Maynard and Jennica. Rudolph Delson
second drop of sweat to fall on her handkerchief. Gah! She gives me a crushing look—a look that means, in Manhattan, Stay away, you crazy—a dumbfounding look when delivered by a woman with two ideal beauty spots. It was as though I’d spat on her while asking her to spare me some change.
So I retreat. And I think to myself, as I retreat, What is this beautiful woman doing on an uptown No. 6 train at 33rd Street at 10:25 A.M.? But I retreat. I retreat, and I take a seat, and I sweat, and I straighten my hat, and I settle my defeated face into a frown. At which point, in a rage, looking for her culprit, enter the subway conductor.
JENNICA GREEN fails to explain what she was doing on an uptown No. 6 train at 33rd Street at 10:25 A.M. (early August 2000):
I was going to buy a six-hundred-dollar cat. Which, I know. But hear me out.
I live on the third story of a red brick walkup on Cark Street, in the West Village. You’ve seen these sorts of buildings. The kind with tiny black-and-white tiles on the floor of the entryway and coppery mailboxes. Where the copper has this gummy feeling from the scraps of glue left behind where the previous tenants have taped up and then torn off their names over the decades. With a narrow cinder-block stairway painted chocolate brown … like, Hershey-quality chocolate brown. I have a rear unit, with a view of the backs of some brownstones and their gardens and some ailanthus trees in the alleys, and with a fire escape leading down into the courtyard. Which supposedly makes my apartment ideal for burglary. I moved in, and my mother said … like, forget that the apartment is spacious and bright, and has parquet floors except in the kitchen and bathroom, and has some redeeming features even if it is too expensive … like, forget all that, what my mother said was:
“It sounds ideal for a burglar.” I said:
“That’s why I have renter’s insurance, Mom.” And my father was like:
“Those policies are a scam. And insurance can’t protect you from a determined rapist.” It’s like, Thanks, Dad, for reminding me.
Anyway, the six-hundred-dollar cat.
On Monday I got home. It was seven-thirty, about. And it was one of those dusks in July and August where the sky is thick and white, the color of a poached egg. I had walked home from the subway slowly, so that I could look at everyone in their heat-wave clothes, and when I got home, there in my copper mailbox, I recognized her handwriting immediately, was a letter from Nadine Hanamoto.
Nadine Hanamoto, who was my best friend in San Jose, California, in 1989, and who was my first cosmopolitan friend. And, okay, cosmopolitan in San Jose, California, in 1989 … so, cosmopolitan with caveats. But Nadine Hanamoto, who I haven’t heard from in I don’t know how long, and whose feelings I think maybe I unintentionally hurt. So I start reading her letter before I am even up the stairway as far as the first landing.
Dear Jenny,
She’s the only one who ever called me Jenny, so already it’s kind of poignant, right?
I’m sorry to send you such a possibly weird letter.
She said she called my parents to ask for my address. She was so happy and impressed that I was still surviving in New York City. What was my neighborhood like? What was my apartment like? Was it “illustrious”? The letter was handwritten in green ink, six pages long, and so I flipped through it, just assessing the volume of it. And on the back Nadine had drawn two blue-ink boxes around one green-ink paragraph, to make sure that one paragraph would catch my eye, if nothing else did.
George (that George) just bought an apartment in Manhattan, and he says he wants to meet you. He says he forgives you for standing him up in 1989. How hilarious if the two of you hit it off.
My parents apparently told Nadine I was single.
I’m reading this as I open my front door. And, I leave my air conditioner off while I’m at work, to conserve electricity, so when I walk in, my apartment feels like, whatever. Poached. But I put my bags down and sit on one of the barstools at my little rolling kitchen island, and I’m reading Nadine’s letter in the heat. So it’s absolutely silent in the apartment, no air conditioning, no television, no loom construction going on next door. Even my refrigerator, which is so huge and so poorly insulated that it spends twenty hours a day in the summer rattling its fan, just to keep my whatever, my mixed salad greens from wilting … even my refrigerator was quiet. So I’m reading in silence, and then there is this noise. Like, a burglar in my apartment.
MITCHELL and SUSAN GREEN discuss their daughter’s aspirations to illustriousness (early August 2000):
M: She was reading those particular books that high schools still think teenagers need to read, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and Great Expectations. And she came away with the lesson that we as a family had done something wrong that there wasn’t more intrigue in our lives. She read Madame Bovary, and the lesson she came away with was that Emma Bovary was a perfectly reasonable woman.
S: What she really enjoyed were all of those books by J.D. Salinger.
M: “The Greens are not illustrious.” There were about six months when that was her refrain, her constant refrain. She thought it would be romantic if there were invading armies we had to flee, or if we were …
S: She wanted to join the leisure class.
M: … or if we were winning a fortune shipping boatloads of spice on the high seas, or if the family was harboring an assassin, or if there was incest secretly afoot.
S: And there was incest afoot, on your side.
M: What, Simmy and Lala?
S: Well?
M: That was no secret. They bragged about it. My father’s parents were first cousins.
S: Jennica thought we led boring lives. What do you tell a sixteen-year-old? “Be grateful you live in peace and comfort”? And expect that to be the end of it? “Nothing interesting ever happens to us. All you and Dad ever did was go to college and buy a house and have us.” I told her she could say whatever she wanted to us, since we were her parents, but she shouldn’t just go around telling other people that she thought they led boring lives, because she would hurt someone’s feelings. She said, “At least hurting someone’s feelings would be interesting.” What do you say to that?
M: And it’s not as if our family is notable for its ordinariness. I mean, the stories your family has about the war?
S: Or that cousin of yours.
M: Cousin of mine?
S: In Israel, with the skin disease and the spa.
M: Oh, he is a freak. Robby, with his friends from EST.
S: Robby. Oh, he was awful. Those showers we had to use.
M: Nineteen eighty-one. Susan and I went to Israel and left the kids with Susan’s parents. We visited my cousin Robby at his spa, outside Haifa. These people, at the spa. They thought that magnetized mud would halt the spread of certain cancers. This kind of pathetic fantasy. People dying for their ignorance. Just losing weight and disassembling their minds out there in the desert. Talking in EST jargon about the chemotherapy conspiracy, over dinner in their communal cafeteria.
S: And what dinners. Quinoa with yeast sauce. Kelp salad.
M: Robby’s spa was macrobiotic. He served seaweed grown at some awful kibbutz somewhere that he wanted to take us to visit. The only Jewish socialist solar-powered aquaculture tanks in the world. In his converted Toyota pickup, he wanted to drive us halfway across Israel with his Russian girlfriend. Who was the worst of them all. A wraith of a woman, talking about Talmud and rising signs versus moon signs and Kabbalistic poetry. As if she’d only learned English from Robby himself.
S: Oh, I am so glad we got that ticket to Rome instead.
M: What a tragedy we left Gabe and Jennica behind. That trip would have taught her something about illustriousness.
S: