The Barge

We walk the plank over a quiet, murky water and onto a hulking barge where drinks are being served, where music thrums from two hefty speakers suspended from the ceiling. The sun is yielding to the lustiness of evening, and I feel hungry for a certain potency tonight.

We find a tall table by the railing and I hoist myself up on the stool. The tall man sits with ease in a chair his own size. I look around at the other tables—to the people collected like beads around the bar—and across the river to the hills beyond. It’s been sixteen years since I last lived here. A different life then: me and my books, me and my future displayed like assorted chocolates in a fancy box—each with the promise of sweetness ready to explode on my tongue. I made my selections and tasted many good things…

Tonight, though, I am a different woman, sitting across from an unexpected man. We order two drinks from a dewy waitress with a Kool-Aid smile. I envy her her youth, all her choices yet to come. When she returns with two tall glasses, a lime draped over each rim, I want to tell her to take her time with things. To go slow, even when she’s in a hurry. To look in the mirror and enjoy what she sees. It will all come too quickly: this. But of course I say none of this to her as she smiles and lifts each chilled drink from her tray onto our table. And she is off to please the next table, sate them with drinks, with charcoaled burgers and baskets of hot wings. It is after all a summer night here on the barge.

Sixteen years ago I did not understand that change was coming. I saw only my days as they revealed themselves. I read and wrote and cooked and walked the cobblestone streets at night and felt the town’s history. I never wanted to leave. Thought my life would gently makes its way along, like a scroll being unrolled along each of those antique streets. I’d wear my hat and scarf in winter, the snow crunching beneath my boots, stopping for cake and tea in the warm basement café. I’d bike those same streets in the fever of summer, the muscles in my legs like loaded springs. I saw the seasons unfold in the trees, in the windows of the stores, in the voices on the street. And it was good enough for me.

But that is simple in a way that life is not. And so I took things from the walls and put them in boxes; stood naked before the bay window overlooking the plaza; said goodbye to two old Jewish brothers who owned the liquor store around the corner—and as they patted my hand and wished me well, I saw for the last time the tattooed numbers stamped along their bony wrists... And I was gone.

Change has come in many ways. Including this barge that rests—tightly tethered to the grassy banks—along the Hudson River. And up the street, a fancy catacomb bar reminiscent of Poe’s Amontillado, of his Fortunato. But down where I once lived is a lapsed neighborhood—those old whispering buildings: Silenced. Blinded. Empty. Cars tires clicking along the cobblestone, headed to the colorless suburbs. My two old friends and their liquor store: gone. But I’m back and I want to remember and I want to be remembered. I look around at the vigorous faces of the crowd collected here on a Friday night on a barge tethered to the quiet downtown banks of a place I once loved—and that once loved me. Yet there is no history here, no face reflecting mine back at me. Not even at this table. The tall man across from me talks of all manner of things as I study his face to find something to hold on to. But I recognize that he has tethered himself as tightly as this barge is harnessed to the banks along the river. I see the thick knotted ropes that hold him steady, keep him secure. Each time he feels their moorings slip, he shores things up with one quick determined tug, so that he—like this barge—does not list, is not rocked by the wake of people passing by. Including me. And so I lift the chilled glass to my lips and drink, while the music fills the space around us, and the unexpected man talks of history, of past, of inconsequential things.
***