When Skateboards Will Be Free (25 page)

It was from my father, she explained, who had passed the time in his cell by whittling three date pits, one for each of his children.

“I’ll keep it in this drawer for you,” my mother said. “It’ll be safe here.” And she opened her dresser drawer and put the date pit inside and I never saw it again.

K
AREN AND
I
ARE DATING.
We’re keeping it a secret from everyone at work, which makes it feel illicit and tantalizing. On the nights I go to her apartment in Queens, she’ll leave the office just a few minutes before I do and then we’ll rendezvous like spies on the subway platform. When we are sure the coast is clear, I will pick her up and swing her around.

Other nights I’ll ride my bicycle down to the Village and meet up with her on Fourteenth Street, where we’ll walk the few blocks to my apartment. “I wish I was a kitten so you could put me in your basket,” she’ll say. And I’ll picture her small, fluffy, with a ribbon around her neck.

My studio apartment comes equipped with a dishwasher, a microwave, an air conditioner, a gym in the basement, and a roof deck from which I can see the Empire State Building. The rent is so exorbitant in my building that it is occupied almost exclusively by lawyers and bankers, who must think that I am also a lawyer or banker. Studio apartments, for instance, easily rent for sixteen hundred dollars a month. I, however, pay the unheard-of sum of four hundred twelve dollars, far less than for even the most dilapidated apartments in the Village. It is a deal that I landed by way of the New York City Department of Housing just two years after moving to the city, when I was earning almost no money. There were three thousand eligible applicants, I was told, but only
sixteen apartments available. What a miracle it was when I opened my acceptance letter. Now I make a considerably higher salary but by law the rent cannot be raised, nor can I be asked to vacate. In twenty years it will revert to market price, at which point I have no idea what I will do next. For now I treat the apartment as if I own it outright and will live in it forever. I am its first occupant, and it is as spotless as the day I moved in.

Karen loves my apartment too and is appreciative of the little touches that I have made to it, like the lavender pillowcases, the cherrywood blinds, and, yes, the brushed-metal tissue holder. And at times she will offer insights of her own, such as “You should get rid of that lamp,” referring to the black halogen floor lamp that I paid fifteen dollars for at Staples.

“I thought it was stylish and minimal,” I said.

“It’s not,” she said. “It looks like a lamp in a dentist’s office.”

So one weekend we went to Filaments on West Thirteenth Street and selected a dark-brown lamp with a scalloped glass shade, for which I paid a hundred fifty dollars.

In the evenings we might work out in the gym where no other tenant is ever seen, making it feel as if it is an extension of my apartment. Or we might take a stroll down to Film Forum to see a movie. We hold hands and say nothing. The West Village, no matter what the weather or time of day, is always tranquil and romantic, the stately brownstones, the streets crisscrossing. Of all the streets in the West Village, I believe it is my street—Jane Street—that is the most
beautiful of them all. And sometimes I will marvel at how far I have come from that street I once lived on that was also named after a woman: Ophelia Street.

Karen has begun making art again. Never mind the minor in marketing, never mind the job as project manager. The first thing you encounter upon entering her apartment is a giant easel wedged in by the front door. We bought it together and then spent two hours rearranging all the furniture to get it to fit. When I visit she’ll show me the latest pictures she’s drawn or the collages she’s made. Once she collected various squares of toilet paper from bathrooms around New York City and then stitched them into a little booklet. “The patterns are quite pretty when you look at them up close,” she told me. I had not known that toilet paper had patterns, but when I studied them up close I saw that she was right.

As for my acting career, I’ve given it up. The last audition I had was for a commercial for a video game that, had I been cast, would have shown me sitting in a tent in the desert, wearing a turban and playing Snowboarding Nintendo. “I’ll get you next time, Snowboarding Nintendo!” I said in that same accent I use for every audition. In my mind I imagined Daniel and Tab, wherever they might be, laughing uproariously. Mercifully, I was not cast. And now I have moved on to playwriting, which is much better. In my spare time I sit home at my desk and try to conjure up interesting people who will say interesting things about the drama they find themselves embroiled in. I dream of stardom and a brown-stone on Jane Street. Above my desk hangs the black-and-white photograph of my father standing behind the podium
giving his speech on Che. Only the frame has changed, a custom black frame to replace the original brown one that had begun to splinter and sag after thirty years. When the guy at the frame shop opened it to remove the photograph, out fell the original label. “Happy Home,” it read. “$1.37.”

Karen is turning twenty-eight years old. When I meet her at the subway station I am holding a pink balloon. “I love pink balloons!” she claps. “How did you know?” Then she ties it around my handlebars. As we walk, it bobs back and forth.

At my apartment we order quesadillas and black bean soup from Benny’s Burritos, because that’s what she wants. While we wait for our food to be delivered, I surprise her with a bottle of champagne. “I can’t believe it!” she says. I’m such a novice at opening champagne that the cork shoots past my face and half the bottle bubbles onto the floor. Karen thinks this is hilarious. I’m worried my floor will be stained forever. “Don’t worry,” she says, “it’s parquet.” I scrub and scrub.

When we’re done with dinner, I go into the kitchen and take out an ice cream cake that reads “Happy Birthday, Candy.” I call her Candy because the message on her office phone has always sounded to me like “Hello, you’ve reached Candy at Martha Stewart…” I stick two candles in the cake, the number 2 and the number 8. Then I light them and flick off the lamp. “Happy birthday,” I sing. She whirls and shouts out in surprise. The 2 and 8 glow dramatically.

Her gifts are a big colorful book about the painter Chuck
Close and a fancy bar of soap. She flips through the book and smells the soap. “Mmmmm,” she says. The soap is blue and has an engraving of a flower in it and comes in a wooden box.

Then I put the cake in the freezer, the dishes in the dishwasher, and the two of us ride the elevator up to the roof. We sit on a bench, her leg draped over mine, and we stare at the Empire State Building. Tonight it is illuminated solely in white, clean and austere.

“It looks nice tonight,” I say.

“Let’s sit and watch for the lights to go out.”

“Okay”

“Thanks for the book.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I like the soap.”

“I knew you would.”

“I’m not going to use it,” she says. “I’m going to save it.”

Karen is from Paramus, New Jersey. Born and raised Roman Catholic on Mayfair Road. Her parents have been together for thirty years. Chuck and Barb. They’re schoolteachers, and they’ve worked hard all their lives. Their house is a cozy split-level with a garage, a garden, and wall-to-wall carpeting. Karen has told me stories about how, during the summer she turned eight, she watched her father cut down the apple tree, break up the concrete swimming pool with a sledgehammer, and extend the house into the backyard. Friends,
neighbors, and relatives came over to help. And the summer she turned twelve, he put on new aluminum siding while she stood next to the ladder and tied tools to a string so he could pull them up.

If I had walked past that house when I was a child I would have thought,
Look at them. The rich asses.

About a month after we had started dating, Karen asked me if I considered myself a communist. “I guess so,” I said. “What does that mean?” she wanted to know. So I began to explain to her how workers are exploited under capitalism and how wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few, but somehow we took a detour and got caught up in a discussion about whether or not under communism we’d be able to buy fancy soaps and beauty products and things like that. “Of course,” I had told her, but I wasn’t really sure. I wasn’t sure if under communism the goal was for there to be overwhelming abundance or for everyone to have evolved to where they no longer desired material things. She didn’t let the matter drop and asked me more questions that on the surface seemed rather elementary, like what’s the difference between communism and socialism. Really I had no idea, but I gave a vague answer that socialism leads to communism, because that is what I remember my mother saying years earlier when I had asked her. But this did not satisfy Karen in the way it had satisfied me, and she went on with her inquiry. Continually flaring inside me was the impulse to respond either with generalizations, or various patched-together facts, or to just simply steer the conversation into familiar territory, where I could speak with some authority. To do this, however, felt
immoral and unforgivable in the face of Karen’s authenticity. Eventually I stopped trying to answer, and muttered to myself, “I guess I don’t know what I’m talking about.” And she had responded, more surprised than accusatory: “Yes, it sounds like you don’t.”

At midnight, and not one second later, the lights of the Empire State Building click off.

“Look! Look!” she says.

We stand and stretch our legs and I put my arms around her waist and pull her to me. Her head comes up to just below my chin.

O
NE DAY, A FEW MONTHS
before I turned sixteen years old, my mother suddenly did the unthinkable: She resigned from the Socialist Workers Party.

Just like that, it was all over. Simple and noiseless and done by way of letter, where she apologized and thanked them all the same. After almost twenty years of membership she had decided she had given all she had and could give no more.

There had been no indication she was considering such a thing. I did not even know such a thing
could
be considered. Only a week before I had seen her leave to campaign all day for Mel Mason, the party’s presidential candidate. Behind the scenes, though, somewhere far out of earshot, a friend had casually posed the question: “Have you ever thought about what you would do with all your free time if you left the party, Martha?” That is how my mother had explained it to me. A friend’s simple question had been enough to jog her into conscious action.

“I would be a writer,” my mother had replied.

Now in the evenings and on weekends she wrote with determination, clacking away at the typewriter at all hours, writing and revising, until she felt satisfied and would drop a hopeful envelope in the mail to
Mademoiselle
, or
Redbook
, or to her brother—now teaching at Arizona State University—
asking for his critical feedback. And when the last issue of my mother’s subscription to
The Militant
arrived in the mail, she did not bother to renew it. The years of accumulation had finally run their course. Not long after that, seeing no reason why we should have them in such close proximity, she asked me to move all the old bundled issues down to our storage unit. Which I gladly did, shutting the closet door and transforming the apartment. In the damp, dim, dusty basement I made room for them beside my comic book collection, my stamp collection, my teddy bears—all relics of the past.

And then our lives changed in another material way: We moved. To the apartment next door, which was smaller but had a sovereign bedroom that my mother would not need to cross in order to reach the bathroom. For the first time since I was eight years old, I would have some sense of privacy. The weekend before we moved, my mother and I walked over to the carpet store, where she splurged on a soft brown rug for my bedroom. Later I hammered a latch onto the door. There were no longer comrades we could ask to help us move, but that didn’t matter; I was strong enough to do it myself. And so I did, dragging every single piece of furniture from apartment four to apartment five.

These were new beginnings for us: closet doors that closed, bedroom doors that locked, stories written late into the night. But two flights beneath it all, the
Militants
remained. Sitting there in the darkness. Why exactly were we saving them? All those years never referenced. They could be bound and stacked and moved, but why could they not be thrown away? Because our allegiance and loyalty to the
party, once so absolute, once so all encompassing, could not be undone by a mere resignation letter.

Which meant that when my teacher handed out blank ballots in my eleventh-grade scholars class and told us to choose—anonymously—the presidential candidate of our choice, there was only one choice for me. After we had each cast our votes, the ballots were collected by Mrs. Alexander, shuffled extravagantly, and then randomly redistributed back to us. One by one my classmates read the name of the candidate that had been ticked off on the anonymous ballot they held in their hands.

“Reagan.”

“Móndale.”

“Reagan.”

Down one row of students, then another, then down my row, and I called off the name on the ballot—“Reagan”—and then on, one after the other, until there came an abrupt pause and the rhythm broke and Connie stared down at the piece of paper on her desk.

“I don’t know,” she said, almost inaudibly, “I think this might be a joke.” And then she looked up, at a loss. “Someone has written in a name for president.”

“Well, go on, Connie,” Mrs. Alexander said, no doubt pleased that the paradigm of voting had been organically extended to include this possibility.

So Connie read the ballot loud enough for everyone to hear. “Mel Mason,” she read, “Socialist Workers Party.”

There was another pause, as if everyone in the room had inhaled at the same time and held their breath at the
same time, and then, on cue, the entire class exhaled simultaneously and erupted with laughter. Long, loud, familiar laughter. Everyone in the room laughed, including Mrs. Alexander.