The Original 1982 (4 page)
O
ne day I get a call from my landlord. I've heard rumors from my neighbors that he wants to sell our building, a charming brownstone on Seventy-eighth Street between Fifth and Madison. The gossip is he wants to make it into a single-family home, but he can't do it unless we agree to leave. The building is rent-controlled, which means we can live in it forever with only small increases in rent, an amount determined by the city and not the landlord.
Some people have lived in my building for more than thirty years, mostly single, older women. They worry about where they'll go. I pay only three hundred a month for my place, a tiny first-floor studio, and the ladies who have lived here for decades probably pay half that. I feel sorry for them. They seem fragile, brittle, with their home-dyed hair and pale skinny legs, coming down the stairs in worn bathrobes. I can't imagine a worse fate than to grow old, alone in one room, and then be asked to leave it. At twenty-four, it's impossible to imagine becoming like them. Being an old woman is something I think I'll escape somehow.
My landlord's office is in a run-down building in the West Thirties near Penn Station. I take the number 6 train down to Thirty-third Street and walk west. It's a beautiful summer day. I love looking into all the shop windows, love the way the city makes me feel private in public, part of a big world full of people walking with purpose.
My landlord is a middle-aged man with thinning dark hair and wire-frame glasses. He sits behind a large metal desk. Without a greeting, he motions for me to take a seat, and I do. I'm wearing a man's white shirt and black pants, top button undone. I've tried to look presentable for our meeting. It's not so obvious that I'm pregnant.
“So, Miss Nelson, you may have heard we have an interest in your apartment.” He has an accent. I'm not sure from where. Israel, maybe.
“The thing is I don't have any money to move,” I tell him. “And the rent is so low. I can't see how I could afford to live somewhere else.”
He's ready for my response. Seems to already have an amount in mind, as do I.
“Miss Nelson, we're prepared to offer you five thousand dollars to vacate the apartment. This will greatly help with your moving costs and other expenses.”
Five thousand dollars is a lot of money in 1982. I can rent a very decent place on the West Side for under a thousand.
“Well, I appreciate the offer,” I say. “But I'm thinking about what it's going to cost to pay the higher rent for a year. I don't think I can do it for less than fifteen thousand.”
My landlord sits quietly, plays with his ink blotter. I have no idea what he's thinking. He sighs and rises from his chair. Behind him is a big window looking out onto the buildings across the alley. He turns to face it, and we both watch the people in their offices, lit by fluorescent lights. Finally, he turns back to me.
“I can tell you, Miss Nelson, it's probably not going to happen, but I'll talk it over with my partners. Hopefully, we can come to a compromise.”
I thank him and make my way back to the elevator, down to the street, and outside to the beautiful day.
That fifteen thousand will rent a place big enough for the two of us and the cats. That's what I'm thinking. I'm not going to take a penny less.
My landlord calls a week later and agrees to the fifteen thousand. I start looking for a bigger apartment, one with a garden.
F
or the ultrasound test, the technician covers my belly with a cool gel. I stare at the empty screen, watching anxiously, until magically you appear in the shape of a lima bean, or a seashell. I'm twenty weeks pregnant. The technician, a middle-aged Indian woman, is gentle and kind. She points to your head, to your foot, to your heart. She helps me to make sense of what I see. Then she freezes your fuzzy silhouette on the screen, takes a Polaroid of it, peels off the back, and hands me a picture of you to keep.
“Looks like you've got yourself a little girl,” Dr. Nancy says. Although, of course, I've known that from the start. She lets me hear your heartbeat, for the first time, using a special kind of stethoscope. She listens first and counts, watching the clock. Then she places the earpiece in my ear.
“It's beating so fast!” I say, truly shocked.
“That's right,” she says. “That's how we're sure it's your baby we're listening to and not you.”
I catch the tears that fall with my tongue. I can't stop laughing. I think of that Joni Mitchell song about laughing and crying being the same release.
Dr. Nancy smiles. “Now you can start thinking about baby names.”
“I have a name already,” I say quietly. It's silvery, quick and shining, delicate and perfect, a name to conjure wading pools, rivers, and smooth stones. But I don't say all that. “I'm going to call her Minnow.”
“Minnow?” Dr. Nancy repeats. Her expression says she thinks she's heard me wrong.
“Yes.” I look down at my sneakers, feeling like your name is a secret I've told and want to take back.
After I leave Dr. Nancy's office, I look for some place cool to grab a bite, but there aren't any restaurants or cafés in the neighborhood. Years later, the Flatiron District becomes super commercial, full of restaurants, a farmers' market, and every retail store you can think of, but at the time it's industrial, desolate, and kind of dirty. A lot of photographers have their studios here in the soot-covered loft buildings. Garbage blows through the streets as it does in much of New York City in the eighties. I look down Sixth Avenue to the bottom of Manhattan and see the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
By the time I reach Ray's Original Pizza, on the corner of Eleventh Street, I'm dripping in sweat. I order a Coke and a slice and snag one of the few tables. The air conditioner is blasting, but every time someone comes through the door, they bring a gust of hot air in with them.
I take your Polaroid from my bag and place it beside me on the table. I want to show it to someone, even to the strangers at Ray's. I wish Gabriel were with me. I think of the friends I've lost touch with since I've been with him, and identify the ache I feel as loneliness. When an incoming gust sends your picture flying, I make a grab for it, and put you away safely in my pocket.
Outside, the sky grows dark through the plate glass. A skinny weed-tree blows back and forth. By the time I've finished my pizza, it's pouring out, the kind of teeming rain that only happens in the extreme heat of summer. I pull up my collar and make a run for the subway.
Once, when I was about fourteen, after a fight with my mother, I ran out of the house into a summer storm like this one. It was just getting dark outside. I don't recall the argument itself, or my mother's shrieking voice, which surely would have demanded I return at once. What I remember is running barefoot, as fast as I could, rain pouring down, the sound of my rapid breath, the slap of my feet on the black tar street. At the end of a dead-end road, there was a high Cyclone fence that overlooked the expressway, and I started to climb it. Cars were rushing by. I was crying so hard, I couldn't tell the rain from my tears.
All of a sudden it occurred to me that the hurtful things my parents said didn't matter. I hung there listening to the sound of the rain in the trees, watching the red taillights speed away, and thought about how it was powerful, natural forces that ruled the world, not my parents, and that one day I was going to be free of them and everything would be different.
Now I bound down the subway stairs dripping wet. On the train, I find your picture in my pocket and dry it off with my inside sleeve.
There you are, Minnow. Proof.
T
he new apartment is in the back of a town house on West Seventy-first Street, between Broadway and West End Avenue. It has a nice kitchen, with a small butcher-block island, that takes up a whole wall of the main room. Through a Dutch door in back there's a garden that's not a garden, exactly, but a yard full of broken concrete and rocks. The narrow bedroom has a window with a view of a scraggly sapling, the only tree in the yard. The whole apartment is probably no more than five hundred square feet in all. Still, it's twice the size of the Seventy-eighth Street studio. It feels like a real home to me.
I move in August, with no furniture except for the crib, changing table, and other baby things. I set up the bedroom for you as a nursery, make curtains for the window, paint a mural of the solar system on one wall and a girl flying a kite on another. Maybe you'll dream of flying, as I did when I was a girl. It's been a long time since I could fly in my dreams, but I can clearly recall the way it felt to lift off, and up, to glide over the rooftops of my neighborhood. Imagine what it would be like to fly over New York City? What views! The Metropolitan Museum of Art glowing next to the dark trees of Central Park, sailboats on the East River, the bright lights and billboards of Times Square. I'd like to fly over it with you.
Here on earth, I paint and clean and fix thingsâdoing it now because soon I'll be too pregnant, and it will be impossible. I'm right on schedule.
Your Baby
says now is the time for making the nest.
I pick up the rest of the furnishings at the flea market on Twenty-sixth Street and Sixth Avenue. I find an old wicker daybed, a walnut dresser, a long table with three pine boards, and a red rocking chair. I face the rocker toward the window and place a soft blanket on its back, imagining it wrapped around us in the middle of the night.
I buy plants for the garden, too, but the job of cleaning it out is too much for me. I don't even consider asking Gabriel for help. Even before he began to avoid me, he would have found a way to avoid yard work. I call my friends Jules and Alan, and they agree to come over and give me a hand.
Jules and Alan have been my closest friends for almost as long as I've been in New York City. They are the family I made when I left home, the ones who will sing to you and bring you presents, make you laugh and watch you grow up. The two share the same birthday, a year apart, and although they only know one another through me, the coincidence makes them feel related. I haven't seen much of either one since I've been with Gabriel, but they understand that, or say they do.
Alan is a guitar player. I met him in school. We used to cut class together and walk around the city talking about music. He's very opinionated and cool, but if he's your friend, it's for life. He's funny, too. Once, I was drinking milk and he made me laugh so hard it came out of my nose.
Jules also has a good sense of humor, although there's something almost regal about her. Maybe it's the high forehead or her clear gray eyes. She's even smarter than she is beautiful, always hungry to learn more about philosophy, mythology, or art history. She's a little full of herself, but so would you be, if you were a brilliant actress on the cusp of becoming a movie star. One time, before we really knew one another, we discovered we were dating the same man. We compared notes, ditched him, and became best friends.
The three of us begin cleaning out the garden around noon, and hardly take a break all day. It's grueling work to rake out all those rocks. We fill garbage bags to bursting with debris and drag them out to the curb. The cats follow us out back. They stretch their long bodies in the sun and scratch on the old fencing. It's a hot summer day and the sweat pours off us, but we have fun, too. We catch up, talk about our latest adventures and mishaps.
By five o'clock, we're so giddy with fatigue and hunger that everything strikes us funny. We laugh so hard, we have to stop to hold our stomachs and wipe our eyes.
“I'm starving,” says Jules.
“Me, too,” I say.
Alan takes a look at the contents of my fridge and decides he can make spaghetti Bolognese. He loves to cook. We think if he wanted to, he could be a chef. Jules and I watch him chop the pathetic onion and lone garlic clove he finds in the crisper. He combines a couple of hamburger patties and simmers it all together. The smell makes our mouths water.
We put whatever money we've got together, a few crumpled dollar bills and some change, and I make a run to get wine. Alan and Jules drag the table outside to the newly cleared yard, and we set it with candles and my mother's cloth napkins. It's a warm August evening. I tell myself it's a night I will never forget, and maybe that's what makes it so.
“To the little rock star,” Alan says, and we lift our glasses to you. I barely let the wine touch my lips.
Then we make a toast to Jules, to wish her luck. She's up for a big movie, and is anxiously awaiting a call from her agent. Last summer she was cast in an independent horror film about monsters in the subway tunnels. But this one would be huge. It has a big budget and a famous director. She tells us it's shooting in London in the fall.
I'm jealous. I'd like to have exciting career things happen to me, too. Alan and I talk about starting a band, but it's hard to imagine what life will be like once you're born. Will there be time to do anything else?
After dinner, Alan takes my Martin from its stand and plays us an instrumental he's working on. I sing along, making up words as I go. Jules attempts to join in with a harmony, although she's not really a singer. The song gets sillier and sillier until we're just laughing. Alan is yipping and barking like a dog.
“We should record that!” he says.
I
n the original 1982, my songs start to fill me with ambition. I want to hear them on the radio. I want to sing them with a band behind me. Drums and bass, piano, cello, accordion, trumpet. Alan and I get together all the time and practice. I'm less than confident about my guitar playing, so I teach him my songs, and he transforms them from folk songs into R&B ballads, rock songs, and bossa novas.
There's a big songwriter scene at the time on Bleecker Street. We go down there one Monday night and sign up for the open mic at Folk City. After we play our two songs, Stevie, the owner of the club, approaches us. “That was really good, you guys,” he says. “You want to play a night here? I've got a Sunday open middle of the month.”
Yeah,
we do. We talk about what we should wear for days. We assemble the rest of a band and book a rehearsal space to practice. I make flyers to leave all over town and mail to everyone I know.
I have photographs from that first gig. I
'
m wearing a headband like Madonna circa 1981. Alan looks handsome, his long hair is falling over one eye. Fish is playing keyboards. He played with a lot of up-and-coming singer-songwriters at the time. That
'
s Mildred, from Gabriel
'
s band, on backing vocals. Look how young she was. Her round, brown eyes are on me as she matches my phrasing, word for word.
We begin to play pretty regularly at Folk City and the other small clubs on or around Bleecker Street. I have terrible stage fright. Sometimes I shake so hard, I can barely hold my fingers on the strings. Alan covers for me and usually by the third song in I'm okay. We add a drummer and bass player, once in a while a guy on sax.
Gabriel comes down to the club and sits at the bar. It feels good to have my own thing, to have him come to hear
me
play for a change, although when I look over at him from the stage, he's usually talking to some stranger and doesn't seem to be paying attention. Still, he gives me notes about one thing or another. He thinks my songs are too slow, and I should add some up-tempo material to the set. He thinks I should cover Michael Jackson, maybe, or the Police. But I only play my own songs. Every one is about him. One is called “Part of the World.” It's about the fact that Gabriel's concerns are worldwide, while mine are only for the world we make between us. The refrain goes like this:
I, too, want to save the world
The part that's yours and mine
Thankfully, it's been lost to posterity.
I didn't really become a good songwriter until many years later. It takes a long time and a lot of practice to do something well.
But enough of the old stories, Little Fish.
