I Totally Meant to Do That (11 page)

“Yeah you are. And you know what? One day you’re gonna explode,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Everyone has a breaking point,” he persisted. “Everyone in New York will eventually break. And so will you. One day you’re gonna pop and go all Bernie Goetz on someone.”

Bernie Goetz? As in, the “Subway Vigilante,” who shot four thugs on a 2 train? Now it was my turn to say, “Typical!” (But, of course, I didn’t.) Why do New Yorkers love to romanticize violence? I’m surprised we haven’t erected a statue of Travis Bickle next to Lady Liberty. To me, the nuts with guns are the aberration in New York. But, then, obviously I want to believe that—for the same reason I accused Jake of wanting to believe they’re the norm. Labeling them perverted helps me justify my yellow-bellied nature.

Which is why the notion that I might emulate Goetz was preposterous. When I’m pushed against a wall, I don’t shoot; I try to blend in with the paint. These boots are made for running, and possibly leaving behind cinnamon-flavored candy as a gift.

At the same time, though, I do have friends in New York—reasonable, polite Southerners—who
have
gone all Goetz, who somehow crossed over. I know because, so shocked were they by the incidents, they talked. Carter, from Greensboro, North Carolina, hawked a loogie on a taxicab when it cut him off in the street. Tiffany, from Charlotte, told a group of teenagers on the subway to “Shut up!” And Abbie, also from Charlotte, once confessed that, after being struck in the face by the briefcase of a man running up the stairs, she turned and screamed, “Fuck you!” Each story was followed by something along the lines of, “I don’t know where it came from” or “I’d never done anything like it before.”

So, terror upon terror, what if one day I flip out on some poor girl reading a book while she crosses the street? If so, does that mean
I’ll also be fat and unattractive? Plus, if Jake is right about that, is he also right that that’s when I become a New Yorker? And if that’s the case, then where the hell had I been for the last five years?

It’s true that living in New York can leave one feeling invisible. The city is indifferent. And you are but one in the sky of eight million stars. It can compel you to act like a child, to shout, stamp, and punch to get attention, to prove you actually exist. Maybe howling at each other is like planting a flag in the soil or carving your name in a tree for next season’s campers: It’s just another way of saying “I wuz here.”

And then it dawned on me. I thought about the goombah and my mom’s words: “He’s probably just having a bad day.” Feeling so ignored that you doubt your own existence is—on a scale of 1 to 10, with “bad hair” being 1—a really bad day indeed. I tried to feel for him.

That girl reading the book just bumped into me. What, did she not see me? Am I invisible? Oh God … what if I am invisible! Am I a ghost?!? Quick, think: What did I have for breakfast? I can’t remember! Did I even wake up or have I just been wandering Hell’s Kitchen since the moment I died? How can I find out? I know:
“Stupid bitch!”
Hooray, she heard me. And she’s crying—oh, thank God
.

So maybe Jake was on to something, even if for a different reason than he’d thought: When you have been forced to question your existence to the point that you need to prove you’re alive, you become a New Yorker. Cogito ergo sum a New Yorker.

Or maybe that goombah just thought I was a bitch. I don’t know now, and I certainly didn’t that night on Staten Island. So instead I responded to Jake’s Goetz comment by saying something like, “You’re a douchebag.”

Erm, that came out wrong.

“Good one, Jane. Look: I’m tired of talking about this. You know I’m right; you’re only arguing because you hate being a coward.”

“No: What I’m saying is—”

He stood up and motioned toward the rest of our friends by the bar. “Come on, guys. Club Atlantis calls.”

Wait. I wasn’t finished with him. It’s like he wasn’t hearing me. It’s like I was making no sound. It’s like I wasn’t even sitting there.

“So you’re just gonna walk away,” I said.

“Jane,
calm down.
”

I felt the blood rising to my face. I stood up from my barstool, stuck my finger in his face, and said, “Fine: You know what, Jake?
Fuck you!
Is that what you wanted? Does that make you happy?”

It did. His lips curved into a most sinister smile. And even though he wasn’t a stranger, we both knew he’d won.

The skies didn’t open up; there was no ticker-tape parade. I felt no different. Actually, I felt a little nauseated, but I think that was the Italian food. I also felt a little ashamed. And then I hiccuped.

Jake stood. He reached for his jacket with one arm, threw his other over my shoulder, and said, “Come on, Bernie, let’s discover Atlantis.”

Long after we’d left the bar, I suspect his smile remained.

to my office. But I can’t receive packages at home. “You still don’t live in a doorman building?” she asked incredulously. “Is that safe?!” This question—along with any relating to my lack of security, wedding ring, or blond highlights—is followed by the cry “Hoahhh!” a dramatic half moan designed to convey that she is concerned and, mostly, that she thinks I should be too.

However, before eliciting a noise of such volume, she pulls the phone slightly away from her mouth in consideration of the listener’s ears. Because even in fits of hysteria, my aunt, a Virginian by birth and North Carolinian by address, is a lady. And that, as it turned out, is exactly why I received a package. During a recent trip home, she’d spied certain aberrations in the polished behavior I was taught
as a child. She’d noticed what I hadn’t: Since moving to New York my decorum has atrophied. I’m a lapsing Southern Belle. This package was her way of pulling me back on to the wagon.

“Oh. My. God.” I said, staring into the box lying open on my keyboard. “It’s a manners book.” This nugget of information pulled two or three of my coworkers from their desks.

“No way,” Adam squealed, grabbing the thin, hot-pink hard cover and reading its title,
“How to Be a Lady: A Contemporary Guide to Common Courtesy.”
That nugget attracted a few more neighbors.

“It gets better,” I said to my growing audience. “Parts have been highlighted in pink.”

child, I learned a specific code of wisdom widely recognized as “etiquette.” Some of its edicts are intuitive and commonplace. For example, it’s impolite to chew with your mouth open. The courteous nature of this is unarguable. No one should witness the marriage of ham biscuit and collard greens in midmastication. No one should have to answer the question, “Do you like ‘see food’?”

Other directives are more abstruse. Once, while helping my mother refill the candelabra on our dining room table, I watched, puzzled, as she lit each candlestick several hours before dinner.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked.

“Sweetie, you
never
display a candle with a fresh wick,” she responded. “Now help me blow these out.”

“What’s wrong with a fresh wick?” I prodded.

“It’s tacky.”

“Why?”

“It just is.”

“But
why
?!” Her impenetrable logic had reduced me to the
five-year-old who responds to every answer with another question. There had to be a reason! Unless you take the Moses story literally, rules don’t fall out of the sky. They have origins. Maybe, in feudal times, I wondered, a host preburned candles as a way of proving to his guests that the wax wouldn’t emit a poisonous gas. Or maybe, at some point in history, kerosene lamps became a hallmark of the lower class so if one had real wax candles, he wanted his guests to know it. Or maybe one time Jackie O lit hers by mistake and told the
Vanity Fair
reporter, “I totally meant to do that.”

I asked again and again until my mother finally said, sternly and exasperatedly, “I don’t know, Jane … it’s just
what you do.
” And that, of course, is the most accurate explanation I could have received. To truly understand etiquette is to take it without question—because the real answer is itself impolite and therefore verboten by the same code being questioned. That circular truth is this: One follows the rules of mannered society in order to prove she knows them.

Although there are general guidebooks, such as the one I received in the mail, information regarding the more obscure end of the etiquette canon is exclusive to oral history. The extent of your knowledge is a résumé of how well you were reared, which reflects directly on your parents’ worth. Each time my sisters and I left our home, we were on display and accordingly assessed. Every meal, shopping trip, church outing, and car pool was a recital. Growing up, I was watched as if by a hawk, except without the eventual relief of being eaten.

Once, while I was setting the kitchen table—a full spate of silverware at each place, even if we were only having stew—my mother answered the phone.

“Hello, Pam!”

I knew instantly that Mrs. Andrews had called to report on our chance encounter that afternoon at the Hop-In convenience store.
Like a perfect soldier, I’d walked her out to her Mercedes, carried her purchases, opened her door, and capped off the exchange with, “See you Sunday in church!”

“What beautiful manners she has!” I heard Mrs. Andrews’s voice crackling through the receiver. “You’ve done a wonderful job.” Mom beamed. I didn’t tell her that I was really just occupying the woman’s attention so my friend Kristen could buy us cigarettes.

Regardless of the motivations behind the actions, I’d followed the code. And, like I said, the code matters most. In the big city, though, people follow a different set of rules, which is to say, they don’t. New Yorkers are nice, mind you; the rude stereotype is largely false. But we don’t do anything for the sole purpose of
doing it
. Although we live within a few miles of both the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, most of us have visited neither. In other words, we don’t even do things with well-established purposes. Pointless endeavors never had a fighting chance.

This neglect of niceties can be disconcerting to visitors. It was for my friend Wortley. She lives in Wilson, a small eastern North Carolina town, which is actually pronounced “Wiltson” (I think this is where all of the silent t’s go). To give you a little context, Wortley and her husband, her cousin and her cousin’s husband, and her parents all live on the same street. I don’t even know the name of the person in the apartment across the hall.