A View of the Piece

In the middle of Cambridge lies a flat open plot of land, roughly square and occupying twenty-five acres bounded by Regent Street and Parkside, Park Terrace and the Lensfield Road. It was owned until the seventeenth century by Trinity College, and named Parker's Piece for a college cook who was given the rights to farm it. The city obtained the land in 1613; over time it became a sort of all-purpose common, home to cricket matches and festivities of all sorts including, in 1838, a feast celebrating the coronation of Queen Victoria, attended by fifteen thousand guests. At one corner of the Piece rises the spire of the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady and the English martyrs, at another the cupolas of a luxury hotel. In the center, two footpaths intersect at Reality Point, marked by a lamppost. All day long, bicycles and walkers cross the expanse of tight-cropped grass; in warm weather students spread out blankets and read or kiss in the indecisive sun. At night drunkards stagger out of pubs to bellow at the open sky there, and to piss on the trees. Several times a year thirty thousand or so animal-rights protesters take over the Piece and howl imprecations through megaphones at the researchers vivisecting monkeys at Huntingdon Life Sciences, outside the city. A Dutch purveyor of custom bicycles sets up shop on the Piece for a day in the summer. Fireworks explode over it on New Year's Eve.

And lucky, lucky, lucky us, because of all the places in Cambridge where we might have lived, we inhabited a flat one flight up in a building on Parkside, and every one of our tall sash windows looked out on this field of drama.

In the winter, we could sit at our desks -- my husband's in the study window, mine by the window in the bedroom -- and watch the starlings swirl across the red sky like the dregs of some bitter black iced drink, draining their numbers systematically into the naked branches of a poplar. In springtime, the daylight hours opened out longer and longer, and the cricketers appeared in their whites to play in the chilly golden twilight. We watched them, I might add, for four seasons and never understood the first thing about the game. We watched them avidly for all that; it was like seeing a movie with the sound turned off -- something I like to do on airplanes, because I can't stand wearing headphones -- and trying, on the basis of body language and shifts of scenery, to make out the plot. If we asked friends to explain why, for example, all the members of one side suddenly and without any apparent provocation shouted, "Hah!" (or something like that) before carrying on with the game as if they had never interrupted it, we only got laughed at.

At the end of May, the university students sit exams, and after that, they celebrate having sat the exams and lived to lift another glass. Colleges host what are called "May Balls," though they happen the first week in June: extravagant parties which last from cocktails through breakfast and feature carnival rides, gondolas, acrobats, entire Shakespearean acting companies, camels, elephants, artificial snow, wave pools fringed with genuine beach sand, and heaven knows what else. May Balls are so lavish that a college couldn't possibly host one every year, so they take turns, and tickets to the best parties are coveted like Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets. During May Balls, in the evenings, we used to crowd the sitting-room window to watch the girls walking out in their shimmering dresses, gauzy shawls slipping from their bare shoulders, rhinestones glittering on the clasps which loosely caught their hair. Their escorts, too, were admirable in black or white tie, like the Drones out for an innocent preliminary amble before trying to pinch a bus.

What we liked best, however, was waking up the next morning in our tranquil flat, and opening the curtains. Sun flooded the sitting room; sun shone mildly down on the green and perfect flatness of the Piece, punctuated here and there by Drones of the evening before who had stopped to admire the stars and wound up staying whatever was left of the night. Here lay one, there another, stretched their various lengths on the sward -- as one would say if one were feeling poetic. Through breakfast we would watch them as one after another regained consciousness, swam to his feet, and tottered off in what to the best of his recollection was the direction in which his lodgings lay.

We had given up television when we came to England, and not out of moral rectitude, unless there's something moral about being too cheap to fork out roughly three hundred dollars a year for the privilege of watching Teletubbies on the BBC. The Piece, right outside our windows, was a twenty-four hour reality show -- not reality rigged for maximum ratings, but reality as it is, which is to say, reality which does not care whether you are watching it or not. At five on a November morning it was fog, and one bicycle taillight flickering into invisibility. In July it was the French market with its stalls of salamis and cheeses, and a bouncy castle for the kids. One January night it was the hotel directly across from us going up in a gush of flame. In the abbreviated afternoons of two autumns, it was my children learning to ride their two-wheelers. It was the friend who cycled home that way and looked up to wave at me as he crossed the street. It was the long shadows of summer. It was the unimpeded wind pouring around our building in the winter, which once tore the roses out of a vase I was carrying and sent them gusting halfway down the lane outside our garden gate. It was disembodied singing in the dark.

I sometimes think that I spent four years doing nothing but look out the window at strangers. Of course I did other things, some of them memorable. Actually, even the most mundane things were memorable, like grocery shopping every day across the street from Oliver Cromwell's head. To remember that now is to look down from a remote window, high in a tower, on my younger self plodding along pushing a stroller laden with bags, thinking thoughts which are as opaque to me as any stranger's. Who is that woman? Where is she going? And it comes to me now, watching her, that even she has no idea.