New York for Beginners (19 page)

They all sat down. Tom seemed completely carefree, and applied himself wholeheartedly to his tomato, spinach, and goat cheese omelet, while his father bit into a sesame bagel with cream cheese and lox. Mrs. Fiorino sipped green tea. Zoe was far too nervous to eat.

“And where did you go to college, dear?” Mrs. Fiorino suddenly asked. She studied Zoe with the cool subjectivity of a mother who had made it her business to vet all potential aspiring daughters-in-law.

Tom rolled his eyes. The trial had begun.

“I went to school in Munich, at Ludwig Maximilian University.” Zoe answered, sitting stiffly at the table, like a hostage whose plea for freedom was about to be recorded on video.

“Is that a private institution like Oxford or Cambridge?” Mrs. Fiorino’s perception of European education was apparently limited to the United Kingdom.

“Um . . .” Zoe began. How should she answer that question? Tom squeezed her hand reassuringly under the table. “No, it’s a state university.”

Mrs. Fiorino looked at her with concern, as though Zoe had just told her she’d received her master’s degree through an online program.

“But it has a very good reputation.”

“The German university system is organized completely differently than the British or the American system, Kitty,” Tom tried to explain.

But Mrs. Fiorino’s attention had long since flown to the Côte d’Azur. “And where does your family spend the summer?”

On their way back into the city on Sunday evening, Tom apologized again for his mother’s behavior. “Just because we have a nice house in the Hamptons doesn’t mean that we’re any less dysfunctional than other families. Sometimes I feel like I have to play the role of ambassador with them, like I’m a foreign diplomat or something.”

“Do you mean that you want to be on my side, but you want to please your mother, too?”

“Exactly. I always feel like an interpreter. I seem to be the only person on the planet who can speak both their language and the language of everyone else in the world.”

“And at the same time, you have to communicate with both camps . . .”

“. . . to avoid cultural misunderstandings from the start so they won’t have to be ironed out later.”

“Even between your father and your mother?”

Tom put an arm around her and pulled her close. Zoe hoped Tom’s driver wouldn’t look in the rearview mirror, which of course he was well enough trained not to do. Tom smelled gloriously of McNeighbor and salty ocean air. They were stuck in the Sunday-evening traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway among hundreds of luxury limousines, whose occupants surely wanted nothing more than to return to their Manhattan townhouses as quickly as possible. If it had been up to Zoe, the traffic jam could have lasted a lot longer. She cuddled close to Tom.

“My mother comes from another world. The Whitneys never forgave her for marrying a Catholic of Italian descent. Even though his family was just as well off as they were, and he was a respected doctor. They welcomed Charles, but they never accepted him completely.”

“Is that why your middle name is Prescott and not Charles?”

“Very perceptive!” Tom answered. He planted a series of kisses down the back of her neck. “I was named after my great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Prescott Schuyler Whitney III.”

“So your parents married for love. Against all conventions of high society?”

“My father worshipped Kitty. He would have walked through fire for her, and he still would. She must have been the most fun-loving debutante of her generation. The family strife over the marriage hardened her, even if it’s long since passed.”

Tom worked his mouth slowly down Zoe’s neck toward her collarbone. “Would you like to go to the Snowflake Ball with me next Saturday? As my official date?”

At that point, Zoe would have answered any question with an enthusiastic yes. If Tom had asked if he could pull out her wisdom teeth without anesthesia, just for fun, she would have accepted. She even would have agreed to pay his income taxes for the year if he had asked.

Bureaucracy, or: How Does This Country Actually Work?

Every now and then, the US is reminiscent of East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. For example, the potholes in the highways and citizens’ willing patience to stand in lines for hours. Anyone who believes that the Germans invented bureaucracy will realize upon their first visit to a US municipal authority that the Americans have improved it to an almost Kafkaesque level.

(
New York for Beginners
, p. 11)

17

“Do you have an American driver’s license?” Zoe asked Eros first thing on Monday morning. “Do I really need one?”

“Why do you ask?” he inquired.

“Well,” Zoe began haltingly, “because I might have been driving illegally over the weekend.”

She wasn’t too keen on telling Eros how, and above all with whom, she had spent her weekend. Not because she didn’t trust him, but because she was a little superstitious. Just like you might not tell anybody about that great new job before you had actually signed the employment contract, she didn’t want to jinx things with Tom before it was official.

“Were you on a business trip?”

Now Zoe laughed. “Not exactly. But I was with our boss.” She couldn’t manage to keep that fabulously fantastic bit of information to herself. Then she gave in completely. “I was in the Hamptons with Tom.”

“With
Tom?
” Eros cried out indignantly. “McNeighbor Tom, boss Tom, ‘let’s just be friends’ Tom?”

“That’s the guy.” Zoe said, grinning gleefully. “Contrary to speculation, he’s turning into McDreamy Tom.”

“Oh, honey. Don’t tell me this is serious.”

“I think so. I’m his date for the Snowflake Ball.”

“Wow,” Eros marveled. “And you’ll be driving there yourself in a car? Why are you asking me about such mundane things as driver’s licenses?”

“Of course I won’t be. I just wanted to know if I really need an American license. In case I’ll be driving with him in the Hamptons again.”

“I think, theoretically, that you have to get your German license exchanged for an American one if you’re in the country for more than three months,” Eros responded.

And for that reason, Zoe and Eros went to the Brooklyn branch of the Department of Motor Vehicles of New York City first thing the next morning before work. They had imagined that they’d just show their German licenses and get American ones in exchange.

“Piece of cake,” Eros said, still in a good mood.

The Brooklyn DMV outpost was situated in a mall on Atlantic Avenue and had the fatalistic charm of an administrative office. The place smelled like floor polish, stale sweat, and utter desperation. Of twenty-three desks, only four were occupied. After almost two hours of waiting, Zoe and Eros were served by a creature in uniform named Rau’shee. “Served” may have been the wrong word.

“Identification,” the representative ordered.

“Here you go, ma’am,” Zoe said in a pointedly polite tone.

Rau’shee held Zoe’s German passport up to the light and scrutinized it, as though it was counterfeit money.

“Country?”

“Germany,” Zoe answered with a hint of irritation. It was written on the passport in huge letters, after all.

“Wrong! You’re from Europe!”

“Europe isn’t actually a country—it’s a continent,” Zoe explained cautiously. “The passport is a European Union passport, but the country I’m—”

Eros interrupted Zoe with an elbow to her side as Rau’shee gave her a reproachful look.

“I’m not responsible for the
country
of Europe,” Rau’shee said arrogantly, as though accusing Zoe of not having paid attention in geography class.

“But we’re from
Germany
!”

“I’m not responsible for Germany, either.”

“Then who
is
responsible for Germany?”

But Rau’shee was unwilling to deal with any more details of global geography. She gave Zoe a lengthy look, which could certainly have been construed as a warning—and then called out, “Next.”

Zoe and Eros sank down on one of the wooden benches, disheartened.

“What kind of name is that anyway,” Eros grumbled. “Rau’shee!”

Zoe thought that was a bit rich coming from someone named Eros, but she held her tongue. “Well, she definitely wasn’t polite,” Zoe said.

“Here in the US, you can name your kids whatever you want. There’s no registry office like there is in Germany.”

“Isn’t Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter named Apple?”

“Exactly. The poor thing is named after a fruit.”

“And just have a look at our Madison at the office. She’s named after an avenue.”

“True! I guess she’s had her share of bad luck.”

“Next thing you know, somebody will be naming their kids Hermes or Versace.”

“Oh, please, no.”

“Conclusion: Never trust anyone with an extremely creative first name. They might be damaged from their difficult childhood.”

“And definitely don’t trust them if they’re wearing a uniform!”

Then they gathered up their things and made their way to the DMV central office on 34th Street in Manhattan, where they hoped to have better luck.

Upon their arrival at the DMV in Midtown, they drew a three-digit number, while, according to the panel on the wall, Number 57 was just being processed. When it was finally their turn, they were directed to a desk behind which a woman in uniform was sitting. Her name tag read Chanelle.

“I can’t believe this,” was all Eros managed to say. Zoe had been struck dumb.

Chanelle looked like someone you wouldn’t want to compete against in roller derby or mud wrestling.

As they had experienced earlier, Zoe and Eros were asked to identify themselves. A passport or an ID weren’t enough in the US, but they already knew that from an online information sheet. In the US, you had to collect points. You only legitimately existed after you’d collected a minimum of six points. A foreign passport, for example, was only worth two points. An electric bill was one point. A paycheck was one point. A health insurance card was another point. The list went on and on. A New York firearms license gave you two points, by the way. But neither Eros nor Zoe owned one of those.

“Are you a nun?” Chanelle snapped, flipping through Zoe’s papers to count her points.

“What makes you think that?” Zoe answered, while Eros howled with laughter and uttered something that sounded like “Hardly. She slept with her boss before the first day of work.”

Chanelle glared at him angrily. Apparently, her agency was no place for jokes. There was nothing to laugh about at the DMV.

“You have an I visa in your passport,” Chanelle snapped.

“It’s a journalist’s visa. I’m the editor of a German fashion website.”

“This is a religious visa for missionaries,” Chanelle lectured her and shoved the application forms for the written test across the counter.

“What do we need written tests for? Is it because we’re missionaries?” Eros asked in surprise. “We already have driver’s licenses.”

“Your licenses are not acknowledged here,” she barked, as if Zoe’s and Eros’s documents were from some banana republic instead of the country where the gasoline engine had been invented and there were highways without speed limits.

“Now listen here,” Eros said angrily, “I’ve driven for ten years without a single accident. Getting a driver’s license in Germany costs thousands of euros. I’m sure I drive better than any taxi driver in this city.”

Chanelle, however, was not impressed. “Next.”

The process of acquiring an American driver’s license was, to put it mildly, slightly unusual. Before you attended driving school, you had to pass a written test. And in driving school you’d learn a lot of theory, but no actual driving. Driving was only possible after successfully passing your road test.

Eros and Zoe passed the written test on their first try right at the DMV, without ever having studied. Zoe had heard from colleagues that immigrants who couldn’t read or write repeated the test many times and always checked different boxes until they finally got less than thirty negative points and passed. Then they probably became taxi drivers.

After that, Zoe and Eros registered at the ABC Driving School in downtown Brooklyn for the required five-hour class. There were no required hands-on lessons. The class consisted of watching a cheesy old video.
Superman
actor Christopher Reeve guided them through the program. The movie, however, had been made before he was Superman, before he’d fallen off a horse and become a paraplegic, and long before he died. In other words, around three hundred years ago. The passengers in the movie panicked as the drivers smoked cigarettes while zooming off cliffs and sliding along on ice. The message of the movie was: Driving is really dangerous; don’t you want to reconsider? The driving teacher, Rashid, didn’t speak a word the entire evening.

The next morning, Zoe and Eros had an appointment for road tests in Red Hook. They were supposed to bring their own car. But how could you bring your own car if you didn’t even have a license yet? And borrowing one from an acquaintance wasn’t going to work, because all of Zoe’s and Eros’s friends were carless. They lived in New York City, where parking in an underground garage cost almost as much as renting a one-room apartment.

“My friend Tobias just rented a car for the driver’s test,” Eros said.

“But we can’t just drive rental cars to the test site to get our licenses without having our licenses in the first place,” Zoe argued.

Apparently they could!

The examiner, a taciturn man of Asian descent, indeed didn’t seem to care in the slightest how their car had gotten to Red Hook. A nice young man from Jamaica took his test before Zoe and Eros. He openly admitted that he had already failed the test four times. The first two times he’d been driving on the left side of the road, like he did at home. He understood that, now. But the other two times the examiner had just been plain mean, he had explained. Zoe and Eros watched as he backed out of the parking space too quickly without looking back or turning on his blinker, and almost hit a passing UPS truck. He would probably have to return for a sixth time.

Zoe felt a little queasy getting into the car with the examiner. He didn’t say a word, only gestured for her to take a left turn at the soccer field. Zoe set her blinker obediently, waited for oncoming traffic and took the left turn. Then a left and another left, and left again, until they had circled the soccer field once. In the end, Zoe had to parallel park. It wasn’t exactly her specialty. The parking space didn’t really qualify as such because there was no car behind her. So it wasn’t a space, but—what, exactly? The edge of a road? The point was, Zoe needed a car behind her as a reference point, which meant she ended up a little too far from the sidewalk, which would have failed her, but she corrected herself immediately. The examiner scribbled a few lines on a slip of paper, handed it to Zoe wordlessly, and got out of the car. Five negative points for “too much maneuvering while parking.” Five positive points for “nice left turns.”

“I passed!” Zoe cried and flung her arms around Eros’s neck.

The examiner managed to smile, just barely, and spoke for the first time. “Maybe you should practice driving on the highway a little more. With your father, maybe?” He glanced at Eros. “Sunday mornings are best. Not much traffic then.”

Eros and Zoe nodded obligingly and tried as hard as they could not to laugh out loud.

“That explains a few things,” Eros said quietly in German after also successfully completing his trip around the soccer field.

“What do you mean?”

“Now I know why American drivers do things like randomly stopping in the right lane on the highway, putting the car in reverse, and backing up to the missed exit—without anybody getting annoyed and honking at them. It’s because their driving tests consist of driving in a circle on quiet streets.”

“And what do we do with our rental car now?” Eros asked.

“We can return it on our way back to the city. You can drive.”

“Sure thing. Now that I have my license and all,” Eros said with a grin. “Watch closely, and I’ll show you how.”

While he steered the vehicle in the direction of the rental office, Zoe checked her iPhone. With little motivation, she scrolled through the fifty-seven emails that had piled up in her inbox since the morning. She mentally sorted them into which ones she had to answer immediately so as not to get fired, and which ones she could ignore. She thought about Tom, the weekend in the Hamptons, and the Snowflake Ball. She was in an excellent mood. While researching a story, Zoe had learned that being in love—in purely physiological terms—resembled mental illness. People in love had a practically nonexistent appetite; nature had been very kind to women in that respect. Also, people in love didn’t need much sleep—even though they spent most of their time in bed. Stress hormones like dopamine and adrenaline made you constantly alert. And the brains of people who were in love showed significantly less activity.