Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

  Santi, having overheard all of this, thinks I should go check out the apartment, why not?

  “Are you crazy?” I say.

  “It could be life-changing for you and your kids.”

  “Well, yes,” I say. “That’s one definition for getting murdered.”

  After several hours of sitting in the coffee shop typing yet another cover letter to yet another job listing that seems vaguely in my field, curiosity wins out. I call the number on the crumpled card. It’s the same Bronx accent as before. “Okay,” I say. “Show me the apartment.”

  The man meets me near the building on the corner of Seaman Avenue and West 207th Street. He has a key to the lobby. This seems promising. He’s affable, even friendly now that I’ve agreed either to be shown an apartment or cut up into tiny pieces. The apartment, on the third floor of a down-at-the-heels, six-story art deco building abutting Inwood Hill Park—its windows look out over the trees of an actual forest I never knew existed, with hiking trails—has three decent-sized bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a small galley kitchen with room for a tiny breakfast nook. Sure, the oven is from the 1950s and coated in grease, the fridge is small with two broken door shelves, the black-and-white checkered tiles on the kitchen floor are the stick-on kind with caked-on dirt between them where grout should be, there’s neither a washer/dryer nor a dishwasher nor room for either one nor permission to have one installed, the cabinets are crumb-strewn and sticky to the touch, and I spot several dead roaches in two of them, but the bones of the living and sleeping areas are good. More than good. The living room is sunken with decent afternoon light, and the master bedroom is flooded with natural light all day, plus it has its own tiny bathroom with a miniature shower stall. “What’s the catch?” I ask the not-really-a-broker.

  “No catch,” he says.

  I ask him if I can have my friend Caroline come by and look at it. Sure, he says. Caroline is a no-bullshit, independent film producer. If anyone can sniff out a scam, she can. The next morning, we are sitting on the floor of the living room. “You could put your dining room table right there. It would probably fit,” she says, pointing to a narrow space between the front door and the kitchen.

  “Maybe. It’ll be tight,” I say. “So you think I should take it? It’s not too good to be true?”

  “I mean…it is too good to be true. But if it’s even halfway true, you’ve still scored. Plus, what other options do you have?”

  “None,” I say. I’ve now seen all of the listings in and around my son’s school. Three bedrooms are rare, and after a year of living communally and cooking for seven, I’m aching for family privacy and one-pan meals. Plus brokers have once again been traipsing in and out of the Commune with potential buyers. The writing’s on the crumbling limestone walls: The new owners, an Australian real estate conglomerate, plan to renovate and flip the house now shared by two rent-paying tenants into a single family home for a buyer wealthy enough to afford all of it.

  Meaning, not me.

  I impart the news to my children and fellow Commune members that the lease on the house is up in a month, and I don’t have the funds to renew it. The kids and I, I explain, will be moving up to Inwood by ourselves. I promise Brittany that I will find her a new au pair situation in a new home, and I do. We will remain friends to this day. Hannah moves back in with her mother before heading off, a year later, to college. My younger son, while sad to leave his childhood home and our weekend walks in Jackie Robinson Park, is excited to be closer to his school, on the same street and within blocks of two of his best friends. My daughter has only one more year at home before she goes to college, her family has already blown up anyway, she’ll have her own room for the first time in seventeen years, and she’ll be closer to her high school in the Bronx, so it’s all good, she says, except for the name of our street. “Seaman Ave? I’m never inviting a friend over ever again,” she says, then laughs even harder when I tell her it’s near the corner of Cummings. The newly separated mother in our midst, however, while completely understanding of and empathic to the necessity of the move, is also quite reasonably upset over losing her new home barely three months after having moved in. My guilt over this remains.

  And yet I also know that I’m not solely to blame for her woes or mine. The Commune’s formation as well as its demise can be traced straight back to the rotting fruits of unrestrained American capitalism: laws and policies favoring landlords over tenants; a deliberately inflated housing market; the 2008 recession; a 40 percent rent hike; the for-profit divorce racket; a for-profit health insurance industry; the outrageous cost of an American college education; the gig economy; private equity takeovers, which stomp on workers like so many underfoot ants; historic levels of income inequality; and a government too corrupt, incompetent, and mired in partisan acrimony to keep dog from eating dog.

  “Try not to get sick or hurt,” I tell my kids as we’re packing up to move to Inwood, using every penny of my meager savings to cover the cost of the movers and the first and last month’s rent. “We don’t have health insurance right now, and we have no reserves to cover anything serious.”

  “When will we have it?” my daughter asks. “And what about birth control?” Her birth control, she knows, costs around $480 a year without insurance. I don’t even have $480 in the bank right now.

  “We’ll have it soon,” I say. “And don’t worry about birth control. I’ll figure out a way to cover it until I get health insurance.” I’ve started looking outside the journalism job boards for work, applying for positions in other industries, including as a holiday greeter at The Container Store, just to have those three months of health insurance while I continue looking for a job in my field. In the meantime, I’ve been taking on whatever freelance work I can find, but with magazines now often offering a flat $200 fee for work that used to pay between $3,000 and $10,000, depending on the number of words produced, these efforts can feel futile.

  I’ve also been writing and trying to sell a forty-page proposal and first chapter of a memoir I’m calling Yes, And…, about the curative powers of saying, “Yes, and…” to a world that’s constantly telling middle-aged women no. True to its themes, after a bunch of initial responses from editors expressing some version of Yes, and…!, it gets a bunch of No, but…rejection letters from every major publisher, with some version of “Sorry, our marketing department doesn’t really see a market for a middle-aged woman’s memoir, but we love the writing and hope it finds a good home elsewhere.”

  This is in 2014, five years before The New York Times will announce, in the wake of #MeToo, that older women are in vogue again. “Ageism is one of the last acceptable biases in our culture, but it powerfully intersects with sexism,” a University of Michigan professor quoted therein will say. “Older women are now saying ‘No, I’m still vibrant, I still have a lot to offer, and I’m not going to be consigned to invisibility.’ ” I will read these words and this article, having finally sold the book in your hands to an enlightened male editor in late 2018, with a mixture of elation and rage.

  I hand the not-broker broker a deposit check and fill out the rental application in a questionable-looking office at the foot of the George Washington Bridge. If it is a scam, I tell myself, I’ll stop payment on the check. Spoiler alert, the apartment is legit, but at each baffling new personal-information-revealing step along the way toward signing the lease, I’m sure I’m being scammed, even on—no, especially on—the day I sign it.

  “Who are these people here?” says the landlord, a gruff, elderly orthodox Jew pointing dismissively to the names of my children on the lease under the part that says, “Other Occupants.” We are signing the final papers atop what will soon be my very own Formica kitchen counter, part of which is peeling off. (“You’ll fix this?” I ask him. “Sure,” he lies.)

  “They’re my kids,” I say.

  “Who said anything about kids? You can’t put your ki
ds on the lease. We never agreed to kids living here.”

  My heart is doing its beat-skipping thing again. I feel on the verge of fainting, but I grip the peeling Formica and feign strength instead. “Why would a mother of three rent a three-bedroom by herself? I have kids. They come with the package.”

  “No, sorry. No kids.”

  If I were standing here with my husband, this would not be happening. I’ve learned, as a solo mother, that the terms of a deal are more malleable if you say, “Hmm, I need to speak to my husband about this. That sounds a little off.” But I’m screwed on this one. He knows there’s not a proprietary penis standing between him and me.

  “You can’t be serious. You cannot tell me I can’t live with my kids. That’s absurd. And illegal,” I say, even though I’m not certain about the latter. Can a landlord forbid children from living in an apartment?*2 I try googling the question, but the cellphone reception in the kitchen is nonexistent. Is that why we’re signing the papers in here?

  “Do you want the apartment or not?”

  “Of course I do! But not if my children can’t live with me. That’s nonnegotiable. Their father lives elsewhere. I am the only parent taking care of them. They either come live with me or I can’t sign the lease.”

  The owner stomps dramatically into the living room with the non-broker to have a private discussion. Ten long minutes later, they step back into the kitchen. “Fine,” says the owner, “but you have to sign this, too.”

  In all my years of renting apartments, I’ve never once felt like I needed a real estate lawyer to help me sign a simple rental lease. “What is this?” I say.

  This is a pages-long rider that somehow gives my landlord—no, let’s call him what he is, a slumlord—the right to transform my low-income, rent-stabilized, government-subsidized apartment into market rate after I leave. (I think. Even now I’m not sure, as I was never given a copy.) So the whole you-can’t-live-with-your-kids drama, in retrospect, was most likely a ruse to disarm me and make me sign anything to keep the apartment, once I’d jumped through so many hoops—yes, many more hoops than normal—to rent it. “It’s nothing,” he lies. “Just a precaution. Because no one told me you have kids.”

  “That’s ridiculous! I told the broker I have kids. When we were walking through the apartment I said things like, ‘This bedroom will be my daughter’s room, and this will be my sons’.’ ”

  “He’s not a broker.”

  “Whatever!” My frustration is now palpable.

  “You’re not a lawyer, are you?” He looks at me suspiciously.

  “No,” I say.

  “A journalist?”

  A bad one, I will later think, because had I done a little more digging, I would have discovered that the umbrella organization of the real estate firm I’m dealing with—which has its own easily googleable complaints, including mold, roaches, and entire months of no heat—is actually the Death Star of crooked New York City slumlords. They send private investigators to spy on rent-stabilized tenants they want to evict. Their multiple one-star Yelp reviews (“Beware!”; “This company is a scam!”; “Considering legal action”; “STAY AWAY FROM THESE CROOKS!!!!”) describe dozens of illegal, corrupt, morally suspect, and racist business practices.

  I avoid answering the “Are you a journalist?” question and redirect. “I’m a Jew,” I say pointedly, hoping that the fact of our shared heritage of abuse will make him less abusive. (It doesn’t.)

  He takes the bait. “You go to shul?”

  “Of course,” I say, leaving out the whole part about not having been since my father died six years earlier. Our family used to go to synagogue (aka “shul”) on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur every year without fail, but when Dad was given his death sentence, and I called him to ask if he wanted me to join him for Yom Kippur services down in Maryland, my Kansas City–born and bred father—whose most virulent curse prior to this moment was either gosh darn or golly—said, “Fuck Yom Kippur. My fate has already been sealed. I’m going to the beach.”

  We finish signing the papers, with the caveat that my kids cannot take over the lease should I die, which I’m sure is illegal, but at this point I don’t care. And I don’t plan on dying before leaving this place, which is shortsighted, considering I nearly do from excessive blood loss three years later. I just need an affordable home—now—and this one looks decent enough. The landlord hands me a set of keys and leaves, and suddenly I’m alone in the new apartment I will officially dub my “divorced-lady apartment” because “separated-and-still-in-divorce-limbo-lady apartment” seems too cumbersome.

  I walk through the still-empty rooms of my new home, be it ever so humble, feeling a sense of pride and wait…is that?…yes…joy. Pure joy. I did it. I left a bad marriage. I got myself out of the outrageously high Harlem rent. I found a place overlooking a forest with actual hiking trails. It’s three blocks from my son’s school, so I’ve just bought myself an extra half hour every morning to linger over breakfast instead of commuting with him on a crowded subway, plus in two years, when he turns ten, he’ll be old enough to walk by himself. It’s half the rent I’ve been paying, so I no longer need to live with boarders to survive. And my bedroom has its own bathroom and tree-filled windows. I’m literally surrounded by the kind of Edenic green that, were this a novel instead of my life, an editor would remove with a “Too on the nose.”

  I will live in my divorced-lady apartment on Seaman Avenue for the next four years, during which I will walk nearly every morning through Inwood Hill forest, my daily Thoreauvian act of reclamation. This simple practice of putting one foot in front of the other will serve as a new baseline. Whatever comes next in my life—whether a job or love relationship or a new home or life situation, if any—I want it to feel like this at its root: grounded, shade-providing, leaf-crunching, oxygenated, sun-dappled, quiet, calm, forward-moving, and verdant, no matter how steep the hills. (There will always be hills.) During these daily hikes, as I watch the leaves turn from green to red to gone to snow-covered and back to green again four times, I will ask myself what I want from this second half of my life, and this daily questioning and awareness of both the self, its evanescence, and time’s passage through the seasons will eventually act as catalyst.

  But not yet. At this point in our story, I’m still at the bottom of the hill, where each morning several paths present themselves. The climb, every day, shows me what’s possible. You choose a path. You stick to it. Sometimes you lose your bearings or trip over an exposed root or slip on a patch of ice or get scratched by an errant branch. But eventually, like every Dante, Hansel, or Gretel before you, you find your way through the forest into the light.

  While the trees of northern Manhattan provide an unexpected, hyper-oxygenated boon, the apartment itself will have its unexpected, well, let’s call them challenges. Gradually, or sometimes in great geysers of sludge, “the catch” of my new home, on the edge of Inwood Hill Park, will reveal itself. Or rather themselves, I should say, as there are many. I will love my new home, let’s be clear, and I remain grateful to it today for its sudden appearance—literally—out of nowhere, but while living in it I will also be inundated with roaches (and I mean thousands of roaches, not just a few); sickened by mold; and frozen on multiple consecutive subzero days by a lack of heat and hot water. My bathtub will emit noxious, brown, poop-smelling sludge that shoots straight up from its drain. The drinking water will constantly turn brown or stop running altogether. Rain will leak through loosely installed windows, transforming two of my windowsills into moldy, paint-flaked pulp that, no matter how many times I inform the management with photos like the one above, will not only never be fixed, they continue to worsen.

  Living room windowsill in Inwood, © Deborah Copaken

  The pilot light on the stove shuts off every day, so I’ll often come home to an apartment reeking of gas. The broken door shelves in the fridge wil
l be held together by duct tape. The elevator will often stop working, sometimes when I’m in it. Only three out of the five communal washing machines in the basement will work at any given time.

  All of these scarcities and inconveniences are classic slumlord ploys aimed at enraging rent-stabilized tenants enough to force them to leave, so they can jack up the rent for the next tenants. In response, the tenants in our building have created a private listserv, which urges us to call 311 en masse each day, every day, whenever the no heat/no hot water situation goes on for more than a week, or whenever the tap water looks as if it’s been tinged with human feces.

  Security will also be an issue. The building has no doorman, and our buzzer intercom delivers unintelligible static instead of a human voice. One of my neighbor’s more troubled psychiatric patients will get buzzed into the building, despite warnings sent via the listserv not to let her in. She will squirt lighter fluid onto his doormat, light a match, and nearly burn down the building. Burglars will find their way into several apartments through windows with busted locks. Another neighbor will be attacked in the unlit area in front of our building after the tenants begged for a light for years. The list goes on and on.

  Minor issues become major quality of life hassles as well, particularly after my daughter leaves for college, and it’s just me and my still-young son. I will spend an hour most nights scrubbing our dishes by hand, often with cold water when the boiler is once again on the fritz. Yes, I realize this sounds petty and entitled, since 25 percent of all U.S. households have no dishwasher either, never mind the rest of the world, but this nightly hour of cold-water dish-scrubbing after a long day at work, instead of the ten to fifteen minutes it used to take to do dishes with a dishwasher in Harlem, means I miss out on four crucial years of post-dinner hanging out with my eight- (then nine- then ten- then eleven- then twelve-) year-old, who already feels abandoned.