Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

  The place was dead to him, but I kept hoping for a miracle. A riding accident, a playhouse fire: lots of things can happen to little girls.

  When looking around, I tried to keep an open mind, but the more places we visited, the more discouraged I became. If the apartment wasn’t too small, it was too expensive, too modern, too far from the center of town. I’d know immediately that this was not love, but Hugh was on the rebound and saw potential in everything. He likes a wreck, something he can save, and so he became excited when, at the end of the summer, the grandmother got a listing for what translated to “a nicely situated whorehouse.” His feeling grew as we made our way up the stairs and blossomed when the door was unlocked and the smell of stagnant urine drifted into the hall. The former tenants had moved out, leaving clues to both their size and their temperament. Everything from the waist down was either gouged, splintered, or smeared with a sauce of blood and human hair. I found a tooth on the living-room floor, and what looked to be an entire fingernail glued with snot to the inside of the front door. Of course, this was just me: Mr. Bad Mouth. Mr. Negative. While I was searching for the rest of the body, Hugh was racing back and forth between the hole that was a kitchen and the hole that was a bathroom, his eyes glazed and dopey.

  We’d shared this expression on first seeing the old apartment, but this time he was on his own, feeling something that I could not. I tried to share his enthusiasm—“Look, faulty wiring!”—but there was a hollowness to it, the sound of someone who was settling for something and trying hard to pretend otherwise. It wasn’t a horrible place. The rooms were large and bright, and you certainly couldn’t argue with the location. It just didn’t knock me out.

  “Maybe you’re confusing love with pity,” I told him, to which he responded, “If that’s what you think, I really feel sorry for you.”

  The grandmother sensed my lack of enthusiasm and wrote it off as a failure of imagination. “Some people can see only what’s in front of them,” she sighed.

  “Hey,” I said, “I have”—and I said the dumbest thing—“I have powers.”

  She pulled the phone from her handbag. “Prove it,” she said. “The owner has gotten three offers, and he’s not going to wait forever.”

  If finding an apartment is like falling in love, buying one is like proposing on your first date and agreeing not to see each other until the wedding. We put in our bid, and when it was accepted I pretended to be as happy as Hugh and his bridesmaid, the grandmother. We met with a banker, and a lawyer we addressed as Master LaBruce. I hoped that one of them would put an end to this—deny us a mortgage, unearth a codicil—but everything moved according to schedule. Our master presided over the closing, and the following day the contractor arrived. Renovations began, and still I continued to browse the real estate listings, hoping something better might come along. I worried, not just that we’d chosen the wrong apartment but the wrong neighborhood, the wrong city, the wrong country. “Buyer’s remorse,” the grandmother said. “But don’t worry, it’s perfectly natural.” Natural. A strange word when used by an eighty-year-old with an unlined face and hair the color of an American school bus.

  Three months after moving in, we took a trip to Amsterdam, a city often recommended by the phrase “You can get so fucked-up there.” I’d imagined Day-Glo bridges and canals flowing with bong water, but it was actually closer to a Brueghel painting than a Mr. Natural cartoon. We loved the lean brick buildings and the wispy sounds of bicycle tires on freshly fallen leaves. Our hotel overlooked the Herengracht, and on checking in, I started to feel that we’d made a terrible mistake. Why settle in Paris before first exploring the possibility of Amsterdam? What had we been thinking?

  On our first afternoon we took a walk and came across the Anne Frank House, which was a surprise. I’d had the impression she lived in a dump, but it’s actually a very beautiful seventeenth-century building right on the canal. Tree-lined street, close to shopping and public transportation: in terms of location, it was perfect. My months of house hunting had caused me to look at things in a certain way, and on seeing the crowd gathered at the front door, I did not think, Ticket line, but, Open house!

  We entered the annex behind the famous bookcase, and on crossing the threshold, I felt what the grandmother had likened to being struck by lightning, an absolute certainty that this was the place for me. That it would be mine. The entire building would have been impractical and far too expensive, but the part where Anne Frank and her family had lived, their triplex, was exactly the right size and adorable, which is something they never tell you. In plays and movies it always appears drab and old ladyish, but open the curtains and the first words that come to mind are not “I still believe all people are really good at heart” but “Who do I have to knock off in order to get this apartment?” That’s not to say that I wouldn’t have made a few changes, but the components were all there and easy to see, as they’d removed the furniture and personal possessions that normally make a room seem just that much smaller.

  Hugh stopped to examine the movie-star portraits glued to Anne Frank’s bedroom wall—a wall that I personally would have knocked down—and I raced on to the bathroom, and then to the water closet with its delft toilet bowl looking for all the world like a big soup tureen. Next it was upstairs to the kitchen, which was eat-in with two windows. I’d get rid of the countertop and of course redo all the plumbing, but first I’d yank out the wood stove and reclaim the fireplace. “That’s your focal point, there,” I heard the grandmother saying. I thought the room beside the kitchen might be my office, but then I saw the attic, with its charming dormer windows, and the room beside the kitchen became a little leisure nook.

  Now it was downstairs for another look at the toilet bowl, then back upstairs to reconsider the kitchen countertop, which, on second thought, I decided to keep. Or maybe not. It was hard to think with all these people coming and going, hogging the stairwell, running their mouths. A woman in a Disneyland sweatshirt stood in the doorway taking pictures of my sink, and I intentionally bumped her arm so that the prints would come out blurry and undesirable. “Hey!” she said.

  “Oh, ‘Hey’ yourself.” I was in a fever, and the only thing that mattered was this apartment. It wasn’t a celebrity or a historical thing, not like owning one of Maria Callas’s eyelashes or a pair of barbecue tongs once brandished by Pope Innocent XIII. Sure, I’d mention that I was not the first one in the house to ever keep a diary, but it wasn’t the reason I’d fallen in love with the place. At the risk of sounding too koombaya, I felt as if I had finally come home. A cruel trick of fate had kept me away, but now I was back to claim what was rightfully mine. It was the greatest feeling in the world: excitement and relief coupled with the giddy anticipation of buying stuff, of making everything just right.

  I didn’t snap out of it until I accidentally passed into the building next door, which has been annexed as part of the museum. Above a display case, written across the wall in huge, unavoidable letters, was this quote by Primo Levi: “A single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way. If we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.”

  He did not specify that we would not be able to live in her house, but it was definitely implied, and it effectively squashed any fantasy of ownership. The added tragedy of Anne Frank is that she almost made it, that she died along with her sister just weeks before their camp was liberated. Having already survived two years in hiding, she and her family might have stayed put and lasted out the war were it not for a neighbor, never identified, who turned them in. I looked out the window, wondering who could have done such a thing, and caught my reflection staring back at me. Then, beyond that, across the way, I saw the most beautiful apartment.

  Put a Lid on It

  In a bathroom at La Guardia Airport I watched a man take a cell phone from his jacket pocket, step into an emp
ty stall, and proceed to dial. I assumed he was going to pee and talk at the same time, but looking at the space beneath the door, I saw that his pants were gathered about his ankles. He was sitting on the toilet.

  Most airport calls begin with geography. “I’m in Kansas City,” people say. “I’m in Houston.” “I’m at Kennedy.” When asked where he was, the man on the phone said simply, “I’m at the airport, what do you think?” The sounds of a public toilet are not the sounds one would generally associate with an airport, at least not a secure airport, and so his “What do you think?” struck me as unfair. The person he was talking to obviously felt the same way. “What do you mean, ‘What airport?’” the man said. “I’m at La Guardia. Now put me through to Marty.”

  A short while later I was in Boston. My sister Tiffany met me in the lobby of my hotel and suggested we spend the rest of the afternoon at her place. The bellman hailed a cab, and as we got in I told her the story of the man at La Guardia. “I mean he actually placed a call while sitting on the toilet!”

  Tiffany is big on rules but allows a pretty wide margin when it comes to mortal sin. Rape, murder, the abandonment of children: these are taken on a case-by-case basis. What riles her are the small things, and in denouncing them, she tends toward proclamations, most beginning with the words “A person doesn’t.” “A person doesn’t just go around making things out of pinecones,” she’ll say, or, “A person doesn’t use the word weenie when talking about a hot dog. It isn’t cute. It isn’t funny. It isn’t done.”

  In telling Tiffany about the man on the toilet, I expected a certain degree of outrage. I expected a proclamation, but instead she said only, “I don’t believe in cell phones.”

  “But you do believe in placing calls while sitting on the toilet?”

  “Well, it’s not a belief,” she said. “But I mean, sure.”

  I thought again of the La Guardia bathroom. “But can’t people guess what’s going on? How do you explain the noise?”

  My sister held an imaginary phone to her mouth. Then she scrunched up her face and adopted the strained, broken voice commonly associated with heavy lifting. “I say, ‘Don’t mind me. I’m just trying to get the . . . lid off this . . . jar.’”

  Tiffany settled back against the seat, and I thought of all the times I had fallen for that line, all the times I had pictured her standing helpless in her kitchen. “Try tapping the lid against the countertop,” I’d said, or, “Rinse it in hot water; that sometimes works.”

  Eventually, after much struggle, she would let out a breath. “There we go . . . I’ve got it now.” Then she would thank me, and I would feel powerful, believing myself to be the only man on earth who could open a jar over the telephone. Appealing to my vanity was an old trick, but there was more to it than that. Tiffany is an excellent cook. Shortcuts don’t interest her, so I’d always assumed that her jar held something she had preserved herself. Jam, maybe, or peaches. The lid released, I had imagined a sweet smell rising to meet her nose, and the sense of pride and accomplishment that ultimately comes from doing things “the ol’ fashioned way.” I had felt proud by extension, but now I just felt betrayed.

  “Daddy’s been thinking about things a little too hard,” she said.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You.”

  “Nobody calls me Daddy.”

  “Mamma does.”

  This is her new thing. All men are called Daddy, and all women, Mamma. At the age of forty she talks like a farsighted baby.

  My sister lives in Somerville, on the ground floor of a small two-story house. There’s a chain-link fence separating the yard from the sidewalk, and a garage out back, where she keeps her bike and the homemade rickshaw she regularly attaches to her bike. It’s a cumbersome, chariot-like thing, with a plywood body and two wheels taken from a scrapped ten-speed. There are a lot of rules involving the rickshaw, most decreeing what a person can and cannot do upon seeing it. Laughing is out, as are honking, pointing, and tugging at the corners of your eyes in an attempt to appear Chinese. This last one is a lot more popular than you might think, and it irritates Tiffany the most. She’s become fiercely protective of the Chinese, especially her landlady, Mrs. Yip, who encourages her to defeat fat by rhythmically pummeling her thighs and stomach. Every morning my sister turns on the TV and stands in the living room, beating herself for half an hour. She claims that it keeps her in shape, but more likely it’s the bicycle and towing that heavy rickshaw.

  “She’s got a beautiful voice,” my father says. “I just wish to hell she’d do something with it.”

  Asked what that something might be, he says that she should put out an album.

  “But she doesn’t sing.”

  “Well, she could.” He speaks as if not releasing an album is just laziness on her part, as if people just walk in off the street, lay down a dozen or so tracks, and hand them over to eager radio stations. I’ve never heard Tiffany sing so much as “Happy Birthday,” but when it comes to speaking, my father is right—she does have a beautiful voice. Even when she was a child it was smoky and full-bodied, lending even her most banal statements a cunning, slightly sexual undertone.

  “A person needs to use their best assets,” my father says. “If she doesn’t want to put out an album, she could maybe be a receptionist. All she’d have to do is answer the damned phone.”

  But Tiffany isn’t looking for career advice, especially from our father.

  “I think she’s happy doing what she’s doing,” I tell him.

  “Oh, baloney.”

  When she was thirteen Tiffany got braces, and when she was fourteen she tried to remove them with a set of pliers. She was on the lam at the time, a runaway trying to distance herself from the class photo my parents had given the police. In trying to track down my sister, I spoke to one of her friends, a tough-looking girl who went by the name of Scallywag. She claimed to know nothing, and when I accused her of lying, she opened a Coke bottle with her teeth and spit the cap into her front yard. “Listen,” I said, “I’m not the enemy.” But she had heard stories, and knew not to trust me.

  Following her capture, Tiffany was put in juvenile detention and then sent away to a school my mother had heard about on one of the afternoon talk shows. Punishment consisted of lying bellydown on the floor while a counselor putted golf balls into your open mouth. “Tough love” this was called. Basically the place just restrained you until you were eighteen and allowed to run away legally.

  After her release Tiffany became interested in baking. She attended a culinary institute in Boston and worked for many years in the sort of restaurant that thought it amusing to flavor brownies with tarragon and black pepper. It was cooking for people who read rather than ate, but it paid well and there were benefits. From midnight to dawn, Tiffany stood in the kitchen, sifting flour and listening to AM talk radio, which is either funny or spooky, depending on your ability to distance yourself from the callers. Tommy from Revere, Carol from Fall River: they are lonely and crazy. You are not. But the line blurs at four A.M. and disappears completely when you find yourself alone in a tall paper hat, adding fresh chives to buttercream icing.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” Tiffany asks our cabdriver, and before he can answer, her cigarette is lit. “You can have one, too, if you want,” she tells him. “It won’t bother me in the least.” The man, who is Russian, smiles into the rearview mirror, revealing a mouthful of gold teeth.

  “Whoa, Daddy. We know where you bank,” Tiffany says, and I start to wish that one of us knew how to drive. Like our mother, my sister can talk to anyone. Were I not here and were she in a position to afford a cab, she would undoubtedly be sitting up front, complimenting the man on his signaling abilities and then, just for good measure, making fun of his ID photo or the name printed beneath it. Growing up, she had a reputation for dishonesty, and her relentless, often inappropriate truth telling is, to her, a way of turning that around. “I’m not going to lie to you,” she’ll say, forget
ting that another option is to simply say nothing.

  As we cross from Cambridge into Somerville, Tiffany points out a few of the other places she’s worked over the past fifteen years. The last was a traditional Italian bakery staffed by aging war veterans with names like Sal and Little Joey. Throughout the day they’d invent excuses to fondle her rear end or run a free hand across the front of her apron, and she let them do it because: “(a) It didn’t physically hurt, (b) I was the only woman, so who else’s ass were they going to grab? and (c) The boss let me smoke.”

  The money wasn’t what she was used to, but still she stayed on for close to a year, until the owner announced he was going on vacation. His extended family was holding a reunion in Providence, so the bakery would close for the first two weeks of October and everyone would go without pay. Tiffany has no credit cards or long-distance service. All her money goes toward rent and cable, and so she spent her vacation in front of the TV, pounding her empty stomach and growing progressively angrier. At the end of the two weeks she returned to work and asked her boss if he’d enjoyed what she called “your little Woptoberfest.” She’s usually a pretty good judge of just how far she can push someone, but this time she miscalculated. We pass the bakery and she tosses her cigarette out the window. “Woptoberfest,” she says. “I mean, how could someone not find that funny?”