Excerpt of After This by Alice McDermott
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I
Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and
grit against her stockings and her cheeks—the slivered shards of mad sunlight in
her eyes. She paused, still on the granite steps, touched the brim of her hat
and the flying hem of her skirt—felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her
sleeves.
And all before her, the lunch-hour crowd bent under the April sun and into
the bitter April wind, jackets flapping and eyes squinting, or else skirts
pressed to the backs of legs and jacket hems pressed to bottoms. And trailing
them, outrunning them, skittering along the gutter and the sidewalk and the low
gray steps of the church, banging into ankles and knees and one another, scraps
of paper, newspapers, candy wrappers, what else?—office memos? shopping lists?
The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails
armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and wrappers
and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the dead have fled?
She squinted against the sunlight on taxi hoods and bus windows, heard the
rushing now of air and of taxis, wheezing buses, and underneath it all something
banging—a loosened street sign, a trapped can, a distant hammer—rhythmic and
methodical. The march of time.
And then George approaching, his hand stuck to his hat and the hat bent into
the onslaught. She went down the steps just in front of him, drawn more by
forward momentum than by any desire to meet up with, or to avoid, her brother’s
latest best pal.
The cold wind made it difficult to breathe, as if it could snatch your next
breath before you had time to swallow it, and she bent her head, too, hand to
her hat, submerged in wind and beginning to imagine herself slowly losing ground
with each step forward, slowly beginning to stall, and then to sail backward—a
quick scramble to regain ground and then another sailing backward. In church she
had prayed for contentment. She was thirty, with no husband in sight. A good
job, an aging father, a bachelor brother, a few nice friends. At least, she had
asked—so humbly, so earnestly, so seriously—let me be content.
And now a slapstick windstorm fit for Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton.
It was either God’s reply or just April again, in the wind tunnel that was
midtown Manhattan. The scent of it, the Easter scent of April in the city, all
around her, in the cold air itself as well as on the shoulders of the crowd; the
smell of sunlight and dirt, something warming at the heart of it all.
And then she felt his hand on her shoulder and he shouted, “Mary Rose,” which
bound him forever to her brother and her father and her life at home since
nowhere else did she tolerate the double name. His head was still lowered, his
hand still on his hat—he might have been waiting for the right opportunity to
doff it—and he peered around at her from under its brim as if from under the
rock of another life.
And she, her hand on the back of her own hat, did the same.
“Hello, George,” she said. She could feel the crunch of city grit between her
back teeth.
“Some wind,” he said. He had one eye closed against it, the other was watery.
“You’re telling me,” she said.
They walked together to the corner and as they stepped off the curb, he
suddenly reached up and took her raised elbow—the one that led to the hand she
held against her hat—and kept it between his fingers as they crossed. She
thought he must look like a man attached to a subway strap. At the next corner,
he did the same; a gesture that was either brotherly or proprietary, but awkward
either way, as if one of them were blind or doddering, or as if both were
involved in some odd, raised-elbow folk dance. At Forty-sixth, the light was
against them and the wind paused enough for her to take her hand off her hat
while they waited with the crowd.
Excerpted from After This by Alice McDermott. Copyright © 2006 by Alice
McDermott. Published in September 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All
rights reserved.
