New York for Beginners

by Remke, Susann

  “With Tom?” Eros cried out indignantly. “McNeighbor Tom, boss Tom, ‘let’s just be friends’ Tom?”

  “That’s the guy.” Zoe said, grinning gleefully. “Contrary to speculation, he’s turning into McDreamy Tom.”

  “Oh, honey. Don’t tell me this is serious.”

  “I think so. I’m his date for the Snowflake Ball.”

  “Wow,” Eros marveled. “And you’ll be driving there yourself in a car? Why are you asking me about such mundane things as driver’s licenses?”

  “Of course I won’t be. I just wanted to know if I really need an American license. In case I’ll be driving with him in the Hamptons again.”

  “I think, theoretically, that you have to get your German license exchanged for an American one if you’re in the country for more than three months,” Eros responded.

  And for that reason, Zoe and Eros went to the Brooklyn branch of the Department of Motor Vehicles of New York City first thing the next morning before work. They had imagined that they’d just show their German licenses and get American ones in exchange.

  “Piece of cake,” Eros said, still in a good mood.

  The Brooklyn DMV outpost was situated in a mall on Atlantic Avenue and had the fatalistic charm of an administrative office. The place smelled like floor polish, stale sweat, and utter desperation. Of twenty-three desks, only four were occupied. After almost two hours of waiting, Zoe and Eros were served by a creature in uniform named Rau’shee. “Served” may have been the wrong word.

  “Identification,” the representative ordered.

  “Here you go, ma’am,” Zoe said in a pointedly polite tone.

  Rau’shee held Zoe’s German passport up to the light and scrutinized it, as though it was counterfeit money.

  “Country?”

  “Germany,” Zoe answered with a hint of irritation. It was written on the passport in huge letters, after all.

  “Wrong! You’re from Europe!”

  “Europe isn’t actually a country—it’s a continent,” Zoe explained cautiously. “The passport is a European Union passport, but the country I’m—”

  Eros interrupted Zoe with an elbow to her side as Rau’shee gave her a reproachful look.

  “I’m not responsible for the country of Europe,” Rau’shee said arrogantly, as though accusing Zoe of not having paid attention in geography class.

  “But we’re from Germany!”

  “I’m not responsible for Germany, either.”

  “Then who is responsible for Germany?”

  But Rau’shee was unwilling to deal with any more details of global geography. She gave Zoe a lengthy look, which could certainly have been construed as a warning—and then called out, “Next.”

  Zoe and Eros sank down on one of the wooden benches, disheartened.

  “What kind of name is that anyway,” Eros grumbled. “Rau’shee!”

  Zoe thought that was a bit rich coming from someone named Eros, but she held her tongue. “Well, she definitely wasn’t polite,” Zoe said.

  “Here in the US, you can name your kids whatever you want. There’s no registry office like there is in Germany.”

  “Isn’t Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter named Apple?”

  “Exactly. The poor thing is named after a fruit.”

  “And just have a look at our Madison at the office. She’s named after an avenue.”

  “True! I guess she’s had her share of bad luck.”

  “Next thing you know, somebody will be naming their kids Hermes or Versace.”

  “Oh, please, no.”

  “Conclusion: Never trust anyone with an extremely creative first name. They might be damaged from their difficult childhood.”

  “And definitely don’t trust them if they’re wearing a uniform!”

  Then they gathered up their things and made their way to the DMV central office on 34th Street in Manhattan, where they hoped to have better luck.

  Upon their arrival at the DMV in Midtown, they drew a three-digit number, while, according to the panel on the wall, Number 57 was just being processed. When it was finally their turn, they were directed to a desk behind which a woman in uniform was sitting. Her name tag read Chanelle.

  “I can’t believe this,” was all Eros managed to say. Zoe had been struck dumb.

  Chanelle looked like someone you wouldn’t want to compete against in roller derby or mud wrestling.

  As they had experienced earlier, Zoe and Eros were asked to identify themselves. A passport or an ID weren’t enough in the US, but they already knew that from an online information sheet. In the US, you had to collect points. You only legitimately existed after you’d collected a minimum of six points. A foreign passport, for example, was only worth two points. An electric bill was one point. A paycheck was one point. A health insurance card was another point. The list went on and on. A New York firearms license gave you two points, by the way. But neither Eros nor Zoe owned one of those.

  “Are you a nun?” Chanelle snapped, flipping through Zoe’s papers to count her points.

  “What makes you think that?” Zoe answered, while Eros howled with laughter and uttered something that sounded like “Hardly. She slept with her boss before the first day of work.”

  Chanelle glared at him angrily. Apparently, her agency was no place for jokes. There was nothing to laugh about at the DMV.

  “You have an I visa in your passport,” Chanelle snapped.

  “It’s a journalist’s visa. I’m the editor of a German fashion website.”

  “This is a religious visa for missionaries,” Chanelle lectured her and shoved the application forms for the written test across the counter.

  “What do we need written tests for? Is it because we’re missionaries?” Eros asked in surprise. “We already have driver’s licenses.”

  “Your licenses are not acknowledged here,” she barked, as if Zoe’s and Eros’s documents were from some banana republic instead of the country where the gasoline engine had been invented and there were highways without speed limits.

  “Now listen here,” Eros said angrily, “I’ve driven for ten years without a single accident. Getting a driver’s license in Germany costs thousands of euros. I’m sure I drive better than any taxi driver in this city.”

  Chanelle, however, was not impressed. “Next.”

  The process of acquiring an American driver’s license was, to put it mildly, slightly unusual. Before you attended driving school, you had to pass a written test. And in driving school you’d learn a lot of theory, but no actual driving. Driving was only possible after successfully passing your road test.

  Eros and Zoe passed the written test on their first try right at the DMV, without ever having studied. Zoe had heard from colleagues that immigrants who couldn’t read or write repeated the test many times and always checked different boxes until they finally got less than thirty negative points and passed. Then they probably became taxi drivers.

  After that, Zoe and Eros registered at the ABC Driving School in downtown Brooklyn for the required five-hour class. There were no required hands-on lessons. The class consisted of watching a cheesy old video. Superman actor Christopher Reeve guided them through the program. The movie, however, had been made before he was Superman, before he’d fallen off a horse and become a paraplegic, and long before he died. In other words, around three hundred years ago. The passengers in the movie panicked as the drivers smoked cigarettes while zooming off cliffs and sliding along on ice. The message of the movie was: Driving is really dangerous; don’t you want to reconsider? The driving teacher, Rashid, didn’t speak a word the entire evening.

  The next morning, Zoe and Eros had an appointment for road tests in Red Hook. They were supposed to bring their own car. But how could you bring your own car if you didn’t even have a license yet? And borrowing one from an acquaintan
ce wasn’t going to work, because all of Zoe’s and Eros’s friends were carless. They lived in New York City, where parking in an underground garage cost almost as much as renting a one-room apartment.

  “My friend Tobias just rented a car for the driver’s test,” Eros said.

  “But we can’t just drive rental cars to the test site to get our licenses without having our licenses in the first place,” Zoe argued.

  Apparently they could!

  The examiner, a taciturn man of Asian descent, indeed didn’t seem to care in the slightest how their car had gotten to Red Hook. A nice young man from Jamaica took his test before Zoe and Eros. He openly admitted that he had already failed the test four times. The first two times he’d been driving on the left side of the road, like he did at home. He understood that, now. But the other two times the examiner had just been plain mean, he had explained. Zoe and Eros watched as he backed out of the parking space too quickly without looking back or turning on his blinker, and almost hit a passing UPS truck. He would probably have to return for a sixth time.

  Zoe felt a little queasy getting into the car with the examiner. He didn’t say a word, only gestured for her to take a left turn at the soccer field. Zoe set her blinker obediently, waited for oncoming traffic and took the left turn. Then a left and another left, and left again, until they had circled the soccer field once. In the end, Zoe had to parallel park. It wasn’t exactly her specialty. The parking space didn’t really qualify as such because there was no car behind her. So it wasn’t a space, but—what, exactly? The edge of a road? The point was, Zoe needed a car behind her as a reference point, which meant she ended up a little too far from the sidewalk, which would have failed her, but she corrected herself immediately. The examiner scribbled a few lines on a slip of paper, handed it to Zoe wordlessly, and got out of the car. Five negative points for “too much maneuvering while parking.” Five positive points for “nice left turns.”

  “I passed!” Zoe cried and flung her arms around Eros’s neck.

  The examiner managed to smile, just barely, and spoke for the first time. “Maybe you should practice driving on the highway a little more. With your father, maybe?” He glanced at Eros. “Sunday mornings are best. Not much traffic then.”

  Eros and Zoe nodded obligingly and tried as hard as they could not to laugh out loud.

  “That explains a few things,” Eros said quietly in German after also successfully completing his trip around the soccer field.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Now I know why American drivers do things like randomly stopping in the right lane on the highway, putting the car in reverse, and backing up to the missed exit—without anybody getting annoyed and honking at them. It’s because their driving tests consist of driving in a circle on quiet streets.”

  “And what do we do with our rental car now?” Eros asked.

  “We can return it on our way back to the city. You can drive.”

  “Sure thing. Now that I have my license and all,” Eros said with a grin. “Watch closely, and I’ll show you how.”

  While he steered the vehicle in the direction of the rental office, Zoe checked her iPhone. With little motivation, she scrolled through the fifty-seven emails that had piled up in her inbox since the morning. She mentally sorted them into which ones she had to answer immediately so as not to get fired, and which ones she could ignore. She thought about Tom, the weekend in the Hamptons, and the Snowflake Ball. She was in an excellent mood. While researching a story, Zoe had learned that being in love—in purely physiological terms—resembled mental illness. People in love had a practically nonexistent appetite; nature had been very kind to women in that respect. Also, people in love didn’t need much sleep—even though they spent most of their time in bed. Stress hormones like dopamine and adrenaline made you constantly alert. And the brains of people who were in love showed significantly less activity.

  Zoe sighed contentedly.

  Her work ethic, however, suffered in reverse proportion to her state of elation. Zoe threw one email after another into the recycle bin. Her attention was piqued by one subject line, however: “German Women’s Journalism Prize.” It came from the German Women’s Journalism Association, GWJA for short, which Zoe, as far as she could remember, didn’t even belong to.

  We are pleased to inform you that we have received your competition entry for the German Women’s Journalism Prize with the title “The Other Woman,” and that it was selected for the final round of the “Online” category. The award presentation ceremony will take place on January 19 in Hamburg. The winners will be announced live, on-site.

  Journalism prize? Competition entry? Final round? Zoe Schuhmacher had never won a journalism prize in her life. You usually didn’t get nominated for the Kisch Prize or the Pulitzer if you wrote stories like “The Summer Homes of Victoria’s Secret Models.” And she wasn’t exactly the type to tailor her work to the available prizes, like the two hundred euro prize from the German East-Westphalian Bank Association, by writing stories like “Savings Books and How Sexy They Can Be.” This prize thing had to be a mistake.

  Easy Living, or: Why Life Is Easier in the US

  The German actress Nastassja Kinski, who lives in California, was once asked in an interview why she preferred the United States to her home country Germany.

  She answered: “When an American is having a bad day, they’ll say: ‘Today’s a bad day, but tomorrow will surely be better.’ When a German has a bad day, they say: ‘Today’s a bad day, and tomorrow will surely be even worse.’”

  This almost childlike optimism actually has a permanent positive influence on one’s mood. You German know-it-all newcomers may think that’s superficial, but it actually makes life a lot easier.

  (New York for Beginners, p. 107)

  18

  “What in God’s name is a woman supposed to wear to the Snowflake Ball?”

  “Ask, and thou shalt receive,” Eros answered with a grin, taking Zoe’s arm as they made their way over to Má Pêche for lunch. “I have connections at every imaginable fashion label. You can borrow a dress from one of their showrooms, just like celebrities do for the Oscars.”

  “Me? Do you really think so?” Zoe was already picturing herself walking down a red carpet in champagne-colored chiffon.

  “Sure. As Fiorino’s date, you’ll definitely get a picture in Page Six of the Post. That’s great PR for a designer.”

  They ordered Korean chicken with Mu Shu pancakes and mussels with kimchi, and fried-rice cakes with chili pepper for Mimi, who was late as usual.

  “Sorry, darlings,” she said, blowing air kisses at them when she arrived. “The Gunns were just redecorating their estate in Connecticut and wanted to get rid of some Square Paintings by Astarot Frist.”

  Then she reached into her Birkin and took out a schedule for Zoe’s big day.

  7:00—Karma yoga and Vipassana meditation

  “With my personal trainer, so your yin and yang will be balanced for the rest of the day.”

  9:00—J. Sisters, Brazilian wax

  “Ouch.” Eros grimaced.

  “Isn’t that a bit much? Drastic full-body hair removal from my most private parts?” Zoe objected helplessly.

  Mimi grinned. “Not if you can’t wear underwear under your skintight ball gown.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Have you ever seen a Hollywood star on the red carpet with visible panty lines?”

  “No bra, either?”

  “Completely impossible with a low-cut back,” Mimi explained. “Don’t worry, though, we’ll fix the dress so it’s bomb-proof around the bosom. With double sided duct-tape.”

  “You’ll be safe against a scandalous wardrobe malfunction like Janet Jackson’s Nipplegate,” Eros promised.

  12:00—Light lunch at Soba Noodle

  2:00—Pedicure, manic
ure, and hair with Sally Hershberger

  If Zoe remembered correctly, that was the woman who’d created Meg Ryan’s famous mop of curls and charged $600 a cut.

  Mimi seemed to read her mind. “Don’t worry. Sally’s giving you a special deal. I promised we’d mention her in the press release.”

  “Press release?”

  “Sure, the gossip columnists have to know whose clothes, shoes, hairstyle, and jewelry you’ll be wearing.”

  Locally, the Snowflake Ball was known simply as Kitty’s Ball, Zoe had learned during lunch. It always took place on the second Saturday of November at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which looked like a winter wonderland during that time. There would be a red carpet at the entrance, decorated with artificial snow if there wasn’t any real snow yet. And it was entirely possible that live reindeer with little bells on their harnesses would be standing guard at the door, as they had in years past. Swarovski had already agreed to turn the entire front of the museum into an ice palace with thousands of glittering crystal stars. According to Mimi, the tickets started at $6,500. Companies like Cartier and Daimler usually bought entire tables for $65,000 to $150,000—depending on their location in the museum’s great hall—and then invited honored guests. Since the expense counted as a donation to charity, 90 percent of it was tax-deductible.

  Tom held Zoe’s hand tightly as they walked up to the entrance through a lightning storm of camera flashes. The paparazzi were probably just waiting for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Tom was wearing a Tom Chrysler tuxedo that even James Bond would have been jealous of, and Zoe was indeed wearing a champagne-colored, floor-length Ralph Lauren gown with a waterfall neckline and a thigh-high slit up the right side. In the great hall, an announcer called out their names, and Zoe felt as though she was at the debutante ball she’d never had.

  Tom greeted the hostess, who also happened to be his mother, with a light kiss on the cheek. Zoe managed an immaculate “I’m so pleased to see you again, Mrs. Fiorino,” and then added a polite “It looks like this will be a wonderful evening.”