Only in New York

by Lily Brett

  A day later my cousin brought up the issue of scaffolding. My cousin Adam is the grandson of Regina, my father’s first cousin. Like my father, Regina also survived Auschwitz. I am not sure if being the grandson of my father’s first cousin makes Adam and me cousins, but it does make us family.

  Adam lives near us in downtown Manhattan. The main point of his story was not actually scaffolding. It was a bicycle. He is a keen cyclist. He rides his bike everywhere. Riding your own bike in New York City, I now know, requires a degree of knowledge voluminous enough to be the basis for a PhD thesis.

  When my cousin first moved to New York he got a very cheap bike, but it looked good. That bike was stolen in days. He then bought a cheap, used bike with scratches and dents. This bike lasted almost a month before being stolen.

  A neighbour explained to my cousin that expensive bikes were stolen to make money, but cheap bikes, on the whole, were stolen to be used. ‘Buy a girl’s bike,’ he said. ‘No self-respecting guy is going to be caught dead riding a girl’s bike.’ But then someone else told him that the answer was a very tall bike. Too tall for most people to ride.

  In New York, you pick up a lot of very useful information from other people. Other people on the subway, on a bus, on the street, in a deli, in a waiting room. Some cities are clear to read. It is easy to know how things work. But in New York, it is always worth listening to what another New Yorker has to say.

  Adam bought a second-hand, cheap, very tall bike. The shortest you could be to ride this bike was six-foot-one, my cousin’s height. This tall bike did the trick. Adam was so happy. He loved the bike. It was the perfect height for his back. He chained the bike to a pole outside his apartment building, every night. It was always there in the morning.

  Summer came and Adam started riding his bike to work. He worked in Midtown. Towards the end of summer, he noticed that the Plaza Hotel, not far away from his office, was undergoing renovations. Its facade was surrounded by very tall scaffolding. Apparently scaffolding is perfect for bikes. If you chain your bike to scaffolding it is protected from bad weather and passing traffic. My cousin started parking his bike securely locked to the scaffolding on the facade of the Plaza Hotel.

  All went well until one night my cousin left work and walked to pick up his bike. It was gone, and so was the ten-foot-high piece of scaffolding he had chained it to. There was now a narrow gap in the scaffolding surrounding the facade of the famed Plaza.

  No one at the Plaza Hotel had any idea of what had happened to the scaffolding. Nor were they very interested. I, briefly, contemplated telling my dentist about the missing scaffolding. I thought he might have some good advice. Finally someone at the Plaza gave my cousin the name of the scaffolding company, which was based out of town. My cousin called the company. They, too, were not interested in locating the bike. Especially when they heard it was a battered, second-hand, very tall bike.

  Adam rang the scaffolding company several more times. To no avail. He must have sounded desperate because two days later someone from the company called him. They had located his bike and suggested he drive out to pick it up. When he said he didn’t have a car their compassion kicked in. They overlooked the fact that he worked in finance. A young man with an old battered bike and no car clearly needed their help. ‘We’ll try to do something,’ a representative of the company said.

  Ten days later, my cousin got a phone call. ‘We’ve got your bike, it’s on the truck,’ a guy said, triumphantly. Adam was elated. He ran the five blocks from his office to where the truck was parked. And there was the bike. Still locked to the ten-foot-high piece of scaffolding. My cousin unchained his bike from the scaffolding, the guys put the scaffolding back on the truck, they all shook hands and everyone was happy. The bike went back to its position outside my cousin’s apartment and all was well.

  Until the morning that Adam went downstairs to unlock his bike and it was gone. He wasn’t too disturbed. After all, he had now had this bike for over four years. He’d never expected to own it for that long. Adam walked around the corner to get a cup of coffee before going to work. And there, in broad daylight, one-and-half blocks from his apartment, was his bike. It was chained to a pole on the corner of Spring Street and West Broadway with a very fancy new lock.

  He didn’t know what to do. He was a bit bewildered by why someone would steal the bike and leave it so close to where they had stolen it. He called his girlfriend. She warned him not to do anything stupid, like confront the thief. He called me. After I had stopped laughing – this bike’s life was becoming more complex and drama-ridden than your average Spanish soap opera – I also told him not to confront the thief.

  Adam hung around the bike for about twenty minutes before deciding that he would call the local police station. He thought they might give him some advice. Several minutes later, two policemen turned up. My cousin was stunned. And mortified. They asked him why he hadn’t filed a police report. He explained that he didn’t want to waste their time on a stolen, second-hand bike.

  The police asked him several more questions. It became clear that they suspected the bike was not his. He took out his iPhone and showed the police a photograph of himself on the bike. They stopped questioning him. The two policemen left to write out a report.

  Adam was still standing in the street, unsure of what was going on, when a black, unmarked car pulled up and a well-dressed man in a smart suit stepped out. He was the head of the local police precinct. ‘I’m sick of people stealing bikes,’ he said. ‘It’s been a real problem. We’re going to sit on it.’

  My cousin hasn’t watched enough New York crime television shows. He didn’t understand that ‘sit on it’ meant that they were going to stake it out. He thought the head of the precinct was going to sit on his bike, which my cousin didn’t think was a good plan. The head of the precinct explained that they were going to stake out the crime scene, the bike.

  Adam was no longer embarrassed. He was excited and energised. He called me to say he was leaving the crime scene. He was already very late for work, although he had texted his boss several times explaining that he had been assisting the police in a stake-out for his stolen bike.

  At about three in the afternoon, my cousin received a phone call from yet another policeman. This policeman told my cousin that they had had plain-clothes policemen watching the bike all day. No thief had turned up. They were leaving now, he said. They had other things to do.

  This story now begins to sound implausible. That is, unless you know New York, a city where even the most unlikely occurrences are perfectly plausible. After work, my cousin went back to the corner of Spring Street and West Broadway. The bike was still there. A man who owns a cafe half a block away walked by. My cousin told him the story. He suggested that my cousin put another lock on the bike. That way the thief wouldn’t be able to take the bike away.

  My cousin was impressed. He thought this was a brilliant idea. The cafe owner happened to have an extra bike lock on him. They put it on the bike. The bike was now double-locked. My cousin continued to watch the bike.

  A man in the street asked Adam if the bike was his. He nodded. The man sized up the situation. ‘Just call a locksmith,’ he said. ‘Someone will come and unlock it.’ Adam hesitated for a minute. He then called a lock company he found online. An hour later a very fancy little Smart car arrived. A sharp-looking 30-year-old man got out and asked my cousin what he needed. ‘I need to unlock that lock,’ he said, pointing to the bike. ‘That will be sixty dollars,’ the locksmith said. My cousin explained that he had the key to the second lock, the cafe owner’s extra lock.

  The lock expert didn’t ask any questions. He opened the trunk of his car to reveal extensive sets of orderly shelves and drawers filled with an array of tools for breaking locks. He pulled out a blowtorch and told my cousin to stand back. Ten seconds later the lock cracked in two. My cousin was elated to be reunited with his bike. He paid the lock guy the sixty dollars.

  I am not sure that in Jac
ksonville, Florida, or Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, or Louisville, Kentucky – or in many other American cities – you would find several policemen, uniformed and plain-clothed, the head of the police precinct, a local cafe owner, a stranger and a lock specialist to come out to investigate the theft of a bicycle. But somehow, in New York, this degree of involvement in a bicycle theft is not surprising.

  A year later my cousin’s bicycle is still living outside his apartment. And still there every morning.

  Galina, my Russian pedicurist, has been looking after my toenails for years. She always kisses me hello on both cheeks and calls me Lilitchka, a name I love to be called.

  The last time I saw Galina I had barely sat down to soak my feet when she announced that her husband had lost eight pounds. Galina made this announcement with the same degree of gravity and solemnity with which the BBC news anchor had recently announced that President Putin may invade the Ukraine. And I reacted in the way I would to a major news item.

  There is, I feel embarrassed to admit, not one aspect of any diet that I don’t find interesting. When people have lost weight or tell me they are on a diet, I always want to know every detail.

  I feel the same when anyone under ninety dies. I have an urgent need to know the cause of death. As though the knowledge of the minutiae of other people’s diets or the details of the diseases or bad luck that have killed the recently deceased could be crucial to my own survival.

  I have noticed that both of these subjects, death and diets, hold a lot of interest for a lot of people. Many people read obituaries. In America, obituaries almost always contain the cause of death. And even in a city as urbane as New York, in my experience most people regardless of their size seem riveted by anything to do with diets.

  I have been preoccupied with diets ever since I was a plump teenager. In decades of diaries and notebooks I’ve left a trail of calorie calculations. Calculations which, if applied to another subject, might have cured cancer or invented the internet.

  And I have endangered myself and others. Years ago, I set off a series of fire alarms in several hotels while I was trying to heat up a low-calorie dish of cabbage, zucchinis and radishes stewed in tomato juice, which I had cooked and packed in my luggage.

  Then there were the years when I couldn’t travel without my favourite breakfast cereal, a very ordinary American cereal called All-Bran. I lugged boxes of All-Bran all around the world. There was no room for my husband’s clothes in the luggage.

  My husband has never counted a calorie in his life. He eats everything. At lunch one day at the Savoy Hotel in Berlin, I took a photograph of his side of the table. On his plate were two enormous schnitzels. They were lying on a large bed of sliced, roasted potatoes. To my dismay and envy, my husband stays the same size regardless of what he eats.

  On my side of the table was a cup of watered-down, decaffeinated coffee. It looked pitiful. I wasn’t eating because I was nervous about a book reading I was doing later that afternoon. If I had been eating, it would have been grilled fish and a salad with the dressing on the side.

  ‘How did your husband lose eight pounds?’ I asked Galina.

  ‘On a diet,’ she said. ‘Me and my husband are on the same diet. We have no dairy, no white rice, no potatoes and no sugar.’

  ‘What do you have for breakfast?’ I said.

  ‘Ots,’ she said.

  ‘Ots?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, ots,’ Galina replied.

  ‘Oh, oats,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But you, with your Australian accent, pronounce it in a funny way.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘My husband makes the breakfast. He cooks the kasha every morning,’ Galina said.

  Kasha is made from buckwheat, not oats. I didn’t say anything. It is not going to improve Galina’s life to know the difference bet­ween oats and buckwheat. Maybe in Russia they are the same thing.

  ‘We eat the kasha with a little bit of sugar, otherwise it doesn’t taste so good,’ Galina said to me.

  Sugar? She just told me that you can’t have sugar on this diet. Galina doesn’t seem bothered by this infraction of the diet’s rules. I am a bit bothered by the fact that the sugar on the buckwheat is bothering me.

  ‘This diet really works,’ Galina said. ‘My husband has lost eight pounds. Everyone can see it. Me, myself, I have lost water and soon I will lose pounds.’ I ignore the medical irregularities in this assumption. I envy Galina her certainty. She has a certainty that I will never have. I think her certainty is reassuring to a lot of Galina’s clients. She attracts nervy types, like academics and lawyers.

  Another client, who had been drying her fingernails, turned to us. ‘My dog needs to lose weight,’ she said. Her dog was asleep at her feet.

  ‘More than half the dogs in America are overweight.’ I said. ‘There are now dog fitness programs, dog trainers, dog treadmills, dog lap pools and dog spas and dog spa camps.’ The woman looked stunned. She was staring at me. I decided her stare didn’t mean that she was disinterested. ‘The University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine runs a fat camp for overweight dogs. The dogs can be inpatients or outpatients,’ I said. ‘They found that the dogs that live in at the clinic tend to be more successful.’

  ‘Lilitchka is a writer,’ Galina said proudly. ‘She knows a lot of things.’

  ‘I read this in the New York Times yesterday,’ I said. ‘The article also quoted the director of a fat dog weight-loss ranch advising dog owners to reward their dogs with carrots, broccoli or green beans instead of ice-cream.’

  ‘Did you hear that, Franklin?’ the woman said to her dog. Of course Franklin didn’t hear that, I thought. Franklin was still fast asleep. Even wide awake, Franklin didn’t look like the sort of dog who spoke English or had a large vocabulary.

  I could tell my conversation had upset the woman. I felt bad. I was glad I had omitted the quote in the New York Times about lazy dog owners who confused food with affection. I thought it was a bit harsh.

  I decided to change the subject.

  ‘You don’t eat any dairy food at all?’ I said to Galina.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘I eat dairy,’ I said. ‘I eat cottage cheese almost every day.’

  ‘No, no no,’ Galina shouted at me. ‘Cottage cheese is shocking. I used to have two tablespoons of cottage cheese every day. That is why I put on weight.’

  Galina has been chubby ever since I have known her. I don’t think two tablespoons of cottage cheese a day would do that.

  What percentage of fat was in your cottage cheese? ‘I asked.

  ‘One per cent,’ she said.

  ‘That is what I have,’ I said. ‘I have one percent cottage cheese and non-fat yogurt.’

  ‘No, no, you also cannot have yogurt. It is no good for you,’ Galina told me sternly. This contradicted most nutritional advice, but Galina was adamant.

  ‘But it’s my main source of protein,’ I said, sounding a bit plaintive and feeling a bit stupid.

  ‘Then do not eat the yogurt in the morning, eat it later in the day,’ Galina said.

  I felt a huge relief. ‘I have yogurt for breakfast but I never have my breakfast early in the day,’ I explained to Galina.

  ‘No’, she almost screamed. ‘No yogurt on an empty stomach. First have some ots.’

  The scientific evidence for all of this advice was more than a little shaky, but it had still unnerved me.

  Galina distracted me by asking me about a person who had been distressing me. I said I hadn’t heard from her for a while. ‘Good,’ said Galina. ‘She is a piece of shit.’

  I smiled. I love Galina. She is always on my side. And she is not one to mince her words. I felt more relaxed about the cottage cheese and the yogurt.

  Franklin and his owner left the salon. Franklin didn’t walk. He waddled. ‘That dog is really very fat,’ Galina said.

  ‘I hope he is not eating yogurt or cottage cheese,’ I said.

  Not very man
y people in New York cook regularly. Well, not very many people I know in New York cook regularly. For a start, most kitchens in the apartments here are small.

  The kitchens in the new, very expensive apartments are large and luxurious but seem, for the most part, to be used as status symbols rather than locations for chopping onions or carrots. As a status symbol, the kitchens are probably less used and less useful than a private jet or a chauffeur.

  Kitchens are no longer just kitchens. I have heard kitchens described as blending creativity, functionality and ergonomics with a respect for a low impact on the environment. That must be a heavy burden for any kitchen to carry.

  One kitchen company says its kitchen doors alone, and that means every door in the kitchen, provide absolute resistance to water, steam and heat. Those qualities sound like requirements for a lunar mission, not a domestic kitchen.

  These high-end kitchens, with their carbon, aluminium, steel or layered laminate surfaces, are also now called ‘living spaces offering endless hours of enjoyment’. When did kitchens become living spaces? Endless hours of enjoyment used to describe televisions or bedrooms.

  There isn’t really a lot of need for New Yorkers to cook. You can very easily have so much good food delivered to you, hot and ready to eat. There are well over one hundred places that deliver expensive and inexpensive food to my neighbourhood alone. Most parts of the city have a similarly large choice. Among the various cuisines you can order are American, Mexican, Japanese, Cuban, Indian, Thai, Turkish, Korean, Vietnamese, vegetarian, French, Jewish or kosher food. I never order kosher food, although I toy with the idea that eating kosher food might make me a better Jew.

  If I ate pork, I could order a slow-roasted Berkshire pork sandwich or a heritage smoked-ham sandwich. I could order a poached-pear salad with arugula, blue cheese, sun-dried cranberries and walnuts, or a kosher sweet potato tempura roll. If I wasn’t always trying to avoid pasta, I could order a veal cannelloni alla Piemontese, or Oaxacan-style shrimp quesadillas with smoked wild mushrooms and oven-dried tomatoes, or black- olive-crusted tuna, or braised octopus, or an organic roasted chicken. I could order a pizza, a hamburger, dumplings, tacos, fried chicken wings, empanadas or crab cakes.