June 08, 2002
brooklyn boobs
Thursday, it turned out, was the ringing of the bell for the cleanup at Ground Zero. I watched on the television while preparations for it began; a camera crew was interviewing one of the clean-up crew on a stand overlooking the eight-story pit where the World Trade Center used to be.
Me, my mind was on my dress and the fact that the hotel iron didn't work. Shallow is as shallow does.
The clinic I was going to spend the day at was only three blocks away, easily managed even in strappy high heels. I padded down the street, toting my laptop, and remembered a bit belatedly that New York gets muggy in the summer; not the ideal environment for full business attire. I turned left down 81st Street, and found myself on a residential block. Every single house was flying an American flag. Some of them flew more than that. This is where Patriotism lives between one year's July 4th and the next: somewhere between 3rd and 4th Ave.
Somehow in the act of packing, I'd neglected to include a few necessary toiletries. One of them, a razor for shaving, was a deliberate absentee; not entirely positive about the nitpicky-ness of airport security, I thought it best to avoid the question altogether by acquiring smooth, ladylike legs over a counter somewhere in Brooklyn. The toothbrush omission, I'll admit quite candidly, was entirely my own fault. Somewhere between the British boyfriend and the electric Braun toothbrush, I forgot to pack one.
My bad.
My colleague had asked me to wait for her at a small place down the street called Bagel Boy. "You have to try their breakfasts," she urged over the cell phone. "You have to experience a New York City bagel with egg whites." As it happened, across that particular street there happened to be a tiny hole-in-the-wall grocer promising all the friendly food and service of your average 7-11, without any of the expensive floor room. I spied the cluttered windows with relief and popped inside, where I encountered a wizened little grey-haired man that looked like he had originally been stocked as part of the inventory back in the roaring '20s.
"Do you sell toothbrushes here?" I inquired.
His eyes lit up. Friendly folks, I thought. "Do you have toothbrushes back there?" he called out. Behind the cash register a clerk appeared, a middle-eastern man previously expertly camoflaged between Snapple signs and tobacco ads.
"Yeah," he grunted. He rustled about behind his counter, scrounging.
I beamed at both of them, left somewhat in the dark as to whether the little old man actually belonged there or not, and went to make my purchase.
Of course, it was while I was paying the suddenly friendly cashier that I realized my shoulder bag had somehow managed to pull my blouse apart and that, as a result, I was offering two of New York's finest citizens a freebie.
Brooklyn, meet my breasts. Breasts, meet Brooklyn.
There isn't much to be said about my first day on the field in New York. It was tiring, it was hectic, it was nerve-wracking, and at one point I caught myself chewing on my nails. On the other hand, it was oddly satisfying in that pleasant, masochistic way associated with papercuts and picking at scabs. Once more I encountered that refreshing New York bluntness, which said exactly what it thought, when it thought it, in exactly the way it thought it. It's easy to trust a nurse that stares at your scale reading and bluntly tells you, "Honey, you have to lose some weight or in a few years we're gonna be chiselling your tombstone." Once you've heard that from your nurse, you feel assured that you have found Diogenes' Honest Man, and to nobody's great surprise, he has a uterus. Here, you think to yourself, here is someone that won't lie to me to save my feelings. Must remember to ask her if this haircut suits me.
There's a vast difference between the New York attitude and Asian Tact Deficiency Syndrome (ATDS), though what that difference involves is rather difficult to pin down. Both have a tendency to make me grin. On the other hand, whereas one makes me grit my teeth, itch under my fingernails and rouse generations of xenophobic hatred, the other makes me laugh, embrace the strangeness, and compare the benefits of honesty over California's more Politically Correct leanings.
Afterwards, my colleague urged me to join her for dinner. "You lived in New York six years and you've never been in the city?" she asked, astonished. I muzzled a sigh and plodded along at her heels, up the street and down the subway entrance into subway cars that took us every which way. "I'll take you to the University," she promised. "Or ... we could have dinner in the Village."
Presumably, I was supposed to know what 'The Village' was. Everybody else in America did. I nodded obligingly -- 'The Village,' great; anyplace less likely to contain something that looked like a Village I'd never yet encountered -- and marched for another six thousand miles on my aching feet.
My coworker turned out to be a superlative tourguide; she knew New York like the back of her boyfriend's hand, which was precisely why she knew the city: he lived there, somewhere, and met us at the strange little bar that produced our dinner. It's was an oddity worth mentioning for me that the public places in New York allowed smoking. I eyed the profusion of little glass ashtrays with astonishment. (It's a measure of how rare the smoking habit has become in California that I couldn't even remember what ashtrays were called.)
"Haven't seen those in a while," I commented to my friend.
"What?" she asked.
I pointed. "Those ... things. The glass ones. With the smoking and the grooves ..."
"Ashtrays?"
"We use them for spoons."
Midway through dinner, my sister called. I trotted out of the smoke and the haze and dallied on the sidewalk, turning my head this way and that to experiment with the scarily strong signal I was picking up on my phone.
"Where are you?" she wanted to know.
"New York."
"You're WHAT?"
"Oh," said I. "Did I forget to mention I was going to New York?"
Apparently I had. "Crap," she sighed. "I was going to ask if you wanted to go to dinner."
We -- my coworker and I -- parted ways at the subway station. "Take the N or the R," she instructed. "Are you going to be okay?"
"Sure." I smiled optimistically, and Californian-like, didn't add the thought that bubbled up promptly after my reassurances. ("I'll just flip a coin to figure out which direction to go in. How hard could it be?")
It would be sitcom-perfect to say that I got on the wrong train and ended up in Queens before I finally realized what was going on. I darted out of the subway at Queens Plaza and huddled in a round-eyed, alarmed ball of tourist terror before getting on the proper subway going the proper way. By this point, it was half past ten, and my mind was beginning to focus on my bladder in a fashion I thought unnecessarily obsessive.
Despite the hour, there were still plenty of people taking the subway, and a few stops after my Crap-I'm-In-Queens? station, a small group of African-American women plumped down around me in the comfortable, settling-in fashion of old friends gathering for a good gossip. The subway car was fairly full; despite an NPR report I'd heard earlier in the month about obnoxious new "friendly" subway announcements, I hadn't heard a single thing that scared me more than Elmo asking me to put on my seatbelt in the taxi ride down.
One of the women wiggled her butt into a comfortable position that seemed to involve half of my seat as well, and from that point forward all of my body heat radiated from that single contact point on my hip, right next to -- damn. My bladder again.
"So I axed her, which should I do for the prom?" the youngest of the trio said, "and she sez, go comfor'ble."
The other two women made approving sounds and settled into peaceable conversation about the girl's forthcoming prom. It was an archetype for the 21st century. Three black women in a New York subway: Clotho, a working teen with a grown-up's mind; Lachesis, a middle-aged woman looking tired and wistful for her youth; and Astropos, a plump grandmotherly type in the blithe, bright colors of Africa, listening with half an ear and dreaming about orthopedic shoes and hot tea.
Of the three, it was the youngest that was the most confident. Lachesis hung on her lips with the sort of admiration that used to be Clotho's at her elder's feet. In this myth it was the children that were wiser than the adults. Astropos looked on with detached interest, already floating on her own tributary. "Who'll you go with, hon?" asked Lachesis, inching into the dream of the Prom, like a middle-aged Cinderella longing after her glory years.
"I'm gonna go with my cousin," Clotho said unselfconsciously. She said it without emphasis, completely free of the need to defend the incest of a relative doubling as prom date. "We're gonna go with a whole bunch of people. It's out on this boat, and then it casts off after like one o'clock so then it turns into this moonlight cruise."
At one of the station stops, a wandering minstrel boarded with a cardboard sign, a tin can, and a guitar clumsily strapped around his neck with a frayed rope. (I only noticed that detail later, as I did his race; catch a glimpse while he disembarks for the next car, because I stubbornly refuse to turn and look at him.) Clotho stopped mid-sentence to watch, attention caught by the first awkward chords of what eventually turned into a popular song from the '80s. The other two women turned to look because Clotho turned to look, and for this subway ride -- like most subway rides, I imagine -- she held the eye for the three of them.
It was excrutiatingly painful to listen to the man sing. In my mind I built him up as a weedy, long-haired hippy-type, in Salvation Army clothes with a scraggy beard and Old Glory stitched somewhere on his clothes. "I love this song," Clotho announced, and dug through her belongings for a dollar.
When he left, I caught a glimpse of his profile and discovered he was Asian, or at least Hispanic, clean-shaven, clean-cut, the very antithesis of the hippy I had envisioned.
A few minutes later we slowed down for a station and did not stop. There was security tape everywhere, and signs boldly written for the subway conductor: DO NOT STOP HERE. An abandoned station, though it looked perfectly serviceable. The three women fell silent and stared out the window with me, then shook themselves as one.
"It makes me sad every time we go through that," said Lachesis, her first original thought.
"I was in school when it happened," said Clotho. "My friend's mom, she worked on like the fourth or fifth floor. You know, it was my birthday. I was wearin' this new outfit, like, with this new blouse and jeans. We was gonna cut class and go to the Trade Center, do some shopping, since it was my birthday, and my mom was workin' on the first floor. I swear, for the longest time, I thought God was punishing me."
Oh, I thought. It's that station.
The women were gossiping around me, like I was the fourth wall in the mythos: null and void. "I was so mad at the school, the way they tol' us," Clotho informed the others. Astropos roused herself enough to listen, dreamy expression focusing just for the length of the story. "There was some kinda list they had in the front office, and they just went bang, straight down that list. Everybody that's parents worked in the Trade Center, they pulled out of their classes and tol' them their parents might be dead. My friend showed up outside my classroom door, she was crying so hard you couldn't see anything of her from the eyes down, she was crying so hard.
I tol' my teacher, I gotta go. I di'n't believe it when they tol' us. I thought it was some kinda joke. It looked like a movie."
"Did her mother die?" asked Lachesis, wanting closure.
Clotho shook her head decidedly. "No. She got out in time. So'd my mom."
"Pore chil'," said Astropos anyway, sympathizing with the trauma absent the loss.
"Every time I think of my birthday now, that'll be what I remember," prophesized Clotho.
They got off the train. My hip missed the extra warmth, and I shivered the rest of the way back to 86th Street.
I got back to my hotel room at eleven-thirty and pondered the priority arguments of my bladder and my aching feet.
[Next time: The sky is falling...!]