Fourth Comings (5 page)

twelve

I
gave up and got up. I pressed an ear to our bedroom door, listening for signs of life. When I didn’t hear anything, I opened the door a crack and listened again. I determined that my housemates were either still asleep or not on the premises, so I tiptoed toward the kitchen, stupidly shushing the loose planks in the wood floor that creaked under my weight.

I leaned against the linoleum countertop, content that the only sound inside the apartment was the slurpy gurgle of the coffeemaker. I said my morning prayer:
Don’t let them come until I finish my first cup.
Despite the rarity of such moments of solitude, I love my apartment. And not just because I thought my post-graduation mailing address would read something like: Jessica Darling, Kitchen-Aid Refrigerator Box, Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215.

I am extremely fortunate to live in one of two bedrooms in an actual apartment with real (i.e., not cardboard) walls, located in the basement of a gorgeous brownstone. It’s rent-stabilized and usually rented by an academic family whose matriarch is currently on a one-year sabbatical in Europe. And it even comes equipped with a colorful landlord character, Ursula, a fortysomething half-Swede, half-German former fashion model who considers it her lot in life to point out Americans’ many flaws in vivid prose. For example, when I delivered the rent check the other afternoon, Ursula informed me that my eyebrows were all wrong. Besides plucking a few strays here and there, I’ve never given much thought to my eyebrows. But I dropped my head in wait for the wisdom Ursula could wield like a guillotine.

“Zey are like two desperate sperm trying to impregnate your eyeballs!”

The blond giantess turned on her boot heel and pounded up the stairs. I retrieved my head and carried it back down to the basement.

Maybe I’ve got a bad case of Stockholm syndrome, but I’m captivated by Ursula’s cruel humor. I’m not surprised that you feel differently. When you were targeted by one of her insights/insults (something about dreadlocks and cockroaches?), you referred to Ursula as “Jotun.”

“What?”

“Jotun. A fearsome Norse demigod, like those that suffer in the Asura realm in Buddhist culture.”

I had no idea what you were talking about. But you had my rapt attention, as you always did whenever your sentences consisted of more than a three-word subject-verb-object construction.

“They mean well, but always do more harm than good.”

I saw your point, then and now. Even when Ursula is on to something—and in the case of my eyebrows, I have noticed a certain spermy resemblance—her methods hurt more than they help. Still, I just can’t help but love someone who could say something like that.

(How about you? Could you love someone who would say something like that? Oh, that’s right. Whether you like it or not—and that’s not even a question, now, is it?—you already do.)

thirteen

K
nowing it won’t last forever enhances our apartment’s many pleasures. (I’m doing a commendable job of not worrying about finding a new place in exactly nine months and twenty-eight days.) Hope and I confirmed the first and best of said pleasures last spring as we sat on the front stoop waiting for our prospective housemates to arrive, before we had even set foot inside.

“According to this historical marker,” Hope said, examining a small bronze plaque affixed to the front door, “this building really was home to the Swedish American Men’s Sporting Society, more commonly known as S.A.M.S.S.”

“SAMSS,” I pronounced. “More familiarly known as Sammy.”

Within thirty seconds, even before we had crossed the threshold, Hope and I had already invented a nickname for our future home. Though Hope and I had never before given much though to Sweden or its fine people, we were entranced by the prospect of living where muscle-bound Brooklyn Vikings once worked themselves into a sweat.

“Do you think Ursula is really serious about the fifty-percent rule?” Hope asked. “Will I be quizzed on all things Swedish?”

The academic family has been officially on the lease for fifteen years—and they still are. Ursula could have terminated their contract when they left for sabbatical in Europe, and made some minor renovations to jack up the rent to its ridiculously high market value. But Ursula, despite her hostile exterior, does have a heart. She’s loyal to her renters, and sort of sees their family as an extension of her own, so she agreed to sublet the apartment for the next year under one strange condition: Fifty percent of the occupants had to come from Swedish stock. Apparently, such pro-Scandinavian discrimination isn’t considered xenophobic when it’s in the name of historical preservation and rent stabilization. It’s one of those strange New York stories that I would never believe if I were not personally involved.

I spun around. “Quick! Who’s your favorite Swede?”

“Hmm,” Hope said, giving the question its due consideration. “A toss-up between Ingmar Bergman and Astrid Lindgren.”

“Oh.” I knew Bergman, of course, having studied his suicidal black-and-white films for a fun fun fun seminar titled “Cinematic Expressions of Existential Crisis.” I had no clue who Astrid Lindgren was. I’d find out later that Astrid Lindgren was the author of the Pippi Longstocking books. I never read them, but Hope loved them as a kid, mostly because she and the titular character are both redheads. At the time I didn’t get the chance to ask about Astrid because Hope had already volleyed the question right back at me.

“Who is
your
favorite Swede?”

“I’m not the one representin’ Scandinavia,” I said. “I’m gonna bigup to all my Anglo-Scotch-Irish boo-boos in the UK!”

“Holla,” Hope said like the honky she is.

“Favorite Swede,” I mused, tapping my finger to my temple. “Favorite Swede…There’s just so many to choose from.” Then after a moment I snapped my fingers. “I got it!”

“Who?”

(Do you, Marcus, know my favorite Swede? Take a guess. Don’t peek. I’ll start on a fresh page to keep up the suspense.)

fourteen

“T
he Swedish Chef.”

(Did you get it right? Or did you guess another Swede? Did you guess Max Martin? Max Martin was the mastermind behind the catchiest late-nineties teen pop. He wrote contagious hits for all the boy bands: *NSYNC, Hum-V, and yes, the Backstreet Boys. “Quit Playing Games with My Heart.” “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely.” “I Want It That Way.” We all owe a great debt to Max Martin for these audio viruses and so many more. You were wearing a Backstreet Boys T-shirt outside the principal’s office when you drawled Jess Darlin’. I think you were wearing that T-shirt, or that’s how I remember it. If you were to ask me to name my favorite Swede, I would say Max Martin because you used to come to school with Kevin, Nick, A.J., B-Rok, and Howie D. on your chest.

You were wearing T-shirts ironically before anyone in our high school even realized that one could wear clothing ironically. I was alone in my appreciation of the joke. Yes, for you my answer would have been Max Martin. But you’re not the one who asked.)

For the next few minutes Hope and I tested the limits of childishness by singsonging nonsense like the cleaver-welding Swede from
The Muppet Show.

“Yorn desh bern, dor reett dor geet der du,”
sang Hope.

“Urn deesh, dee bern deesh, dee urr,”
sang I.

“Bork! Bork! Bork!”
we sang together.

“
Sprangten unga teem der muken
Swedish pancakes?” I asked.

“
Der muken
Swedish pancakes?” Hope asked.

And then I reminded her, in English, about the Swedish pancakes her mother used to make whenever I slept over her house.

“My mother never made Swedish pancakes.”

“Yes she did! They were sort of like crepes. Thin and golden brown with crispy edges. And she would dust them with confectioners’ sugar—”

And then I suddenly stopped myself. Hope’s older brother used to snort sugar off our pancakes with a curly straw, flinging his rangy frame around the kitchen, banging his body into countertops and appliances in imitation of a crazed, coked-up
SNL
cast member. Six months after the last time I remember him doing this routine, Heath was dead from mainlining a bad batch of heroin. Had it been insensitive for me to so casually mention the sugar? Did the memory of her dead eighteen-year-old brother leap to Hope’s mind at the time? Of course, it’s too late to undo a conversation from four months ago.

And if the memory had stung, she didn’t let on. She stopped humming “Dancing Queen” only long enough to correct my mistake.

“My mother made German pancakes.”

She was perched on the bottom step like a frog on a lily pad, her long legs bent and splayed out wide as she hunched over the ever-present sketchbook resting between her feet. Her hand never stopped moving, her eyes didn’t lift from the half-finished sketch of a homemade rain-smeared sign taped to the nearest corner stoplight. In the sketch, as on the sign that inspired it, the central image was blurred beyond recognition. Only one word was legible:
LOST.

“Really?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

“
Ja,
” she replied.

“How are German pancakes different from Swedish pancakes?”

“I have no idea,” she replied, tapping her pencil. “Maybe they don’t have as many sex partners?”

“And they’re really bureaucratic….”

Memory is a strange thing. I distinctly remembered those pancakes as being Swedish. Why would my mind randomly swap Swedish for German? After we discovered that our landlord was, in fact, Swedish-German, there was a brief, embarrassing moment where I thought my memory slip might really be evidence of an underdeveloped form of ESP. And then I literally smacked myself on the forehead for being suckered into one of the human brain’s most common contrivances, one that gives deep significance to mere coincidence.

“I think that if we get to live here, we need to be more respectful of the many contributions the Swedes have made to our culture,” I said seriously.

“We will sing ‘Dancing Queen’ and other ABBA songs,” Hope suggested.

“And Ace of Base….”

“And we will eat many Swedish fish….”

And so it went. The apartment had already become a part of our history.

Instant inside jokes were reason alone for renting the place, even before we found out that our basement apartment had served as the
bowling alley
for the Swedish American Men’s Sporting Society, which explains why it’s very long and very thin. And also very dark, since Swedes are genetically accustomed to getting little sunlight.

Sammy comes completely if unimaginatively furnished by the Swedish geniuses from IKEA. Behold our overstuffed Olga couch with the celery green Fjeliin slipcover! Our Nökskaagen steamer trunk/coffee table and stainless-steel Måkdorrpvat bookshelves! And Sammy boasts a washer and dryer stacked on top of each other and located in the bathroom in what would normally serve as a linen closet. I don’t have to subject myself to the indignity of dragging my dirty duffels to the Laundromat! Imagine! Who knew such luxuries could be afforded to someone so desperately in debt?

The only possible downside to our apartment is the neighborhood. In this overwhelming, real-estate-obsessed metropolis, you are your neighborhood. People make instantaneous assumptions about who you are based solely on your address. Everyone does it. It’s a necessity in this city of eight million, an instant ID badge that defines you as a member of a more select community among the masses teeming in anonymity.

It reminds me of what I’ve heard about huge public universities, where first-year students feel pressured to rush a fraternity or sorority because it’s the easiest way to develop an on-campus identity. (Well, easy if you don’t mind consuming grapes that have fallen out of your pledge brother’s ass crack.) You get a bid from Sigma Whatever and everyone knows that you’re an alcoholic jockstrap. You pledge Kappa Kappa Fill-in-the-Blank and everyone knows you’re a rich girl whose inbred equine features kept her out of the sorority for rich
hot
girls.

The same holds true here in the city. What’s more, we all go around preaching our allegiance wearing the post-college equivalent to Greek letters (Gawker T-shirt, YSL ski goggle sunglasses) and pledge pins (skull pendant, Tiffany solitaire).

Some quick and totally subjective free association:

UPPER EAST SIDE=ARISTOCRATIC

UPPER WEST SIDE=ACADEMIC

LOWER EAST SIDE=ADDICTED

These are totally biased observations, of course. Certainly there are welfare moms on the UES, college dropouts on the UWS, and triathletes on the LES. (Then again, maybe not.) I should really make a better effort not to stereotype, especially since I fall victim to such casual assumptions. We happen to live in a very desirable neighborhood, but not one that comes close to accurately reflecting who we are, because:

PARK SLOPE=BREEDERS

Yes, the Slope is known for having more sidewalk-hogging sancti-mommies than any other neighborhood in all five boroughs. Whether this is really true, I don’t really know. It seems to me that annoying mommies are hardly limited to the confines of Fourth Avenue, Prospect Park West, Flatbush Avenue, and Fifteenth Street. Still, Ursula has lived here for twenty years, and often waxes nostalgic about the good old days, when “zere were more dykes den tykes.”

The Park Slope Mommy is a peculiar, oft-ridiculed mommy, one who is stereotyped as both crunchy
and
uppity. Oh woe to the straggler who stands between her double-wide Urban Mountain Buggy and the seminar on sustainable permaculture at the Food Co-op. And when it’s a dozen Maclarens deep at Tea Lounge, do not even think about apologizing if you accidentally brush an elbow up against the shrieking red bundle slung across her body. The Park Slope Mommy will mow you down and Croc-stomp your ass, because
Park Slope Mommies don’t play.
(Seriously. They don’t. They engage their children in “multidisciplinary explorative colloquia.”)

Again, I don’t know how much of this is really true. But childless singles like myself swap PSM stories all the time. Creating these urban legends is a big part of this neighborhood’s appeal because New Yorkers just love to one-up one another in their tales of metropolitan woe.

In that vein, I get a lot of mileage out of the fact that I’m sharing a bedroom for the first time in my life, and bunk-bed style at that. But at least I’ve got the bottom bunk, and the top bunk is Hope’s. And really, at only $550 a month, all grievances are moot. Considering my income-to-debt ratio, I’m lucky to be living anywhere at all, let alone in relative comfort in one of the more desirable neighborhoods in one of the acceptable outer boroughs. I love this apartment so much that it almost didn’t bother me at all when I heard the biggest drawback to living here unlocking the front-door dead bolt before I was even halfway through my first cup of coffee this morning, my silent prayer unanswered.

“Good morning,” said the biggest drawback as she half-walked, half-shuffled toward me with a weary grimace, as if she resented the very idea of complying to the laws of gravity, of actually having to
lift her limbs
off the ground.

“Good morning. Uh. Manda.”