Eleven

The wind caught Vivian again as she climbed up the steps from the subway, twining around her legs like an angry cat. It caught up trash and dirt and the shouts of an angry motorist before it spun up toward the purple clouds that bruised the sky.

A man in a blue suit pushed past her, then stopped at the edge of the street to light a cigarette. Around her, shops were starting to wind down for the day, young men fetching in the bolts of fabric or carts of books that had been displayed outside. In the window of a butcher's shop, someone was just pasting a sign that declared what she assumed was half off until closing in multiple languages, though she could only read the line in English. Restaurants were starting to turn on their lights, windows glowing as the early diners inside received their bowls of soup or mugs of tea. Two cats darted out of an alley in front of her, spitting and hissing as they chased each other into the street. And all around her, voices called and shouted and laughed and complained in a comforting, undecipherable babble.

She couldn't understand most of it. There was some English mixed in, and two men arguing in what she thought might be Hebrew or Yiddish, not surprising with the Jewish neighborhood just on the other side of Bowery. But mostly the voices around her spoke Chinese.

No, not Chinese. What folks like her lazily called Chinese, Danny had told her sternly, was dozens of different languages and dialects. Vivian felt her cheeks grow hot with remembered embarrassment as she thought of how he had rolled his eyes at her ignorance. But that didn't stop her feet from moving.

The first time that she had ever come downtown, she had been overwhelmed trying to make sense of everything unfamiliar in the Chinese neighborhood. But now, after Florence and Danny's whirlwind romance and the first few months of their marriage had brought her there more and more, she mostly saw what was the same.

The buildings, old and shoddy and packed with tenants. A spindly tree, defiant and alone, waiting hopefully for a spring that was taking its sweet time arriving this year. The smell of food from chimneys and doorways, reminding her how long it had been since she'd eaten.

Plenty was different. But winter in New York was bitter no matter what part of the city you lived in. And people were people, no matter where you went.

Well, maybe not everyone. Vivian paused to watch a crowd of young men make their way down the street. There was nothing threadbare about their coats, and their shoes shone as if the mud of the city had never touched them.

Their sort wasn't an uncommon sight these days, wealthy young men coming downtown for what they called an adventure, away from manicured streets and stately stone walls.

Vivian hugged the shadow of a doorway as they went past. People weren't all the same. Not everywhere. And she needed to remember that if she wanted to have any chance of escaping this mess.