by Dana Czapnik
Lex holds up her right hand to show me her mood ring. The one that matches mine. The ones we bought together at a street fair by her house in Flushing over the summer, when she introduced me to churros for the first time and told me to go with the caramel drizzle instead of the powdered sugar and I didn’t regret it. Hers is aquamarine on the inside, with a bit of golden brown at the edge.
“What does it mean?” I ask.
“It means I’m in love,” she says.
“With PJ?”
“Who else?”
Paul Jimenez—PJ for short—is Alexis’s first real boyfriend, and so she’s been acting like everyone who has ever had their first real boyfriend: a little smug, a little moonstruck, and a little nervous that her recent state of boyfriendedness could turn on a dime and she’d be back to being in a state of boyfriendlessness.
“Where’s he taking you tonight?”
“Coney Island. Why don’t you come?”
“You don’t want me hanging around on your date.”
“You could bring Percy, get him up on the Wonder Wheel. Two bucks for two spins and everything could change.”
“Have you been to Coney Island recently? It’s all hookers and graffiti and used syringes. The last time I was there, Percy and I went on a ride called Dante’s Inferno. It broke down in the middle, and we had to walk out of it in complete darkness. On our way out we saw a sign that said ‘You who enter here, abandon all hope.’ ”
She laughs. “That sounds awesome to me.”
“Actually”—come to think of it—“it kind of was.”
“So come.”
“I can’t anyway, I gotta babysit tonight. Earn some jingle.”
Up ahead of us is a hunched woman in an oversized “Co-Ed Naked Hockey” T-shirt pushing a dirty and dented coco helado cart filled with Italian ices, which are always better than the ices you get at pizza places, even though the pizza places have more flavors. We race to flag her down. One good scoop for 50 cents, two scoops for a dollar, but everyone knows you can only eat one scoop in time before it goes all liquid. We dig into our pockets. Alexis orders for us in Spanish. I watch and listen carefully as she motormouths through the conversation. I like hearing Alexis speak Spanish. It reveals a part of her I can’t know. Because language is like that, a hiding spot for your secret self. Plus she talks so fast, especially when she does impressions of her mother yelling at her for wearing jeans she thinks are too baggy for a girl. I’m envious of anyone who speaks another language. Especially those who grew up with that language in the home, because there’s an understanding for it, a texture, an identity that those of us who learn it later in life can never have. It will always be a second skin. I asked my Spanish teacher once, “How do you know when you’re fluent en español?” and she said, “When you dream in it.”
“Un Limón y un Rainbow,” she says, giving the lady all our change.
“Say it in Spanish,” I go.
“No. ‘Rainbow’ is the only word that’s prettier in English than Spanish, and when you speak both languages you get to choose.”
“Is that why corazón is in every Spanish song?”
“Yes. If the word for ‘heart’ in English was corazón, it would be in every song too.”
The lady passes us our ices.
“What other words are better in Spanish?”
She takes a mouthful of lemon ices and considers the question. “ ‘Hunger.’ ‘Hunger’ in Spanish is better,” she says.
“Hambre. Yeah, that’s a good word.”
“No, no. It’s not the word. It’s the expression. Like if I were to ask you if you’re hungry, in English it’s ‘Are you hungry?’ but in Spanish it’s ¿Tienes hambre? ‘Do you have hunger?’ Tengo hambre. ‘I have hunger.’ Like, being hungry and having hunger, these are two different things, you know?” A chunk of lemon ices dribbles down the side of her paper cup.
“I do,” I say. “Tengo hambre, mi amiga. Tengo hambre.”
“What are some good words in Italian and Hebrew?”
“I bet there are some amazing words in Italian, but I don’t know any. My grandmother on my mom’s side was the only one in the family who still spoke a little Italian, and she died before I was born. Besides, she and my grandfather were communists. They weren’t particularly culturally Italian. My mom said she was the only girl in Brooklyn without a Christmas tree. That’s probably why she ended up with my dad: Only Jews understand the emptiness of not being able to celebrate Christmas. And on my dad’s side, all the fresh-off-the-boaters spoke Yiddish, not Hebrew. I know a few words, but none of them are pretty like corazón or tengo hambre. Yiddish is not a Romance language.”
“But it’s a great language for cursing! Schmuck! Fuh-cockt!”
“How do you know those words?”
“I live in New York. Everyone here has to speak at least a little bit of Spanish and a little bit of Yiddish. Those are the rules.”
* * *
Our ices continue to melt in our palms as we walk past The Falconer, a statue of a young boy in tights, leg muscles blazing, releasing a bird, only his toes on the ground, the falcon’s wings in the midst of opening. The statue’s situated at the top of a classic Central Park rock formation, set against a break in the trees so when you look up at the bird, all you see is open sky. I know I’m supposed to love the statue of Alice in Wonderland, being a girl and all, but I’ve always loved this one. It’s reminiscent of the feeling when you hit the perfect jump shot. The way your body goes skyward and the ball is released at the tippy-top of your fingers and you know, as soon as you let it go: that shit’s gonna fall in.
I’m envious that there are statues like this made of boys, but none of girls. Statues of girls are always doing something feminine or unfun, like lounging half-naked by a spring, gently dipping elegant fingertips in the water, or standing stone-faced for Justice or Liberty or some other impossible human ideal. Why can’t girls with muscular legs in leggings stand on a hilltop and release a bird?
I’ve known since I was little that the kids having the most fun were the boys. They got to run through the world, feral and laughing. Girls were quiet, played at being grown-ups with dolls, whispered into each other’s ears and giggled behind cupped hands. They imitated each other’s expressions, gesticulations. Found comfort dressing like each other and traveling in groups. At the playground, they’d draw flowers with chalk and politely seesaw, have competitions to see who could swing the highest. I’d watch the boys with envy from a distance. They didn’t want me to participate in their games of war. They’d tear through the playground like animals, and I so wanted permission to have that kind of abandon. Eventually, I found my place with the boys because I was a strong enough athlete that someone would occasionally want me on their team when they got some sort of organized play together. I was sporadically allowed to participate but never allowed a say in the direction of the game. A bit player. But it was okay to not have any power, as long as I was given a few moments to run roughshod through the world with my skinned knees and shins and hollowed-out mosquito bites, so much surface area of my body red and brown and scabbed. But then when I was given those permissions, as few as they were, I found that there was no place for me with the polite girls practicing penmanship during art class. I was not like them. They didn’t understand me. The girls thought I was weird. That I wanted to be a boy. But I didn’t want to be a boy. I wanted to be a girl who had fun. My version of fun.
I turn to Alexis, who came to Pendleton in the seventh grade and was cut from the same cloth. Skinned knees. Flared nostrils. Dripping with hambre.
“Lex, don’t you wish they made statues of girls like that?” I point out The Falconer to her. “Just some girl having unapologetic fun.”
“I never apologize for the fun I have. And neither do you.”
“Damn straight,” I go and give her a high five, even though we both know it’s part-lie-part-truth.
I squeeze the rest of the rainbow ices from the bottom of m
y paper cup and lick it off, trying my best to avoid getting it on my hands so they won’t be sticky with artificial flavoring all afternoon. I hold up my mood ring and show it to Lex. It matches the color of my ices. The mixture of red and blue and white has melted into a purplish brown and tastes like childhood.
* * *
Janie Gruener opens the door to let me in. She’s got unruly wavy black hair speckled with wiry tufts of white. The nascent formation of jowls. Soft, shiny skin with fine crisscrossed lines around her cheeks and eyes, like tidal patterns in sand. Normally she wears shapeless, boxy, monochromatic glorified pajamas or pleated khakis paired with a sweatshirt. Her face is actually younger than her appearance usually suggests—like she’s looking forward to menopause so she’ll have a legitimate excuse to stop trying. It’s conceivable that she could be in her thirties, at the right angle. And at a different angle, she could be in her fifties. Which is to say, she’s most likely in her forties. And that age, to me it seems, is some sort of a strange death knell for female beauty. Not that women lose their beauty at forty, but that seems to be the age when so many of them give up. They cut their hair short, put on fifteen to twenty pounds, start wearing clothes from Eileen Fisher. But tonight, Janie Gruener’s got on a little-ish black dress that shows off the upper limits of cleave, which, unlike my mother’s, doesn’t have any wrinkles.
I follow her into the kitchen and watch as a run in her stocking gets wider with every step. It adds to her essence of defeat. She reminds me where the emergency numbers are—on a faded piece of paper taped to the left-hand corner of the fridge—and she writes the numbers of the restaurant they’re going to and the Met on a notepad hanging on the wall next to the phone. The notepad has a Cathy cartoon on the top of the page. Cathy looks frenzied, and the bubble over her head reads: “Ack! I have so much to do!” Did someone in this household actually lay down the buck fifty or whatever to purchase this—was it purchased by Janie herself? A thoughtless Mother’s Day gift? A gift from someone at her office?—or is it one of those artifacts that migrates into a home without leaving any clue to its origin? Like the magnet on my fridge with the Jimmy Buffett quote “Why don’t we get drunk and screw” and “Fort Lauderdale” written atop a postcard picture of a palm tree, even though I know for a fact no one in my family has ever been south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Janie takes out a plate of food from the microwave and explains to me that Abigail is to eat all the steamed broccoli before she gets to eat her fish sticks. She stops for a moment and takes a deep breath and hugs me. “Lucy, thank you so much for babysitting for us tonight. You’re a real lifesaver.” Her face reads genuine appreciation, but I hate expressions like that. It’s a benevolent fakeness that seems harmless but all it does is add to the sticky coating of dishonesty that covers the world. She finally looks down and notices the run in her stocking, which I’m glad about because it means I won’t have to point it out to her. She curses and runs to the bedroom, kicking off her square-toed heels on the way, and yells, “Now I have to shave my legs!” in a comic voice aimed for a chuckle. I half expect her to add an “Ack!” to the end of it and I make a solemn, secret vow to the soul inside my soul to never utter a sentence that could be punctuated by an onomatopoeic grunt that sums up the sentiment Look at me! I’m so sad! Isn’t it funny? in one neat syllable.
Janie spends the next half hour giving me instructions, mapping out every moment of my evening with Abigail until finally Elliot drags her off with a curt, “We’re going to miss the show.” After they leave, I negotiate with Abigail to eat her broccoli. She makes me play Barbie with her, and no matter what direction I try to steer things, she always navigates the game back to Ken and Barbie making out. At one point she asks me, “Is this how you kiss boys?” And I say, “Sort of,” even though the real truth is I’m as clueless as her. Because I’m a teenager, she just assumes I must be cool and know all the answers to the questions she asks me about boys and high school, but all it does is remind me of how little experience I have and it always depresses me. This is why I usually say no when the Grueners ask me to babysit.
* * *
The only perk of babysitting, aside from the money, is getting to explore the lives of relative strangers. I know it’s unethical, but the anthropologist in me loves examining the pictures and shelves and excavating all the drawers in people’s homes after the kids I’m babysitting have gone to sleep. I’m not even looking for anything juicy or salacious. It’s just an impulse I have to see how others live. Since I’m the resident teenage girl in my apartment building, I’ve babysat a lot of the kids and have been able to really examine the lives of our neighbors.
In apartment 4E, I found divorce papers with specific custody terms hidden in the bottom of an underwear drawer, obviously never having been read by the soon-to-be divorcé. God, the Ellisons. Whenever I see them all together, I think, Someone needs to put a picture of that family in an advertisement for life insurance. That’s the kind of perfection they radiate—and yet. Divorce papers hidden in a drawer.
The Krashevskis live in apartment 7A. Mr. Krashevski is a super-old white guy with the kind of beard that belongs on a Hasidic rabbi from Warsaw circa 1934, unkempt and willowy and down to the middle of his considerable belly. Our building was built in the late 1890s, and my parents joke that he’s lived here so long, he must be an original tenant. He’s been married a bunch, but this wife—who has to be at least thirty years younger—is the only one he’s had a kid with. He’s a famous poet, I guess, and has pictures all over the apartment with people like Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac. But I don’t know how much poetry he writes anymore. Every time I babysit, the same poem he started at least two years ago still sits in the typewriter on his desk. All it says is:
time is a
Whenever I see him, I want to shake him and yell, “Time is a what, Mr. Krashevski? Time is a what?!” He better finish that poem before time runs out is what.
In apartment 5B, I found this old photo album with pictures of people at a Japanese internment camp. The Watanabes. Their son goes to Pendleton too. Sometimes I walk him to school when his mom has an early meeting. I think she’s a social worker for the city. The Watanabes aren’t the ones in the photos, they’re way too young. Maybe their parents? What must the people in the photos think of their kid going to a school that used to be only for white, Anglo-Saxon men? I guess it’s just as weird that I go there, considering they didn’t let girls or Jews in until the 1970s. I wonder if the Watanabes have the same attitude as my parents: In any other era, a girl with Jewish blood would have been shut out of a school with a direct pipeline to the Ivies, and now that you’re not, you have to take advantage and not stand on ceremony. It’s not like my parents were revolutionaries. They were just your run-of-the-mill lower-middle-class striving hippies who probably dabbled in a few recreational herbs now and then. They must have—I mean, my dad had muttonchops when I was born. And he once asked me if I’d ever tried “grass.” I lied and said no, but I also turned bright red, so who knows if he believed me.
* * *
After Abigail falls asleep, I walk around the Grueners’ huge apartment. When they moved into the building two years ago, they purchased two adjacent units and renovated the space to combine them. So even though they’re in the same line as my apartment, their living room is more than twice the size of ours and stretches out like in a downtown loft. When my mother saw the apartment for the first time, she came home lamenting, “What’s happening to this neighborhood?” but there was also a tinge of jealousy in her voice. But despite how beautiful their apartment is, there’s no personality. Nothing of interest, really, to excavate. I look through the drawers of the dresser in the entryway. Pencils and pens and random papers and brochures. Mittens and gloves and winter hats and scarves. A bowl for loose change. A tin can full of orphaned keys, which does have a certain mystery to it.
In the office off the foyer there’s paperwork, a desk calendar, a circular Rolodex, and metal file cabinets. I open a des
k drawer and find a scattering of loose business cards. One has a corporate logo at the top and the company name Atlas Management. Beneath that is the name Elliot Gruener followed by the initials CFA, though I have no idea what they stand for. Probably not Cat Fanciers’ Association, but it’s the first thing I think of and it makes me giggle. I find Janie’s business card. She uses the name Jane Horton-Gruener. Turns out she works for Condé Nast, which could be interesting, but it’s in the human resources department, which definitely isn’t. I don’t bother searching through the rest of the office. The situation’s sad enough as it is.
Is there anything more tragic than being boring?
In the living room, there are bookshelves, but the only books on them are of the coffee-table variety and a collection of very nice, but nothing special, glass bowls on display. On the mantel are a series of family photos: Abigail on a horse in Central Park. Janie and Elliot’s wedding—her with teased-out Eighties hair and a Disney-princess puffy lace dress, him in a shit-brown tuxedo and a thick ’stache. A family portrait in a photographer’s studio when Abigail was a baby, snot running down her lip, an exasperated look plainly visible on Janie’s face, though she’s trying to hide it with a plastered smile. A black-and-white photo of Janie from what looks like college. She’s got glamorous Farrah Fawcett wings and is wearing a striped tank top and bell bottoms, braless, thin, in control, her face serious and shadowed and alive. The next photo over she’s sitting on a folding beach chair in the sand under an umbrella, wearing what appears to be a blue floral muumuu, spider veins and cottage-cheese thighs visible just above her knees before the shadows conceal everything you don’t want to see. Next to her is Elliot, sitting on another chair, with Abigail making a sand castle by his feet. He’s wearing swim trunks that are way too short and his hairy tummy tire hangs listlessly over them, his nose and bald head slathered in sunscreen. Live slow, die old, etcetera etcetera.
