“’Lizbeth, is this the sausage for the dressing?” she asked, holding up the brown paper-wrapped links I’d bought at Fairway.
“Yes. I got a pound. Isn’t that right?” I asked.
“I guess. You couldn’t find Jimmy Dean? Irvin, come look at this. Will this work?”
There are a handful of food items that my mother is newly incredulous, every time I tell her, can’t be found in New York. Tubes of Kraft garlic cheese that she likes for making cheese grits. Black-eyed peas that aren’t in a can. Country ham. Some of them, over the twenty years I’ve lived here, have become more available. Collard greens are everywhere. Whole Foods now sells a log of bulk pork sausage that works for making breakfast casseroles, and I have seen Jimmy Dean in the wild a few times. But that Thanksgiving I had purchased individual, fresh links of sausage from the butcher, rather than the more familiar, forearm-sized package with the metal rings on each end, and my mother wasn’t having it.
“I’m going out to get sausage,” she said, and left the apartment.
What transpired while she was gone will never be fully known. All I can gather is that she strode up Amsterdam Avenue, stopped at the first supermarket she came to that was open, and had a bewildering back-and-forth with an employee in the meat department until he finally managed to make clear to her that they did not carry Jimmy Dean—or any pork sausage—because they were a kosher grocery store. He may have walked her outside and pointed to the giant Star of David on their sign, I don’t know. But she came home empty-handed.
“I don’t know how you do it,” she said to me, dropping her purse by the front door and rolling her eyes. “Everything is so hard here.”
. . .
It’s been sixteen years since that day, and despite the fact that I now have three children, some parts of my life are easier than they used to be in this hard city, at least for my parents. I graduated to a building with an elevator; they no longer have to climb four flights of stairs to reach my door. It has a doorman, who flags cabs for them when they leave for the airport. I get my groceries delivered most of the time. But, then, because of those children, there’s almost always something we need on the fly: milk, baby wipes, chewable ibuprofen, drinkable bourbon. And if my mother is visiting, and I tell her I’m running to the bodega on the corner for something, she’ll pipe up with a version of her old refrain. “It’s the daily hunting and gathering!” she’ll say. “I don’t know how you do it.”
Does this happen in any other cities? Do people visit their children in Nashville and say, “I don’t know how you do it, with all of these open-air shopping centers”? Or is it only for those of us who move somewhere weird and unfamiliar? (Which, if you are Southern, is one of two places: New York City or any metropolis in California.) It’s not just my mother. I’ll have acquaintances come to the city for a weekend and not even see me but feel compelled to email after the fact to say what a brave (read: crazy) soul I am to live here, day in, day out. Just this week, a family friend who was visiting from Memphis asked about my kids over drinks, and then furrowed her brow and cocked her head. “Isn’t it hard ?”
I never really have a good answer for this. The smart aleck part of me wants to say, “Well, we don’t live in a refugee camp on the Syrian border, and my mother-in-law took my kids to see Tootsie on Broadway last month, so it’s actually fine.” The well-mannered part of me shuts that part up and says, “It can be.”
What I’ve gathered, over years of fumbling through these conversations, is that when people refer to New York being hard, what they really mean is: it’s expensive, and you have to walk everywhere. I try to stick to those two complaints. Certain types might also mean that everyone here is a godless liberal, and I can’t help with that, other than to say that we aren’t all godless, and I’m sure there are some conservatives on the Upper East Side.
But the walking!
I love walking, because I don’t like exercise, and running errands all over the city or shuttling my kids to and fro or climbing up and down subway station stairs gives me a false sense of cardiovascular security. At my annual checkup, my primary care physician always sits next to the exam table with a clipboard and a chart and runs through the same list of questions. Has anything changed in my family history? How is my sleep? Do I drink? Exercise? When we get to exercise, I do the same little song and dance every year. “Technically, no, but it’s New York! I walk everywhere, and I’m usually pushing a stroller or carrying a toddler. That counts, right?” She never confirms that it counts, but she doesn’t scold me either. My doctor has a thriving “concierge” practice, where she provides house calls to older (wealthier) clients, so my theory is that she lets my laziness go primarily because I look good in comparison to the majority of her patients. Also: I’m extremely punctual about mammograms.
It’s not to say that I’m completely out of shape. Presently, I can’t run a 10K. Or a 5K. But there is a type of endurance you develop as a resident of this city, where you are able to walk for hours, weaving around crowds, ducking into stores or playgrounds, without feeling depleted. Whereas, and this is truly nuts, when I am in a city where I have to drive a lot, my right shin muscle—does that have a name? A shin muscle?—will start to ache from pushing and flexing up and down on a gas pedal. We adapt to our environments, I guess.
The only time I resent the walking is in the summer. This is not the norm with most New Yorkers, who in large numbers complain about winter—having to walk to work in single-digit temperatures, bundle up young children, wade through snow drifts or, after the snow begins to melt, black pools of indeterminate depth on every street corner. Me, I like winter. Snow still feels rare and exciting to this former Southerner. I prefer sweaters to tank tops. You can always add more clothing, I say; you can only take so much off. And in the summer, you have to rely on window units for air conditioning. Newer models have timers, so you can set them to come on an hour before you think you’ll be home, giving them time to cool down the living room in preparation for your arrival. That’s if you remember to set the timer. Otherwise, you arrive home after walking all day, carrying two large bags of groceries over your shoulder and pushing a stroller, to an 86-degree interior. If you’re me, you strip down to a bra and underwear, and, if there is another person in the house, instruct that person not to touch or even talk to you for at least half an hour. (Side story: Michael and I got married in late May and went on our honeymoon to Mexico. One of the two locations we visited was an eco-friendly resort with no air conditioning. You also had to compost your toilet paper—romance! By the second night, it was so hot that I told him, while lying buck naked on the top of the sheets, that if he tried to do that thing we’d waited almost five years of dating to do, I’d hit him in the teeth with my Corona Light bottle.) During the winter I’m so happy to be back in my warm house that I hug whomever is there. It’s a world of difference.
My final plug for walking is going to get a little philosophical, but in a world where people feel increasingly isolated and alone, and where all of us are trying to curate what we consume to weed out unpleasantness, I find the necessity of being out in the world, face to face with people, helpful. Left to my own devices, I’d only talk to people I like—a circle that’s increasingly smaller and may consist only of my husband—and avoid what the Bible calls “the least of these”: poor people who need food, strangers who need to talk to you on the bus about their gout, those types. Being out and about in New York forces you to be in community with these folks, and, over time, that changes you. And by virtue of living so much of our lives outside or in public spaces, we are privy to other realities. We get different perspectives. Just today I watched a woman use a syringe the size of a clarinet to draw a pale, green liquid out of a mason jar and inject it into the feeding tube of her disabled daughter. I see strangers crying while walking around Michaels. I watch people pick up someone else’s shopping cart that’s stuck on the curb or help push a heavy wheelchair across an intersection. At a table next to me at Wh
ole Foods last week, an elderly white man and a young Asian woman played a board game that involved seven stacks of blank, royal blue cards, a pile of iridescent cubes the size of corn kernels in various metallic finishes, and cardboard disks that the man kept pulling out of a reusable plastic food container. It was bizarre and an absolute joy. There’s love, friendship, sorrow, and pain everywhere you turn around here.
My kids don’t really share my rose-colored outlook just yet. They complain about walking home from school as if I’m marching them with a bayonet through a den of snakes. (We pass Party City, a cupcake store, and at least two Italian ice carts on our way home, FYI.) They are even more annoyed when I spur them on with my favorite all-purpose, inspirational phrase, which works for a host of difficult situations, including a hot walk home: “God doesn’t promise you comfort!”
WHO SAYS I’M NOT A WARM AND FUZZY MOM?
I stand by it though. God promises us all kinds of great things—an open line of communication, an assurance that he has a plan even when it doesn’t seem like it—but he never said life wouldn’t be hard. If life feels incrementally harder, earlier, in New York because we are stripped of certain eases, like, ahem, central air conditioning, so be it. If we have to confront the brokenness of the world with our kids at an earlier age because we walk past homeless men and women or have a mentally disturbed individual flash us on our morning walk to day camp (true story), that’s okay with me. Life will get hard for every person, in every city, in some way, eventually. People say they feel close to God in nature, when they are sitting beside the ocean or at the foot of the mountains, and I completely understand that. I feel the same way. But I feel closer to God on the streets of New York, when my kids and I have to stand in an eternally long line for a bagel, or we get caught in the freezing rain trying to carry our Christmas tree home, and everyone is miserable. I feel close to God when life is hard, because I need him. Why would I wish that away all the time?
As for the other complaint I get from family and friends, that New York is expensive, there’s no good defense. It is. But less expensive than London and possibly San Francisco? And there are certain bargains, like manicures and pedicures, which are cheaper here because there’s a nail salon on every corner. I also save on lawn care, because I do not have to mow Central Park. (Here my mother will note that I pay high taxes for someone else to mow it, but . . . details.)
I’m going to let you in on a few math theories that I have. One is what I call New York Cultural Amenity Math. It’s the concept that having access to museums and Broadway shows somehow alleviates the astronomical cost of real estate, and it’s baloney. You hear chipper people say things like, “Sure, our three kids share a room, and no one has a college fund, but we can go to the Natural History Museum any time we want! That makes all the hassle worth it!” This is a lie. Don’t get me wrong, I love taking my children to the Met, and Hamilton was as good as everyone said it would be. But last time I checked, neither of those is free, and both are crowded. The amenities are like a garnish. A garnish isn’t dinner. You still have to pay for dinner.
My second math theory has to do with giving money away, and it goes like this: because New Yorkers are constantly dropping a couple of dollars here, a couple of dollars there—your child begs for a snack, and you pass a Nuts for Nuts stand, or the toddler is melting down, so you jump in a cab and pay thirteen dollars to get home—it’s no stretch to give a few bucks to someone on the street or buy him a slice of pizza. I’ve swiped my subway card many times for a struggling passerby who asked, because what’s another $2.75? It’s not just charity. Consider: New Yorkers never get separate checks at restaurants. New Yorkers split the bill, which is proven to be 97 percent more enjoyable than tallying up the partial cost of a communal dessert. So I pay a little more for my share. Who cares? I paid eight dollars for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—on brioche, but still—at a fancy bakery the other day simply because I was on the Upper East Side, and that’s what peanut butter costs in that neighborhood. This is where every member of my family, all of whom are very fiscally responsible, shake their heads and wonder how they’ll support me and my children when we go belly up. But in all seriousness, I believe being openhanded with cash is the Christian thing to do.
Whenever I am weak and start to think that having more money would cancel out some of the discomforts of living here, all I have to do is look around at the celebrities. Yes, I see them. All the time, actually. You know why? Because despite how rich they are, they still walk everywhere like the rest of us schlubs. There was a year where I saw Mark Ruffalo every other week; I think his kids went to school on the same block as James’s preschool. Joey McIntyre, New Kid on the Block, must live in my neighborhood, because I see him constantly. We once rode the subway together downtown. (Joey McIntyre, wealthy former teen idol, takes the subway.) Last week, Tony Danza walked past me outside my kids’ piano teacher’s building. The gift of seeing these famous people up close is that you realize God doesn’t promise them comfort, either, even with all of their good fortune. I’ve seen John Oliver snap at his son—but, like, the most charming snap, because of his accent—who was whining loudly about not being allowed ice cream from the truck in the park. Once, when I was sitting outside at a taco restaurant with my friend Catherine, Tina Fey walked by on her way to drop her daughter somewhere. (I only assume that fact because she walked back by us—daughter-less—about fifteen minutes later.) She looked disheveled and late and annoyed, although that might have been because Catherine, who has the least amount of chill around celebrities of anyone I’ve ever known, screamed her name. Both times. Suffice it to say, Tina looked like a woman who was frantically trying to get her kid somewhere on time before tackling a million other tasks in her afternoon. She looked like a mom.
Tony Danza was limping pretty severely.
That’s what I want to say when people comment on life being hard here. Life is hard everywhere. It’s hard for Tina Fey, who is Tina Fey. Maybe the nuisance is up in your face a little more in New York, but that can be a good thing. The more I remember that God doesn’t promise me comfort, the faster I can stop expecting it and feeling sorry for myself and get on with my day. I’m going to the Met, by the way.
TWENTY
THEY GOT LOST AND WERE NEVER SEEN AGAIN
MY FATHER DIED ON DECEMBER 23, 2019, of a stroke, sitting in the guest bed at my sister’s house in South Carolina, where he and my mom had arrived the day before, for Christmas.
By all accounts, I should have been prepared. I’d been preparing for it since I was eight.
It’s not that my father had a terminal illness he battled his entire adult life. He’d had some issues in the few years before his death, some episodes where he passed out unexpectedly, due to a heart condition, and he had Parkinson’s disease, which, in addition to the telltale tremors, had made his voice scratchy and thin, like he was constantly on the tail end of a cold. But he was certainly healthy in 1985, the year I began exploring death in earnest.
I blame him for my morbid tendencies. It was his doing that I asked so many questions about disease and maiming and alien abductions that might end with a space thing sucking your brains out with a straw. My mother liked to keep conversations pleasant. She was the beauty, the music, the light, the calm in our house. My dad would take the tail of a dead squirrel one of our cats would occasionally leave on the doorstep, tie a string to the bald nub on the end, and pull it around the house to drive the cats (and my mother) crazy. The entire time, he’d curl back his lips and suck air in sharply through the small space where he had a baby tooth he’d never lost, creating a hissing noise and looking a little like Jack Nicholson in promotional posters for The Shining.
Scary movies. That was another thing. My dad loved them—loved television in general—and saw no reason that his young daughters couldn’t enjoy them alongside him. So, at tender young ages, when we should have been watching Little House on the Prairie, my sister and I would be on the couch next to m
y dad, watching Attack of the Killer Tomatoes or Poltergeist or The Exorcist.
“Wait, wait,” he’d say, as I peeked through my fingers or hid under the glass-top coffee table. “Her head’s about to spin around! Look! There she goes!”
“Irvin! Turn that off,” my mother would say, walking through the den.
I was terrified but pretended not to be. My dad was downright gleeful at the sight of a small child in a nightgown, no older than I, being pulled across the kitchen floor by an unseen sinister force. It wasn’t real, it was camera tricks, he tried to explain to me. But even comical, Volkswagen-sized, man-eating tomatoes felt real to me in the solitary chill of my own bed, and I’d scramble to be near my dad again, climbing between him and my mother in their bed, light and comfort on one side, steely Jack Nicholson on the other.
. . .
Second grade was when I knew I was a writer. It started with my ability, which, at the time, felt like a superpower, of graduating from the single newsprint pages with pink and blue lines at the bottom, a blank square for illustrations at the top, to a real notebook. I felt my stamina surge, filling page after page with stories that included characters with exotic names, such as Caleb. I wrote about worlds I’ve never known: snowy farms in the middle of nowhere, families filled with all-male children. I tried to do what writers everywhere still do, which was order, organize, and make sense, through narrative, of things that feel too big—whether it’s unimaginable fear or overwhelming joy—to just carry around inside our heads all day.
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