She Hides in Windows
She waits in the dark of the window, because she is a liar and she knows it.
She waits for the last customers to leave, and in the plaza below she sees the waitstaff scurry around to clean up quickly so they can have as much of their evening—as much of their lives—as possible.
The boy is among them, and she watches him scrub mashed noodles out of a tablecloth. She would like to go down, to help him under the peach glow of the streetlights that line the lake walk, to graze her fingers supposedly on accident against his arm. But she knows if she goes down there, she will have to say something about herself, and she will lie, and it will break her heart.
Or she will say something true and stupid, and her heart will break all the same.
So she stays at the window with the lights off in her flat so she can blend in with the dark drapes. She watches the boy joke shyly with his compatriots, watches him decline their invitation to the bar down the block, their thumbs pointing over their shoulders. Next comes the part she loves best, when he lights a cigarette, standing at the corner with his apron still on, and blows smoke at the moon. She wants him to look around at the buildings, look up to her window, and she loves that he doesn’t.
On Thursday she decides to pass him on the street. Not with the object of engaging him; just for the thrill of his seeing that she exists. It takes her forty-five minutes to pick out the clothes she’ll wear, and the shoes, and to comb her hair just so, and to slide a book into her purse to give it some weight, as though she is coming home from work. She decides on a black tank and a long, high-waisted skirt—a look decisive enough to draw the eye but not a billboard. She is not ready for him to know about her secret window, so she stages her entrance two blocks away. She knows he will come out from the subway and turn the corner toward the restaurant.
She walks slowly toward the subway entrance. He does not emerge. She circles the block quickly and tries again.
He is not there. She remembers Thursday is his day off. She walks to the book store to give herself something to stave off the embarrassment, and then she remembers the book in her bag. She hides it behind a neighbor’s potted plant in an alcove. She doesn’t want to give the bookkeep reason to suspect she’s stealing, since sometimes she does.
On Friday she turns on the corner lamp and hides behind the curtain. He looks up. Her heart quintuples in size, jamming up against her jaw so it’s hard to swallow.
She wants the story to continue, but she knows if it does she’ll ruin it. She crawls under the window and switches the lamp off.
