'Look Out Your Window' Series - 'Momma's Boy'

‘Look Out Your Window’ Series

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2.

‘Momma’s Boy’

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Look out your window.

It’s quiet, out there.

No businessmen commute on subways that stink of takeaway food and Saturday night excess.

There is no checking of watches, no desperate scramble to be there on time before the competition.

Not at 4am.

There is still struggle, however.

Money still changes hands.

Business is still conducted, far from the office blocks on Fifth Avenue.

Far from the corridors of power, where laws are made and livelihoods are weighed in demographics.

Somewhere out there, a woman degrades herself for crumpled dollar bills.

Somewhere out there, she is readjusting her skirt and panties.

Reapplying her makeup to hide the bruises.

Do you know that she changes before she goes home?

Slips out of that uniform of stilettos and garters.

Removes the garish lipstick and the smile with the same cloth.

She wears her only pantsuit on the bus back to the Lower East Side.

Odd, you would think.

For such a woman to tuck that uniform into a well-worn business case.

This woman, earning a living on her back or on her knees.

Why, then, is it so important to end her day dressed as something she is not?

The subway driver offers her a cigarette and asks her if she was working late.

For he sees only the suit, the briefcase, the weary eyes.

And she smiles at him.

“Just one of those days…”

He laughs and says he knows the feeling.

Yet, he does not.

Her key sticks in the lock and she tries to ignore the graffiti on her front door.

Bad part of town.

Gang signs and death threats displayed on both sides of the street.

Etched proudly on the crumbling paintwork of the tenement buildings.

She looks again at the crumpled bills in her purse.

She doesn’t have enough to move.

Later, as she cuts open the box of breakfast cereal, her hands start to shake.

She looks at the knife poised over the box.

And wonders, briefly, if the world would be a better place without her.

The voice breaks her melancholia.

All the way from the apartment’s only bedroom.

“Mom? Are you home? I’m hungry.”

The knife goes back in the drawer.

Forgotten, now.

And a mother makes breakfast for her son.