Christy Writes: The Unseen Couple Outside My Window
There is a couple who talk outside my writing room window every morning.
I live in a city, so people giving me my daily dose of their noise is not unusual. Silence, on the other hand, is unusual. And generally cause for concern. But these two people fascinate me. He is always out there, at the same time every morning, waiting for the bus. And she walks past, at the same time every morning, and they talk. Her voice always chirps a happy hello when she sees him, I can usually hear him laugh at some point.
This is not a flirtation, it seems important that I point out. Their exchanges never have that tone, and as a longtime student of interpersonal interactions and human social mores, I know flirting when I hear it. This is a genuine appreciation of each other, a high point in each of their mornings.
The bus stop he’s waiting at is directly beneath my window, which is always open in the mornings as I sit there, drinking coffee and writing in my journal. I have never stood up to see what they look like, although I easily could. I don’t, for some reason, want to know. My ears fill me in on the basics. She is young-ish, black, and cheerful. I don’t know where she lives or where she works, all I know is that she doesn’t take that bus. He is older, white, and he smokes. The sweetly acrid smell of cigarette floating on the morning air always finds me first, heralding his arrival at the bus stop before I ever hear him speak. I don’t know where he lives or where he works, only that he takes that bus to get there.
Soon she passes, and they greet each other. There’s a little banter, some pedestrian observation about the weather, local happenings, and whatever the current situation is right there right then on this part of the street. Then she pushes off, on to work, to the rest of her day, to the rest of her life, and eventually he grinds out the stub of his cigarette and gets on the bus and disappears until he turns up again the next morning, like a slow-moving boomerang the bus is playing with. I don’t need to know what either of them look like. I know all I need to know.
“Call me later!” she usually tosses over her shoulder as she’s walking away.
“Call me later.” This adds a whole new dimension to my audio observations of these two. “Call me later” is nothing I’ve ever said to someone I chat with on the street, even someone I see regularly. The whole purpose of sidewalk talk is to exchange pleasantries, to prove to the world and maybe yourself that you are capable of interacting in polite society, then to get on your way again. In his essay “Imperial Bedroom,” Jonathan Franzen says “All I really want from a sidewalk is that people see me and let me see them.” I concur. That’s why these two are an endless fascination to me. They see and are seen. Their chat is not of the variety in which “Call me later” seems necessary or even relevant. Yet it must be, because nearly every day it is her parting comment, and his gruff rejoinder is always “Yeah. I’ll call ya.” I’ve no idea if he actually calls her later or not.
These two are slowly restoring my faith in people, in our ability to interact with each other without a screen between us, with our inherent knowledge that it doesn’t matter our age, our race, or our gender, because the bottom line is we’re all in this together.
When I was a little girl back in Kansas, I remember being in the kitchen with my mother one evening and hearing the tornado sirens go off. Any kid who has lived in Kansas any real length of time doesn’t immediately panic, as you might expect, when the siren goes from its low guttural groan to a full-blown wail. The sirens are part of the sounds of summer to a Kansas kid, and we took our cues from our parents anyway. They were the ones who were tasked with listening to the weather reports and keeping us safe. If they didn’t seem worried, we went right back to the Dukes of Hazzard without batting an eye.
On that particular night, I remember my mother glancing out the window at the sky, then turning on the kitchen radio. Worry level: medium. I went to the sliding glass patio door which allowed me a better view of everything. Beneath the gathering clouds, which were getting angrier by the minute, I could see our neighborhood, each of the houses surrounded by lawns all the kids trampled all summer long, the sandy alleyways that made up our personal juvenile road system, the familiarity of every tree, every garbage can, every light in every window, and I thought, “Well, at least we’re all in this together.”
That all of us could end up sucked into a funnel cloud to rival Dorothy’s didn’t particularly frighten me because a) Dorothy got some awesome shoes out of the deal and b) there was strength in numbers. As long as the world as I knew it was right there together, we’d be fine.
It’s the same feeling I get listening to the pair outside my window in the mornings. They have become part of the world as I know it, and as long as they are out there, engaging in their morning chatter, I feel safe. Because they are kind, because they are connecting with respect and affection, I connect with them. When I read in the news about murders and robberies, rape and abuse and neglect, I disconnect. I don’t choose to link my world with that world. It’s foreign to me, distasteful and distrustful. The man and woman outside my window are part of a world I link to. We’re all in this together. And as they wrap up their chat and she sings out “Call me later!” I am suddenly completely certain that he will.
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