The crack in the sidewalk was getting larger. Her foot could no longer cover it completely. Small leaves of grass were sprouting from above her big toe, separated from the four other digits on her right foot by the soft pink rubber of her $2 sandals. She loved the shoes. But Cassandra was still worried about the crack in the sidewalk.
It was definitely not OCD, but it was something. And although up and down the block there were probably dozens of concrete cracks digging deeper into the city’s center, this crack in particular had an above average significance to her. Tuesdays and Thursdays, and sometimes Saturdays when she walked down 17th before cutting over to Wallington and jumping on the red line, she would slow to a stop over the tannish block of melted rock and, while holding a disposable cup of tea or one of the city’s five free newspapers, mosey inconspicuously back and forth for however long it would take before she would be satisfied enough to walk slowly away.
Today she waited for ten or maybe eleven minutes. Half this time was spent shifting weight between her two legs, covered in black jeans. Today she had coffee. And the messenger bag she was using to replace her purse had been “tagged” by a friend in bright orange spray paint with some strange symbol he was unusually fond of—kind of like the way she felt unusually fond of the square. Her collection of accessories made her feel like an obnoxious art student, the ones you can spot without any of the usual amount of second guessing. They walked around like forgotten royalty but managed to simultaneously uphold the type of slouching posture which encourages wheelchair use later in life.
The majority of the other half of her ten or maybe eleven wasted minutes was spent examining the split. The heat of summer must’ve been convincing the ground to break up. Today it was only seventy-six degrees, but last week’s climate had broiled the city at above eighty day after day. It was completely the result of chemistry. There were reasonable scientific explanations for what was happening beneath her feet.
The final minute or two of her time was spent trying not to make eye contact with the dry cleaning woman in the store behind her. She knew. The woman knew that she always came to this spot on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and sometimes Saturdays. Miraculously, the woman, a middle aged Korean woman, was always in the dry cleaners; or at least, always in the dry cleaners on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and sometimes Saturdays. The baristas in the Starbucks across the street were constantly changing. The pedestrians on the sidewalks were never the same, or at least, never were recognizable from one day to the next. Even the bus drivers, who had a designated stop about a block south from her little square, always looked different.
Maybe it wasn’t a miracle—because it certainly wasn’t ideal. She didn’t want this small facet of her life to be recognizable to anyone. She didn’t want to be noticed. Especially not in the ten to eleven minutes she spent two or three times a week when she felt the most uncertain. If anyone, even a friend, asked her to explain this ritual, or the reasons behind it, she wouldn’t be able to give a clear answer. She valued lucidity. But these few minutes were especially hazy. Kind of like limbo.
She finally left when she spotted someone she knew, a friend of a friend, turning the corner to walk straight across her. If she had remembered his name, maybe she would have stayed where she was, tempting an invitation to experience her insanity. But she couldn’t remember his name until she was already home, scrolling through channels on her television while a pot of whole grain ziti noodles boiled on her stove in the kitchen behind her. Ivy, the girl who shared the apartment with her, walked in, slightly slamming the door before apologizing without words, but by softly saying “hey” with more demure and less enthusiasm than was to be expected. Then Cassandra remembered his name. It was Evan.
Ivy had gained fifteen pounds in the last five-and-a-half months. It was more like twenty-five, but Cassandra didn’t want to say something that would cause Ivy to experience any more discomfort. Her natural face, without any contortions or simulation, exuded panic. The plumpness that now enveloped her from the bottom of her developing double chin to the pink, plastic, skinny headband she wore every weekday (and which did nothing to make the comparison to Little Miss Piggy more difficult for a viewer) made the panic even more striking. The slight bulbous nose, the bagging adding to her eyes—such details had turned Ivy from a melancholy looking young woman to an absolute dread to cast your own eyes upon. It wasn’t simply that she was unattractive because she had gained weight. It was just that it now became impossible, with all her features being propelled to the surface of her, to avoid the sadness that she did a poor job of concealing.
It bothered Cassandra more than a little. She never knew for sure when she’d be unable to look Ivy in the face, or if she’d be able to make it through a shared meal without having to excuse herself to “use the bathroom”—which only consisted of flushing the toilet and running the water while she stared at her own face in the mirror, wondering if she was starting to look sadder than usual. She never was. But she was starting to look a little dead.
Maybe she was just more tired. It was a horrible excuse, she knew. It was probably the second biggest lie to the question, “Are you alright?,” behind “I’m fine.” Clearly there was something wrong. She didn’t go to sleep as quickly as she used to. When the lights of her apartment went out, she’d spend the following hour or more trying to capture her thoughts as they led her, often times, circumferentially around silly articles with little emotional value. There was nothing significant about what she was going to wear the next day, she knew. She knew that such little things about what she would do the next day had little emotional value. She didn’t care at all. But her mind did. And her mind wouldn’t let her make her own decisions. So every night, she’d find herself being dragged through mental rehearsals of her next day.
And for the most part, her easy-to-live-without-consciously-processing life followed such instructions exactly. Eat breakfast. Which cereal? Organic frosted flakes? Okay. Go to work. Walk or take the bus? Walk. But don’t use your MP3 player. Fine. At work? Wave to Jake. Say hi to Kate. Remember to smile. Got it. The one thing she couldn’t actually plan for was that damned crack.
For the hour she spent in bed every night, somewhere between the bright overhead lights over her dinner table and the complete utter darkness that sheltered the city around two in the morning, she never once thought about that sidewalk abnormality. But then, somehow, she would lose herself for a brief, unrecorded moment on her walk home, and she’d be standing over it again; she would be staring at it.
What Cassandra really wanted to do was tell somebody about her problem concerning city concrete. Ivy would listen to her, she knew that, but Ivy also had a bad habit of proposing solutions that were either illegitimate or illogical to carry out. Ivy was in graduate school at the city’s highest ranked fine arts program. Although this validated her frequent, implicit claims to intelligence, nevertheless it led to her over analysis of all practical items presented to her. In short, Cassandra did not trust her larger-by-the-day roommate to be helpful in matters concerning which Thai restaurant to go to for dinner the next day; she certainly did not like the image of presenting information, personal information at that, to Ivy’s overworked and over-analytical mind, which would likely just confound her, regardless.
Ivy had gained fifteen pounds in the last five-and-a-half months. Cassandra was trying to process this information discreetly while they both watched the five-thirty local news. She had snuggled into the black reclining chair, her feet folded up underneath her. She realized that perched in the chair, her legs in the black tapered jeans she had changed into once she had gotten through her front door, and her torso covered by the black work shirt she still wore because it didn’t feel dirty enough to toss into her slowly growing laundry pile, she must’ve looked very ominous. And she hadn’t combed her black hair during the current work week; about five days had passed without a comb connecting with the curls which defined her face. She must’ve looked crazy. She glanced at Ivy to see if Ivy was staring at her, right in that moment, when she felt most self-conscious. But her chubby friend was enthralled, no, engrossed, with the television screen, using a fork as a shovel to pile up pasta in her mouth before remembering that indeed, her teeth could be used to chew.
They were not friends. They were friendly. That was far worse. Cassandra wanted the truth. Did she look crazy? She didn’t want awkward confrontation. She wanted blunt. Ivy wouldn’t give her that. A commercial for a local rug company came onto the television screen, accompanied by an annoying jingle. Cassandra’s feet found the wooden floor and shuffled closer to the door. She picked up the messenger bag that she had let slump into the corner separating a wall from their front door. “I’m going,” she turned around slightly to catch Ivy’s glance. Their eyes connected and Ivy’s face fell to focus on the collection of more pasta into her mouth via fork, as a few strands had decided to play fickle around her bottom lip and swing in front of her half-and-one-more chin. Slightly before Cassandra’s right arm let the door close firmly behind her, she heard Ivy’s voice over the continued commercials. “Bye Cass-.” The door slam cut her off. Or maybe she had decided to experiment with a nickname. Maybe she had been distracted by food. Or television. Cassandra didn’t really care. She needed to get to 1145 Burbank Avenue.
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