Only in New York

by Lily Brett

  Nobody shouts at you any more either. In the old New York you had to state your sandwich order at high speed or you would be berated. Now everyone is patient. You can take your time wondering if you’d prefer your roasted pork shoulder or sautéed chicken tenders with pepper relish and fontina cheese sandwich to be on grilled country bread or grilled rye.

  Murders in New York have dropped to their lowest level in forty years. ‘The essence of civilisation is that you can walk down the street without looking over your shoulder,’ Mayor Bloomberg said. I remember trying to look discreetly in the reflection of store windows to see if I was being followed. ‘Yes, I’m still there,’ one of the shadier people following me called out one day. I was definitely scared.

  But living in that rougher, tougher New York made me feel quite brave. And adventurous. I still love the city. It’s one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world and one of the most cultured and one of the most exciting. However, it is not as unpredictable as it used to be. And I don’t feel quite as tough.

  New York is not a very horsey city. Horses are not uppermost in most people’s minds. People don’t talk about horses. No one rides a horse to work. Nobody rushes home to feed a horse.

  In the last few months, however, things have changed. Our new mayor, Bill de Blasio, has decided that the horse-drawn carriage business in Central Park is inhumane. He has suggested that the horses be replaced with electric-powered replicas of vintage taxis.

  This has caused a furore. Not the idea of the electric-powered replicas of vintage taxis, which I personally find weird, but the notion of getting rid of the horses. The horses’ supporters have been very vocal. A recent poll suggested that sixty-four percent of New Yorkers supported the horses continuing to work in Cen­tral Park.

  Actor Liam Neeson added his voice. He said that in Ireland he spent his childhood summers caring for horses, and that he could recognise a happy horse. The Central Park horses, he said, were happy and healthy. He claimed that the horses’ opponents were funded by real-estate investors who wanted to develop the prime real estate occupied by the horses’ stables. The four stables are located west of Tenth Avenue, where properties are being sold for multiple millions of dollars.

  The carriage horses are not the only horses in New York with a very good address. Twelve of the city’s police horses and twenty police officers are in the process of moving into their new and luxurious homes. They are moving into Mercedes House, the new architect-designed apartment building at 550 West 54th Street.

  These horses are definitely going to be happy. They will have special flooring to soothe their legs, and ten-foot-high doors for easy access, a top-tier ventilation system to eliminate all odours and ducted air-conditioning. Their eating and bathing facilities will be just as impressive.

  The other tenants of this 32-storey building are not short of amenities. The other tenants are, mostly, human. They have a state-of-the-art wellness centre and fitness club, on-site parking, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, two outdoor decks with space for sunbathing, bocce, yoga and indoor basketball. They also have an outdoor amphitheatre, juice bar, spinning studio and spa facilities.

  Most of the human tenants don’t seem bothered by the prospect of their new equine neighbours. They are probably too busy playing bocce or perfecting their ping-pong.

  I don’t think about horses much at all except during the month of May. In May, I suddenly develop a huge interest in horses. Racehorses. This interest is not shared by many New Yorkers. In May, the height of the American horseracing season, you never see women in New York wearing very large hats. Hats adorned with plumes of feathers and fresh flowers or a flock of life-sized, silk canaries sitting on satin branches. The sort of hats that are worn only at horseracing events or the occasional royal wedding.

  My love affair with horseracing starts in May and is over by mid-June, at the latest. The rest of the year, I don’t give horses another thought. That is not strictly true. I once thought about horses in late summer when I found out that an acquaintance had married a very rich man who kept miniature horses at his seaside home. The horses were decorative. They were too small to ride and they couldn’t run very fast. They couldn’t even do any tricks or, like most dogs, respond to commands. This man also kept chickens that were groomed and shampooed daily. He didn’t like the mess that ungroomed chickens can make.

  I wondered why anyone would want to own a bunch of miniature horses. Or marry someone who did. Maybe when you are very rich you can give in to every whim that enters your head. I have had some very odd whims myself. Fortunately I have never had the means to implement them.

  May and early June are the months of the three biggest races in the American horseracing calendar. The Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes are the three races for three-year-old thoroughbred horses that, together, make up the Triple Crown. If a single horse wins all three races, it is considered to be a Triple Crown winner.

  It is not an easy crown to win. It is more complicated than marrying a prince. All the races are run within a five-week period and each of the races is a different length and held on a different track. Only eleven horses have won the Triple Crown since 1919.

  In May, I almost turn into someone else. Every day I pore over the sports pages of several newspapers. This would be a surreal sight for anyone who knows me well. It still makes my husband laugh. I have become relatively knowledgeable about the Triple Crown.

  There is a theory that horse breeding has changed to emphasise speed and good looks rather than stamina and durability. That would explain why so few horses have won the Triple Crown. The theory involves the horse’s fast-twitch muscle fibres and slow-twitch muscle fibres. Slow-twitch fibres enable muscles to work for longer periods of time. Fast-twitch fibres contract quickly and unleash power and speed.

  When I first heard about them, I was very taken with the notion of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibres. I hoped I had some myself. I asked my physiotherapist whether human beings, like horses, had slow- and fast-twitch muscle fibres. When he said yes, I was thrilled. He explained that slow-twitch fibres were for endurance and fast-twitch fibres were for explosive activities. ‘Like running for your life from a snake,’ he said.

  This man is an excellent physiotherapist, but he clearly needed help with snakes. I hesitated to tell him that it might not be a good idea to run from a snake. Sudden, quick movements are prone to make a snake strike. I only know this because my husband grew up with snakes. His older brother is a herpetologist.

  I decided that I should let my physiotherapist know that if he came across a snake he should not run. He should engage his slow-twitch muscle fibres and slowly and quietly move away.

  I am proud of my horseracing knowledge. I could talk endlessly about the state of the track in various weather conditions and the lengths of tracks and the frequency of training routines if I had anyone who wanted to listen.

  I can also talk about the language of the track. I love the language of the track. It is rough, tough, very direct language. ‘He is a really talented rider,’ a famous horse trainer said of his jockey. ‘When you throw him on a horse his IQ  goes up a hundred points.’

  I also love the names of the horses. Horses have great names. Much better names than most of us. Horses have names like Emotional Kitten. Imagine being called Emotional Kitten. Or Summer of Fun or Will Take Charge or Storm Cat, Siberian Summer or Diamond Flame.

  My friend Kenny’s mother gave all eight of her daughters matching names. There was Maureen, Colleen, Aileen, Heleen, Doreen, Noreen, Ireen and Geraldeen. I asked him why he wasn’t named Keneen. He’d never thought about that, he said.

  I named my son Paris. ‘Harry, what a beautiful name,’ my father said when I called him from London, where I was living, to tell him the news. He wasn’t so thrilled when I explained that it wasn’t Harry, it was Paris. ‘Harry is a beautiful name,’ he said.

  When my mother heard that I wanted to name my younger daugh
ter Gypsy, she reacted swiftly. ‘Hitler hated the gypsies more than he hated the Jews,’ she said.

  ‘So we’re with Hitler on this one, are we?’ I said, in my dazed state. I had just had a C-section.

  Paris and Gypsy survived with their names intact. Well, almost. Most of the family call Gypsy Gypo and Paris’s sisters call him Pari. Gypsy shudders every time I tell her that I almost called her Paradise. I am so glad I didn’t. I’ve really gone off the name Paradise.

  Last year I adored a horse called Palace Malice. I loved his name. I am sure there is a reasonable amount of malice in most palaces. My father’s father owned a small palace, in Lodz, Poland. He owned it together with a partner. They argued about how to evenly divide the palace in two and ended up disfiguring the building by adding to the top floor.

  When Palace Malice won the 2013 Belmont Stakes, I was so happy. I didn’t have any money on the race. I never bet on any of the races. I am not interested in betting on horseraces. My real interest is the stories. I read everything I can about the horses and the jockeys and the trainers and the stablehands and even the owners. I am fascinated by the stories. They are stories of real life. And often stories of hardship. And stories of love.

  I watch all three races on television. I begin watching an hour or two before the race starts. That is the best part. That is when I see the horses in the stalls, and listen to the interviews with jockeys and trainers and owners. When the race starts, I become almost rigid with tension. I so badly want my favourite horse to win. By the time the race is over, I am so tense I can hardly breathe.

  When my favourite horse doesn’t win, I feel abysmally sad. I have no one at all with whom I can commiserate about this. Nobody I know in New York is remotely interested in horseracing.

  I am standing in my study holding twelve pairs of my mother’s eyeglasses. These are not ordinary eyeglasses. They are exotic and sophisticated. Like my mother.

  My mother was glamorous even when she worked in factories and we lived in one room in Melbourne. She had wide, alluring eyes, high cheekbones, flawless skin and hair that ranged from mid-brown to a reddish, dark blond, depending on which hair-colour mix she bought. She almost always wore a sultry expression, except when we were alone at home.

  She turned heads wherever she went. The local butcher, the fishmonger, the baker and the man who sold fruit and vegetables all ran to serve her as soon as she walked into their stores. I have a photograph of her taken when we were still living in one room. She and her friend, Luba, are wearing fitted black tops with wide, scooped necklines. Someone had given my mother some fabric and she had made tops for herself and for Luba. My mother is standing with her head raised and tilted slightly to one side. Luba is looking earnestly into the camera. My mother looks like a combination of Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren. Luba looks like somebody’s mother.

  I don’t know what to do with the glasses. I can’t wear them. I don’t look like either Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida. I found the glasses when I decided to clear out the drawers in my study. I knew I had my mother’s glasses but I didn’t know I had twelve pairs. It is often a mistake to clear out drawers.

  I was clearing the drawers because my husband and I had been talking about renting out our apartment while I wrote what felt like a longish novel that has been in my head for years. Renting out your apartment in New York makes sense when you make, as I do, an always unpredictable and often precarious income. It makes even more sense if you are married to an artist.

  I wanted to be in a quiet place when I wrote the novel. The novel, about two old men, is set in on the Lower East Side in New York, and in Shanghai. Neither of these places is quiet. I plan to write the novel on Shelter Island, a small island ninety miles east of Manhattan. I can see the irony of writing about two very noisy cities on a very quiet island.

  The pace of life on Shelter Island is reflected in the ‘Police Blotter’ column of the Shelter Island Reporter, the island’s weekly newspaper. Not too long ago, the ‘Police Blotter’ stated that the police had received a report about cheques being returned for insufficient funds. On the same day a caller told police that a raccoon was sleeping in a garbage pail in an area where children were playing baseball. Police trapped the raccoon for later release. The next day a caller claimed that an unknown motorist had cut her off, causing her to swerve off the roadway. Police canvassed the area with negative results. Later that day two geese were reported blocking traffic on Congdon Road. Police chased the geese off the roadway. A burglar alarm was set off on the squash court of an island residence on 8th May. Police checked the grounds. No criminal activity was noted. A swan was reported on a driveway on 12th May but was gone when police arrived. Put together, all of this news can be quite heady.

  I try on my mother’s glasses. The lenses are so thick, I can’t see through them. I can’t see how my mother could have seen through them. Or, more to the point, I can’t see how she could have seen without them.

  She refused to wear glasses while she was driving. I said that she couldn’t have my children in the car when she drove unless she wore her glasses. She was furious. I had twice seen her veering towards the wrong side of the road when she tried to make a left-hand turn into Acland Street, where she did most of her shopping. Luckily, Acland Street was only a four-block drive from her home.

  My mother missed the first five minutes of every movie she saw at the cinema. And she often missed the ending. She would wait until the group of friends with whom she and my father went to the movies every Saturday night were immersed in the movie before she would surreptitiously slip on her glasses. She would then quickly remove them before the movie ended.

  My mother definitely did not want to be seen wearing glasses. These were the days of the popular, and now politically suicidal expression ‘Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,’ first uttered by Dorothy Parker.

  A lot of men made passes at my mother. She loved it. Although she would have vehemently denied it, she was very flirtatious. She looked up at men through a curtain of thick, black mascaraed lashes. My father didn’t mind. He was proud of my mother’s beauty. He often told me that she was the most beautiful girl in Lodz, Poland, where they were both born.

  My father fell in love with my mother the moment he met her. He was nineteen and she was about to turn thirteen. He came from a wealthy family and was a bit of a playboy. He loved ice-cream and he loved girls. My mother was a quiet, studious girl. She came top of her class every year. She came from a very poor family and tutored fellow students after school in order to pay for her schoolbooks.

  She was not interested in my father. She wanted to be a paediatrician. She didn’t want a boyfriend. She didn’t want a husband. She had wanted to be a doctor since she was eight or nine. My father doesn’t give up easily. He pursued my mother relentlessly. When that didn’t work, he set out to charm my mother’s mother. And, in an unexpected way, was more successful.

  Not long after Germany invaded Poland, all the Jews in Lodz were forced to leave their homes and were imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto. My mother’s mother mistakenly thought that my mother would be better off being part of my father’s very wealthy family.

  My mother married my father. My mother began her married life in the Lodz Ghetto, sharing one room with my father’s parents, whom she was not crazy about. She was seventeen.

  I showed my mother’s glasses to a friend. ‘Wow, your mother must have been beautiful,’ she said. It is strange how a collection of inanimate objects can reflect the beauty of their long-deceased owner. I don’t like the word deceased. It seems detached and devoid of the continuing presence of people who have died.

  I feel my mother’s presence powerfully. I often have internal dialogues with her. I know what she would approve of and what she wouldn’t approve of. I know what would make her proud. I miss her. I miss her at all momentous moments. My children’s marriages. The births of my children’s children. I wish she could have seen what a large family we were going t
o become.

  Decades after my mother died, her eyes turned up in a small girl. My son’s daughter. A beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde-haired version of my mother. My mother’s eyes appeared in this small girl. But something had changed. There was no wariness, no bewilderment, no anguish, no anxiety. All these things had excised themselves. Dissolved and disappeared. I cried when I first saw those eyes on that small girl.

  I miss my mother. I have missed her from the day she died, twenty-eight years ago. I am lucky. My children remember her. And so does my husband. And so do several of my friends. Talking about my mother with people who knew her brings her vividly back to life.

  I can’t imagine my mother being old. She died at sixty-four and looked years younger. I remember looking at her legs when she was briefly hospitalised with the cancer that killed her. Her legs were tanned and smooth and firm. They were the legs of a thirty-year-old. How could her legs have looked like that after the hardship and horror she had experienced? My own legs looked as though they had suffered much more wear and tear.

  You can feel a bit silly saying you miss your mother when you are over forty or fifty or sixty. I think many people feel that at some stage the missing has to stop. I know it never does.

  Holding my mother’s glasses, I feel as though I am holding a part of my mother. I have to find a safe space for these parts of my mother. The glasses must have been avant-garde. They so distinctly belong to their era. They are divided into the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Each pair is so identifiably of its time.

  My mother was ahead of her time. She used food as part of her beauty routines. She set her hair in beer. Beer was a great setting lotion or, as it would be called today, a styling product. Beer could curl or straighten your hair very effectively. Unless you were heavy-handed with the beer. Too much beer and your curls or waves crackled when they were touched.

  My mother also used cucumber peel to refresh her eyes and made her own cucumber beauty mask with ground, strained cucumber flesh, lemon peel and glycerine. Now, you can’t buy a face cream or a shampoo or a skin cleanser that doesn’t contain a pantry load of apricots, peaches, almonds, oatmeal or any one of a number of herbs and vegetables.