Only in New York

by Lily Brett

  What I thought was a new, very chic, health-food restaurant opened around the corner from me. I was dismayed to discover that it was a beauty supplies store. My mother would have been amused. And would probably have approved.

  I often wonder if she would have liked New York. I think she would have liked the excitement and the glamour. She would have liked being able to dress up. New York is definitely a city where you can dress up. My mother, who was a very good cook, would also have been surprised to see a resurgence of the Jewish food she cooked so well among the young and the hip in New York.

  When we were young, the Jews of my generation were running from the Jewish food we were brought up eating. No Jew I knew was making chopped liver or pickled herring. We laughed at chicken soup and cooked onion soup served gratinéed with croutons and cheese. Or vitello tonnato, cold sliced veal covered with a creamy tuna sauce. I remember making pheasants in champagne sauce. Pheasants? Who did I think I was? British aristocracy?

  This new wave of Jewish restaurateurs has tinkered with the old, Jewish standard dishes a little. At Kutsher’s in Tribeca they serve the latkes, grated-potato pancakes, with caviar and sour cream. And gefilte fish, which used to be made from carp or whitefish, is now, at Kutsher’s, made with wild halibut. The pickled herring has wasabi, yuzu (a Japanese citrus fruit) and peppers. It all somehow still feels Jewish.

  There are more and more new places that specialise in modern versions of traditional Jewish dishes. In downtown Manhattan alone, there is Balaboosta in Mulberry Street, Jezebel on West Broadway and Joe Dough on First Avenue. I think my mother would have been intrigued. And very pleased.

  I would have liked to have taken her to Ben’s Kosher Deli on 38th Street, one of the old, traditional delis. It is worth paying a visit to Ben’s and not just for their very good stuffed cabbage and over-stuffed sandwiches, which might have overwhelmed my mother. It is worth going there for the sheer corn of their slogans. My favourites: ‘At Ben’s we know everything about cold cuts and nothing about short cuts.’ And ‘We cure our own corned beef. Chicken soup cures everything else.’

  I decide that I will keep my mother’s glasses in the drawer, in my study, where they have been for years.

  I notice that the lenses of one of the pairs of glasses, a pair of 1960s glasses with carved and looped metal frames, look grubby. I pick up a lens-cleaning cloth, but I can’t clean the glasses. I can’t clean them in case my mother was the last person to handle the glasses and her prints are still on the glass. My mother would prefer them to be clean, I think. Then I realise that my mother is long past having preferences for anything. I feel glum.

  I decide to cook one of her signature dishes, her veal and beef meatballs in tomato sauce.

  My husband falls asleep easily. I don’t. I start chatting. Whatever I say, it is not what my husband wants to hear. Not late at night, in bed, anyway. I sometimes creep out to our guest room and read until I can fall asleep.

  More and more Americans are choosing to sleep apart. The National Association of Home Builders predicted that by 2015 more than sixty percent of custom-built houses would have two master bedrooms. An architect was quoted as saying that those who couldn’t afford a second bedroom often had a small day bed in an alcove or in the living room. This had nothing to do with sex, most of the people interviewed reported. It had more to do with snoring and other sleep disturbances.

  ‘It was more than snoring,’ one woman stated of her husband. ‘He cannot have his feet tucked into any of the covers. I have to have them tucked in.’ This piece of information riveted me. I like to have my feet untucked, too. And so, I discovered relatively recently, does my father. Maybe this is an inherited condition.

  In New York, a city that is always ahead of the trend, more and more couples not only have separate bedrooms but separate apartments. My friend Antonia has an apartment in the same building as her husband’s apartment. The entrances to their respective apartments are on different streets. She and her husband Harry have been married for more than twenty years and have never lived together.

  ‘I love my apartment,’ Antonia often tells me. ‘I can have it looking exactly the way I want. I can go to bed whenever I want to go to bed, watch whatever I want to watch. Harry and I chat on the phone a lot. We go out to the movies, or to dinner or to the theatre. It’s a much more romantic way to live.’ She has given the word romantic an inflection that definitely implies sex. Good sex.

  I met a young woman in my ophthalmologist’s waiting room who was looking for two apartments, one for herself and one for her fiancé. She was hoping to find the apartments before her impending marriage. ‘I wanted apartments in the same building,’ she said. ‘But that proved too hard to find, so now I am looking for apartments in the same street.’

  Waiting for your doctor can be a very illuminating experience in New York. This is just as well as the wait can often be very long. I asked the young woman why she wanted to live in separate apartments.

  ‘I don’t want him to hear or see me every time I brush my teeth or go to the bathroom,’ she said. ‘I don’t want him to have to listen to every phone call I make or watch me decide what to wear to work. I don’t want to hear his phone calls to his mother or his buddies. I don’t want to see him brushing or flossing his teeth. I don’t want to do his laundry or iron his clothes.’

  I thought no one in New York City ironed their clothes any more. The city is full of drycleaners and cheap laundries. ‘Do you iron your clothes?’ I said. It’s the sort of question you can ask someone in a doctor’s waiting room but which, out of context, could seem pedantic.

  ‘I don’t have clothes that need ironing,’ she said. ‘I am also very untidy,’ she added. ‘My fiancé is a neat freak. My mess drives him crazy. We tend to eat and watch TV and make out at his place.’ She says the phrase ‘make out’ very casually. No one in the crowded waiting room looks up.

  She was in the middle of a long list of what she didn’t want in a marriage, when the ophthalmologist beckoned me in. ‘I love him madly,’ she called out after me.

  In New York, everybody talks about the weather. Complete strangers bond over the weather. Weather conversations transcend age, class and race.

  I, too, gravitate towards a good weather conversation. However, I have always been wary of the weather. Weather feels too unpredictable, too disorderly for me. Weather worries me.

  There is always deadly and terrifying weather somewhere in the United States. There are fierce clouds darkening and tornadoes, illuminated by lightning, tearing across the landscape. I am geographically impaired. I find it hard to read maps. As a result, I am never quite sure how far I am from the approaching tornado or the flash floods that are turning highways into rivers, or the hail the size of golf balls or sixty-miles-an-hour winds or a predicted twelve feet of snow. I sit in front of the television weather reports, rigid with fear.

  As for meteorological terminology, I find it both fascinating and frightening. Meteorological words and phrases have remarkably human elements. Weather forecasts frequently contain references to depression, disturbances, instability and pressure. The words ‘doldrums’ and ‘knots’ and ‘knuckles’ have meteorological meanings. And so does the phrase ‘popcorn convection’. Popcorn convection basically means disorganised thunderstorms. Who knew that thunderstorms, like people, could be organised and disorganised?

  ‘Cyclonic circulation’ is the counterclockwise wind rotation in the northern hemisphere and the clockwise wind rotation in the southern hemisphere. Cyclonic circulation is what I feel happens to my blood pressure in tense moments.

  During the winter of 2013–14, in New York, the weather was an almost omnipresent subject of conversation. It was an unrelentingly awful winter, with grey skies, temperatures below freezing, and one large snowstorm after another.

  Strangely enough, or maybe not so strangely, the adversity, the cold, the ice, the difficulty of navigating mounds of snow or inches of slush, created a sense of solidarity among N
ew Yorkers. I’m certain that quite a few new friendships were formed while trying to cross one of the many impassable street corners.

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a list of winter storm-warning terms and their meanings. They could all be summed up as very bad news. There was the ‘Winter Weather Advisory’ that told you to expect winter weather conditions that could cause ‘Severe inconvenience and life-threatening hazards’. Given a choice, I would definitely opt for the severe inconvenience.

  The ‘Winter Storm Watch’ suggested that you be alert and the ‘Winter Storm Warning’ told you to take action. I thought it was very useful to know the difference between a watch and a warning. I would then be able to adjust my level of panic accordingly.

  Just next to the list of winter storm-warning terms was a photograph of a cheerful young woman digging out, or pretending to dig out, snow from her driveway. On her head was an even more cheerful-looking hat with three large pompoms. The pompoms seemed a little at odds with severe inconvenience or life-threatening hazards.

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also issued a Food and Safety list. They recommended that you have a week’s supply of drinking water, a first-aid kit, a flashlight and extra batteries, a bag of sand or cat litter to add traction on walkways, prescription drugs and other medicines and canned food, a non-electric can opener, bread, crackers, dried fruit and other foods that require no cooking.

  I already kept a supply of all of these items, except for the cat litter. My husband said I had enough pharmaceutical products to stock a small hospital. And enough batteries to be able to run the hospital. I kept all these supplies on hand. For years. Of course, by the time Hurricane Sandy hit New York, most of my batteries were flat, the crackers were stale, the canned food was way past its expiry date as were the headache, anti-nausea, anti-acid and anti-allergy medications I had bought.

  Hurricane Sandy was deadly and affected twenty-four states in America. The most severe damage was in New Jersey and New York. The storm surge hit New York on 29th October and flooded streets, tunnels and subway lines, cutting power in and around the city.

  Early in the morning I rushed out to buy batteries and water. We had no power, no heat, no phones, no internet. There was no public transport, either. For those of us who live downtown, the streets were eerily reminiscent of 9/11. You could feel the heartbreak of the loss and the damage and hurt to a city that most of us love.

  I felt triumphant when I found a small store open and operating with a flashlight, in Chinatown. I bought a bag of batteries and several flashlights. And some bottled water. And tried not to panic. I walked over to my father’s place on the Lower East Side. I knew he had also lost power. I took some batteries, bottled water, a battery-operated radio, two extra blankets and some dried fruit and bread and chocolate.

  My father was then ninety-six years old. The elevator in his building was not working. I walked up the pitch-black staircase. I was carrying parcels in both of my hands so I put a small flashlight in my mouth. Someone passed me on the stairwell and said hello, but I couldn’t answer without dropping the flashlight.

  My father looked like his usual self. He was sitting next to a window reading one of his books of detective fiction. He was completely unfazed by the lack of power or heat. He was happy to see me. That is until I unpacked the things I had brought over for him.

  ‘What do I need so much stuff for?’ he said, sounding more than annoyed. I tried to explain, but he cut me off. ‘Please take it all away and give it to somebody who does need it,’ he said. ‘Maybe the Salvation Army.’

  ‘You don’t even want the radio?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  I made things worse by suggesting that he move in with us. I had been worried that his building, like some buildings on the Lower East Side, would be evacuated. ‘Are you crazy?’ he said. ‘You have got more stairs than I have got.’

  We talked for a while. Just before I was about to leave my father asked me if, while I was the area, I could get him a doughnut from the Doughnut Plant around the corner, in Grand Street.

  ‘You want a doughnut?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Make it two doughnuts.’

  My father discovered the Doughnut Plant within days of his arrival in New York, about a decade ago. He is crazy about their doughnuts. The store has been phenomenally successful. It is always busy and on the weekends long lines form outside.

  Several years ago, my doctor told me he thought that Doughnut Plant doughnuts were the best in New York. I don’t think he was telling me to eat them, he was just passing on a piece of interesting information in the way that New Yorkers often do.

  My father, who had seen me hesitate at his request to buy him two doughnuts, told me a very lengthy story about the Doughnut Plant. The story, in brief, is that the owner of the Doughnut Plant, Mark Isreal – yes Isreal, not Israel – is the grandson of Herman Isreal, a baker who owned the College Pastry Shop in North Carolina where he invented a cake mix he used to make doughnuts. Mark’s father Marvin’s job was to glaze the doughnuts.

  Mark started making doughnuts from his grandfather’s cake mix at night in a basement on the Lower East Side. In the morning, he delivered the doughnuts on his bicycle. The Doughnut Plant now makes many varieties of doughnuts, including vanilla-bean doughnuts, Meyer-lemon doughnuts, fresh-blackberry doughnuts, peanut-butter and blackberry-jam doughnuts, coconut-cream doughnuts. Carrot-cake doughnuts, triple-chocolate doughnuts and crème-brûlée doughnuts. They have nine branches in Japan.

  I realised that my father had spent far more time in the store than I had thought.

  ‘There is no way the Doughnut Plant will be open today,’ I said to my father.

  Five days later, at 4.45 a.m., our power came back on. Suddenly everything was alight. I got such a shock. Things were beeping. I walked around the apartment switching off lights and trying to stop the beeping. All the while, I was holding a flashlight despite the fact that the apartment had been lit up like a Christmas tree. We were the very last area in Manhattan to regain power. My father’s power had been reconnected the previous day.

  Later in the morning, I took a long shower and walked to the Doughnut Plant to buy my father two glazed doughnuts.

  I spent five or six years of my youth interviewing rock stars. I interviewed them backstage after concerts, I interviewed them in their homes, in recording studios, at radio and television studios. I interviewed Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, the Who, the Mamas & the Papas, Sonny & Cher and dozens of others. I interviewed them in London, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Monterey, California.

  It was the mid- to late 1960s. It all began because my father wanted me to be a lawyer. He thought that I would be better than Perry Mason, the lawyer played by Raymond Burr, who won his case, on television, every week.

  It was very hard to rebel if you were the child of two people who were imprisoned in Nazi death camps and had had almost everyone they loved in the universe murdered. My rebellion was unplanned. It seemed to come out of the blue. I was at a high school for gifted students. I botched any plans to become a better lawyer than Perry Mason by going to see Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho instead of sitting for my final-year exams.

  I’m not sure what I thought I was going to do when it became obvious that I had not sat for the exams and therefore failed the year. I’m not sure what I thought I was going to do with my life. I wasn’t thinking. Seeing Psycho didn’t help me to think any more clearly. It just left me terrified.

  My father was bitterly disappointed when, through a stroke of massive good fortune and possibly a degree of deception, I got a job as a journalist. I didn’t even know how to load a sheet of paper into a typewriter. He thought journalism wasn’t a real job. And certainly not a profession. He was even more appalled when he realised I was working for a rock-music newspaper. Australia’s first rock-music newspaper, Go-Set.

  I travelled the world at a very
young age for Go-Set. I interviewed rock stars in an era when you could talk to them without today’s entourage of minders, assistants, managers and public-relations people present. I interviewed Mick Jagger in his apartment, Cher borrowed my false eyelashes and Janis Joplin and I discussed difficult mothers. In so many ways it was a much more innocent time.

  A lot of people thought I had a glamorous job. Let me tell you that travelling with Gene Pitney or the Troggs, whose hit at the time was ‘Wild Thing’, and staying at boarding houses in the north of England, is far removed from anyone’s notion of glamour. My father couldn’t have been less impressed or less interested in my job. For several years he harboured a small hope that I might yet end up a lawyer.

  In my novel Lola Bensky, the title character is a nineteen-year-old rock journalist who irons her hair straight and asks a lot of questions. Mick Jagger makes her a cup of tea and Jimi Hendrix, possibly, propositions her. Lola Bensky spends her days planning diets and interviewing rock stars.

  I loved being Lola Bensky. And I liked sharing initials with her. My long-term editor calls me LB. I called Lola Bensky LB in all the notes I made for the novel. It wasn’t at all confusing. I knew exactly which LB I was referring to.

  Lola Bensky, which is set in 1967, is a book of fiction. But in real life, I interviewed every one of the rock stars I wrote about in the novel. I wanted to paint as honest a portrait of the rock stars I interviewed as I could. I wanted to draw an accurate and intimate picture of this group of musicians.

  When my father, who is now ninety-eight, saw the book, he was annoyed all over again. I have written sixteen books. No other book of mine has irritated him like this one. It has brought back all of his dreams of having a daughter who could stride into a courtroom brandishing her law degree, and, week after week, against all the odds, win every case.