A Different World
Park Avenue. My new employer gave me the address of the apartment where I would be tutoring a Colombian student.
4:30. I was early, I leaned against the molded cement corner of a building and ate my granola bar. People walked by, people with white skin and blond hair and lacy shirts and tailored pants. Other people walked by with skin the color of chocolate milk, speaking Spanish, wearing t-shirts and tight jeans, pushing strollers with children the same white color as the people in the lacy shirts.
I tossed the wrapper in the trashcan on the corner. I headed into the building, cutting off a woman with a sweater draped over her shoulders. I told the bellman who I was looking for, as I’d been told to do. He mumbled softly into a phone in Spanish, and hung up, making an affirmative noise in a hybrid language.
“Number four,” he said pointing at the elevator.
“Which apartment?” I asked, then quickly realized my mistake. “Oh.”
I stepped into the elevator with a barefoot blond girl licking an ice cream. I pushed the button, wondering if I was even supposed to touch it.
The door opened at the fourth floor, revealing a twelve-foot cloudy blue wall, polished floor a giant mirror and a single door twice my height. I walked through it where a man greeted me in Spanish and led me to a part of the apartment where the floor wasn’t stone tile, and the cabinets weren’t stained chestnut, but linoleum and simple pine, like any house I’d ever known. I snuck a peak through the door to the side and there was a kitchen the size of the house I lived in in high school.
The girl I would be tutoring walked in, and on her feet, over her sneakers were blue caps like the kind you wear on your head or over your mouth to prevent contamination.
Where the hell was I?
Tags: 7A. New York City, Travel
Drea
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