Alice Austen Lived Here: Chapters 5–9

The clump of gray points and rectangles that made up downtown Manhattan popped out of the water on our left, and off in the far left presided the little green spot that was the Statue of Liberty. Long barges dotted the bay, the distance masking their massive size.

They said it with a bouncing cadence, so it sounded like Juh-SAY-pey PULCH-ih-NELL-eh. “Don’t ask me to spell it. He immigrated in 1915, when he was about our age.”

The black-and-white photos Alice had taken of it came to colorful life, with its three gabled windows that stuck out from the steeply sloped roof like cubes with triangular hats.

There were even wicker rocking chairs on the long porch.

The moment we walked inside, we were greeted by an older white couple behind a cash register wearing matching ALICE AUSTEN HOUSE MUSEUM baseball caps and T-shirts. The woman appeared eager to have patrons, but the man looked like he would have been just as happy to have read his paper in peace.

“So I guess you plan to leave the little one outside?” the man said, revealing a grin that said that as long as he was going to be disturbed, he might as well enjoy himself.
“Martin!” the woman admonished the man.

A plaque identified Alice as the woman on the left, embracing her friend Trude Eccleston.

“You’re so antisocial,” TJ chided.

“I’m an introvert.”
“I’m pretty sure libraries are like parties for introverts.”

“Books are better than people.”
“Hey! I’m a people!” TJ wrinkled their face in mock offense.

I sent an animated gif of a pug stretched up on their hind legs, feebly attempting to reach a tennis ball that had rolled to the back of the couch cushion.

The intricately floral wallpaper peeked out between photographs in large frames.

“Oh, you will.” Jess nodded for emphasis.

Cameras back then had long exposures so people had to stay very still in order for the picture not to blur.

Other kids were loading onto the bus at each stop, and now there were nearly as many kids standing as sitting, backpacks pressed against each other and the whoosh of the bus’s engine was drowned out by a growing conversational hum and intermittent shrieks of joy, anger, and embarrassment.

I noticed TJ sneak a peek at the pictures in the book between classes when they could, but it wasn’t until lunch that they really got to pore over the photos again.

We made our way between high school students milling around and crowding the sidewalk, laughing and yelling and complaining about everything from teachers and parents to the school-to-prison pipeline.

“No stereotyping now. Besides, if Alice Austen was alive today, she’d be way older than Leslie.”

I bypassed the slow-as-a-tortoise elevator and ran down and around the three flights of marble stairs, left hand poised an inch from the handrail, to grab on if I lost balance, but otherwise letting the tips of my toes rat-a-tat-tat my way down.

At the bottom of each flight, I grabbed on to the banister and used my momentum to swoop myself around 180 degrees so I could run down the hall to the next set of steps.

I rang Ms. Hansen’s bell, then bounced slightly on the bristle welcome mat.

Ms. Hansen had decorated the walls with shelves of knickknacks, including a section dedicated to salt and pepper shakers and a display of sixty small spoons in five rows of twelve.

“How do you know?” I winced at my own question the moment I asked it, but if it was rude, Ms. Hansen hadn’t seemed to notice.

Alice used to say she lived the larky lifestyle.

“Basically, being a bohemian.”
“Again, not to be rude, but—what??”
“I think she means like being a weirdo,” said TJ.

She was poor by then, and near the end of her life, but maybe she could still see the copper statue in the water, which had turned green, and maybe she would think about how she had lived her life with the freedom and determination of a person wearing a crown and holding a torch in the air.

TJ put on a song by Miss Chris for inspiration and opened my closet with a shimmy of their shoulders.

Dresses weren’t great, but they were better than the tie-and-dress-pants alternative.

I pointed down at where a row of buttons would leave a set of awkward diamonds between where the fabric pulled together. Even if the shirt looked safe in the mirror, once I was out and moving, gaps were inevitable.

“You could just wear your own thing and not worry about us coordinating,” I pointed out.

TJ just shook their head while Miss Chris transitioned into a slow song about rain falling on a round window.

I switched back into the gray T-shirt with the green apple that had an old woman’s face and gray beehive hair, sandwiched between the words GRANNY SMITH HAS APPEAL! and gave TJ a thumbs-up when I got back to the bedroom, tossing the polo shirt on the bed.

TJ lifted their voice in a rough approximation of a cartoon mom. “Sam, I just want to make sure you put your best foot forward.”

It got easier once the seventies hit and there were more androgynous clothes around.

Leslie put up her hands in a gesture of resignation.