by Jane Borden
Like a kid who snoops precisely where you tell her not to, I started going out of my way to walk under ladders. I still do. It is my tiny and meaningless, yet somehow satisfying revenge for every time I had to get out of that Buick and spin around. I open umbrellas inside. My soccer jersey in high school was number 13. Yes, I recognize that there is little difference between avoiding black cats and chasing them, but like I said, it all seemed pretty silly.
Still, silly is fun, and I was obsessed with the Tale of the Dead Alcoholic’s Topaz. I simply couldn’t believe they’d dug a hole in someone’s garden to bury a rock—and that my grandmother had played the red herring! It was straight out of the Hardy boys. It was completely absurd.
The first and most obvious question pertaining to its burial: “If it was such bad luck, why not throw it away?” I recently interrogated my aunt.
“She figured as long as it wasn’t in our home, we wouldn’t get the bad luck.”
“Then why not bury it in your own backyard?” I asked. “Did Nana have something against the Hermans? Was this retribution for stealing Dit?”
“Heavens no! We loved Elise and Milton. But the stone couldn’t hurt them because it hadn’t been given to them.”
“But then you took it to Raleigh! Weren’t you worried?”
“Well,” she said with a sigh. “I figured, it was always mine. After all those years, it’d already done whatever it was going to do.”
As I got older, my fascination grew. I thought about it frequently, envisioning the stone sitting in my aunt’s chest, where, in my mind, it radiated light and generally stewed. Then, one Christmas morning, a few months before my Vegas experience, I no longer had to imagine. It became clear that she was giving me the topaz as soon as she started unwrapping it—regular jewelry doesn’t come in a Ziploc baggie.
I was overjoyed: much cooler than a pair of socks. The rock was smaller than I’d imagined it to be; magical things typically are. Bereft of a setting or chain, it looked lonely. Still, it felt special in my hand, strange in its lightness. Even though I knew—I know—that there is nothing supernatural living inside that crystal, I drew a certain power from closing it within my palm.
Later, back in Brooklyn, during a party in my apartment, the saga came up in conversation. Standing by my refrigerator and keeping an eye on a frying pan, I launched into the story, fielding furrowed-brow questions to the best of my ability.
One of my friends: “Wait.” [Eyes squint; head bows momentarily.] “What?”
Me: “I know!”
A crowd began to gather. “Kate, you watch the sausage,” I said. “I’ll get the stone.”
I scuttled downstairs, fetched the suede drawstring sack from my underwear drawer, and ran back up. The topaz was still in its plastic bag. I took it out and passed it around, like it was nothing more than silicate mineral of aluminum and fluorine. We exchanged a couple more “Wow”s and “Huh”s, and then turned our attention to my friend Brian who had pulled out a card game he’d brought called Set.
The stone must have been furious! What was it, a toy or a trophy? We were so disrespectful. I paraded it around like a monkey in diapers. But I didn’t know! I didn’t think it was charmed. I mean, I don’t think it is. I don’t … I don’t know anymore. Maybe it is. Who am I to say? Here’s something else my aunt told me when I interrogated her just before starting the chapter you’re reading. I asked why she’d never put the gem in a setting and she said, “I only wear a few pieces of jewelry, my favorite things.” Then she paused, and added, “Or maybe I was always saving it to give to you.”
What?! So, all along, the stone was meant for me? And—oh no—she gave it to me. Gave. That means, by whatever Gremlins-rules logic we’re following here, the focus of the gem’s power was then transferred onto me, which is clearly exactly what it wanted.
What was she thinking? “After all those years, it’d already done whatever it was going to do”? All what years? Forty-eight is nothing to a rock. Those things live for millennia. It takes thousands of years just for the crystals to form. That means it was in labor for longer than Christians and Muslims have hated each other. If one dog-year equals seven human-years, then one rock-year equals … whoops, you missed it. Here comes anoth—ohp too late again.
Well, if it wanted me, it got me, coldcocked me on the loo. And just so you know, my … curiosity … regarding the … potentiality … of a hex, and my belief in the scientific definitions of human biology need not be mutually exclusive. Who’s to say Snow White didn’t also have low blood sugar?
Obviously, I only believe because I want to. My dad was right: Superstition is attractive. It’s easy and comforting to live in a world in which the rules are already set. I know this because I’m a New Yorker.
Everything has been decided in this city. No fundamental conundrums remain. There are no paths to be cut; they’re all laid out already, flattened and gilted in concrete. Life here is a cinch. Stay on the sidewalk, stop when you see an orange hand, the pigeons don’t bite. That’s basically it. Every New York guidebook is too long by however many pages it is minus one.
Sure, a New Yorker’s life is full of tiny problem-solving opportunities. Should I pick up Thai, Indian, Ethiopian, Peruvian, Polish, or Afghani? To get home I can either take a subway, bus, cable tram, train, ferry, taxi, water taxi, bicycle taxi, or helicopter.
But those only mask the fact that all of the major decisions have already been made. What will I eat? I can either figure out how to kill that bear or invent agriculture. How will I get to my yurt, especially if I have to drag this bear?
In New York, I don’t need to follow the sun to find my way—which is good considering I can’t see it—because I memorized that rule about traffic flowing north on even-numbered avenues and south on the odds. How is that any different from not needing to prepare for disaster because you know how to knock on wood?
It was easier for me to believe I’d been cursed than to accept the cold, hard-bathroom-tile fact that my lifestyle was slowly destroying me. “You’re burning the candle at both ends,” my mother would say (thanks, Edna St. Vincent Millay).
It’s just that there is so much to do and I want to do it all. If there are that many cuisines available for takeout, imagine the number of events: rock concerts, comedy benefits, book launches, TV wrap parties, art openings, restaurant openings, theater openings, even the opening of my mail is a fete if you add champagne. And of course, there is always an after party. You know how you can count rings in a tree trunk to determine its age? If you looked at a slice of my brain in a microscope, you’d be able to tell which weeks were spent outside of New York.
It wasn’t my fault, you see. New York was tempting me. It expected me to participate, always, the way a gregarious person’s friends expect her to always be “on.” The city lures its inhabitants, seduces us; it’s an evil hypnotist, a nefarious prankster, a … uh-oh, this sounds familiar. I’ve mistakenly followed this logic before. New York is not a cartoon assassin. It’s not out to get me, and it doesn’t care if I go to its parties. Actually, it’d probably prefer I don’t; my absence could be filled by two, maybe three, models.
I mean, without doubt, the city is killing me. But it’s because I’m running into the knife. I’m so quick to blame New York, but it’s never New York’s fault. Waking up on the bathroom floor felt like being thrown out of a game of Double Dutch I didn’t know I was playing. I stood outside the switching ropes and perceived with incredulity how swiftly they revolved. Had I been moving that fast for that long? I find I am reluctant to hop back in.
I’ve slowed down. I stay home some nights. I drink water and sports drinks and have cut back substantially on sugar and alcohol. And, although half of my muscles are clenched in so doing, I sleep at least nine hours a night. I’m following the medical advice, the truth, the facts—I mean, obviously. It’s not like I’d rely on a wooden knock or lack of ladders. I put no stake in superstition. That doesn’t mean, however, that I’ve discounted th
e supernatural powers of the metaphor.
And so, whenever I’m riding the subway, waiting in line, or anytime I don’t need to see with precision, I take off my glasses. That way, even if only for a few minutes, the whirring, glowing UFO that is New York City smudges hazily into a more manageable landscape, an impressionist version of itself. The effect is like Xanax for the senses.
Also, I still revere the topaz, but not because it’s magic. I just think it’s beautiful. The question is the stone itself and whether or not it means something is not for the stone to tell.
through the iTunes folder on my laptop. I was making drinks; he’d been tasked with music. A pause followed his dude exclamation while, I deduce in retrospect, he continued to scroll. Then he said “Whoa” again and made that sound that resembles a cough at the start, but ends with a tiny derisive laugh, before adding, “You have a lot of James Taylor albums.”
Seriously? A guest in my home was mocking my music collection? Through lips he later planned to put against mine?! This couldn’t be happening. I put down the half-sliced lime.
“You don’t like James Taylor?” I asked from the kitchen.
“Um, no,” he responded as if the answer were obvious, as if I’d asked him, “You don’t eat poop?”
My incredulity no longer stemmed from his brazen disregard for my hospitality. He was laughing at five-time Grammy-award-winning, Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Famer James Taylor. I was being called to crusade against ignorance. I walked into the living room.
“Are you actually familiar with his albums?” I asked, standing over him with the knife still in my hand. “Have you heard anything besides the greatest hits?”
“Well, uh, no.”
“Then consider the possibility that you are wrong.” I walked back into the kitchen, poured the tequila, and shot back over my shoulder, “By the way, I don’t have ‘a lot of James Taylor albums’; I have them all.”
That was a lie. I haven’t bought one since New Moon Shine in 1991—the lyric before “Never die young” in his 1988 hit by the same name is “Never grow old”—but I was beyond playing fair.
Don’t hate on James Taylor. Just don’t. My mind raced with what I wanted to say: He is the Prometheus of molasses white-boy blues; you play drums behind some guy who went to Brown. His 1970 album, Sweet Baby James, helped define and cement a new wave of singer-songwriters; your band sounds like three others I heard this week. James Taylor’s lyrics are heartfelt and unashamed; your glasses are ironically too big for your face.
My knife split the lime with a thud.
Oh man, I was mad. It surprised even myself. As a Southerner in New York, I am accustomed to enduring slights against all manner of my homeland’s characters and characteristics. Please, I was used to it before I hit puberty. In jokes on TV, film, and in cartoons, Southerners, whether real like Jesse Helms or imagined like Gomer Pyle, are frequently cast as the butt.
It doesn’t faze me anymore. Call me inbred, racist, stupid, flighty, fake, Bible-thumping, backward, or red and I will not bat an eyelash. I’ll probably play along: “What? God bless you, chile, but you’ll have to speak up—I got the KKK in one ear and my cousin’s tongue in the other.” But take a crack at the man who recorded “Carolina in My Mind” and apparently my insides turn to lava.
“Awesome, you’ve got the Muffs,” he exclaimed and clicked play on the first track of Happy Birthday to Me.
Typical, I thought and delivered his margarita.
After dinner we hit the neighborhood bar scene. I lived in Greenpoint at the time, a traditionally Polish area on the Brooklyn waterfront to which artists, and the hipsters who inevitably follow them, were flocking. The latter two groups acted like warring colonies in the New World; the cool and the trying-to-be-cool were engrossed in a battle for Greenpoint without recognizing the native culture’s stake.
The indie rocker and I reached our destination in a few blocks. The Pencil Factory is Greenpoint’s oldest and most authentic artist-hipster bar. It was packed; it usually is. The bare wooden tables and benches—the place is too cool even for decor—were full of the young and attractive. I noticed the bassist of a semifamous band sitting with friends at the far end of the bar, the teenager equivalent of the back of the bus.
We staked out a spot and I ordered a margarita.
“You don’t like it?” the indie rocker asked, prompted by my pucker.
“No, it’s good. It’s just really tart.” I got the bartender’s attention and asked, “Could I trouble you to make this a little sweeter?”
I knew I’d done something wrong because the indie rocker winced. Then the bartender replied, “Uh, I could put more triple sec in it—if that’s what you want.” And then that sound again, that contemptuous laugh masquerading as cough. Do they teach you that in cool school? Besides, when did triple sec become lame? It’s an orange liqueur, not a film director. It’s not even a brand; it’s a category. You can’t stratify a liquor cabinet like The Breakfast Club.
“I’d love a little more triple sec,” I said, smiling. Although the doctored drink was better, it couldn’t eradicate the bitter taste in my mouth.
At the bottom of the glass, I told the indie rocker I had to catch an early flight. Although I did want an escape, I wasn’t lying. The next morning I left LaGuardia Airport and, five hours later—via Charlotte, New Bern, and Highway 70—pulled up to the neighborhood Fourth of July block party my family was hosting in Morehead City.
It was already in full pastel-seashell-sundress effect. I meanwhile wore all black, hadn’t showered, and smelled like diesel fuel. When I opened the door between the air-conditioned car and the sun-surrendered lawn, it made a sucking sound. My hair instantly curled.
The house we share with my dad’s brother and sister is not on the coast proper. Morehead City lines the Bogue Sound, which is part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, a route navigable from Virginia to Florida. The Intracoastal bisects North Carolina’s mainland and the Outer Banks. Across the water, we can see the city of Atlantic Beach and the ocean-seeking tourist hubbub that crowds it. Morehead is more of a community. Today they were showing their pride.
Barbecue smoke rose above the surface of an undulating sea of blond hair, and multiple mayonnaise-enhanced homemade delicacies lurked just beneath. There were about sixty people crowded around a makeshift tent on the empty lot between our house and cousin Millie’s next door. Half were kin, and at least four of them went by Borden as a first name, the youngest of whom was my seven-month-old nephew, currently strapped to the chest of my cousin Nancy.
“Jane!” she screamed, like a riptide. I didn’t take my bags out of the car. I didn’t even go inside to wash my hands. Who knew how long the sun had already warmed those mayonnaise salads? Time was running out.
I hugged Nancy, stole my nephew, held my proverbial nose, and jumped in. My sisters were by the buffet, unsurprising as we’ve always congregated around food. I filled a plastic red-white-and-blue plate with slaw, ham biscuits, and a salad with bacon and broccoli in it, and then also spotted my mother by the side of the house, indulging my other nephew’s fascination with the water spigot. Dad was nowhere in sight.
I took a turn on spigot duty and later revisited the tent to get homemade pimento cheese and a closer look at a neighbor’s matching linen summer suit that involved lime-green culottes. No one had seen my father.
My older nephew tore across the lawn toward Millie’s. Assuming that area to be out of bounds, I gave chase but, upon turning the corner, discovered a new wing to the picnic. Close to twenty more people were under Millie’s porch, including my father, who lingered, I should’ve guessed, by the dessert table.
There were lemon squares, several kinds of pie, pound cakes, rum cakes, and iced cakes, cookies baked with various supermarket candy bars stuffed inside, brownies, blondies, a variety of treats unidentifiable, and fudge. “What’s good?” I asked him.
“Well, I’m partial to the pea-can pie,” he said in the rollicking eastern
North Carolina accent that returns to him, seeping out like pine sap, whenever he’s with Uncle Donnie. Donnie isn’t really my uncle; he’s my dad’s first cousin and closest friend. In their bachelor days, they had a boat named The After You Two. When they double-dated, they’d tell the girls they’d “named a boat after you two.”
Donnie was grilling hot dogs a few feet away. I grabbed one because … I don’t need to explain myself … hugged him and returned to the dessert quandary. “Hm, what else?” I asked with my mouth full.
“Oh tha’s right, you don’t like pea-cans.” He pointed at something brown and said, “That one’s delicious, but dadgum if I know what t’is.” The treat in question was a bar of some sort; it appeared to have a graham-cracker crust, gooey filling, and, on top, glistening butterscotch chips half melted in the sun. “I’ll warn you, though,” he added. “It’s pretty sweet.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s how I like ’em.”
I put one on a napkin, in addition to whatever I could grab quickly, as we were being called to the tent, and apparently this sort of time constraint with food causes me to act like a refugee. Once the crowd gathered and the hosts quit trying to shush the kids, an elderly gentleman I didn’t know read out loud the Declaration of Independence. When he finished, everyone cheered, and then we sang “God Bless America.” No one laughed; no one was being ironic.
With my treats in tow, I walked from the party toward the dock and out onto the Bogue. The wake from a powerboat impassively whapped the pilings. Barnacles blinked, licked the air, opened and closed until the water covered them again. I dangled my feet over the edge, looked out at the green and red channel markers.
Leading in to every port is a dredged path. Poles topped with green signs are staggered along the left side of the canal; reds are on the right. To avoid running aground in shallow waters outside the channel, boaters are taught a mnemonic device: Red Right Returning. Keep the red markers on the right when you’re returning to your home port. Then, of course, when you’re leaving port, the greens would be on the right. In the big channel, the Intracoastal Waterway, the red markers run along the mainland, so in order to apply the mnemonic device, you just need to pretend like Miami is your port. The only thing you need to remember is that if you’re going south, you’re going home.
