Thanks for Waiting

by Doree Shafrir

  * * *

  —

  MEANWHILE, THE 2012 marathon was approaching. As the summer came to an end, I decided to stop drinking for the last couple of months of my training. I was proud of my newfound ability to run over the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan and then run another seven or eight miles up the Hudson River path, and then back. My brother and sister-in-law, who lived close to the marathon route on the Upper East Side, offered to host my friends for brunch and then everyone could go cheer me on. My parents were going to come down from Boston; my sister from Washington, D.C. I felt loved and supported in what was about to be one of the biggest undertakings of my life. Sure, it wasn’t a wedding or a pregnancy, but it was officially a big deal and I was glad it was being recognized.

  I could hardly believe it: Just two and a half years earlier, I could barely run a mile, and now I was going to run a marathon. It became a point of pride for me, something that I didn’t hesitate to tell people and wait for their disbelieving reactions. It was a new aspect to my identity that I had never thought I’d have, and I was loving it.

  And then there was a storm. Hurricane Sandy was going to sweep up the East Coast and hit New York in the last week of October. The night Sandy hit, I sat alone in my apartment in Fort Greene, watching the rain come down in sheets outside my window and listening to the wind howl. I’d bought a three-pound pork butt that I was planning on putting in the slow cooker the next morning; I may have been left to ride out the storm alone, but I’d have enough slow-cooked pork butt to last me for weeks. (It never crossed my mind to get other, possibly slightly more useful supplies, like batteries or bottled water.) At some point during the night, my internet went out, but I never lost power, and when I woke up the next morning, the internet was back. So while things in my neighborhood had never gotten especially bad, it wasn’t immediately clear how devastated other parts of New York were. I put my pork butt in the slow cooker and settled in for the day.

  It turned out that things elsewhere had gotten bad. Really bad. Huge swaths of the city had lost power, including the BuzzFeed office, and the subway shut down because the East River tunnels had flooded. BuzzFeed set up a spreadsheet so that people who still had power and internet (me!) could host our co-workers for the day; a lovely woman I’d never met before who worked on the product team came over. We sat at my dining room table (which doubled as my desk), but we didn’t get much work done. I was glued to Twitter, impatient for any news of what was going on in the rest of the city. It looked like parts of Staten Island were basically under water, and people were missing. I looked around my cozy apartment, now infused with the scent of a slow-cooking pork butt, and felt a tinge of survivor’s guilt.

  In the first few days after Sandy hit, it seemed like the marathon, scheduled for that Sunday, would still happen. They couldn’t cancel the marathon, could they? But then the number of people who had died during the storm started coming out—and it was shocking. So many people, many of them old and/or disabled, had drowned in their homes. And as the days went on, and the electricity and the subway still hadn’t returned, it started to seem superficial to even care about the marathon at all. Many residents of city housing projects didn’t have heat or power, and increasingly desperate calls for supplies went out on social media. I went to the Old Navy store near my house and bought a bunch of fleece sweatshirts and blankets and took them to a neighborhood organization in Red Hook that was distributing them to freezing residents.

  For a couple of days, BuzzFeed set up a temporary office in the Hearst Building in Midtown, which still had power. (Hearst was a BuzzFeed investor.) There were buses leaving from the Barclays Center near my apartment to get into Manhattan, so I joined the long line and got on the bus to go over the Manhattan Bridge. Driving through the streets was eerie; the traffic lights were out, and cops were directing traffic at busy intersections. The streets felt empty. I was reminded of the disaster movie I Am Legend, particularly the scene where (uh, spoiler for a nearly fifteen-year-old movie coming up!) Will Smith’s wife and child die in a helicopter crash as they’re trying to escape Manhattan after the bridges and tunnels are shut down. That scene had always seriously freaked me out.

  After work, I decided to head to Chelsea. For the past few months, I had been walking a miniature poodle named Sugar that belonged to an elderly, mostly housebound woman, and when I wasn’t able to reach her on the phone, I figured I should go check on her.

  Nancy lived in a large, institutional-like building that was a typical New York mix of older rent-stabilized tenants and twentysomethings who looked like they worked in finance. All of Lower Manhattan still didn’t have electricity, and as I walked the thirty or so blocks to her apartment, I noticed that the typical buzz of the city had gone silent. Her building was likewise completely dark; the doorman had a flashlight and seemed nervous when I approached. “I’m here to see Nancy,” I said, and he waved me up. I went up the stairs, the flashlight I had brought lighting the way, and made my way down the dark hallway. I knocked on her door. “Who is it?” she said, and I could hear fear in her voice.

  “It’s Doree,” I said. “I came by to check on you. I tried calling you, but I guess you haven’t been able to charge your phone.”

  She opened the door. The studio apartment was completely dark. It smelled of pee. “How are you doing?” I asked, even though it was obvious: not well.

  “We’re okay,” she said.

  “Do you want me to take Sugar out?” I asked. “Oh also—I brought you a flashlight.” I hadn’t been planning on giving the flashlight to her, but I couldn’t handle seeing her sitting in the dark.

  “No, you don’t have to take him out,” she said.

  I was quiet for a moment. “Do you need anything? Do you need food? Can I go grocery shopping for you?”

  “No, no,” she said. “Thanks for coming by.”

  I left, feeling unsettled. I had a vision of myself, growing old and sitting in the dark in a New York studio apartment, alone. It scared me.

  * * *

  —

  TWO DAYS BEFORE the marathon, it was still scheduled to happen. I went to the Javits Center, the huge convention center on the West Side Highway, to pick up my registration. It was a cloudy day, but not too cold; as I left and crossed Eleventh Avenue, carrying the bag holding my bright orange Marathon 2012 shirt, I saw on Twitter that the race had been canceled. I had been expecting it, but it still felt like a blow. All the training, the goals I’d set for myself—everything was gone. I didn’t know how to process my disappointment. It still felt surreal, and it was also compounded by the fact that as the week had worn on, and the city had dithered about whether to go forward with the race, I had grown more and more wary of running it. The thought of running through neighborhoods that had been devastated by flooding, where people had died sitting in their homes—it felt wrong. The marathon was supposed to be a big, celebratory event, everyone’s favorite New York City day, when people line the streets and cheer on the thousands of runners. Bands performed, people danced—it was a big, citywide party. It wouldn’t be right to hold it right now.

  I tried to find space to hold both of these competing feelings: that it was right to cancel, and that I was abjectly, horribly disappointed. I had a suspicion that I only had it in me to train for a marathon once in my life, and this had been my shot: a period where I wasn’t dating anyone seriously, had no kids, wasn’t drinking, had time to train, and was in reasonably good shape.

  For weeks, I couldn’t get up the motivation to run again. When I finally did, I felt off, like it had been a completely different person who had been doing all that training for the past two years.

  I went to see Cynthia, my therapist.

  “I’m just having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that I trained for so long, and worked so hard, and then it just didn’t happen,” I said. “But I also feel guilty for feeling that way beca
use I know so many people have it so much worse than me. Like, who cares about the dumb marathon? People died! People lost their homes!”

  “You’re still allowed to grieve the loss of the marathon,” Cynthia said. “It was something you worked really hard for.”

  “I think I also just feel like, after all the bullshit with Luke and everything else, that this was a sort of salvation,” I said. “Like running the marathon would be a way I could definitively move on.”

  “That makes sense,” she said. “I don’t think you need to feel guilty about that.”

  “I’m just questioning whether I even want to stay in New York,” I said. “Sandy was so grim, my apartment has mice that I can hear in the walls. And my dating life is so grim too.”

  “You’re not alone; I hear a lot of my female clients say that about dating in New York,” Cynthia said. “It’s really hard.”

  “It just feels like the odds are not in my favor,” I said, warming to my topic. “The few guys who are single and who I’d potentially be interested in have literally dozens if not hundreds of women just like me to choose from—smart, reasonably attractive, work in media, listen to the same bands, read the same books. I feel like I see my literal clones everywhere.” I paused. I’d never quite articulated it this way, not even to myself. “And every time I do go on a date it’s just depressing. It honestly feels hopeless.”

  It didn’t help that at BuzzFeed, it seemed like all my co-workers in their twenties were hooking up with each other. I certainly didn’t want to hook up with any of them (not to mention I was determined never to date anyone I worked with ever again), but it just underscored how I felt like I was aging out of my opportunities to meet anyone. I knew on a rational level that certainly not every person who didn’t get married ended up like Nancy, alone in the dark in an apartment that smelled of dog pee, with no family or friends to help her. And I also knew that getting married was certainly no guarantee that I wouldn’t end up alone. But another part of me couldn’t stop thinking about Nancy as she sat in the darkness of her apartment; my mind was drawing a straight line between “goes on a bunch of mediocre OkCupid dates” and “lives alone in sad apartment, dies.” And it felt like if I did want to meet someone and get married, it was not going to be in New York.

  “I just feel like I want my life to be…easier,” I said to Cynthia. “Is that a bad thing?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I was in L.A. for three weeks to help solidify the new BuzzFeed L.A. bureau, but also to test the waters about whether I wanted to live there. I had rented a MINI Cooper, perfect for squeezing into tight street parking spots in Los Feliz, the neighborhood where I was staying, and I’d told everyone I knew in Los Angeles that I’d be in town.

  The second night I was there, I met up with my friend Lara, her husband, and a bunch of their friends at a bar in the neighborhood; Lara was also visiting from out of town, but her husband used to live in L.A., and between the two of them they knew a lot of people. I started talking to a friendly blond woman named Steph who, it turned out, had moved from New York to L.A. just a couple of months before.

  “We love it here,” she said. “We live around the corner. It’s so nice. I was living in a shitty apartment in Williamsburg and I haven’t looked back.”

  We’d been talking for half an hour or so when I finally put it together who she was: a hilarious writer I already followed on Twitter. “You’re that Steph!” I exclaimed. “I’ve followed you on Twitter forever. You’re so funny.”

  “I obviously think you should move here,” Steph said. “How long are you in town for? Do you want to come over and watch movies sometime this week?” I left the bar feeling buoyant. Friends! I didn’t even live here yet, and I was making friends.

  A few days later, I hung out with my friend Scott, and on our way home we stopped at a Whole Foods in Pasadena to get a snack. I hadn’t even realized how inured I’d become to the experience of going to a grocery store in New York—the long lines, the crowded aisles, the cramped stores—until I saw this literal palace of a supermarket. It seemed enormous, with beautiful produce (in January!), more aisles than I’d ever seen, and almost no line to check out. I wandered the aisles. Everything looked shiny, colorful, gleaming, pristine, abundant. It was like I was seeing food for the first time.

  I’d been so enamored with New York, both before and while I lived there. I had pictured myself as a kind of grown-up Harriet, sharp and sophisticated, feeling like the city and I were intertwined. Even though I wasn’t from New York, and there was no real reason why I should feel more attached to that city than anywhere else, New York has a way of sinking its tentacles into you and it’s really, really hard to shake. For so long, my whole sense of self had been wrapped up in being someone who lived in New York. Who was I, if I didn’t live there?

  When I left my PhD program, I feared that quitting meant that I was a failure. I felt similarly about leaving New York, that it would mean I wasn’t tough enough or hardened enough or strong enough to live there, that the city had finally worn me down and now I was at the point where it didn’t take much more than a Whole Foods to get me to move—how embarrassing. I was enticed by the sunny (read: shallow) openness of the West Coast, just like millions of apparently weak people before me had been. I would just be the living embodiment of another “Why I Left New York” essay, mercilessly mocked across the internet.

  I was more worried about how people would react to my decision to leave than whether I actually wanted to leave in the first place. Why did I overlay every decision with the fear of being judged? I needed to do what was right for me, not what I thought people wanted or expected me to do. It had never been clearer to me that I needed a new start.

  * * *

  —

  I FINALLY MADE the decision to go to L.A. New York would always be here; I could always come back. But even as I made the plans to move—booking the movers, buying a plane ticket, having one last tag sale to get rid of stuff from my apartment—I felt a seed of doubt planting itself in my mind. Wasn’t I getting a little old for new starts? Wasn’t part of being an adult learning how to stick things out, not abandoning ship anytime things got hard? I tried to ignore it. This wasn’t a sign of being a quitter, or giving up. This was actually a sign of adulthood, I decided. I could finally recognize my needs and act on them, and not have to wait for anyone to give me permission.

  I had a big going-away party at a bar near my house, and I stumbled home, drunk on Negronis and nostalgia, at two in the morning, stopping at a bodega on Fulton Street so I could get a two-dollar fried chicken drumstick. I ate it as I walked, the grease dripping down my chin.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The apartment building was on a quiet street not far from the Grove, the outdoor L.A. shopping mall where people—maybe tourists, maybe not?—like to take photos in front of its gaudy Italianate fountain, which plays music and does a “show” every fifteen minutes or so, like a junior varsity Bellagio. It was the fifth or so apartment I had seen in two days, and I was starting to get anxious about finding a place in L.A., since I was supposed to be moving in three weeks.

  But as soon as the landlord led me into the courtyard, I felt like I didn’t even need to see the apartment itself; I knew this was the one. It was a Spanish-style building, with each of the eight apartments’ windows facing the exterior or the courtyard. The courtyard itself was lush and calm, with a small fountain with a very small stream of water bubbling through it. I was enchanted.

  “So you know, Elisabeth Shue and Davis Guggenheim used to live in the apartment downstairs from this one,” the landlord said as he opened the door to the apartment in the back corner of the courtyard, name-dropping the actress and her director husband. “And when they were rebooting Melrose Place, he wanted to shoot the pilot here, but it didn’t work out.” I had no particular affinity for either Davis Guggenheim or Elisabeth Shue, but he had correctly p
egged me as someone who would be impressed by a tenuous connection to Hollywood fame. I was quickly learning that in L.A., almost everything has a tenuous connection to Hollywood fame.

  We walked into the living room. The walls were painted white but instead of feeling blank and utilitarian, the room radiated lightness. Sun dappled the hardwood floors, and archways led to the dining room and the hallway. Casement windows, stretching to the ceiling, overlooked the courtyard. The bedroom was enormous, light and airy; there was a washer and dryer off the kitchen, and a back door that led to a little patio and a set of stairs. “Davis wanted to paint the doors to shoot the pilot, but my mom said no. And Bebe Neuwirth lived here for five years.” More Hollywood!

  “Here?” I asked, opening the kitchen cabinets and drawers. They looked original. No dishwasher, I noted, but that would be fine. I’d have so much space—the apartment felt like it was double the size of my place in Brooklyn. I started picturing where I would put everything—the dining room could double as an office, and in the living room, I could get a small sleeper sofa for all the out-of-town guests who’d probably want to come visit immediately. I’d keep the bedroom pretty spare, I thought, probably just a bed and maybe an armoire, because the closet space was tight, and get some sheer curtains to let the light in.