Two Blocks at Priya’s Pace

On Saturday, Priya and I left my building at the same time and reached the corner separately. She had come by to return a book. I needed bread. We were both going in the same direction, which seemed sufficient preparation for a walk of perhaps ten minutes. By the first crossing, she was waiting with one foot angled toward the street while I was still beside a basement railing, looking at a leaf caught in its iron scroll.

It was a large leaf, brown along one edge and green through the middle, held upright as if someone had placed it there. I mention this because Priya asked what had detained me, and “a leaf” sounded inadequate even to me. She glanced back at the railing. “Strong afternoon for the leaf,” she said. Then the light changed, and we crossed.

She walks with her whole body committed to the next block. Her bag stays close to her hip; her gaze moves ahead, finding a space before she needs it. I can move quickly when a train or a meeting requires it. Left to myself in Cobble Hill, though, I tend to drift toward the edges: a shallow doorway, a newly painted fence, the pale outline where a sign has been taken down. I had never noticed quite how much sideways travel was involved in my supposedly direct errands.

Between crossings

We were talking about her week, and I kept losing the ends of her sentences. A bus passed as she turned her head; I stopped to let someone carry a folded stroller down a stoop; she went on two paces before realizing I was gone. Each time we reassembled, I asked her to repeat something. After the third request, she stopped beside a tree pit. “Are we walking, or are you conducting a survey?”

I said I was listening. This was true in the generous sense in which a person can be listening while inspecting a door hinge. She had been telling me about an afternoon spent sorting photographs, the strange fatigue of choosing between frames that looked almost identical until she had stared at them too long. I had caught the fatigue and missed the part about what she had finally chosen. I asked. She told me. We stayed where we were for a minute, with people parting around us.

When we began again, I tried her speed. It made the block feel narrower. The details I usually gathered resolved into useful things: enough room between two people, a delivery cart to pass, the shallow dip before the curb. Priya noticed all of these before I did. I am accustomed to thinking of her as the person who sees what a photograph needs. It was pleasant to watch her see the practical route through an entirely unphotogenic knot of pedestrians.

I had caught the fatigue and missed the part about what she had finally chosen.

At the next corner, we stopped for the light. My shoulder had crept up to hold my tote strap in place. I lowered it and told her that this was a brisk pace for a woman whose only urgent appointment was with a loaf. She laughed, then said she always walked like this. I knew that, of course. I had simply assumed that once she joined my errand, its speed would become mine.

There was something faintly embarrassing about hearing the assumption stated so plainly in my own head. When Priya comes to dinner, I think about her preferences. I know how much pepper she will add and which chair she takes when she intends to stay. Outside, I had treated her as company added to an existing route. Meanwhile, she had assumed we were getting somewhere. Neither of us had made a particularly unreasonable arrangement. We had just made two of them.

We turned onto a quieter block. She shortened her stride a little, and I stopped examining every lower window as though there might be a question afterward. Our conversation became easier to hear. She described a pair of nearly identical photographs, one with a hand just entering the frame. I asked why she preferred that one. This time I heard the answer without requesting a second performance.

I bought the bread at an unnamed neighborhood shop while Priya waited outside. When I came out, she was looking up at a row of small projecting windows. One had its blind lowered at an angle. She pointed to the shadow beneath it, a narrow wedge against the brick. I looked. Then she started walking again before I had finished, which made me laugh. Apparently an interest in light did not require remaining beside it indefinitely.

We parted at the next crossing. She had another errand; I turned toward home with the loaf warm through its paper. Without her beside me, I slowed almost at once. I noticed the difference more in my legs than in any thought about it. At my building, the leaf was still lodged in the railing. I passed it and put my key in the door, then looked back down the block. Priya was too far away to see. A pair of people came around the corner together, one taking two short steps to match the other’s long one.