PROSPECT PARK

He found himself once again wondering how it was that he was broke, more than broke, penniless, really broke.  His parents worried about him.  He would have to go again to the old home, knock on the door, stand there looking hapless when they opened it, and accept their charity when they pulled him in, sat him at the table in the kitchen, complained how thin he was, fed him, and tried not to pry, though they always did, making him defend himself, though he was always less and less able to do that, since it had happened so many times, and he would eat, thank them, go to his old bedroom, sleep, and get up in the morning and go out and look for work, then come back in the evening and say that soon all will be well again with him, and he would have to look in their faces and see the worry and the skepticism.  It was a trial.  It was an ordeal.  He had no choice.  He would have to go again, knock on the door, and let it all happen just as it has so many times before.

     He was jobless.  That was because he would get fired when he came to work the way he did after he had lost everything, unshaved, unwashed, slept-in shirt and trousers—what could he do?  He would end up evicted from whatever apartment he was in, have to find a shelter somewhere for the homeless, and in the meantime live on the streets.  It all sort of came together as a single event.  Then, off he’d go late in the evening to his parents’ house, and it would start all over again.  Sometimes it would be a year or more between visits to his parents.  Sometimes only a few months. 

     In spite of the humiliation he felt, he remained cheerful and hopeful.  This was not a front he put on for his parents’ sake.  It was his natural condition.  It was what would land him on his feet again.  He always expected it would happen and it always did.  He was undefeated in that regard.  In spite of the humiliations.  It would begin with the sidelong looks.  These would before long become rude stares.  Then usually a supervisor, a boss of some sort, would come to talk with him.  He would plead his circumstances, but to no avail.  When he didn’t come in the next day normally groomed and clothed, or the day after that, he would be told to leave or to not come back.   He would get the few dollars owed him since his last paycheck and be ushered to the door.  That was the hardest part.  In spite of it all he remained cheerful and hopeful.  He thought about knocking at his parents’ door. 

     Wasn’t it time? he thought as he walked, hands in his pockets.  Wasn’t it time?  After all, he wasn’t getting on as well these last months.  He resolved.  But he had resolved before.  He never changed.  But wasn’t it time?  Wasn’t it time to change?  To make a life that would last longer than a few months?  Old questions.  What should change was his questioning whether he could change.  Why not accept who he was?  Why not go to his parents’ house, knock, and say when they opened the door, “Look, I am one of those who just can’t cope, I can’t live by myself, I can’t make it.  I need to come home.  You need to let me in.  You need to take care of me.”  That would change everything.  Really, it would.  “Mom, Dad, let’s stop pretending.  Can’t we?”

     But that would never happen.  There were reasons.  He stopped walking at the corner of Flatbush and Linden Avenues.  He had passed Prospect Park.  The intersection stank of cars.  Everything stank.  He had only a couple more blocks to go.  One block passed Linden, one block left, and he would be there.  The red brick house in the middle of the block, hydrangea in front, cracked concrete driveways on both sides, the glossy green door with the panes of glass, which he had painted when he was still in high school, the red brick steps.  As he thought of ringing the bell, his stomach turned and instead of stepping off the curb he waited for the feeling to pass.  It was late, very dark, but the traffic was still thick, was always thick, the trucks making it worse.

     Even if his parents were in bed when he got there, they would be happy to see him.  They always made him feel like he did them a good deed by coming home, even though he looked the way he did, was as down and out as he was, and coming home was his last resort.  That always bothered him.  He couldn’t care less about them.  If he had had the luck he always felt on the edge of, he very likely would never see them again.  He never phoned them between visits, why would he do that?  Call them to say, “Hey, mom, dad, everything is honky dory, and I just wanted to say hello”? 

     He waited for the feeling to pass, and as he came out of his reverie, the light changed.  The truck at the corner lurched into the intersection, drivers impatiently creeping behind him to get far enough into the intersection to cut around and speed on.  He put his hands in his pockets and stood, staring not at but through the vehicles jamming the intersection behind the truck.  The light changed again, and slowly the cross traffic began to flow. 

     An elderly woman, in the lead at the intersection now, rolled her window down and called to him.  For a moment, he didn’t realize what was happening, but when he finally caught her arm waving from the window at him, he stepped into the street beside her car and leaned down to hear what she wanted to say.  But what she did was press a five dollar bill into his hand, saying the Lord favored his kind and so would she.  He looked at the bill and at her and without saying anything, feeling broadsided by it all, stepped backward onto the curb again.  He stared at her as she pushed the button to roll the window up, smiling and nodding at him. 

     Suddenly, the sense he always carried of being able to get back on his feet, of getting by the latest humiliation, evaporated, and he was overwhelmed by fear and by the feeling that this time he would not get over it.  He knew, as he gripped that five dollar bill, there was something different about this latest trip to his parents’.  He loved the trotters, he loved the flats even more, and his trips to Roosevelt or Belmont with bucks in his pocket and the expectations that his latest tips would prove out are what always drove him to this pass. 

     When the light changed and the old woman drove on, he realized that he had been standing on the corner instead of crossing, and the irritation goaded him.  He would have to wait through another cycle of the stoplight.  He looked at the fiver still in his hand and turned and began to retrace his way back up Flatbush Avenue.  He shoved the bill in his pocket and picked up his pace.  He had no idea where he was going.

     It was a warm night, and as he walked, the briskness in his step caused his shoes to clip at his heals and because he had no socks to put on that morning, the sweat inside them made his feet squish.  He ignored the discomfort.  He walked as if he knew where he was going.  As he approached Prospect Park again, he remembered playing there as a kid, especially by the lake.  He loved the lake.  He learned about rowing boats on it, and how to fish there, and how not to be afraid of the swans and the geese when they came to take the bits of bread from his fingers.  He decided to go there.  He hadn’t been there since high school.  How different would it look? he wondered. 

     But it wasn’t different.  The only strangeness about the lake he could sense was the darkness.  He had never been there in the dark before.  The surface of the lake didn’t reflect anything he could see, not the sky, which was cloudy, nor the trees along its bank.  It looked for all the world to him like an abyss, a vast sheet of darkness concealing terrific depths.  The thought didn’t frighten him.  It so much reflected his mood that it seemed natural to him. 

     On the north side of the lake there used to be a huge elm tree.  Climbing into its branches and looking over the lake always made him feel heroic when he was little.  He decided to go there.  The tree was still there, a bit rounder in the trunk, but the same old tree, he thought fondly.  He couldn’t tell about its height.  As he neared it, he reached out to pat it, then let his shoulder fall onto it as he turned to gaze at the lake.  That’s when heard the voice.  It said, “Why are you here so late at night?”  He almost leaped out of his skin.

     It was a woman’s voice, an old woman’s voice.  Instinctively, he felt for the fiver in his pocket, then turned around to where it sounded from.  He really expected to see the same old woman who gave him the bill.  It made him feel creepy, as though he had been watched or followed.  The woman stood some feet away, on the same side of the tree as himself.  He couldn’t make out her face, but he could see she was dressed in slacks.  Even though the sky was dark and cloudy, her hair was visibly gray.  He didn’t expect anyone to be in the park at this hour and felt intruded upon, but worse than that, he half expected he’d spend the night here, curled up against the tree.  He had nowhere else to go.  Now what would he do? 

     “Who are you?” he replied.

     “Nobody,” she said, stepping closer. 

     The sense of intrusion gave way to anxiety as she came close to him.  She stepped right up to him and then beside him, looking at the lake.  He turned around to face the same way.  They stood almost touching shoulders.  Even though she was so close, the darkness under the tree hid her face.  He felt an urgency to talk, to make her talk. 

     “I come here a lot,” he lied. 

     “No you don’t,” she said.

     “I do,” he insisted.  “I used to live only a few blocks from here.  Played here all the time when I was a kid.”

     “I don’t know about that.  That may be so.”

     “It’s true.  I used to climb this tree.  All the time.”

     “Maybe so.”

     “How about you?” he said, trying to shift focus.  The woman’s rudeness shook him.  He wished she would go away.

     “The darkness attracts me.  A night like this.  I like it.”

     He shivered at the idea the darkness attracted her.  When she said it, goosebumps rose on his arms.  He was wearing a light short sleeve shirt that smelt of five-days’ worth of perspiration, since he hadn’t taken it off all week.  He could smell himself and wondered if she could smell him too.  But he could also smell the lake, and, strangely, the sedges on the bank, where the dropped or culled feathers of the ducks, geese, and swans were drifted by the wind.  Quickened by the sense, he wondered if she was affected too.

     “Can you smell the lake and the bank?” he said, hoping the idea would divert her into more happy thoughts.

     “Yes,” she said. 

     He waited for her to go on, to say something about it.  But she only stared at the lake.  After a few moments, she turned to him and tried to look through the darkness into his face.  He could make out her face a little bit, now, because they were so close, and he could see she was not the old woman in the car.

     “The lake is deep,” she said, staring into his face.  “Did you know that?”

     “I,” he began but stuttered, “I, I,” and then he got a grip on himself and fell quiet.  After a second, he responded again, “I never thought about it.  I suppose it is deep.  Deep enough to row boats, for the kids to fish.”

     “Yes,” she said, turning back to the lake.  “But it’s deeper than that.”

     He wondered why she thought about it, what she had in mind by saying the lake is deep, and why she came here at night.  He knew why he was here, but now he began to wonder about her.  He also, because she stepped in so close to him, noticed that she smelled vaguely of lavender, an odor he always associated with old women, both his grandmothers’ homes smelling of it when his parents took him to visit.

     “How deep is your future?” she said to him now, still looking out upon the lake.  “Mine is less deep now than yesterday.  Less deep,” she said dreamily, pausing, standing almost shoulder to shoulder with him, both looking out upon the lake, across which they could see headlamps of cars and trucks on the road that bordered the park on that side.  Far away those vehicles seemed, and barely any sounds they made drifted to them over the water. 

     “But that’s the way with old people,” she said, turning again to him and sharpening the tone of her voice.  “A time comes when one thinks about it, and then, don’t you know,” she said, lightening her tone, “one gets over it.”

     “Gets over what?” he said, not following her thought.

     “Why, knowing that the count of one’s days has grown short.  It comes on suddenly, you see.  One day you don’t think about those things at all, and the next, all your thinking seems to have got done.  And it’s all right.  That’s why I like to come here, especially on warm nights like this.”

     He looked out across the lake with this idea in his head now, the idea of imminence, and the lake became for him suddenly a horror.  He looked at her, and she grabbed his arm, just above the elbow, and gently turned him toward the tree, and, still holding on, urged him to walk.  Then she slipped her arm into his, and arm in arm they rounded the tree and followed the lake’s bank.  

     She was tall, almost as tall as him, and she was thin, almost as thin as him, and as they walked, she talked cheerfully of herself, guiding him with her arm in his, and did not ask him anything about himself.  He listened to her, forgetting about himself.  She told him how pleasant it was to meet someone unexpectedly like this, and how pleasant it was to walk together, how nothing like that had happened before, and he listened to her chatting on and on until they came to a sidewalk that led away from the lake out to the road bordering the park.

     “This is where I shall leave you,” she said.  “That’s my way home.”

     “Goodbye,” he said, as she pulled her arm from his.  “Sleep well.”

     “Oh, I shall,” she responded lightheartedly.  “Thank you for your company.”

     She ambled away, the street light at the end of the walk illuminating her as she neared it.  He stood and watched.  She walked out of the light, eventually, graceful and tall, and he turned back to look again at the lake.  But now the prospect held for him only the feeling of dread, and going back to the tree where he originally thought he might spend the night seemed horrible to him.  The whole park at this hour of darkness seemed horrible to him, and he couldn’t remember anymore why he even came here.  Taking in a breath, sour with the odor of his own sweat, he walked out of the park in the same direction the old woman had taken, even though he would have to walk far to get back to the street on which his parents lived, where he lived his boyhood, he thought.  As he walked, his sockless feet squishing in his shoes, his hands in his pockets, his left hand feeling the fiver given to him by yet another old woman, he thought how deep his future was when he used to play here then.  How deep!