The Record: New York or Bust
I get the job.
I call everyone I know to tell them.
It’s New York City, and I’m twenty-two.
The whole thing is ridiculous.
But it was a combination of ingenuity and fine art, my art, that got me this job. I have something real to offer. Seriously.
Too bad I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
I start.
They ignore me.
I eat lunch alone every day.
I’m starting to freak out after a couple of weeks. I buy myself some new clothes from The Limited and do my best to fit in. I’m given monumentally important assignments. Headline news.
I meet Al Gore, who is still the Vice President, in the hallway. Secret Service ok’s his path through the building, but he stops to shake my hand.
I say, It’s a pleasure to meet you.
I’m so grown up now.
After four weeks I realize something: no one ever says Bless you when I sneeze. Ever.
I start sneezing louder.
Nothing.
By my fifth week I’m so miserable that I start to think about what might happen to my job if I got hurt. Would it be a good enough excuse to quit? Would being hit by a cab do it? Would that be enough?
It’s not good.
One day in the middle of my sixth week, I find myself crying on the subway the entire way to work.
My boss isn’t in that morning, so I grab the next best thing and tell her instead. She can’t seem to believe me, and the tears rolling down my face aren’t enough to convince her.
I give her my production notebooks and walk out.
My boss calls me later in the day.
So, you’re just quitting? No notice?
And in a world of terrible decisions, it’s very clear to me that I’ve made the right one this time.
I go home.
The Record: Pastor Says……Let us pray.
Uhh, what?
Holy shit. I’ve got a hundred people standing behind me as we take our vows, and this guy wants me to pray? That was not part of our discussion in advance. We aren’t religious. We don’t pray. And now we’re…ok…it looks like we’re praying.
We put our heads down and are forcibly blessed by the kind man who is marrying us.
When we met him for the first time, my father was insistent that we use him. He was free, a friend of the family, and he’d married three of our numbers already. When we went to his house to meet him; he and his wife showed us around, which was a little weird. Their place was ridiculously clean, and it seemed perfect until they showed us their bathroom. Right there above the tub was a big, black spider.
If they noticed it, they didn’t say anything. But we noticed.
From then on, every time we saw a big, black spider in an otherwise clean place, we would look at each other and point it out, shaking our heads. We took it as a sign of good luck.
Nobody is perfect. Nobody can prevent every tiny imperfection that gets shown to the outside. Not even if you have all the time in the world to keep a spotless home, a spotless record, a spotless life. Something always sneaks through.
So we let the man pray for us, let those hundred people pray for us if they want to, a precious gift from some. And when we turn around to face our friends and family, I realize I’d almost forgotten they were standing there at all. People clap, and we are presented to the world as one.
The Record: Twenty Below
He wants to go back to the town where we met. The air, freezing. The time, volatile.
He’s looking for something he left there. Or maybe that’s me. I’m the one looking.
For what?
When I first set foot in the place, my mother was already on her way out. There’s a photo of me and my father shoving my large portfolio of my photographs into the trunk of his car before we set out for the airport. I’m excited. I can see it in my face, and I remember. It’s not the swooping sensation of love, not the fear that makes one flee danger, but a feeling of tension in my chest, delicious tension, bursting with excitement. Everything I’ve ever, ever wanted lies before me.
A year later, my mother buried, I live there. I experience my very own tundra, and my nose hairs freeze, it’s so cold. I’m a California girl; it has never once occurred to me that nose hairs can freeze. A California girl in the tundra.
I wonder now, if I go back there, will I lose the four dress sizes I’ve gained over the past twenty-five years? Is that what I’m looking for? Or maybe the falling of the leaves, orange and red and yellow, so vibrant, will help to calm my mind. Or the silent beauty of snow as it comes down, quieting the world around it; footsteps and car tires muted.
It took something for me to fly back to California after I was done with New York, both upstate and in the city. It wasn’t so much a fracture as a large, deep bruise that Manhattan had left on me. When I left California, I truly had no intention to ever return. No family. No lovers. Nothing but a lifetime of mostly bad memories.
But when I think of New York, of the beautiful rolling hills and the snow and the rain and just all of it, I want to go back. It was, for me, a birthplace of creativity. I wonder if I might be able to catch it again there in that space.
It's not even a question of should I go back, but when.
