Things were already starting to fray, even then. Cut hours, lower wages. Prices beginning to climb. But it wasn’t everywhere yet: you still saw people buying new clothes, eating in restaurants. At night certain parts of town still shimmered and hummed with the collected energy of people who gathered just to be young and alive in the dark. It was still possible to enjoy things. To waste time. It was still possible to sit on a park bench or out on the stoop and watch other people go by, smiling and laughing, and smile back.
Margaret plunged herself into the city. She got a job waitressing. She skipped class and walked around and around the city, exploring its corners and crannies, devouring it. She made friends. In Chinatown you could still hear people speaking Cantonese then, and she bought Chinese newspapers and a dictionary, pored over the characters at night, learning their parts and their sounds the way she might learn a lover’s body. For the first time, she realized that her old life had chafed like a too-tight coat. She learned to drink, and to flirt. She learned to give pleasure, and to take it. She was writing by then, lines scribbled on scraps of paper, on grocery receipts, on the white backs of minty gum wrappers, each word a chip of diamond, flint edged and biting. They felt like the work of a different person, someone she hadn’t known she was carrying within her. The Crisis was coming, would be there soon, but there were still magazines and time for poetry and people to read it, and editors liked her tempestuous rhythm, the marvelous wild suppleness of her lines. Images that sank their teeth into your heart and refused to shake free. They never paid, but it didn’t matter. At night she and her friends would pool their handfuls of bills and change for bottles of wine, drinking it from plastic cups in someone’s dorm room, a ring of them sitting with mouths stained red.
In those days, the city was at fever pitch, as if everyone could feel the storm coming, the air electric, crackling with potential. Her parents thought it demented, but to her it seemed the sanest and most logical course: if the world was on fire, you might as well burn bright. Late nights that turned into early mornings; just enough money to buy coffee wherever she happened to end up. Walking home in the dawn hours to save cab fare, watching the city shift from gray to gold as the sun rose. She went to parties, danced, kissed strangers just to see what would happen. Often they’d end up in someone’s bed—hers, theirs, someone else’s. Beautiful men. Beautiful women. The world, at that time, was full of them, all of them furiously incandescent like dying stars.
Later, when she thought of that time she would picture a nightclub, the air thick and black and steaming around her. Bodies jostling, slick with sweat. Flecks of light circling the room, fragments of illumination: an eye, a lip, a hand, a breast. The feeling of dissolving into a crowd, a shapeless sweaty pulsating thing, all of them moving separately to the same beat, bound together by the moment. Above their heads: bright lights that would flick on when the night was done, if they hadn’t fled yet. Below their dancing feet: the floor grown sticky with spilled liquor. There was no curfew yet.
* * *
? ? ?
It started slowly at first, the way most things did. She’d been a junior. Shops began to shutter, windows soaped over from within. Here and there at first, like cavities in teeth, and suddenly whole blocks were empty, all over the country. The rents too high, the customers too few. More panhandlers, rattling coins in paper cups plucked from trash cans, more signs markered on scraps of cardboard. family of 5. lost my job. anything helps. Everything cost more and everyone had less to spend. Clothing stores marked down their sweaters—ten percent off, twenty, forty-five, and still they dangled on the racks. No one even tried them on. No one had the money, or the time, anymore. One in ten unemployed, the statistics ran. Then: one in five. People began to lose their cars, then their homes. People began to lose their patience.
The restaurant where Margaret worked shut down: forty-five years in business, but no one came in anymore except the men who ordered coffee and lingered in the corner booths, sipping it long after it grew cold. Her boss wept as he pulled the grate across the door; he’d played behind the counter as a boy. When she asked other restaurants if they were hiring, some of them laughed. Some of them simply shook their heads. One manager told her, gently, to go home. It’s going to get worse, he said, before it gets better. If it gets better. He had a daughter about her age who had just lost her job, too.
They would never fully agree, the economists, on what had caused it: some would say it was just an unfortunate cycle, that these things happened periodically—like cicadas, or plagues. Some would blame speculation, or inflation, or a lack of consumer confidence—though what might have caused those would never be clear. In time, many would dredge up old lists of rivalries, searching for someone to blame; they would settle, in a few years, on China, that perilous, perpetual yellow menace. Seeing its sabotage behind every stumble and fracture of the Crisis. But at first all they agreed on was this: it was the worst crisis since the 1980s, then since the Depression, and then they stopped making comparisons.