Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen

  Nora wondered where Rachel was now. The plan had been for the four of them to go to an outdoor classical music concert in Central Park after dinner at the Greek restaurant nearby, but the plans had gone awry. Nora had forgotten that she had a business meeting with a potential donor who was in from the Hamptons for one day only to check the paint colors in her apartment renovation. Rachel had gotten a text, made a yelping sound, said, “I’m sorry, guys, but I absolutely have to take care of something,” and blown out the door. So Charlie and Oliver had trudged off together and had wound up having wings and a pitcher of beer at a bar Oliver recommended.

  “He didn’t get carded?” Nora said.

  “He’s got a fake ID,” Charlie said.

  “Oh, great.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Where did our daughter get to?” he asked.

  This time Nora shrugged. Changes of plans were more common in their household than sticking to them. After the twins were born, Nora had learned at a Mommy and Me class that the most important thing she could do to keep her marriage intact, other than practicing her kegels and installing double sinks in the bathroom, was institute a date night. Their first date night Oliver spiked a fever and they spent the evening walking the floor with a mewling baby. Their second date night they talked about how crazy their first one had been, and whether Rachel was meeting her developmental milestones before Oliver, and whether Charity, their nanny, was as good as she seemed. Their third was canceled because of a business meeting Charlie had, the fourth canceled because Charity had to take her sister to the emergency room. Nora couldn’t remember when they’d dropped date night, but the routine of cancellation continued now in almost every arrangement they made. A dinner party Nora had to attend alone after the state commissioner of banking wanted to have a drink with a group at Charlie’s firm and Charlie was afraid to miss it. A professional conference Nora couldn’t go to as Charlie’s plus one because of a new press preview she needed to handle personally at work. Once they tried to factor the twins in, the possibilities for cancellation became infinite.

  They had miraculously all managed brunch the day before, and had walked home through the shimmering August air of Central Park together. Rachel had stopped to look at the memorial plaques on the park benches, and to read them aloud. For Robert A. Davidson, Who Loved the Park. Joan and John, Fifty Years and Counting. Happy Birthday, Janet—Have a Seat!

  “ ‘Maisie, sorely missed, 1999 to 2012,’ ” Rachel read. “Oh, Mommy, look. That would make her only thirteen years old.”

  “It’s probably a dog,” Nora said.

  “What?”

  “Lots of people do this for their dogs. I bet Maisie was a dog.”

  “Because a teenage girl is too threatening?” Rachel said. Nora sighed and shook her head as her daughter trudged along next to Charlie. Oliver dropped back to Nora’s side. Coming toward them was first one double stroller, then another, both inhabited by toddlers of the same age. “My peeps,” said Oliver, smiling.

  “You have twins,” people had said when they first met Nora and Charlie, with that knowing look. New York City was lousy with twins, twins that meant you and your husband had had sex like normal people for a year or two, then like people charting ovulation on a graph in the bathroom, then like people whose relationship consisted mainly of one giving herself shots of nuclear hormones while yelling at the other. Twins meant a doctor’s office with your eggs in a dish and your husband’s sperm in the little vial they’d given him to fill in a closet, along with some fairly tame porn. When the Nolans’ pharmacy put Nora on hold, the recorded message said it was the number-one purveyor of fertility medications in the New York City area, as though that were an achievement.

  When she’d first pushed a double stroller Nora had wanted to hang a sign on the front: THEY ARE NOT THAT KIND OF TWINS.

  “I don’t know why you care,” Charlie had said.

  Oliver had always liked the idea of being one of two. Rachel, not so much. “It’s a good thing we’re not identicals,” she said more than once.

  “A boy and a girl, identical twins,” Oliver said. “That would be one for the bio books.” Rachel’s singularity was her national flag, her official seal.

  “I saw some people on campus—they had triplets,” Oliver said to Nora now.

  “God bless them,” Nora said.

  A group of Japanese tourists wearing surgical masks went by, taking pictures of one another without bothering to lower the masks. Nora sighed again. “I wish your sister would stop pushing my buttons,” Nora said.

  “She’s fine, Mom,” Oliver said. “I know you feel like she unloads on you, but sometimes she just goes down a rabbit hole. She’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

  “Okay, now I’m worried.”

  “No, don’t be, it’s just—be cool. Senior year is hard on people. Not me so much, but a lot of people. She’s just a lot more breakable than she seems sometimes.”

  “Ollie, if you’re trying to make me feel better, you’re not doing such a great job.”

  “Mom,” said Oliver. “Everything’s fine. Just cut her some slack.”

  Nora watched Charlie put his arm around Rachel’s shoulder. She had spent some of the best years of her life worrying about Rachel, staring at the bedroom ceiling as Charlie snored beside her, thinking mainly about terrible things she’d read about in magazines. If Rachel lost weight, Nora worried that she was anorexic. If she was distracted, Nora worried that she was taking drugs. The sound of vomiting echoing through the stairwell during high school first thing in the morning—that one didn’t even bear thinking about. Alma Fenstermacher, who was twenty years older than Nora, once said there was a fine line between worrying about your daughter getting pregnant accidentally, and obsessing about when she would finally give you grandchildren. Luckily Rachel threw up in the morning only twice, once because of tequila, once because of bad sushi. Nora worried about her no less now that she was out of the house much of the time, and she didn’t suppose she would worry about her any less even when she was gone for good. Which Nora thought was a horrible turn of phrase.

  Nora rarely worried about Oliver. That worried her.

  “Ollie, want to check out the parking space when we get home?” Charlie called as Rachel leaned into him.

  “Wait until the first time he has to dig the car out after a snowstorm,” Sherry Fisk had said.

  “Charlie says he finally feels like he’s part of the block,” Nora said, as Sherry rolled her eyes.

  Nora had felt as though they were part of the block long before, when the twins had been invited to babysit for the Rizzoli grandchildren (which had sometimes consisted of Nora helping to sit for the Rizzoli grandchildren), when they’d received their first invitation to the holiday party on Alma Fenstermacher’s beautiful thick note cards with the engraved border of holly, but especially when Ricky first rang their bell. For Nora, Ricky was one of the two linchpins of a daily existence that, between the house, the twins, the dog, and the job, was always in danger of tumbling out of control in some minor but annoying way, like a persistent itch. They had lived on the block for almost six months when the doorbell rang on a Saturday morning. The twins, who had spent their first nine years in an apartment, were still agog at the idea of answering their own door, and ran down the stairs, shoving each other aside.

  “It’s some man who wants to talk to you or Daddy,” Rachel said. “I said Daddy was at work. Like always.”

  The man at the door was someone Nora had already seen dozens of times on the block, wearing a uniform of drab green pants and matching shirt, often with two or three others trailing behind him. “Missus,” he said, removing a baseball cap that said METROPOLITAN LUMBER, “my name is Ricky. I do fixing, painting, putting out the recycle, you name it. I am reasonable and reliable.” There was no doubt that it was a carefully rehearsed speech.

  He handed h
er a slightly grubby business card. ENRIQUE RAMOS, it said, with a phone number.

  Satisfaction guaranteed.

  No job too small.

  Reasonable rates.

  References available.

  He’d crammed every cliché from every small business onto the card, so that the type was almost unreadable, it was so tiny. George had been his patron then, telling everyone he met that Ricky had done a great job rebuilding the brick wall in his backyard. “Rock-bottom prices,” he said.

  Nora insisted that the twins address him as Mr. Ramos, and she never called him Ricky when she spoke to him directly. “Enrique,” she would say when she ran into him on the street, “there’s a short in that backyard light again.” Or there was a problem with Oliver’s toilet, or a clogged sink in the basement, or a tap in Rachel’s bathroom that dripped, and, according to Rachel, kept her from sleeping for even a single minute during the night. Ricky would ring the bell and stand just inside the front door slipping paper covers over his shoes, the kind that surgeons wore when they were operating. If it was a bigger job, he would have one of his guys with him, but Nora had never learned any of their names and they rarely spoke. Once there had been a young one with gelled hair ridged into rows like a cornfield and a shabby little soul patch flaring beneath his lower lip. He had arrived with Ricky and another guy to reattach a section of the furnace duct work that had come loose. Rachel had gotten home from school as the young guy was pulling off his shoe covers, and he had said, “Hola, chica,” and Ricky had let loose a string of Spanish that Rachel said she had not understood despite an immersive summer program. What Nora understood was that she never saw the young guy again. “He’s gone,” Charity said darkly.

  “Without Ricky and Charity, this whole house falls apart,” Nora said to Charlie, tapping the message from George, whose patronage had later given way to some minor dispute with Ricky, probably over a bill. “We can do without your car. We can’t do without them.”

  “It’s your car, too,” Charlie said.

  Nora didn’t think of it as her car, but she said nothing. She hoped that the acquisition of the space in the lot would make Charlie stop talking about selling the house. This, too, was George’s fault, and had increased her antipathy toward him to the point that she barely acknowledged his pugs when they trundled, bow-legged, across her path, breathing asthmatically. George was a person of serial allegiances: to the writer who was researching the block and would give all of them free copies of his book if he could just take a quick look around their houses; to the roofer who was willing to repair flashing and gutters cheaply; to the salvage yard that had period doors that could be made to fit the jambs with only a bit of tweaking. He would send out missives vouching for the writer, the roofer, the manager of the salvage yard. “Mom, there’s a new George-o-Gram on the floor by the door,” Rachel would say.

  This always ended in disaster, and disavowals. The writer never found a publisher. The roofer did half the job and then disappeared. The tweaking meant the doors looked dreadful. But his latest had sucked them all in, or at least all the men. An appraiser had estimated the market value of all their houses. He’d expected to be paid afterward, as people often did, and George had stiffed him. But before that George had gotten him to cough up some numbers. Charlie had come home from his morning walk with Homer, and said, “We should put this place on the market as soon as we can get it into shape.”

  “What? What are you talking about? It is in shape. And it’s our home. Why would we sell it?”

  Sherry Fisk told the same story, and Linda Lessman, who lived across the street, and George’s wife, Betsy, had probably heard the same sales pitch, too, although the other women never saw her much, nor, it seemed, did George. The houses on the block, like most of Manhattan, had appreciated so much they constituted a lottery prize. The women saw them as homes, the men as real estate. Charlie would be reading the Times on the weekend, and he would suddenly look up thoughtfully and say, “If we sold this place, we could buy a great old house in Savannah and bank the rest.”

  “I don’t want to live in Savannah,” Nora said.

  “You’ve never even been to Savannah, Bun,” Charlie said.

  “You’ve never been to Savannah. I went there for work. It’s a beautiful place. I don’t want to live there. I live in New York. I have a job here, remember?”

  “There must be museums in Savannah.” Or Charleston. Or Santa Fe. It depended on which town with reasonably priced housing was featured in the paper that week.

  Nora hoped the parking lot would insulate her from Charlie’s sense that they could no longer afford to live in their house because it was too valuable for them to do so. Of course there was really no earthly reason to have a car in New York City, but Nora knew enough not to mention it. Their children did not even have driver’s licenses, although they were twenty years old. Rachel had driven up over a curb her second time out in the car, turned to her mother, and said, “See,” and had never, as far as they knew, driven again. Oliver had let his learner’s permit expire. He came home from college on the train. Rachel hitched a ride with whichever suburban kid was willing to pass through Manhattan in exchange for gas money.

  Still, Charlie insisted on having the car. It was used to transport his clubs to golf courses on Long Island and in Westchester County. There was a small stone house upstate they had owned when the kids were small, although they had sold it when Rachel and Ollie were in middle school. Charlie complained that they’d gotten to the point that they never used it, but the truth was they’d never used it much anyhow, mainly for Thanksgiving dinner and as a base from which to cut down a tree at a tree farm and bring it back to New York for Christmas. And Nora remembered how much Charlie had actually hated the drive, the kids wailing in the backseat—I have to pee I’m so hungry she’s touching me with her foot he smells so bad he’s farting am not are so. “If you don’t stop that I’m going to leave you by the side of the road,” Charlie had yelled at the end of one Thanksgiving weekend, and both children had started to sob. “I’m never going in the car with Daddy again,” Rachel said that night as Nora tucked her in. “Me neither,” yelled Oliver from his room next door. “Copycat,” Rachel yelled back.

  “Daddy didn’t mean it,” Nora said.

  “He sounded like he did,” Rachel said.

  Nora remembered that before George had gotten a space in the lot, he had insisted loudly to anyone who would listen (after a while no one would listen) that it was absolutely unnecessary to pay for parking. George had been one of those New Yorkers who had a second job—or, as far as any of them could tell in George’s case, a first one—gaming the alternate-side parking rules of the City of New York. Like some odd circus act, the cars wove around, away from the dirty curb, over to double-park across the street, then in behind the traffic cop and the street cleaner to pull back to the curb, often into the very same spot they’d occupied just minutes before.

  “Let me give you a tutorial,” she had heard George say one morning to a young man who had just moved onto the block. “See the sign? No parking, nine to eleven, Monday and Thursday. So what you do is, you sit in your car and you check for the agent. Don’t jump the gun! Wait until she’s coming up on you or ticketing the guy behind you who forgot or overslept. Then you move out and up. It’s easier than it sounds because you’ll probably be following the guy who was parked right in front of you. You sit tight on the other side of the street, the Tuesday-Friday side, and wait for her to get to the end of the block, wait for the street cleaner, boom! You finish the circle and you’re good to go.”

  “What about the double-parking? Won’t I get a ticket for double-parking while I wait?”

  George shook his head. “I’ve never seen it happen.”

  There were many measures of the insanity of living in New York City: private school recommendations for four-year-olds; co-op boards that asked the question “W
hat do you think you will bring to the gestalt of this building?” But those cars circling the block behind the mechanized, rotating whisk brooms and spray of the street-cleaning truck, wagon trains on a pitiless paved frontier, were one of the most ubiquitous and conspicuous. The drivers were mainly men, cultlike in their understanding of the underpinnings of their work. The high, grubby walls of cindered, hardpacked snow that foiled those who parked in the lot, the municipal plows leaving a huge berm atop the curb cut, were a boon to the hardcore alternate-side parkers. Alternate-side parking was suspended when snow accumulated. This being New York, it was also suspended not only for Memorial Day and Christmas but for Chinese New Year, Purim, the Hindu festival of lights called Diwali, and the Feast of the Ascension.

  “That’s just ridiculous,” Linda Lessman, who had grown up Catholic, had said one year at the block barbecue. “Ascension Thursday is a minor holiday.”

  “More minor than Shavuot?” Jack Fisk said.

  “You’ve got me there,” Linda said.

  Of course once George had gotten a space in the lot, he had forsaken all others. “Suckers,” he said when he saw someone sitting at the curb at 8:45, sipping coffee from a go-cup and checking his mirrors for the street cleaner. Almost overnight he had gone from being the alternate-side aficionado to the parking lot overseer, so that people sometimes made the mistake of thinking that he owned it. One of the things Nora hated about Charlie’s new space was that it had made him friendlier with George. The trade-off was that it had made Charlie friendlier in general.