Free Tale for the Mirror by Hortense Calisher

dinner—the glasses thinning appropriately with the neighborhoods, all along the way.
    Even in the city though, the conversations of their friends were more and more loaded with the impedimenta of the parent. “That’s just like my Bobby” and “If you can just remember it’s a phase” floated above the bridge tables, and when the men coagulated in a corner afterward, even there, the inverted boasting of the successful male was likely to be expressed in terms of what it had been necessary to pay the orthodontist. When he and Bee met downtown for dinner these days, it was more and more often in a foursome with some couple older than they, some pair admiringly ticked off by others as “so devoted to one another” or “very close”—with only the faintest of innuendoes that this might be because there had been nothing else to come between.
    Of a sudden, he turned away from the entrance to the express highway and wheeled up the entrance marked LOCAL TRAFFIC.
    “Aren’t you going down the highway?”
    “Just thought I’d like to go by the old neighborhood.”
    In front of them, Broadway jigged like a peddler’s market. Tonight, Saturday, it would be streaming with the hot, seeking current of young couples walking hand in hand, as Bee and he had once done, picking their futures on the cheap from the glassed-in cornucopias of the stores. He felt an immediate throb of intimacy with these buildings, their fronts pocked with bright store-cubicles, their gray, nameless stone comfortably sooted over with living. From the ocher and malachite entrance of the building where Bee and he lived now, one walked, every pore revealed, into a fluorescent sea of light tolerable only to those who had in some manner arrived—the man jingling pocket change he would never dream of counting, the woman swinging lightly from her shoulders the stole of success. Most of the houses here would have small, bleared hallways with an alcove under the stairs, and on each of the five or six flights above there would be a landing where a boy and a girl, scuffling apart or leaning together, could smell, from their paint-rank corner, the indescribable attar of what might be.
    He touched the hydromatic foot pedal as they reached a stop light.
    “Not bad for a couple of kids from around here,” he said, slapping his free hand on the duvetyn seat.
    “Not bad.” She smiled up at him eagerly, two lines on either side of her mouth slightly frogging her cheeks. Her almost gross hunger for compliment always touched him nevertheless; she seemed to need to amass his every approving remark—either personal or marginal—as evidence that their life together was what he wanted it to be. He watched her as she looked out the window and squinted slightly for lack of the glasses she would never wear except at home. If you had put the Bee of tonight in a red dress with too much braid on it and had substituted a hairdresser’s springy weekend curls for her present casually planed coiffure, she would be very like the girl who had ridden uptown from City College with him, with whom he had walked these streets on countless Saturday nights. Still, with the years, a woman had a choice of either spreading or withering, and behind her quick, compulsive smile he sometimes caught a glimpse of what she might be at fifty. It was less frightening to see only age in the face of someone you loved, than to see the kind of aging it could be. He saw her at fifty—one of those women like shrunken nymphs, all slenderness and simulacrum from the rear, who, turning, met your glance with faces like crushed valentines.
    “Where on earth are you going?” she asked.
    They had left the vivid, delicatessen reek of the main street, and were traveling slowly down a street that dead-ended on the Harlem River. He stopped the car on a street with a few furtive secondhand stores on the west and a murky fuzz of unregenerated park on the east. None of it had changed with the years.
    “There’s