In the Slammer With Carol Smith by Hortense Calisher Page B

knowing the city, its new haunts and plazas, that indeed is her obligation. Over the summer she’d grown rusty at it. Behind the two of them, the crooked street had already realigned itself. He hadn’t asked her where she might be off to, with her pack. Standing on the leftover slate steps, she’d waved goodbye at him. Yet she has kept the appointment.
    ‘This Palm Garden plaza’s in the news,’ he says now, swilling his coffee with vigor. ‘As “a democratic anomaly.”’
    The last two words ring like bells from a distant convent. If she lets them into her brain, where words like that had used to rear like fists, they will stretch her mind, the way the tailor’s wooden form had stretched the hat of Milan straw bought for her when she was ten, and every year enlarged. What can she do with such a phrase, in her daily round? He has brought the newspaper with the article in it; he’s enlarging himself, for the job. She sees the phrase like a storefront that sells foreign wares.
    The Garden is wonderful. High as a church, silly with de luxe shops at the sides, and cleansed by the view of the river that comes from the sea. Children of all races sprinkle the stiff rows of metal seats like poppies, in the bright cheapy jackets that could be bought at any mall; their folks, seen when the tots run to them, are not the sort who would buy at the shops here. Outside the great central window, figures stroll the walk as if the painter behind all this has unfrozen them. Tourists chat, lifting their chins. It hurts her to observe these levels; she is used to being solely in one. The barrio had had none too challenging. She hadn’t been for years in the streets of perfection over East. Here, she feels uneasily, the people, all of them, are being challenged by the decor. ‘Where’s that word again?’
    He puts her finger on the newsprint headline. ‘Anomaly.’
    ‘I still have trouble,’ she says. ‘Observing.’
    He nods, not yet thinking that strange. They both will be receding from the Cat Club, she thinks. He in his way, she in hers. She tries to read the newspaper column, but shakes her head. ‘You may need glasses—’ he says. ‘You better check.’ She knows he doesn’t believe that. Maybe he’s being kind. If so—she wants to tell him, it’s all right with her.
    ‘There’s this controversy, you see—’ he says. ‘On whether the buildings around this plaza are allowed to keep the odd people out. Or whether the city must demand that they can stay. Even in the daytime, they’re being shoo’ed. Nobody’ll say who’s doing it. Maybe the city itself is taking advantage, this here says.’ He taps the news-sheet. His nails have always been nice. ‘Now that winter’s near, it’s coming to a head.’
    ‘The dirty people,’ she says. Sorry though, when he turns red. One can’t act that. Or not so quick.
    ‘I’m not distancing myself, Carol. And I could lose the job.’
    Sneakily, they scan the rows of chairs, the tables like their own, the long aisle leading to the stores on the garden’s rim, the bright wind-protected vision up front.
    There. In the second row of chairs. A middle-aged man with a woolen cap; at first glance he might be anybody, even a ringer for the waiter at the Greek restaurant, dawdling maybe before time to go on shift. But the collar of his lumberjack is badly frayed, and the body in it has no outline; you wear the extra blanket; she knows that trick. And the bag on his lap is too plump for groceries. But his feet are decently on the floor, and he is staring rigidly eyes front, as if the view is his defense. No guards anywhere, that she can see. Police? Yes, there’s one lounging near the Restroom’s sign. And there, not too far from him, in the last row of chairs, a girl is sleeping, her feet stretched on a second chair, a bundle in front of her on the elegant tile-stone floor. All in a not too dusty black, she might pass. Some yards behind her, one of the huge bordering vases