She looked like a doll. Her face had a creamy complexion with a rosy glow, and I don't know enough about cosmetology to know if that can be done by make up, but her facial skin was simply perfect. Her nose was a small, like on a doll. Her lips too, though perhaps that's the result of some lipsticks art. Her face is round, and perfectly symmetrical. What she was wearing was equally doll-like, or mannequin-like. She was wearing a cap of probably some French style, with black and white patterns too abstract to be described. Her scarf, partly hidden under her collar, is of the same exact material and design. And her coat looked something out of a Fifth Avenue boutique shop. Her demeanor made her look like some elegant character from a movie about society people in New York. Her eyes betrayed neither any obvious emotion nor lack of emotion. She was like a model for something I just didn't understand. She wouldn't be a model for clothing, for her face suggested that she wasn't one on the border of anorexia, or crossed over it. She was simply a doll, like the dolls for young girls. She obviously know exactly how she wanted to look and could perfectly execute the means to achieve that goal, every morning.
Even after getting off a flight. We were in a bus, a public bus, from La Guardia to uptown Manhattan. She wasn't a model, let alone a super model. She was probably some student or recent graduate who was enjoying some independence in the big city. She could have taken a taxi. But I have known wealthy New Yorkers who prefer public transportation because the way they got wealthy was to be frugal. My guesses with her can't go confidently beyond simply her looking like a doll. Everything perfect, every detail of her face, including the eyebrows, the eyelashes, the ears, or what I could see from under the cap, and everything covering her. So this doll was in a New York public bus, going with me to Harlem. She didn't get off in Harlem, though. I don't know where she went.
Coming to New York there's always something worth noticing. And coming back from even a brief, weekend trip, there's always a bit more to notice. As the plane descended over Brooklyn and Queens, the part of New York sitting at the eastern tip of Long Island, I saw the island illuminated in ways incomparable to any city in the world. Only a few minutes before I looked down and I saw the suburbs of Northern New Jersey in the purple hues of dusk. I closed my eyes for a few minutes during this descent to the airport, and when I opened it again, I saw all these yellow lights and the spaghetti of yellow streets they illuminate. It was as if the sky had taken on a dust of gold and inverted itself on earth. And as the plane got closer to land I could see the thousands of yellow and red lights on those strands of spaghetti. I didn't know exactly over what neighborhood we were passing by. I recognized the thin peninsular, more like a colonized sandbar, that is the Rockaway. So my parents' house was nearby. But then, where was JFK Airport? I didn't see any runways far away. The sea was just a fused part of the darkening, blue sky, and the effect of this fusion was enhanced by the haze that apparently had formed over the sea. And as the details over the little houses of Queens became more clear, I could see first the Whitestone Bridge, and then the Throgs Neck. They were bridges I'd crossed many times, and with each crossing some memory of my life.
That's what New York does to me more than anything else. Memories. My life has always been inextricably linked to this city since arriving in it during my childhood. Even when I no longer lived there, a lot of deep memories were associated with a return to or a departure from the city. And so the twinkling lights of the Whitestone Bridge glittered equally in the boxes of my memories. And suddenly, strangely suddenly, the things on the ground, the houses, the cars, parked or speeding, the stores of different neon signs of different colors of different sizes, they all started speeding in front of me very fast as the plane was about to touch down. And among all these lights and the human stories nurtured and rotting among them, the sea showed its face briefly again in the form of the Long Island Sound, the last remnant of it before joining the Hudson River. And this nudge of the Sound almost looked like a dark island in a sea of civilization. It was as if the city had to take break somewhere, had to have a solace somewhere.
And the plane touches down, roaring as its wing flaps open up and the reverse engine throttled to make the plane decelerate quickly. Whenever I landed at night in La Guardia I saw the body of water that's the dark island among the twinkling lights, and I would always think about the accident I saw on TV when I was a child, an accident involving a plane overshooting the runway and ended up in that body of water. It was a winter day. I wonder what I was thinking as a child then. I wonder what I was doing before and after. My childhood in New York, or rather, the path towards resolving the many issues of that childhood, has been another bond between me and the city.
The city has changed a lot over the years, and I have seen the recent changes while missing the ones before when I wasn't around very much. But there have always been the public bus, no matter how much more civilized it has become and still could become, and there have always been the mannequin-like women who walk with confidence and understood at least a superficial sense of their own beauty, and there have always been people like me, who have left the city but deepdown always felt a connection that sometimes get confused, perhaps, with a yearning.
