Strangers in the Night

While walking down the street late one December evening, I crossed paths with yet another New York City cad. I was carrying three bags of groceries. Comfortably encased from my calves to my cheeks in a long winter coat, I felt like an anonymous winter warrior.

Two bags were slung over my right shoulder; one over my left; I was tilted to one side like a granny and could have been anywhere from 19 years old to 92. But I was 29 and almost home when a van drove slowly past me. The driver’s window was rolled down like it was July and his left arm filled the space where the glass should have been.

“Hola, sweetie,” he shouted. I looked around and I was alone. He was talking to me. He was assaulting me in two languages, just to make sure I understood his prurience.

I kept walking. He had slowed to a stop just two cars back from the traffic light on the corner. I was still within his sights. I crossed the street and walked past my apartment building so he wouldn’t see where I lived.

When the light changed, he drove straight away, down the block, maybe turning right or left, I couldn’t be certain, and my thoughts drifted back to dinner plans: mashed potatoes, a small steak, some onions, something simple because money is tight.

He didn’t come to mind again until yesterday afternoon, when in broad daylight I crossed the same street headed home. The sun was high, it was almost one o’clock. I’d just had coffee with my best friend; also 29. We talked about men, one-night stands and varicose veins. We poured honey in our cups, getting sticky, both avoiding sugar for different reasons. I’d had a fine time, chatting as women do about nothing and everything all at once. I was feeling about as content as any woman could in a cold January.

And then I remembered van man. I remembered how men who holler from vans can always tell that you are a woman even though your only visible body part is your forehead. I remembered how I was neither bothered nor terribly upset after van man shouted at me. I remembered how what he had said had seemed stranger than the fact that he had said anything at all. Hootin’ and hollerin’ is normal; men can be a lascivious lot.

When I was in my early twenties I used to smile when I received ‘compliments’. I even referred to comments from men I’d never met as ‘compliments.’ I suppose I was encouraging them without realizing it.

When I was 25 or so, I tended to yell back. Once, a pack of teenage boys were shooting insults at my best friend and me from behind us. So first we walked to the other side of the street, not far enough away in hindsight, then we started flinging insults back. Almost ten years older than they, we females were outnumbered and therefore in danger. Or that’s what the boys wanted us to believe. One encouraged me to suck his dick. I said, I would if he had one. We’d never met before that side street and yet so much hate was tossed around that we might have seemed to yet another stranger to be bitter ex-lovers reunited by fate or hard luck.

But van man and I had a mutual understanding. Once van man’s stare returned to his dashboard, his grubby steering wheel, the turn signal, we both moved on. Though I’ve turned his words into dialogue, I know for certain he will never read them, and even if he does he will almost positively never hear my voice. He never saw me, actually. Not my love of Nerds and recycling; not the two or three gray hairs that have started to grow from the center of my forehead.

He saw woman. He saw weak.

Nor did I see him. His love of –, his addiction to –; all assumptions. Nor did I weigh the possibility that he genuinely felt some love for me in that moment. Perhaps that was his good deed for the day. Perhaps he normally throws in some profanity. Perhaps he was being nice.

We looked beyond each other, through each other, seeing others like statues or place markers of individuality.

His ears do not register “woman” and I sing too sweetly for the dogs.