Identity & Culture
Sidewalk geometry
We stepped into the gutter at the same time. She was a stranger. The sidewalk was narrow — a Brooklyn block in late September, scaffolding on one side, a stoop on the other — and a...
Read →Point / Counterpoint
Her side
I take the half-step on purpose
The half-step is a tactic. I have been doing it on purpose for twelve years. I trade the visual center of the room for the part of the room where people say things they would not say to the loudest person. Men tell me what they actually think about the deal when they think I am the polite one. I have closed two acquisitions and one custody arrangement from that position. The other women in my profession have started to notice. We have not put a name on it. We do not need one. What looks like deference from the front of the room is a listening post most of the men in the room cannot afford. I will give it up when I have to. I have not had to.
His side
I watched her do it for twenty years before I asked
I noticed it at our wedding. She was looking at me, but her feet were angled at her father, who had not spoken to her for two years. I have watched her body turn itself toward the people she is trying to keep in her life ever since. At dinners with my parents. At funerals. In the kitchen with my brother. I do not know how to ask her to stop. I know that I am one of the people she has angled herself toward, and that what I read for two decades as warmth was also a calculation I had been the beneficiary of without paying. I am fifty-four. I have still not asked her. I think I am afraid the answer will be that the angling is the warmth, and that the warmth was never the part I thought it was.
