rent

i will warn you right now that the next few posts will be filled with ridiculous details of our foray into the world of apartment hunting. if you're not someone who has rented an apartment in new york, these entries may be too upsetting, may even overwhelm you to the point you find yourself crouched in a dark room, rocking silently, tears streaming down your face. you have been warned. read on if you must.

our incredibly responsible landlord has decided to sell the jalopy of an old victorian house we live in. he lives here, too, and there's an older couple living on the second floor, living there since the seventies. i asked the landlord about this during the great fridge debacle of '09, asked him to let us know if he went into contract so we could start looking for a place to live. and he said, in exact words, these words: we haven't even had anyone looking. i'll be sure to let you know, though. nice, we thought. thanks, landlord, we thought. and we thought this right up until the point when, two days later, i walked into the entryway and found a fancy document for us and another for the sweet folks upstairs. a notice to vacate. hmmm. dated the week before. my, that's classy. nice, we thought. thanks, landlord, we thought.

so the sweetie and i set out to look for a new place to live. it turns out if you live somewhere for ten years or maybe a little more than that, you sort of lose touch with what things cost. sort of like when i was in high school and we went back to school shopping and my mom told me not to tell dad how much my fancy new wal-mart jeans cost. because dad thought jeans cost five bucks. so we learned that apartments that cost what ours cost tend to be in places where people like to shoot guns at other people more than i like to. a lot more. so we scaled up. more dollars a month up than i thought it was right to ask of people. and we found that we could move away from gunshots and toward poorly maintained things called "two bedroom".

let me explain to you what a two bedroom apartment in brooklyn has in it. first, go look at the closet in the smallest bedroom in your house. go stand inside it. pretend you are brushing your teeth. pretend you are taking a shower. this closet you're standing in is probably a few square feet larger than a bathroom in one of these apartments. now, if you can get yourself out of that closet and go to, say, a closet about three square feet larger, and if you can shove a thirty year old stove (in a "newly remodeled one", shove a factory second stove with three burners or something equally off) and two cabinets in there, then you've got a pretty representative kitchen. then there's a bedroom. if an ad says "box bedroom" what it means is you can't fit a queen bed in the room. not because it will be too crowded. because a queen bed is actually larger than the dimensions of the room. i'm not making this up. i asked. and then the second bedroom, that magnificent item that can kick a rent price up to dizzying heights is usually strangely situated, often off the first bedroom, shotgun style. it is also usually a four by six closet. you might want to add to that the incredible stairwells leading to these places. you know how those naturalist novels of the turn of the century described stairwells in tenements? they used words like stench and fetid and cabbage. they used foul soup. the stairwells we wandered through, built around the time these novels, novels like maggie, girl of the streets were written, managed to hang onto the stench that has evidently been clinging to them for the past hundred years. two bedroom was clearly out of our range.

but after a while searching, dealing with all sorts of ugliness, we found a place we liked. very small. very, very small. but with a landlord who clearly understood that refrigerators are meant to be running and bathrooms are not meant to be painted with whipped cream textured walls. a landlord who believes that there should be lights in the stairwells and that the stairs themselves should be sturdy enough to bear the weight of people. a landlord who is not likely to repair a hole in the ceiling by screwing a slab of metal over the hole. and we looked around outside. half a block to the prettiest city park in the entire country. another half the other way to a train. two blocks to our favorite diner. three to the vet. a co-op, four bookstores, a farm market, flea market, movie theater and dub pies all walking distance. if you don't know about dub pies, that's a whole other story. well, we liked what we saw and decided to go for it. and that's when we entered a dickensian world of paperwork and doublespeak. the world of realty. stay tuned.

i made some socks

what do you do when you're waiting days and days for your landlord to bring you a working fridge and it's 90+ degrees outside? you get out some fat, hand-dyed wool and start on some socks. yeah, i know. but on day 7 of the saga of the fridge, i stomped out of the house, took the train to one of the local yarn stores and splurged on some malabrigo yarn because i'm worth it. i got two skeins because i had no idea what i wanted to do but you should never buy just one skein of anything. i stomped back out into the warm bathwater air and trudged home. i got boxed california rolls at the hippie store by the train and ate them with the cheap plastic chopsticks while sitting in the underground station at 7th avenue. 200 degree subway station. california rolls with wasabi. bench. honeysuckle tea. a pile of yarn in my bag. ahhhhh. what a wonderful world.

the sweetie had been saying he'd like some socks and i found myself a nice pattern knit up by a man whose father had size 11-13 feet. i figured with my fat wool and larger needles, i was set. so i started knitting. i'm not sure i mentioned my sock knitting skills so now seems like a good time. several years ago, i attempted a sock pattern and managed, after much crying and swearing, to make one rather ugly sock. there didn't seem to be a reason to make a matching one, so my sock making career was born, flourished and died in that moment.

until.... something in my brain has shifted and the risk-taking part of me seems to be coming back. that's right. i plunged right back into the high-risk, danger-laden, fear-fueled world of sock knitting. hell-bent, i tell you. and now i know why all those lunatic knitters chatter on so about making socks. it's like crack. i'm not saying this lightly. i have known crack addicts and it is terrifyingly close. the high is quick and brief before you need more. more and more of your world begins to revolve around how you get that high. you don't care what others think. you just don't.

so i tried it. and i made a sock. it had a heel and a toe and all the things socks have. then i made a second one. they matched. i had no idea. there are things i don't much care for about my socks. i didn't use an appropriate yarn so they're a little bit boxy and since i made them originally for the sweetie (oh, yeah, i misjudged how much i'd need to knit for a size 14 sock and ended up with something for my own self), they're slouchy. the yarn itself is beautiful, but you never know what will happen with variegated stuff and it's certainly not what i expected. on the other hand, i have incredibly soft, exceptionally warm, hand dyed and hand knit wool socks for my own feet. and i did something i almost never do. i read a pattern, followed someone else's directions. they are nothing fancy, but they are a good first step.

secret zoetrope

if you can't get on the q train, go here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/arts/design/01zoet.html

august in the new york city subway is a form of punishment. for me, mildly paranoid and substantially claustrophobic and not much a fan of my fellowman en masse, it's nearly paralyzing in its ugliness. as you walk down into a station you breathe air that can only be described as chunky and you can taste the varied forms of human waste clinging to what you breathe. you are in a hole under the ground, but unlike natural caves that keep themselves set at nice fall day temperature, these holes under the ground take a 95 degree day and scoot it on up to 100 or so. there is no amount of soap, deodorant, perfume or bourbon that will help you survive a five minute wait underground. everyone smells, but you do too. and of course, on hot days, on high electrical use days, there's always the concern that those air conditioned cars whizzing through the tunnels will shut down because of a power failure. no lights. no air conditioner. no air at all. just the hot breath of the strangers sitting next to you. imagine being mummified in old, unwashed dog blankets. imagine being mummified with 130 other people. dark. awful.

so it was with some amount of trepidation i waited for the q train to take me under the ground, over the bridge and into the city on an 87 degree morning. i got on a nearly empty car and sat down just opposite a large backpack, unattended. now, all over the trains and stations you'll see these posters: if you see something, say something. the hope is we'll report terror before it blows up. the problem with paranoid folk is that everything is something and we see all of it. if i reported every single suspicious thing i saw on the subway, i'd have to move in at the precinct and do nothing else. so i do what i do often, which is simply get off the train and wait for a new one. and i wait. in an underground station with other folks melting there beside me.

when the train arrives i am standing between two cars. two roads diverged in a yellow wood. to my left, a half-empty car full of folks listening to headphones and reading, almost all adults, clutching iced coffees and bags. a laptop or two. solitary. it looks like a starbuck's in there. to my right, a car that has maybe five or six folks reading, but about sixty children in bright yellow shirts. summer camp. the children range in age from five to maybe twelve with the younger ones at the near end and the older ones toward the far end of the car. it is hot. i hate crowds. the largest fear looming in my head is the idea of being trapped in the train in a tunnel for hours. so when the doors open and the screaming of a carload of children washes over me, i get myself right on into that car. i stand there next to where the smaller ones sit, near the adults attending them. they are the kind of loud you hear in public school cafeterias, a loud that can shatter bone, melt spine. i try to knit but i am standing and the conductor is driving this train like a thirteen year old, so i hold to the bar with one hand while my knitting droops from the other. idle. but should all my paranoid fears be realized, i will be useful in this car. i will be needed, which means i won't be able to think about me and how i'm suffocating. this is how paranoid people make decisions. i'm not kidding.

just past dekalb avenue but not quite to the bridge, the train stops. it seems like the trains stop here often, coming and going, to shuffle express trains around locals and so on. but the train just stops and stays there. and more than once i've been there on the train waiting five, ten, twenty minutes. in silence in a dark hole in the ground. and when i look around it never seems to bother anyone else and i want to scream about suffocation, about being trapped but i calm myself down and recall that i'm really the only one suffocating, the only one trapped. so we are sitting still in this train in the tunnel and the children do not even notice, are so busy chatting they cannot feel the difference between motion and stillness.

the train starts up after a minute or two and we roll along until a boy a few feet away from me, five or six and pudgy faced, looks out the window and screams. his eyes get bigger even than in cartoons. the three or four little boys around him turn to look and their eyes pop right out of their little heads. they scream and continue to gaze out the window, mouths gaping. and pretty soon half the train is staring out the window, howling. i am standing by a door. i turn to look at what the children see. the c.h.u.d.s, flushed alligators, the crate of wolverines? i am completely flabbergasted. it's a giant zoetrope. on the walls of the tunnel. as we speed toward the bridge and manhattan, bright shapes swim and fly back past us headed the other way, flickering. and the children, born into so much technology, so much aggressive entertainment, just stare and can not get their eyes back in their heads. look, they whisper all together. they have no other words to match up with what they're seeing. the whole car watches the images float by. the children oooh. the few adults on the train look up from books and smile. then we move out into open air and rumble across the bridge.

refrigerator

our refrigerator is a special kind of ugly. now, this refrigerator has been ugly a long time. i think it may be a long lost sibling of the fridge my parents had back in 1974. it dates from just about then. the first generation ice maker is connected to nothing and covered with tape. the bin for vegetables most fridges have is sitting useless in the bottom of the thing. the runners that held it to the sagging shelf above are missing. the outside is pitted with rust and although i clean it regularly, the inside seems always to have a sweaty grayness to it.

sometime in the spring we started to notice things wouldn't last in the fridge very long. scallions could get by maybe a day before we'd hear their faint screams wafting out from behind the yellow doors. lemons or limes made it three days. meats grayed overnight and anything we used part of- a tomato, a red onion- and put in the fridge for later use, would wither up so fast you could almost watch it happen, no matter what method of containment we used. our fresh food consumption dropped dramatically. when we were gone for large parts of the summer, we forgot the fridge and its hideous interior. but then i noticed my yogurt, as i spooned it into my mouth, didn't feel cool. it didn't feel even coolish. if you've never eaten room temperature yogurt, it can be quite upsetting. there's the temperature, first. then there's the texture and smell. not quite right. not quite.

so i grabbed the thermometer off the back porch, scooted the wilted scallions and souring yogurts aside and slapped the thermometer, reading 78, in the fridge. now, for those of you who don't know, a healthy refrigerator runs at somewhere between 35 and 38 degrees. that's high enough above freezing that the milk stays milk and cool enough to keep bacteria from dancing around on your food. by 40 degrees, you start laying out welcome mats for all sorts of bacteria that will make you cry. and other things. a few hours later, the thermometer read 52 degrees. the sweetie suggested i crank up the dial. our dear refrigerator comes with a dial reading 0-5, with five being the coolest possible setting you could ever want. ever. it will make your plums shiver. so i turned the dial way on up to five, against the insistence of a sticker on the inside of the fridge warning me to keep things set at 3 for optimum performance. no fridge that comes from my generation can be expected to be optimum this far down the road, so i paid that sticker no mind. you've seen those shows where the space ships shift into warp speed? a field of wiggly air developed around the fridge as it shot up to five. i am sure the foods inside were pressed back against their seats.

next morning, that two settings up on the dial bought us three degrees. i opened the door and stared at the 49 degree food sweating in there and got out the garbage can. goodbye yogurt. goodbye blue cheese dressing. goodbye (sob) small hunk of cheese made with local beer. goodbye wilted salad greens. you were too good for this world.

the sweetie ran into our landlord and mentioned the 50ish degree inside of our fridge. our landlord said it sounded dead. i wrote him a little note because he sometimes needs what you'd call reminding on things like this. because he's trying to sell the house, he's not interested in buying a new fridge, no matter how cheap. "i've got one in the basement," he tells me, smiling. because that's what everyone wants. to go three days with no fridge, then have the busted one replaced with a basement fridge. mmmmmmmm! because you know there's no good reason a fridge should ever go to the basement and you know this fridge is down there because ten years ago the fridge languishing in our kitchen won out over it. so tomorrow, the landlord will arrive with "some guys" and they will, without assistance of a dolly, drag the old fridge out, exposing more than ten years of whatever builds up behind a refrigerator. and while i am on hands and knees, scrubbing up this frightful mess, they will drag in the basement fridge, managing to gouge a big scrape along the hardwood floor and probably knock off plaster on at least two of the doorways they have to drag it through.

i will wait the whole twenty four hours for the replacement fridge to cool down and will spend sunday restocking. milk. cheese. salad greens. olives. mustard. blackberry preserves. i will make a pitcher of iced tea. clean slate. brave new world.

passenger

1. walking down the street in a brooklyn neighborhood i see a group of women and children walking toward me. not just a few. seven or eight women and probably somewhere close to fifteen children, all under eight. all adorable. the women push strollers or hold the hand of a small child and chat with each other in spanish, laughing. the children walk in a cloud around them, never straying into the street and never getting themselves too far ahead of or too far behind the group, looking out for each other as they go along. generally, when you see a group of kids this large walking together, it's a daycare group but the strollers are single strollers, not those four seater things preschools have. and the children are too easy with one another. but mostly, mostly, the women, their faces, say this is something else. they are happy to be together. some sort of meeting, some club of moms, headed to the park with their children on a summer morning. and i walk past them, smiling at the children. they smile right back and make room for me on the sidewalk, weave their small parade around me. but at the end of the group is one white woman walking with them, but not at all participating in the joy. she smiles at me, but it isn't a smile like the rest of the women in the group have. it isn't a real smile. it is an awkward, uncomfortable smile. it is a smile i see generally on the faces of white people when i am the only other white person they can see. in a room. on the train. waiting in line. but the smile i am used to. it is what she says that makes the middle of my stomach feel cold. "i'm sorry," she says, looking right at my face, shoving those words out around that awful, ugly smile.

2. i stop at an intersection because the light is getting ready to turn. a woman in a minivan with small children in the back sits just up from the crosswalk, staring blankly. the light turns and she stays where she is, looking at nothing. a car behind her honks once. honks twice. the minivan backs up slowly, just a bit, and somehow sidles over and out of the way of traffic. the woman does all this without moving, without looking, without expression. and a small brown car, the one from the honking, pulls up beside her and a woman's head cranes out the window, looks hard into the minivan. i wait. i wait for words you can hear only when a brooklyn driver feels wronged. she opens her mouth and says, "hey!" and she takes a slow, deliberate breath. then, in a tone moms use with sick children, she says, "are you okay?" she looks at the driver and waits. i know what she is thinking. the woman in the minivan does, too. she seems grateful and nods. yes. she is okay. she is breathing and alive again. the driver of the car scoots around and moves through the intersection. the woman in the minivan stays where she is, maybe to collect her thoughts. i wait for the light to change.

3. i walk a few blocks over to a street where the sidewalk is at least as wide as the road. large flagstones, too bumpy for skating but not bad for a bike. there are three girls on the sidewalk, hanging out together, nine or so years old, doing what nine year old girls do in summer. standing on skinny legs, giggling, flinging an arm or flipping hair to emphasize a point. i am halfway down the block from them when i see a man jogging toward them, toward me. one of the girls sees him, too. she continues with her giggling obligations but as he nears, she darts out across his path and runs in a fairly tight circle around him as he runs by. he is startled, but survives. she is giggling to herself now. i walk closer. she readies herself. as i come up next to the girls, she leaps out and runs in front of me, then around me and back to her group. her friends seem neither amused nor disturbed by this behavior. they do not talk to her about it. it is just something she does.

4. i wait for the bus near the park. it is a short trip and usually i would walk it but i have picked up some supplies for max, heavier things than i expected, and the bag i'm carrying broke. the rain is more like mist and although i was expecting to feel cooled by it, mostly i just feel like someone sweated on my skin. i wait at the stop with an older man and a woman who could be his daughter but seems, because of the questions she asks him, like she might be a home health aide or some sort of hired caregiver. it is clear from their conversation he likes her, is glad to have her standing there next to him. it is clear from the way she puts her hand on his back as he gets on the bus that she feels protective of him. she gives him her metro card to use on the bus, tells him to put it in his pocket and starts to walk away. he is confused, asks where she's going. home, she tells him, but she'll walk so he can ride the bus. the bus driver looks at her. the bus driver has been watching this whole exchange and says, "just get on the bus with him. it's raining. don't worry." the two of them sit down next to each other, thanking the driver. although we wait a while before we leave, nobody else gets on the bus. he asks her a question. tells her she should marry her cellphone, she loves it so much. she laughs, then keeps smiling after that. she looks at him like he is a baby bird. they get off at the first stop and both thank the driver again for her kindness. it is not so far from where we waited for the bus. three or four blocks. but he walks with a cane and it is raining and three or four blocks can be a great distance sometimes.