Overlook

On the grounds of a full year I worked for the landscaping crew and I went there at other times. What used to be an old white manor became the economics building, a longing for ghost stories dug into the beds. The only stranger I met on the grounds represented the Bank of Korea. We talked about magnolias. He gave me his card.

My job at the time was to follow around; the sunken garden was only one place. I walked there with boys in my off-hours, or to think or talk about boys, include boys, all kinds of plans sluicing down the hill to the river. Each time across the grass I made a dent. The central fountain drained for the winter. My favorite excuses are those of omission: I missed, I forgot, I didn’t know. Instead of noticing people and seed pods, I was busy.

I walked on the grounds with a boy. We kept saying, “Oh, look at this, oh, look at that.” I thought we should probably get married because of this looking at things, a flatness built into a slope. I had to get up at six the next morning to trim the boxwood hedges, one of my favorite smells under the sun, but scentless in weather. If only my boss and I were working, we’d talk. She instituted the recycling program and tried to keep construction sustainable. More and more buildings rose between older buildings and the river. Steadying the ladder required a certain amount of immobility: when she brought up Bible study or abstinence, I didn’t listen as well. Pressure cracked the thin ice on puddles, still loose underneath. “Keep working,” she said, or, “Don’t stop working.”

A year or so after birth, babies learn to look at what you’re pointing at instead of your finger. Opposites like “I” and “everyone else” open later in the season. So when I was walking on the grounds by myself, especially at their edge—a string, a sign hanging, a couple of posts—I kept looking behind me. The same man had raped four people, including an eight-year-old girl, somewhere beyond that. The circumstances weren’t unusual, a failure to take the slope into account. I climbed around for a while, thought in terms of being watched. The river furnished the incline, concentric orbits furnished the luxury of feeling: “Bury me in the shallows under the brown ice till it catches up with me.” For my inside to catch up with my outside was what I meant, but what that meant. I crossed back and went home.

Observations germinate in the eye. A lot of popular science exists around this, where the fact that “I” and “everyone else” aren’t really opposites sometimes fails in the ground. People look at the spot and they don’t know why, but it cause them trouble when watching, for instance, a skinny German kid along the top of a wall. Girlfriend upholding, some kind of white plaster falling away from the brick. He might or might not have if she hadn’t been there, that’s part of what I mean by trouble. The opera of finding and assuming a place—that’s easy to care for. The rest feels like spadework, or holding someone’s ladder. One points, the other looks. Or one points and looks.

The Hudson River carries its weight in glass and PCBs, otters and mutated fish, barges and discards to Manhattan, Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. And in suicides who conclude that enough has happened to them. Overlooking the river, the watershed; overlooking the watershed, builders and planners; overlooking the river, the grounds. A number of counselors were on call. The rest went home on our private paths. It’s natural to think, “I’m the opposite of a rapist.” On the other hand.

Observation falls short sometimes, as from a wrought-iron balcony, whatever the grounds for building. How, looking down, could a ghost imagine her future haunts, pot smoke and self-discovery, and fail to go back in? Niches along the outer wall of the garden mostly are empty or hold benches. One has a statue. The story’s that it’s a portrait, a daughter of the house, much loved, died young, and the rest. She has a concrete lamb under her hand. One breast pokes out of her concrete dress. Maybe it’s marble. People swear there are certain nights. A nice girl ghost. Spooky. Pleasant. Would it be possible, on any grounds, for me to plunder anyone? Then my opposite disappears like two beads of rain on the end of a black twig: now that there’s only one, where did the two go?

Orators are as valuable to the river as otters. Whole fortunes devoted themselves to ruining it, now overtly trusted to clean, to preserve, with columnar weight. To make it watchable, a bend or ox-bow, not two parts but the same part touching itself again. My friend works for one of these. Every day now, he returns to it. On the bank, ice shatters to a kick, infiltrated with habitual poisons. In going to any but familiar lengths, if it can’t stay despoiled and can’t be mended good as new—Not much in the way of growth to float there. I was blown away when he told me that devil-pods—black pointed flotsam so rampant they outnumber dead leaves on the bank—grow not on a tree but in the river. A kind of algae, he said, an invasive species. One niche faces another.

Somebody on the path behind me rang their bell, I stepped aside into the dark reaction. Builders and planners cut more each year: fewer places for rapists to hide and suicides to go, the dark woods, the dark water, they think. What they account for anxiously not to offer, harbor, or shelter. A couple of times I thought of taking up residence in the garden just to show them. Under a blind of dirty white walls, dirty snow, stick shadows, blue wells where something denser fell in. The landscape would need watching to prove it to them in the spring. Omissions of notice lead to excuses, excuses to organs, organizations, to seed pods and seeds. The manor house, built for some reason, changed, watched others to save itself. The river swelled with late runoff and protests. Just over the property line—two posts, a sign swinging emptily like a horror movie—the marchers made a circle, and speeches. Candles went out, lumps in their surroundings, as if rapists’ eyes were so different from ours that they glowed in the dark woods. Our shoes filled up with mud, a gradual account.

Omissions, false opposites, unmet conditions, a chant. Pointing for comfort: it’s something. In the low temporary building, a committee decides the disposal of some fields, ogles blueprints, defines orange pools of light on the northbound path. Just the size for two people to see and be seen in, and vanish into oxygen, pouring richly from stomata on one side. The roadside’s made of spindly, thriveless saplings from the cleared acre, transplanted and circled with wood chips by me and the rest. Not big enough, clinging, in spring the buds turned black.

People took blankets out to the grounds again. Letters arrived about walking safely or in pairs. Through flats, mud, water, loose straw and moldy grass seed, as if the builders had no option. Between cafeteria, library and manor house, between the water and the river. Paths ran. The landscaping crew despaired. Lovers slipped, even raised beds were swamped with preventable waters.




Kate Schapira lives, writes and teaches in Providence, RI, where she is an MFA candidate at Brown University. Her work has appeared in a number of print and online journals; she also enjoys making chapbooks and leaving them around for people to find. She's currently working on a serial story, which appears weekly at different outdoor locations around Providence, and a cycle of poems and essays about apartments.



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