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: : : THE UNMADE BED IN CLARK'S apartment. The collection of unwashed coffee mugs on the counter. The filing cabinet, so crammed full of papers that it can't be shut. The notebooks heaped upon a desk. One is open. Written at the top of the page are the words I am moved when people make gestures in the face of the world's indifference.
Clark bangs in through the door, throws her purse onto the table, frowns at the heap of mail there, and heads into the bathroom to change her tampon. It's Monday, but she's not at work. She's taking a personal day. The air turned autumnal this week and she just wanted to spend some time outside, relaxing.
It wasn't very relaxing, though. She made the mistake of going down to Wicker Park.
It seemed like a good idea when she woke up. She thought that maybe she'd drop by Quimby's, pick up some zines. You haven't done that in like forever, she thought. It seemed like it'd be fun.
But the neighborhood had changed since she'd last been down there. Jesus Christ, she thought. How long has it been? It can't have been more than a year—but she didn't remember there being quite this many trendy boutiques a year ago. She didn't remember all these salons with high-priced hair products arrayed in their windows. Or this place that's charging $3.25 for a slice of pizza. She made it down to Quimby's and there was a woman with a Louis Vuitton bag browsing the racks. What the fuck?
She shouldn't have been surprised. She knows the way the game works. She knew how it would all turn out a decade ago, back when she and a couple of her art-punk friends lived there. Back then the neighborhood was mostly working-class Hispanic, and she was smart enough even then to understand that she was the thin frontal edge of the chisel of gentrification, that her presence was the very thing that would eventually make the neighborhood a comfortable place for hip yuppies.
As of today she can officially say that the cycle is complete. The hip yuppies are here. Half of them don't even look so hip; they mostly look like suburban parents. The thing that Clark kept thinking is they all look so clean. Freshly-scrubbed, exfoliated, depilated, whatever the fuck else. Clark, by comparion, hadn't showered, hadn't shaved her legs in forever, was dressed in an old hole-riddled T-shirt and a pair of ratty jeans. Plus she was in the middle of her period. She began to half-believe that the spa-perfected clones around her somehow knew this, as if they could smell it on her, like dogs, mean ones, that walk upright. On her way back to the train she could feel her tampon start to slide out, having grown slick inside her. She didn't have a spare in her purse and even if she did where would she be able to change? She imagined trying to persuade someone at one of these posh new restaurants to let her slip in to use the bathroom and she thought yeah right. She felt like she couldn't even go in any of those places, not even as a customer—surely someone on the staff would catch a whiff of her abjection and ask her, in low, polite tones, to leave.
Fuck Wicker Park, she thought, as she climbed the stairs to the L platform. And she stood up there, and looked down at the streets below, and thought, sweepingly: This is a place that cannot be redeemed.
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