Maynard and Jennica

And if there was a big earthquake, I knew how to turn off the gas.

I mean, just, this atmosphere of desolation, in San Jose, as a teenager. In 1985, when I was thirteen, the City of San Jose started a redevelopment campaign, “San Jose Is Growing Up.” With a purple-and-pink logo that was the exact color combination I would have picked for my bat mitzvah if I’d had a bat mitzvah. The city planted these sycamores, these gangling sycamores, along 1st Street and San Carlos Avenue. And they proposed a new downtown convention center and a new downtown shopping concourse and a new downtown light-rail corridor. And the Fairmont built a twenty-story hotel on Market Street. It was San Jose’s tallest building. Twenty stories, salmon pink, with an open-air swimming pool on its fourth-floor patio. After the graduation ceremony from middle school, Herbert Hoover Middle School, the dare was to sneak into the Fairmont Hotel and go for a swim. Except no one would admit to knowing what county bus line would get us from our graduation ceremony at the Rose Garden over to Market Street, because familiarity with the county bus lines was shameful. So instead we all walked over to the Rosicrucian Museum, twenty or thirty of us, in our navy blue vinyl graduation gowns. And we kicked each other with the chlorinated water from the fountain surrounding the Rosicrucian statue of the hippopotamus god. And then we went home and felt exquisitely desolate and waited for high school to start.

This is San Jose. This is where I am from.

MITCHELL and SUSAN GREEN explain about the bat mitzvah (early August 2000):

M: She complained and complained, and we relented.

S: You relented. I never needed any convincing. She said, “I don’t believe in Torah, you don’t believe in Torah, what’s the point?” And I said, “Look, you’re missing the chance to have a big party and make some money.” She said, “I’ll get a job if I need money.” And I thought, What more can you ask from an eleven-year-old? Jennica is very sensible when she needs to be.

M: But can we say we would have let Gabe quit? Would we have let him, as a boy, at age eleven, drop out of his Hebrew classes? We tried very hard to be evenhanded, but would we have let Gabe quit?

S: Well, Gabe never complained, so it was never an issue. But Jennica hated those classes. And I can’t say I blame her. She never became friends with a single one of the girls at that synagogue. Nor did Gabe, I might add, with the boys. And, the mothers. These women were just so … Asking me wasn’t I anxious about keeping the kids in public school. Good riddance. I told Jennica, You may not marry any right-wing evangelicals; otherwise, as far as religion, do what you want to do.

M: It’s more than that. She should marry a Jew.

S: Mitchell has some opinions about this.

M: I don’t have some opinions, I have one opinion. Jennica should marry a Jew. I had the same opinion about Gabe, and his wife is Jewish. And it’s just my opinion. I’ll let the fiancé know my opinion, and then I’ll keep my mouth shut.

S: And Jennica did get a job, when she finally did need money. Not just in college, but very early on in high school. She wanted to join the Los Gatos Rowing Club, but Mitchell put his foot down about the fees, which were very high. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars, to join a rowing club. So Jennica got a job at Yogurt U.S.A. and paid her own way for three years. Because she wanted to be on a rowing team.

M: She said that there was no point in being Jewish in California. Remember this? “Why won’t the Green family admit that there is no point in being Jewish in California? We aren’t wandering in the desert.” And then she joins a rowing club.

JENNICA GREEN succumbs to nostalgia; the uptown No. 6 train, forget it (early August 2000):

All of which is background for why it was so … poignant to get a letter from Nadine about her brother.

I said Nadine was cosmopolitan. Which … fine, caveats … but sophistication is always relative. What I mean is, by the time Nadine and I became close, in high school, she had tastes and some opinions. She was nearly through with her parents and was buying herself a used car, with her own savings, she said. And she was making her own arrangements with a city, on terms she seemed to be negotiating for herself. Which was impressive to me. It was like she was the sole proprietor of her own flea market. All these curiosities, these five-and-dime thrills. She would always be chewing on hard candies with indecipherable Asian wrappers. Licorice? Sesame? Taffy from, like, Korea? Or Thailand? She wouldn’t tell me unless I put one in my mouth. She bought them at Vietnamese and Salvadoran groceries, and she wore such a straight face as she defied me to eat them that I would laugh until I choked, practically, out of anxiety about how rancid they would taste. Her car radio was incessantly tuned to this one schizophrenic station, KFJC, that never played any song you knew, so riding in her car there was always some unrecognizable noise happening in the background. I would be like:

“Who listens to this?” And Nadine would be indignant:

“Who cares who listens to it? The point of music isn’t to be able to tell other people that you listen to the same things they do.”

“The point of music also isn’t to be able to tell other people that you don’t listen to what they do.”

“How about the point of music is enjoying yourself?”

“How about I only enjoy myself if I actually recognize what’s playing once in a while?”

“So listen to KFJC more often.”

When she was fourteen, Nadine had lied about her age and gotten a job at a Subway Sandwich, so that by the time we were sixteen, when I was earning $4.25 at the yogurt place, Nadine was already working at the artsy movie house in Los Gatos for, like, $6.85 an hour, which seemed like a fortune in 1988. But which in retrospect … it should have been obvious that Nadine’s finances didn’t really make sense.

She shopped secondhand, of course, which was a revelation to me. I mean, how did she know about the Salvation Army in Redwood City? I guess it was a revelation to me in general, how much one could know about a city. Every Goodwill or Savers in Santa Clara Valley, Nadine had been there and knew what they had. Nadine was the first one to start wearing vintage T-shirts. Like, faded blue, child-sized Garfield T-shirts. She squeezed into them by cutting off the collars. This one Garfield shirt that she wore, when my brother saw it, he was like:

“Garfield?” And Nadine said:

“Garfield’s cool.” And my brother was bewildered. He couldn’t tell if she was kidding. And then there was Nadine’s Peugeot.

GABRIEL GREEN tells us about Nadine’s Peugeot (early August 2000):

I have these conversations with my sister that I don’t have with anyone else. And one theory is that it’s because she’s my sister, but another theory is that it’s because in Santa Cruz I don’t meet a lot of people who lead the kind of life Jennica leads in New York City.

Take how Jennica eats.

Rachel and I have visited Jennica in Greenwich Village a couple times, and there are definitely some pretty good grocery stores near her, but the food is so expensive. Five dollars for a pint of supposedly organic strawberries. Two-fifty for one bunch of kale, and they don’t even have lacinato kale out there, or purple kale, or rainbow chard, or even red Swiss chard, so Jennica’s basically eating monoculture greens. She buys “mixed salad greens” for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get this stuff home, which is only two blocks away from the grocery store, Jennica throws all of it into plastic bags. There is a husk on her corn, corn that Jennica’s store sells in April … there is a rind on her grapefruit, grapefruit that gets flown in from Florida … but still, Jennica puts the corn and the citrus into plastic bags. Her supposedly organic red peppers, which cost six dollars a pound, come in a foam tray under shrinkwrap, but she puts them in a plastic bag. And then the checkout girl puts all of Jennica’s little plastic parcels into two or three more big white plastic bags, and then Jennica walks the two blocks home, where she unpacks all the bags and then throws them in the same trash bin where her corn-husks and citrus rinds go, because they don’t do compost in New York City.

The last time we were out there, Rachel and I gave Jennica a whole set of hemp shopping nets as a present, to use instead of plastic bags. Jennica was like, “They won’t let me use these! Not in New York!” Instead she hung the nets up on her bedroom doorknob, and now she uses them to dry out her dirty gym clothes.

I mean, Jennica drinks her water from a so-called water purifier. Which means that she only drinks water that has been sitting for hours on end in a plastic Brita jug. I told her that New York City has the best drinking water in the country, except maybe for water from rain-catchment devices, and what she said was, “Obviously I know that, Gabe. But you can’t trust the pipes in old buildings.” What she really meant was, “Everyone I know drinks their water from a Brita water purifier.” So yes, Jennica buys her organic fair-trade coffee, but when she makes it, she makes it in a drip machine, with Brita water, with a plastic cone, and with a reusable nylon filter, so she’s basically pouring boiling hot plastic water through a membrane of plastic and then ingesting it straight.

Not that the consumption of plastic polymers that mimic human hormones necessarily will play the same role in modern America that lead poisoning played in ancient Rome, or necessarily contributes to infertility or dementia. But it’s possible. I’m only saying it’s possible. So that is another theory about Jennica’s phone calls: dementia.

Anyway. Jennica will call me up. It will be four-fifteen in the afternoon for me, but in New York City it’s seven-fi fteen, so Jennica will be walking home, and she’ll be all perky and needy. But in California, I’m still at work, and in my IT Department, four-fifteen is the catatonic hour. I’ll be like:

“Beh.” And perky Jennica will be all:

“Gabe, I need you to tell me everything you can remember about George Hanamoto.”

And then it’s my job to tell her everything I can remember about George Hanamoto. We don’t talk about Rachel, or the baby, or the latest ridiculous thing that Mom and Dad said about the fact that Rachel and I are having a baby, or anything else; we have to talk about George Hanamoto. What I remember about George Hanamoto is pretty much nothing, except the fi stfi ght with Old Man Bersen on the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Jennica’s on her cell phone, walking through New York City. In the background, what I’m hearing is sirens and screaming people and drivers leaning on their horns and trucks with no suspension hitting potholes and motorcycles without muffl ers. It sounds basically like Jennica is walking through rush hour in the apocalypse, but what she wants to talk about is George Hanamoto. Or, like, my phone will ring:

“Beh.”

“Gabe, I need you to do that voice that Nadine Hanamoto used to do with her Peugeot.”

When we were in high school, Nadine had this Peugeot, some mid-seventies model. It was a loud car, and when Nadine drove it, she would always be coaxing it along, like, “Oh, you want to be in third gear, don’t you? You want to know why I won’t take you out of second, don’t you? Oh, poor baby. You wish Mommy would give you the unleaded gasoline, but Mommy can only afford the regular. Let Mommy put you into third. Yes, yes.”

Jennica hated the voice, because she couldn’t do it right, which became a joke in itself. But now, ten years later, Jennica suddenly wants to hear me do the voice. It’s as if she can’t cross the street in New York without thinking about California. Where is all this nostalgia coming from? And yes, one theory is that all siblings have these conversations with each other, but another theory is that Jennica just isn’t happy in New York City.

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

About the letter from Nadine.

Nadine’s father was Japanese and her mother was Mexican. Which is fascinating, come to think of it, but which I hardly thought about at the time; at most, I envied how exotic Nadine looked. Her father was hardly around, but Nadine’s mother, Perla Hanamoto, was always there, and always formidable, with huge reserves of energy to direct against Nadine. Unless she was making the effort to smile, Perla had these deep lines from her nose down to the corners of her lips, the lines of discontent. Whenever I went over to their house … this ranch-style house with aluminum windows, at the border of Willow Glen … she always interrogated me about my academic plans, as a way to needle Nadine. Was I planning on graduating with my class or taking the equivalency exams to graduate early, like Nadine? Was I going to a university or to a community college, like Nadine? Was I going to Junior Prom or was I skipping, like Nadine? She would open the door to Nadine’s bedroom, her boxy, eastern bazaar of a bedroom, to nag Nadine about something, and Nadine would just say:

“Later, Mom, okay? Bye.”

That was alien to me, that refusal to engage your parents. But Perla Hanamoto certainly loomed judgmentally enough around that house, and Nadine’s older sister, Theresa, was their mother’s, like, deputy.

And, Theresa and Nadine. Really, they were the funniest people I had ever met. It’s hard to explain, but when they got going with each other? Like, Theresa would come into Nadine’s bedroom because, whatever, their mother was angry with them about the refrigerator. And Theresa would have a plastic takeout box with her, holding it like clinical evidence. She’d kick herself a path through the Salvation Army sheets that Nadine had hung from her ceiling and whatever random mannequin parts Nadine had lying around her floor, in order to get to Nadine’s bed to confront Nadine with the takeout box.

“Nadi, regarding this specimen from the fridge.” And Nadine would be like:

“I said I’m going to eat it.”

“Right. You said that … last week.”

And I would recognize the box. It would be from a month before … some enchilada from El Cacique, which was Nadine’s favorite taqueria. Theresa would be like:

“Nadi, when I asked you about this specimen of enchilada last week, I figured you knew about … the mold. I told myself, Nadi’s not squeamish, she’ll scrape the mold away. I fi gured, Nadi is tough enough.” And Nadine would say:

“Would you just shut up and put it back in the fridge? Because the longer it stays out, the faster it will go bad.” And Theresa, like, pressing ahead:

“So, Nadi. Last week the mold was only on the left, on top of the rice. Now I observe three kinds of mold, all of which have spread from the moist lower regions where the rice was to this large lump in the middle, which I believe to have once been an enchilada. I am going to attempt to lift the lump.” She’d be, like, prodding the enchilada with the handle of a fork and making a face. “I have successfully lifted the lump. And my question is, Nadi, have you smelled this? Are you … tough enough?” Like, pressing the tray in Nadine’s face. And, Nadine would fi x her face against the odor and say:

“I’m totally going to eat that.”

Which, maybe you had to be there.

And then there was their brother, George. The oldest sibling. Who had been gone for ten years. He had run away to San Francisco when he was fifteen or sixteen, and he was never mentioned. And the day his name finally came up was the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake.

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

Enter the subway conductor.

She is young, black, with one of those tight, heavy MTA uniforms on. She is a buxom conductor, but her uniform has compressed her chest into a flat breastwork of civic authority. And—the redbird trains are designed such that the conductor has to hustle back and forth from one car to another, depending on whether the train has pulled up to an express platform or a local platform. I mention this because apparently we were in the car that the conductor used as her headquarters at express stops, so the fact that the conductor was investigating our car implied that she had already searched one entire half of the train looking for her culprit, the entire down-track half of the train, and had found nothing.

So! Enter the subway conductor. Those doors between subway cars are always hard to get apart, but she just thrusts them wide with one wrist and shouts at the whole carload of us, “Anyone here touch the brake?”

The woman with the beauty spots—looks at me. She wants to verify that I will confess that I did in fact close the cover of the emergency brake. I realize that either I turn myself in or I will be denounced. So as the conductor is hurrying past, I say, “Madam? The cover on that brake there? It was open, and so I shut it.”

The conductor looks at me with—wrath!

“You touched the brake.”

“No. The cover was open. The little metal box, the cover. I shut that.”

“You touched the brake.”

“No. This was after the train had stalled. I shut the cover. Because the alarm was sounding.”

“The alarm was going off,” she said with disgust, “so you decided to touch the brake.”

So then—then! She turns away from me and reopens the box over the brake.

What the EMERGENCY BRAKE has to say for itself (early August 2000):

Meee!

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

The conductor pretends to inspect the brake, but—what is there to inspect? The woman with the beauty spots just sits there, underneath the conductor, eyes shut, wishing for her privacy back, until finally the conductor gives up, turns to me, and asks, “You think maybe the alarm was going off for a reason? Like something is wrong and you shouldn’t be touching the brake?”

She hasn’t properly shut the cover, so the alarm is still bleating at us. But she leaves it bleating and unlocks the closet in our subway car, her little closet for the express stops, and she goes inside, saying, “I am not done with you.”

“But I did nothing wrong.”

“I’m telling you, I am not done with you.”

At first she is tinkering with some of the controls, shouting with the motorman over a telephone. But then—the lights and air conditioning come back to life. She leaves the closet, leaves our car, and then the side doors spring apart and 33rd Street heaves its flames into the subway car.

Over the hoarse public address system comes her voice: “Thirty-third Street. Grand Central next. Stand clear the doors.”

In her voice I can hear, she is not done with me. But as I am awaiting my trial, the two black boys—who knows where the three girls were hiding themselves—the two black boys with the trumpet cases board the subway car. One of them is chubby, the other one is skinny. They sit down not far from me, open up their trumpet cases, and begin admiring each other’s graffiti pens. That is what they were toting in their trumpet cases—vandal-sized permanent markers.

JAMES CLEVELAND talks television (early August 2000):

Brittany and Juney and Shawna flipped off the white guy. I said, “Why you all trying to get us in trouble?”

And Chief said, “You a coward, son?”

I hated that, because it was like he was trying to prove something that didn’t need to be proved. But when the subway doors fi nally opened, Brittany and Juney and Shawna ran to get on a different car, and so it was only me and Chief that got on board the same car with the white guy. And Chief was talking all loud, like, “I’a fucking show you, son, I’a fucking show you.” He was talking loud, and I couldn’t tell whether Chief was scared or not, which I also hated. He was saying, “Son, it is fucking hot in here.”

And yeah, it was hot on the subway. My jeans were like they just came out of the drier. And the white guy, when we got on, he was right there, like he was on safari, in his mad layers of clothes. I saw this show on thirteen about the Sahara. “Funding was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” It was about slaves in the salt mines and Timbuktu and camel caravans and all that. The nomads keep cool by wearing lots and lots of layers of clothes. And that was what it looked like the white guy was trying to do with his mad layers. But it is bullshit about layers being cool, because the white guy had a whole Congo River of sweat coming down his face. That was probably what the cold thing was that touched his balls—it was probably sweat.

The only seats were right next to the white guy. So that was where me and Chief sat, right next to the white guy. And Chief, he was trying to show off he wasn’t scared, so he opened his case and took out the pens. And he whispered, “Who the coward, son?”

Everybody was looking at us, so I tried to look normal, like, “Ain’t nothing to see here, folks.” Pretending the pens weren’t nothing special at all. But I was holding the pen in my hand, and the train conductor walked right in.

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

The doors close on 33rd. The train leaves the station like a dog on a leash—lingering behind to sniff the stains on the platform, then jolting ahead, down the tunnel, already smelling the urine of Grand Central. And I, like the rest of the train car, am gawking at these boys and their pens, and their—bravado in displaying them. They are, I believe, quite illegal under Mayor Giuliani.

Reenter the conductor, to execute me right there on the linoleum floor of the uptown No. 6 train with her MTA-issue revolver. She is sturdy-footed, quite obviously used to riding in trains without holding on. She straightens her uniform with a tug at the belt—as if anything that tight could really become displaced—and seeing her, the chubby boy claps his trumpet case shut and the skinny kid shoves the pen he’s holding between his legs.

YVETTE BENITEZ-BIRCH, the conductor, quotes her brief lecture (early August 2000):

Jonas was the motorman, and he found the problem up front. It was just a brake in the third car, and so once Jonas found it, we were back up and running. Whatever that gentleman had done, that condescending gentleman in the white straw hat, it wasn’t responsible for stopping the train. But there was something about him that made me think he needed a talking-to.

I told him, “Mister, I don’t know where you’re from. Maybe where you’re from they let you touch the emergency brake. But here in New York City, we ask our customers not to touch the emergency brake. Understand?”

He said, “But madam! I am from New York City.”

I told him, “If you are from New York City, then you should know not to touch the brake.”

He said, “But touching the brake is exactly what I didn’t do.”

I was thinking, I do not have time for this—I do not have time to be called “madam.” But there were two little boys sitting there, and one of them said, “Hey lady, he lying.”

I thought, Now why would this skinny little boy call the man in the white straw hat a liar? I knew the man in the hat hadn’t pulled the brake, but like I said, there was something about him that I did not like. I thought, Let’s see what the boy has to say.

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