From My Life
6.
I'm sitting in the car, awaiting the time at which I can legally leave it unattended, when three girls in, perhaps, their mid-teens come around the corner, one of them carrying part of a broken mirror of the sort that usually hang behind the door of young girls' bedrooms. The street is one of those in the neighborhood here where I used to be able to see, about a mile and a half to the south, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. At least one of these girls wasn't even a teenager then. I never really liked those towers, thought of them as twin sticks of margarine jutting up into the air above lower Manhattan, but only recently have come to be able to look south along those streets without being conscious of their absence. The girl who'd been carrying the broken mirror (I wondered briefly where the rest of it was) set it down on the sidewalk, leaning it against a garbage bin, and then squatted down in front of it, peering into it one last time and making some slight adjustments to her make-up before standing up and, with her two friends, turning around and going back the way they'd come, leaving the mirror, which, although I can't be sure, no longer held any trace of them.
6.
I'm sitting in the car, awaiting the time at which I can legally leave it unattended, when three girls in, perhaps, their mid-teens come around the corner, one of them carrying part of a broken mirror of the sort that usually hang behind the door of young girls' bedrooms. The street is one of those in the neighborhood here where I used to be able to see, about a mile and a half to the south, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. At least one of these girls wasn't even a teenager then. I never really liked those towers, thought of them as twin sticks of margarine jutting up into the air above lower Manhattan, but only recently have come to be able to look south along those streets without being conscious of their absence. The girl who'd been carrying the broken mirror (I wondered briefly where the rest of it was) set it down on the sidewalk, leaning it against a garbage bin, and then squatted down in front of it, peering into it one last time and making some slight adjustments to her make-up before standing up and, with her two friends, turning around and going back the way they'd come, leaving the mirror, which, although I can't be sure, no longer held any trace of them.
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