Standing on the corner of 5th and Cork Avenue the traffic trundles past. It’s not a particularly busy day, but always busy enough to require a wait for the small luminescent man, frozen forever in mid step, to beckon the waiting toward a safe passage to the Jewish deli on the opposite corner. It’s been hot for days. The heat isn’t searing, the sun isn’t bright, but the instant pool of sweat that develops on the ledge above the lip and the stained backs of t shirts walking past know that it’s a heat that matters, pervading the masses. It makes everyone so miserable that it almost renders itself moot, becoming a point for uncomfortable small talk on elevators and train cars. A paper car mat, the kind the mechanics leave under the pedals, with two feet printed on it lays unmoving and abandoned on the side of the street, blown only occasionally by the wind produced by cars driving past, the feet moving like those of a shy dancer in the back of the room, a half step forward, a shuffle back. Open windows try to catch a nonexistent breeze and instead offer a voyeuristic dream, a small glimpse into the intimacy of strangers.
Through that window children are fighting over a cheap toy. Through another a TV blares while an unemployed man sleeps off the two beers he had for breakfast. A woman stands at one, washing dishes and staring off into a distant nothing, imagining herself far away from the kitchen sink and stained wallpaper. In a fourth window, a young girl plays with dolls. The stranger at the crosswalk watches her a bit longer. He watches her become, second by second, each moment older than the last.
She loses her first tooth as he watches. Gets her first report card. Thinks boys have cooties. Thinks boys are cute. Tries on her mother’s lipstick and roughly wipes it off when she hears the front door open and the sound of her mother’s footsteps in the living room. Unpacks her first bra from the shopping bags, proud and embarrassed. She throws out all her stuffed animals and paints white over her baby pink walls, a blank canvas for her rapidly changing self. She builds science projects and writes debates, practicing in front of the mirror. She throws paper airplanes out the window and has pebbles thrown at the panes. She dances in her socks and picks out outfits for first dates, borrowing her mother’s heels and her friend’s dress.
As she grows older, time slows for the watching stranger, even as time speeds by the girl, the open window framing her life. She practices her walk in cap and gown. She opens acceptance letters and letters that aren’t as accepting. She falls in love and has her heart broken, cries in her mother’s arms and then cries because her mother’s arms are no longer there to hold her. The first man she makes love to, she’ll have with blinds drawn. The second with shutters wide open. And the third will leave her hanging out the window, cigarette in hand, trying to breathe in enough cold night air to make her feel alive again.
Some days time stops.
She’s framed in the window, a book in hand wearing a sundress or with eyes closed leaning against the ledge smelling coffee brewing and shivering in her well worn sweater.
Time resumes eventually. Once, she tries to start a window sill garden, with small herbs and the like, but she takes care of plants the way she takes care of herself, and eventually the garden is just dirt and a few weeds that she still waters when she remembers, not knowing or caring whether they are from the seeds she planted. Sometimes several days go by in quick succession, while some last as long as the six before it, or the sixteen. On days like that, she may be alone, she may be falling in love again. On one of those days, a man moves in, moves out, moves in again. They dance in slow motion to songs on the radio, never really matching the beat and never really caring. Sometimes they fight, screaming and slamming doors before silent apologies and forgiving smiles. For a while the man is gone and the girl is empty, staring out the window with no recognition on her face of the place she has never left, irreparably changed. Those days are slow and the nights are slower. He comes back eventually, kneeling down so only the top of his head shows through the window, offering her the rest of his life next to a half empty pizza box. She accepts, hoping she won’t be as lonely. She is, sometimes even when he’s there, but she’s also happy, smiling at him through the window as he walks up the sidewalk on his way home from work, looking up to see him wave through the glass on her way to the store. They attempt to eat frozen wedding cake a year later, and end up throwing it at each other instead, laughing and dodging sugary missiles. Some lands on the window sill and is eaten by a bird as they wake up the next morning and pick frosting out of their hair.
An “It’s A Girl” banner is strung across the top of the window, and arguments are had over names and I love you’s are shared over cereal. A nursery is set up, with its own window. Sleepless nights and burned cookies and juice force time to move quickly again, as the girl spends less time at the window, having to be more than just the girl.
The daughter grows up through the window, much like the girl before her. Time moves quickly again until the girl stops coming to the window, unable to move from the bed. Visitors with stethoscopes and sad eyes block the window and the man cries when he thinks the girl isn’t looking. The window stays shut and the blinds stay drawn for a long time until one day the girl asks for a little fresh air and day by day that fresh air fills her lungs until she can sit by the window, supporting herself on the moulding. She gets stronger by the window and soon the man doesn’t have to cry anymore. The girl’s girl still has arms to cry in and a mother’s lipstick to borrow.
But another day, the man is gone from the window and unlike the girl he doesn’t come back to the sill for strength and when the girl stops crying it’s because he is no longer there to cry for. The daughter finds a new man and tries on white dresses just inside the window, twirling in front of the mirror and then twirling out the door, returning occasionally to visit in the girl’s window again.
Some days later, she visits with a girl of her own, and then later alone.
Once again, the girl, no longer a girl, can no longer come to the window and eventually the window is closed and the blinds are drawn and the curtains shut and dust gathers in the panes and the stranger looks away and sees the timer urging him to cross the street, on the corner of 5th and Cork, to the Jewish deli on the opposite corner.
–Art by Milan Vopálenský & Esmahan Özkan