PANCAKES
Years ago, I read a story in the NY Times about an elderly woman in Queens who was home alone, and a young man with a gun broke into her apartment. I am paraphrasing from memory, but this is what I remembered and has stuck with me all these years…
So, there she was, with her morning robe and slippers on, standing in the middle of her kitchen on a cold winter morning, face to face with this desperate, delirious man pointing a gun and demanding money. She stands in shock, of course, but stares into his eyes with tenderness, with compassion he probably hadn’t seen in some time, and, asks him if he is hungry. His entire demeanor changed, his shoulders sunk, his head dropped, and he began to cry. She tells him to sit down, and that she’ll make him some pancakes. She wants to talk with him. Try to understand the reasons that led him to break into her apartment. And so, he does. He sits at the table, weeping still, and talks to this woman about his problems as she makes him pancakes. He has family support, babies at home, lost his job, can’t pay his bill, trying to make ends meet, and on and on. She then sits down next to him with a beautiful stack of pancakes dripping in maple syrup, calmly takes his gun, and proceeds to tell him that she will have to call the police. He nods his head in understanding. She does, and the police arrive to take him away.
A few years after I read that story, I was on the subway, and a hard-ass Puerto Rican girl with tattoos up and down her neck, two teardrops under her eye, sat across from me on the crowded train. She was listening to headphones (this was like the early 2000s). She caught me staring at her. It was impossible not to look at her. She had so many stories on her face. My mind was overflowing just gazing at her, imagining what her life was like and what was behind all those tattoos covering such a stunningly beautiful young face.
That’s one of the things I love most about this city — riding the train with so many different people from wildly different walks of life and all the stories they hold. At any rate, she didn’t like me staring at her. So she looked me dead in the eyes, flicked her chin up with a homey head nod, and said, “What the fuck are you looking at white girl?” In a flash, I remembered that story above and said with a smile, never losing contact with her eyes, “I love your purse. Where did you get it?” She took a beat, confused by my response then, rolled her eyes and smacked her bubble gum instead. I got off at the next stop and changed subway cars. I couldn’t believe I said that, and I really couldn’t believe how much it deterred her from her fighting attitude.
CUT TO, decades later, a few days into 2022 actually, I was downstairs preparing dinner in the kitchen, drinking a glass of something bubbly with my husband, talking about the endlessly depressing world events and our plans for the new year. Our kids were one flight above, watching a movie and playing around with each other. My son casually walks downstairs to the kitchen, fidgeting with his new Rubik’s cube, my daughter following closely behind him. They both say, in a very faint voice, “Someone is in the house.” My husband and I looked at each other, not believing either one of them, thinking they were playing one of their many games where they scare each other as kids do — especially siblings that have been trapped in the house during a pandemic.
They say it over and over again as my son nervously twists and turns his cube. My husband and I look at each other, still not believing any bit of this, but he ascends up one flight of stairs to the living room to have a look around. I continued sautéing my onions in the hot skillet — the kids remained silent. A few beats later, I hear my husband yell (which is rare), “What are you doing in here? Get out!”. I abandon my kitchen task, look at my terrified kids, and tell them to stay put. I walked upstairs, and low and behold, someone was in our brownstone — without a mask!
Now, this little bit of information can only make sense if you are in the year 2022 (where we are at present) and have been living 2 years with a pandemic, wearing masks whenever inside or mixing with people for pretty much the entirety of it to avoid the looming virus. So, the first thing my husband thought when she saw her, he said later, was not that she was in our home, but that she was not wearing a mask, and now we might have been exposed to COVID. This was not the first thought in my mind, surprisingly.
By the time I got up to the living room, seconds later, he had moved her into the mudroom, which is a little nook in-between the front door and the living room. He was holding the door on the living room side, so she couldn’t come back in. I stood 10 feet away and looked directly into her lost eyes. She had jet black skin, a tight afro, and the demeanor of a lost child looking about in amazement and utter shock that SHE was in our home. Or, more to the point, was let into our home. To be more specific, she reminded me of the character “crazy eyes” from Orange Is The New Black.
I held her gaze and asked her if she was all right. If she needed help? Her response was prolonged, and very weighted with some influence of medication or some drug. She kept apologizing to me, saying she felt so embarrassed that my daughter let her inside. As we were speaking, I noticed she was putting her shoes back on — she took her shoes off alongside all of our shoes (we are a shoeless home) — I mean, she took her shoes off and hung her jacket up on the hook! Anyway, she got her shoes back on, and her coat, grabbed her cane (she had a cane!) apologized to us again, and went on her way. We were left in utter confusion and amazement at what happened. How on earth that could happen, why it happened, what happened, and on and on. But it happened, and not only that it happened, that unfolded in the way it did. I mean, wow.
Wow.
Needless to say, it was a terrific lesson for my children to learn. We began to immediately question how this could have happened, how they are never allowed to open the door for anyone who knocks again, and how lucky we were with the outcome. And, most importantly, how they need to have their voices heard (scream, yell, yodel, do something loud!) so anyone around them knows that there is possible danger. We also refreshed their memory of thee ole boy cried wolf story and on and on. But, ya know what, after all that craziness (I mean, what a crazy thing to happen!) I bet if we weren’t living in a pandemic — I most likely would have asked her if she was hungry and made her some pancakes.
