One delicate spring morning, my husband and I traveled from the heart of Brooklyn, where we now live, to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, so that I could buy a bicycle advertised for sale in the paper. We met the gentleman selling the bike and looked at it in his storage room. The bike had some rust and the tires were flat, but the man was asking only twenty dollars. My husband pinched the tires and spun the pedals and I handed the man a twenty-dollar bill.

This bicycle-buying plan was the most recent of many schemes to make the tenancy in our neighborhood more palatable for me. I pictured those tires, plump with air, racing me away from the ugly and toward the benign. The next time I saw the neighbor hit her dog in the head with a frying pan, I’d ride away, cycling madly to a happier place where dogs were loved and respected. I’d zip here and there, to this café or that bookshop, no longer hampered by our neighborhood’s lack of such amenities.

Transaction completed, we spoke a bit longer with the man selling the bike. He was gray-haired and friendly, a widower, and the bicycle had belonged to his wife. We gathered that she had recently died. He seemed to enjoy our company and I felt that he observed us, as a couple, with a sense of nostalgia.

“Hold on a moment,” he said, ducking into the storage room. He came back holding a bright green coat. It was made of wool and had a Sixties cut and white buttons. He gave me the coat. “For you,” he said.

We took our bicycles—for now my husband had one, too—for a test ride. As we biked along, the six- and eight-family buildings that lined our neighborhood’s streets gave way to an industrial section pocked with rubble-strewn lots. At night, this area was patrolled by wild dogs. Now it was deserted, save for a prostitute hunching over the pavement in a sweatshirt and high heels.

I was out of shape and panting after a few blocks. My husband pedaled easily, smoking as he went. My legs wobbled. I’d never make it across this desert and to the land of enlightenment. We turned back. Back to our block, where kids tore branches off the young trees the city had planted, where at night the drug-stricken argued in ragged voices, where I once saw a dead cat in a plastic bag in the gutter.
The coat stayed in the back of the closet through the spring and summer. It was of such a vivid green hue that the dim walls around it glowed faintly green. As soon as it was cool enough, I took the coat out to admire it. It fit me as if custom-made. Apart from the torn lining, which I repaired, it was in perfect condition. Outside, the coat caused quite a sensation. Grandmothers frowned at me as if I were naked. Children stared, their eyes transfixed by the coat while their mamas tugged them away. When passing a cluster of teenagers, an explosion of laughter was certain to follow. I was even rapped at: Lady in green/looking so mean. Mean?

Now it’s my second winter with the green coat. Every day, I climb the stairs and pass the bicycle in the hall, and every day I feel a pang of guilt for giving up so easily—after the test drive, I never rode it again. To have thought I might escape this neighborhood by bicycle! It’s an idea that seems to me now both naïve and noble, for there can be no escape from the grief of these streets. The gestures of heartlessness I’ve seen will follow me wherever we go. As will the green coat. Sometimes it seems a chore to wear it, and I opt for the anonymity of a black parka. But sometimes as I scurry past the rats, down the darkening street, I button it close at the collar, and I fancy that it’s woven of more than merely warp and weft.