Window Narrative

New York, though constantly churning and straining its eyes, staring down the sun, and following that by staring down the moon, until the last call shouts begin and end, and the heavy eyelids and tired eyes draw together like flesh tone magnets, encouraging rest, is full of people who appreciate privacy. For such an excitingly outgoing crowd (a complete generalization), there are wrought-iron gates, blinds, curtains and locks abound: the tenement lifestyle. Once inside, the inhabitant locks up, and he or she returns to his or her own slice of the city; the walls deadening the outside noise and reintroducing the comforting tone of home. Outside, people pass brownstones such as these and drool: like me. We wonder how the hell we could be able to live in such a place. And then we try to block out the thoughts of living in suburbia at a much cheaper rate. Here I was, stopped and staring.
There she was. I passed by on the opposite side of the street and was immediately drawn to the bizarre circumstance of a woman, her apartment on the first floor, in her kitchen, with a window facing 9th Street. She was exposed. Her figure was framed in the window like a panorama. The night was fresh. She had left work two hours prior and stopped at Gristedes on her way home to purchase groceries: a bag of apples, a bunch of celery, two pomegranates (she doesn’t understand what the point of buying pre-packaged seeds is), seven grapefruits (one, to split with her husband, for breakfast every morning), a bag of baby carrots, beets, three white onions, dill, cilantro, mixed mesculin greens and three packages of tofu. She decided to experiment with a vegetarian diet to boost her immune system and energy level ever since she recovered from a nasty bout with mononucleosis. In her neighborhood there were enough vegetarian and vegan eateries to provide her inspiration for recipes. She loves experimenting in the kitchen. Her husband appreciated the concept of vegetarianism but couldn’t resist eating chicken with any might. By the time she walked in the front door, the clock on the stove read 8:16. She really wanted to make borscht using the recipe her mother’s Georgian caretaker gave to her, but she only really had time to prepare all the vegetables. The juice from the beets would stain her fingertips and give them a floral hue, unable to be scrubbed off with routine hand-washing methods. She pushed the borscht-thought to the back of her brain and decided on making a tofu stir-fry for dinner, with brown rice. When they had originally looked at the apartment, she knew she had to live there because the main window in the kitchen was facing the street. She loves people watching because it lets her tap, ever so gently, into the thumping metropolitan heartbeat, while she’s indoors. Dinner’s done. Her husband walks in the door and gives her a kiss. They eat. They laugh.