I’m discussing my recent relocation with my personal trainer. I’m getting kind of tired of all the moving I say. I don’t know what drives me to do it every two to three years. Keep your shoulders low he says. Why’d you want to know what drives you if you know you’re tired of it. Stop doing it. I like him for his practical approach to things. And for other reasons, but they are not what this is about. It’s stronger than me I go on. If I know what causes the restlessness I may be able to do something about it. I’ve been taking this end-of-pipe all this time – not curing it at the source. It’s exhausting and it’s expensive. You’ve been training with me all this time he says. Yeah, three years going on four I say. I outline the exercise room with a wave of my arm. But this is not the place where I come home to, have my meals, sleep. It’s not like I like the new place better. I’m just relieved to have escaped the old one. Wow he says. Escaped. Unpack that. He cuts the workout playlist to switch to my favorite Tabata track. We’re doing a circuit he says. Ropes, slam. SIT. Weighted squats. 45 seconds each. Three rounds. He lays out the battling ropes, picks the dumbbells (15 lbs). I take the ropes, swaying my hips in anticipation. 5…4…3-2-1 GO!
This time it’s a rental. The unfurnished apartment is upscale. The apartment’s basement has the bedrooms, two bathrooms, a study, storage rooms. The ceiling height of the basement rooms varies between 10 and 13 feet. The bedrooms have skylights near the ceiling, allowing a partial, slanted view of higher-up parts of surrounding buildings and the sky. Like a prison. There’s no direct exit to the street from the basement. There’s just the narrow and steep-angled staircase to the main floor. A classic fire trap. The main floor features an anteroom, the sitting room and a spacious kitchen. A sliding door at the far end gives access to a sundeck. It has a ladder that you can step down from onto a boat – if you have a boat moored in the canal below, which I don’t. The apartment is in the part of town they call Little New York. It’s near the docks, part of repurposed and fully modernized former warehouses. The best restaurants are here. It’s a 12-month lease. That gives me about a year to buy into this neighborhood. As it is, I don’t care what’s going on outside. Kids setting off illegal fireworks. I let them. They could stab one of my own sex to death outside the token front yard of the apartment for all I’d care. I’m not invested. It would need a different kind of violence.
The other day, driving home from the office, I got caught in a snow blizzard just one mile from my destination. At 25 mph my brand-new EV skidded off the road, hitting the curb with the front wheel. It’s a heavy machine, the batteries making for a ton of bricks. The suspension and steering system had self-destructed. I called the insurance person I had on record and two hours later the car was loaded onto a flatbed tow truck and taken in for repair. I instructed HR to free up a car from the company fleet pool and the next day I made my way to the office using public transportation to pick it up.
Getting on the bus I had asked the driver if he would make a stop at the train station where I had to catch a train to the city where my office was. Sure he said ‘cause the sun’s shining. It wasn’t. It hadn’t in days. There was snow everywhere and a leaden sky seemed slated to unload more of the stuff. Was he fucking with me (because I was immaterial to him and he was in no danger of risking his job talking nonsense) or flirting (because he liked the way the beanie I was wearing softened my facial features)? But will you I asked. Oh yes he said. When the bus had arrived at the station I got off at the far end. I waved without looking if the driver was watching me in the oversized rear-view mirror. Contrary to what I had feared, the train station offered an uncomplicated route to the elevated platform where I needed to board. With 20 minutes to spare and the public transportation stress having dissipated, I entered a Starbucks in the main hall and ordered a latte. The girl asked for the name to write on the cup in marker. Nom’s fine I said. N-O-M. Gotcha the girl said. Sipping from the cup I climbed the stairs to the platform. A train was waiting. I knew it wasn’t mine – the next one would be mine. Regardless, to prolong the sense of contentment with having interacted personably with the bus driver (or so I assumed) and the Starbucks girl, I asked a railway person if this was the train to such and so. The next one he said, touching his cap in respect.
I damaged my car in an accident I tell my trainer when we have stopped. It’s a brand new car, three weeks old. I came in a loaner, the black SUV, with the blinded rear windows. I point at the car parked across the street. Wow he says. I’m not sure if he wows the accident or the gangster whip. I wasn’t hurt I say. Do you have a back-to-back? I don’t he says and since he owns the gym we move to a room where we have sex.
I married in my early twenties. My husband passed seventeen years ago, two years into our matrimony. Moved within a year of his decease because I couldn’t afford the place on a single pay check, even if the check was already sizeable then. Then again after little over two years on account of an intolerable neighborhood. Three years later to a grander house with a portico and Tuscan-style half-columns, because I had joined the equity, which is where my husband was at in a different firm when he died of an alcohol addiction that I didn’t know had destroyed most of his liver capacity even before we got married. That house I gave up after another three years thinking I’d be happier in a small but luxury apartment that I could wrap myself in like a cozy garment. But that was just a romantic infatuation and less than two years later I was selling. Convinced it would go in a matter of weeks, I bought a large house in the country and moved some furniture to it. There turned out to be no traffic on the apartment for almost a year. During that year, following costly renovation works, never having spent a single night in it, I had put the country house on the market (where it still is) because I had decided I prefer town too much. When the apartment had finally found a buyer – an unkempt Russian expat I suspected of money laundering because after I had angrily rejected his first offer and raised the price by 20 percent he returned two days later to buy the apartment at the new asking price – I started the lease in Little New York. I’m four weeks in as I write these notes. I’ve lost millions in the housing market. Fine. As money goes, I don’t want it to be more all the time, I just want it to be enough.
The next day, Sunday, I walk to the nearby waterfront. It’s very cold. There’s no one here, on the reconstructed quay right out in front of the most iconic and expensive residential buildings of Little New York, if not the city, where I imagine buying a rooftop apartment in, oh, let’s say, a year’s time from now. There is no barrier between the quayside and the icy water less than three feet below. I find myself staring into the cold emptiness. Then I hear a voice behind me very close closer than it ought to be that I can’t tell is a man’s or a woman’s saying you’re not going to jump in are you and I turn around groping blindly for them and then my arms lock around a body like a steel trap and completing my turn with a force I didn’t know was in me I throw it in the ice cold substance. Of course not I mutter under my breath but you sure as hell might’ve pushed me. And neither looking nor listening I walk back to the rented apartment.
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Hard Nosed Women 