The Petering of Out

Sandy, she says, “I haven’t felt this way since 1993,” as she arranges her blowsy grey wig in the wind. “I love the craggy grandeur of this godawful place…as long as I keep a polite distance from it. I can’t even get you to be in my dreams anymore.”

She glides and smooths her hands across the stone of six florid Corinthian columns that run along the sidewalk beneath the old Stock Exchange Building’s peaked crown. She closes her eyes and dreams of the terraced receding stories of ziggurats somewhere anciently up above, and her mind floats her over all those Renaissance palazzo-styled downtown buildings with their corny Beaux-Arts facades and their ornamental crests and palmette acroteria: so many strange, old things lost to the hasty temperament of the times. She dreams in pastels of marmalade windows with saffron-icing sills. She dreams, and then she does not.

If someone were to ask about her appearance, she’d tell them, “I got this flimsy tiara at a 99-Cents store in Vegas. It suits most of my occasions, with the occasional flute of champagne. These eyeglasses are broken in five places, and my heart’s in about the same shape. And this teal dress with the ruffles? Don’t ask me about this teal dress. Nobody likes the things that I like enough for my liking. I’m hiding my face from the present.”