fresh air will do you good
It was Saturday, and I had planned weeks earlier to have lunch with my mom. I took the train out to Long Island and was seated next to a guy who had quit smoking that day and felt the need to talk about it incessantly.
“It’s not the first time I’ve quit,” he said after he’d finally stopped talking, and I thought that we were finally done.
“Hmm.” I nodded.
“Yeah, I quit once before . . . I mean, I’ve quit a thousand times before but one time for real.”
“Yeah, quitting is hard.” I thought a definitive statement and a look out the window would give him the cue that we we’d covered the topic.
“But obviously I picked it back up again. And you know when? Like four months later. I’d quit cold turkey. And I was fine. Completely fine. Then I was walking down the street and it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I needed a cigarette and I needed one that instant. I couldn’t even wait until I got to a store or passed someone I could bum a smoke off. I just stopped right where I was and looked around at the ground. Sure enough, there was a butt. A beautiful butt.” I could tell he wasn’t going to stop. Smoking or talking. Ever. “I reached down and picked that butt up and oh man . . . it was heaven.”
I got off the train an entire stop early and walked to my mom’s house, which took an extra half hour. We lived in an affluent suburb—not nearly so much then as now. Home values are so high that they’re inducing a kind of paralysis in some of the neighbors, like with a stock that keeps rising. You don’t want to jump out now, because you’ll kick yourself if it goes up more the day after you’ve sold.
Walking through the neighborhood, I had memories of my childhood. I passed the Andersons’ house and remembered how awed I was by their Christmas decorations and how they always outdid every other house on the street. When I passed the Dickersons’ house, I thought about the rumor that Mr. Dickerson was having an affair, which was so widespread that if he wasn’t, he might as well have been. And I still scowled when I walked by crazy Mrs. Cooper’s house—the woman who used to say that she’d have our dogs shot if we didn’t stop them from barking.
When I got there my sister, Samantha, shot me a look that rivaled the best Mean Girl Junior High dirty looks. Both she and my mother looked completely surprised and none too pleased to see me. My mom regularly vacillated between wanting me around and wanting no part of me. But only since I’d graduated college and moved out. Prior to that, she always wanted to have me under her roof—not because she liked my company but more as a method of control. I was a part of her, certainly not her favorite part but a part nonetheless. An appendage. So my leaving somehow felt like an amputation—because it was always about her. Sam was still living at home, taking one class at the community college to justify it.
“Hey, Jordan,” said Samantha as she looked at our mom, seemingly wondering what the hell I was doing there.
“Hey,” I said back. My mom just kept looking shocked to see me.
“Jordan, honey, what are you doing here?”
“We’re going out to lunch today, remember?” I said, more annoyed than hurt. She almost always forgot when we had plans. And I swear she wasn’t forgetful about anything else, but when it came to me . . . I don’t know.
“Are you sure, J.?” she said, looking skeptically at me. “I told Samantha I’d take her shopping today.” Sam was twenty years old, and she still couldn’t buy as much as underwear without my mother’s presence. And wallet.
“Yeah, and we’re late!” chimed Princess Bitch.
“Well, I just took an hour-and-a-half train ride and walked forty minutes to come see you, as was the plan. Well, not the walking part. That was because of a psychotic nonsmoker, but the train was the plan. We had a plan, Mom,” I found myself whining and hated it. Why did she drive me to this? Why did I let her?
I took out my day planner and even showed her where I’d written it down weeks earlier as proof.
“Oh, I’m sorry, sweetie. I penciled you in for tomorrow. I’d tell you to come shopping with us but . . . you really don’t like to shop. Do you like to shop? I don’t think . . .” She trailed off. No, she didn’t think. At least not where I was concerned.
“I’ll shop.” I sighed. The truth was, I didn’t mind shopping. I just didn’t like shopping with them. Whenever the three of us shopped, they always got two of everything, same size, different color. Two Juicy Couture sweatsuits, size zero; two pairs of size twenty-four dark wash jeans; two pairs of size twenty-four light wash jeans; two this, two that, two, two, two, two, TWO.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t fit into their shared wardrobe that bothered me as much as the feeling of not fitting into my own family and having it so glaringly amplified.
My mom and Samantha shot each other a look. Mom’s was telepathically asking Sam if it was okay if I tagged along. Sam’s was telepathetically begging Mom not to let me. I knew she didn’t want me to come shopping with them, and believe me, I didn’t want to either. But seeing how annoyed Samantha was at my inclusion made it that much more enticing.
We were riding in the car, Mom driving, Sam riding shotgun, and me in the back. Mom and Samantha were gabbing away about inane crap while I sat getting whipped by my hair—all of the windows were open and my hair was blowing all over the place and all over my face. Samantha was planning her to do list.
“I’m obsessed with the new Jimmy Choo’s! Everyone was wearing them in this week’s US Weekly.”
“But doesn’t that mean that by next week they’re going to be out?”
“No,” she said. “Well, yeah,” she added. “But, Mo-om! They’re so cute!”
I couldn’t take the hair in my face any longer. “Do you think you guys can maybe roll up your windows please?”
“It’s a beautiful day, honey, enjoy it. You’re always holed up in that city apartment. The fresh air will do you good.”
If it wasn’t already unbearable enough, as my mother was uttering the last word of her sentence and I was opening my mouth to object—a bug flew in the back window straight into my mouth. I started freaking out, making faces, flailing around, spitting . . . all of which my mom caught in her rearview mirror.
“Jordan! What’s the matter with you?” Sam started laughing at me and shook her head.
I’d managed to get the bug out of my mouth, but I was fingering my gums just to make sure. The bug was gone. My hair was a rat’s nest. I looked into my mom’s eyes, still locked on me in the rearview. “Nothing’s the matter.”
“Honestly, Jordan, the way you act so crazy sometimes, I find it hard to believe that you’re my daughter.”
“Maybe she was adopted,” Sam offered. “Was Jordan’s dad so big boned?”
“She wasn’t adopted, Sam, and yes, her real father was tall.”
I sank farther into the backseat as the Sister Sledge song “We Are Family” taunted me in my head.
We were in the shoe section at Bergdorf Goodman when Samantha dropped the bird bomb.
“So you know I’m going to Cancun with Amy and Alex next week, right?” she said to what I assumed to be our mom but she was looking right at me.
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said. “Sounds like fun.”
“Well, I thought you could watch Sneevil Knievel for me . . .” Sneevil Knievel was her canary. If she thought I was going to watch him, she had another think coming.
“I think that would be a very nice big-sisterly thing to do, J.,” my mom said. “Oh, these shoes are to die! Are they to die or what?” she asked Sam.
“They’re hot,” Sam said, and then looked pleadingly at me. “It’s only for a week.”
“I’ll drive you back into the city with the birdcage,” Mom offered.
“Fine,” I said.
“Awesome,” Sam yelped. “I totally won’t forget this.”
* * * * *
Finally we got back to the city. The bad thing about shopping with my mom and Samantha . . . was shopping with my mom and Samantha. But the good thing was that I got the ride back into the city, which I hadn’t planned on.
When I got back to my apartment building, birdcage in hand, my next-door neighbor had a giant box outside his apartment that I had to step over. This was a weekly occurrence. The guy worked in shipping at his company, and over-ordered toner and ink-jet cartridges, which he then sold on eBay for a hefty profit as a side business. I stood there, thinking about all the little secrets that you come to know about your neighbors and wondered why he was so cavalier about his stealing. What if I was a police officer? Or the daughter of his boss? The building super was guilty of it, too. He was a pot dealer for everyone in the building and probably beyond. I’d never seen inside his apartment, but from all the business he did I imagined it to be a full-on greenhouse. That coupled with the fact that when I moved in, he told me under no circumstances should I let any representative of the city including firemen, police, or any inspector of any kind into the building made him slightly suspect as a law-abiding citizen in my book.
Sneevil Knievel started to chirp, so I had to quit musing on my fate as keeper of every neighbor’s dark secrets and quickly get us both inside. For once I had no debtor messages on my answering machine, so I turned on the TV and surfed around until I landed on an old favorite. Regarding Henry was on television. I changed into my pajamas and settled in to watch it. I wrote in my journal a little bit, further pondering the film, wondering what it would be like to forget everything and everyone, and soon after fell asleep.