I Totally Meant to Do That (4 page)

On Canal Street, I drew no suspicion, because I looked like a tourist, sure, but also because the salesmen had an incentive to believe I was who I said I was: They wanted to sell bags. Just like the fool from Long Island believed the wallets were real because she
wanted
to have found a deal on a luxury item.

It was the incentive that had made me a good spy—not my own work—and no one in the grocery store had it. They saw my syrupy Southern-tourist persona for what it was: a knockoff unraveling at its haphazardly stitched seams.

I was too ashamed to tell my boss, so instead I removed my name from the remainder of the schedule and left.

Not long after that, upon entering my apartment building on the corner of Hudson and Perry, I walked upstairs and stuck my key in the lock, but it wouldn’t turn. Duh, I thought, as I instantly realized my gaffe: wrong floor. I deduced the error quickly because I was familiar with the mistake; I made it about once a week that year. It was a strange and annoying affliction that has never struck me in any other of my many dwellings.

My place was on the third floor, first door at the top of the stairs. Sometimes I stuck my key in the right lock. Other times I tried to open the corresponding door on the second floor, and sometimes even the one on the fourth. My neighbors never said anything; I was mostly a nuisance to myself.

In this particular instance, however, after recently being burned, the pattern played out a little differently. When I yelled at myself in my head—
Geez, it’s like you’re a tourist in your own home!
—I saw that I was. The West Village wasn’t home. I realized that I didn’t even like it that much. In fact, I generally hung out in the bars and
restaurants of other neighborhoods. I’d hardly decorated my room. The apartment felt counterfeit.

So I started thinking backward. If this seemed obvious now, but I hadn’t noticed any of it before, then my ignorance must have been willful, which means I’d had an incentive—one whose imagined worth was so great, I’d gone more than $4,000 in debt paying rent in a neighborhood I couldn’t afford.

OK, here is where I tell you that I lied one last time. The truth is this: I do know why I moved to the West Village. I was chasing Lou. Finally,
finally
I’d reached her, and suddenly she was gone again. But in the legendary West Village, I could retrace her steps. Whenever I fancied, I could pop into Magnolia for a chocolate cupcake or go dancing at Automatic Slims. I could eat burgers at Corner Bistro and tell myself with eager eyes, “I bet Lou sat here once … in this very booth!”

I had spent so many years imagining her before, it was easy to slip back into the habit. But I wasn’t chasing her; I was chasing her narrative, trying to consume her authentic experience—an inherently inauthentic pursuit. No two people follow the exact same path. And I couldn’t even be certain the narrative was true. I’d cobbled the account together from anecdotes apocryphal and embellished by drink. I had the right key but it was in the wrong lock. If the world is made of narratives, then it was time I write my own.

And I may as well start from the beginning.

grandfather used to shout those words from his front porch every night. He was calling the dog inside. The dog’s name was Dammit. My mother and Aunt Jane had begged for a puppy, but my grandfather said no, until he finally relented, on the condition that he be allowed to name it, which he did with the express purpose of wailing curse words into the neighborhood.

One night, Dammit—or, Dit, as he was known to everyone else—didn’t come home. It was an inevitability the family had anticipated since the first time their next-door neighbors fed the dog filet mignon. He liked to visit the Hermans, and one time when he did, Elise Herman had her butler prepare steak. After that, Dit began every morning by trotting next door for breakfast. Once he correctly
assumed that there might also be filet for dinner, Dit ate all of his meals with the Hermans. He liked it there. So when Elise placed a blue-satin, down-stuffed pillow next to her own bed, Dit moved in for good.

Decades later, when I graduated from college and decided to leave North Carolina for New York, Aunt Jane exclaimed, “Don’t go! You’ll have a ball and stay. I have a friend who moved there forty years ago and never got married, and no one ever saw her again. You know that happens to a lot of girls.”

“Wait a second,” I interjected, knowing I had her trapped. “What’s the fear, that you’ll miss me or that I’ll be an old maid?”

She thought for a few seconds and responded, “No, I know you’ll get married because you’re not fat.” Then she announced that she was late for a bridge game and hung up the phone.

As reluctant as I am to further expound upon an analogy that likens me to a dog, I must admit that when I first came to New York, I wandered around all wide-eyed and trusting, assuming that everyone wanted to scratch my belly. It makes sense: I’d come from the Land of Belly Scratchers, the South, where 50 percent of the vocabulary is comprised of heartwarming adages. We are a population who whistles, says good morning to inanimate objects, and ascertains the presence of angels. There is always someone who’s the last to stop clapping; that person is usually Southern.

This doesn’t necessarily make us nicer people. Obviously, human beings are more complicated than that. I’m just saying that this is the way we behave: People think we’re drunk when we’re sober. I was reared to act like a golden retriever. Which is why, in at least one instance during my first week in New York, I literally fetched.

While walking up Eighth Avenue, I noticed a piece of paper fall from the pocket of a man walking a few yards ahead of me. Prescription? Important receipt? I ran to pick it up and catch him.

“Excuse me, sir?” I touched the back of his shoulder and said with pep, “I think you dropped this.” But before he even turned around—while “dropped this” repeated in distorted deep-voiced slow motion in my ears—I realized my mistake. He’d littered. And I had been horrifically naive. I steeled myself for the ensuing humiliation, but when he turned around, his face held only contempt.

Double eureka: he thought I was being sarcastic. Because we were in New York, not a Disney film, he’d never considered sincere to be an option. And therefore, he assumed I was handing him trash to make a self-righteous point. I thought I was wagging my tail; he saw a stray with rabies.

Scrunching his brow, he said only one word: “Really?”

But I couldn’t think of a response that might not also be misconstrued as sarcasm. So instead, I dropped the litter back on the ground. There you go, Borden! Why stop at offending one man, when you can disrespect an entire city?

Walking away red in the face and chastising my own gullibility, I thought,
Lesson learned
. But of course, that wasn’t true; I’d only come to understand one symptom of a much larger and deep-seated problem, which would, like all buried issues, manifest eventually. Mine arrived a few days later in the form of jaw pain.

“Ow,” I said, rubbing my cheeks and climbing into bed.

“What hurts?” my roommate asked.

“My face.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think it’s stress?”

“But I haven’t even started work yet,” I said. “I spent all day in a bakery.”

“Maybe it’s from crunching,” she offered. “Have you been eating a lot of raw vegetables?”

“I spent all day in a bakery.”

A couple of days later, it blossomed into headaches.

“Maybe you’re grinding your teeth at night,” a friend suggested.

No, because it was better in the morning and worse at night.

“Have you been wearing headbands?” my mother asked.

No.

“Maybe you took a strange exercise class?” she offered.

No, because, OK, I was spending every day at bakeries.

Then, while walking down Amsterdam Avenue, a passerby made eye contact with me and recoiled in that way that silently says “You are embarrassing yourself.” You know the look. The eyes bulge, the lower lip curls down, and the entire head pulls slightly back and to the left, as if there’s a God of Awkward Social Encounters who’s tugging the person’s ear in warning.

Why would she do that? All I did was smile at her.

Oh my God of Awkward Social Encounters! I
smiled
at her! And it wasn’t a halfhearted, obligatory lip twitch that says, “Oops, we accidentally locked eyes.” Mine was earnest. Without realizing it, I’d been staring for half a block, patiently waiting for her to return my gaze so I could shoot her one heat-seeking grin. And then it sunk in. No wonder my jaw was sore: I’d been smiling at
everyone
. In New York, that’s more than a dozen per block, times a ten-block walk, is at least 120 per outing. I had a new exercise regimen after all.

In my hometown, Greensboro, North Carolina, everyone smiles at one another. Without exception. In the aisles of the Harris Teeter grocery store, in lines at the movie thee-ate-er, even in cars—stoplights are long. I realize, in retrospect, how strange it is, and how time-consuming. If you know the person, you pause to speak. If not, you say “Hello” or ask “How you?” At the least, you wave. Not the standard arm-raised, palm-forward, side-to-side swish. The preferred
method is to place your arm out parallel to the ground, palm facing down, and then vigorously wag the hand up and down from the wrist as if you’re suppressing a putrid smell or doing that thing homophobes do when pretending to be gay. You’re probably thinking only women wave like this. Men do too. Even the homophobes.

We’re real-life versions of those animatronic Teddy Ruxpin bears: Regardless of our intentions, out of context, the behavior is creepy. It may be nice to make contact with one stranger on a sunny knoll, but to do so with a dozen on a grimy city block is terrifying. I must have looked like a maniac, bobbing my head this way and that, forcing onto everyone my hysterical grin. If I were a man, I would have been maced.

You can’t walk around New York going, “Hi, I’m Jane Borden. Will you be my friend?” Fifth Avenue is not a high-five tunnel. I felt like a total asshead. And I could hear Aunt Jane standing on her porch screaming, “Asshead! Get back here, Asshead!”

But it was just a habit, right? Obviously I didn’t want to be pals with eight million people. I mean, I kind of do, but no, that’s absurd: When would we all get coffee? It’s simply not possible. So I would have to change, assimilate, or be shunned by the herd. It wouldn’t be easy.

I remember standing in a line somewhere a few weeks later—it was probably a bakery—behind a man wearing a worn-out black T-shirt from R.E.M.’s Green tour.
Oh, man
, I thought,
I have a shirt from that tour too! I should tell him
.

Relax, Borden. He probably found that tee at a thrift store. He doesn’t want to talk to you. Leave him alone.

“Stand in the place where you live …”
I started singing in my head and thinking about the video. Maybe he remembers the choreography!

Get a grip: He doesn’t want to dance with you. He doesn’t want
to bond. This was harder than I’d anticipated. I tried to think about something else, likely a muffin. My efforts at cognitive redirection backfired, however, by opening the door to my subconscious, which quickly revisited the Green situation. When I emerged from my reverie, my hand was in the air, an inch and a half second away from tapping him on the shoulder.