by Melissa Haley
I see myself as if in a scene from a grainy home movie. I am sitting by the window in the residence hotel, nine stories up, when there is a knock on the door. I sit there, by the window, like an aeronaut on some hovering balloon, looking south toward that stretch of Broadway where it starts to curve inland, away from the river. I often sit at the round table by the window in my little room and wait. I wait for the pink neon Cannon’s Bar sign to pierce the December dusk as pigeons fly in wide circles, and I wait for other lights too, for the spire of the Empire State Building there in the distance, a different color every night it seems and what will it be tonight? I think of going down there someday, to the building itself, to ask how they decide, but I never do. I am in my little room of the residence hotel, waiting for my life to begin. I do not go out into the city; I do not ask questions. Instead, I sit and wait for this: the rare moment on the curve of Broadway below, when every streetlight is red for blocks heading downtown, creating a brief lit ribbon along with all the brake lights of stopped cars.
But there is a knock on the door! Inside my little room, nine stories up, I am usually waiting for the telephone to ring, not for a knock on the door. A knock on the door has never happened. I am too cheap and temporary to set up a phone account so my phone can only be used to call other rooms of the residence hotel (but I know no one else here) or used to call the front desk in the gold-painted lobby, decorated with framed posters of Antarctica. I could call the front desk to complain about the drum-machine-playing Manhattan School of Music student next door (though sometimes neighbors complain about me too, blasting punk rock from my double cassette boom box) or about the pet birds downstairs that squawk through the pink tiles of the bathroom floor while I take my baths, or about the cockroaches crawling through dirty plates in the kitchenette sink, crusted with remnants of the only thing I can cook so far in my sweet, short life: baked potatoes in a toaster oven. I think I am so adult with my corner kitchenette and toaster oven, and my cheap Mr. Coffee brewing Lipton’s Tea, which I drink by the potful while Star Trek reruns play on my portable black-and-white TV.
My telephone can receive calls; it just can’t make them, out into the world, and if someone were to call, my voice would crack from lack of use. Save me! Would I croak? I was always a girl who liked to hide—in the middle of clothes racks at Filene’s, in rarely-used stairwells of the library, in the backseats of parked cars. I see myself sitting there in that little room nine stories up, waiting for something, watching the birds prepare themselves for night and settle in the trees.
The knock on the door breaks through the sound of the Christmas tree vendors down on the 110th Street sidewalk; they hammer x-shaped wooden stands into the sawed trunks of trees all day long and into the night even, into my fervent single-bed dreams.
In this almost black-and-white movie scene, I turn my head and look towards the door, away from the window. Do I get up from the table by the window and cross the little room? Do I go to the door to see who is knocking? I must, for this is where the memory comes in—and it’s a solid one, a clear image that will settle into my brain for decades to come. I am at the locked door of the residence hotel, squinting through the peephole. I see that the knock was not, in fact, on my door after all, but on the door across from mine, and a woman is standing there holding a birthday cake with candles blazing. Why does this image persist when so many others have fallen away? That briefly lit cake, framed by the peephole, a signal flare to my younger self from the outside world. I can still see the fiery cake lit up like a mirage in the dim hall, and then a door opens, and it disappears.
SLAG GLASS CITY · Volume 11 · May 2025
Header image by ruffin_ready
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