“Yeah. And what else?”
“‘Stay where you’re happy.’”
“Right. The city ever becomes the place where you’re happy? Go there. But as long as this is it? Stay home. Nothing wrong with staying home.”
Yes. She has told herself this every day of her adult life, to console herself for being a grown woman who still lives at home with her parents. It’s a lie. She’s lonely and ashamed and she hasn’t given up hope for a life of excitement and sophistication, somewhere and sometime. But this is the sort of lie that she needs, especially in the wake of her disastrous attempt to board the ferry.
“Yeah. Thanks, Daddy.”
She knows he’s smiling. “Tell your mom I’m gonna be home late. An arrest means paperwork. These fucking people.” He sighs as if the Puerto Rican man sat around New Aging while brown just to make him late for dinner, and hangs up.
Aislyn puts her phone away, then finally pulls her purse back up to her shoulder to compose herself—or she tries to. The strange woman is still holding Aislyn’s shoulder, although she’s frowning a little, as if wondering how her hand got there. Aislyn looks at the woman’s hand, too. “Uh, is something the matter?”
“What? Oh.” The woman finally removes her hand and smiles. It’s a little strained. “Everything’s fine. I’m just going to have to do this the hard way, apparently.” Then her smile broadens, more genuine. “But I know I’m right about you.”
For the first time, Aislyn begins to feel uneasy. The woman doesn’t look scary, but there’s something about her that’s a little off. “Right about what?”
“Well, for one thing, I haven’t been able to claim you as my own.” The woman folds her arms and turns to face away from the ferry station, toward the cluster of tall office buildings and high-rise apartments that dominate this side of the island. “You have the right inclination, but even though the city just rebirthed itself this morning, you’re already closely enough bound with the essence of this place to keep me from pulling you in. You even smell like a city now, and not an ordinary human being.” She shrugs. Aislyn puzzles over all of this, then surreptitiously angles her head to sniff at her pits.
The woman has begun murmuring to herself as she stares at the paltry skyline of St. George. “Haven’t had this much trouble since London. Usually it’s easier to isolate the vectors. City morphology defies predictability, of course, but there are epigenetic manifestations, metabolic fluxes that should follow through in a perceptible way. It’s this city, though.” She shakes her head, scowling. “Too many New Yorkers are New York. Its acculturation quotient is dangerously high.”
Abruptly the woman’s head swivels to face Aislyn. (That’s what it looks like, a swivel. As if the woman’s neck muscles are motors or pulleys or something else mechanical.) She looks thoughtful. “Do you know who you are?”
“Uh, I don’t, uh…” Aislyn looks around again. Which bus platform was it? There are so many, and they all look alike. Maybe she should just pick one and start walking toward it. Because something about this woman has made Aislyn think she needs an exit strategy. “Sorry, but I don’t think…”
There is a moment—in retrospect she will recall this with great clarity—when Aislyn feels the woman’s attention shift. Before now, the woman in the white outfit has been… not quite present. Underneath her comforting smiles, there has been a distance, and a… going-through-the-motions-ness, if that is a thing? All at once, however, the woman becomes here; she becomes more. Now she looms. She’s only a few inches taller than Aislyn, but within those inches, she towers. She smiles, and buried in the woman’s shadow, Aislyn feels small and forgotten and terribly, hopelessly alone.
But in almost the same moment, that other feeling rises within her. It’s the feeling that hit her this morning, while she was in the middle of washing the dishes from breakfast and thinking about Scotswoman’s Secret, the romance novel she’d been reading the night before. She had been fantasizing a little, maybe, about being a proud, strong-willed noblewoman from the Highlands who decides to start discreetly sleeping with the handsome foreign stable hand, who isn’t Black but whose penis nearly is, except for the tip when it gets excited (that part is pink, and Aislyn isn’t sure whether it’s creative license on the author’s part or something that’s actually possible).
Then, while scrubbing crusted eggs off a pan and visualizing the previous chapter’s sex scene, Aislyn began to hear shouting in her mind. These were crude, vulgar, angry shouts—shouts so suffused with rage that had she heard them with her ears, she would never have been able to make out the words. Incoherent anger. In her mind, though, she had not only heard the words, but known them, and felt them. She’d wanted to fight, as the speaker of those words was fighting, somewhere. Somehow she’d known that. The vicarious aggression had suffused her with a rage so terrible, so overwhelming, that she had to go to her room and destroy a pillow. That wasn’t like her, not at all. She never fought back. Yet this morning she had ripped that pillow to shreds, then risen from foamy carnage filled with a powerful compulsion to go to the city. So powerful had she felt in the wake of that rage that for the first time in years, she actually tried it.
Only to fail. Again.
Now, however, Aislyn feels that strange angry strength stirring inside her again. Who is this woman to stand over her so? She doesn’t belong here, Aislyn knows. Aislyn might be afraid of the city, but SI is her island, and she will not be loomed over on her home ground.
But before Aislyn can open her mouth to stammer out some devastating variant of Please leave before I call the police, the Woman in White leans down to grin into her face.
“You are Staten Island,” she says.
Aislyn starts. It isn’t the words that surprise her, but the fact that someone else has said them. The woman laughs softly, eyes flicking back and forth over Aislyn’s face as if drinking in her shock. The woman continues: “The forgotten one, and the despised one when they bother to remember. The borough no one, including its own, thinks of as ‘real’ New York. And yet here you are! Somehow, despite their neglect and contempt, you’ve developed enough distinctiveness of culture to survive rebirth. And this morning, you heard the rest of the city calling out to you. Didn’t you?”
Aislyn takes a step back. Just for personal space reasons. “I didn’t—” But she did. She did. She heard the city’s raw, defiant demand, and some part of her tried to respond to it. That’s how she ended up at the ferry station. She trails off midsentence because she doesn’t actually need to say the words. The Woman in White knows Aislyn as surely as Aislyn knows her island.
“Oh, you poor thing,” the Woman says, her expression shifting from avid to tender so quickly that Aislyn’s anger vanishes. Now all she feels is a rapidly growing unease in this woman’s presence. “You can’t help sensing some of the truth—but you’re alone amid the vastness of it all, aren’t you? Just one little alga floating amid a green sea of them, convinced of your unimportance even as you threaten a hundred billion realities. I could pity you, if not for that threat.”