by Jane Borden
In this particular instance, however, after recently being burned, the pattern played out a little differently. When I yelled at myself in my head—Geez, it’s like you’re a tourist in your own home!—I saw that I was. The West Village wasn’t home. I realized that I didn’t even like it that much. In fact, I generally hung out in the bars and restaurants of other neighborhoods. I’d hardly decorated my room. The apartment felt counterfeit.
So I started thinking backward. If this seemed obvious now, but I hadn’t noticed any of it before, then my ignorance must have been willful, which means I’d had an incentive—one whose imagined worth was so great, I’d gone more than $4,000 in debt paying rent in a neighborhood I couldn’t afford.
OK, here is where I tell you that I lied one last time. The truth is this: I do know why I moved to the West Village. I was chasing Lou. Finally, finally I’d reached her, and suddenly she was gone again. But in the legendary West Village, I could retrace her steps. Whenever I fancied, I could pop into Magnolia for a chocolate cupcake or go dancing at Automatic Slims. I could eat burgers at Corner Bistro and tell myself with eager eyes, “I bet Lou sat here once … in this very booth!”
I had spent so many years imagining her before, it was easy to slip back into the habit. But I wasn’t chasing her; I was chasing her narrative, trying to consume her authentic experience—an inherently inauthentic pursuit. No two people follow the exact same path. And I couldn’t even be certain the narrative was true. I’d cobbled the account together from anecdotes apocryphal and embellished by drink. I had the right key but it was in the wrong lock. If the world is made of narratives, then it was time I write my own.
And I may as well start from the beginning.
grandfather used to shout those words from his front porch every night. He was calling the dog inside. The dog’s name was Dammit. My mother and Aunt Jane had begged for a puppy, but my grandfather said no, until he finally relented, on the condition that he be allowed to name it, which he did with the express purpose of wailing curse words into the neighborhood.
One night, Dammit—or, Dit, as he was known to everyone else—didn’t come home. It was an inevitability the family had anticipated since the first time their next-door neighbors fed the dog filet mignon. He liked to visit the Hermans, and one time when he did, Elise Herman had her butler prepare steak. After that, Dit began every morning by trotting next door for breakfast. Once he correctly assumed that there might also be filet for dinner, Dit ate all of his meals with the Hermans. He liked it there. So when Elise placed a blue-satin, down-stuffed pillow next to her own bed, Dit moved in for good.
Decades later, when I graduated from college and decided to leave North Carolina for New York, Aunt Jane exclaimed, “Don’t go! You’ll have a ball and stay. I have a friend who moved there forty years ago and never got married, and no one ever saw her again. You know that happens to a lot of girls.”
“Wait a second,” I interjected, knowing I had her trapped. “What’s the fear, that you’ll miss me or that I’ll be an old maid?”
She thought for a few seconds and responded, “No, I know you’ll get married because you’re not fat.” Then she announced that she was late for a bridge game and hung up the phone.
As reluctant as I am to further expound upon an analogy that likens me to a dog, I must admit that when I first came to New York, I wandered around all wide-eyed and trusting, assuming that everyone wanted to scratch my belly. It makes sense: I’d come from the Land of Belly Scratchers, the South, where 50 percent of the vocabulary is comprised of heartwarming adages. We are a population who whistles, says good morning to inanimate objects, and ascertains the presence of angels. There is always someone who’s the last to stop clapping; that person is usually Southern.
This doesn’t necessarily make us nicer people. Obviously, human beings are more complicated than that. I’m just saying that this is the way we behave: People think we’re drunk when we’re sober. I was reared to act like a golden retriever. Which is why, in at least one instance during my first week in New York, I literally fetched.
While walking up Eighth Avenue, I noticed a piece of paper fall from the pocket of a man walking a few yards ahead of me. Prescription? Important receipt? I ran to pick it up and catch him.
“Excuse me, sir?” I touched the back of his shoulder and said with pep, “I think you dropped this.” But before he even turned around—while “dropped this” repeated in distorted deep-voiced slow motion in my ears—I realized my mistake. He’d littered. And I had been horrifically naive. I steeled myself for the ensuing humiliation, but when he turned around, his face held only contempt.
Double eureka: he thought I was being sarcastic. Because we were in New York, not a Disney film, he’d never considered sincere to be an option. And therefore, he assumed I was handing him trash to make a self-righteous point. I thought I was wagging my tail; he saw a stray with rabies.
Scrunching his brow, he said only one word: “Really?”
But I couldn’t think of a response that might not also be misconstrued as sarcasm. So instead, I dropped the litter back on the ground. There you go, Borden! Why stop at offending one man, when you can disrespect an entire city?
Walking away red in the face and chastising my own gullibility, I thought, Lesson learned. But of course, that wasn’t true; I’d only come to understand one symptom of a much larger and deep-seated problem, which would, like all buried issues, manifest eventually. Mine arrived a few days later in the form of jaw pain.
“Ow,” I said, rubbing my cheeks and climbing into bed.
“What hurts?” my roommate asked.
“My face.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think it’s stress?”
“But I haven’t even started work yet,” I said. “I spent all day in a bakery.”
“Maybe it’s from crunching,” she offered. “Have you been eating a lot of raw vegetables?”
“I spent all day in a bakery.”
A couple of days later, it blossomed into headaches.
“Maybe you’re grinding your teeth at night,” a friend suggested.
No, because it was better in the morning and worse at night.
“Have you been wearing headbands?” my mother asked.
No.
“Maybe you took a strange exercise class?” she offered.
No, because, OK, I was spending every day at bakeries.
Then, while walking down Amsterdam Avenue, a passerby made eye contact with me and recoiled in that way that silently says “You are embarrassing yourself.” You know the look. The eyes bulge, the lower lip curls down, and the entire head pulls slightly back and to the left, as if there’s a God of Awkward Social Encounters who’s tugging the person’s ear in warning.
Why would she do that? All I did was smile at her.
Oh my God of Awkward Social Encounters! I smiled at her! And it wasn’t a halfhearted, obligatory lip twitch that says, “Oops, we accidentally locked eyes.” Mine was earnest. Without realizing it, I’d been staring for half a block, patiently waiting for her to return my gaze so I could shoot her one heat-seeking grin. And then it sunk in. No wonder my jaw was sore: I’d been smiling at everyone. In New York, that’s more than a dozen per block, times a ten-block walk, is at least 120 per outing. I had a new exercise regimen after all.
In my hometown, Greensboro, North Carolina, everyone smiles at one another. Without exception. In the aisles of the Harris Teeter grocery store, in lines at the movie thee-ate-er, even in cars—stoplights are long. I realize, in retrospect, how strange it is, and how time-consuming. If you know the person, you pause to speak. If not, you say “Hello” or ask “How you?” At the least, you wave. Not the standard arm-raised, palm-forward, side-to-side swish. The preferred method is to place your arm out parallel to the ground, palm facing down, and then vigorously wag the hand up and down from the wrist as if you’re suppressing a putrid smell or do
ing that thing homophobes do when pretending to be gay. You’re probably thinking only women wave like this. Men do too. Even the homophobes.
We’re real-life versions of those animatronic Teddy Ruxpin bears: Regardless of our intentions, out of context, the behavior is creepy. It may be nice to make contact with one stranger on a sunny knoll, but to do so with a dozen on a grimy city block is terrifying. I must have looked like a maniac, bobbing my head this way and that, forcing onto everyone my hysterical grin. If I were a man, I would have been maced.
You can’t walk around New York going, “Hi, I’m Jane Borden. Will you be my friend?” Fifth Avenue is not a high-five tunnel. I felt like a total asshead. And I could hear Aunt Jane standing on her porch screaming, “Asshead! Get back here, Asshead!”
But it was just a habit, right? Obviously I didn’t want to be pals with eight million people. I mean, I kind of do, but no, that’s absurd: When would we all get coffee? It’s simply not possible. So I would have to change, assimilate, or be shunned by the herd. It wouldn’t be easy.
I remember standing in a line somewhere a few weeks later—it was probably a bakery—behind a man wearing a worn-out black T-shirt from R.E.M.’s Green tour. Oh, man, I thought, I have a shirt from that tour too! I should tell him.
Relax, Borden. He probably found that tee at a thrift store. He doesn’t want to talk to you. Leave him alone.
“Stand in the place where you live …” I started singing in my head and thinking about the video. Maybe he remembers the choreography!
Get a grip: He doesn’t want to dance with you. He doesn’t want to bond. This was harder than I’d anticipated. I tried to think about something else, likely a muffin. My efforts at cognitive redirection backfired, however, by opening the door to my subconscious, which quickly revisited the Green situation. When I emerged from my reverie, my hand was in the air, an inch and a half second away from tapping him on the shoulder.
My God, the line was moving slowly. I started feeling fidgety, tweaking out. Teddy Ruxpin was bottling, sweating, about to explode.
But soon the man reached the front of the line. And then he left.
I’d done it: successfully silenced my urge to lick the face of everything that breathes. Although my heart hurt a little, I felt a sense of pride. There was no other choice: Old Yeller had to be shot.
But then I thought about the countless others at whom I’d unconsciously grinned during that first week. The ones who hadn’t recoiled. Most of them must have at least politely acknowledged me or I would have cottoned to my behavior sooner. Maybe some of them were even secretly glad to smile back.
So I struck a deal with my new home. I have hardened. I turn a lot of opportunities into ghosts. You have to; there is no other way. But sometimes, when the circumstances are right, say, a quiet block on a Sunday night or an empty subway stairwell, I’ll pick one approaching, unsuspecting pedestrian, wait until we’re within a few feet of each other, and then stick my hand out—not a limp-wristed, high-pitched, produce-aisle wag, but a commanding, decisive, palm-facing-forward call for a high five. And I’ll tell you this, contrary to whatever stereotypes you think you know about New Yorkers, I’ve never been denied contact.
had was with a total stranger. I love strangers. When I don’t know you, I don’t know your faults. And you don’t know mine. For the brief time we interact, we’re flawless.
The notion is similar to the way some grade-school teachers tabulate behavior scores by starting each student at a hundred and knocking off points for transgressions throughout the year. For instance, if my third-grade teacher had employed such a system, I might have lost ten points for talking during his tests, five for fomenting resistance to our monthly fluoride rinses, and twenty when I accidentally called him a whore.
“Do you know what that means?” he asked.
“A wild pig,” I responded.
He shook his head and handed me the dictionary.
My point is that, before the plummeting kinetic energy of our faults takes hold, our new relationship is full of potential. I don’t know that you’re the kind of person who pockets crackers from restaurants. Neither do you know that I sleep with a noise machine and also earplugs to drown out the noise machine.
As strangers, we are perfect. And will remain that way. Until I inevitably call you a whore.
So: this relationship. It happened in a bar on the Upper East Side one night toward the end of my first year in the city. In a place as diverse as New York, the bar scene uptown is surprisingly homogeneous, full of twenty-two-year-olds who come to the city for a postgrad degree in drinking and one-night stands.
Our parents encourage the journey, saying “Go and have fun!”—the silent supporting clause of that statement being “Before you settle down back here.” So coveys of college grads recycle themselves in overpriced adapted two-bedrooms on York Avenue. We treat our time in New York like a rite of passage, a year spent in the woods. The problem is that most of us hang out exclusively with other Southerners in frat bars on the Upper East Side. We don’t want to be in New York specifically; we just want to be somewhere else for a while.
This is “the plan.” It’s not the sort you set in advance, but rather, realize after the fact you’d unwittingly followed. No one says, “I’ll move to New York and procrastinate life.” Nevertheless, that’s precisely what we do. We say, and believe, that we came to the city to seek opportunity, take a chance. But mostly we’re just killing time until last call. Or, at least, that’s what I was doing.
But I didn’t know it until that night in the bar on the Upper East Side, when the DJ’s playlist—“Y.M.C.A.,” “I Will Survive,” “Like a Virgin”—sounded like a mix from a Phi Delt late night. That is when this opaque plan revealed itself to me. Like many a revelation, it came after I’d gone into a bathroom to accidentally smoke half of a joint.
Upon exiting, and complaining to the next girl in line about the stoner who must have preceded me, I heard it: the song lyric that can make the ears of any American girl prick up.
“I got chiiiiiills, they’re multiplying. ”
Most young people in our country can’t find Kuwait on a map, but we all know the words and battle-of-the-sexes choreography to the penultimate song in Grease. I stood motionless, stunned by the marijuana, in an estrogen stampede. Responding to the song’s war cry, a brigade of calf-high black boots carried girls to the dance floor just in time to gather on one side, point an accusing finger at their testosterone-filled counterparts and croon with all the gravitas they could muster from a semester in poli sci, “You better shape up!”
I circumnavigated the dance floor, enjoying the show and filling out the actors’ résumés. A girl in a pink cardigan was flipping her long hair from side to side on cue with the “ooh, ooh, ooh”s. She looked like an Allison.
Allison lived on Eighty-Second Street and York, I supposed. Although she’d wanted a job in fashion, she’d wound up in PR. The girl with whom she shimmied was definitely a boy name: a Blake or an Eason. Maybe Hadley, Tinsley, or Dabney. Southerners do this a lot. It sounds like a boy’s name but really it’s a last name, typically the mother’s maiden, and actually it’s the girl’s middle name.
It was harder to guess the guys’ names, as I assumed that several of them went by the nickname Chip or Trip. Of their jobs, I could be more certain: finance, finance, finance, money management, and finance. The three leaning against the column had been together all night, predominantly in that spot. This led me to believe they were fresh off the boat and probably living in what I’ve come to call a Halfway Frat: an apartment that, like a halfway house, provides living quarters to recently deinstitutionalized persons, in this case college graduates who’ve moved to New York.
There are two categories of HalfFrats. The first is a “Willing.” Year after year, a lease is passed down, or willed, from last year’s alums to this year’s graduating seniors—who must still pay real-estate agents their finder’s fees. Such was the case with my first p
lace in the city. I moved into, with two college roommates, an Upper West Side apartment, which had previously been occupied by three girls who’d just graduated from Carolina, which had previously been occupied by three girls who’d just graduated from Carolina. Farther west along the block was a literal halfway home, one of many in a program designed to sprinkle low-income housing throughout the city in brownstones and town houses. If its residents saved their wine corks for future craft projects, then we had a lot in common indeed.
The second breed of HalfFrat I call a “Revolving Door.” This is generally a one-in-one-out system. Whenever one roommate moves, a graduating friend replaces him, which means that the lease need not change hands. However, in accordance with the friend-in-need maxim, and also the drunk-dude-sleeps-anywhere theorem, Revolving Doors typically feature more tenants than bedrooms. When my friend Sammy moved up from Chapel Hill, he took up residence with several of his older Phi Delt brothers in a closet in their East Village Revolving Door. Although it was a three-bedroom, at any time, four to five people were passing out there.
And every weekend they had a party, frequently with a keg and almost always with KC and the Sunshine Band playing while the television was on but muted. I know because I was usually there. I “knew” those people in the Upper East Side bar because I am them. For example, my sister has a boy name: Tucker. It’s my mother’s maiden name, and actually, Tucker is her middle, but my parents chose to call her by it because her first name is Russell. So really she has two boy names. And technically, the third Borden sister, although it is short for Louisa, goes by Lou, which is a man’s name too—or, at least, all others going by it, excluding my grandmother, have either been male or a fixture in a bathroom. I’m surprised my parents didn’t name me Tom. Or Sink.
What I didn’t yet know about my college crowd—there were a couple dozen of us in the city at the time—is that after a year, most of them would be gone. They’d start saying they were tired: tired of hangovers, piles of garbage, and the stench of urine; tired of screaming neighbors and the constant rumbling of trucks in their dreams. Tired of New York. So they’d leave. Budweiser is cheaper in Raleigh.
