(Originally featured in Flash Me Magazine: An Online Magazine for Flash FIction)
The cart she pushes is full of bags, and the bags are full of other bags, which are full of mysteries. We call her a “bag lady.” She is tall, although she’s grown taller as she’s grown more mythic through the years.
She has taken refuge on our block, in the cavity of the doorway of the brownstone across the street. The residents of the neighborhood scowl as they skim past her.
Our Greenwich Village apartment is small, but it is also warm. It smells of spruce and cider. My mother the conjurer has located every empty nook and adorned it with a bow, wreath, or figurines of the nativity. The tree is colossal, overwhelming the room. An abundance of presents pour from its base, more presents than we can afford. As I lean wide-eyed at my windowsill, the room is bursting with anticipation and the anticipation bestows itself on all I see.
The window frames the bag lady in the doorway. Opening it, I am confronted by winter’s chill. My mother yells my name, as she always does when I lean over the window’s edge. In defiance, I lean to my waist. I breathe in the crisp beauty of the air, but finally relent, shrinking from the cold. “Close the window,” she reprimands, as she shivers and rubs her arms, “It’s freezing.”
“She must be freezing,” I offer, and my mother, whom I have observed eyeing the bag lady before, slowly shakes her head. She pauses, fixes her brow and calls my father who is tinkering in the kitchen, stirring a bowl of cinnamon cider. “Look at that woman. She must be freezing.”
Overcome by the seasonal spirit, drunk with the smell of spruce, my father shakes his own head and fixes his own brow and, observing the bag lady’s plight, proclaims, “That is just awful.”
“We should do something, bring her something,” urges my mother.
My father, who knows that “we” means “he,” announces, “Then I’ll bring her some cider! That’ll warm her bones.”
“At least she’ll have the feeling,” offers my mother, “that somebody cares.”
My mother observes with concern as my father rummages through cabinets seeking the sacrificial cup. After all, we only have so many. Backtracking, my mother suggests, “Maybe we can just buy her some hot chocolate?”
My father nods the kind of dramatic nod that only a New York actor can muster. “I’ll go to the Deli” he declares, “and buy some hot chocolate!” He swoops into the closet and emerges with his coat. Then he propels the full force of his determination out of the door and onto the street.
My mother and I run giddily toward the window and, after a pause, my mother herself pushes open its weight, blasting our warm apartment with frosty air. We jut out our heads and waists, struggling to watch as he strides off to the corner. As he rounds it, our gaze returns to the bag lady across the street, hunkered in the doorway.
“It will be a few minutes,” observes my mother, regaining her composure, and she ushers the re-closing of the window. After a few moments of pacing she does not object when I open it again, and now we see my father navigating the corner, hot chocolate in hand. We both lean out.
My father, whose confidence is waning, who under the bravado is really rather shy, who feels awkward when he isn’t on stage, begins to slow his pace. As he approaches the bag lady I see his arm begin its gesture, hesitantly raising the hot chocolate.
Her head is turned away from him, yet as if with a third eye, she senses his approach. Rotating fully, she stands and rises to an impossible height. She steadies her gaze. The upward motion of her head is accompanied by a swelling of her chest. She heaves her wool and burlap about her like splendid velvet robes.
With the outstretched cup of hot chocolate my father speaks, but his voice is obscured by moving cars and the gurgle of our city’s eternal stew. I imagine that he says, “Here’s some hot chocolate.”
Then, after a pause, a voice rises porous through the traffic. It rises like Old Faithful, from the earth’s subterranean womb: “I do not like hot chocolate! Drink it yourself!”
When my father returns with the hot chocolate, he laughs woodenly and repeats what she has advised him.
Not long after, before the decorations went down, but after the bag lady moved on, my father tells some guests an anecdote about the hot chocolate he bought for a resident bag lady. The punch-line is her imperious retort.
My father laughs, and so do the guests, and so does my mother, and so do I. After all, she was just some bag lady, dressed in cruddy old wool and burlap, huddled alone in a doorway on Christmas Eve. She refused our hot chocolate. “Maybe her bags were full of money,” jokes my father. “Maybe she’s a millionaire.”
Before long, the wreaths come down from the walls and the lights come off the tree. The cider turns cold and the days turn warm.
Sometimes we still joke about the bag lady. It is an enduring joke, even as other bag ladies and bag men travel to the stoops and doorways beyond our windows, and stay there a while, and then move on.
But we never refer to the hollow tone of our laughter. We never refer to how we sat there, staring at unopened packages and how empty they looked.
I don’t know if we were insulted, or if we were afraid, but there’s a space in the story we always leave out. In this fissure we see her full height and we hear her cavernous voice; we sense her majesty; and we marvel at the burlap robes thrown over the shoulders that defy the trappings of our own fragile world.
