“T’ai chi,” Susan says.
“I didn’t know people really did that.”
“They all do it,” Susan says, glaring at me. “Even I can do it.” She takes a couple of poses, the first like a vulture about to attack, her fingers suddenly talons, and then she is a dragon, hissing.
When Susan and I met there was a gap between us, a neutral space. I saw it as an acknowledgment of the unbridgeable, not just male and female, but unfamiliar worlds—we couldn’t pretend to understand each other.
I look back out the window. Kate is there now, standing next to Mrs. Ha, doing her kung fu imitation chop-chops. Kate punches the air, she kicks. She has nothing on under her dress.
“Kate needs underpants,” I tell Susan, who runs, horrified, down the stairs, shooing the two of them into the backyard. For a moment the boom box is alone on the grass—Jimi Hendrix wailing “And the wind cries Mary,” at 8:28 A.M.
I see Sherika, the nanny, coming up the sidewalk. Sherika takes the train from Queens every morning. “I could never live here,” she told us the day we moved in. “I have to be around people.” Sherika is a single ebony stick almost six feet tall. She moves like a gazelle, like she is gliding toward the house. In Uganda, where she grew up, her family is part of the royal family—she may even be a princess.
I go downstairs and open the door for her. My top half is dressed in shirt and tie, my bottom half still pajamaed.
“How are you doing this morning?” she asks, her intonation so melodious, each word so evenly enunciated that just the sound of her voice is a comfort.
“I’m fine, and you?”
“Good. Very good,” she says. “Where are my ladies?”
“In the backyard, warming up.” I am still standing in the hall. “What does the name Sherika mean?” I’m thinking it’s something tribal, something mystical. I picture a tall bird with thin legs and an unusual sound.
“I have no idea,” she says. “It’s just what my auntie in Brooklyn calls me. My true name is Christine.” She smiles. “Today, I am going to take my ladies to the library and then maybe I’ll take my ladies out to lunch.”
I find my wallet on the table and hand Christine forty dollars. “Take them to lunch,” I say. “That would be nice.”
“Thank you,” she says, putting the money in her pocket.
Susan and I walk ourselves to the train, leaving the car for Sherika-Christine.
“Fall is here, clocks go back tomorrow, we can rake leaves this weekend,” I say as we head down the sidewalk. It is my fantasy to spend Saturday in the yard, raking. “We have to give it a year.”
“And then what—put her in a home?”
“I’m talking about the house—we have to give ourselves a year to get used to the house.” There is a pause, a giant black crow takes flight in front of us. “We need shades in the bedroom, the upstairs bathroom needs to be regrouted, it’s all starting to annoy me.”
“It can’t be perfect.”
“Why not?”
Sitting next to Susan on the train, I feel like I’m a foreigner, not just a person from another country but a person from another planet, a person without customs, ways of being, a person who has blank spots rather than bad habits. I am thinking about Susan, about what it means to be married to someone I know nothing about.
“It’s exhausting,” I say, “all this back and forth.”
“It’s eighteen minutes longer than coming down from 106th Street.”
“It feels farther.”
“It is farther,” she says, “but you’re moving faster.” She turns the page.
“Do you ever wonder what I’m thinking?”
“I know what you’re thinking, you confess every thought.”
“Not every thought.”
“Ninety-nine percent,” she says.
“Does that bother you?”
“No,” she says. “Everything is not so important, everything is not earth-shattering, despite what you think.”
I am silenced.
We arrive at Grand Central. Susan puts her book in her bag and is off the train. “Call me,” I say. Every morning when we separate there is a moment when I think I will never see her again. She disappears into the crowd, and I think that’s it, it’s over, that’s all there was.
Twenty minutes later, I call her at the office—“Just making sure you got there OK.”
“I’m here,” she says.
“I want something,” I confess.
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “More. I want more of something.”