In the Automat

She had never arrived alone in the city before, and now she found herself swept toward the exit amid the pack of morning commuters, most of them businessmen who proceeded in a vaguely furtive manner, as though they were secretly and independently trailing someone who was trailing someone else, the crowds separating into currents up the escalators and across the main concourse beneath the vaulted ceiling and its pinpoint constellations, carrying Nora this way and that and finally to the end of a taxi line. But she didn't want a taxi, and once she realized what the others were waiting for she headed in the opposite direction, downtown on Vanderbilt, no, uptown and over to Fifth, yes, this was correct. Firmly en route, she swung her arms, fingers balled into loose fists. The ridges below her cheeks swelled when she tightened her jaw. Every few steps her lower lip disappeared beneath her upper teeth and then reappeared as she exhaled in a long, determined sigh.

She paused to study a window display. A fan blew sparkling ribbons around a mannequin draped from head to toe in mink. Inside the store, a clerk moved slowly, like a fish along the bottom of a clear lake. Nora watched her adjust a blouse on a hanger. She watched the mannequin. She watched her own shadowy reflection and with a start noticed the reflection of a man looming behind her—a ghost, or a trick of perception, and when she turned he shouldn't really have been there. But he was there—a black man in a speckled wool coat holding in his outstretched hand a worn red leather wallet identical to the one she'd been carrying in her back pocket.

"Does this belong to you?"

He had stolen her wallet. Next he'd hit her, knock her to the ground, and race away, taking with him the seventy-eight dollars she'd managed to save over the past year. She knew that such things happened routinely in the city. Except... what did he say?

"Um . . ."

"Yes?"

"Me?"

"You dropped this."

"I did?"

"All right, then."

She wanted to thank him, but first she had to check to make sure her money was still in the wallet. When she looked up again the man was walking away with a decisiveness that from behind conveyed a fierce disgust, though the tilt of his head suggested that he might have been laughing to himself. So Nora laughed, too, along with the mannequin and the rich old East Side matron who'd been laboriously entering the store with tottering, high-heeled steps and had paused to witness the conversation.

"It's your lucky day, miss!" cried the old woman in delight. Nora made a motion as though tipping a hat, and she continued on her way, heading uptown on Fifth Avenue. She rested the fingertips of one hand on the wallet in her pocket. She intended to be more careful with her belongings, though not careful enough to guard against the sudden blinding of the winter sun as she crossed the street, the glare dissolving the oncoming taxi into a watery nothing. The taxi honked, Nora jumped, and that was that—the taxi had already entered the jam on Fifth Avenue and Nora was safely up on the curb on the north side of Fifty-fourth Street.

She stopped to examine a store's display of robes and slippers. She stopped again to admire the diamonds in Tiffany's window. She crossed Fifth Avenue beside a man walking a poodle, both of whom, man and dog, were haloed by white puffed curls.

Up the carpeted steps of the hotel past a doorman who was helping a woman into a limousine. Through the revolving door and into the hushed lobby. Red-capped wooden soldiers dangled on gold threads from the branches of a ten-foot Christmas tree. Piles of gift boxes sparkled in the light cast by the immense chandelier. Everyone seemed to be floating a few inches in the air, except for Nora. What was she doing there? Blink. Um. The pale, freckled face of a...