grief dumplings

by Georgia Williams

All the girls left for work early. It was 10 am when I decided it was time to venture out. Hannah had left a spare key for me on the entry table. I walked south towards the Williamsburg Bridge. It was warm already; the sun was in my eyes. I could've kept going south, walked towards Prospect Park. The winking sheen of Manhattan called to me. I crossed the bridge; it only took me 20 or so minutes before I was in the Lower East Side. Hannah texted me a list of shops and restaurants in that area that she liked. I walked up Houston St, passing markets with large crates of lychees, lotus root, baby bok choy, and ginger. Most of the markets had doorways with thick plastic curtains and men in white aprons walking back and forth inside holding various cuts of meat; some had large water tanks with crabs and lobsters settled at the bottom. I bought a Diet Coke on the corner. There were so many things in the crates that I didn’t recognize. Different kinds of bulbous roots and nuts, and lots of old women’s hands gently raking over them, thin plastic bags hanging along their arms.

The last time I was in New York, it was for a funeral; I looked at the faces in the crowd as I weaved through and thought about whether anyone I was passing was there for a funeral. There was something about looking at someone, an older person, and knowing they had lost someone. Haven't we all lost someone?  I opened my Diet Coke, some of the bubbles spilled onto my boots. Are they thinking about the person they lost now? Are we brushing shoulders and thinking about the same thing?

I thought about Rachel, wondering if she liked coming down here when she was growing up. I wondered if she had a favorite deli or shop. Where did she buy her clothes? Her mother worked in the fashion industry as a buyer for department stores. Is that where she got her clothes? Did she ever stand in the large corner changing room at the end of summer and try on the clothes her mother handed her one after the other, seeing if the sweaters were itchy or something soft, so she could wear that fall? My mother always did that; she would take all three of us, and if something didn’t fit me, she would pass it along to my younger sister and have her give it a go.

I got to Soho; there was a store that opened at 11 am. Vintage, upscale. It was 10:45. I went around the block twice to kill time. I bought a candle. Hannah's roommates knew I had come for a funeral the last time I was in town. I wondered why they didn’t say anything to me, maybe tell me how sorry they were for my loss. I think it would have upset me if they did, but not a lot of people said anything to me back then. I wish they had, wish people knew that when I was thinking about something, most of the time, I was thinking about her. Is there a time limit for that kind of conversation? I know there isn’t one on thinking about it. Is there one for talking about it?

At 11:05 am, I went inside the shop. I wanted a white, cotton sundress to wear for the rest of the summer. There was going to be a heatwave when I got back to LA, and it would be nice to have something breezy. There were many dresses scattered among the racks; I grabbed 5. The tags read: 1960s cotton linen blend. 1970s made in Italy; 1940s made in Italy; 1960s cotton; 1950s made in Italy. I love Italy; I love it in the summer. I love walking up and down the narrow streets in Rome with red sauce on my chin. I love running through vineyards in Tuscany. I loved the woman who worked in the Villa and made us dinner every night. We would eat it in the large, dome-shaped wine cellar down by the pool.  Yolanda was her name, I thought it was Mescolanza for a long time but remembered that was the name of the Italian restaurant my friend's parents had taken me to when I was nine years old. A younger girl accidentally poked her eye with a fork, and then all the adults fought while she cried with her mouth open. The pasta was excellent; the restaurant went out of business. Rachel loved Italian food. When I visited her in the Hamptons four years before she died, we went to this large restaurant on the water and sat by the window. We ordered too much food and reached across the table for bites of each other’s plates. Split a bottle of white wine.

None of the dresses fit quite right. I could've gotten them tailored, but I realized they were all already over $280, and with the tailoring, I would be spending over $300 on a sundress I only had a month to wear before it got too cold. I wondered about the women these dresses belonged to, whether they were Italian or if they bought them in Italy and then came here. If they also had pasta in a wine cellar near a pool in Tuscany. I thought about women in vintage bathing suits jumping into bright blue water, then driving along winding roads with scarves tied around their hair and cat eye sunglasses.

I walked back towards Chinatown after, got a bahn mi at a Vietnamese deli, and ate it at the counter as I scrolled through my phone. I walked north after, went to more vintage stores, and bought a pair of ballet flats. I got another Diet Coke. Then, I got on the train, got off at the closest station to the southeast corner of Central Park, near the Plaza Hotel, and began walking through it. I sat on a bench for a bit, took a couple of pictures of the Plaza, wrote a couple things down in my journal. The bench seat was hot, and my sandwich made me feel too full. My legs didn’t hurt yet; I decided to keep walking. I think about how pretty it must be to sit on that bench during each season. People on rented bikes passed me, it looked fun, I wished I wasn’t wearing clunky boots.

I thought about Golden Gate Park, how people in all public parks fit into the same little categories: how there is always a group of people playing with a frisbee, how there is always a man with an old-fashioned cart selling popcorn or lemonade or hot dogs. There is always a toddler on a tricycle going too fast, and there are always nervous parents jogging behind them, saying "whooaa!" when the toddler almost swerves into someone or something.

I ended up on the Upper East Side, and I wondered about intuition, about my intuition. Could I have figured out where Rachel used to live? Felt her in the air? I knew it was near Fordham's campus, as Rachel told me that when Hannah started going there, how she was only two blocks away from Hannah's dorm. I went to the campus, looked for a building that seemed like a place they would put the freshmen. I sat on a bench. I wrote a note, something about hoping she was watching this, hoping she knew I missed her. I could tell she never believed me when I told her how much I loved her. I buried it in the dry soil of a planter box. There were peach-colored roses. A lot of time had gone by; it was late afternoon by then. I still had no white dress. Hannah called to say she would be off work soon, asked to meet outside the Plaza since it was by her office.

I piled some more soil on top of the note. I walked back through the park.

We went to get dumplings that night. It began to rain, so we huddled under the awning at the Marcy St. station. Our shoes got wet. Hannah and I grew up with dumplings. Whenever we finished each school year, beginning at the end of 1st grade, both of our families would go get dim sum at Ton Kiang on Geary. We would always sit at a round table on the second floor. There was a lazy Susan in the middle of the table for soy sauce and shavings of ginger. Ton Kiang went out of business, too. Mescolanza was also on Geary.

In high school, our first bursts of freedom were spent at little, dark restaurants downtown, eating shu mai out of bamboo steamer baskets. Our chopsticks clashed, as we reached for the last har gow. How we’d laugh in between sips of soda.

The dim sum restaurant she took me to was in Alphabet City, down a narrow winding alley. It was cash only; it was the first time we had been alone since I arrived. We used to know everything about each other, every little moment. Sitting across from her with a pot of oolong tea between us, we kept mentioning casual events in our lives and then fell into brief silence when we realized we hadn't told the other. She asked me what I did that day, and I told her about burying the letter. She nodded, asked me how I was doing with that, and I told her most of the time I'm fine. We got red bean sesame balls for dessert. When we left, some tourists asked us to take pictures of them underneath the strands of red lanterns, and we did. We took the train back to Marcy St. station, watched an episode of Jeopardy, and got into bed facing each other. We shared a bed all weekend, whispered to each other in the dark like we used to, both grasping for something between us that felt like it used to, both grieving something different that had been lost.

Photo of Georgia Williams

BIO: Georgia Williams is a creative writing student in Los Angeles. She is the founder of a local writing collective and spends a lot of time worrying about everything. She has two dogs, who spend all of their time worried about nothing.