Suzanne Davis gets a life
Page 1
SUZANNE DAVIS GETS A LIFE
First Paul Dry Books Edition, 2014
Paul Dry Books, Inc.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
www.pauldrybooks.com
Copyright © 2014 Paula Marantz Cohen
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cohen, Paula Marantz, 1953–
Suzanne Davis gets a life / Paula Marantz Cohen. — First Paul Dry Books edition.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-1-58988-095-5 (alk. paper)
1. Single women—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 2. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 3. Book clubs (Discussion groups) — Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.O372S89 2014
813’.54—dc23
2014002968
HERE’S SOME BACKGROUND on me: I’m thirty-one years old, single, and live in an apartment the size of a shoebox on West 76th Street in New York City.
OK—I know what you’re thinking. An apartment on West 76th Street, even one the size of a shoebox, is nothing to complain about. There are people with apartments the size of shoeboxes way downtown and way uptown, not to mention in not-very-nice sections of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and New Jersey, which should make me feel grateful that my shoebox-sized apartment is much better located. That kind of comparative thinking is how people in New York in very small apartments are supposed to make themselves feel better about where they live. The only problem with comparative thinking is that it’s a double-edged sword. No sooner do you start thinking about all those people in minuscule apartments in the boroughs and New Jersey than you also start thinking about all those other people in prewar sevens and humongous lofts right here in Manhattan—and before you know it, you’re right back in your well-located apartment the size of a shoebox being miserable again.
You may be curious to know how I got my apartment. I bought it with the legacy from my father’s death. This is also a very New York thing, where someone’s loss is always someone else’s gain. I can’t tell you how often I’ve met people who told me about the death of a relative, only to say, “Upside is that I got his apartment!” The problem with the upside in my case is that I loved my dad. He gave me hope that men were not all jerks and that I might someday find one who would appreciate me. “Suzanne,” he would say, “you’re an exceptional young woman, and any guy who doesn’t see that isn’t worth the time of day.” This may not sound like much, but trust me, it was the way he said it. Then he up and died of colon cancer at the age of sixty, which not only deprived me of someone I was really attached to, but also removed the buffer between me and my extremely annoying mother. So, to make a long story short, every time I turn the double locks on the metal-reinforced door of my well-located apartment the size of a shoebox, I miss my dad.
Here I need to stop and correct something I said in the heat of the moment. I’m not thirty-one years old; I’m thirty-four. Dr. Chitturi, my therapist, says lying about my age is a way of not coming to terms with who I am, and since I’m paying Dr. Chitturi $200 an hour to help me come to terms with who I am, the least I can do is take her advice and tell the truth. So—thirty-four, not thirty-one. Thirty-five in five months, if you want morbid truth-telling.
The reason I lie about my age is because if I say I’m thirty-four, people think that my biological clock must be on my mind. This bothers me for the simple reason that it is true. I think about my biological clock, like, all the time. I think things like, “If I meet some guy tomorrow, and we get married in a month, and then we started trying right away, and I get pregnant right away, I could have a baby by (fill in the date).” This is the sort of thinking that can keep you awake at two in the morning, causing you to sleep most of the next day and thereby put off, by another twenty-four-hour cycle, the chance of meeting the person you will marry in a month, etc. etc. Not that Dr. Chitturi and I aren’t working on this sort of thinking; believe me, we are. But breaking toxic patterns of thought is hard, not to mention expensive (i.e., $200 an hour).
When I’m not sleeping through my biological clock, I am, despite what my mother thinks, trying to find Mr. Right. For example, I’ve tried Internet dating, and gone on many dates with people on JDate who went to the same summer camp as I did, and with other people on Match.com. The result hasn’t been successful, though I admit that maybe it’s my fault. I can only take so much reminiscing about Camp Ros-cowan (Native Americanese for its founder, Roz Cohen). As I see it, Internet dating is like going to the gym: you have to put in the hours on the machines if you want to get flat abs, and you have to slog through lots of bad dates to find your soul mate. I know this, but I just don’t have the stamina for either one.
Moving on to what I do for a living: I’m a technical writer. I found my way to this not-very-lucrative field because I couldn’t find a job when I graduated from college with a degree in English (which cost, rounding off, $120,000) and was told that there would be lots of jobs if I supplemented that degree with a one-year program in technical writing (which cost a paltry $20,000). This happens to be true. There are lots of writing jobs related to technical things like electrical circuitry and dry-wall plastering. I’m not sure dry-wall plastering is technical, but it probably could pass because it’s boring. Technical writing jobs are boring—they sound boring, and they are.
The particular outfit I work for is called the International Association of Air Conditioning Engineers, which pretty much sums up what they are, with the exception of the international part. As far as I can see, this is a euphemism for lots of air-conditioning engineers, most of them from New Jersey. As for the work itself, mostly what I do is write press releases on the latest air-conditioning regulations and on hot news about indoor air quality, trying to make these things interesting to the general public. To give you an example: the other day I wrote a press release with the headline “Air in 75% of Homes Is Silent Killer”—which I thought might snag the attention of your everyday non-air-conditioning-engineer type. Unfortunately, the air-conditioning engineers ended up changing my headline to: “Air in 75% of Homes May Be Unacceptable.” What can I tell you? This is a cautious group of guys; they get excited about indoor air quality, even when it’s not killing anyone.
Which brings me to the seemingly hopeful fact that there are primarily if not entirely guys in I-ACE. One of the small thrills of my job is being able to throw around that self-congratulatory acronym (though I have yet to actually ace anything since my fourth-grade spelling bee). But given that there are all these guys in I-ACE, you’d think that the job would be a dating bonanza. This, however, is not true. The reason? The quality of air-conditioning engineers, like the quality of air in the average home, is not very good.
Let me assure you, if you’re starting to worry, that I’ve had my share of relationships. For example, there was a guy named Bob I met in college and lived with for three years after graduation. I did not, I admit, treat Bob well; I was biding my time until someone better came along—with the result that one day he ran off with the super-friendly girl down the hall, and they are now married and live in Montclair, New Jersey, with two kids and a dog. I can’t say that I regret letting Bob get away—though from my current vantage point, his split-level house, Ford minivan, and steady job as a human resources manager make him look like he might have been more promising than I thought when he sat around the apartment playing Super Nintendo and eating jelly donuts.
I also had a relationship of slightly lesser duration with a musician named Roberto (a name with no connection whatever to his origin in a Jewish family from Larchmont, New York). Roberto played so-called “gigs” in the Village and lived hand-to-
mouth. Again, this was not a great passion, and we broke up at my instigation, since it was becoming clear to me that my not-very-lucrative job with the air-conditioning engineers was pretty much supporting us both. He later went on to law school and is now making seven figures at a Manhattan law firm and married to a girl he met at Starbucks. I seem not to have understood the long-term potential of Bob and Roberto and simply judged them based on their appearance as gig-playing, jelly-donut-consuming deadbeats. Others more perceptive than I went on to reap the benefits.
I should point out that my dad (who was my biggest fan, so take this with a grain of salt) didn’t like either of these guys. He said they weren’t worthy of me and that, correcting for the fact that Roberto went through a Hispanic phase in high school, they both had the same first name. I hadn’t even noticed this until my dad pointed it out—which says something about the attention I was paying to these relationships.
Bob and Roberto aside, I do have male friends who I can call up when I need a date for an I-ACE function or am feeling really desperate. These guys are like certain clothes that I keep in my closet under the assumption that maybe, someday, I’ll wear them, even though I never do. Each time I think about having a relationship with one of these guys, I end up deciding “not this time,” and back in the closet they go.
I have other friends too, who like to hang out with me, at least on an irregular basis. These are people who laugh at my jokes—pretty much what friends are for in Manhattan. I mean if you don’t have friends who laugh at your jokes, you stop trying to be funny and end up spending every night, not just two or three nights a week, eating a Lean Cuisine, watching Entertainment Tonight and House Hunters, and running out for a double scoop of gelato that you regret right after you eat it.
Of all my friends, Eleanor is the best. I’ve known her since the fourth grade, which means she knows my mother and so has a good grasp on why I am the way I am. If she gets really annoyed with me, I can remind her from whence I came, and she generally acknowledges my point. She’s such a good friend that she doesn’t even have to laugh at my jokes; she can say, “Suzanne, that’s not funny”—which only a really good friend can tell you when you’re being funny in a bitter, self-destructive way.
Eleanor is a free-lance art director for some of the big-name fashion magazines, which means she’s around supermodels a lot and in a position to critique conventional ideas of beauty and success. Whenever I start to complain about how I look or how boring my job is, Eleanor tells me how this or that supermodel in the magazine I’m looking at is actually an anorexic, drug-addicted illiterate who has to spend hours each day striking a jaunty pose in four-inch heels. This makes me feel better for about ten minutes until the effect wears off and I go back to wishing I were a supermodel. As you can see, this is comparative thinking again: if it’s not a double-edged sword, it’s as long-lasting as a double scoop of gelato.
I HOPE BY NOW I’ve given you some idea of what my life is like. There are people in it and things happening now and then, but not much. And this, quite frankly, is the problem. I could spend the next fifty years, if I don’t watch out, writing press releases for the air-conditioning engineers about unsatisfactory but not deadly indoor air quality, talking on the phone with Eleanor about why I’m lucky not to be a supermodel, re-inspecting and rejecting my collection of loser male friends, and paying (upwards of) $200 an hour to Dr. Chitturi to help me figure out who I am. Then I’d die, and that would be the end of me.
And let’s face it, I want more. I’m not asking for a Jane Austen novel, but I want love or at least companionship and maybe a bigger apartment. In short, I want a life. So I’ve come up with this idea—“my project,” as Eleanor puts it, since she and I used to do those diorama projects together in fifth grade and she thinks this is like that, only without the Elmer’s Glue.
The idea came to me a few days ago when I was reading an article about speed dating. It was a newspaper clipping my mother sent me—my mother being possibly the last individual on the planet who, instead of e-mailing a link, sends newspaper articles through the mail. These articles are usually on topics like how to find romance in museum gift shops. In this case, the topic was speed dating and she’d written “Try this!” with her Sharpie in the margin.
I had actually been thinking about speed dating—Eleanor’s cousin met her third husband that way—though when my mother sent me the clipping, I immediately rejected the idea. I wasn’t simply being oppositional, as Dr. Chitturi would say; I was experiencing one of those revelations that sometimes need a push to become clear. The revelation I had was this: I didn’t want to do speed dating; I’m not a speed-dating kind of person. The very idea of meeting so many people in such a short time made me want to crawl under the covers and meet no one for, like, forever.
And with that revelation, I also realized this: New York is big, and I’m not good at big. I don’t like too many choices. I don’t like ordering from menus in Greek diners or buying stockings in department stores. Two choices are fine— between string beans and broccoli or sheer and opaque, but if you throw in Brussels sprouts, summer squash, creamed asparagus, and coleslaw, I’m going to get confused; same with extra sheer and extra support and all that stuff with reinforced toes. Anyway, I was thinking about this when it came to me: Stop thinking big and start thinking small. Narrow your sights; pare down your world. Here is one area, I told myself, where Jane Austen—despite being extremely damaging to my psyche in giving me unrealistic expectations that men like Mr. Darcy actually existed—got it right. She kept things small; I would do the same. Instead of “three or four families in a country village,” I’d go with a dozen or so New Yorkers in an apartment building on West 76th Street—my building, to be exact.
So that’s what I would do: dig for meaning, direction, and a soul mate in my own backyard. I’d get a life without leaving home.
As MY FIRST PHASE of research I decided to observe the playground behind my building.
You may be wondering why I chose to begin here, surrounded by mothers and children, when my unstated goal was to find Mr. Right or, if you prefer, Mr. Good Enough, who could be the sperm donor for the child I wanted to have before my biological clock clicked past its appointed hour. The fact is, I wanted to know the inside scoop: What had these women done to land here; how were they faring; would I fit in?
I launched my project on a Monday morning. Early— to prove to myself that I was serious. Until now, I’d gotten into the habit of sleeping late, given the laissez-faire attitude of the air-conditioning engineers regarding my work hours. But now that I had set my sights on getting a life, a change seemed called for.
My new schedule was to wake up at 7 A.M., shower, dress, and put on makeup. I didn’t need to wear makeup to go to a playground, but I’d been conditioned to put it on because I could hear my mother’s voice in my head saying, “You never know who you’re going to meet. Don’t you want to put on a little lipstick?” I was therefore nicely made up and able to arrive at the playground behind my building at around 7:45. Once there, I positioned myself on a bench with a good view of the proceedings.
The mothers with the hyperactive children began to arrive around 8 A.M., with most of the regulars making an appearance by 9. This put me in place to watch the entire spectacle of mother-child interaction until the group’s late-morning retreat for lunch and nap.
I should note here that all in attendance at the playground were the actual mothers of the children in question, itself a novelty when you consider that this is Manhattan, where it is standard practice to shunt the labor-intensive aspects of child rearing onto a nanny while keeping the good stuff, like making cupcakes and reading Dr. Seuss books, for yourself. But given that my address was not among the swankier ones on the Upper West Side, and given that such staples as prepared food and Starbucks lattes can dig into even a substantial income, many of the mothers in my building were shouldering the child-care burden themselves (with occasional help from foreign exchange students a
nd accommodating, if annoying, mothers-in-law). As for the handful of nannies who were associated with the building, they had chosen to congregate elsewhere, which, I have to say, I could understand. It’s one thing to see a child as your job, another thing entirely to see said child as an extension of yourself—and the crazed intensity of the latter persuasion might reasonably cause those of the former to want to keep their distance. As a result of this fact, my building’s playground presented what one might call a “pure sample of biological motherhood.”
My vigil soon yielded some superficial observations. For example, all the mothers carried flowered Vera Bradley quilted duffel bags that contained the following staples: a half-dozen assorted juice boxes, a Ziploc bag of Cheerios, a jumbo container of disposable wipes, a small, picturesquely tattered blanket, and a few extra pairs of underpants.
Despite the sameness of these items, the mothers themselves varied in certain predictable ways. I soon identified three distinct groups. First were the dazed-looking very young mothers, who seemed to be wondering how it was that they had gotten here. When had they gone in a blink of an eye from the college classroom, where they had whiled away their time tracing the names of their boyfriends in their notebooks, to being saddled with kids who were whining and pulling at them every minute of every day? You could see how befuddled they were by it all. If they were comic strip characters, they would have had thought balloons with question marks in them emerging from their heads.
The second group of mothers were slightly older and therefore less befuddled. They had spent enough time in the workplace to realize how deadly dull it was and to be mildly exultant (if a little guilty, given those feminist texts about self-actualization they’d read in college) to be released into the world of PB&J sandwiches and time-outs. OK, it wasn’t always scintillating, but it was way better than working for that bitch in marketing who had kept making them re-do their spreadsheets.