Portable Television

That morning Judy brought a television to the bakery, one of those little tube driven units. It must have been twenty years old. Back then, portable meant eighteen pounds. We plugged it in next to the coffee maker, pulled the antenna to length, and looked into Manhattan through that black and white window—each suit jacket and blouse a gradation of exhaust, the sky a shade of overcast. Only the dust was its true color—no color—and when you couldn’t see it, you saw people choking on it and spitting it onto the blacktop.   

Judy rolled the dial from six to ten to thirteen—the networks all showing the same—as her leg bounced and her hand with the dishtowel traced the same circle of countertop where nothing had spilled.

“Leo’s cousin is volunteer FD,” she said. “He’s already on his way down there.”

Judy hired me that summer, I think, because I reminded her of her son Leo, a boy who kept washing ashore on this beach or that, whose ship it seemed knew only how to wreck. She once told me, eyes fixed on the floor, how he squatted on state land in a teepee through the three longest months of winter. I met him a couple times. All we seemed to have in common was the false belief that society had secret emergency exits hidden away somewhere. Only Leo was brave enough to go looking for them.

As Judy stared into that cloud that had once been a building, I asked her,  “Leo wasn’t—”

She grabbed my arm and squeezed the blood back towards my heart.

“No,” she said. But on a day when everyone had heard from their most beloved, she hadn’t heard from hers.

No one came in that morning—not for sandwiches, not for biscotti and the coffee to drown them in. Judy and I kept busy. We washed the floor-to-ceiling windows with a squeegee and a bucket of suds, and the voices on the television told us what we knew, what we didn’t, and what we were still waiting to hear.

Judy kept talking so we could listen to something else. She told me how she met her husband. He was alright, she said. But really, she had a thing for his car. She told me how Leo was born in their bathtub after twelve hours of hell.

And how long would this hell last, she wondered.

I asked about the cross she wore on a chain, that was always throwing light in my eyes. Yes, she believed in god, she said, but she didn’t trust him.

When Judy pried, I told her about my recently acquired English degree. How my parents were tapping their fingers, waiting to see how useful it would be. That was the first year of my life when the calendar turned September, I had nowhere to be. It was a panoramic feeling. Every door was suddenly an exit. At the time, I mistook it for freedom.

As we talked, the windows disappeared under our work, became sky and concrete, and the elms planted by the city. I watched the light at Main and Church change from red to green for no cars; the intersection became the province of crows who pecked at the tar until it yielded up some overlooked kernel of sweetness. Later when I went back for more towels, I found her sitting on the employee toilet with the door open, head in her hands.

“Don’t become a parent,” she said. “It’ll shorten your life.”

Above her were stacks and stacks of folded white towels. Enough to dampen and dust the entire store. And perhaps when that was done, we would start on the street.

Whenever the phone rang, Judy jumped. It was never an order for pick up. It was her husband or for me or the bakers, acquaintances just checking in, as if New York could stretch this far up the Hudson, backwashing into our quaint streets, up to our painted shutters—a brackish tide. As if it hadn’t already. It was a day when no one said, well, the sky isn’t falling.

A baker came out to deliver a finished cake to the case, a chocolate mousse that held a face’s reflection before one blew out the candles and away the year. He watched the TV with us and asked what we’d learned besides the temperature at which jet fuel burns. Later someone told me that day was the beginning of news all the time.

The baker asked Judy if she heard from Leo.

“No,” she said. “Though, you know, there was this one ex-girlfriend. From the Bronx. The one that got away.”

 Still, he said, the odds were against it. But what did the odds say about everything we had seen so far on the little television, the impossibilities it had pulled out of the ever-thinning air?

“Sweet girl,” Judy said. “With a heart-shaped face.”

I could see the dryness in her eyes. As if she hadn’t blinked since breakfast.

“Judy, go home,” I said softly. “I can close up.”

But she shook her head, and we washed the pastry case again with Windex on paper towels, until the glass gleamed, a French dictionary of pastries under there, the butter from Normandy, Umbrian chocolate, dates from the Saudis, all of it battered and whipped and proofed, grown in the ovens overnight by Amis, a hermit who drove down from the mountains to bake the city its breakfast. That day no one had an appetite for anything but speculation, and the pictures, those doughy pictures, horrible and transfixing. So this was hypnosis, I thought. Broken only by the ringing of the phone, by Judy explaining that he wasn’t—could not have been, no way on earth—in the city, in the swirling dust that the wind blew past Montauk out to sea, and that the tide would, again and again, bring back.