Maynard and Jennica

Twenty-third Street. Twenty-eighth Street. Shadows and stiff air. The beautiful woman’s halo is vibrating in time to the trill of the emergency brake siren. Thirty-third Street. And just note the pointlessness of the place and time. Thirty-third Street? Ten twenty-five A.M.? In the midst of a primordial heat wave? At 10:25 A.M., 33rd Street—is harrowingly bland. It is nowhere.

But—33rd Street. The train pulls up to the platform, but the doors don’t open. And then, as was foreordained, the train stalls. The electricity weakens and dies, the lights dwindle and quit, the air conditioning expires. We, the passengers, are experiencing the subway as it was in the age of reptiles. The only things still functioning are the alarm on the emergency brake and the public address system, the latter of which the conductor is using to scold us. She is accusing someone of having pulled the emergency brake. “This train is going to be held in the station.” Apparently she is planning to go car to car, looking for the culprit.

Now, you can tell a lot from this conductor’s voice. She is black, young, and calm, but not necessarily always calm—you can hear the potential for impressive intemperance. “People, listen up. We have a brake situation, so you are going to have to be patient. Be patient, please.”

So we sit there and, without the air conditioning, commence to sweat, and we listen, in the darkness, to the whine of the emergency brake. Outside, growing restless, are all the damned souls on the platform at 33rd Street, waiting to get into the train, waiting to be pardoned and released into the cool interior of the 6 train, or rather, the ever-less-cool interior of the 6 train.

The woman with the beauty spots is sipping an iced coffee, at peace in her seat. She is wearing leather sandals, but her feet are enchantedly clean for someone who has been walking about Manhattan in weather hot enough to sublimate the concrete. Her hair is thick and wavy and blackish, pulled back under a knotted white handkerchief, a pristine handkerchief. Eyes closed, soft features, and two beauty marks on her right cheek. Maybe she is Spanish, or maybe Jewish. A sleeveless black shirt made out of something elastic-y, stained in the faintest half-moons of perspiration, right along the bottom of the armholes, which is very sexy, and billowy black linen pants. Sipping her iced coffee through a straw. No milk; she’s drinking it black. And the condensation is dripping onto her hands. She’s got a napkin, a bundle of paper napkins, that she’s using to mop the condensation from the side of her plastic iced-coffee cup and that she’s then holding against her forehead, so she can feel the coolness. Freckles on her shoulders.

Her seat is at the other end of the car, directly under the noisy emergency brake. And I—I see my opportunity. All I need is one teaspoon of courage, in order to do her the dignifi ed courtesy of shutting off that alarm.

JAMES CLEVELAND, age twelve, describes what Maynard looked like under the air-conditioning vent on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):

He was just some tall white guy dressed like an old man. Except he wasn’t old, as in old-old. But he had on old-man clothes, like one of those brown checkered jackets that looks like a tablecloth, and a white straw hat with a brown stripe around it, and a red tie with one of those silver clips to hold it to the shirt. He looked like the geezer who sits all on his own at church and who thinks he behaves better than everyone else and who stares at you and your sister to let you know it. And that was the thing with this white guy—he had a face like he was surprised at something. And when he raised his eyebrows, he had about five hundred and fifty-five wrinkles on his forehead. You know how they add extra lines in music for the high notes? His forehead was like music that has all kinds of notes that are going way, way, way too high.

Chief was like, “Son, he look like he just step in something nasty, son.”

And I said, “Son, you be saying son far too much, son.”

And Chief said, “Your mother be saying it too much. He got a face like something cold just touch his balls.”

But the point being is, ain’t nobody going to pay attention to you unless you make a problem for them. And Brittany and Juney and Shawna were trying to make a problem for the white guy, to see if Chief and me were scared enough to run away. So they got the guy’s attention, and then they flipped him off. And I think the reason they picked him was because of his face.

MAYNARD GOGARTY continues undeterred with the story of what happened on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):

So, now, out on the platform, waiting to get in, are five black kids, two boys and three girls, twelve or thirteen years old, and they are waving at me through the window. Or at least the girls are waving. Only twelve-year-olds could muster such brio in such heat. These three girls are absolutely—conjubilant. And bear in mind, these kids are perfectly the age to do something simultaneously adolescent and childish: go on a double date, yet wave at strangers on the other side of the glass. They have the look of cutting class—some infinitely tedious summer band camp, perhaps, since the boys have trumpet cases with them. They feel daring for skipping class, for being on a date, and so the girls are giving themselves courage and teasing their young escorts by waving at me. Well—! Naturally I wave back. Naturally I wipe my sweaty brow and wave back.

Which is when the girls show me—their ring fingers. If a twelve-year-old black girl shows you her middle fi nger, you know what it means; but what does it mean if she shows you—her ring finger? So, after a brief moment of racial disharmony in America, the three girls run away, up the platform, laughing. Their escorts watch them vacantly and then look at me vacantly. If you spend enough time as a teacher, especially if you are as subtle a disciplinarian as I am, then you develop a certain indifference to these things. I can see that the boys’ opinion of the three girls isn’t much higher than my own—and then I realize I have accumulated one teaspoon of romantic courage. So I put on my jacket, pick up my attaché, and stride down the subway car toward the woman with the beauty spots, determined to silence that jeering alarm.

Now. A digression on the nature and construction of the cars that run on the Lexington Avenue line. Redbirds, I think they may be called. Anyway, a digression:

At the front right and rear left of every redbird car are the emergency brakes, each of which consists of a little handle shaped like an upside-down letter T, dangling on a wire. The brakes aren’t very sturdy, apparently, because to prevent anyone from yanking one down accidentally, they are protected by metal covers, hefty boxes with hinges at the top that have to be lifted before you can gain access to the brake. If you lift the metal cover, an alarm goes off—or not an alarm so much as a high-pitched electric buzzing, a crude, piercing whistle. Nnneeennneee. It’s flat of A sharp. Nnneeennneee. The alarm doesn’t mean that the brake has been pulled—it means the cover has been lifted. A sharp bump in the tracks will sometimes jolt one of the covers open, setting off the emergency siren until some gallant and savvy rider—par exemple, moi!—has the mind to slap the brake cover back into place. End of digression.

So! I stride down to the emergency brake, and I draw to a stop in front of the beautiful woman. Her eyes are closed, but they flutter open when she hears my footsteps coming. I draw to an emphatic stop—and administer a single, decisive whap.

The alarm falls silent. The woman looks up. For one twinkle, I enjoy her pretty eyes. She is about to say something, presumably thanks, when a drop of sweat from my wrist falls onto her pristine white handkerchief. We both watch it fall together.

“Pardon me—I just meant to—ah.”

Because I am who I am, I had paused dramatically to demonstrate what I was doing. I had frozen in place with my arm next to the brake box, to show my gentlemanly intentions. So there is time, while I am stuttering my apology, for—a second drop of sweat to fall on her handkerchief. Gah! She gives me a crushing look—a look that means, in Manhattan, Stay away, you crazy—a dumbfounding look when delivered by a woman with two ideal beauty spots. It was as though I’d spat on her while asking her to spare me some change.

So I retreat. And I think to myself, as I retreat, What is this beautiful woman doing on an uptown No. 6 train at 33rd Street at 10:25 A.M.? But I retreat. I retreat, and I take a seat, and I sweat, and I straighten my hat, and I settle my defeated face into a frown. At which point, in a rage, looking for her culprit, enter the subway conductor.

JENNICA GREEN fails to explain what she was doing on an uptown No. 6 train at 33rd Street at 10:25 A.M. (early August 2000):

I was going to buy a six-hundred-dollar cat. Which, I know. But hear me out.

I live on the third story of a red brick walkup on Cark Street, in the West Village. You’ve seen these sorts of buildings. The kind with tiny black-and-white tiles on the floor of the entryway and coppery mailboxes. Where the copper has this gummy feeling from the scraps of glue left behind where the previous tenants have taped up and then torn off their names over the decades. With a narrow cinder-block stairway painted chocolate brown … like, Hershey-quality chocolate brown. I have a rear unit, with a view of the backs of some brownstones and their gardens and some ailanthus trees in the alleys, and with a fire escape leading down into the courtyard. Which supposedly makes my apartment ideal for burglary. I moved in, and my mother said … like, forget that the apartment is spacious and bright, and has parquet floors except in the kitchen and bathroom, and has some redeeming features even if it is too expensive … like, forget all that, what my mother said was:

“It sounds ideal for a burglar.” I said:

“That’s why I have renter’s insurance, Mom.” And my father was like:

“Those policies are a scam. And insurance can’t protect you from a determined rapist.” It’s like, Thanks, Dad, for reminding me.

Anyway, the six-hundred-dollar cat.

On Monday I got home. It was seven-thirty, about. And it was one of those dusks in July and August where the sky is thick and white, the color of a poached egg. I had walked home from the subway slowly, so that I could look at everyone in their heat-wave clothes, and when I got home, there in my copper mailbox, I recognized her handwriting immediately, was a letter from Nadine Hanamoto.

Nadine Hanamoto, who was my best friend in San Jose, California, in 1989, and who was my first cosmopolitan friend. And, okay, cosmopolitan in San Jose, California, in 1989 … so, cosmopolitan with caveats. But Nadine Hanamoto, who I haven’t heard from in I don’t know how long, and whose feelings I think maybe I unintentionally hurt. So I start reading her letter before I am even up the stairway as far as the first landing.

Dear Jenny,

She’s the only one who ever called me Jenny, so already it’s kind of poignant, right?

I’m sorry to send you such a possibly weird letter.

She said she called my parents to ask for my address. She was so happy and impressed that I was still surviving in New York City. What was my neighborhood like? What was my apartment like? Was it “illustrious”? The letter was handwritten in green ink, six pages long, and so I flipped through it, just assessing the volume of it. And on the back Nadine had drawn two blue-ink boxes around one green-ink paragraph, to make sure that one paragraph would catch my eye, if nothing else did.

George (that George) just bought an apartment in Manhattan, and he says he wants to meet you. He says he forgives you for standing him up in 1989. How hilarious if the two of you hit it off.

My parents apparently told Nadine I was single.

I’m reading this as I open my front door. And, I leave my air conditioner off while I’m at work, to conserve electricity, so when I walk in, my apartment feels like, whatever. Poached. But I put my bags down and sit on one of the barstools at my little rolling kitchen island, and I’m reading Nadine’s letter in the heat. So it’s absolutely silent in the apartment, no air conditioning, no television, no loom construction going on next door. Even my refrigerator, which is so huge and so poorly insulated that it spends twenty hours a day in the summer rattling its fan, just to keep my whatever, my mixed salad greens from wilting … even my refrigerator was quiet. So I’m reading in silence, and then there is this noise. Like, a burglar in my apartment.

MITCHELL and SUSAN GREEN discuss their daughter’s aspirations to illustriousness (early August 2000):

M: She was reading those particular books that high schools still think teenagers need to read, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and Great Expectations. And she came away with the lesson that we as a family had done something wrong that there wasn’t more intrigue in our lives. She read Madame Bovary, and the lesson she came away with was that Emma Bovary was a perfectly reasonable woman.

S: What she really enjoyed were all of those books by J.D. Salinger.

M: “The Greens are not illustrious.” There were about six months when that was her refrain, her constant refrain. She thought it would be romantic if there were invading armies we had to flee, or if we were …

S: She wanted to join the leisure class.

M: … or if we were winning a fortune shipping boatloads of spice on the high seas, or if the family was harboring an assassin, or if there was incest secretly afoot.

S: And there was incest afoot, on your side.

M: What, Simmy and Lala?

S: Well?

M: That was no secret. They bragged about it. My father’s parents were first cousins.

S: Jennica thought we led boring lives. What do you tell a sixteen-year-old? “Be grateful you live in peace and comfort”? And expect that to be the end of it? “Nothing interesting ever happens to us. All you and Dad ever did was go to college and buy a house and have us.” I told her she could say whatever she wanted to us, since we were her parents, but she shouldn’t just go around telling other people that she thought they led boring lives, because she would hurt someone’s feelings. She said, “At least hurting someone’s feelings would be interesting.” What do you say to that?

M: And it’s not as if our family is notable for its ordinariness. I mean, the stories your family has about the war?

S: Or that cousin of yours.

M: Cousin of mine?

S: In Israel, with the skin disease and the spa.

M: Oh, he is a freak. Robby, with his friends from EST.

S: Robby. Oh, he was awful. Those showers we had to use.

M: Nineteen eighty-one. Susan and I went to Israel and left the kids with Susan’s parents. We visited my cousin Robby at his spa, outside Haifa. These people, at the spa. They thought that magnetized mud would halt the spread of certain cancers. This kind of pathetic fantasy. People dying for their ignorance. Just losing weight and disassembling their minds out there in the desert. Talking in EST jargon about the chemotherapy conspiracy, over dinner in their communal cafeteria.

S: And what dinners. Quinoa with yeast sauce. Kelp salad.

M: Robby’s spa was macrobiotic. He served seaweed grown at some awful kibbutz somewhere that he wanted to take us to visit. The only Jewish socialist solar-powered aquaculture tanks in the world. In his converted Toyota pickup, he wanted to drive us halfway across Israel with his Russian girlfriend. Who was the worst of them all. A wraith of a woman, talking about Talmud and rising signs versus moon signs and Kabbalistic poetry. As if she’d only learned English from Robby himself.

S: Oh, I am so glad we got that ticket to Rome instead.

M: What a tragedy we left Gabe and Jennica behind. That trip would have taught her something about illustriousness.

S: We told her, my mother and her parents escaped Hitler, your father’s grandparents moved to the Bronx from Russia with nothing and worked in cigar factories and pencil factories, my father’s family has that whole fascinating side in Venezuela, the ranchers, and the one cousin in New Zealand. And she says, “It’s just you guys who are boring, it’s just my parents. The whole Green family is interesting except my parents.” What do you say to that? But you see what it is she likes about New York City.

M: And since when aren’t we interesting?

NADINE HANAMOTO weighs whether or not the Greens were illustrious (early August 2000):

I don’t think Jenny ever appreciated that she lived in a house where no one was insane. I mean, you’d go over to the Greens’, open their refrigerator …

My family’s refrigerator was, like, some gross, burned fried rice that my mom made, my dad’s beer, and some limp celery. You know ants-on-a-log? Where you fill a celery stalk with peanut butter and sprinkle it with raisins? If you made ants-on-alog at my family’s house, the celery would be the least crunchy part.

But you’d go over to the Greens’, open their huge new refrigerator, and in the condiments compartment, like: pickled herring, pickled grape leaves, four kinds of mustard, salsa de no-pales, anchovy paste, smoked Riga sprats, some jar fi lled with Susan Green’s homemade mayonnaise, every single possible variety of salad dressing. Susan Green’s homemade jams, with these labels that Gabe created with their dot-matrix printer. And that was just the condiments. In the meat drawer, all these white packages, deli wrapped: smoked salmon, Havarti, roast beef, head cheese, two different kinds of salami, a whole, real liverwurst, blood sausage, Gorgonzola, three kinds of Brie, deli pickles.

You open up their pantry doors: Nutella. Three kinds of rye bread, six different kinds of vinegar, and a complete Tupperware dream set filled with three kinds of rice and two kinds of sugar and four kinds of flour, and whole-wheat wagon-wheel pasta and tomato-infused fettuccine and spinach-infused spaghetti and a mountain of ramen. The Tupperware sales guy would open this pantry and stand tippy-toe with pride.

This is the Greens’ kitchen.

I’d be over there, and I would be pleading with Jenny to let me eat, but there was always some reason why we had to wait. I’d be like, “Please, just let me put some blue cheese on these Wheat Thins.” Jenny’d be like, “No, I think my mom is making Schmüchlblärchl tonight, so we should wait. You can have an olive maybe.” So I’m devouring the Greens’ olives, famished. Jenny’s eating nothing.

Susan Green would come in with a paper sack full of groceries. I’d be like, Why? Why? Why is she buying more? When there is this whole gorgeous picnic in the fridge? And Susan Green would be like, “Well, Nadine, you can have those olives if you want, but tonight I’m making Schmüchlblärchl.”

It didn’t matter what was for dinner, it was always worse than what was already in the fridge. Because Susan Green cooked some weird shit. Jenny and Gabe were totally brainwashed. Susan would be like, “You should stay for dinner, Nadine. Tonight we’re having the Apricot Dish.” And she’d be chopping apricots into a frying pan full of ground turkey sautéed in cumin. And Mitchell Green would come home from work and be like, “Smells like the Apricot Dish! Let’s put on La Traviata.” Then they’d all start arguing about which opera to listen to while eating the Apricot Dish. Gabe would say, “So long as there are no arias in a minor key, because minor keys inhibit digestion.” I’d be like, What are these people talking about? And Jenny would be saying, “The best thing with the Apricot Dish is the goat’s-milk yogurt.” And Mitchell would be like, “I agree,” and start burrowing through their fridge for the goat’s-milk yogurt.

Jenny and I would set the table. With napkins and napkin rings and wooden bowls for the salad. And then, at seven P.M. sharp, they’d all sit down together at this table for six. Susan, Mitchell, Jenny, Gabe, me, and one chair where they would balance all nineteen kinds of salad dressing they had brought out for Susan’s shiitake mushroom and red bean salad. And out would come the Schmüchlblärchl and the Apricot Dish and some mashed potatoes. They’d all be like, “Yum! The Apricot Dish!” I’d be like, Why? Why are we eating fried apricots and turkey with goat’s-milk yogurt? When there is deli meat right in the fridge? And rye bread in the breadbox? The Greens aren’t insane, like my family, so why, why must we suffer? Meanwhile, Mitchell would be like, “Nadine, this is an important aria. This is where Violetta declares the folly of love,” and he starts singing along. And I’d be making myself swallow the Schmüchlblärchl and thinking about the pastrami and the mustard.

At my house, dinner was at eleven P.M. My mom would burn some rice and eat it in front of the TV. Setting the table meant asking my sister to move over on the couch. My sister, who would be eating ants-on-a-log.

JENNICA GREEN again fails to explain what she was doing on an uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):

And here’s why I can’t explain it just like that: because I have to explain about California before I can explain about New York. Or, like, about San Jose before about Manhattan.

I mean, San Jose.

I am from San Jose, California. A city of never quite one million people. Well, city? Municipality. Sunny, and quiet, and always a little brisk at night, and the summers never humid. With lawns and lanes, all spread out sort of low, across the flats of this valley, the Santa Clara Valley. Where before I was born there were orchards.

And there was such a sense of shame about the orchards! The first mention by any of my teachers of, like, the deportation of San Jose’s Japantown in World War II? Junior year of high school. But the first mention of the annihilation of Santa Clara Valley’s orchards? Second grade, Ms. Rappe, Trace Elementary. We thought Ms. Rappe was mean, because she made us do multiplication a year early. And because she yelled at us sometimes. She had an allergy to chalk dust and so she used the dust-free kind, which was shinier and crumblier than regular chalk and which made that horrible noise on the chalkboard, but if we even peeped when her chalk inevitably scratched, she would yell at us. And she would yell at us if we called her Mrs. instead of Ms., like, “I learned your name, you should learn mine.” But despite all that, she still maintained some popularity because of her two Great Danes, these mammoth Great Danes that she would bring to school a few times a year and let the smallest kindergarteners ride like ponies during recess. For example, Nadine Hanamoto was tiny enough to get to ride Ms. Rappe’s Great Danes when we were in kindergarten, although she and I only became friends later, in the ninth grade, when we had English together. Anyway. Ms. Rappe was forever nostalgic about the orchards. Cherry and apricot and pear orchards. And, along the ridges of Santa Clara Valley, to the south and east, cattle ranches, on estates granted by the king of Spain. She was forever waxing sappy, and forever making us do coloring projects involving the Spanish missions and local fruits and fruit blossoms. She told us it was our civic duty to save the coastal redwoods because they were the last real trees left.

The history is, between the world wars, developers started cutting down the fruit trees in Santa Clara Valley and subdividing the orchards. So by the time I got to high school, in 1986, you could tell the age of the shade trees in San Jose by the age of the houses. Like, “That’s an Eichler from the fifties, so that maple must be in its thirties.” Eichler was this notorious developer, to be mentioned only with distaste. It was a point of ridiculous pride in my family that our house was built in 1924 and was in the Rose Garden District, which Eichler hardly touched. And that our house had wood-frame windows, not aluminum. And that instead of having a swimming pool in our backyard, we had cherry trees, and a cement fountain of a shepherd pulling a thorn from his foot that came from a 1920s Sears, Roebuck catalogue. I knew about all of this before I knew how to multiply, about Eichlers and wood-frame windows and fruit trees versus shade trees.