Blue Plate Special (34 page)

Unfortunately, we lived right on the main truck route in an industrial neighborhood, and the front of our house was a popular sleeping spot for truckers. All night, they would park below our windows and let their engines idle, spewing diesel fumes into the bedroom. Crack whores plied their trade on the sidewalk in front of our building to these truckers and the
Hasidic men who pulled up in station wagons. Our upstairs neighbor got drunk every night and wailed away on his electric guitar for hours, oblivious to his ringing phone and Jon’s thumping on his door; we nicknamed him Wankin’.

In the mid-nineties, Williamsburg was just starting to become the epicenter of the known hipster universe. Back then, the streets were wide and quiet, the sky was huge over the low two- and three-story row houses with aluminum siding and the brick factory buildings that ran all the way to the waterfront. When I’d first come to the neighborhood, Bedford Avenue had no bank machines: there was one old deli, a bodega or two, the Greenpoint Tavern, which we always called the Budweiser bar, the Northside Pharmacy, the hardware store with dusty tools that appeared to have been there since the 1970s, and a Polish restaurant. Now, suddenly, ATMs sprang up, along with trendy thrift stores, little boutiques, a hip record store, and—this heralded the beginning of a new era—a minimall on the ground floor of an old loft building.

Through all this change, the food industry in Williamsburg was still run by local vendors. Although there was an odd supermarket called Tops on the Waterfront where I could get staples and produce, most of my shopping I had to do in the old style. Up on Bedford Avenue, the main drag of Williamsburg, were two butchers, the “red butcher” and the “blue butcher,” so called because of the colors they were painted inside; they had official names, but no one used them. According to anyone who knew anything about the neighborhood, one of them was good and the other was bad. But I could never remember which was which. I went into one and sniffed hard, then did the same thing in the other one, hoping to ferret out the bad one by any hint of putridness or rot. I never could tell the difference; they both smelled equally of garlicky sausage and the tangy stink of fresh meat. I generally bought kielbasy in either
one and felt perfectly safe in both. Until one day, I bought a piece of beef from the blue butcher which, when we cooked it, tasted gamy, and the texture was sinisterly stringy but tender. I was convinced it was horsemeat, and from then on, I went exclusively to the red butcher. A few years later it closed, and a bubble tea emporium opened in its place.

Every summer, Jon and I went to the Mermaid Parade out at Coney Island along with tens of thousands of other New Yorkers. The first year I went, in 1993, the year before Jon’s and my first date, I gyrated and lip-synched in a blond wig, aquamarine spandex minidress, and fishnets on the back of my band’s friend Larry’s pickup truck with the other Sporkettes, who were similarly sluttily attired, as was everyone else at the Mermaid Parade, male or female, gay or straight. We won Best Musical Group that year, and the next time I marched as well, with Jon’s band, the Hungry March Band, a rotating group of about twenty-five musicians who played Latin and Balkan songs on horns, winds, and drums.

We fueled ourselves on Nathan’s hot dogs before the parade, then hung out with all the other mermaids before we strutted down the boardwalk, sardine packed with paraders and spectators. Most of Williamsburg and the East Village turned out with all due pale tattooed pierced flesh, black leather bustiers, and Doc Martens lace-up boots. The nautically themed costumes and floats were beautiful, funny, and inventive—sea creatures, underwater gardens, schools of fish, squid puppets, floating plankton, dolphins. There were little girls in glitter and mermaid costumes dressed just like their mothers, green-painted skinny algae men in Speedos, body makeup melting
in the heat, dogs on leashes, music, cheering, the background noise wash of rides and games.

Every year, the Hungry March Band ended their parade by walking off the boardwalk down the steps onto the wide, crowded beach, through the sand and crowds on towels, and straight into the ocean, gathering followers as they went. There, we splashed around thigh-deep in the shallow, foamy waves in a bacchanalian, decked-out, ragtag bunch and didn’t once think about hepatitis or E. coli or floating syringes. When it was time to disperse, we drifted in clumps back up the beach to Ruby’s, the bar on the boardwalk, which had a food stand in front with raw clams and deep-fried everything. There was always a half-hour wait in line for the bathroom. The bartenders were witty and frantic. All of us were tipsy and happy and sunburned.

Afterward, a group of us walked a mile or so down the boardwalk over to Brighton Beach to watch the sun set and eat Russian food and drink vodka at the Winter Garden. There always seemed to be a table outside big enough to accommodate us, and there was always a group we knew at the next table, so we expanded to include them. From the beautiful, mock-scornful, playfully sneering waitresses, we ordered pelmeni, oysters, blini with caviar and sour cream, broiled whole fish, shrimp cocktails, octopus and crab salads with mayonnaise dressing, and beakers of vodka.

This was the serious part of the night. It was a Saturday, which meant Shabbat was ending, so the Russian Jews came out to celebrate after sunset. It was a whole new parade on the boardwalk, and we were the spectators this time. Just as we had all known one another at the Mermaid Parade, they all greeted one another, kibitzed in Yiddish and Russian, caught up, moved on to the next group of friends—the older men dapper in white suits, the younger ones fashionably urbane in tight jeans and loose shirts, women of all ages just as sluttily dressed, in their way, as the Mermaid Parade marchers—slippery sexy
short summer dresses, perfume that wafted behind them on the warm air, movie-star makeup, scalloped baby-doll hair.

This rite of passage into summer was my ritual for many years. Then Coney Island got bought out in the early oughts and the parade turned corporate, and we old regulars started complaining and gradually stopped showing up.

On Halloween, the Hungry March Band always marched in the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. The men went in drag, dressed as aliens or cowboys, or wore rubber masks. We women dressed in our sluttiest, fishnetiest attire, a cabal of blood-red-lipped medieval serving wenches, Mad Maxine dystopian sci-fi wet dreams, and Morticia-Vampiras in satiny black slip dresses with glow-in-the-dark fangs, my own preferred costume. The parade thronged through lower Manhattan, so densely packed it was impossible to tell who was marching and who was spectating. It didn’t matter. It was a big, decadent, wild, loud, raucous party.

My life in those days felt like a protracted adolescence or postcollegiate idyll. Jon and I went out constantly to lavish dinners, wild loft parties, live music, underground clubs, rooftop barbecues, and all-night binges. We ran in a big, loose crowd of local painters and musicians, many of whom were Jon’s old classmates from Bennington.

For the most part, except for my writer’s group, which I’d joined the year I met Jon, I kept away from other writers. It was mostly out of fear, as I always expected the same kind of cold competitiveness from my fellow writers that I had found at Iowa. But I did have a close writer friend, Cathi. She lived on the Upper West Side with her husband, Dan, who was also a writer, and their baby daughter. Theirs was a grown-up world of schools and restaurants and baby carriages and enormous, proper apartment buildings with awnings, far removed from the scruffy, low-lying warehouses, dive bars, and messy artist lofts of Williamsburg. I took the subway to Broadway and West
Ninety-sixth. Cathi and I would meet at Empire Sushi, where we sat for hours over spicy tuna rolls, California rolls, and miso soup, talking and laughing and exchanging news about our lives. She was a breath of “real” life, as I thought of it, the life I hoped Jon and I were headed for, soon.

By that time, I had a finished manuscript of
In the Drink
, and Cathi helped me find an agent for it. Over the next year and a half, at least twenty-seven different editors rejected it. Many flat-out hated the book. One of them wrote to my agent that she literally threw it across the room. Others tried to find a more delicate way of expressing their dislike for poor Claudia—she was the problem, not the writing, which they all grudgingly admitted was not bad. But Claudia was too drunk, too much of a loser, and too pathetic; worst of all, she didn’t seem to want to help herself. She didn’t fit the mold of the scrappy, decent, charming heroine who pulls herself up by the proverbial bootstraps. Her problems were all entirely her own fault. It was hard to root for her, hard to care about her when all she did was screw up. Unfortunately, that was the point of the novel.

During this constant influx of disheartening, depressing rejections, Jon never flagged, never lost heart on my behalf. Right after our honeymoon, he’d convinced me to quit my job and offered to support me until I sold my novel. It was the first time in my adult life that anybody had ever done that for me; I felt a complex brew of intense gratitude, guilt, pressure to succeed, and safety. Jon read every draft of the book, believed fervently in my writing, and encouraged me to keep going. He built us a new bedroom so I could have his old one for a writing studio, soundproofed his music studio so his band’s late-night practicing wouldn’t bother me, refurbished the deck outside our bedroom window for a garden and a place to have cookouts. At one point, when I felt almost suicidal, he took me out to our favorite restaurant and spent the whole evening
comforting and reassuring me. “It will sell,” he said for the ten-thousandth time. “I promise. Just wait.”

He was right. My agent finally managed to finagle a two-book deal with a determined, persistent, brilliant young associate editor at Doubleday. The higher-ups weren’t wild about
In the Drink
, apparently, but she’d convinced them to take a chance on me, and they wanted to see what I’d do next. They liked my writing, at least.

In 1999, when I was almost thirty-seven years old,
In the Drink
was published. It was then promptly swallowed up in the first wave of “chick lit” that came crashing onto these shores from Bridget Jones’s England. It was a mixed blessing, like so many other things.

Sometime in 1998, Susan announced to us that she was marrying Alan, our ex-stepfather Ben’s nephew. I was overjoyed, if slightly bemused: I’d always thought of Alan as our stepcousin. But it made sense. As teenagers meeting for the first time on Tuckernuck, they had been instantly attracted to each other but had lost touch for many years afterward. Then, the summer before they got married, they reunited at Tuckernuck, then went off to Paris and had a fantastically romantic fling. When Susan got pregnant, they decided to get married, and she moved to Holland, where Alan, who was Dutch, lived.

Although I knew Susan was dying to settle down, I was worried about her, in an annoying older sister sort of way. She had a seemingly wonderful life as a trained masseuse and yoga teacher in Northern California. Now she would be living in dark little Holland, where she didn’t speak the language, didn’t have a job or any friends, with a baby on the way, married to a man she barely knew. Of course, our mother had taught us all how to start over, to land on our feet, and to make the best of any circumstance. And Alan was a kind and loving man, and I had no doubt he would make an excellent father.

A few days before the actual ceremony, Jon and I flew to Amsterdam to hang out with my other stepcousins, Christian, Daniel, Liesje, and Jason. We ate
bitterballen
and
fritjes
and drank
pils
in various cozy little Amsterdam pubs while Susan and Alan, who was loyally staying by her side, remained at home. It never occurred to me that it might be hard for Susan to be left out while Jon and I had fun with our cousins, her new in-laws.

The ceremony was at Alan’s family house in southern Holland, an old converted mill in the countryside. Their legal ceremony had already taken place at the town hall. For the wedding itself, they had asked Daniel to marry them, and me to read “The Owl and the Pussycat.” For some reason, I balked at this, and insisted, in prima-donna-like fashion, on reading an excerpt from “Song of Songs” instead. I also insisted on marrying them along with Daniel, to which they acquiesced wearily in resigned second-born fashion. Then I proceeded, cluelessly, to show up wearing an off-white cocktail dress to the ceremony. I did manage to have a black sweater and a colored scarf over it, but what sort of sister does that? Susan, of course, had thoughtfully worn black to my wedding. In fact, she had been an impeccably selfless maid of honor. I was apparently incapable of that.