“Goddammit, Jenny, I’m not young like you!” she complained as she manically wrapped our precious lamps in brown packing paper. Everything but our clothes, a bookcase, the computer, and a TV would end up in storage. I never realized how much I’d miss eating off my own dishes until they were shut away and all we had were Marge’s. Our silverware and appliances were nicer, as my mother had such sophisticated taste. But while Marge may not have lived up to my standards in cutlery, they had a house—many houses, in fact, purchased as investments and scattered throughout the county. Our penchant for finery, it turned out, had gotten us nowhere.
That evening I pulled out of the garage of the Summerfield townhouse; after the game, I pulled in to Marge’s driveway in Laguna Hills. We were officially homeless.
CHAPTER 7
Lockwood Avenue
Farmingdale, Long Island, New York
July 1995
• • •
WE LIVED AT MARIA’S HOUSE FOR EIGHT MONTHS, AND I’VE blocked out most of it for the sake of my sanity. When I wasn’t sleeping through the remainder of my classes I was raising my low-density lipoprotein by hitting up every In-N-Out Burger between Seal Beach and Oceanside, while my mother got fired from Budget Carpet after three months and spent the rest of our time in California chain-smoking while glued to the O.J. trial. One afternoon a few months before my high school graduation my mother took me into an office located in the mini-mall behind a 7-Eleven in Laguna Hills. It was a welfare office, and she was getting her weekly food stamps.
“I didn’t want to tell you,” she said.
“Just make it quick,” I said, disappointed. I learned that my father had been on food stamps and public assistance for months, and they’d both kept it a secret from me. The shame I felt wasn’t just the stigma of welfare—rather, I knew that if we had fallen this far it would take that much longer to pick ourselves back up. Throughout our last depressing months in California I’d beg her to tell me what New York was like: Would I love it? Hate it? Would the indignities we’d just suffered be redeemed by our arrival in the Capital of the World?
“Oh, Jenny, this again?” she’d ask, wary. “You’ve been there before.”
“Yeah, but I don’t remember,” I said. “It was so long ago.”
“You remember the cobblestone streets,” she pointed out. “You remember crying because you were afraid the glass on the street would puncture your shoe and cut your feet.”
I’d never live that one down. “Yeah, but what’s it like?” I asked, seeking specifics. “Is it like the way it’s depicted in the movies?”
“It’s …” she started, searching for the words. “It’s kind of like Anaheim. Or downtown Santa Ana.”
“Yuck!” I said. “Mom, that’s terrible!” Both of those places were beset with smog. I don’t know why she said it, because I’d eventually find out for myself it wasn’t true.
My graduation ceremony was held on a Friday evening, and my father flew in to watch me collect my diploma. But I had little time to celebrate, as he wanted us on the road by Sunday morning. They let me sleep Saturday while they packed, but reality set in when I awoke. I was about to be yanked from my hometown, the one place my mother admitted she never thought we’d leave. My father took us to the storage facility to fetch our things, and I felt a stab of nostalgia when I saw our remaining furniture being moved into the U-Haul; it was like seeing old friends. I missed our life and I wanted it back, and if we had to go to New York for that to happen, so be it.
That night before we left I initiated a discussion about The Future with my mother in the living room. “What are we going to do when we get there?” I asked. “I mean, financially.” We were supposed to stay with my parents’ friend Cecilia, Big Vinny’s widow, with whom we’d briefly stayed while my father was in the facility in 1983, but we didn’t know for how long. We’d be “playing it by ear,” as my parents were always so fond of saying. Except when they said it, their accents made it sound like they were saying “play it by year;” throughout my childhood I wondered how anyone could play something by year. “I mean,” I continued, muting my voice because my father was in Maria’s backyard, smoking, “is Daddy even living above the poverty line at this point?” His carpet business hadn’t exactly gotten off the ground in Brooklyn because his steam cleaning machine froze in the winter and stayed frozen until April, which is why we were all on welfare.
“I don’t know, Jennifer, why don’t you ask him yourself?” she replied. A few moments later my father opened the sliding glass door and announced, “Hey, kids, I’m gonna go to bed soon. Oh, and Jennifer, just in case you were still wondering, yes, I live above the poverty line.” I was mortified.
Maria was not at all psyched about us leaving; she and my mother had whiled away the days smoking and watching Court TV, and they’d come to rely on each other for emotional support. Even Maria’s father was upset; Akbar had come to revere my father for his blue-collar work ethic and often spoke of his attributes in hushed tones. I sensed a slight fear lingering behind the way Akbar regarded my father, though I’m sure Akbar wasn’t even aware of it. But my father could evoke a subliminal mixture of fear and respect in people; it was the same quality that lodged a lump in my throat every time he opened his mouth to yell. It defied explanation.
“See you soon! Promise to write!” I yelled out the window of the U-Haul. And with that, we were on the road again.
I was mostly silent during that first day on the highway, comatose from the hypnotic forward motion and the heat, but when we crossed into Blythe, a small town on the California-Arizona border that my mother dubbed “the armpit of the world,” I began to cry. This was it, we really weren’t going back. I didn’t want to freeze my ass off every winter. I wanted to stay in the land of inground pools and fish tacos. How would I survive without the strangely comforting Santa Ana winds, raging through the trees each autumn like static fire? My father stoically tolerated my tears until we got to Illinois.
“I’m going back!” I declared after taking in the baking, desolate landscape for far too many hours in a row. “I have a choice, you know! I don’t have to go with you guys.”
Threatening mutiny put my father over the edge. As it was, stress had turned both of my parents ghostly white. “Then go, Jennifer!” my father erupted. “Go live with Maria’s family. Go get a job and buy a car and pay for your own gas and your own bills.” Without money I was strapped to them, and I had no choice but to relent.
Somewhere around Ohio I stopped my kvetching and began to embrace an unavoidable fact: I was moving to New York. In a way, it was a great moment: Caught between two lives, we ventured across the country—again—to a future that was wholly uncertain. The next day, as we approached the Goethals Bridge from the New Jersey side, I gazed at New York—well, the backside of Staten Island, really—and remarked to my mother, “I feel like my whole life is leading up to this point.”
“That’s funny,” she said, “I felt the same way when we first came to California.” And that’s when I understood that my New York would be different from the New York my mother and father had left all those years ago. The majority of their lives was behind them now, while most of mine was still in front of me. Even though we’d taken a few detours, I could finally glimpse the road ahead.
MY FIRST VIEW of “the city” was from the U-Haul place on New Utrecht Avenue in Brooklyn, and I immediately wanted to turn around and go back. It was hot and humid and the streets were dirty—I doubted I could walk barefoot on any of the broken sidewalks I saw before me. We baked in the heat for an hour while we unloaded our furniture into a storage space, and I wondered how long it would be before I saw any of it again.
When I told my friends exactly where I was going to be staying, they seemed confused: “You moved to New York so you could live in Farmingdale?” I tried to explain that we moved to New York to be in the city, but when we arrived at Cecilia’s we might as well have been right back at Maria’s house because we were in the
same situation as the one we’d left.
“Johnny! Eleanor!” Celie called from the driveway as we pulled in, holding out her arms. She was petite and blond and resembled a weathered Ellen Barkin. (“A blond-haired, blue-eyed Sicilian,” my mother had told me. “Very rare.”) Her accent was much thicker than my mother’s, a remnant of her Queens childhood. “Is this Jennifah?” she asked, her eyes widening as they settled on my chest. “You’re so big! And you’ve got some breasts there, Jenny!” I nodded and smiled, though I wanted to cry. I’d last seen Celie when I was five. Now I was seventeen and every ounce I gained went straight to my tits. I felt awkward and unsure of myself and I wanted to go hide under the covers after the year I’d just had. But at least my father was with us. As long as the three of us were together, everything would be all right.
Celie lived on the second story of a two-family house in a sleepy town with no Starbucks for miles. The ground floor was occupied by Big Vinny’s sister and her husband and son in an arrangement that had evidently survived Big Vinny’s death. The biggest attraction in the area was the Amityville horror house, which was apparently the one on which the movie was based. Then there was that strange buzz in the air, a humming, clicking sound that could be heard in every direction.
“What is that?” I asked, but if I’d waited ten seconds I would have gotten my answer. That’s when a bug that looked like a flying cockroach with butterfly wings hit the porch, apparently dead, and a Doberman entered stage left and snapped it up in its mouth.
“That’s Ellie,” Celie said, gesturing at her dog. “She loves eating the cicadas, don’t ask me why.”
“What’s a chi-cay-da?” I asked, about to vomit.
“They come out in the summer,” Celie said. “They’re harmless.”
“Just wait until you see the Great American Cockroach, Jenny,” my mother said, raising her eyebrows. I shivered. We climbed the stairs and came upon a high-ceilinged living room and eat-in kitchen, and three bedrooms arranged back to back down a tight hallway. It was a decent-sized apartment for Celie and her son Anthony—Carmine was still in prison, having ultimately rejected my father’s advice four years earlier—but the arrival of a family of three was pushing it. Anthony, who was twenty-four, was sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch with a friend.
“Hey, Johnny!” he said, and gave my father a hug. “How ya been?”
“Good, good,” my father said, settling in for some coffee. “Tired.” While my mother and I exchanged pleasantries with Celie, my father mentioned to Anthony’s friend that he was in desperate search of work.
“Ya ever paint?” Anthony’s friend asked. It turned out that Anthony had just returned from a job in Delaware that had him painting the exteriors of Texacos and Taco Bells. Anthony’s friend was actually his boss, and he ran a crew.
“Sure, I’ve painted,” my father lied. And with that, he had a job, albeit one that would keep him on the road for weeks at a time. My mother took this as proof that only good things could happen as long as we were together. “Twenty minutes!” she said. “We’re here twenty minutes and your father gets a job! See, Johnny? We need to stick together.” He nodded. He was to leave the next day, which upset me so much I got diarrhea.
By the time I swallowed some Imodium and took a shower, the sun had set. My parents were having their post-dinner cup of coffee and a cigarette when my father saw the grimace on my face. “You okay, kiddo?” he asked, concerned. “Come sit on my lap.”
I obliged, but supported two-thirds of my weight by pressing my legs into the floor. It would be the last time I’d ever sit on my father’s lap. “It’s just stress, Daddy,” I said. I noticed a legal pad sitting nearby and reached for it. I began to make a list.
GOALS
Get our own apartment somewhere in the five boroughs
Get an apartment in Manhattan
Buy our own place, preferably in Manhattan
“Wishful thinking, Jenny,” my mother said when she read goal number two. “It got so expensive here. Donald tried to warn me. Jennifer, five years ago no one wanted to live here, the city was crawling with crime, and now you can’t get a studio for less than fifteen hundred a month.” The Yolanda house had been $1,350, and that was a two-story house with four bedrooms.
“Maybe yous should look at Valley Stream, maybe the Oranges in New Jersey,” Celie suggested as she breezed into the kitchen for some coffee. Like my father, she was a fan of “yous.”
“Yeah, we’ll look into that,” my father said, while my mother slowly shook her head so only my father could see. When Celie left, we finished our conversation in hushed tones. “Don’t worry, El,” he said, making the “quiet down” gesture with his hand. “We’re going to live close to the city.” My heart soared. “I was thinking maybe Staten Island.”
“Because Brooklyn is too depressing,” my mother said in agreement, “and Manhattan is out, for obvious reasons. And the Bronx is out, also for obvious reasons. And Queens … well, I’ve never been too crazy about Queens, either.”
“Um, guys?” I asked. “What exactly do you mean when you say, ‘the city’? I thought the five boroughs were all part of New York City?”
“They are,” my father said. “But people who live outside Manhattan call it ‘the city.’ That’s what we do in Brooklyn. Actually, when we were growing up we referred to Manhattan as ‘New York.’”
“Yeah, I never understood that,” my mother said, and turned to me. “Let’s make another list,” she said, commandeering my notebook. “Here, I’ll start. Paprika, thyme, cumin, rosemary, oregano—we need to replace our spices, you know—extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, russet potatoes, Dijon mustard, Valencia oranges …” It was just like the list we made on the return trip to California in 1983. I smiled at the memory. After an exhausting 2,954-mile journey, there we were, dreaming about ketchup.
“Don’t forget U-bet chocolate sauce,” I said, remembering how my hand would be covered with chocolate every time I pulled the spoon out of the jar. When List 2.0 was completed I held it up and announced, “The list is life.” My mother cracked up at the Schindler’s List reference.
Just then a lightning bolt cracked the sky open, illuminating the blackness for an instant.
“Whatthefuckwasthat?” I asked, jumping off my father’s lap and darting to the window just in time to see another tree-branch-shaped strike. “There’s another one! What’s happening here?”
“It’s probably a rainstorm, Jenny,” my mother said casually.
“Rain? I’m sorry, did you say rain?” I asked, hardly amused.
“Yes, Jenny,” she replied. “It rains here in the summer.”
“What?” My stomach rumbled with this latest predicament. “I didn’t sign up for this!”
My father left promptly the next morning, traveling to Georgia or Oklahoma or somewhere to paint. His salary was $100 a day, but the second he signed on he confessed to my mother his plan to overthrow his boss and eventually run the crew. “Your father always gets ahead,” she said. It was true, he always found a way to succeed, even if his idea of success was different from most people’s. With my father gone I moped around Celie’s place watching the MTV Beach House and wishing I was in Malibu with Kennedy. My mother was also glued to the TV, often fixing me an iced coffee and pouring a hot one for herself before melting into the couch beside me. Celie found us this way before she went to work one morning and erupted.
“Eleanor, you’ve got to help Johnny,” she pleaded. “You have to get a job, the both of yous. You must help him!” Celie washed hair at a salon in Dix Hills and her day began at 6 A.M.; our laziness must have been an affront to someone who worked so hard. One morning I made the mistake of sitting on the back of one of Celie’s couches to watch TV.
“Jenny, goddammit!” she yelled as soon as she walked into the kitchen and spotted me abusing her furniture.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered, jumping off the couch like it was on fire.
“Jennifer, wha
t are you doing?” she asked through a nervous half-smile. But what she really seemed to be asking was “What are you doing with your life?” I took in her tiny frame, which was lacking any trace of body fat, and felt like I didn’t have a reason to exist.
“I don’t know,” I muttered.
The next morning my mother took me into the city for the first time. Before we hopped the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station we sat in a diner and munched on bagels and discussed my future. I had to decide where I was going to college, and when. Technically the intention of our Manhattan trip was to look at possibilities, Hunter College on the Upper East Side being my mother’s preference.
“But maybe we’d be pushing it if we enrolled you in classes this September,” she said, which was slightly more than a month away. I focused on her face: Was she giving me an out? “And we still don’t know where we’re gonna live,” she added.
“And I’ve always been young for my grade,” I chimed in. I was still seventeen, and would be until the end of November.
“Now, this doesn’t mean you’re not going to college,” she warned.
“Of course,” I agreed. I wanted to go to college, but I badly needed a break. And that’s how I won my gap year. My mother had turned a corner—the woman who had shoved me headfirst into honors classes was giving me room to breathe in a time of tremendous stress.
“Come on,” she said with renewed vigor. “Let’s go to the city.”
After an hour on the train I stepped out of Penn Station into a drizzly July afternoon, and my first impression was that New York was exactly as it appeared in the movies. As I craned my neck to behold the tall buildings and watched all the people scurrying past, I was filled with a familiar feeling, like I’d been here before.
“You have,” my mother reminded me.
“But that was a dozen years ago,” I reminded her.
She indulged me in the obligatory stroll through Times Square, and when I spotted a newsstand I asked her if we could stop. CROSSROADS OF THE WORLD, read the scaffold above the kiosk.
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