I Totally Meant to Do That

by Jane Borden

  It’s possible that Nana intended to use her Haviland again, but simply forgot it. Or perhaps she imagined this day, when someone would roll away the stone to reclaim the contents of the tomb. Instead, time after time we only check on the body and roll the stone right back. My back ached. My nostrils were full of dust. I’m sick of these burials. Raise them up! Resurrect the dead!

  But my mother is right: I couldn’t schlep a case of crystal to New York unscathed. And even if I did, I’ve nowhere to put it. Lou and Tucker have glass cabinets for storing, and dining room tables for entertaining. My mother keeps five sets of china in the kitchen—and she uses them all.

  Which means that fifty years from now, when I see the butterflies on her Queen Victoria or the Meissen’s delicate orange flowers, I’ll remember how she made us wear hats on Christmas Eve. I’ll think about the way she’d always join a dinner party while still wearing her red-peppers apron. How she’d fill a bowl with ice cream, put it on a saucer with a silver spoon, eat it in bed, go back downstairs to refill it, eat the second serving in bed, go back down, and so on.

  What if, when my children find my boxes in a cellar, they think of only the newspaper headlines? Actually, we won’t even have that in common; they’ll be more interested in the fact that news was once printed on paper.

  My nephew Franklin appeared at the top of the basement stairwell. He was in that “Why?” phase, asking questions that inexorably lead to other, harder-to-answer questions. And I was in that smart-ass stage, because I’ve never outgrown it, so I couldn’t help but egg him on.

  “Can I come downstairs?” he asked.

  “No,” Lou replied.

  “Why?”

  “There’s nothing down here for you,” she said.

  “Not for another forty years,” I added.

  “Why?” he asked. “What is that stuff?”

  “These aren’t toys, sweetie,” she responded.

  “Well,” I said, “technically they are.”

  “Then why aren’t you playing with them?” he asked.

  I looked at Lou, but neither of us had an answer.

  That night, while everyone else was asleep, I crept down to the living room and swiped that Herend green-leaf dish. It was still sitting in its wrapping paper by the Christmas tree and I stole it. I put it in my suitcase, and the next day, when the coast was clear, I walked it directly out of the house, into the car, out to the airport, and into my Brooklyn apartment, where it sits now on a chest of drawers.

  I use the crap out of it. I put my iPod in it, my passport. Stamps, lip glosses, an old watch, Post-it notes, receipts, anything really, including items far beneath its grooming and heritage. But I think it’s happy. It’s hard to know for sure, it being a dish and all. But I’m pretty sure it is.

  What I wish I had, though, is that samovar. It can’t find its way home either, but I guarantee, wherever it is, it’s shiny.

  momentous happened during the day. Obvious examples include promotions, major cultural events, and so on, but tiny triumphs also suffice. Bumping into Debbie Harry on her way out of a West Village head shop, trying a new flavor of Doritos, and high-fiving a fellow skateboarder coasting by have all, in the past, been enough. But in New York, the city of happenings, moments compete for consequence, constantly one-up each other.

  Increasingly, I find that typically important events feel unworthy. I’ve moved beyond the pleasures of corn chips—even those cool ones with two flavors in one bag, which, let’s all admit, are pretty rad. As night falls, I grow fearful of lying awake, lamenting a wasted day. So instead I go out in search of something to throw the hours at. That is how I wound up watching two men wrestle at 5:30 a.m. in a dominatrix’s apartment under the Williamsburg Bridge.

  And still thought, Ho-hum.

  It was a “Once in a Lifetime” moment. You know the Talking Heads lyrics: “And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself … Well, how did I get here?” Except, I didn’t wake up to the sterilized routines of adulthood—lawn mowing, carpooling, PTA—wondering what happened to my punk-rock youth; I did the reverse. I opened my bloodshot eyes to see a grungy unfurnished apartment, an elevated J train rumbling outside, and a plastic cup of warm vodka in my hand. Wasn’t I supposed to be living in Raleigh, married to a banker, and driving a Volvo wagon? Instead of a handsome husband, I stood next to a hipster dominatrix in cutoff jean shorts. “And you may tell yourself, This is not my ironic T-shirt! And you may tell yourself, This is not my vinyl collection of the Velvet Underground! And you may ask yourself, my God—when did ‘jorts’ become stylish?!”

  I was only supposed to be in New York one year. Two, max. But somehow I jumped the curve. And now I’m lost in the woods. I’m a ghost in the machine. I’m not supposed to be here.

  Oh, but I love to visit, of course! And I do pretty often. A couple of times a year I come to the fashion markets in Manhattan to buy clothes for the darling boutique I opened in Raleigh with one of my old sorority sisters. And every few years, my husband flies us up to catch a Broadway show. And, then, of course, every now and then, when I need a quick escape from my marriage and mortgage, I spend a weekend partying with my crazy friend Jane who’s still in New York even though she’s single, broke, and lives with strangers. I mean, have you even heard of Craigslist? Apparently anyone can go online and—

  Oh, wait … I got confused … sorry. Who am I in this hypothetical scenario? Where am I? It’s dark in the woods.

  The night I wound up under the Williamsburg Bridge began, innocently enough, by barhopping. My friend John, always a game enabler of trivial pursuits, met me at a dank dive called the Abbey, which I chose not only because it has a great jukebox but also because, being a Sunday, it afforded me the opportunity to tell my parents I was going to “church.”

  The Abbey buzzed with patrons enjoying one another’s company in a convivial, straightforward manner. John and I didn’t have the same goals—we like each other, sure, we enjoy hanging out, we wanted to catch up. But we were also looking for something more, literally looking over each other’s shoulders during the “how was your week?”s to ensure we wouldn’t miss anything of interest. Maybe someone’s dog would start doing backflips, or Arcade Fire would walk through the door. Maybe the bartender would spontaneously combust. There was no way of predicting. That’s the thing about New York moments: You can’t make them happen, you can only catch them when they do.

  One night, while walking on South Fifth Street with my friend Kurt, this surfer-looking guy with blond dreadlocks jumped out from between a bush and a trash can in someone’s stoop-side front lawn, and said, “What’s up? I’m Joel!”

  Kurt and I looked at each other, as if to say, “Do you see the leprechaun stoner too?” I mean, he leapt, he literally leapt from behind a trash can, like a friendly Oscar the Grouch. There was still a wrought-iron fence between us when Kurt asked, “Dude, what are you doing in someone’s garden?” Joel was from Seattle; he had lost his friends. He was all gangly and boisterous, like a hippie golden retriever, and he wanted to hang out. So Kurt and I said, yes, we would hang out. We bought him a drink on Grand Street, and then sent him back into the bubbling New York ooze from which he’d sprung.

  That is why John and I had to split our attention at the Abbey, because you never know when you’ll be visited by a leprechaun, and they are the only ones who can lead you to the buckets of gold. But everyone at the Abbey was what we weren’t: happy just to be with each other. Self-actualization rarely breeds excitement. So we threw back our round and left.

  “Black Betty?” John asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Sunday was Brazilian night at Black Betty. But, just to be clear, there would be no Brazilians there. On Sundays, the DJ played samba music. Although, actually, there would be no samba dancing. The floor more closely resembled a trampled anthill: Dancers moved without direction and, somehow, in all directions at once. It was the sort of happening hot mess Peter
Sellers might accidentally stumble into and mumble, “Oh goodness, pardon me, ouch!” before becoming tangled in someone’s bell-bottom, falling over, and exclaiming, “But if that’s not my hand, whose is it?!”

  It was as if the crowd had only ever heard about samba from someone who’d watched a documentary about it directed by Margaret Mead. But they weren’t distracted by their shortcomings, weren’t self-conscious. They were in tune with the present, in sync with each other—needing nothing more than the beat and the calories in their bloodstream to push through each moment and into the next in a stream of energetic expression that beckoned us to join, to let go.

  Borrrrring.

  John and I locked eyes, nodded in agreement, and left.

  I’m aware that this is disgusting behavior. I wish I could want the life my friends and family have back home, grilling lean chicken, listening to lite FM, painting nurseries, kissing their husbands, and going to sleep. Instead I shambled aimlessly through the streets of Brooklyn like a zombie searching for food, something I was unlikely to find as anyone with brains was already in bed.

  About this insomnia thing … I know what you’re thinking: a restless New Yorker? How unsurprising. Believe me, I know: New York is the city that never sleeps and neither do its inhabitants. No wonder we have a reputation for being unfriendly! You’d be too on four hours a night. We can’t sleep because we’re overstimulated. At least I admit it. Most New Yorkers refuse to attribute the problem to the city itself, relying instead on a number of head-in-the-sand excuses. “My job is superstressful right now.” Or “I guess I’ve been playing too many video games.” Or “I think my apartment is haunted.”

  They can’t or won’t admit that New York itself is the root of their problems. “Can’t” because no one wants to be a stereotype. Or “won’t” because, and this one hurts, if New York is the problem, a solution is available: leave. For most of us, though, that’s not an option. Because we’re addicted.

  That’s the thing: It’s not that I can’t come down; it’s that I can’t get enough. Furthermore, I got hooked on New York before I even knew it was a drug. I never had the opportunity to partake recreationally because I skipped freebasing and went straight to shooting up—I moved here directly from college. If New York is the city that never sleeps, then Chapel Hill is the city that dozes often and only gets up from the couch to go to the bathroom, which is saying a lot considering some towns go in their empty beer bottles instead. Nothing against Chapel Hill; it’s very hip. But it’s like comparing Pluto to the sun.

  And so, now I’m a junkie. I’m chasing the Dragon, or, more specifically, I’m chasing the Tranny Hooker.

  During my first week in the city, I played whoopee cushion with a transvestite prostitute in the Meatpacking District. I passed him/her on my way to Tortilla Flats and s/he asked if I had a pen. I checked my bag and replied, “I’m sorry, I don’t, but I have a whoopee cushion.” (Must a lady explain why?) S/he replied “No way!” I said, “Yes way.” Then we passed it back and forth, manufactured a few hilarious thrbbps, and went on our ways: I to dance to Michael Jackson in casual pumps, s/he to … do whatever it is they do.

  You’re thinking, “Of course you knew what they do.” Generally, sure, I suppose I could have figured it out, but I’d never previously considered their existence. No transvestite prostitutes were members of the First Presbyterian Church. What I knew about modern prostitutes I learned from Pretty Woman. And transvestites were the good-natured hucksters in Bosom Buddies. I was a sheltered child.

  For example, Mom didn’t let me patronize water parks. Something about diseases. Therefore, when I finally met one of these neon-blue paradises at the age of thirteen, on a beach trip with a friend’s family, I was overwhelmed. So amped was I for my debut run, I heeded my pal’s suggestion to close my eyes while hurtling down the shadowy chute because it would be “more intense.” She was right: Intense describes the feeling of breaking my nose. Intense was also the reaction of mothers scrambling to retrieve their children upon seeing my bloody face barrel out of the tunnel into the wading pool. I sat bewildered while the water slowly turned pink, while Lilliputian arms made tiny splashes and still-developing feet thrashed desperately, kicking toward the sound of mothers’ high-pitched wails and away from the Jaws of Emerald Point. I was the reason people get diseases at water parks.

  I jumped into New York with my eyes closed too. Within a week I was sharing a rubber balloon with a prostitute! Talk about picking up diseases. But the only thing I caught was a bug for out-of-the-ordinary encounters, consequence, happenings. Where does a casual thrill seeker go from there, but up? And so I wander the streets of Brooklyn like a capricious Roman seeking the Coliseum’s lions-eating-Christians show, something I was unlikely to find anyhow because the locals think earnest expressions of religion are uncool.

  After leaving Black Betty, John and I popped by a new bar in the building next to mine on Bedford Avenue. But we stopped short in the doorway; something was slightly off. It was too loud to be so empty. And it was a bit too, if this is possible, red. Plus, the bartender eyed us desperately. It was like the bar was trying to be a bar, instead of being a bar. And it was trying too hard.

  John and I needed a drink, not a mirror into our souls.

  I remembered I had two airplane bottles of tequila in my messenger bag—seriously, must a lady explain why?—and suggested we shake our losing pattern by christening a drinking hole of our own. On some parts of the East River shoreline, if you climb over industrial fencing or squeeze through gaps in it, you can perch on forgotten rock beds at the water’s edge and watch the show that is Manhattan.

  I frequently wind up in one of these spots. As you’ve no doubt noticed, I am a wanderer, and the river is where the sidewalk ends. There have been times when, after flossing and brushing and putting on my pajamas, I find myself, forty-five minutes later, back in street clothes and sitting on the rocks. I come for the sound track. If New York City is a testament to the human imposition of order on chaos—a flattened landscape bearing grids of streets dotted with rectangular buildings populated by rows of potato chips and candy bars and filled with the dulcet A, A, B, A, B, B drones of Beyoncé—then the sound of innumerable, indistinct waves slapping against a random configuration of rude shapes, without a beginning or end to its pursuit, is one of the brain’s few respites from the forced labor of perpetual pattern recognition. Without a map, the mind is released. Conscious thought slowly erodes into dreams; being awake slowly dissolves into …

  “Pass the booze,” John said. We sipped tiny bottles, like delicate alcoholics. John told me about growing up in Manhattan. By the age of twelve, he’d “seen it all.” First, he became a skinhead. Then, he became a lawyer. Now he’s a writer or, as I like to put it, somewhere in between.

  If you mapped this tendency, it would look like a heartbeat on an ECG machine. It starts out straight. But we get bored, we want more. So we run far and fast, spiking dramatically. So far and fast that our internal bungee cord snaps us back, careening past home base on a new route down. That’s not right either, though. So we wind up back where we started. Then we forget how it all happened and do it again. And again. And again.

  So, sure, there’s no point in running and there’s no point in fighting. But we will anyway. It’s just what we do. Heartbeats keep us alive.

  Manhattan was gorgeous. And since John and I were alone on the rocks, when she winked, we knew it was at us. “It’s almost last call,” he said. “One more round?” I was tired. I was bored. I wanted to go home. I said, “Yes.”

  We hit the first bar we found: empty. “This is the end of the road for me,” I said. John and I clinked our glasses, sighed. Just then the door swung open. A bevy of revelers paraded in and fell upon us.

  “I think the Asian girl is a dominatrix,” John said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because she told me.” The madam in question looked five-feet-zero and hardly old enough to drink, much less spank. Then a
gain, maybe this was how she paid her way through college, like Tori Spelling in the Lifetime movie Co-ed Call Girl.

  I glanced at the two boys in her harem. If she was a dominatrix, they’d been conditioned to certain behaviors, right? I swiveled on my stool, introduced myself, and, after a bit of small talk, said, “You should take your shirts off.”

  “Why?” one replied.

  Uh-oh. I hadn’t anticipated questions. “Um … because … I told you to …?” One of them shrugged. Then they both started unbuttoning. They actually did it! They took their shirts off! In a bar. Who does that? Outside of Myrtle Beach?

  John shot me a scathing look and said, “Do not expect me to take off mine.”

  OK, I surmised, she was for real. That is why, when invited to her apartment for drinks, we said yes—from what I understand, you don’t say no.

  While we walked from the bar, in spite of the predawn chill, the two boys carried their shirts in their hands. “Are they waiting for direction?” I asked John, wondering if this was like that jinx game. If they put their shirts back on, would they owe me a Coke?

  But I was too embarrassed and uncomfortable to deal with the matter anymore. Besides, I was preoccupied with our destination. I wondered how a dominatrix lives. Are there oven mitts in her kitchen? If so, are they leather? Turns out this one lived like every other twentysomething in Brooklyn, which is to say the only things of value in the apartment were an iPod and some liquor. I bet she doesn’t let her parents visit either.

  “Sorry,” our host said, “I don’t have any mixers.” I poured two glasses of vodka, confirmed my suspicion that the freezer bore no ice, and handed one to John. Then I turned around to something I hadn’t seen since boarding school: one guy kneeling behind another who’s on his hands and knees, or, the ready position for Greco-Roman wrestling. They went at it—I mean really went at it. It wasn’t erotic. It wasn’t funny. It was only disturbing in the way that wrestling is always disturbing. They grappled and flipped each other over. Dust began to stick to their sweaty backs. Faces turned red and torsos quivered as they exhausted the last bits of energy out of each other. I’d landed at the Coliseum. I’d found my gladiators. But my thumb was unmoved to gesture up or down. Two half-naked men writhed in front of me and all I could think was, How much does she pay for this loft?