If Myra ever talked about the window, people treated her as though she were crazy. They didn’t believe that she could descend from a family that was once considered the city’s royalty. They didn’t believe that anything so beautiful could be real. They didn’t believe that anything unseen could so long survive. But she had always known that the window existed. She never doubted what she knew to be true, not when she had seen the dazzling colors with her own eyes.

In the window one down and two across, a lone figure is now standing in the light, waving to her. Nina recognizes the bright smile, the long, curly hair. The gestures grow more insistent: she points at Nina, then at the sky. Instead of hiding, Nina reaches over to a nearby lamp and switches it on. Her corner of the room is flooded with light.

In an instant, Nina is out the front door, taking flight in her pajamas. There is no time for shoes. Outside on the street, Emma is standing.

“The moon,” Nina said.

“You remembered,” Emma said.

“Should I get the kids?” Nina asked.

“No,” Emma said. “Just us.”

The two of them take off, in step with each other, bare feet slapping against the pavement. Perhaps the kids are waking up, perhaps Jeremy is looking for her, calling her name. She doesn’t stop. Along the way, they pass a man and woman walking their dogs. The dogs are playfully barking; the couple hold hands. Along the way, they pass lampposts and bus stops bedecked with glimmering signs, colored photos of jeweled windows.

Inside the park, they run over the branches and the stones, onto the grass. The full moon lights the way. She has never been alone in the park at night, but there is no fear, not tonight. It’s a cool night, a reminder of winter that’s on its way. They run deeper into the park, to the Central Park Zoo, which is closed and locked, but Emma knows the way in. Nina follows her to the spot where the fence is slightly lower, and she grabs hold of the top and hoists herself up. Nina tries, and she struggles and falls. She tries again, and this time, she swings one leg over, then a second, until she is perched on top.

“Do you want to turn back?” Emma asks when she sees her trepidation, but Nina shakes her head no. There is no way but forward. She leaps down and is inside.

“It’s just like you said,” Nina says.

“It’s even better than I remembered,” says Emma.

The animals are awake. The bars of the cages have ceased to exist—those were mere illusion, present only for those who believed they were there. At night the animals know better. They are sitting on benches, swinging in trees. The colors of their fur have brightened. Horns, teeth, tusks, and claws have grown longer, stronger, sharper. The animals cry out, they caw roar squawk growl. Every animal is aflutter, afoot. Everywhere, the whoosh of wings, the pounding of hooves.

Emma runs from one end of the zoo to the other, her arms outstretched as if she too can take flight. Then she extends her arms, one at each side, and she spins. Her hair is set loose and spins around her, her mane, her feathers, her wings. Nina joins her, her hair loose too and flapping against her face, the two of them spinning around.

Spin past the internal assault of should and could; spin past all you were supposed to do, to be. All these efforts to hide inside other people, to tuck away what she did not want to feel, to know. There was no turning back from what she had done, from who she had become. For how long could she hold this inside her? Could Jeremy widen the space inside his mind where she lived; could he turn himself into new shapes as well, and could there be ways, like an ever-turning kaleidoscope, to find those shifting points of intersection?

And if not, then what? She didn’t yet know. She would not turn back in fear, not desperately reshape herself to fit into old, tightly wedged spaces. She had never thought of herself as someone who would do anything other than what was expected of her, yet there was never really an arrival at any fixed point. All that wishing for certainty, all that belief in the clear path always visible up ahead. Here she was with life before her unknown, a reluctant yet inevitable traveler on the path still uncharted.

No longer spinning, Nina regains her balance and steadies herself. She turns around to look for Emma, but she has gone home ahead of her, leaving her to take in this vision alone. She is the only human in a dark world lit with eyes. But as soon as she leans her head back and looks, she sees that the entire city has become visible. Shades are pulled open. Every window is lit. People inside wander from one window to another. They cut holes through their walls and connect this living room with that bedroom. They extend hallways to create passages from one building to another. But not even that is enough. The windows are flung open and people shimmy on ropes, swing acrobatically down to the street. Doors everywhere are open. Neighbors, on every street, on every block, spill out of their buildings, in masses, in hordes, all of them like she is, loose on the streets. They take over the sidewalks, stop all the cars, fill all the parks. On a night like this, no one can bear to be inside.

I would like to thank the Massachusetts Cultural Council for their support and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute for the gift of time and space. I am enormously grateful to Julie Barer, my agent, and to Lauren Wein, my editor, for their extraordinary insight, intelligence, and vision. Finally, I am deeply appreciative of my family and friends who have sustained me with their love, support, and enduring belief in this book.

T
OVA
M
IRVIS
is the author of
The Outside World
and
The Ladies Auxiliary,
a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in various anthologies and newspapers, and her fiction has been broadcast on National Public Radio. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fiction Fellowship and lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her three children.