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Given Maggie’s attitude, I decide not to introduce her to Miranda after all. They’d probably get into a big fight about sex and I’d be stuck in the middle. Instead, we walk around the Village, where Maggie has her tarot cards read by a psychic—“I see a man with dark hair and blue eyes.” “Ryan!” Maggie exclaims—and then I take her to Washington Square Park. There’s the usual assortment of freaks, musicians, drug dealers, Hare Krishnas, and even two men walking on stilts, but all she can talk about is how there isn’t any grass. “How can they call it a park if it’s all dirt?”
“There probably was grass, once. And there are trees,” I point out.
“But look at the leaves. They’re black. Even the squirrels are dirty.”
“Nobody notices the squirrels.”
“They should,” she says. “Did I tell you I’m going to become a marine biologist?”
“No—”
“Hank’s a biology major. He says if you’re a marine biologist, you can live in California or Florida.”
“But you don’t like science.”
“What are you talking about?” Maggie asks. “I didn’t like chemistry, but I loved biology.”
This is news to me. When we had to take biology in junior year, Maggie refused to memorize the names of the species and phyla, saying it was the kind of stupid thing that no one would ever use in their real life, so why bother?
We walk around a bit more, with Maggie becoming increasingly distressed about the heat and the odd people and how she thinks she’s getting another blister. When I take her back to the apartment, she complains about the lack of effective air-conditioning. By the time we’re supposed to leave to meet Bernard, I’m nearly at the end of my rope. Once more, Maggie balks at taking the subway. “I’m not going down there again,” she declares. “It stinks. I don’t know how you do it.”
“It’s the best way to get around,” I say, trying to urge her down the stairs.
“Why can’t we take a taxi? My sister and brother-in-law told me to take taxis because they’re safe.”
“They’re also expensive. And I don’t have the money.”
“I have fifty dollars.”
What? I wish she’d told me she had money earlier. She could have paid for our hamburgers.
When we’re safely in a cab, Maggie reveals her conclusion about why New Yorkers wear black. “It’s because it’s so dirty here. And black doesn’t show dirt. Could you imagine what their clothes would look like if they wore white? I mean, who wears black in the summer?”
“I do,” I say, nonplussed, especially as I’m in black. I’m wearing a black T-shirt, black leather pants that are two sizes too big—which I bought for 90 percent off at one of those cheap stores on Eighth Street—and pointy-toed black high heels from the 1950s that I found at the vintage shop.
“Black is for funerals,” Maggie says. “But maybe New Yorkers like black because they feel like they’ve died.”
“Or maybe for the first time in their lives they feel like they’re living.”
We get stuck in traffic by Macy’s, and Maggie rolls down her window, fanning herself with her hand. “Look at all those people. This isn’t living. It’s surviving.”
I have to admit, she’s right about that. New York is about survival.
“Who are we meeting again?” she asks.
I sigh. “Bernard. The guy I’m seeing. The playwright.”
“Plays are boring.”
“Bernard doesn’t agree. So please don’t say ‘plays are boring’ when you meet him.”
“Does he smoke a pipe?”
I glare at her.
“You said he was over thirty. I picture him smoking a pipe and wearing slippers.”
“Thirty is not old. And don’t tell him my age, either. He thinks I’m nineteen or twenty. So you have to be nineteen or twenty too. We’re sophomores in college. Okay?”
