by Nell Zink
“You could get a job, and rent yourself a place that’s nice.”
“I’m trying! But the job market’s not easy. I don’t want another internship.”
Amalia sighs.
“The issue right now is, I need a place to stay by the end of next month.”
“The summer place is not mine to give. I told you, it belongs to Matt and Patrick. It was their mother’s.”
“Who wants to be way out there anyway, when I can be close to the PATH train in Jersey City? The Palisades suck in cold weather. Two snowflakes, and I’m trapped. I couldn’t get to work or anywhere else.”
“Eh,” Amalia says. “Maybe you’re right. But if you move into Norm’s childhood home, I’ll never get you out. You’ll be sentimental.”
“I could get sentimental about anything with a roof on it, and this place definitely has a roof. I’m just being pragmatic. A pragmatic interim solution, so I don’t become homeless.”
“Oh my god, don’t use words like that on your guilty old mother,” Amalia says.
“You’re not old. Dad was old.”
“I could get you a job at the bank. We have a purchasing department, you know. You could have a good lifestyle. Don’t move into that messed-up old house.”
“Oh, please no, Mom. That would be too much. I don’t want to be dependent on you for everything. I want to stand on my own feet. I just need a place to stand. Everybody would know it’s nepotism. Word would get out, even if we didn’t look like sisters. But we do.”
Amalia puts her fingertips on her cheekbones and pushes her skin toward her ears. “Maybe I’ll get a face-lift,” she says. “Then we’ll look alike.”
“You don’t even have any gray hair,” Penny says. “I don’t know what your problem is.”
PENNY’S PLAN HITS A SNAG: all the bedrooms at Nicotine are taken. There is a long waiting list to move into Stayfree.
Sorry invites her housemates and Penny to eat lasagna on a Sunday night and brainstorm a resolution.
On Sunday afternoon, Penny helps her prepare the lasagna. She expresses surprise that it involves alternate layers of white sauce rather than ricotta. Sorry explains that her dad converted to Judaism from being Italian American. “Not his fault,” she says. “These Hasidim accosted him on Fifth Avenue on Hanukkah. They thought he was an apostate. He was in default and on the rebound. Next thing you know, he’s living in a settlement. Anyway, he says ricotta in lasagna is an abomination.”
“So you’re not actually Jewish.”
“Jewish is a lifestyle. It’s an attitude. What they used to call a religion. Anybody can be Jewish.”
Penny laughs, because of course she’s right.
At suppertime, Rob brings a six-pack and Jazz, a bottle of Chianti. Penny finally meets Anka and Tony. She has never seen either of them before. Anka works a full-time job and has friends at another house, and Tony sometimes vanishes for days. His housemates attribute these absences to women.
Sorry introduces them by pointing. “Anka,” she says. “Tony. This is Penny. She’s looking for a house.”
Anka says, “Hi! Nice to meet you!” and waves.
She is in her midtwenties, the child of a research biologist and an American Red Cross executive, a graduate of Quaker day schools and Penn. She is an accomplished painter, using her talents to make portraits of acquaintances, which she gives away for free. She doesn’t think of her painting as art because she majored in public health. She is lovely in the most conventional way—tall and blond—but so often troubled by serious thoughts having to do with her AIDS advocacy that she seems forbidding to people who don’t know her. Consequently, she sees her boyfriend from high school when she goes home to celebrate national holidays. They have furiously passionate sex behind his wife’s back. They know each other and the lay of the land so well, they’ve even done it in the baby’s room while his wife was cooking. But Anka isn’t easy, and she doesn’t look it. No New York metropolitan–area single has ever persisted past the fifth date.
Tony—who says he’s heard a lot about Penny, and shakes her hand—is a self-described “working stiff,” currently unemployed and open to odd jobs of any kind, interested in staying off the grid. Never says why. Maybe (Rob tells Penny later) the problem is as simple as the threat of garnisheed wages for delinquent child support. He might be an escaped convict, or just violating probation. An undocumented immigrant with unusually good language skills? Nobody knows. And nobody cares, because he is laid-back, amusing, clean, and tidy. Tony is old, chubby, and balding by anarchist standards, but not by the standards of the New York metropolitan area.
As planned, the dinner-table conversation centers on Penny’s residential options. Rob proposes DJD and Tranquility, two CHA houses devoted to alternative energy sources and the rights of indigenous peoples, respectively. Each is less than half a mile from Nicotine, inconvenient by public transport but amenable to biking, and not fully booked, for lack of suitable activists.
“Tranquility is vegan,” Sorry points out.
“I can handle vegan food, except sometimes dessert,” Penny says. “What’s DJD stand for?”
“Donald Judd Daybed,” Rob says. “There was this guy moved into the house, which at that point was called Pangaea, with this huge sofa called the Donald Judd Daybed, which is like a car shipping crate made of teak or some shit. It weighs more than a waterbed. It’s like a house-within-a-house. So when he set it up on the third floor, the whole place started to list to one side. You couldn’t close the inside doors. DJD is not brick like this place. It’s wood frame. So they put it back on the ground floor, and when it got a scratch it came out that it’s worth like a hundred thousand dollars.”
“It’s truly very comfortable,” Tony says.
“Half the house wanted to break it up for firewood,” he goes on. “The house theme is alternative energy, with pellet stoves and a heat pump, and they were always freaking out about the price of wood, and they were like, ‘Free wood!’”
“Petty bourgeois ascetics,” Jazz says.
“In the end they got mediators to come in from Movement for a New Society,” Rob continues, nodding, “and they reached a consensus that it’s ‘super comfy.’ And so overnight, the whole focus of the house changed from insulation and solar panels and everything like that to bundling up together with a lot of blankets on the DJD. They called it ‘passive’ something—passive recombinant thermal something—”
“And then Trine got pregnant,” Sorry wraps up the story. The whole room (except for Penny) laughs. For several seconds Sorry, Jazz, Anka, Tony, and Rob laugh. The laughter subsides to latent giggling.
“That was one sneaky bitch,” Tony adds, giving his homemade cigar a few swift puffs. They laugh again.
“Trine was this woman nobody liked,” Sorry explains. “I mean, nobody but nobody was fucking her. But somebody knocked her up. By accident! Like Leah in the Bible. I guess people were disoriented.”
“Sorry, Tony my man, it never gets that dark in the city,” Rob says. More laughter.
“What I don’t get,” Penny says, “is why they don’t sell it and do something useful with the money. I mean, if it’s really worth a hundred thousand dollars.”
“So speaks a woman who never lived in a squat,” Sorry replies. “Okay, they unload it. Who gets a share—the guy who brought it? The guy he lifted it from? Everybody who lived there when he did? The people who live there now? CHA? It’s like what happens when squatters have a chance of getting title. The second and third generation is always like, ‘Whatever-squat stays!’”—she puts on a melodic whiny voice—“because they do the math and figure out that not paying rent is worth it. If a room would rent for five hundred, that’s six thousand dollars you’re saving every year. Stay in the house for twenty years, and it’s a hundred and twenty thousand—way more than your share would be if you sold the house. And meanwhile there’s inflation and attrition. The longer you wait, the more likely you’re going to end up walking off with a mill
ion. Same thing goes with the DJD. People are biding their time.”
“You would love the DJD,” Jazz says. “I can see you now, curled up on it like a kitty-cat. It’s so Penny. You’d never get up.”
“Plus I’d fuck whoever came along, by accident.”
“That’s the sexual spell of the DJD. It has all the purity of minimalism, but it’s a sofa—the most bourgeois item of furniture known to man—so it’s like a biodynamic dungeon or a radioactive unicorn. But listen. There’s a massive environmental issue with that house. They’re deep into conserving water. As in not letting it flow to the ocean. And not just in desert regions.” She sees Penny’s blank expression. “You know Belo Monte? A guy at DJD told me the Belo Monte Dam is a small price to pay for sustainable growth with zero emissions.”
“Oh my god,” Penny says, as though hearing that cannibalism is a small price to pay for trichinosis. “What about the other house?”
“Tranquility,” Jazz says. “But I can’t see you doing indigenous rights.”
“What do you mean?” Rob protests. “Look at her Kogi amulets!”
“Penny is their worst nightmare. A modern woman. The great leveler. Entropy incarnate.”
“It was my mom who blew out of indigeneity,” Penny says. “Or indigence or whatever. I’d go back and spend my life doing coke and taking naps in a heartbeat! I like fricasseed guinea pig! I’d be an upper-class Kogi, obviously. Not one of the slaves.”
“You can teach them the old ways,” Tony suggests. “Then lead them to freedom.”
“I think you should just interview at Tranquility and get it over with,” Anka says, frowning at Tony and Jazz. “It’s a nicer house. The room that’s free has two closets and a parquet floor and a nice light fixture. They’ve been renovating the upstairs bathroom at DJD for like two solid years.”
“Sold,” Penny says.
THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY NIGHT, PENNY sits in the corner of a sofa in the common room at Tranquility. The other residents look at her with interest. She shares the sofa with Rufus, a middle-aged African American man, and a South Asian–looking man in his thirties named Barry wearing a Filipino dress shirt with eyelet lace and patch pockets. Two white college students, Jacob and Maureen, sit in armchairs, while an African American woman named Stevie occupies the rug.
“We hear you’re Kogi from Colombia,” Maureen says. Her right arm is decorated with a fresh, clear, deep black tattoo of a Kwakiutl orca totem. “That is so fascinating.”
“Half-Kogi, I guess,” Penny says. “Where are you guys from?”
“Louisville,” Barry says. “My ancestors immigrated to Maryland in the seventies.”
Maureen says, “Wilkes-Barre.”
Jacob says, “I’m from around here.”
Rufus nods in assent, indicating that he is also a local.
Stevie says nothing.
“Well, basically I’m from the Upper West Side via Morristown,” Penny says. “And Morgantown. I went to WVU. It’s my mom who’s Kogi. She ran away from home and ended up meeting my dad, who was from New York.”
“Just like me!” Stevie says. She has curly magenta hair and wears a forties-style bathing suit of plum-colored cotton gabardine with fishnet stockings and Chuck Taylors. She looks ageless and possibly about thirty-five. “My parents wanted me to finish high school and I was like fuck you. It’s indoctrination. So I ran away. That’s part of why I’m committed to indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination. Nobody should have their way of life dictated to them.”
“I joined the navy when I was seventeen,” Rufus says. “That’s when I started learning about oppression.”
“Cool,” Penny says approvingly. “I’m sure you know more about it than I do. I’ve never really had to follow orders, except in college, and at work, I guess. I mean, my parents weren’t strict.”
“It’s stressful,” Rufus says. “The navy is very traditional. Always doing things the way they always been done. I had to run away, too.”
“What, are you AWOL? Do you get a lot of MPs coming around here?” Seeing that Rufus looks horrified, she adds, “Just kidding.”
“Are there very many Kogi left?” Barry asks.
“No clue,” Penny says. “But anyway, my dad was Jewish.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Huh?”
“I mean, your mom could have married a Kogi.”
“What do you mean? They’re not an endangered species! Do you think my dad should have married a Jewish girl?”
“This interview is taking a strange turn,” Rufus remarks.
“It’s not a job interview,” Penny says, turning to him. “I don’t have to put on a fake personality. I get tired of hearing people say indigenous people should practice their folkways. White people don’t have that responsibility, do they? They can innovate all they want, because it’s their tradition to be modern, and I’m supposed to reclaim my ancestral mountaintop? Thanks a lot!”
Penny knows she is talking too much, but in the presence of five strangers she can’t keep straight, she feels safe falling back on a familiar topic—herself—somewhat as when people dominate conversations in bars simply because they can’t hear anybody.
“But it’s genocide,” Barry says. “Once indigenous peoples assimilate, they’re gone.”
“So if I convert to Islam to keep Boko Haram from killing me, I’m committing genocide.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Sorting people into groups isn’t what anybody needs. Not indigenous peoples, or anybody else.”
Barry says, “It’s an inevitable irony that you can’t condemn genocide without using the perpetrators’ racial categories. But that doesn’t make it right to kill people because of their ethnic background.”
“I didn’t say I’m okay with genocide! I just meant that they call it a crime against humanity because it’s subhuman, and I say fuck that. If somebody kills me, I don’t want it to be beneath his dignity. I want it to be murder.”
Maureen says, “I don’t get what you’re saying, but I think you might be a really interesting addition to the house. I like these kinds of discussions.”
Jacob pipes up at last. “Do you sit down in the bathroom?” he asks. “Because that’s my main concern with new indigenous groups in the house. Remember that Hindu guy who squatted on the toilet seat without taking off his shoes? And that girl who would only shit in plastic bags.”
“But she was a runaway, and crazy,” Rufus says. He turns to explain her to Penny. “It was sad. She would throw those bags out in the yard, and the cats would get in them. A kitten gets hungry enough, it will eat human feces—but I don’t want to know. Don’t confront me with that fact. Don’t make me go out and clean up the yard and find all those little kittens with the bags ripped open and your shit on their faces!”
“Oh my god,” Penny says, visibly moved. “How long did she live here?”
“Months,” he says. “She was a street kid with nowhere to go. We couldn’t throw her out until we found her a replacement abandominium.”
“She had so many friends,” Jacob says.
“She was tribal,” Stevie says. “The tribe of underage sex workers from Garden City.”
“So you guys are basically just suckers,” Penny says. “Way too nice.”
Shrugs all around. “We try to be friendly,” Rufus says.
“Do you mind if I ask a question about the solidarity work you do as a house?” No one minds. They look flattered and expectant. She asks, “Do you support any groups engaged in armed struggle?”
“Do we what?” Barry asks.
“You ask if we building bombs?” Rufus says.
“I mean like the Karen in Burma or whatever. With your fund-raising. I’m basically against violence. I’m kind of a pacifist. Anything is better than hurting people.”
“We’re not in a position to raise money,” Maureen says. Her housemates nod. “I mean, I give all the support I can to my favorite causes on social media.
It’s so many initiatives, I can’t even keep track. I like Amnesty International, but I guess my favorite is UNICEF. They have this great program to make sure indigenous girls get food.”
“I like UNICEF, too,” Penny says. “I’ve actually done some fund-raising work for them.” (She means while trick-or-treating in Morristown.)
“Maybe you can teach us something about fund-raising,” Stevie chimes in. “I work with a collective that builds puppets for street theater, and it takes so much money. Just storing the puppets between conferences takes money.”
“The puppets are great,” Jacob says. “They’re what made me into an activist. I saw them on YouTube.”
“You can get more support with puppets than with anything else,” Stevie says. “People go to a demo or see video and they see the police on one side and us on the other, and they see who’s having all the fun. It gets them to join the revolution.”
“The puppets are awesome,” Barry agrees. The others nod.
Maureen says, “Lots of indigenous cultures do street theater with puppets. The Dogon. The Hopi.” Again, they all nod.
“That sounds awesome,” Penny says. “I love puppets.”
She feels as though she were admitting a weakness for baby bunnies or chocolate sprinkles—not much of a confession, much less a commitment—but the resonance on the faces around her is so approving that her mind bends willingly. Why shouldn’t loving puppets be a revolutionary act, in a world where so many people love drone warfare? Bunnies and chocolate sprinkles don’t work as street theater—much too small—while values such as peace, love, and understanding are notoriously invisible. Puppets it is! Big ones! Why not. There are more inane things you could love.
Mustering these thoughts, she smiles in a way that comes close to the Mona Lisa. She feels that Tranquility is inhabited by hapless lunatics, but she’ll be spending most of her time at Nicotine anyway, so who cares.
They ask her to leave the room for a moment. There is a swift consensus to take her in. They feel they have never met anyone quite so indigenous. They imagine both the Kogi and Jewish cultures as the sorts of patriarchies that produce women so strong they’re actually matriarchies, if you take time to scratch the surface.