“Did you say he’s thirty?” she said incredulously.
“What? It’s not that old,” I said. “You’re almost thirty.”
“That’s exactly how come I know how old thirty is,” she said.
After that I watched It’s a Wonderful Life. I ate a Swanson’s turkey dinner. I felt lonely and pathetic. I flung myself around on the furniture as if I were a nineteenth-century maiden dying of consumption. I thought again about trying to track down Raymond. Gross, for sure, but maybe bad kissing was a small price to pay for human companionship . . . Surely, though, he’d gathered up all that change from his floor and used it to buy a plane ticket somewhere for the holidays.
In the quiet days after Christmas I should have been writing. Was I not an aspiring creator after all? Or I should have been running—why not take some inspiration from Cindy Tollan and make this the year I trained for a marathon? Or at the very least I should have been reading some trashy yet engrossing thrillers by Barbara Darby or volunteering at a soup kitchen or . . . something! But no. The closest I got to interacting with other humans was when I smiled overenthusiastically at the clerk while swiping my credit card at the grocery store.
Instead of doing anything really worthwhile, I hauled a bunch of crap, including Sylvia’s sagging particleboard bookcase and some broken shelves, down to the basement. It was a huff-and-puff effort, and the exertion felt good. Once I got to the basement, I still wasn’t bold enough to really brave the murky depths, so rather than stacking everything neatly, I sort of hurled it into the dark. After that, I went back upstairs and dusted. Truly, a person is desperate when she turns to dusting as a source of solace and entertainment.
As New Year’s approached, there were multiple parties at friends’ places in the offing. The trouble was, given our intertwined worlds, Robert and Lily stood a pretty good chance of sashaying into whichever party I chose. I resolved to tough it out at home, which had the added benefit of frugality, and I would have done exactly that had I not gotten a Facebook friend request from Ms. Tanisha Whitaker.
She was the stand-up comic–cum–SAT tutor, and although I’d chatted with her mother and received Tanisha’s e-mail RSVPing yes to the gala, we’d never actually spoken.
I accepted the friend request and minutes later a message arrived in my Facebook inbox:
Looking forward to the Ten Girls to Watch Gala! This is last minute, but if you’re in town, I’m having a New Year’s Eve show. I can put you and a friend on the comp list if you have any interest!
Maybe Tanisha thought I was a bigger deal at Charm than I actually was and that inviting me was a good PR move, but whatever delusion had led to this, I decided to take her up on it. The show was free to me, Robert certainly wasn’t going to be there, and I really needed to get out of the apartment. Wasn’t this what Jessie Winston was talking about? You had to take care of yourself. If you were a famous opera singer, that probably meant lots of sleep and warm tea and cashmere scarves to protect your throat. If you were me, it meant get off the couch and reenter civilization. I wrote back to tell her yes, though I failed to mention I’d be going solo. Until I knew Tanisha a little better, there was only so much loserdom I was willing to cop to.
I put on the same short navy dress I’d worn to TheOne party, this time with thick black tights and tall black boots. I curled my hair. I blackened my lashes. My mother had sent me some of that new shiny-but-not-sticky lipstick / lip gloss for Christmas, and I lacquered my lips with it. Then off I went to catch the subway to the East Village.
The show was in a small auditorium behind a bar, and even though I was thirty minutes earlier than the time Tanisha had told me, the lights were already out and a comic was already onstage (apparently, it was a marathon show, and Tanisha was buried deep in the middle of the lineup). Folding metal chairs were set up in rows, and I had to slink by half a dozen people to get to a free seat near the back, “slink” being a poor description for anything done in a puffy winter coat.
Onstage, a wiry man in a tweed fedora said, “How many people with ADHD does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Oh my God, is that a spider? You want to go get a drink?”
Next up, a guy with a thick handlebar mustache pretended to be a cabdriver from Canarsie who took people places he thought they should go rather than where they asked him to drive. Agonizing silence greeted most of his lines.
Finally, it was Tanisha’s turn. Even though it had been a few years, she looked just like her photo from the magazine, big smile with blazing white teeth, huge brown eyes, and a mass of curly black hair down to her shoulders.
“So, I’m an SAT tutor,” she began. “Everyone out there take the SATs?” She waited for a reply. “Did you hear that? I think the only one who whooped was the bartender. See where college can get you, kids? You need to study those SAT words! So anyway, yes, rich people hire me to help their kids do better on the test. And the problem I have is that after I spend all evening drilling these kids on their vocabulary words, I can’t really cut it off. I’ll try to go on a date after. It’ll be some guy I met on the Internet, and we’ve got beers, and he says, ‘What do you do?’ and I say, ‘I hasten the retention of ephemeral vocabulary in my obdurate wards.’ ‘Come again?’ ‘Cajole callow kids into amassing verbal adroitness. I only do it because I’m impecunious.’ Oh my God, are you guys groaning? I hear groaning. I am sorry for this tedium. I’m just tenacious!”
The crowd warmed up a little more when she moved on to jokes about the woes of finding roommates on Craigslist. “People should have to have those little disclaimers, like pharmaceutical ads. Like mine would be ‘Tanisha Whitaker is nice, funny, and neat.’” Then she switched into a fast, low voice: “Tanisha Whitaker has also been shown to clog drains with her hair and to eat all your food when drunk. Other side effects of living with Tanisha Whitaker may include a television perpetually tuned to the Food Network, strange men sneaking out of your apartment at the crack of dawn, and unexpected visits from Tanisha’s mother.”
She then turned all perky. “Is anyone out there looking for a roommate? No really, I need a place.”
After her set, another three comics went onstage before there was a break. Finally, intermission arrived, and I pushed my way through the crowd toward the front, thinking maybe the comics would return from wherever they disappeared to backstage. I waited until just before the lights dimmed again, but no Tanisha (though I did get a number of up-and-down, checking-me-out looks and smiles in my direction while standing there, which was a helpful little boost to my self-esteem just then). The show ended at about eleven thirty, and I pushed up to the stage area once again, but either Tanisha had been whisked away somewhere or she and the other performers were planning to ring in the New Year backstage.
I might have felt depressed, disconsolate, dispirited (clearly I was still channeling Tanisha) leaving a bar alone at 11:45 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, but I didn’t. The crackling cold air felt clean and bracing, the opposite of my stuffy apartment and the crowded club, and I knew I’d get a chance to talk with Tanisha eventually. Walking past packs of people spilling out of bars and restaurants, I thought about her act. I’d laughed plenty, but I was an easy audience and it wasn’t as if everyone was falling out of their chairs. Still, she was working on it. And to have to “work on it” so publicly . . . wow. Despite my initial disappointment at being exiled to the archives, I took such comfort in my quiet basement office, where no one was around to overhear (and presumably judge) my phone conversational abilities. I was going to work on a short story in the privacy of my bedroom for weeks on end before even thinking of showing it to anyone, and then I certainly wasn’t going to stick around and watch their faces while they read it. But Tanisha got up there in front of a room full of people and sometimes got laughs and sometimes got . . . nothing. Brutal, instant criticism. I thought it was one of the bravest things I’d ever seen.
I reached the subway at 11:59 on my cell phone clock and decided to give it a minute before I headed down t
he stairs. Seconds later, a roar from a bar across the street went up, and I looked at the numbers again: 12:00. Happy New Year, I said to myself. Before I even really thought about it, a resolution popped into my head. This year, you’ll do brave things. I didn’t quite know how, or what that would entail, but I said it again, a little vow: Dawn West, you will be brave.
_________
At last, January 2 arrived. Back at work, the TGTW anniversary party was only a few days away. I double-checked the spelling of every place card. I picked up the programs and delivered them to Charm. I fielded calls and e-mails from TGTW winners confirming time and place and dietary restrictions. I sent Tanisha a note to thank her for the show, and she wrote back apologizing profusely that she’d gotten stuck backstage and hadn’t had a chance to see me. I switched her seating assignment so she’d be at my table for the event. I had the feeling that when we actually got around to talking in person, she and I were going to be friends. Finally, the night before the event, the giant photo prints delivered to the Morgan Library, the gift bags (which included the hot-off-the-presses January issue) all assembled, I got off the subway a stop early to enjoy the unseasonably warm evening.
The clouds hung low over the city—the weather predictions all said a storm was brewing. I loved the pink blanket of sky, all the lights of the buildings and bridges held close and reflected back down on the streets. It was cotton-candy noir, and I wanted more. I didn’t walk straight home and turned instead down toward the Union Street bridge, toward the gritty urban splendor of the Gowanus Canal. I leaned against the iron railing, watching the lights of the low-slung warehouses along the canal’s banks waver in the purply murk, the scraggly weed trees standing stiff in the windless air. The air was chilly but damp, and my coat felt far too heavy. I loosened my scarf and finally turned back toward home.
I showered, put on my love-you-a-bunch pajama bottoms and my gray sweatshirt, drank some warm milk, and tucked myself into bed with the New Yorker. Sleep hygiene at its finest. Except that after I finished the issue and turned off the lamp, no brain wave transformation took place. My thoughts scuttled around in their regular conscious fashion for first a half hour, then an hour. I’d exhausted my Somnilab drug supply, and Benadryl had groggy consequences. Round and round my visions of the TGTW gathering swirled. I imagined introducing Helen Hensley to Barbara Darby and Tanisha Whitaker to Rebecca Karimi. I imagined Regina pulling me up to the podium after the event to introduce me to Gerri. I had to be at the Mandalay Carson building at nine the next morning. I kept imagining sleeping through my alarm. I was still awake when the storm’s first lightning flashed. Somewhere around two in the morning, my fantasies veered—Jessica Winston sang, as planned, but then she pulled me up for a duet . . . and then, at last, I slipped into sleep.
I was traveling through a dream about moving back into Helen’s hut when a sharp smell that didn’t fit in with the dream urged me awake. When I opened my eyes my room was completely dark save for the little green glow of my cell phone charger and the pulsating white light of my MacBook, and completely silent save for the sound of rain battering the window. But it was undeniable, there was something in the air.
I sat up and turned on my lamp, then started sniffing around my room. The smell was stronger when I opened the door and walked into the living room. Smoke. Maybe. It was four o’clock in the morning, but I dialed Bob and Mary anyway. “Carroll Gardens Realty Corp.,” the message said.
I went back to my bedroom and sat on my bed. I wanted to think I was just being crazy, that everything was fine. I didn’t want to be the paranoid neighbor who overreacted and called the fire department in the middle of the night. I’d already been the crazy neighbor who called the fire department because her roof was leaking. I sat there for a good five minutes, sniffing and deliberating.
Finally, I slipped my bare feet into sneakers and walked to the front door, where the smell was strongest of all. I sniffed again. Then I opened the door. Instead of the usual hallway, the door opened to a solid curtain of smoke. I should have slammed it shut, but I didn’t. I gently pushed it closed, as if I were trying not to disturb the smoke. It took a second for sensible thoughts to form, but when they did, I grabbed a coat and scarf, wrapped the scarf over my nose and mouth, opened the door, and bolted down the stairs. I knocked on the doors of the third- and second-floor apartments as I went, yelling “Fire!” loudly at each. I was on the ground floor before I had the inane thought that I should have grabbed my laptop. I’d backed up my writing, but the backup was in my apartment too.
Had I been rational, I might have thought of grabbing my wallet, or my phone, or, gosh, even something like my passport or my glasses. Or being a humanitarian and really banging on those neighbors’ doors. No such thoughts crossed my mind. My writing, my writing, my writing, blared my lone panicked, pumping thought. I ran back up the stairs. Even while running I realized how stupid I was being, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop. I pushed past one flight and the next. Finally, back in my apartment, I got down on my knees and pulled my laptop from under my bed, where I always tucked it away so I wouldn’t accidentally step on it if I sleepwalked in the night.
But that wasn’t enough for me. I spent more precious time grabbing the wastebasket beside my bedroom door, pulling out the plastic grocery bag liner, and shaking out the scraps of paper, receipts, and wads of hair. All so I could shove my laptop inside in hopes of it keeping dry in the rain.
Now that that was done, I could go ahead and escape my burning building. For a second, I even felt elated, like I’d rescued the only thing that mattered, so who the heck cared if the rest of it burned. I coughed, choking on the smoke, and took as deep a breath as I dared through my scarf before opening my door once again and charging into the stairwell.
Could the stairs really take so long to descend? They felt like Escher stairs. I banged on the other apartment doors again, just to be sure. And then, at last, I reached the front door and tumbled out into the pouring rain. Across the street, I joined the huddled collection of neighbors, people I recognized from mailbox interactions, but none of whom I actually knew beyond pleasantries. Still, a quick survey of faces was enough to know we were all out. Another quick survey—this one of the building—was enough to know we weren’t going back inside. Actual flames lit the windows on the first and now the second floor.
We talked to one another with surprising calm, as if this were a fire drill, not an actual fire. The guys from the ground floor had 911 on the phone. We watched the fire climb for another minute. It was like watching one of those fireplace DVDs, logs charring on your TV screen—that’s how removed it felt from any actual peril or trauma. I looked down at the way the light from the fire lit my hands. The glow on my skin looked warm and cozy, except for the plinking raindrops that ever so slightly ruined the effect. We heard sirens in the distance.
Two neighbors had been smart enough to grab umbrellas, and I joined the mass pressed together for protection from the storm. Here I was, the twisted version of Teresa Anderson peeking out from beneath her umbrella in the inaugural TGTW photo spread. Velvet dress replaced with monkey pajamas, tuxedoed date replaced with burly, bathrobed neighbor. No need to reach from under the umbrella to check for rain. How strange it was to watch a building burn in the midst of a deluge.
By the time the trucks showed up in force, Mohamed, the owner of the twenty-four-hour bodega on the corner, had taken our shivering, sloshing mass of humanity into his store. As it grew apparent that our building and all our worldly possessions were quickly becoming nothing but soggy ash, he even started taking orders for egg sandwiches. Whatever style we wanted, on the house. When his griddle momentarily burst into a ceiling-high grease fire, I didn’t move a muscle, except for the contraction of my stomach, gasping with a shocked half gasp, half laugh. Luckily, Mohamed wasn’t laughing. Moments later, fire extinguisher clouds and fumes filled the bodega. Our huddled mass returned to the sidewalk.
Eventually firefighters and neighbors fr
om up and down the block mingled among us. By that point, rain still gushing down, most of us had given up on umbrellas. I was leaning against the iron fence across the street from what had been my apartment, waiting for emotion but still feeling blank. It was like I’d blistered over, a haze insulating me from the injury for the time being. The haze was helpful. I was staring out into the rain when Trevor the firefighter ambled by.
“You again,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be,” I deadpanned. “It’s fate bringing us together.”
He froze.
“I’m kidding,” I said.
He nodded seriously. “This happens way too often in old buildings. Water damage and electrical fires.”
“I thought electrical fires were made up,” I answered, my voice flat, the energy required to make it otherwise beyond me.
“Well, they don’t usually burn buildings to the ground. But this one started in the basement, and it looks like there were lots of flammable materials down there. Paint stuff, scrap wood.”
Paint stuff and scrap wood? The paint stuff and scrap wood I’d hauled down there in Sylvia’s wake? I hadn’t cried yet, but now the tears started. Luckily, the rain rendered them invisible. Trevor ambled along.
By five thirty or so, the Red Cross arrived to dole out coats, shoes, whatever we needed. Except umbrellas, no umbrellas. Also no fancy dresses for gala events. I took a pair of socks instead. As the fire crew and Red Cross volunteers mingled among us, news spread—flooding rain was overwhelming the subway pumps. Water on the tracks meant F train service was suspended. The A train was still running, but who knew for how long. Really? It was almost funny at that point, except it wasn’t at all.
During the hours in the rain, I realized that without my cell phone I knew exactly two numbers: Robert’s cell, and my childhood home phone. Perfect since Robert wasn’t answering my calls and was probably off on a holiday vacation with Lily somewhere. Doubly perfect since my mom had disconnected that line and only used her cell phone now, a number I’d never bothered to memorize. I also realized I had nothing in this world but the “outfit” I was wearing, the laptop in the plastic grocery bag under my arm, and the stuffed animal collection I’d wisely kept back in Oregon. This included having no money. Not even any access to the thirty-one dollars I had in the bank—paying my January rent had proved to be a poor decision.
The Ten Girls to Watch Page 27