Linda Mannheim

The Highgate Stop

That grey December day, we walked into the cemetery. You told me that Marx’s tomb was there. You said we just needed to explore.

You were staying with my ex-lover’s ex-lover who used to phone late at night. I could hear him tell her, yes, I was there, and no, please don’t do that. He’d say, I do care, and I don’t want you to hurt yourself. In London, she was more predictable, happy even. She’d moved to Highgate with her new husband. They lived right near the cemetery.

We wandered down the paths, eyed the tombstones  and looked up at the mausoleums. You told me about your Statue of Liberty paintings, what the curator did when he read the inscription you’d written across the bottom: ‘Any atrocity is okay as long as you have a mermaid statue.’ Painfully obvious, he’d muttered under his breath.

YOU MAKE ME FEEL UN-AMERICAN

You make me feel Un-American – Norman Rockwell and Grant Wood, Georgia O’Keefe and Andrew Wyeth. I don’t know these places you’re painting. I don’t. They’re foreign to me.

I see farms in movies, small town Main Streets on black and white TV. The tumbleweed and sun-bleached skulls of the west are backdrops for skittering cartoons.

I come from a place where you can only see a grove of buildings, windows facing brick, soot-smeared walls, asphalt and concrete. English is not our native language. We only use it to shout at one another on the street.

Don’t tell me about your wheatfields, your windmills, your pitchforks, your pickup truck, your cows, your pie cooling on the windowsill, your front porch.

The Last Christmas of the Cold War

In Bahnhof Zoo, he begins his journey. He has the red fur-trimmed jacket on to keep warm. The long white wig and fake beard are in his burlap bag. He has the list of houses.

On Jebenstrasse, next to the station, rent boys stand waiting, wild-eyed smack users stand waiting, and the kids who left home because they couldn’t stay stand waiting.

Bahnhof Zoo smells like piss and cigarette smoke, and on Christmas Eve—in the fluorescent light of station that tinges everything yellow—the rough sleepers slump against the wall staring into space. Pen and ink signs nearby ask people to be kind, and every now and then a coin drops down with a clink and someone calls out: Thank you!

Ghost Stations 4: The Wall - 10 November 1989

It is not possible to get on the train. He has walked to Tiergarten Station, up after the long night – the phone call advising him to turn on the television, the images of the crowds at the Wall, the champagne erupting, and the border guards waving the Ossis through to the West.

It is not possible to get on the train.  The S-3 is packed, bodies against bodies, tight against one another, giggles when the train doors open.  On the platform the other commuters stand back, shaking their heads.  Another train comes, but it is not possible to get on the train.

He walks to Bahnhof Zoo instead. There are crowds everywhere, long lines of people snaking out from Deutsche Bank, East Germans in fake leather jackets and Goldfuchs jeans. Every East German is entitled to 100 Deutschmarks upon arrival in the West. Two stocky men in anoraks giddily side-step their way along the length of the queue, shaking the hand of each new arrival to welcome them to the other side.

Butterfly McQueen on Broadway        

My brother and I go down to Alex’s health food store on Broadway. It’s the first health food store in Washington Heights. There’s a rope of bells on the door that jingles when you open the door.

Inside, it’s bare, with wood shelves holding canisters of soy protein, sacks of brown rice, jars of peanut butter.

I am 12 years old, and my brother is 22, and we go in almost every day and talk to Alex.

Alex offers us paper cups of carrot juice. The first time he offers, Alex has to explain to me how you can get juice out of a carrot, shows me how you drop the carrots into the juicer, how you push them down with a metal plug. The machine whirs. The brightly coloured juice falls into a cup. Alex hands it to me, and I accept it with suspicion.

It is 1975. Health food stores – they’re all downtown. People who buy their food in these places are called health food nuts.

One day, we walk in, and I hear a voice – helium high and sing-song. A little girl, cajoling: “Alex, why don’t you come back to Harlem? We’re good to you there.”

But there is no little girl. The voice is coming from an old lady – tiny, in a long flowing skirt, her grey- flecked hair peeking out from underneath an old-fashioned kerchief.

“Butterfly McQueen on Broadway” first appeared in Losslit (Spring 2015). You can read more here. 

When It Breaks  

When the side of the building falls, it is a spring morning, April, not yet dawn. And there is no warning. The crack was there for a long time, all up the side, visible on every floor. Everything’s broken, all broken. You can’t worry about these things. What Sondra’s mother told her: You stop worrying. You do your homework and get to sleep and stop worrying with your childishness.

When the side of the building falls, Sondra is lying in bed. She feels it before it happens; the folding in of bricks, the dismemberment of five stories of concrete. The room is shaken – she is shaken – as if the building itself is angry at her. Well, maybe it is. All along, there have been hints she has done something wrong, that all of them have done something wrong to land here: the labor required to take baths, the heating of water on the stove; the coats and sweaters that must be worn throughout the winter, indoors, as if the cold radiator is punishing them; the skittering shapes in the shadows of the grime-caked halls, the presence of rats multiplied from fear of seeing them in full light.

“When it Breaks” originally appeared in The Learned Pig (April 2015) and the short story collection Above Sugar Hill (2014). You can read more here.   

Business

You’re standing outside the bar on 104th Street and Broadway, the rain beating down like it means you harm at first, then dissipates so all it does is leave the street slick and smooth as a sheet of marble. You inhale that smell of wet pavement you’ve known forever, and the city shines back at you. The light stretches across the street and plays in shapes that change when the wheels of the cars hit them.

You huddle back in the doorway; your expensive, clean trench coat around you that you’re angry has gotten wet, doesn’t seem so new anymore. And the edge of your straight, black hair has gotten damp, and you’re afraid you don’t look like what you are, that someone will mistake you for what you once were. And when a beat-up brown Chevy pulls over, you start to go to the sidewalk’s edge because you think it’s him, but it isn’t. It’s just someone street-looking and scrappy, baseball cap and Bronx walk and B-Boy clothes, who says to the man in the driver’s seat, Just a minute, man. I’ll just be a minute. I just gotta get something.

“Business” appeared in Bookanista (May 2014) and the short story collection Above Sugar Hill (2014). You can read more here.