Bridge of Sighs

was halfway across the street. At this early hour the courtyard was oddly peaceful, with only the sounds of sleepy children and televisions on low leaking out the open doors and windows. A low, cinder-block wall surrounded what had been the swimming pool, so Sarah sat down there and opened her pad to a fresh page. She did a quick sketch of the window box outside her mother’s former apartment and felt a little better, if no less foolish, for the effort. She did a couple more sketches on the same page, then got up and moved down the wall to frame the window box within the rusty swingset. That somehow made both objects more interesting. It might be the basis for a painting later, when she returned home.
If
she returned. (“You
want
the LIRR,” the woman had insisted.) She started a new page. She’d only been there for half an hour, but could feel in her blood and busy hand that she was, well,
getting
w
armer.
Again, the child’s game. Was she losing her mind? Wasn’t it enough to just sit here and let her pen fly over the rough paper, instead of indulging a fantasy that had already proved futile? On the other hand, what could she lose as long as she acknowledged that it
was
a fantasy?
    Sarah was only vaguely conscious of the passage of time, of doors opening and closing, of children emerging into the courtyard, of snatches of adult conversation. “She doin’ down there?” “Same woman as the other day?” “She crazy?” There was also the sound of a tricycle with big plastic wheels thumping over cracks in the pavement to the cadence of adult instructions:
don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t.
Eventually she became aware of someone watching her, close by, and she turned and saw it was the lanky black girl who’d returned her smile the day before, the one who should’ve been in school. She was standing awkwardly on one leg, regarding the sketch pad and Sarah herself with a kind of terrible longing.
    “Can you teach me?” she said.
    Sarah started to say no, felt the word forming on her lips, and saw the girl accept her answer even before it was given and start to leave. Where had she seen that mixture of longing and immediate resignation before?
    “Of course I can,” she said, though in truth she was none too sure what she meant. That drawing was a skill that could be taught? That she herself had been a teacher most of her adult life? That she could spend the rest of the morning showing the girl a few basics, maybe even go out and get her an inexpensive sketch pad and a starter pen-and-pencil set? Or was she suggesting the girl could actually learn, even in a place like this, if she really wanted to?
    “Really?” the girl said, not quite sure she’d heard right, her eyes now big and round.
    Really?
That’s what the Mock boy had said, in exactly that same way. “Really? You would? With me?” In fact, she hadn’t even said yes. What she’d said was that she’d ask her father, then warned him not to get his hopes up, because she was never allowed to go out with boys. At the time she thought she was being kind by allowing him to believe the only impediment was her father, that she would’ve gone with him to the matinee if the choice had been hers, but it wasn’t. It had nothing to do with him personally. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, or that what he was proposing wasn’t permitted because he was a Negro. He’d been expecting one kind of no and she’d given him another, a no that had some yes in it, and didn’t include the humiliation he’d expected. But a moment earlier the look of yearning and surrender on his face was the same as the one on this girl’s in the split second before Sarah changed her mind. How awful it must be, she thought, to ask for something you knew you’d be denied. How much courage it took to ask anyway, instead of just slinking away and adding this new refusal to the stew of countless others.
    “When?” the girl said, thinking perhaps this was where the no would come.
    Sarah turned to a fresh page in the sketchbook and motioned for her to sit down on the wall. “How about we start with that window box? The one by the blue door.”
    The girl took the pad and balanced it on her knee like she’d seen Sarah do, then took the pen almost fearfully.
    “Like this,” Sarah said, showing her how to hold it. “Don’t worry about making a mistake. We’re going to draw it over and over.”
    “What comes first?”
    “You’re the one holding the pen. That means