Scraps
by Amy Kalbun
The day I left New York, Riverside Park was scattered with crushed, overripe tomatoes and a carton of broken eggs. The scatter started near the Eighty-Seventh Street Dog Run: a few shell fragments and shiny strings of pulp. Then came the yolks in splotches and streaks, and ruddy shreds of tomato flesh. I found the egg carton, empty and un-crumpled, on a trail near the West Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin. As I stepped over it, a runner swerved around me in a wide, loping arc.
This was the morning of March 12. That evening, I boarded a packed M-60 bus to LaGuardia, and from there, a nearly empty plane to Toronto.
Toronto: my parents; my sister; my cats; my collection of high school sweatshirts; the redbrick bungalow where I grew up. New York: my friends; my books; my privacy; most of my underwear; my apartment with high ceilings and uneven wood floors, which I’ll have to abandon if I can’t find a summer subtenant.
In Toronto, I live near a lake, not a river. On calm days, you can see across the water to a dark smudge of land that, as a child, I always thought was New York state. I told my sister—as we packed loose sand into chunky plastic buckets—that that was America, where all the famous people were.
“We’ll live there someday,” I said. “You’ll be an artist, and I’ll be an actress.”
My sister turned her bucket over into a crumbling castle, and said she wanted to be a pop star. The sun blazed across our bare shoulders, but I barely noticed because the clouds over the smudge were dark and glamorously tangled.
When we were teenagers, our father broke the news that the smudge was actually St. Catherine’s, Ontario, a little more than an hour from our house.
Since I returned to Toronto in March, the city has put folding signs all along the boardwalk, to remind people to stay apart. Six feet: about the length of a hockey stick, or three Canadian geese in a row. If I was in New York, I would turn this into a joke—Canadian analogies right on brand—to seem cool and self-reflexive and gently patronizing of my home city.
Here, it’s not food that litters the ground, but cloth. Lone gloves in gutters. Scarves slumped in damp wads on street corners. The air still bites, cool and sharp. In New York, at this time last year, the trees along Cherry Walk were already in bloom.
Spring comes earlier in New York. But it is more beautiful in Toronto: maple key carpets and hydrangea clouds and the lake’s soft, damp breath.
My father has been making masks out of his old button-down shirts. He stitches pinstripe over furnace filter, and uses cotton ties from my childhood curtains as straps. My mother laughs at him. She says he is turning into his mother. But when she leaves for a bike ride, I notice a corner of pinstripe sticking out of her pocket.
According to my cat, I am exactly where I belong. He sits in my lap—a warm, sleek lump—and purrs as if trying to fuse my legs to the floor with his sound.
My sister disagrees. After our mother jumbles her words in a dyslexic twist, she jokes that nobody in this house knows how to use language. I sputter something about my MFA, and she says, “but you don’t really live in this house anymore.”
“I’m here now,” I say.
Amy Kalbun is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Columbia University. She is currently working on a novel, and divides her time between Toronto and New York.
