I Totally Meant to Do That (18 page)

And if a woman asks, “How do you get around New York City in heels?” I know that I’m in the South, and also that I’m about to disappoint her. She wants me to respond by saying something like, “I take cabs” or “I carry flip-flops in my purse” or “Pain is the price of beauty, sweetheart.” But all I can say is, “I
don’t
wear heels.” Because I am not Carrie Bradshaw!

The long manicured fingers of that show find and pinch me wherever I go:

“Do you go to all the hot restaurants?”

“Do you hang out with fashion designers?”

“Do you know anyone like Mr. Big?”

What? Are you kidding me?! The answers are no, no and … well, sure, but so do you; charming narcissists exist everywhere.

I do hate to disappoint these women; their questions are an act of kindness. They wish for me to lead a glamorous life. It’s a self-fulfilling optimism. They want me to be like Carrie Bradshaw, so they assume I am.

And they want it for themselves. They imagine that if they’d moved to New York, they’d live the
Sex and the City
life. Therefore they need to live vicariously through someone who does, and that person may as well be me. So … they couldn’t help but wonder … can’t I at least do them the favor of occasionally drinking too many cosmos and throwing myself at emotionally unavailable men?

Surely my days are spent dining next to celebrities, dashing in and out of Diane von Furstenberg, and cutting velvet-rope lines, because otherwise, why would I be in New York when I could be home with them? By assuming the answer to this question, they don’t have to ask it. And I don’t have to tell them otherwise.

Of all the tiny readjustments, however, of all the cultural alterations necessary for me to pull off this constant back and forth, there is one I cannot master: the volume of my voice. I leave New York for the pastoral silence of North Carolina, crawl into a car or sit down at the breakfast table, and wail. “WHAT CD IS THIS?” “WILL YOU HAVE SOME SALT?” “WHY ARE YOU WINCING?”

I don’t realize I’m roaring, of course, not even after I’ve heard my own bellow. But then my patient mother covers her ears and I apologize—in dulcet tones. Sometimes she even closes her eyes in some synesthesia defense mechanism: “Please, Jane, you’re screaming so loudly I can’t see.”

Still, fifteen minutes later I’m hollering again. Rinse and repeat. Here’s the disconnect: Although the background noise in New York is prodigious, it is also omnipresent; I cannot perceive that I am
raising my voice to overcome it, because I do not recognize it’s there. And I’m not talking about one’s learned ability to tune out sirens or horns. There is a base-level, low-decibel constant buzz in New York that you
literally cannot hear
.

In an upstairs bedroom in my parents’ house, one-third of my laptop’s total speaker capacity is loud enough to enjoy music. Meanwhile, in my third-floor Brooklyn apartment, after midnight, when there are no screeching buses, screaming drunks, or cooking roommates, when, if I strain to listen I catch only occasional wind, full laptop volume is not even sufficient; external speakers are required.

Eight million whirring refrigerators add up to a whole lot of nothing. How voluminous this lack of volume! It astonishes me that a collection of sounds so large goes completely unnoticed, exists beneath the surface, affecting us in ways unknowable. It’s like dark matter in space: We can’t find the stuff but we know it’s there because it alters gravity. Just like we only know “dark silence” exists because it turns New Yorkers into eighty-year-olds when they leave.

But in the city we do not know we’re screaming. We merely aim to supersede the din. And then, in our collective ignorance of the sonic deluge, we slowly grow louder and louder until, eventually, no one hears anything but his or her voice. In the right place at the right time, you can yell bloody murder and disturb no one.

One night, after closing down a dive bar in Chelsea, my friend Shawn and I took to the streets with my iPod, one tinny earbud for him and one for me. As we reached Port Authority, Guided by Voices’ “Glad Girls” came on and although we could hardly hear the music, or maybe because we couldn’t, we sang—
“Hey, glad girls only want to get you high”
—and jumped in place and stamped our feet and wailed at the top of our lungs—
“In the light that passes through me.”
The subway rumbled beneath, trucks bellowed beside, and no one could hear us scream.

This was my quintessential New York moment, standing next to a puddle of piss. So now you understand my reluctance to share such a defining motivation with my friends back home.

“Surely, Jane, the reason you’ve forsaken home for all these years is because your life in New York is fabulous. Right?”

“Nah, it’s because in the middle of the night, in the part of town that smells like diarrhea, no one can hear you scream.”

Who am I, hobo Freddy Krueger? Better not to say, not to let them know that I feel like a foreigner in what used to be my home.

And when I first moved to the city, it was the other way around! North Carolina was concrete, was reality. Therefore, New York felt strange:
It was the weirdest dream. I was in the West Village, and then all of a sudden I was on a train underground. And there was this guy talking on a cell phone—somehow, even though we were underground—except then he turned into a homeless guy … and the cell phone was actually a tin of mints … and the next thing I knew I was in Midtown! That’s when I woke up
.

Then, during my urban tenure, a reversal: North Carolina became the alternate universe, the foreign land so peculiar it must be a dream.
So, we were in a car, right? Looking for a parking place. And the lot was enormous. It was like the biggest shopping center I’ve ever seen—but all of the stores were exactly the same. And we couldn’t find a spot, so we just kept driving around and around in circles … endlessly. I remember thinking, Can’t we just walk? And that’s when I woke up
.

I no longer know which is terra firma and which incognito; neither can I choose which one I want. In all this back and forth, I constantly change my mind. Every time my plane touches ground down south, I breathe in air so thick with humidity and sweet with plant-produced oxygen, it feels like ingesting a cloud. People smile, and when they speak it sounds like singing. I become convinced that I must move back. But when my plane touches ground again
at LaGuardia, my whole body buzzes with this electric Technicolor energy, the cars on the BQE look like they’re dancing, and I’m all, like,
This cabbie and I are vibing on the same wave; we don’t even
need
to speak
.

The distinction between home and destination has disappeared. I’ve lost my inner compass. I mistake up for down and contrary for contrariwise—I do not know which is the real world and which is the Looking Glass world where books are written backward and the sun shines at night.

It’s as if each airplane is a passageway between two realms that are, to me, opposites, mirror images. And if that is the case, then every time I travel from one of my home/destinations to the other, the mirror image of me—the version of me that everyone at home thinks I am—must be traveling at the exact same time but in the opposite direction.

Oh dammit! I went and created the Carrie Bradshaw version of myself. I called the her-me into being. I should’ve left well enough alone. But it’s too late now. She exists—and, boy, must she be disappointed every time she has to take my place in my crappy Brooklyn apartment with nowhere to fit her shoes.

While I’m toasting beautiful newlyweds in elegant clothes with expensive champagne, she’s cleaning my deaf cat’s litter box. While I party at fancy receptions into the wee hours of the morning, she sweats through the sheets because the air conditioner broke, she’s trying to block out the souped-up stereo systems of teenage thugs.

And while I toil at my laptop, trying to write my way into understanding which life to choose, she clacks away on hers with confident clarity:
Men are like cities. Some will cook you dinner and spoon you to sleep; they’re the hometowns, overweight in a cuddly way and always smiling. They’re safe and dependable—but claustrophobic. They’ll ask for a key to your apartment, come over while you’re out, and then wait
up all night just to ask where you were. They’ll always be there; they’ll never change. And then there are the New Yorks, those bastards we chase like bad habits. They’re charismatic and dashing and they never stay in on a Saturday night. They don’t call and they don’t sleep over; sometimes when you talk it’s like they don’t even hear you. But they leave you completely weak in the knees and just when you’ve sworn off them, they show up in a limo with flowers and tickets to the Met. They’ll only give you a New York minute, but I couldn’t help but wonder, isn’t that enough?

Maybe for her. It’s an attractive argument, but as I keep telling you, I am not she. I’m not ready to choose. So thank goodness for all these audacious Southern weddings that keep me coming back. Every summer, the invitations pour in, and every time I respond, s’il vous plait, “yes.” When one ends, another begins, on constant repeat in my life. They’ll always be there; they’ll never change. I’ll always go.

And yes, this back-and-forth behavior is taxing: monetarily, mentally, emotionally. But I am up for the challenge. I’m a brick house.

into the driveway was a plump jack-o’-lantern with a “W” carving instead of a face. It was Sunday, October 31, 2004, two days before the presidential election, and I was in Jacksonville, Florida. The purpose of my trip was twofold: to volunteer for an organization called Election Protection, which aims to secure the voting process, and to visit one of my dearest friends, Sarah, who’d recently left New York for her hometown. I specifically chose Jacksonville, of the volunteer centers calling for bodies, so I could multitask this way.

But I miscalculated the reconcilability of my two objectives. Sarah’s friends and family were vocal supporters of Bush. And, although Election Protection is nonpartisan, most of the volunteers,
including myself, were rabidly opposed. I hadn’t anticipated the divide because typically politics don’t play a part in my social life. But during the 2004 election, the topic was impossible to ignore—particularly in Florida, where the wounds of 2000 were still open, particularly when the first question any of her friends asked me was, “So Jane, what brings you to town?”

The trip was schizophrenic. Case in point: Halloween. That morning, I’d whooped and hollered in support of Kerry at a rally in an African American church in one of Jacksonville’s poorest neighborhoods. An hour later, I was riding in Sarah’s fiancé’s SUV to a picnic at her cousin’s beachside house, outside of which stood guard that orange sentinel with an alphabetical scar for a head.

I have to admit, it was a clever idea. The shape of the letter even resembles a toothy grin. But to me, the carving was also unintentionally appropriate. Jack-o’-lanterns are scary, just like the Bush regime. And neither a pumpkin nor George W. knows how to speak.

This was my frame of mind when they welcomed me into their home. While I hugged her cousins and met their new infant, all I could think about was that stupid vegetable. I’d known these people since college, spent multiple spring breaks in Sarah’s childhood home. Her parents have literally said I’m “family.” And yet, suddenly they all had new, additional identities: “Bushies.” Some of them were suspicious of me, too. It’s like we were all wearing masks for the holiday. It was a very divisive time.

Early Tuesday morning, I was dispatched, in a black Election Protection T-shirt, to stand outside a poll in the same neighborhood where the rally had been. My job was to answer basic questions about casting ballots, but I wasn’t allowed to offer opinions or advice. No one asked me anything, though. Essentially, my presence was meant to deter voter-fraud funny business, the perpetrators of
which were assumed to be—since these voters were poor and black and therefore predicted Democrats—Republicans. Basically, I spent the morning criminalizing my opponents.

Sitting next to me was my suitcase. I’d booked my return flight for that afternoon, following this line of reasoning: “If Bush wins, I don’t want to be stuck in Florida.” But I had one more stop to make first. I’d called another college friend, Emily, who was also living in Jacksonville. She and I had lost touch over the years, but we’ve always had a way of picking up where we left off. If I could bum a ride to her home, we’d have a quick visit and then she’d take me to the airport. Deal.