**photo of lower Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry, by DieselDemon, Flickr Creative Commons.
Today’s high is 82 degrees. It is bunched and muggy and
mostly euphoric on the sidewalks. The temperature has set the city into a
different tone today, one of skirt-awareness, bare-arm awareness, warmth-on-skin awareness.
My route to the ferry landing passes a bus stop that is a
long, peopled alcove, like Venus’ half shell. People there seem bored, waiting,
like they could be prone to catcalls or sneering. They haven’t, so far, and I’ve
needed to grant (reluctantly, sometimes, and the reluctance is with good reason)
points to Staten Island.
This morning I passed the bus stop without incident, but next
went by two teenage boys, one of whom was speaking to the air in front of me as
I walked past. I was surprised by the anatomical
specificity of what he was saying. The other boy said to him, “Are you talking
to her?” The first boy spun away and said, “Hell No!” It was one of those
teenage things. I have no idea to whom he was talking. He was a good-looking kid, which
might help him--and I do think our culture tells him it’s fine to be that
direct. Maybe this will last a year or two, his way of talking. In a way I felt sympathetic for his raw teenage
struggle, his awkwardness. I wondered
how far this would get him. (On the other hand, ick, boundaries.)
But it was just part of the heat-wave morning, and I breezed
onto the ferry, where the front and back doors of the ship were left ajar for
air to waft in from the bay, and we multitudes sat on long, multi-colored
benches, trying not to crib body heat in our proximity. The sun was low and a heated yellow
in the sky, the Statue of Liberty glinting in its light. The water had a muggy, blurred edge.
**photo by Lindsey Turner, Flickr Creative Commons.
Later, at a Midtown
elevator, a man in a suit said to me, “I was waiting for you." I said, “Ah.
Well, thanks,” meaning for not letting the door shut too fast. I remarked about the weather. “Hot day!” he declared. I observed that we were expecting
rain, and that it might get cooler. “Yes, but HOT rain!” he said. We laughed, though I was a little uncertain. “You
will not be satisfied!” he said. “By this rain,” he continued after a pause.
Heat waves bring out strange things, yes. It is an electric
day.
