Only in New York

by Lily Brett

  For an extra dollar you can add cheese to any of Hiroko’s curries. Cheese with beef, chicken, seafood or vegetable curry does not sound like my sort of food. Neither does tarako spaghetti. Tarako is a salted-roe food usually made from Alaskan pollock. At the risk of appearing to be either very fussy or very strange, I have to admit I don’t like roe of any sort. Even caviar – Beluga, or not.

  I do like Hiroko’s salmon teriyaki, and that is what I usually order. My husband, who often has to be dragged to Hiroko’s, likes their shumai and their casseroles. I haven’t seen a casserole on a menu for years. It has been decades since I made a casserole. I remember the days of casseroles. Everyone was always making a casserole. And then we slipped from casseroles to quiches, and casseroles were relegated to oblivion.

  Hiroko’s has many devotees. Many of them Japanese. Like me, they keep coming back. I don’t think it is the service that inspires our loyalty. ‘Hiroko’s takes in guests and makes everyone calm and happy,’ one reviewer wrote. What does it say about a restaurant when the review makes no mention of the food or the service?

  The service at Hiroko’s is very courteous and enthusiastic. But not fast. Do not go there if you are in a hurry. The young waitresses are a rotating cast of Japanese students who work at Hiroko’s partly to improve their English. Improve might not be quite the right word. Often the waitresses have no English. But pointing to items on the menu works. And the waitresses are so eager to please. Their eagerness to please makes you want to avoid asking any complicated questions or any questions at all. If there is something you really want to know, Hiroko is always there and always ready to translate your request.

  I am not usually very patient when faced with a long wait for food in restaurants. At Hiroko’s you sometimes have to wait for quite a while. But somehow it does not disturb me. I have no idea why I am so tolerant about this at Hiroko’s.

  Hiroko’s is quiet, even when it is full. It is very hard to find a quiet restaurant in New York. It is almost useless going out to dinner at most restaurants in New York, if conversation is part of your plan. More than once I have come home hoarse from shouting after having dinner out in New York.

  My cousin Adam and his partner, Andrea, used to live next door to Hiroko’s. They frequently return there. Adam loves the mushroom spaghetti, the casseroles, the kiwi juice, the green-tea parfait – as well as Hiroko and her brother and father.

  Andrea, who once saw me shaking my head at the ketchup, tried to enlighten me. ‘I love that a lot of the food comes with ketchup and that they bring you a green container of Kraft parmesan cheese with all the pasta dishes,’ she said. I think I still looked bewildered. ‘It is so comforting,’ she explained. ‘I remember those items from my childhood and they haven’t changed at all. The ketchup still looks and tastes exactly the same and so does the Kraft parmesan cheese in the green container.’

  Although I have no fond memories of either ketchup or Kraft parmesan cheese, I suddenly understood an aspect of the restaurant that would have completely eluded me. A nostalgia for an earlier time in America. It could well explain the egg sandwiches and the ham sandwiches and the soda floats on the menu.

  I was having a cup of tea at Hiroko’s one afternoon when some of the staff brought out a birthday cake lavishly decorated with swirls of cream and fruit. It was Hiroko’s brother’s birthday. All the staff and Hiroko and her brother and father sat down and joined in a rousing rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’.

  One of the waitresses came over and presented me with a slice of birthday cake. I must have looked worried about the cake because the young waitress looked bothered and started to take it back. I felt bad. I had to work hard to persuade her that I really wanted the cake.

  I try not to look like the sort of person who is worried about eating cake. I don’t think it works. I have been worried about eating cake since I was about six or seven. My mother often baked cakes but I was not allowed to eat them. My mother dreaded me becoming fat. The dread escalated into terror when I turned into a tall, stocky adolescent.

  I have internalised my mother’s role and mostly don’t allow myself to eat cake. Unless I am in Café Eiles, in Vienna, where they make the best topfen strudel in the world. When I was last in Vienna, I was on a book tour. I went to Café Eiles every day. On the first day, I thought the slices of topfen strudel were huge. By the third day, the slices looked small and I had to have two. It is a very good thing that I don’t live in Vienna.

  Everybody at the birthday party at Hiroko’s wanted to know if I was enjoying the cake. I nodded enthusiastically. I had eaten half and was pretending to be engrossed in my work.

  It is easy to work at Hiroko’s. You can sit there with a cup of tea and work and no one asks you to leave or looks as though they hope you will leave. They seem just as happy to have you there as they do with other customers who are eating a lot of food.

  I had been answering emails at Hiroko’s for about two hours one day recently. I looked up and Hiroko and the waitresses smiled at me. I hadn’t yet ordered anything. I had meant to order some chamomile tea. But they looked as though they were just very pleased to have me there.

  Then it hit me. Right there and then, I understood why I liked Hiroko’s so much. It has a sweetness and a modesty. I think it must be one of the sweetest places in Manhattan. Its sweetness and modesty are scarce. Not just in this city, but everywhere.

  Most people don’t think of New York as a city where people line up to buy lottery tickets. New York is home to the sophisticated, the famous, the chic, the cool and some of the richest people in the world. But we do line up for lottery tickets. Not the rich, the cool or the famous. Just some of the rest of us.

  Lotteries have been around forever. And so have people buying tickets. The first recorded signs of a lottery are from the Chinese Han Dynasty, between 205 BC and 220 AD. And there were lotteries held during the Roman Empire. I am not sure that what was at stake at that time measures up to what you can win today. The world’s largest lottery jackpot was won in 2012, in America. It was a Mega Millions ticket worth 656 million dollars.

  I buy Mega Millions lottery tickets. There are too many lotteries to choose from, so I stick to the Mega Millions. I love buying lottery tickets. As I buy my ticket, or occasionally tickets, a sense of calm comes over me. The sort of calm you could get from knowing that you will never again have to think about money or the possible lack of money.

  Usually I buy my tickets in Midtown near 44th Street and Third Avenue. I leave the small newsagency with a sense of boundless optimism. This feeling alone is worth the price of quite a few tickets. The Indian vendor always wishes me good luck, which I see as adding a piece of insurance to ensure my win.

  A lot of people buy lottery tickets at this newsagency. They are mostly men. Working-class men. Most of them are very serious about the numbers they choose. They come in with lists of numbers on sheets of paper. I sometimes feel like an amateur as I always let the machine choose my numbers. Statistically, more men than women buy lottery tickets. I don’t know why. But I see it all the time.

  I buy my tickets at this particular newsagency in the belief that because they sell a lot of tickets, I will have a greater chance of winning. This belief is not only stupid and irrational but, I am sure, mathematically implausible. I don’t think an increased volume of ticket sales can have any bearing at all on your chances of winning.

  Last year lottery officials revamped the Mega Millions, dramatically decreasing the odds of winning. The current odds of winning the Mega Millions are one in 258 890 850. That is one in two hundred and fifty-eight million, eight hundred and ninety thousand, and eight hundred and fifty. It might as well be one in two hundred billion trillion. I don’t think it dampens my enthusiasm, or anyone else’s. A friend of mine told me that the odds of winning America’s most popular lottery, the Powerball, were the same as being hit by lightning on your birthday.

  For the few days after I buy my Mega Millions tickets, I plan how to spe
nd the money. I have a list of people I want to share the money with. And causes I want to contribute to. I develop mathematical skills that were not in evidence for the entire duration of my high-school career. I shift and change the amounts of money I will keep and the amounts of money I will share and donate, in a series of manoeuvres designed to arrive at the perfect distribution and use of the ten or twenty or one hundred million I will win.

  These calculations and recalculations often give me a headache. It is hard work trying to decide what to do with all that money. Another problematic prospect always emerges. What if my husband doesn’t agree with the financial decisions I have made? What follows is a flurry of very irritable and sometimes volatile exchanges between me and my husband.

  I don’t actually involve my husband in these emotional and divisive disputes. I play both of our roles. I pose the questions and arguments and provide the answers. Often unreasonably. At this stage, when I do actually see my husband, I feel furious with him and don’t want to talk to him. I am furious about his attitudes and opinions. Attitudes and opinions that I have invented.

  I have to remind myself that he has not taken an active part in the discussion. Or, more accurately, that he has not taken any part. It still takes me a while to calm down and get rid of the feeling that he was unreasonable. That feeling makes my head ache even more.

  The night before the Mega Millions draw, I have usually settled on a plan for what to do with the money. In my head, the friends I am sharing it with are so grateful. I am feeling magnanimous and generous and deeply satisfied.

  It is all downhill from there. The next day I scan the newspapers for any news of the Mega Millions winner. If it has been a particularly large jackpot, that news will often make news. I don’t look up the results. That would be too quick. I have to ease myself into the results.

  A day or so later, I check out the size of the new Mega Millions jackpot. If it is a small amount, say only six or seven million dollars, then I know that someone has won the previous draw. If the jackpot is even bigger than it was, that is a good sign. It means that although I didn’t win, nobody else did either. In that case, if I buy a ticket, I have a chance of winning an even greater amount next week.

  If there has been a winner, I go up to 44th Street and Third Avenue to see if the newsagency has a large sign saying that they sold the winning ticket. That sign has never been there. I walk home feeling a bit flat. I now know I haven’t won the 120 million or 250 million dollars.

  I still don’t bother to look up the results. If I didn’t win the jackpot, then I don’t want to know that I also didn’t win any of the smaller prizes. I have gone from being someone with a firm belief that she is going to win the jackpot to a person who dismisses the possibility of having won any of the lesser prizes.

  I plan to look up the results later. I keep the tickets in a safe place. For ages. I write notes to myself to look up the results. But I can’t seem to do it. Occasionally, I have printed out a year’s worth of results and have seen that I have left it too late. You have to claim your prize money within twelve months of the draw. So I don’t check to see if I might have won something. That would be too depressing.

  Once, I discovered that I had won 126 dollars and 53 cents. I filled out the claim form, attached my winning ticket and put the two documents in an envelope addressed to the claims department of the New York Lottery, in Schenectady, New York. Then I panicked. I know this wasn’t the millions of dollars, but I suddenly worried that my ticket would be stolen.

  There is something not quite right with this picture. I banked on winning the millions and then worried about someone stealing the 126-dollar winning ticket. ‘It would be tempting to open an envelope addressed to the claims department of the New York Lottery, wouldn’t it?’ I said to my husband.

  ‘You go to jail for tampering with the US mail,’ he said.

  I posted the ticket and the claim form at the local post office. Several months later I received a check for 126 dollars and 53 cents. That would cover five or six months of Mega Million tickets, I calculated.

  I continue to buy my Mega Millions tickets and store them in a safe place. I make plans for the money. And take headache pills.

  Living in New York means that, eventually, everyone you know visits the city. So you see a lot of people you may have lost touch with if you were living in a mountain town in Poland or Wales.

  Living in New York also means that, eventually, everyone leaves. New York is a city where most of the population comes from somewhere else. From other parts of America or from other countries. Many, many people leave New York and go back to that somewhere else.

  Every one of the small handful of my close Australian friends living in New York has gone back to Australia. Jill left, then Fiona left, then John and Christine left. I could go on and on. I still miss them. I am not sure that there are many other cities with so many departures and so many arrivals.

  An old friend I hadn’t seen for a long time arrived in New York recently. She had told me that a former friend of ours had been unwell. When I saw my old friend I said that I had mentioned the news about the former friend being unwell to someone else who had also known her. ‘Oh, God,’ my old friend said.

  It turned out that the friend who had been unwell hated the friend I had relayed the news to. She hated her because of something that had occurred when they were both sixteen. It has been at least fifty years since either of the two women were sixteen.

  ‘It must have been something bad,’ I said to my old friend.

  ‘Apparently she didn’t behave very well,’ my old friend said.

  The friend in question, the badly behaved person to whom I should not have relayed the news, has had an international, highly responsible and very complex job for decades. She is so serious, she makes most of us look frivolous.

  I didn’t even try to imagine what sort of behaviour would elicit a fifty-year-old grudge. On the whole, I admire people who can carry a grudge. But I like my grudges to be about more than bad behaviour.

  My husband is incapable of holding a grudge. Any acts of malice or malevolence that have been directed towards him slip straight out of his head. That is why he has me. I remember all the grudges that should be lodged in his brain.

  I have to remind him that the person he has just greeted enthusiastically with a warm embrace is a jerk and has jerked my husband around. While my husband is embracing the jerk, I stand there, glowering. When we finally leave, my husband inevitably asks me why I was so off-hand. ‘I wasn’t off-hand,’ I reply. ‘I was glaring at that jerk.’

  A lot of grudges are formed and nurtured in New York apartment buildings. The air in co-op board meetings, in the buildings, can be thick with grudges and resentments. Co-op is short for cooperative. It is sometimes hard to see a lot of co-operation.

  The husband of one of my closest friends is a great grudge holder. He can think up revenge strategies that leave me in awe of his brilliance. They are complex and sometimes involve legal actions. If there was a Nobel Prize for grudge revenge, he would have won it.

  I think grudges and grievances are harmless. Often the people holding the grudges know that they are being ridiculous. What is not ridiculous is hatred. And hatred seems to be here to stay.

  My parents, who had every reason to feel hatred, never did. Being the victims of hatred had made them intolerant of all hate. They were the first to speak up and act if they witnessed bullying or discrimination of any sort.

  Not long after my parents first arrived in Australia, a drunk Australian called my father a wog and started to push him around. My mother landed a punch on the drunk guy that sent him reeling. Sixty-five years later, my father is still proud of that punch. Each time he recalls the story he follows it with the fact that the guy got up again, and wasn’t really hurt.

  Many years ago, I met a former school friend of my mother’s who had also survived Auschwitz. I was struck by how gentle and sensitive she was. She had also lost her thirty-
year-old daughter, an only child, the love of her life.

  Yet after a life of tragedy and unspeakable horror, there was no anger in her. There was only concern and care in her demeanour. She talked about her school days with my mother. She talked about her life in the death camp. She talked about her failed first marriage.

  We were eating lunch together in a diner in Los Angeles. She explained, laughing, that she couldn’t eat chicken because she had been married to a chicken farmer and had had to eat the broken chickens for dinner every night of her marriage.

  My mother’s school friend talked about the parents and siblings she had lost. She talked about her daughter, she talked about her anguish. She talked about a lot of things. And never once expressed any anger or hatred.

  I am always shocked by hatred. And always bewildered and depressed by it. Hatred never seems to go away. In April 2014 Frazier Glenn Miller, who called Hitler ‘the greatest man who ever walked the earth’, opened fire with a shotgun at a crowded Jewish community centre in Kansas.

  Miller shot and killed a doctor and his grandson before moving on to a Jewish senior centre where he killed a mother of three. When he was being driven away in a police car, Miller was shouting, ‘Heil Hitler. Heil Hitler.’ None of his victims were Jewish.

  Intelligent journalists like Frank Bruni went to great pains to point out that most hate crimes in the US are not perpetrated by people as extreme as Frazier Glenn Miller.

  In 2012, the Federal Bureau of Investigation found that 6573 hate crimes were reported. Of those, twenty percent were linked to the victim’s perceived religious beliefs. And sixty-five percent of those religion-based hate crimes were aimed at Jews. These statistics shocked me. As did the survey last year by the Anti-Defamation League which found that fourteen percent of the adults surveyed agreed that ‘Jews have too much power in this country’. And fifteen percent said that ‘Jews are more willing to use shady practices’.