Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Promenade
He always seemed a little lost, and she always acted like she’d just found him again. His face bore witness both to years of hard experience, and to unvarnished naievete - a look of curiosity and wonder shining out from under a reticule of faint wrinkles. His hair was boyishly cut with long sandy bangs that shaded his eyes; he wore comfortable casual pants and golf shirts, and she invariably hung tightly to his arm.
She was older than he was, and made no effort to soften the ravages time had wrought on her face: her thin lips pursed; her tired brow furrowed; and her chin pointed accusingly at the whole wide world. She wore nice luncheon dresses, with pale stockings and matching shoe-purse-belt combinations. She emanated an air of impatient frustration, clinging to his arm as they walked, in no great hurry, everywhere. I saw them downtown and on the Haight, in my ‘hood and on the bus and all kinds of places. They were always together, him with eyes downcast, watching out on her behalf for pavement cracks and sidewalk soilage, and her glaring out into traffic with ill-concealed disdain, or against golden beams of sunlight that utterly failed to penetrate her opaque visage.
They shared a hairstyle, though she wore it much less casually. They shared a brow and nose and chin, each reflecting the other’s physiognomy sufficiently to establish beyond doubt that they were related, and very closely. With every step they took during their mutual perambulations she broadcast her creation of him, her ownership. He existed to assist her. She existed because, otherwise, none of the rest of reality would have had any reason to have come into being in the first place.
I rarely saw her speak and never heard her voice when speak she did, for she spoke in hushed and withered words, uttered with scant and sour breath, whispered to her son as private jibes against a world that could never meet her expectations, much less win her approval.
Anyway, over the past five or ten years that I’d noticed them out together, that’s how it looked to me.
Recently, however, I saw him out walking, and she was not with him. Instead, he was with another woman - one much closer to his age, who didn’t look too much like he did; a woman with hair that was stylishly cut and teased by the breezes, and stockingless legs that were kissed by the untamed air. Her arm was wrapped through his, but her grip on him was companionable, not possessive. Her eyes sparkled as she glanced up at the pigeons skipping from rooftop to rooftop, and his eyes gazed, not down to the grimy pavement in search of hazards to avoid, but clear out to the horizon, taking in the view as if he’d never seen it before.
