Only in New York

by Lily Brett

  Several weeks later a jury found Sylvia Mitchell guilty of ten counts of grand larceny. She was sentenced to five to ten years in prison. There was a photograph of Sylvia Mitchell after the sentencing. She had a huge scowl on her face. Clearly she hadn’t seen this coming.

  I decided to change the course of my research. In fact, I decided to entirely eliminate the lost soul in my novel.

  On Sixth Avenue I walked past a black poodle wearing a red, tartan, pleated skirt. Who would put a red tartan skirt on a poodle? On any dog? Dogs aren’t meant to wear skirts. Skirts don’t sit particularly well on dogs, although this tall, black poodle probably carried it off with more elan than most dogs could muster.

  So many dogs in this city are now wearing clothes. They stroll or walk briskly through the streets wearing sweaters and hats and, sometimes, mittens on their paws in winter and sun visors in summer. Yes, sun visors. Imagine not only having to decide what you are going to wear for the day, but also having to choose an ensemble for your dog. I have a neighbour who, if the forecast is for rain, packs a raincoat for her dog. I thought dogs were supposed to get wet in the rain.

  On festive occasions like Halloween, dogs as well as their owners don Halloween costumes. My younger daughter’s French bulldog, Crumpet, has been a bee, a walrus and a butterfly. I’m not sure why Crumpet can’t go to the Halloween parade as a dog.

  New York is not the sort of city where you can just go up to a stranger and start a long conversation. Unless the stranger has a dog. You can talk to almost any dog owner and they seem pleased to talk to you. Some people address their conversation directly to the dog. The owner usually answers. It’s a great way of making friends in a big city. And so is a dog run.

  New York has a surprising number of dog runs. You see an entirely different aspect of New York in a dog run. You see New Yorkers unguarded and in love with their dog, or demented by their dog. I like the dog run in Tompkins Square Park, in the East Village. It has rules posted on the gates. Discourage barking and digging. And If your dog digs a hole, fill it in. Then Do not let your dog pester other dogs. And You are financially responsible for injury caused by your dog. Please settle all vet bills before returning to the run. An online guide to using the Tompkins Square dog run points out that many dog fights fall into a grey area where it is hard to tell which dog is at fault.

  Although I like walking past the Tomkins Square dog run, I don’t really like pets. For some people this is akin to being a bad person. I am just not particularly fond of cats or dogs or birds. Unless they are doing something interesting. There was a man who often appeared in downtown Manhattan with a parrot on his head. A parrot isn’t enough to attract a lot of attention in New York, but a parrot on top of a man’s head is.

  Another man used to walk around SoHo with a cat on his head. The cat had great posture and used to sit up ramrod straight, on top of the man’s baseball cap. I once asked the man if the cat had ever fallen off his head. ‘Cats don’t fall,’ he said. I still don’t know if that’s true.

  I was standing in the foyer of a hotel in Havana, Cuba, when a man said to me, ‘I’ve seen you in SoHo.’ I looked blank. ‘You must have seen me,’ he said. ‘I’m the man with the cat.’ Suddenly I knew exactly which cat he was talking about.

  ‘The cat on top of your head,’ I said. He looked pleased. I never would have recognised him. I’d spent all my time looking at the cat. I wanted to ask him if the cat was okay and if he knew the man with the parrot. But I didn’t.

  In the last year or two, a large number of Australian cafes have opened in New York and have become very successful. Being successful in New York has never been easy. Yet one Australian cafe after another has flourished. Among them are Culture Espresso, Toby’s Estate, Bluestone Lane, Laughing Man, Bluebird Coffee Shop, Fiend Coffee Cart, Smooch, Flinders Lane and Little Collins.

  Australian cafes seem to be changing the way New Yorkers drink coffee. The flat white, ubiquitous in Australia, is all the rage in New York. Flat white is not a very inspired name. It conjures up images of a depressed Caucasian. But despite this, flat whites have captured New York. A flat white – steamed, whole milk on top of an espresso – is halfway between a latte and a cappuccino, minus the foam.

  Americans don’t have a history of great coffee or great cafes. On the whole, coffee shops in America were variations of diners. Places where you ate and had an endless cup of drip coffee to wash down the diner food.

  In Australia, the coffee culture was created by the huge influx of post-World War II European immigrants. Australian cafes were based on the Italian espresso bar, where the emphasis was on the quality of the coffee and the pride of the barista.

  Little Collins at 667 Lexington Avenue has New York’s first mod bar, a high-tech, under-the-counter set of brewing machines that make the coffee. A friend explained to me that the mod bar is designed so that you can see the hot barista rather than have that sensual view obstructed by a coffee machine.

  Little Collins and Flinders Lane are both names of streets in the centre of the city in Melbourne. It is strange how unexpected parts of your life can follow you around. I have lived in New York for twenty-five years. I grew up in Melbourne.

  I spent a lot of time in Flinders Street and Flinders Lane where my father and many other Jewish refugees worked in factories. I used to love walking in the city when I was a teenager. I used to walk up and down Flinders Lane and Little Collins Street and Bourke Street and Little Bourke Street. It was my escape from my world, a world that felt cluttered with the debris of a painful past.

  Now in New York I have echoes of my youth. I can walk past Flinders Lane and Little Collins. If I didn’t dislike milk, I could stop by and have a flat white.

  I grew up in North Carlton, an inner suburb of Melbourne. We had a lot of Italian neighbours and fabulous cafes. The cafes felt like another universe. A universe full of men, smoking and playing cards and tabletop soccer games.

  We lived at 575 Nicholson Street, a short tram ride away from Little Collins Street and Flinders Lane. It was a small cottage of three rooms and a small kitchen. We moved there when I was almost four and lived there until I was fourteen.

  On book tours I have driven by 575 Nicholson Street numerous times. I have walked past and lingered. I have peered over the back fence from the laneway behind the house. But in the more than fifty years since I left that address, I have not been able to knock on the door and ask if I could have a look inside. I have been too frightened. As though parts of my past would still be there and would adhere themselves to me. As though the house might whisk me back to being six years old and frightened. And chubby. Or suck me into one of the recurring nightmares I used to have as a child. In these nightmares, I would be floating high in the air. Above everyone else. High enough to be out of earshot so that no matter how loudly I tried to scream, no one could hear me. And I would be stuck, floating and unable to return to earth. Even as an adult, I have to look away when the tornado whirls Dorothy up and off to the land of Oz in The Wizard of Oz.

  A couple of years ago on a book tour of Australia, I had a weekend off in Melbourne. I spent the weekend with three of my closest friends. Two of them had flown in from Sydney. It was such a luxury to be with the three of them. I know a lot of people in New York, but I don’t have a close friend there, the sort of friend who is part of your heart.

  On Sunday, out of the blue, I suggested that that we go and look at 575 Nicholson Street. I thought we would just drive by and then go and visit Mario De Pasquale at Marios Cafe on Brunswick Street. When I lived in Melbourne I spent a lot of time at Marios Cafe.

  We drove up Nicholson Street and stopped outside 575. The house hadn’t changed. I am always relieved when I see that it is still the same. That it hasn’t, like most of its neighbours, added, altered and adapted to the chic neighbourhood it has now become.

  The handpainted 575 sign looked a little brighter. I think someone might have gone over my father’s lettering with a stronger white. We wer
e all standing outside the house, when a young man came out. To my own surprise, I rushed up to him to ask him if I could go inside and see the house. I explained that I used to live there. He said he was just a guest and he would have to go inside and check.

  Part of me hoped that he would come out and say no, we couldn’t come in. One of my friends said that maybe they were rushing to stash away the pot or whatever drugs were around, as we all looked quite straight and well dressed.

  He came out and beckoned us in. The owner, he explained, was having his ninetieth birthday party. I walked into the house. My heart was beating so fast. I turned left and was in what used to be my parents’ bedroom. I started weeping.

  The 90-year-old man, who used to be a local postman, came in to see me.

  ‘My parents used to have a chest of drawers against that wall,’ I said to him. ‘My mother kept her handbag on top of the chest. I was tall enough to steal change from her purse.’

  ‘You shouldn’t cry about that,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’m crying because the room still feels like their room.’

  ‘What did you buy with the money?’ he said.

  ‘Broken biscuits and pencils.’

  ‘The broken biscuits were from a bin at the store on the corner of McPherson Street, weren’t they?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I used to spend a lot of time in that corner store. You never knew exactly what sort of broken biscuits would be among the assortment. It was pretty exciting.

  ‘Can I look around the house?’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. He showed me the bathroom. Nine years ago, he told me proudly, he had put in a toilet. When I lived there the toilet was outside. You had to unlock the back door and go down the stairs. The toilet was next to a pile of coal, which was, at night, often overrun by rats.

  My mother’s green, Early Kooka stove was no longer in the kitchen. My mother loved that stove. So did I. The oven had a white enamel door with a drawing of a kookaburra in the middle of the door. It had been replaced by an ordinary-looking white stove.

  ‘I only changed that stove two years ago,’ the owner said. ‘The new one is nowhere near as good as the old one.’ I believed him. It was a wonderful stove. I used to use it illicitly when my parents went out. I loved cooking, even then.

  The small backyard had been landscaped. Flowers were growing in the old trough in which my mother had scrubbed and washed clothes. The clothes boiler was gone. I wanted to ring up my father in New York and tell him that my mother’s old washing trough was full of flowers. But it was the wrong time. I would have woken him up.

  The owner and I talked about our former neighbours in the street. He knew every one of them. It was a strangely soothing conversation.

  We went back inside. The house still felt like my house. It is astonishing, to me, how a few bricks and some mortar can contain so much of the past. How they can be a repository of moments and meals and happiness and unhappiness. I was less nervous, now. I was a little overwhelmed. I felt as though I had been allowed to go back in time.

  Inside, despite the prolonged absence of the birthday boy, the party was really going strong. Every one of the guests was in high spirits.

  I walked for about two hours that night, after the visit, in an effort to settle down. It had been such an emotional day. I thought about the Italian cafes of my childhood. The customers, it seemed to me, were mostly men. They were ordering an espresso or a macchiato or a caffè crema or a ristretto. No one was ordering a flat white. Flat whites, I later learned, originated in Australia in the late 1970s. They have clearly come a long way.

  I was buying a puffy, down-filled winter coat at the Broadway branch of Uniqlo, the Japanese-owned chain of clothing stores. In fact, in the 2013–14 winter of relentless snowstorms, I was buying two identical coats. I planned to wear one on top of the other. This would cause much mirth and some admiration whenever I took off my coats in public. I don’t mean in the street. I mean in cafes and restaurants and at the hairdresser and at the gym, where I was trying my best to keep my body in working order.

  The line to pay for the coats was long but the eight or nine cashiers kept the line moving. ‘Will the following guest please step down,’ one cashier after another kept calling out.

  I was disconcerted. Suddenly, regardless of whether you are buying a pair of shoes, a pair of pyjamas or some headache pills, everyone who shops in New York is called a guest. Major chain stores like the drugstore Duane Reade and the Old Navy clothing stores and even smaller stores like Dean & Deluca, the high-end food store that has been in SoHo for decades, are calling their customers guests. When did we stop being customers? And why did we metamorphose into guests?

  ‘Why are you calling your customers guests?’ I asked the cashier at Uniqlo as I was paying for my coats.

  ‘Because you are my guest,’ she said.

  ‘I am not your guest,’ I said. ‘If I was your guest, I wouldn’t be paying for my coats.’

  ‘Why are you buying two of the same coat?’ she said.

  ‘I want to wear them both,’ I said. ‘At the same time,’ I added. I think I lost some credibility with that reply.

  ‘I am not your guest,’ I repeated. ‘If you invited me to dinner at your place, would you present me with a bill after the meal, and not allow me to leave the premises before I paid?’

  The cashier looked bewildered. I wasn’t sure what aspect of my question was so bewildering. I thought I was being very clear. I always speak clearly. And slowly. I speak at half the speed of most New Yorkers.

  I speak slowly because my parents barely spoke English when I was very young, and their command of English was never as fluent as their ability to speak Polish, German, Yiddish and Russian.

  My parents, refugees from Nazi Europe, were desperate to assimilate in Australia. They saw me, with my English-language skills that I had picked up quickly, as all children do, as the key to their assimilation. From the time we arrived in Australia, they also spoke to me only in English. This decision caused us to have relatively blunt and often puzzling conversations. When I spoke to them, I spoke slowly and used simple sentences.

  This lack of speed in my speech stayed with me. In New York, where everything happens at high speed, my slow speech sometimes causes people to ask me if I am well. I hate that question. It is a question that no one could possibly answer. How do any of us know whether we are well or not? So many minuscule parts of our bodies have to be playing their part with precision and accuracy. And we have no way of ascertaining whether even a fraction of all that activity is proceeding as it should. Or flagging.

  The cashier still looked bewildered. I was starting to wish I hadn’t said anything when she spoke. ‘My apartment is too small for me to have guests for dinner,’ she said. I conceded defeat.

  ‘Are you a guest here, too?’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘No, I am an employee,’ she said.

  I tried again when I was buying some eye drops at a Midtown Duane Reade. The cashier had just called out, ‘Next guest, please’.

  ‘Why do you call your customers guests?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘I have to pay for these eye drops, don’t I?’ I said.

  ‘Of course you do,’ she said.

  In New York, you have to learn not to be bothered by quite a lot of things. For example, you have to get over the fact that if you engage with the city at all, you will endlessly be asked how you are, by people who don’t want an answer.

  At my local Citibank, a person, often a young man, stands inside the entrance and asks everyone who enters the bank how they are. ‘How are you guys?’ he said to me and my husband, the other day. ‘How are you today, sir?’ he said to the man who walked in just behind us. I was at least pleased that he had called us guys. It seemed a more youthful term than sir.

  Three hours later, the young man was still there, still saying, ‘How are you?’ to every custome
r. No one seemed to give him more than a nod or a one-word reply. I am not sure that listening to the answers is part of his job description anyway.

  In New York you will also always be being thanked for something. You will in fact be thanked for everything. For purchasing an item. For making a reservation. For inquiring about a price. Thank you for shopping with us, flying with us, using our service. You will also be thanked after every complaint you have made. Thank you for being a Verizon customer, the phone company representative will say after you have spent ten minutes explaining that you are not at all happy with their service.

  I sometimes use a cheap car service based on the Lower East Side called Delancey Car Service. I love Delancey. No one thanks you for anything. You ask for a car, they say five minutes and hang up. It is such a relief.

  ‘Thank you for asking,’ a woman walking in front of me said to her female companion who had asked what she had planned for the weekend. We were on Fifth Avenue below 14th Street, a part of Fifth Avenue I love. It is rarely heavily trafficked and often quite peaceful.

  ‘I plan to surprise myself with one of those giftboxes. I thought that would be so cool,’ the woman said to her friend. I almost stopped in my tracks. How can you surprise yourself with a giftbox, let alone plan to surprise yourself with a giftbox?

  I started to feel I was being way too fussy about the English language. ‘I am going to get myself a gift voucher for a one-hour massage and a facial,’ the woman said. ‘I’m also going to get some creams and a bottle of perfume and I am going to gift-wrap the package and write myself a really nice card to go with it.’ Her friend didn’t seem at all fazed. ‘That is a great idea,’ she said.

  ‘I was going to wait until something special had happened in my life, but then I decided that I didn’t need to wait,’ the woman said. These women were not hippy remnants of a more hallucinogenic era. They were both wearing business suits and high heels and walking at quite a clip. Both of them were very excited about the planned surprise giftbox. Two blocks later some lipstick and theatre tickets had been added to the surprise package.