You should know I consider myself an excellent walker. A glider, even. It’s not an ego thing — I’m just a fast walker, see, and smooth. While other people scuff and swagger, I just slink, and I like to think it sounds like that shiny, glazing sound you hear when you’re buttering toast. But once I get a good, swift stride going, just the slightest errant pebble or cracked sidewalk can interrupt the delicate balance of the whole operation, sending me groundward in a swearing avalanche of tweed wool and lipgloss and fluff. It’s a problem I have.
It’s a problem I never thought would have revealed itself in the middle of one of the most upscale streets in Boston, of course. But it did. Traipsing down Newbury one night before winter break I had that rather remarkable glowy feeling that comes with the season. Finals were ending, the weather was crisp but warmed by the lighted trees and I was wearing a fabulous pair of new kitten-heeled boots. Winding through the bustling smudges of wealthy shoppers, I felt it was a perfect night for traipsing.
I saw no harm in truly embracing the walk home as I exited Marc Jacobs — I maxed out the volume on my iPod, rearranged my purchases so they dangled both aerodynamically and artistically from one shoulder and got going. One foot placed itself effortlessly in front of the other, so that if there had been snow on the ground instead of a brittle icy film, my tracks would have presented a single straight line, rather than two parallel ones. Latte in hand, it was all very epic.
I reached an intersection. Planning on gliding through it, I took no notice of the “don’t walk” symbol flashing ahead of me. To have stopped would have been like pausing a great song right on the precipice of its most delicious crescendo — I wouldn’t even consider it. I stepped down off the curb, made eye contact for no reason with the briefcase-toting Yuppie crossing swiftly from the other direction (he smiled back) — and then found myself knocked out of equilibrium with the world. A small, brownish patch of ice, the size of a napkin, was all it took.
I found myself suddenly very cold, lying absolutely horizontally in the middle of the intersection, the white lines from the crosswalk wrapping themselves around me like those outlines of dead people at crime scenes. My latte was leaking languidly from its dropped vessel, creating a $5 Starbucks lake that seeped into the absorbent foam soles of passing Ugg boots. The contents of my purse skittered into the next block; my iPod headphones had wound themselves vindictively around my arms; and I thought for sure I was dead. Hell felt surprisingly cold.
I knew I was still alive the moment I was almost killed by an oncoming Acura. When I say “almost killed,” I mean I had managed to drag myself from the intersection in time to see the car almost run over my bag of H’M purchases. I was prepared to throw the bag out of the way and sacrifice myself — but alas, some other size-six passerby would have likely thought nothing of swiping the bag and keeping it all for herself after I died. I wouldn’t have it — so in the ultimate act of heroism, I looked death in the eye for the second time that evening and stole into the street, breathlessly ushering my precious purchases to safety.
When I say “looked death in the eye a second time,” I really mean the bag was lying in an injured heap, sort of on the side of the road and beside a puddle, in prime splashing range should it remain there as the Acura zoomed past. The offending puddle was one of those muddy, awful winter kinds that would artlessly lap the back of your legs if you were foolish enough to walk through it. I couldn’t have let that happen to my new dress.
I stood, haggard where I had once been cosmopolitan, slumping where I had once been striding, The Girl Who Just Fell where I had just been The Girl Who Sort of Fit In with All the Rich Newbury Street Shoppers. I was back on the side where I started from, having procured most of my possessions, and was focusing my thoughts on trying to find the glamour in the situation. I found it across the street in a couple of velour-tracksuit-wearing snobs as they laughingly pointed their Camel 100s at me. Even though I had just been supine and sprawling in the middle of a Newbury crosswalk, I was not wearing a velour tracksuit. And I never had, and I never would. And that was everything.
Lauren Rodrigue, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at [email protected].