The Hardware Store

Part 1: “I want to fight back.”

I have been slowly making war against my super with help from a Midtown hardware store. Yesterday, I bought a thermometer to prove our apartment is indeed freezing. Today, I returned to buy a shovel to dig our car out of the fortress of snow pinning it in after my super refused to let me borrow his.

Upon entering the hardware store, I felt a surge of power completely foreign to me. I had a purpose here. Even better: I knew where my purpose was located and didn’t need to ask for assistance. I strode up to the shovels and picked up two -- a shorter one with a pointed spade and a taller one with a squared edge. How much, I asked, and bought the squared one which was cheaper. It was the best shape for the immediate task at hand, but I wondered about its greater use and longevity. A pointed spade, in my experience, was superior in dirt. Such uses were years away, but still. It was entirely likely that this shovel would be used once and never again for many years.

Walking down 40th Street with the shovel in hand I ran into Julian and he looked quizzically at my new companion. I explained the emerging Cold War with my Polish super and the shortage of shovels in my own neighborhood. The day went like this, with the shovel serving as a conversation piece and me brandishing it as a weapon in my private feud. On the subway ride home, I felt like the farmer in Grant Wood’s famous painting. Except my long-handled tool was a spade, not a pitchfork, and I held it from the rubber red nub of the handle rather than the neck of the steel end.

I abstained from reading my new book after it nearly made me sick on my morning commute. Racing around the dark bend between Chambers and Canal, my skin suddenly prickled with hot needles and a wave of nausea welled up my throat. I was only a few pages into In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin, but I couldn’t go any further. The bear attack, the thin hospital bed and cruel nurses, the long rough tubes for breathing and feeding — it was all too much. But what was truly unbearable was the powerlessness, and that the only path forward was surrender. So the author, a French anthropologist, surrendered to the cold touch of a Soviet medical system that styled their wards after gulags and to the humiliations that witnesses inflict on miracles and those who survive them.

When I got home, C greeted me at the door and said, “I want to fight back.” I could tell she’d been on social media again watching citizen footage and first-person testimony from Minneapolis and Palestine.

I took off my coat and muttered, “I want to write.” She followed me into the bedroom where I sat at my desk and looked back at her without saying anything. She left, and I heard the window to the fire escape open.