Gentrificate

The night breeze at this outdoor café reminds her of his fingers in her hair. She wants those fingers on her skin, her waist. She sighs and leans in to him even more, caressing his soft palms and coarse knuckles. A thickened middle finger joint. A pointer finger ever pointing to it's left. A pinky finger unable to bow. The hands that knew every inch of her and so expertly learned her most private of inches now spent their time fumbling with the wooden table where they sit. Ripping off the stickers from local bars and bands, his smoke-yellowed two fingers use their oil to rub of the remainder of the glue from the first sticker, his left palm rubbed itself against it, rolling it into a tiny ball until his thumb stamped it, stuck to it, and dropped it into an upside down beer cap that was sitting at the table before they intruded on its rest. She is jealous of the stickers, ripped to shreds by his hands, though no one who knew her would ever have guessed. His fingers were all crookedly healed from years of jamming hands bartending without insurance. Half the time she's known him he's had one or another finger handsomely wrapped with popsicle sticks by the school nurses where they met working as assistant teachers. She loves those hands. They show his two jobs, his exhaustive daily effort to succeed. Her last boyfriend's mom got a new nose “just for fun,” and these hands are about 60% of her attraction to her Bushwick-raised man.

A red umbrella at their purposefully worn wooden table blocks the view of the barbed wire a neighbor put on the top of their fence. Catching a glimpse of it, she mentions “My mother collects barbed wire! She loves industry 'cause she was raised in a factory town.” Looking up to check out the plain barbed wire, he shares that the moon and stars are why he loves living out in Brooklyn so much: "You can actually see the stars here.” She thought about how her Hamptons summers reveal the same sky, but knows not to share that with him.

Their waiter, a man who has begun his transition into hipster with a strong start to a beard and mustache, a forearm tattoo and a trendy updated 50s style haircut, greased back, comes to take drink orders. Her man takes his role very seriously, and always orders for them, tonight being no exception. He likes to make an effort, and speaking for his lady is his old-school way of expressing his feelings. Assuming a lack of familiarity of alcohol on her part due to her age, he orders two Coney Island Brewery somethings without knowing her typical drinking order is a Pinot Grigio. He intensely watches the waiter as he works. He hates this new group of kids moving into his hood. They’re all Midwesterners — a dirty word in the city — stealing the neighborhood, pushing his favorite Mexican places and Halal food carts out. He glances at the swiftly moving feet of the visitor to his land, running around the restaurant as his arms carry drinks. The sneakers are worn on the tops, the soles are new. He looks at his own shoes, not listening to the story his girl is telling him about a squirrel she made friends with at the park, and remembers the time he spilled bleach on them at work while cleaning the bar bathrooms. He was furious at having destroyed his new shoes, but this bearded loser went out and bought pre-worn shoes to go with what his neighborhood is becoming.

The dinner conversation lands on school, as he reveals that he has been planning to head back to college now that he has “finally got off my ass and got that GED,” but by the time food arrives, he is defending himself from her critique, a critique she would never have thought, let alone said. A whole family raised not to judge on looks, but who never refrain to mock her “public school talk.” Her siblings always kindly made sure to point out that her experience could be good for her future; being able to relate, without acknowledging that these speech slips were becoming her real self with each passing year. Her date says with a wave of his fork, throwing her feelings on the barbed wire on the other side of their umbrella, “you wouldn't get it, Miss Cardigan.” She wasn't wearing a cardigan that night. Her support sounds patronizing to him, and he cocks up his chin and says “Not everyone can have a job they love, some people have to work!” As though she works solely to fill her time.

He paid the check though she clumsily objected, perkily letting slip that "It's not really my money, this credit card is connected to my Mom's account!" With pursed lips he replied, “Must be nice.” He had a decade on her, something he never brought up after discovering it, but gave him both shame and pleasure as an automatic elder in every situation between them. Having walked past four blocks of iron-fenced walk-ups and the single bodega for the entire neighborhood, he recommends they watch Leon The Professional, which she had never heard of and he had seen in theatres. She teases him for stealing jugs of blue liquid soap from his bar that he keeps in a shot glass with a spilled lentil in it on his kitchen sink for use on his hands, body and dishes. She hopes with enough teasing he would get body soap, dish soap, face soap, hand soap.

While he had his last smoke of the evening until the urge woke him up as it does every night, she had fallen asleep on the brown-stained beige sofa having washed the city summer off with a lentil-shower. She didn’t look spoiled here, in a borrowed wife beater and plaid boxers. On his coffee table next to his one-hitter he saw his roommate's bong-mask and her Furla bag. He whispered to himself, “fuckin’ idiot,” referring to the lost 125 dollars his rich-kid roommate spent on such a piece of paraphernalia. His roommate was truthfully “slumming it” with him, and was open about it. He touched the leather her purse and thought it felt like every other purse his past girlfriends or his sister has had. He lifted his girl’s feet and slid beneath them. He touched her ugly toes and bottoms of her feet, rough from working and walking in fancier shoes than her lifestyle wanted. He thought he would buy her comfortable shoes for work, but told himself, ‘she’ll go back any day now.’ Back to a world where flats in the winter are sensible, and taxi travel so assumed that stilettos are worn without a second thought. He loved those ugly feet, the beautiful legs attached to them. He never saw anything like them before, and promised himself he would keep them at a distance.