"How Not To Run Away From Monsters" by Elizabeth Gaffney
The following is a section from the Epiphany’s Summer 2023, “Stay” issue. To read more from the issue’s other excellent contributors, purchase your copy today in print or digital.
The front door lay in bits when the family returned. Broad daylight, Sunday afternoon, 1970. Tawny splinters, chips of paint. Twisted chicken glass crunched beneath Liz’s mary janes.
Fifty years later, she passed that doorway as she walked home to her daughters, pizza box in her arms. She wheezed, just barely able to make out the aroma of the margarita's mozzarella and sauce. Sometimes she couldn't tell what was suffocating her anymore, her lungs’ asthmatic slime coat or those three fucking layers of damp cotton.
The old place was in excellent repair, she saw, bricks recently repointed, all the window trim and ironwork glowing with tidy black semi-gloss. She didn't know who lived there now. It hadn't been so spiffy, then, the day its iron gate was installed.
Other families were picking up stakes, fleeing to the woods of Westchester, Jersey, Darien, on the day the Browns took the kids to hear Pete Seger at the Seaport and came home to no more front door. But even after the city reared up and bit them, the Browns stayed. It was cheap yet rarified, vibrant if decaying, challenging and worth it. It contained multitudes. They had stayed for the people. They’d refused to drop dead for the people.
Now, where were all the people? At home, of course, hiding from each other and a virus. The bridge park had been desolate as Liz walked its piers in her orange polka dotted mask with yellow rickrack ties. She'd stopped to read the lines written in the railing along the pier — flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide! — then called the pizza place. The person who had handed her the warm, wide box was wearing full PPE, a hat with a face shield over a mask, gloves, but she recognized him and he her. They exchanged eye smiles and "Stay Safes," and off she went, back to Ada and Storey. Jake was at work. He wouldn't be coming home to them.
When they’d got home from the Seaport, Liz's father braced himself on the spalling brownstone door jamb as he leaned down and picked up the robbers' ax from the pile of splintered wood and shattered glass. He’d lifted it over his shoulder. "Stay out on the sidewalk," he commanded, and then, like a gladiator, entered the apartment.
Their super, Henry, flew up the block, pork pie hat sliding back on his bald head. Usually, he gave Liz and her brother, Victor, lollipops. Not that day.
"I called the cops, and Vinnie-the-iron-guy. And I got this…"
He lifted his shirttail to reveal a gray pistol grip tucked in his waistband. Liz and Victor bugged their eyes at each other. Their mother blanched.
"Where's the mister?" Henry asked.
At which point Liz's father reemerged through the shattered doorway.
"You shouldn'ta gone in there by yourself, Mister B," said Henry.
"Well, I had the ax," said Liz's father.
"Ax no match for bullet."
"Anyway, they're gone."
Liz remembered the day in snapshots: the sparkling, mast-hemmed harbor, the chips of wood, the navy blue carpet of her parents’ room strewn with brassieres, their TV trussed up by the door in the green mohair blanket that belonged on the back of the sofa. The strange militarization of Henry, with his gun, and her usually bookish father, with the ax. There were absences: her mother's vacant jewelry box and the space on Liz's dresser where her sterling piggy bank with the leather ears once stood. The next day, in Kindergarten, Liz had brought a shard of wood from their stove-in door for Show and Tell, passed it around like a piece of the true cross. Each child touched the broken wood that had been touched by the robber, pondering their vulnerability. Mrs. Chapin asked her if she wanted to tell the class anything.
"We got a metal gate," she said. “We’re going to be safe now.”
In the spring of 2020, when the lockdown began, Liz still owned the ax that broke down her childhood front door, though she hadn't used it in decades. Sometime around the turn of the millennium, she and Jake began burning logs of recycled cardboard and wax. It was supposed to be greener. Still, she was glad she had the ax.
She'd talked to her brother on the phone, in the Midwest, other day. He'd told her he worried about riots and looting. Victor taught painting at a university. He’d been more progressive once. But when they spoke, he admitted he'd stood in a line for two hours to buy ammo, "just in case."
They'd had such a lovely day at the Seaport. Pumpkin carving on the deck of the sloop Clearwater. Gulls wheeling overhead. Halyards snapping in the breeze. Pete Seeger singing his song of danger … warning … love … and justice … all over this land. Her family sang it together on car trips, along with the radio. To Liz, then, "The Hammer Song" was the mysterious thread that connected the lettuce boycott to Viet Nam. One of Liz's uncles had died in the war, one was still fighting, and a third went to Canada forever because of it, and the lettuce workers were not safe on their farms, meaning Liz must eat sulfurous broccoli for her vegetables instead of the sweet iceberg wedges she loved. The world was filled with unwelcome changes and sudden peril, but singing "The Hammer Song" helped fix it. The wind wafted the lyrics out across the East River along with the seaweedy smell that issued from tin-clad sheds of the Fulton Fish Market — trimethylamine, the stinking decomposition product of the molecule that enables fish to survive in the salty seas.
Liz never saw the Market open for business, not in all her years. It closed for the day at seven in the morning, and then, in 2005, it closed forever. Even with the shutters locked, it reeked. Even after the market moved to Hunt's Point, its old shed stank for another thirteen years, till the city finally demolished it. Liz wished she'd gone, just once, before dawn, and shopped its bins for oysters, crabs, eels or skate wings. Just once breathed its clean ocean whiff before the scales and filets caught the shimmer of dawn and deoxidized into their putrescent components. Fish, when it's fresh, has an extra oxygen atom. With that atom, it smells nothing like the Market in the heat of the day and not remotely like the breaded sticks her mother lifted from the pan with metal tongs every Friday and served to Liz and her brother with ketchup and macaroni. Fish, when it's fresh, sparkles like crashing waves trimmed in bubbly white lace. It smells as glistening and transparent as the eyeball Liz's father gave her in a baggie after gutting their bluefish one morning when she was nine: golden iris, deep black pupillary well, lens like ether. Fresh fish is one with ocean.
It had been a warm holiday weekend at the end of fourth grade. The Browns had gone to the shore. Her father took her, just her, not Vic, she didn't remember why. It was the spring of the Bicentennial, because she'd been wearing her 200 Years Young t-shirt, white material, blue trim at the neck and arms, red lettering.
As they landed the first fish that Liz had ever hooked herself, it thrashed.
"Back off, Liz," her father shouted. "These guys have some serious teeth in them."
It was big, or big to her, and when it thrashed again, the hook tore free from its cheek. Blood flew. Her father swore as it slashed his thumb. He knocked the fish's skull against the metal stanchion, and it went slack. A few minutes later, as her dad pulled the loose flap on the pad of his thumb back into place with a pair of butterfly bandages, Liz saw that her t-shirt was spattered and wondered, Whose blood?
Liz had sealed the fish eye in a rinsed-out olive jar and packed it in her suitcase for the trip back to Brooklyn. Then on Tuesday morning, she tucked the eye into her lunchbox along with her ham sandwich, her dill pickle, and her Thermos of milk. A nine-year-old girl with an eyeball in an olive jar can freak out her friends. Liz wanted to make them laugh, to make them scream, to make them think she was tough. She'd been worried her best friend Julie was drifting toward another girl who'd joined their class midyear. Taking the eyeball to school was a misstep. It only nudged Julie further away. Still, Liz liked the eyeball. Now and then, she reached into the back of the refrigerator where she kept it hidden behind the horseradish and marmalade, took out the cold glass and regarded it. It looked back at her but never judged. It helped her be brave that whole summer between fourth and fifth grades. By Halloween, the eyeball had gone to sludge and been discovered and discarded by her mother. The trimethylamine when she opened it made the house smell like a packing plant for hours.
The winter she turned ten, Liz developed a phobia of the nearby welfare hotel she passed on her way to school every morning and started going three blocks out of her way, just to avoid it. The St. George had been grand once. Liz's mom had stayed there as a girl and swum in its vast saltwater swimming pool. She'd eaten breakfast one table over from Esther Williams. By Liz's childhood, the pool and all the fancy restaurants were shuttered. The guests, such as they were, paid by the month or the week, cooking their noodle soups in hotpots — or maybe they survived entirely on sandwich crackers and tapwater, and the city covered the rent. It wasn't the diet of the guests that worried Liz. It was the random justice of the icy milk cartons that fell like bombs from their windowsills. Her father had written a story for the paper about a forty-year-old mother of three who was killed by a quart.
How old are you, Mommy? Liz had asked.
As she walked by the old hotel now, she looked up at its repointed yellow bricks and sandblasted limestone sills and imagined the dead mother's thoughts as the rock-hard wax-paper carton hurtled — 2% over homogenized over MISSING. (Etan Patz had been six years old.) It struck her coronal suture, the spot where babies have those soft fontanelles. What should I make them for lunch? the mother might have been thinking. Wham. The mother's pupils dilated, and her brain bled out. What visions did she see? Whose frozen milk was it? Was the milk’s owner a murderer? A manslaughterer? A motherslaughter? Did the person even know what had happened, when they opened their window the next morning, letting in the bitter cold, and cursed to find the milk missing. Did they grumble as they choked down their coffee black? Liz remembered a few residents of the hotel, as diverse as the city itself but with at least one thing in common: the winter was their only refrigerator. They were probably sleeping on the streets now, those that were still alive, chilled milk a forgotten luxury. Gentrification, a suspicious fire, and welfare reform had conspired to evict them. Only the hotel itself came up roses — after years of boarded-up windows and doors, the decaying building was gutted and transformed into a fancy dorm. It was a survivor.
Liz credited her father for her own survival of the Seventies. Beginning just after the Seaport robbery, he'd taught her how to walk on the streets of New York City: how to be fully aware.
Don’t walk inside scaffolding or tightly parked cars.
Know who’s on the sidewalk with you — and across the street.
Look them in the eye, and they will choose another victim.
If you hear hoots or whistles, change your route — it may be a signal among thieves.
Keep a fake wallet with just $5.00 to give to your mugger, so you don’t get fleeced for more.
Hold your keys so one protrudes through your fist as a weapon, and have them ready before you approach your door. Check the surroundings first, then enter quickly.
Caution and preparedness were part of the equation, but because her father believed the corollary of safety was fear, he had also taught Liz not to be afraid. Not of bad guys, nor of darkness, not of death, nor decay. Cycle of life, Chicken Little, he said. It's unavoidable. Deal with it.
It wasn't a lesson she’d always remembered.
Liz had propped the front door of her parents' building open the day when things came full circle for her father, hoping it would speed the EMTs to his rescue. This was long before Liz's daughters were born. It still made her wince with regret that they never got to meet their Da. The 911 operator recommended the door thing, to save time. It didn't make a difference. Funeral directors, not medical technicians, carried her father away in a Naugahyde bag. Her mother shrieked as they put him in the van. No one had expected it, not yet, though probably they should have. He'd had that mortician's pallor, atherosclerosis, a history of heart disease.
They left the door open, even after the hearse turned the corner. Soon, Jake walked up the block. Then out of a cab from the airport stepped Liz's brother, Victor, and his wife. All day and night, a stream of mourners came and went through the unlocked portal, bearing flowers and casserole and love. No one thought to shut it.
Crime had gone down since the Seventies, Liz thought, as she stepped over the round metal hatch in the sidewalk, just beside her stoop, and removed her mask. Assault, burglary and homicide were almost non existent since the Lockdown, though that was temporary. Liz stood in the very spot where her daughters' brand-new over-and-under stroller had flipped, shortly after Storey was born. Liz and Jake had saved up for the thing, a seemingly ingenious invention that enabled a parent of two to navigate busy sidewalks and shop the narrow aisles of urban grocery stores, and it came in such great colors. They chose red. Ada, their toddler, reached for the handle for leverage as she climbed out of the lower seat, her weight pivoting the stroller on it rear wheel. The crack when occiput met bluestone ripped through Liz's core like a gunshot. The lower seat was for the smaller child, according to the safety warning Liz became aware of only after the incident. Who read the instructions on a stroller? Who followed all the rules?
Failing to follow the rules resulted in a thirty-second blackout, a trip to the ER, permanent amnesia for the prior and subsequent twenty-four hours, and who knew what other insults to Storey’s still-forming brain. When she later was diagnosed with dyslexia, they wouldn’t know why. But unlike the case of the mother and the milk, the swelling subsided, Storey survived.
What was the difference: blunt force from this or that, pneumonia from a common virus or a novel one, system collapse due to coronary artery disease or a cytokine storm? The death rate throughout human history, as her father'd often remarked, holds constant at 100%. The goal being to stave it off as long as you can, at least long enough to reproduce, and to make the most of the interstices.
Liz was raising her children in Brooklyn, in the neighborhood where she was raised. They were upstairs right now, doing their homework perhaps, awaiting her return with dinner and unconditional love. Did she love them unconditionally? Was there a chance she despised them, saw them as parasites who’d unwittingly trapped her in the very prison she and her own parents had inhabited, the prison of life? No, not today. Today, they tethered her to life. They snapped shut the possibility of an easy out: the oven, the Sylvia Plath maneuver, the choice her grandmother had made.
Why twist any longer on this mortal coil, when the end was the end was the end?
Because of matching ladybug boots, an imaginary friend named Move-On Marvin, and the way Ada had made the pandemic spring sweet by baking thirty variations of chocolate lava cake. Because of the wild shrieks of the girls jumping hand in hand off the lifeguard stand, the terror, the joy, the sisterhood.
Jake, was at the hospital, all suited up in full PPE as if this was an airborne toxic event. Which it was. He'd been sleeping at a free hotel room in midtown for weeks now to spare the family the risk of contagion. Was survival worth solitude, distance, separation? Sometimes she didn't think she could do it anymore, single parenting, living in fear. Then she thought of him saving the lives of strangers, or trying to, coping and kind in the face of their massive viral loads. She had to try harder.
Before she climbed the stoop, she set down the cooling pizza and reached into her bag for sanitizer and her keys. She squirted and scanned the streetscape all around: cars, stoops, lampposts, several masked pedestrians, none of them muggers. Which didn't make them safe. Killers were incognito now, asymptomatic carriers. Was it just her, she wondered, or did everyone now have revolting breath? She was looking forward to a visit to the hygienist, as soon as this was over. She imagined the day the masks came off, the vaccine was available, the streets again teemed with people. It seemed scary. People, the point of life, were also a threat. The vector. They always had been, to some extent.
For every season, there was a peril and a fitting mode of self-defense. Someday, the pandemic would end. Soon, her girls would be ready for their own jagged Medecos. It wasn't the Seventies anymore, but when the masks came off, there would be joblessness. Would crime resurge? She must teach the girls that every key was also a weapon. They would need to know.
A neighbor she recognized but had never spoken to drifted toward with her, green coffee straw shoved through a hole in her mask. Was that kosher, Liz wondered? Was that distant? The woman had her eyes glued to her phone, as usual, but then, when she got close, she looked up, met Liz's eyes and waved her green tea Frappuccino.
"Hi," said Liz.
Some people claimed there'd been progress in the world — this was a kinder, fairer time. Others argued the confluence of pandemic and cicada, warming and war, tornadoes and police violence, proved humanity was doomed. Liz squinted her fish eye at the scene around her, then picked up the pizza and climbed the stairs. So far, she'd weathered emergencies real and imagined, faced monsters large and small, wiggled out of disasters natural, man- and woman-made. So, presumably, had that neighbor with her drink, and all the rest of the people out there on the sidewalks. Jake. Even their girls, in their own ways. She peered through the window, into the vestibule. There was no one waiting there to mug her. If you survived long enough to breed, you’d been selected. The rest was gravy. She pushed against the outer door and stepped into the must of years. A gust of ocean, fresh off the harbor, followed her into the vestibule. She shoved her key in the lock.
Elizabeth Gaffney is the author of the novels Metropolis and When the World Was Young. She also teaches at NYU, is the editor at large of A Public Space and runs the virtual writers space the24hourroom.org.
