Only in New York

by Lily Brett

  All the gold chains and glitter are not far from Spandex House. Spandex is more complicated than you think, if indeed you have ever had any thoughts about spandex, which most people probably haven’t. Spandex can conjure up images of women in too tight, too bright skirts or tights or tops. Or trapeze artists in a circus or carnival. Or maybe Jane Fonda in her former life as a fitness instructor.

  But Spandex House is much more than that. It is a specialised source of stretch fabrics. You can buy stretch lace, denim, cotton, lining and tulle. You can buy stretch lamé and stretch horsehair mesh and glitter mesh. And metallic spandex, nylon spandex, bamboo spandex and moleskin, satin and wet-look spandex. You can also buy beautiful, plain stretch crepe, silk, satin, lace or wool.

  Spandex House is one of my favourite stores in New York. I don’t think I am doing myself a favour by admitting this. Especially after just mentioning Liberace and showgirls. I love browsing through the store. The other customers are usually very interesting. They are mostly ice-skaters or dancers or gymnasts, or people who design costumes for figure skaters, dancers, gymnasts, athletes and acrobats and actors and actresses.

  The stretch fabrics are perfect for skaters and athletes and gymnasts. All of these people move a lot. Most of the people who shop here move a lot or make costumes for people who do a lot of moving. Except me. I don’t make costumes. And I don’t move that much. I don’t dance or ski or skate or do somersaults or run very fast. I do walk.

  I love fabric. Especially stretch fabric. It is so comfortable to wear and mostly doesn’t need to be ironed. When I travel, I can overfill my suitcase and not have to worry about my lack of ironing skills or the possible lack of an iron at my destination.

  There are often a few other relatively inactive customers in Spandex House. They are mostly women from the outer boroughs of New York. I have had several uncomfortable conversations with these women. The subject always involves a sewing technicality. They can all sew. When asked if making a sleeve out of a particular tulle would make the tulle pucker or if a certain satin would look good cut on the bias, I have looked blank. I have been forced to confess that despite the metres of fabric I am buying, I don’t make my own clothes. And I can’t sew. I am usually the only person in the store who can’t sew.

  For almost thirty years a friend of mine has been designing and making my clothes. Graham Long started off as a designer with his own store in Brunswick Street in Melbourne. After having worked as an academic in Australia, India, Vietnam and China, he is now a professor of fashion design in Taiwan.

  I have bought fabrics and shipped them to Graham in whatever part of the world he was in. He makes the clothes and ships them to me. I think, between us, we have kept UPS and the United States Postal Service afloat.

  Occasionally, we are in the same country and have the luxury of seeing each other in person. And the luxury of me trying on the clothes while we are together. If I am on a book tour the trying on of clothes has to be brisk. I am not normally all that comfortable when I am undressed, but I throw off whatever I am wearing as soon as I see Graham.

  For years, Graham has worked with an extraordinary seamstress named Dawn. Because of me she has become an expert at working with stretch fabric. I feel quite proud of my role in this achievement. Unfortunately, Dawn has kept a record of thirty years of my size fluctuations. She offered to give me the folder containing these statistics. I did not take up her offer.

  I am almost always wearing something Graham has made. It is just as well I have a wonderful friend like Graham. I am not a person who can lounge around the house in a sweatshirt. And I have never worn a pair of jeans in my life.

  My mother was well dressed all the time. Even when she cleaned the house. She polished the floor and scrubbed the kitchen in a silk blouse, pleated skirt and high heels. After her world cracked and splintered when the Nazis invaded Poland, my mother was never the same. She could never relax. She was always on guard. It was as though she needed to be prepared for any eventuality. And I have inherited that need.

  I have to be properly dressed. I often look as though I am about to go to the theatre or out to dinner when I am just pottering around at home. However, when I write I lose that need to be prepared, to be on guard. I don’t care what I look like. I choose loose, shapeless clothes. I don’t want to feel constricted by anything. I wrote my last novel, Lola Bensky, in pale-green cotton pyjama pants with little pink flowers dotted through the cotton and an old, brown spotted cotton shirt that had been washed about one thousand times.

  I never let anyone but my husband and my children see me in these clothes. Although, as I was almost at the end of writing Lola Bensky, a group of four friends and my younger daughter tricked me into a surprise Skype session on my birthday.

  I thought I was just Skyping with my younger daughter. I was horrified when four friends in different parts of the world and my daughter appeared on my computer screen. I’d never seen five people on a Skype screen, anyway. They were all saying such nice things about me and our friendships but I could barely speak. I was so shocked at being caught in my old brown spotted shirt. Thankfully they couldn’t see my pyjama pants. At heart I am my mother’s daughter, and after that I tried to make sure I was always reasonably well dressed for future Skype sessions.

  Research about inherited stress has been accumulating for decades. The largest group of people studied has been Holocaust survivors and their children. I am the child of not one but two Nazi death-camp survivors. Research has shown that the children of Holocaust survivors have a greater chance of having stress-related symptoms like post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Other studies suggest that genocides in Rwanda, Nigeria, Cambodia, Armenia and the former Yugoslavia have resulted in distinct psychological symptoms in the offspring of the survivors. Recently, psychobiologist Inna Gaisler-Solomon, writing in the New York Times, said that there were reasons to believe that it was not only stress during the mother’s pregnancy that could be biologically inherited by her children but also stress that the mother had experienced before the pregnancy. I found that easy to believe.

  The cotton pants with little pink flowers and the brown shirt I was caught wearing on Skype are two of the very few items of clothing I own that were not made by Graham Long. This long-distance method of creating clothes mostly works well. Sometimes, there are hiccups. Something is too big, too small, too long or too short. And then I run to Shanan. Shanan is a tailor in Thompson Street. He mostly does alterations. He has been making large and small alterations to all sorts of garments for me for years. His place is also a neighbourhood hub. You tend to start talking to acquaintances and neighbours you’ve only previously nodded to in the street. You also, inadvertently, find out who has lost weight, who has gained weight and who is going on a vacation or to a wedding or, less frequently, to a funeral.

  Of course this being New York, I have to compete with the alterations he does for Christian Dior, Hugo Boss, Prada, Armani and Dolce & Gabbana. Clearly I can’t compete with the likes of Prada and Christian Dior, but I mostly get whatever I need done promptly.

  When Shanan is very, very busy he says he is ‘really backed up’. For a long time, I thought he meant he was constipated. I always tried to be sympathetic. Shanan is such a nice guy. It is impossible not to like him, even if you think he talks about constipation too frequently.

  New York is a very good city for those of us with a propensity for loneliness. It is always crowded. Crowded with the warmth of life and movement and purpose. The city sort of sweeps you up in this warmth. You can be on your own in New York. And not alone.

  I have often felt alone. In reality, I am not really alone. I live with a man who loves me. Who loves me when I look terrible. Who loves me when I am being unreasonable. Who just loves me. I have children who like me. And my children have children.

  My father is still alive. He loves me. And I have close friends. In the middle of this cornucopia of love, I can, and often do, feel an immense loneliness. A
loneliness so steeped in me that it feels like part of my circulatory or auditory or vascular system. It is not a good feeling.

  I don’t feel the loneliness when I am with my family or my friends. I often have a fantasy of sharing a building with one or two of my children or one or two of my friends. I think that could dissipate much of the loneliness. But in this increasingly mobile and increasingly expensive world, that fantasy doesn’t seem possible. And maybe it wouldn’t work.

  Last year I visited my younger daughter when she was living in Seattle. On the first day of my stay, after an endlessly delayed flight from New York and my arrival in Seattle at two a.m., I was standing in the kitchen of my daughter’s house. Things were not going well. My daughter, whom I adore and almost ache for when I am away from her, can be quite bossy in the kitchen. She is a very good cook and fussy about how things are done in kitchens, especially her kitchen.

  I made the mistake of asking her not to be so bossy.

  What followed was a few minutes of very tetchy exchanges until her three-year-old walked in and said, ‘Are you two fighting?’

  ‘No, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘We are just having a discussion.’

  He walked out.

  ‘He is not stupid,’ I said to my daughter. ‘He knows we are fighting.’

  The tetchiness continued. At one stage, I said, a bit hastily, that I might as well go home. At that point her three-year-old re-appeared. He looked solemn. He stood in front of us, pointed his index finger in our direction and, with a firm flourish of his right arm, said, ‘I want this fighting to stop.’ He then turned around and marched out of the room.

  My daughter and I both started laughing. She apologised for her bossiness and I apologised for threatening to go home. After that it was, mostly, smooth sailing.

  I do spend quite a lot of time alone. And it suits me. It is the time when I think and the time when I write. I don’t feel at all lonely when I am writing. I don’t know where the loneliness goes.

  I have always felt a loneliness. A feeling of being alone. As a child, I invented a clutch of friends and relatives. I talked about them in great detail all the time. I talked about them so much that every one of my friends believed they existed. And so did I.

  I have often wondered where the loneliness comes from. Is it from the dead? I have a lot of dead. I grew up surrounded by them. Dead grandparents. Dead uncles and aunts. Dead cousins. By the time I was three I knew that, apart from my mother and father, everyone I was related to was dead. Murdered in Nazi death camps. I had so many dead. I felt their presence. I still do.

  When I was thirty, I told my mother that when I closed my eyes I could hear the sound of people weeping. I surprised myself when I said it. My mother wasn’t really receptive to conversation like that.

  My mother surprised me by replying. ‘We were DPs, displaced people, when you were born,’ she said. ‘Everyone was crying. They were either crying at the sight of a new baby, you, or crying because they had just heard that another person they loved was dead.’

  ‘You were born into a big sadness,’ she said. Neither of us ever mentioned the conversation again.

  I think that a belief in God might take away a large part of my loneliness. But no matter how hard I try and how much I would like to become a believer, I cannot. I cannot believe in God. It is another lopsided, cantankerous inheritance from my mother and father who each, separately, decided to ditch God when they were imprisoned in the chaotic and cancerous universe of Auschwitz. My father still doesn’t believe in God. He is unstoppable in his anti-religion fervour.

  He is also unstoppable in his love of busty women. He used to pick them up while going on his daily walk on the Lower East Side. He had a group of women who waved to him enthusiastically as he did his two miles of brisk walking, every day.

  These walks came to an abrupt halt when my father fell, broke his hip and needed hip-replacement surgery. He was in his early nineties. He fell while feeding my younger daughter’s new puppy. He had had several falls before and had refused my endless pleas for him to use a walking stick.

  He had fallen when he was playing ball in the corridor with his next-door neighbour’s children. He got straight up and continued the game. He was knocked over by a van in Essex Street and was very annoyed when the ambulance attendant said he had to go to hospital. ‘I told you I was fine,’ he said to me when I spoke to him. And he was. He had several nurses running around to make sure that he had everything he needed.

  After his hip-replacement surgery he was assigned two healthcare aides to help him recover. They took different shifts, fed him, helped him to get dressed and made sure that he got to his daily physiotherapy sessions. They were both busty.

  After a few weeks, my father, who has always been chubby, decided that both of his aides needed to lose weight and become healthier. He gave them some nutritional advice. He advised them to eat more apples and grapefruit and less bread. This advice was coming from a man who loves eating McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets and kilos of chocolate.

  He then mapped out an exercise program for his aides. He used the same exercise routine for each of the women. It was comprised of most of the daily post-hip-replacement physiotherapy exercises he was doing at his rehabilitation clinic.

  He had his aides lying on the bed, lifting their legs in the air, ten reps at a time, while he sat in his armchair correcting their positions and postures.

  ‘Keep your knee straight,’ he would call out periodically. Sometimes he became overly enthusiastic and shouted the instructions. ‘Lift your leg higher and keep your knee very straight,’ he would shout with the demeanour and authority of a highly trained and seasoned physiotherapist. He never let either of the women miss a session.

  By the time my father’s hip had healed both of the women had lost over ten pounds each. ‘You gave your aides hip-replacement surgery physiotherapy exercises,’ I said to my father after one of the aides told me how much better she felt. My father gave me a blow-by-blow account of the whole program.

  ‘Show my daughter,’ my father then said to one aide. She got on to the bed and started lifting her legs in the air. ‘See how well she can do the exercise?’ my father said proudly. ‘This one is called a straight-leg raise.’

  ‘Slide your leg out to the side as far as you can and then slide it back again,’ my father said to the aide. ‘Ten times on each leg.’ The aide carried out the exercise with precision. She looked pretty proud of herself.

  After the aide left, I suggested to my father that maybe these sets of exercises may not have been exactly what the aides needed. After all, they hadn’t had hip-replacement surgery.

  ‘Are you crazy? Doesn’t she look very, very good?’ he said. I had to agree.

  I left my father’s apartment laughing. I couldn’t imagine myself conducting exercise sessions while I was recovering from surgery. I laughed most of the way home. My father always surprises me, and often leaves me laughing. I never feel lonely when I am with him.

  I stepped out of my front door one day to find a table festooned with cupcakes outside our building. Someone was having a cupcake sale. This being New York, there were flourless cupcakes, gluten-free cupcakes and dairy-free cupcakes for sale at this small, homemade-cupcake stall. Several young children were running around excitedly.

  A middle-aged man walking by looked at the display of cupcakes and the over-excited children. ‘I resent happiness,’ he said to no one in particular. My son-in-law, whom I was with, was so pleased to hear this existential communiqué. ‘It’s such a relief to be back in New York,’ he said. He has been in Seattle for two years. Everyone in Seattle is so nice. I found Seattle exhausting. It is exhausting to have to smile back at everyone you pass in the street or to have to chat to every other shopper when you shop. There is no need to be effervescently friendly to everyone. It’s not natural. And it is unsettling and unnerving.

  Sadly, New York is heading in that direction. This formerly tough, gritty city has mellowed. I liked
it better in the good old days when everyone was afraid of New York. Even New Yorkers. When you knew that your chances of being mugged were not insignificant and most of us greeted our local drug dealers with a neighbourly nod.

  When I first moved to New York, twenty-five years ago, people who lived uptown never went downtown. Downtown was seen as dangerous. Now everyone wants to live downtown. And downtown is slowly becoming almost indistinguishable from uptown.

  Years ago when you were on the Bowery you didn’t dawdle. The old Bowery was grimy and desolate, particularly at night. There were homeless shelters and poor homeless men who had seen better days gathered in groups around the trucks that sometimes came to feed them. There were large, vacant lots where people dumped rubbish and large rats roamed.

  A painter friend of ours lived on the corner of Houston Street and the Bowery. I felt as though I was taking my life in my hands every time I visited and waited for him to come down from his fifth-floor studio to open the front door.

  Now the Bowery has pricey hotels, architect-designed museums, very expensive apartments – and the chic and the elite. The corner that housed my painter friend’s apartment now houses the Whole Foods Market, a food store that takes up the whole block. They sell every food item you could possibly think of, and also have a cafe and cooking classes. They even have cooking classes for children.

  Things have changed. I now live within walking distance of Chanel, Armani, Louis Vuitton and Diane von Furstenberg stores. I used to live close to small groceries and delicatessens, small cafes and small bookstores.