“Okay, I’m leaving. Can I have a kiss goodbye?” I asked.
“Ugh, yes,” she said.
I leaned down to give her a hug and kiss, but she wouldn’t give me full body contact this time. Instead, I get a side-arm hug, and when I planted my lips on hers, she was laughing and saying, “Go!” So instead of lip-to-lip contact, mine smushed up against her front teeth, awkwardly.
No one cried. But we did get a letter a few days later detailing how homesick she was the first few days. The next day, another letter came. She was totally fine and loved camp and would like more stamps, please.
The drive home was long, the traffic was bad, and I was exhausted and stiff by the time I finally pulled off the West Side Highway, just ten blocks from home. I drove straight across Riverside Drive onto 95th Street, and then I saw police lights in my rearview mirror. I assumed he was trying to get past me, so I pulled to the side. He pulled behind me. As the cop got out of his car and walked toward my window, I pointed at my chest and mouthed cartoonishly, “Me? You were pulling me over?”
“How is everything tonight?” he asked, as his partner was shining her flashlight through the passenger side window, looking around in my backseat.
“Were you meaning to pull me over?” I still couldn’t imagine what I’d done wrong. I didn’t run a red light. Was my taillight out? Did I not have my headlights on?
“You went straight on 95th Street here from a right-turn only lane,” he said. I was so confused and incredulous, I began to argue that I drove this route constantly and was pretty positive that was not the case; the opposite of needy, if you were wondering, is often belligerent. Don’t I always go straight from the right lane? While I was expressing indignation, I was fumbling with my new license, which was stuck inside the transparent sleeve of my wallet and would not budge under my sweaty thumb.
“Sorry, I can’t . . .” I said. “It’s new. This is a new license. Do I have to take it out? Hold on.” After a full minute, I managed to free it. The cop told me he would be right back, then pointed to a beige circle about the size of a urinal cake pinned to the front of his shirt and said, “So you know, I am wearing a body camera.” I had no idea how to respond. That’s what body cameras looked like? Was he worried I was about to fly off the handle? Did he think I was drunk? I wished I were drunk. But home. Home and drunk. I said, “Great!”
He came back and gave me a ticket for disobeying a sign, which he wrote in large, childlike block letters: DISOBEYED SIGN. (Was I picking on a superficial detail to make him feel small? I was. Because he looked like he was twelve years old, and I was really mad.) A $138 ticket! When I was ten blocks from home! It felt so unfair, even though it wasn’t, and I’d gotten away with breaking all kinds of other traffic rules that day, including driving 85 miles per hour in a 65 zone and making a U-turn to get to Five Guys at an exit, even though there was clearly a No U-turn sign. I felt like I was sixteen again—insecure and lost and in trouble, because I was such a massively terrible driver. I have tried for years to get better, but I can’t. No amount of capability or determination can make me have a better sense of direction or better instincts about changing lanes. My bad driving is just a weakness. I’m trying to look at it as a blessing, and it would be, if it weren’t costing me so much money in tickets.
It turns out that sending your oldest child to sleepaway camp and having only two kids at home does not make life easier if said oldest child is actually incredibly helpful with the baby and you unintentionally shipped off a crucial extra set of hands. I missed Julia like crazy. Thank the Lord she was only gone two weeks.
THIRTEEN
SOUTHERN MANNERS: AN IDENTITY CRISIS
FOR SOUTHERNERS LIVING IN NEW YORK, there comes a point where you have to decide which it’s gonna be. If you live here for three to five years after college before moving back to the South, you’ve chosen: You are a Southerner. Who lived in New York. If you stay, like I have—especially if you pass over the imaginary line of having lived in the city longer than you lived in your hometown, like I have, which is wild—then you are a New Yorker. I once heard the author Helen Ellis, who grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but has lived in New York for twenty-five years, say, “I’m a New Yorker with a Southern accent.” I don’t even have much of an accent anymore, other than the way I say Thanksgiving: accent on the “Thanks.” So, I’m a New Yorker. Full stop.
Some people like me, New Yorkers née Southerners, hold on to sentimental traditions or foods, small talismans of their former lives. My friends Merritt and Patricia, who are from Nashville and Austin, respectively, have certain food items shipped in. Merritt orders a turkey from Greenberg Smoked Turkey in Tyler, Texas, every Thanksgiving, and Patricia’s mother sends her an Easter ham from New Braunfels Smokehouse outside San Antonio. My sister has gifted us Benton’s Bacon, which comes from the Tennessee Smoky Mountains, and once I ordered Sister Schubert’s Parker House rolls, but the cost of shipping could have covered one of my children’s college tuition, so I never did it again. On a shelf in my kitchen live Junior League cookbooks from various southern cities—Houston, Birmingham, Raleigh, Memphis—but I rarely pull them down. I cook a few of my grandmother’s standbys, like her cobbler, but I don’t get all weepy about them. Other transplants I know hold on to their Southern-ness by wearing pearls or signet rings or proper lipstick, and, well, I never did that with much success, even when I lived in the South. My look has always been less ladylike and more menswear-inspired, if the men who inspired me were old and retired and wore a lot of pajamas and Birkenstocks.
The one area where I didn’t become a complete embarrassment to my people was manners. I have excellent Southern manners. I gave up being a Republican, but you’ll have to pry my thank-you notes on monogrammed stationery from my cold, dead hands. When I got married in 2005, I reluctantly included response cards with the invitations, even though I’d been trained to write a separate note—on my own stationery—as a wedding RSVP, worded thusly: Elizabeth Passarella accepts with pleasure your kind invitation for Saturday, June 16. Or: Elizabeth Passarella regretfully declines your kind invitation for Saturday, June 16. Notes like those have gone the way of the hoop skirt, I believe; even the most traditional Southern brides include response cards with checkboxes now. But I like knowing that I know that.
My most marketable Southern skill is the ability to make killer small talk. How is that related to manners, exactly? It is in the sense that I learned to make killer small talk by being expected, over many years of my childhood, to come downstairs when my parents had company, say hello to and shake hands with their friends, answer a bunch of questions about how school was going, and then disappear back to my room like a von Trapp. To most non-Southern parents reading this, that may sound demeaning or old-fashioned, but they should watch me work a room. I credit this skill with getting me my first jobs in newspapers and magazines. I’d walk into an interview, make excellent eye contact, shoot the breeze, tell a funny, self-deprecating story (another Southern specialty), and send a prompt thank-you note. I’m not saying other people can’t send thank-you notes, but, well, I’ve received thank-you notes for my thank-you notes.
Occasionally, I get a little big for my britches, and my manners get me into trouble. On the subway, for example. If I see someone holding an international guidebook or leaning and squinting toward the subway map on the side of the train car, trying to determine where he’s going, I am like a dog who spots someone holding a tennis ball from seventy-five yards away. It’s my calling, to be a subway Sherpa, if you will, a fellow passenger with Walmart greeter levels of enthusiasm and knowledge. My need to give people directions goes beyond just trying to be helpful. I feel responsible for making sure New York City puts its best face forward, and the subway can be confusing, especially on weekends or when there’s construction, and certain lines don’t follow their prescribed routes. If that German-speaking family of six stays on the orange D train instead of switching to the orange B, I say to myself, they will go exp
ress from Columbus Circle to 125th Street, which they may not want to do, and they might think badly of my city, which I take personally. So, I smile at the family and give them a look that says I’m ready to jump in, should they need me. Sometimes I offer outright. And then, after we’ve muddled through language barriers, and I feel confident that they know what to do, we sit awkwardly for a few stops, me continuing to smile intermittently, until their stop comes, and I motion for them like a maître d’. “This is your stop. Yes, here. The Natural History Museum. Goodbye! You’re welcome! Have a good time!”
That’s the best outcome. But I have a terrible sense of direction, even when it comes to public transportation. My bearings get jumbled, even more so under pressure, and I forget which subway lines go where. In my haste to be a cheery mouthpiece for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, I sometimes give people bad information. I can’t help it; I get frazzled. Does the B go all the way to 2nd Avenue on the Lower East Side? Or do they need to switch to the F? Oh, crap. Williamsburg. Williamsburg, Williamsburg . . . the L. It’s the L! That sounds right. They get the L at 23rd Street. Wait, no. Fourteenth. Fourteenth? All of this goes through my mind, while these nice tourists are looking at me expectantly, and I consider texting Michael, but I’m underground and running out of time. I give an answer, the tourists get off, and then I spend my entire ride home convinced I sent them to Queens.
Things are easier when I run into a group of Southerners. They are easy to spot, mostly because they tend to talk loudly in familiar accents. Southern tourists—families, girls’ trips, a gaggle of grandmothers up here to see Phantom—are my Olympics. I get to excel at all my favorite things: showing off my good manners, talking to strangers, and putting in some good PR for my city.
“Excuse me, where are y’all trying to go?” I say, turning up my accent and hitting hard on the y’all.
“Oh, goodness, honey, we are looking for the Majestic Theater. Is it the Majestic? Carol? Majestic?”
This is another way you know you are dealing with a tourist, usually a Southerner over the age of fifty: When they give you the name of a building or an address—“We are going to 245 West 44th Street”—instead of an intersection or cross street. New Yorkers say, “We’re going to 44th and 8th.”
“Where are y’all visiting from?” I ask, already dooming myself to wasting enough time with small talk that I’ll inevitably panic when it’s time to tell them where to get off.
“We’re from Mississippi. From Jackson.”
“Oh! My mom is from Mississippi. She grew up in a small town near Tupelo, called Ripley. I grew up in Memphis.”
“Y’ALL! Did you hear that? She’s from MEMPHIS! Where did you say your mama grew up, honey? Ripley? Carol! Ripley!”
Tick tock.
“Now, do you live here?” she asks.
“I do. I’ve been here almost twenty years! I just love it.”
And this is where I get one of two different responses. Either, “I can see why. We are just havin’ a ball.” Or, “Your poor mama.”
I quickly explain that they should get off of the B train and switch to the C or the A, which will take them to 42nd and 8th Avenue, and they’ll be a couple of blocks away.
“I think she said she LIVES here!” I hear one of them say, incredulously, as they exit.
I do. I live here, ladies. Have a great night. I’m 70 to 80 percent sure I sent you to the right theater.
. . .
Having kids has muddied the waters a little. They are embarrassed by my small talk, for starters.
“Mom, why do you always laugh when you are talking to a cashier? Or another parent?” Julia asks.
“What do you mean?”
“You laugh after everything you say. You laugh when nothing’s funny.”
“I wouldn’t say nothing’s funny. Sometimes I do make a little joke. It puts people at ease! It’s just nice manners.”
“No, it’s not. It’s weird. Yesterday you laughed while you returned those jeans at the Gap. And you just laughed at the bus driver.”
It’s not easy to raise my children with the same manners I had growing up because, I’ve realized, manners are a group effort. When I was a kid, my friends’ parents had the same expectations as my parents, more or less. So did my teachers. Everywhere I went, outside of my own home, my manners were being reinforced. Once in a blue moon, I’d meet a parent who said, “Oh, sweetie, you don’t have to say Mrs. Gordon. Call me Kathy!” but I didn’t dare. My friend Murff’s dad would say s*** every once in a while—usually referring to a certain brand of hiking boots that were popular when we were in high school and that he called “s***kickers,” as in, “Hey girls, y’all got your s***kickers on?”—but if we had said anything other than, “Yes, sir!” back to him, he’d have raised one of his formidable eyebrows at us, and I would have peed in my pants. By comparison, my children call every adult by their first names, and I doubt anyone would raise an objection or an eyebrow if they said s*** straight to someone’s dad’s face. Even my kids’ school dictates that they call their teachers by their first names. And not the first name, plus a prefix. Not Ms. Tracy. Just. Tracy.
“Tracy said we need to bring our book baggies home every night.”
“Tracy was sick today. We had a substitute. Her name was Maria.”
Maria. Good Lord.
As for ma’am and sir, I waved the white flag on those long before I gave up Mr. and Mrs. Ma’am and sir aren’t just waved off in New York; they can be considered offensive. Ma’am sounds like a judgment on a woman’s age to the adults of this city, and they aren’t having it. So I never taught my kids to say “yes, ma’am” or “no, sir” to an adult. We created a sort of bifurcated system: the way they talk to adults at home, and the way they talk to adults when we visit my parents in Memphis. We dubbed it “Memphis Manners.” I make a big show of telling them to “turn on your Memphis Manners” when we exit the airplane, and they know that means using ma’am and sir to address my parents and their friends, as well as going the extra mile to answer questions, make polite conversation, and refrain from saying the word pee. My mother prefers tinkle.
I wrote about Memphis Manners for an etiquette column I write in Southern Living magazine. I made the point that, maybe, ma’am and sir were becoming a little outdated. Some of my friends had stopped bothering to enforce it with their own kids; it felt too burdensome, they said. I argued that children could show respect to adults with a polite, “Yes,” or “Yes, please”—as long as it wasn’t a dreaded “Yeah” or “Uh-huh”—and maybe we could all put to rest the habit of yelling, “yes, what?” to our kids a dozen times a day. A lot of people disagreed with me. I got letters. Now, most of the people writing to me missed the point—I was blamed for my entire generation’s moral decline more than once—and were also, without exception, from readers my parents’ age, so I knew where they were coming from, namely the 1940s. They didn’t move my opinion so much. I still maintain that my kids can be respectful of adults and moderately well-mannered without ma’am and sir, with first-name-only salutations, and with limited opportunities for honing their small talk. At least, that’s what I tell myself. What choice do I have? It does mean that thank-you-note writing, my last stand, takes on outsize importance in our family. And there are other small niceties that I blow out of proportion, due to scarcity. For example, if we are leaving a birthday party, and my child says, “Thank you for having me,” to the parent in charge, but that parent didn’t properly hear her, I insist she go back, make eye contact, and say it louder. “Go! Say it again,” I hiss. “Kathy didn’t hear you.”
Am I worrying about all of this for the wrong reasons? I wonder about that a lot. Do I want my kids to have good manners for them, or for me? Is my motivation that my children show gratitude and selflessness to others in our community? (I think so.) Or that they be little Eddie Haskell robots who lead others to believe that their mom must be pretty on top of things? (Also sounds good.) I’ve debated giving up and going feral m
ultiple times, but there’s one thing that always brings me back to thinking manners are worth it.
Teenagers on the bus.
One afternoon a week, my kids and I board the M7 near their school and ride twenty-five blocks south to Julia and James’s piano teacher’s apartment. At the time of day that we are riding the bus—directly after school dismissal—it is packed with teenagers traveling home or to various activities together. Now, I was a teenager once. In a few short years, I’ll have a teenager who will act like a jack wad and think the world revolves around her. I understand that so much of teenagers’ behavior is posturing to seem cool in front of their friends, and I know their executive functioning is still underdeveloped, and I get that they are full of hormones and self-doubt. They’re still terrible bus patrons. When we get on, three of them are sitting in the seats at the front that are designated for elderly or disabled riders. It’s fine for them to sit there; I sit there often with my kids, if the bus isn’t crowded and there are no elderly neighbors waiting for a seat. But these teenagers have their heads down, looking at their phones, and then when an elderly person does come on the bus, they don’t notice or move. Sometimes there’s a little kid, a preschooler, who is having a hard time holding on to the bus pole and keeps getting tossed around when the bus lurches, which causes a domino effect: his parent or babysitter swoops forward to steady him, and then she bumps into someone in the process. In the back of the bus, there is a pack of teenagers fighting over another phone, trying to grab it from one another to delete a post of some sort, and they are screaming curse words. Two of them have their backpacks sitting on the seat next to them, while I am standing with a baby strapped to me who is getting pancaked by passengers on either side. When an elderly man or woman does get on, and the teenagers don’t budge, another adult will give up his seat, or, rarely, wave wildly in front of the teenagers’ faces and say, “Hey, kids, you need to get up.” (It is almost always a Black woman with the commanding presence of Beyoncé; everyone is in awe.)
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