I Totally Meant to Do That (27 page)

Geez, I’m really giving it to Brother Jimmy’s. It’s just a barbecue joint. What’s my deal? So what if it’s engaged in a misguided search for an authenticity that cannot exist beyond its own borders? After all, that’s exactly what I was doing. Oh, right, of course:
That’s what I was doing
. Classic projection of self-loathing. Sorry, Bro.

I felt like a character in a romantic comedy who, having wronged her lover, races to the airport to apologize before he boards a plane and leaves forever. “I’m sorry, North Carolina! I’m not really dating New York, I promise. You’re the one I love. Please come back!”

And that’s my problem: I want it to come to me. But I can’t import the South, not through pictures tacked to my walls, recipes created on my stove, or sayings inserted into my vocabulary. Because as soon as I bring those things to New York, they become part of my New York life, and are, therefore, instantly bereft of the quality I’d sought. Regions don’t travel. People do.

It’d been a little over a year since my sister Tucker left SoHo for Raleigh. We talk on the phone frequently, and I visit. I had convinced myself that her move would barely affect us. But I’d only accounted for time together. Turns out, there are gradations of time
apart. Before, even when I wasn’t with her, I knew I could be in thirty minutes. But miles make potential energy heavy as sand. I miss having her
here
. I miss having home a half an hour away.

She brought the South to New York, the same way my parents do when they visit and insist upon making friends with every waitress, bartender, and cabbie. The last time they came up, while my dad and I were at the American Museum of Natural History, he asked me if I knew how to remember the difference between a stalagmite and a stalactite.

“No, sir.”

“The one with the ‘g’ grows up from the ground. And the one with a ‘c’ comes down from the ceiling.”

Blame my middle-school earth sciences teacher, but I had never even known, before seeing that exhibit, that stalagmites were formed
by
stalactites, the dripping of the latter making the former higher, so that, in effect, they grow toward each other until, occasionally, they fuse into one.

And so, I am not ashamed to say, that sometimes, in my bedroom, I put in my earphones, close my eyes, play James Taylor, and try to grow myself toward home.

“Here I sit, country fool that I am … holed up in a cave of concrete.” “So close your eyes. You can close your eyes; it’s all right.” “And I can hear a heavenly band full of angels and they’re coming to set me free.” “Cause there’s nothin’ like the sound of sweet soul music to change a young lady’s mind.” “It’s time for me to be stealing away. Let those rain clouds roll out on the sea; let the sun shine down on me.” “Keep a weather eye to the chart on high and go home another way.” “And the dog barks and the bird sings and the sap rises and the angels sigh—yeah.”

There are plenty of musicians reminiscent of home, but only JT brings me closer to it. He doesn’t just sing about North Carolina;
he
is
North Carolina. The thick drawl in his voice is like the humidity, slapping over certain vowels and hugging them the way a sweaty T-shirt sticks to your back. His cadence and phrasing loll unpredictably on top of a melody the way waves roll randomly over a current beneath. If I close my eyes when I hear it, I’m sitting on that dock in the Bogue Sound, pulled out by the tide.

How could I possibly have explained that to the indie rocker? He’s from Michigan. Besides, who’s to say he’s wrong? If he doesn’t know where James Taylor comes from, then the music
does
suck. It’s as saccharine as triple sec. I’d rather he disparage it than open a theme restaurant in Times Square called “Fire and Rain.”

All he knows about my home is what gets the most press. And I don’t deny his knowledge; the South wears many faces. My grandmother used to take me to the Woolworth’s in Greensboro for lunch. I sat, eating grilled-cheese sandwiches, at the same counter where civil-rights activists staged the famous 1960 sit-in, on the same stools that were later installed in the Smithsonian. I do realize that these things happened. My great-uncle, who as a candidate for governor supported desegregation, woke up once in the middle of the night to a burning cross on his front lawn.

But I only understand this side of my home in the abstract. That South isn’t in my bones. The one I know is forty-person-strong Thanksgivings, and having to buy an extra book of stickers for all of the casserole dishes that came through my house when my grandmother died. It is “Shower the people you love with love.”

And it’s
not
fake. When my great-aunt died, her children received a phone call from a stranger who’d seen the obituary. The woman said, “I’m sorry to hear about Mrs. Preyer. I work at the Burger King, and every time she came in, she told me I was beautiful.”

“Franklin has something to ask you,” Lou said, and passed the receiver to my nephew.

“Do you know Lyle the Crocodile?” he asked.

Aha, the title character from a popular series of children’s books about a crocodile who lives with a family in an Upper East Side town house.

“Yes!” I responded excitedly. “I just saw him the other day. He is so funny.”

Silence
.

“Franklin? Are you there?”

“Well,” he began, because he once began every sentence that way, “I don’t think I believe you.”

“It’s true!” I said. “We laughed and laughed; he’s very silly.”

In fact, I felt silly, but no matter: He’d already handed the phone back to Lou and run off. “Shoot!” she exclaimed. “I had him going this morning.”

“You’ve got a skeptic on your hands,” I said, noting that he probably recognized that crocodiles can’t make beds. Or maybe he did believe Lyle was real, but doubted that I, based on the way I dress, could have any friends on the Upper East Side.

Either way, at this point, the most noteworthy aspect of the call was that my sister and I reaped great humor from lying to her child. But then, about a month later, I heard a variation on the theme. On the Saturday of a weekend visit with my dear friend Lyssa, her first child, my goddaughter, announced that tomorrow she wanted to take me to the other park, the one with the bigger slide.

“Sweetie, Jane has to leave tomorrow,” Lyssa said.

“Why?”

“Because she doesn’t live here.”

“I live in New York,” I interjected.

She looked confused.

“Do you remember when Curious George goes to the big city?” Lyssa asked.

There it was again. I’ve been away for so long that my life is now understood in relation to children’s books. This is preferable, I allow, to living somewhere with fewer points of reference. If I’d moved instead to Malaysia, my friends and family would be forced to tell their children, “You know, the place where all your toys are made.” And then it would be my fault their kids didn’t believe in Santa.

And anyway, my life here does resemble a kid’s tale. For example, I live beside hipsters scruffy enough to belong in
Where the Wild Things Are
. I just devised a lunch out of a leftover burrito half, a
frozen veggie burger without a bun, a handful of carrots dipped in mustard, and some stale crackers with jelly, which means, like
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
, I will eat anything (and everything). Also, without warrant, I retain the delusion that I can achieve my dreams.

If I had to compare my decade in New York to just one classic, though, it would be P. D. Eastman’s
Are You My Mother?
, about a confused baby bird who asks everything it sees, including a dog, a cow, and a power shovel, the titular question. The day I returned from visiting Lyssa and my goddaughter, I packed everything I owned—excluding of course the dowry box in my parents’ basement—and moved from my seventh New York apartment, in Greenpoint, to my eighth, in Gowanus. I can’t seem to find the right nest.

This behavior is bothersome, largely because moving in New York is a major hassle, particularly when the friend-of-a-friend mover you hired, and with whom you confirmed, fails to arrive, and his phone is suddenly out of service, and the new tenant is arriving in a matter of hours. Also, by the way, you contracted debilitating tendonitis in both shoulders, so you can’t lift anything heavier than a bottle of water, which is why you’re already out $100 from hiring someone to help you pack. This was not the ideal time for you to move, but when a friend tipped you off to a $1,000-a-month one-bedroom, and you’d recently been asked by the local police to deliver the license-plate number of your current downstairs neighbor who was using and selling heroin, you imagined that even if opportunity did knock twice, you might not hear it over the sirens.

I’m not telling
you
what to do, but if I were in that situation, after waiting for an hour, I would purchase a box of Entenmann’s brownie bites and a party-size bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos, stress eat for thirty minutes, and then call the first random number I found on a “Moving?” poster taped to a streetlamp.

Five minutes later, Arnaldo Sanchez stood in my living room counting furniture. He lived in the neighborhood. He wore an Urban Express T-shirt.

“You work for them?” I asked, pointing to the logo.

“Used to,” he answered, “but I’m starting my own business.”

I was pretty sure he didn’t have a truck.

“I wish you’d called yesterday,” he continued, “because I would’ve had the truck, but this afternoon it’s in Long Island.”

Yeah, right.

“But I can handle this in my van,” he said.

“A moving van?” I asked.

“A minivan,” he said. “Don’t worry; it’ll only take two trips. What? You gotta be somewhere?”

“Yeah, but not until 8:00 p.m.”

“Aw, you’ll be
unpacked
by then. Two trips—guaranteed. No doubt, no doubt.”

I, in fact, had serious doubts. There was a bed, a sofa, a loveseat, a dresser, a bookshelf, two desks, a vanity, five chairs, more than a dozen boxes, and as many tote bags. But he offered me a $300 flat fee (the guy who’d bailed: $550), and I can appreciate a hustle, so we shook on the deal and he told me he’d be back in fifteen with his “men.”

An hour later, he arrived with one other guy, his brother, Georgie. There was definitely no truck in Long Island.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Georgie said, when he noticed me staring at his red, swollen, and wandering left eye. “I’ve got surgery tomorrow.”

“Oh dear,” I responded with concern. “Can you see?”

“Kind of,” he said. “I mean, with the other one; I can’t see nothin’ out of this.”

I reached for the brownies and stuffed one in my mouth without
even microwaving it. Then, imagining they might like to stress eat too, I asked, “Y’all want one?”

“I just ate,” Arnaldo replied.

“I have diabetes,” Georgie said. “That’s why I can’t see.”

OK: So a diabetic blind man would carry me and all of my belongings across Brooklyn? While I sat doing nothing—like a colonial crossing a mountain range on a sherpa’s back? Well, not exactly like that; as I quickly discovered, Georgie also had a bad back.

I looked to Arnaldo: “Are you sure this is doable?” Georgie answered for him, “I’m fine!” Arnaldo shrugged his shoulders, stuck his fingers out in what was neither a peace nor victory sign, and said “two trips.”

“What’s taking him so long?” Arnaldo asked the steering wheel.

“Beats me,” I said, and tried to straighten my neck against the felt ceiling. Another few minutes passed, and Georgie appeared with two large plastic bottles of Snapple.

“What the hell!” Arnaldo demanded.

“I was looking for the kind you like; they didn’t have it,” he said.

“It took you that long to pick something else?”

“I was checking all the bottles! I couldn’t see!” Georgie yelped. “And you shouldn’t curse in front of Jane.”