Love and Magic

I had heard about a free play in Central Park and my friend L. and I decided to venture into the city for the day to see it. By the time we found the outdoor theater there was no one around. The chatty employees in matching shirts did not notice us staring into their booth, clearing our throats. Waiting. We noticed a sign hanging above us that leveled our lukewarm hopes:

Tonight’s Show SOLD OUT

A man came around to the front of the booth to put up a poster.

“Excuse me,” I said, “But the sold out sign – is that for the play at seven?”

“Oh, yeah, we ran out of tickets hours ago. People start lining up at six in the morning and wait there until two when we begin passing them out. Then it’s crazy for a half hour and it’s all sold out by two-thirty.”

I sighed. It was about three now.

“If you want, though, you can get in line over there and I can just about guarantee that I can get you a seat when the show starts.”

He indicated a line of people on the distant sidewalk, kept far from the ticket booth. Neither of us felt like waiting in line for four hours and enduring the lethargy that was sure to madden our fragile minds, so we declined and moved on. There was an enormous park before us, several hours of daylight, and a half-eaten bag of truffles in L’s bag for us to feed our sugar highs.

I smelled a delicious smell wafting through the air.

“Food,” I said lovingly.

L. and I followed the path and passed the turtle pond and a little league baseball game. We came to a stand and knew immediately the source of the orgasmic odor.

Waffles.

Waffles.

We inched closer to the waffle stand and read the menu carefully. I wanted to know everything.

“What are you girls doing, standing all the way over there?” a black haired fellow with glasses and a white apron said from inside of the stand. He had an accent that sounded Scottish to me, but I rationalized that he must be a waffle expert from Belgium. “Come closer. Come on.”

We took a few little steps towards the stand.

“Where are you girls from?”

“New York,” I answered, gazing down at the varieties of waffles described below his face.

“Brittany, we’re in New York,” L. said. “Saratoga.”

L. and I did not want anyone selling us anything. We quietly discussed waffles. We wondered what dinges were and how to even say it.

“I think it’s pronounced ‘dingus,’” L. whispered.

“That’s what Dave calls people when their being idiots,” I said. “Spekaloos - what is that? Is that a Belgian thing?”

The fellow behind the counter overheard us.

“Do you want to try it?” he said.

I nodded eagerly. He dipped both sides of a plastic knife with a tan, buttery substance, much like a goopy peanut butter. I took it, licked the knife end, and handed L. the handle. It was warm, spicy, and smooth. She tasted the handle end.

 “This tastes so familiar. What is this made of?” I asked.

“Love and magic,” the man behind the stand said. “What do you think it tastes like?”

“Love and magic seems about right, actually,” I said.

“There’s some cinnamon,” said L, thinking aloud.

“It’s gingerbread,” the fellow in the stand said before either of us could produce the answer.

Gingerbread!

“Oh! Gingerbread!” I cried. “That’s exactly what it is!”

That’s what we were smelling before; it wasn’t merely the waffles.

L. and I whispered about the possibility of buying some fragrant waffles. We had already planned to go to Alice’s Tea Cup and fill our happy stomachs with scones and tea after dinner, and with bellies already gushing with truffles, the thought of waffles seemed over the top.

“Should we go then?” I asked her.

“Let’s go.”

“Bye,” I said to the guy at the stand, “Thanks for all the magic!”

He looked sad. We walked away very quickly.

The Inevitability of the French Fry

I sat wedged between two Turkish students nibbling cheeseburgers in Woodbury Commons. I was the only person outside of the MacDonald’s restaurant without food, daydreaming about frozen desserts.

Usually I do not get paid to peruse discounted brand name merchandise with international students, but the group leader for the Turkish kids flew back to her sales office in Istanbul and left the group unsupervised for the weekend. One girl, Beren, was older than the other students and took charge of the group. There wasn’t much for me to do but make sure they all got to the outlets and back without breaking their legs.

They had already been to the outlets on the fourth of July and now they were just buying souvenirs from friends. When I ask international students why they wanted to come to New York, the word “shopping” is invariably upon their lips. Clothes, handbags, sunglasses, watches – it’s all cheaper in the US.

With little money and a lot of time, I followed Beren and her young friend, Pinar, through the Gap and Armani Exchange and gave bad fashion advice with the best intentions. I couldn’t remember the last time I went shopping with girls.

“Which of these shirts do you like better?” asked Beren, holding up two white American Eagle shirts with red logos, one of which was slightly faded. Squinting slightly, I pointed to the brighter one. I watched them try on tee-shirts over their tee-shirts.

After, Pinar and I dug through a bin of underwear labeled, “4 for $10.” In spite of my resolve to spend no money, I started picking out pairs of cheap underwear. At least I’m not spending frivolously, I thought. Underwear is a necessity of life.

“Where can I go to a Victoria’s Secret?” Pinar asked, tossing aside a pair of extra-large lace-backed panties.

“Just so you know,” I said, “Victoria’s Secret is still pretty expensive here. You can spend, like, forty dollars on one bra there.”

I lifted my breasts slightly as I said the word bra because I find that communication goes more smoothly when I talk with my hands.

“What was that word you used?” Pinar asked.

“Bra,” I repeated. “Bra. But really, they’re, like, forty dollars.”

My mind simply cannot justify forty dollar undergarments.

“Bra,” said Pinar.

“I want just one to take home,” said Beren. “I will buy.”

Among Turkish ladies, I discovered that “I will buy” can be a complete sentence.

“The Gap tee-shirts are eighty US dollars in Istanbul,” Beren explained, contemplating shelf of twelve dollar tees. “I will buy.”

After many hundreds of US dollars were dropped on watches and shoes and handbags, I followed Beren and Pinar to the food pavilion. The word “pavilion” might indicate an establishment that is just as sophisticated as the designer outlets the pavilion keeps company with. Inside, we found pizza, tacos, and Au Bon Pain. This food court fare did not interest the two girls and they went to MacDonalds. We joined the rest of the group at a table outside of the MacDonald’s joint. The Turkish language reigned supreme and I had no idea what was going on.

“Kdeiomcr erjkwjhod kdjsjoe System of a Down adfadewtn,” one girl said.

Okay, they’re talking about music, I thought to myself.

“Please, Brittany, have a fry,” said Beren, pushing her large box of fries towards me. “Please.”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“You have nothing,” she pouted. “Please. I beg you. It’s potato, Brittany.”

“No, I know what it’s made of. I’m okay. Really.”

“But it’s so much food,” she said.

No matter where you’re from, you must know what you’re getting yourself into when you order a large fry in America. You made your salty, deep-fried bed and you can sleep in it. She dipped a fry into a white sauce and I asked her what it was.

“People here usually dip fries into ketchup,” I said.

“This sauce… this is good. You must try it, Brittany,” Beren said.

I’m usually inhumanly immune to peer-pressure. Some combination of curiosity and a desire to not be offered any more fries compelled me to take the smallest one and dip it into the white sauce. And… disappointment. I tasted ranch dressing and salt.

“Thanks,” I said with lukewarm enthusiasm. I hadn’t eaten a MacDonald’s French fry since I was sixteen. I left the group for a moment to purchase a salad from the Au Bon Pain and rethink my life.

In the car that evening, Dave lectured me on the inevitability of the French fry.

“You thought you could avoid MacDonald’s for the rest of your life? You can’t. I predict that someday, before you die, you will eat another MacDonald’s French fry. Someday you will be traveling and you will be starving and after walking for miles you will come to a MacDonald’s restaurant. You will buy fries because that is the only food for miles around and you will eat those fries whether you like it or not because you need that food to live.”

Disaster Bus

I arrived at my place of employment at precisely 8:45 pm on June 16, 2012, where a rented car was waiting for me just outside of the door.

“Are you… Brittany?” said the driver of the vehicle. He opened the door and I climbed into the backseat, which contained all of the modern conveniences. Peppermints, bottled water. I tightly hugged my tote full of folders and lanyards as we embarked upon our adventure.

The driver and I talked about pistachio ice cream, train rides through Eastern Europe, and the meat industry. I confessed my worries about getting twenty-one Vietnamese kids through the airport terminal.

“You’re selling yourself too short, Brittany,” said the driver. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

“Maybe I am. What’s the worst that can happen, anyways?”

The drive went quickly and I took my bag and my clipboards to the terminal. I looked for Hanoi on the board of arriving flights and only saw Paris, Istanbul, and Taipei. At that point I was absolutely certain that I was already in the wrong place. A French woman in a headscarf approached me asking me, in French, the best way to get into Manhattan. Soon I was playing the role of the translator as she discussed the least expensive mode of transportation with an airport employee. It was exhilarating.

I raced back to the gate, which was just as barren as I’d left it. Employees in suits and bellboy uniforms paced around leisurely in the proximity of some unclaimed baggage. I must have missed the group. The Vietnamese kids came and left and were probably taking scam artist taxis all the way to the school for a meager $500 per student. I bugged the employees again and they assured me the plane had been late and the kids were probably just getting to customs.

A flood of people who looked like they might be from Taiwan flooded through, dragging bags and embracing their families beyond the gate. Time passed. Suddenly everyone was Turkish and I did the only thing I could do: I whined to the airport employees again. Are there any more Vietnamese people back there? Are you sure? Am I really in the right terminal? They comforted me by saying that my group was probably still in customs and it could take a long time if they’ve never been to the US before. I called the emergency number to inform the school that my group was very late.

About an hour and a half later I was approached by a woman who appeared to be of Middle Eastern decent and two kids, all wearing tee-shirts from my school. She pointed at my clipboard from the international school and waved to me. This cannot be, I thought. They don’t look Vietnamese at all. Who do these people think they are, pretending to be Vietnamese? But then again, just because they don’t look Vietnamese doesn’t mean they don’t live in Vietnam. Perhaps they emigrated. There is nothing wrong with emigrating. People emigrate every day. I handed her a folder labeled “Group Leader” and welcomed her to New York.

“Are there twenty-two of you?” I asked urgently.

They smiled and nodded and I quickly determined that they didn’t actually speak English. Maybe they weren’t part of my group after all. Then I took back the folder and I called the emergency number.

“Hello, is part of my group Turkish? I haven’t found a large group of Vietnamese kids, but I do have three Turks and… they seem to want to go with me.”

Just then a beeline of Vietnamese kids in blue and pink tee-shirts emerged from the crowd, waving enthusiastically.

“Uh, hold on, I think I found the Vietnamese group. I’m just going to go greet them now. I’ll call you back,” I told the emergency contact and hung up. “Welcome to New York!”

The leader of the group explained that one girl was still detained in customs. A Vietnamese person with the same name had come through JFK earlier that day and airport security deemed her suspicious. They were going to hold on to her indefinitely.

From across the room, the Middle Eastern family gave me a wave and indicated that they had found their ride, a man with a black driver’s hat and a sign. I was relieved that they weren’t my responsibility after all.

I introduced myself to clusters of drowsy kids who rolled around on baggage carts and wandered off to the bathrooms without any supervision. I attempted to learn their names. Every once and a while a man would come from customs and tell us we had to keep waiting. A little before one in the morning the girl we were waiting for finally emerged from customs – not an imposter after all, it turns out. I called the emergency number again to tell them that everything was finally okay.

Once we boarded the bus, I handed out their student I.D. cards. Every time I read a name, the bus erupted with muffled giggles. Am I saying something dirty? I asked myself after each name. After four names, I passed the load of name tags off to the group leader.

I explained the rules of the school, such trivialities as why they can’t drink, why they can’t smoke in their rooms, why they can’t pull the fire alarm at their leisure. Sometime after I tackled the subject of urinating in public areas, the group leader told me that a student realized his passport was missing. We were halfway to the school and it was one in the morning. I whipped out my cell phone and dialed the emergency number. They said we would just have to turn the bus around and find it. A collective sigh rose from the bus seats, mine among them.

A half hour later we were at JFK airport once again. I paced the bus aisles while the student and group leader rummaged through the luggage compartment of the bus and the bus driver scoured the pavement in search of scattered documents. After a long search, they returned with a passport.

“It was in the back of the bus all along,” the group leader announced.

I called the emergency number.

“We found the passport. We’re on our way. For real, this time.”

When I lead the army of half-asleep students with rolling suitcases into their dormitory at 2:30 in the morning, a crowd of students smoking outside of the door greeted us with applause. I didn’t get home myself until 3:00.

A Commercial for Science Diet Cat Food

I took my first walk through the new neighborhood today with my friend Christine. It was warm and breezy and adventure was calling. About two houses, away a boy with a voluminous, red fro tousled the fur of some sort of animal. Upon closer inspection, that animal was a cat.

“Hey kitty,” I called out in a high-pitched voice to the cat, who was more interesting to me than the person.

“My friend is going to get her some food,” the boy announced. I took a few steps back and stopped in front of the boy and the purring black cat. “Is that your cat?”

“This is a stray. We found him right here,” he said.

I was stricken with jealousy. However intense the cat lady vibes I emit may be, I have never been approached by a stray on the street, nor has a skinny tom ever appeared on my doorstep. This boy was living my dream.

“Why don’t you love me?” I thought, hoping the cat could telepathically hear my thoughts. The cat was receiving an intoxicating belly rub and did not concern himself with my dreams.

Soon another young boy sprinted down the street with no food to give the cat.

“If you need some cat food, I have some in my apartment,” I said.

“You have cat food at your house? Do you have a cat?” the fellow with the fro asked.

“No!” the other boy said. “That’s why she has cat food!”

“I’ll go back and grab a couple of cans,” I said.

Christine and I returned to my apartment, where I stuffed my purse with a few cans of Science Diet and a Ziploc full of cat treats. We walked back to the yard two houses over. The boy was still tending to the cat, which had retreated under a thorny bush.

“Did you bring food?” the boy asked. “The cat is hiding now, but I think I could put a can in there.”

The boy with the fro opened up the can of turkey giblets and slid it under the bush. The cat devoured the gravy with relish.

“I think that cat belongs to the lady across the street,” the boy’s friend said. He had picked up his bike and rolled it back and forth on the pavement.

“That cat is awfully friendly for a stray,” I said. “He might be right. You should ask your neighbors if they’re missing a cat.”

Just then, a woman in purple sweatpants came outside. I assumed that she was the boy’s mother.

“What are you guys doing?” she asked.

“He found a stray cat,” I said.

“That’s not a stray. That’s my cat, Jake.”

And there was the switch. What kind of game were they playing?

“I can see why you might think Jake is a stray,” the woman continued. “He never eats and he’s so skinny. Did you feed my cat?”

“She brought us some cans of food,” the boy said.

“Well, that’s nice of you. Jake never eats anything, but he seems to like whatever you gave him.”

“It’s Science Diet turkey giblets,” I said. I was blushing now and Christine and I started to back away from the stranger’s yard. The boy with the fro and his friend both ran off to their own houses.

“He’s only eating the gravy. Jake loves gravy. He doesn’t usually like cat food.”

“Well, now at least you know that he likes Science Diet,” I said, laughing nervously.

A man in a suit emerged from the house and headed towards the car with his briefcase.

“Look, Paul, some kids fed our cat. They went out to the store and bought him canned food,” said the woman.

“I didn’t buy them,” I said, backing towards the sidewalk. “I have a cat. That’s her food.”

A teenage boy came out of the house.

“Look, Sam, this girl was feeding our cat.”

“Well, bye,” I said, starting down the street with Christine. The two boys rode by on their bicycles.

“You can come over and feed our cat whenever you like,” the woman called out.

This is a strange place.

The Mysterious Tenant

Tonight I am writing at a desk. I am not hunched over a glass coffee table with a whale full of truffles, nor am I using an Indian food cookbook balanced on my thighs as a makeshift table. It feels great. When we moved into our new apartment, the landlord kindly bestowed upon us a dresser missing one drawer, a forbidding metal table, a 1970s lamp, two TV stands, and this desk.

“I don’t know about the two TV stands,” I told the landlord, an older Italian man fresh out of a black and white crime film. “We don’t even have one TV yet. But I’ll take the desk.”

I’m sure that I’ve seen this same desk on Craigslist since November. Perhaps this is what destiny feels like. The wood is light-colored and the sides are silvery metal punctured with air holes. It’s marked with marker and blotted with something that could either be nail polish or driveway tar. I don’t know who the previous owner of this desk was, but we can draw some conclusions.

When we first saw the apartment, we were instantly sold on the tacky waiting room wallpaper and the green 1970s toilet.

“You seem like two nice, attractive young people,” the landlord told us. Then we asked him if he would allow a cat.

“Eh,” he said. “I had a bad experience with cats in this apartment. I can’t have a cat spraying on the carpets.”

The last tenant had an unneutered male cat that marked every gym sneaker, couch cushion, and spider plant as his territory. We explained that Olive is female and therefore biologically incapable of spraying, that she is far too well-behaved to ever spray anything, and that we would never keep an unneutered male cat in our home in the first place. Dave offered to pay a pet deposit if necessary and the landlord caved to our attractive youthfulness.

Yesterday we moved in. While everyone else was lugging heavy boxes, Dave’s mom recruited me to help her clean the kitchen and she began wiping down the contact paper inside of the drawers and cupboards.

“What’s this?” Dave’s mom said, reaching into the back of a drawer. She pulled out a tiny black thing. “What is this?”

“That’s a pipe,” Dave explained.

Then, for some reason, everyone smelled it. Curious noses swarmed the pipe, attempting to detect a particular odor from the residue.

My mom told the story of how our neighbor found fifteen thousand dollars in her ceiling when she was renovating. We all had a good laugh because we weren’t nearly so fortunate.

I moved towards the futon, ready to sit down for a long time and leave work irresponsibly incomplete. My goal was to shut off my entire body and stare at one point on the wall like an android for couple of hours, but it was not to be.

“What is this?” said Dave’s mom, emerging from one of the cupboards. “Is this…? Is this a…?”

“Is that a syringe?” I asked, frowning at the brownish tube in her hand, with even lines up the side like a science class beaker. There wasn’t a needle attached, but otherwise it looked an awful lot like a used syringe. “Don’t touch that. Put it down somewhere and don’t touch it. Just throw it away.”

Great, I thought. The drawers are full of pipes, the cupboards are full of syringes, and we haven’t even gotten to the bathroom yet. There is probably a fully functional meth lab in the green 1970s bathtub. We could never walk barefoot in the apartment because there are used needles everywhere and there is a 90% chance of contracting blood borne pathogens from the contact paper under the silverware.

A police siren blared outside. And now we’re going to be arrested, I thought wearily. I washed my hands about six times even though I didn’t even touch the syringe, imagining little AIDS monsters swirling down the drain.

I remembered this dream I once had where someone stabbed my skull with a needle full of heroin.

“Hey! What did you do that for?” I moaned, rubbing the top of my head. “Now I’m going to get a venereal disease and a lifelong addiction.”

I stomped around for the rest of the dream slamming doors, flipping tables, and frowning mercilessly.

Now I’m piecing together the results of my investigation. Due to the scribble of blue marker on the TV stand that Dave accepted from the landlord, the previous tenant had a young child with an unschooled artistic flair. 

Our apartment also has an adjoining nursery that the landlord has claimed as a storage room, which bolsters my speculation.

“Addicts don’t clean themselves,” my mom explained to us from under a Mexican blanket on the futon. “They think bathing ruins their high.”

I’m not sure who provided my mother with this little tidbit, but she seems to think the mysterious former tenant was a bit smelly. Based on the unneutered cat spraying all over the bedding, I cannot argue.

And my desk belonged to this person. Who knows what seedy business came to pass on this very keyboard tray, what terrible things that this manufactured pine surface once witnessed? Beyond this laptop is an aura of mystery that I shall penetrate, right after I wash my hands.

Crunch Time

Having endured five separate leaks in this little sinkhole of an apartment, Dave and I are looking for a new place to live. We have seen twelve apartments to date and still haven’t found a keeper.

Dave started calling real estate agents and on Memorial Day we took a drive to visit one at her office. We arrived first and sat down at the desk. She burst through the door of her office in an American flag T-shirt and introduced herself as Elaine. She shook my hand and held onto it for a long time. Elaine stared at me intently through her darkly shaded sunglasses.

“Oh my god. Do you know who you look like?” Elaine asked. “You know, that girl that everyone says you look like.”

I shrugged. I supposed she was probably thinking of Cindy Lou Who or the flying nun.

“You know who I mean. Come on. That cute little country singer girl,” she prompted, waving her hands.

Clearly we would not be seeing any apartments at all until I produced the name of a cute little country singer.

“Taylor Swift?” I guessed, wincing. The last time I saw my sister she spent hours trying to Swift-ify my hair. I don't want to talk about it.

“YES. You look just like Taylor Swift. Don’t people tell you that all the time?”

“No,” I said.

Dave and Elaine began discussing apartments, but she was quickly reminded of a con man who had been plaguing her all month long. He called her house phone addressing her as a senior citizen and told her that she had won a brand new car. All she had to do was pay the taxes on it and he would deliver it to her house. 

She played along and said that she couldn’t possibly take the car today because she was recovering from hip replacement surgery. The next day he called her back. And the next day.

“Can you believe that this man calls poor senior citizens and takes advantage of them like that? He’s conned more than four hundred senior citizens in this area. You’d think the law would step in, but I called the sheriff myself and do you know what he said? He said that he’d been trailing this guy for weeks and he knew exactly where the con man is: he's sitting pretty in a big house in Jamaica, but there’s nothing they can do. The United States police can’t reach him there.”

Then she turned to me.

“Do you sing?” she asked. I shook my head. “What about dancing? No? Acting?”

“No, I’m a writer,” I said.

“You know what? You should enter a Taylor Swift lookalike contest. Have you ever considered entering a Taylor Swift lookalike contest?”

I admitted that I had not.

“I think you’d really have a chance. You should think about that,” she said. “She is the sweetest girl. She’s just so genuine. I was watching this talk show the other day and Taylor Swift was the guest star. She was talking about how she was driving along in her car and she saw a girl with a Taylor Swift concert T-shirt walking down the street to a record store. So Taylor had her driver pull around and drop her off in front of the record store. She came up behind the girl and just tapped her on the shoulder and said, ‘Thank you. Thank you for being a fan.’”

After listening to more of Taylor Swift’s merits, we took a ride in Elaine's SUV and checked out some apartments. The first one was on the second floor, but somehow had a small, two-tiered yard reminiscent of the ruins of Machu Picchu.

“You could clean this up really nice and put a little patio table right here,” Elaine said.

Inside there was a slight paint odor. The floorboards were warped and lumpy due to the age of the building. I don’t recall there being a bathroom.

The next apartment was in some sort of British estate house that had been transplanted into New York. Elaine presented it as a train car-style apartment. You entered in the bedroom, walked through a door to the living area, and the kitchen was all the way in the back. It was very stupid.

Elaine drove us to the last apartment and we lingered outside of the building.

“I don’t know if you’re going to like this one, but we’ll take a quick look at it. Why not?” Elaine said. “But first I want you to meet some friends of mine…”

Elaine flung open the door to the hair salon on the first floor.

“Hey girls, look who I brought you. It’s Taylor Swift’s sister.”

All of the hairdressers stopped foiling their clients and stared at me, nodding. I waved and scooted away from the door.

The last apartment we saw was occupied by an elderly Greek couple ready to move into their daughter’s house. We barged in just as the woman was frying some fragrant Greek food. They lived in the apartment for thirty-five years and it was actually quite nice. Everything was peach and frilly and smelled like food.

“I could imagine us living here,” Dave said.

I closed my eyes and imagined myself in the kitchen curing olives with the Greek woman. I imagined myself on the couch checking my emails as an old Greek man beside me watches reruns of Married with Children. It was impossible for me to imagine myself living in the apartment without the Greek couple cohabitating with us like the Greek grandparents I never had. But I didn't mind.

Princess Bud