Don't Worry, It Gets Worse Page 14

  I plan on leaving my hair down but doing my makeup with an extreme flourish. I put all my things in an old backpack and remember my underwear at the very last second. Heading all the way back to Westchester with Amanda to await the arrival of my ride to New Hampshire, I realize I have left my check at the bottom of my bag, where it will surely get wrinkled.

  When I arrive at my parents’ home for a quick stopover, our other road trip partners, Brittanie and our friend Shane have already arrived. We gather in the kitchen, chatting a mile a minute in between bites of spinach lasagna. Actually, we didn’t really chat—we were shoveling bites of pasta and bread in our mouths like pigs in a trough or hosts of a Food Network show.

  “Do you want seconds?” My mother is staring at us, and she can tell by the mouth shoveling that there is very little food in any of our apartments.

  “Yes, please. I haven’t had homemade food since last…uh, week, when I roasted a chicken for some of my foreign friends.” My mother raises her eyebrows. I have thirds.

  We spend three hours at home, and my mother tells me my hair has gotten longer and that my backpack smells like cigarettes. She tells everybody else they look great. I happen to agree that they do, although I also think all of their hair got longer, too.

  My mother makes us take a picture all together, because she has one of all of us at graduation.

  “It’d be so funny! You all look so mature now!” I knew that she would put this on the fridge. A fridge, I noted, that was a newer, nicer fridge than the one that the grad photo had lived on for a while.

  In our graduation photo, we all smiled. In this one, we all made funny faces. The older we get, the less we care about looking good in pictures, which is something we only decide when we chose to look constipated in our pictures instead of smiling.

  “I have to go upstairs,” I announce. In my mother’s bedroom, I take two bottles of hairspray and a tube of toothpaste, because I’ve obviously forgotten them. And then, to bed! I sprawl myself out on the covers, waving my legs and placing them on the bed frame. From far away, I look like a child. I roll around and bury my face in the pillow. For ten minutes, I fantasize, like I always do when I go home—what if I never had to leave and never had responsibilities and nobody my age ever did, either? The perfect age, I think, could be eleven. I eat my crust now, sure, but my legs are in a constant state of dangling.

  I lie on my bed until my friends come up to find me, to tell me we have to go.

  The moment we climb in the car, out of parental earshot, it has been concluded that we must buy whiskey. There was no question of anything else. Whiskey is the drink of choice because whiskey allows nostalgia while seeming refined and mature. You have to have a strong stomach for it. You have to take it slow. When one’s very first friend is getting married, you drink whiskey. You talk about things like old loves, or things we have missed, or things we have lost.

  We are adults who don’t buy Old Grand-Dad, or anything in a plastic bottle. We are adults who go and buy Jameson for thirty dollars in a supermarket liquor store. We tell the lady at the counter she shouldn’t sell the margarita-flavored gelatin shots. She tells us, yes, they are awful.

  Then she ID’s us.

  * * *

  For the car ride up, we put on Space Jam and sang it at the top of our lungs and put our hands out the window, and it was like middle school again.

  We put on Alanis Morissette and sang it at the top of our lungs and talked about how we wanted to drink whiskey in the car but only because it would make the story better. But we didn’t drink the whiskey, and it was like high school again.

  For the car ride up, we put on Fleetwood Mac and sang it quietly to ourselves and all stared out the window and passed around a cigarette, and it was like college again.

  We ate trail mix and split the gas bill, and it was like every car trip I’ve ever been on with friends.

  * * *

  I figured I was going to get murdered and tossed in the rather vast field that stretched far and endless by the Knights Inn near Easthampton, Massachusetts. In the true spirit of being an adult, the four of us had decided that we would not “crash” on somebody’s mothball-infested couch, and we would rent a motel between the four of us like normal adults might do on the way to a wedding. This motel is like the set from every slasher film ever made. I think of a groundskeeper walking around with a shovel and waiting to bury us, people peeking through windows. I’ve seen horror movies before, and I know I am a Hispanic girl with two white girls and an attractive guy, so obviously I am going to die first. I scream when I enter the bedroom, because it’s all retro carpeting and an old-timey radio and GHOSTS. Shane turns on the ancient television and pours whiskey for each of us in plastic cups.

  “Here’s to a crazy night,” he jokes. We know the routine. In college, when the four of us had whiskey in our hands, we would stay up all night, listening to music, talking the old “What does it all mean” philosophical bullshit, and getting so drunk we’d eventually pass out with our clothes on, our teeth unbrushed.

  All of us got into our pajamas, letting the ice in the whiskey melt. Somebody turned on Saturday Night Live and we watched it in silence. I noticed Bee and Amanda fell asleep.

  “It’s a big day tomorrow,” I could imagine them saying.

  I stayed up by myself watching a Seth Rogen movie on television. I fell asleep with mascara on, making raccoon eyes out of me.

  We wake up at 8:30 A.M. Shane makes us watery coffee, and though it tastes like the piss of a dead cat, I appreciate it. I do Amanda’s makeup—gold shadow to bring out the green flecks in her eyes. Shane steams his button-down shirt. Brittanie tries to sew a tear in her dress. I model my heels. We all decide, while checking our motel room for almost-left-behind hairspray or bracelets or ties, that we look like presentable adults. Breakfast is a worthy reward.

  After driving around, starving and anxious, we finally find a tiny diner that smells like we have physically jumped into the frying pan and rubbed grease and canola oil and lard all over our bodies. I stand in the gravel parking lot next to the guy on the motorcycle, putting on nude lipstick and tapping my heels. Brittanie sits in the front, wearing sunglasses and smoking a Camel Light.

  The waitress literally asks us if “we’re from around here.”

  “You going to a wedding?” she asks.

  Then, she tells us about the wedding she just went to, a Harley Davidson–themed job where the groom got in trouble for refusing to put down his Twisted Tea in the wedding party photographs.

  “I can see why that might…raise some eyebrows.” I excuse myself to the bathroom and forget to watch my step.

  I eat eggs sunny-side up on rye toast, splattering hot sauce everywhere, never feeling like such a New Yorker.

  We sit in the diner talking—not about the past, not about college, or George, who kind of got famous, or that time I hooked up with George BEFORE he got famous. We talk about our real current lives and our futures, in Philadelphia and Brooklyn and Los Angeles. We talk about how our jobs are hard and our dreams are even harder.

  We tip well and we go to a wedding.

  * * *

  I am totally fine when I wave to the groomsmen, my friend Zac, a guy I constantly envelop in bear hugs.

  I am totally fine when the music starts.

  When Karen walks down the aisle, I’m not as fine.

  I have a memory of me and Karen and Brittanie in the nook of our apartment in Davis Square. We lured her over with a large bottle of Yellow Tail wine. The three of us drank and talked and made fun of each other for hours. She was supposed to leave early and we ended up drinking the whole bottle. That seemed like such a long time ago.

  Now, she was being walked down the aisle with her mom and dad. I looked at Brittanie, and we nodded at each other through tears, like, Where does the time go?

  And then I laughed because I was still at that nook, drinking wine.

  I had half a bottle left.

  * * *

&
nbsp; When the reception started, I found myself drunk off punch almost immediately. I stood by the bathroom line and chain-smoked with my buddies from college, even though none of us were smokers anymore. We stared at the night sky and asked ourselves how long we had been like this.

  “Years, it’s been. Years since we’ve done this.”

  We reminisced about the time we would sit outside the dorm room buildings and refuse to go to class and share sandwiches and wonder where we could get alcohol.

  We talked about the time I fell in the garbage can, or when Greg lined up a bunch of cups of water in our friend’s dorm room, and he tripped over them and it was mean and funny.

  We talked about jobs briefly, about current lives in different cities, then got self-conscious.

  Mostly, we talked about nothing. About the moon, about dancing to music, about the veggie burgers, about Karen, about dressing up and looking taller and facial hair and how late it felt.

  * * *

  Karen’s best friend gave the speech I knew I’d give to someone one day. On some day, maybe not as far in the future as I had always envisioned.

  Someday, the someday with no space, is what you say when you’re eighteen and imagining your wedding, in all its aubergine tablecloths and fall décor. It’s a faraway thing, with no need to wonder if moments will be the moments that will shift you. The someday that exists when you’re twenty-three watching a girl you used to do shots with walk down the aisle to the man who would now become her partner for years? It becomes some day, two words, a kind of admission that almost everything is around the corner.

  I’m not talking about weddings, really. I’m not even talking about love. I’m talking about change. I’m talking about change happening right now, no matter how much glitter nail polish or pencil marks you might rub all over the evidence. Two years ago, I used to sit with all these people and talk about how easy it was to use SparkNotes to get away with not reading a book assigned to you. Now, we wouldn’t do that ever again. What the wedding did, simply, was point that out. It stopped time for a brief moment—put the same people who knew each other a while ago in a different place. Then you got to see how much you’ve all changed. How much time had passed.

  But some day is still not here, and so I get up and drag Brittanie to the dance floor. It is, for six minutes of hopping and smiling, exactly as it had used to be.

  On Finally Feeling Home (or, a Love Song for New York)

  When you move into a new city, the first sounds you notice on your first night are the police sirens. For me, they were a constant reminder of things my mother had told me—that I should be careful, vigilant, scared. My wired-to-be-paranoid brain eventually interpreted this as “everybody who lives here wants to take something from you,” so I lay on my bed, frozen stiff like the corpse I would no doubt soon become. After a while, I stopped hearing them and heard other noises—the dog barking, the Spanish music that blasts every Sunday night, the drunk girl outside my window calling her ex-boyfriend. They stopped keeping me up and began lulling me to sleep. Now, I find the absence of noise unsettling, which for me, was as much of an “I belong in a city” badge as figuring out the subway lines. The first night, though, all I heard were the sirens.

  When you move into a new city, you can’t help but feel lost and unwanted. Most cities aren’t very welcoming to begin with (urban development < cozy farmhouse) and you don’t have to live in New York to know that New York is the stern patriarch of the lot of them. Excuse me, I’m walking here! It is a place where you plan on fighting both your goodwill and your personal demons, somewhere to succeed by scraping by for the chance of a bigger success.

  It was hard to move to a place that I knew I would eventually feel very lost in, and I didn’t do it because I am naturally thick-skinned. I did it because I am very thin-skinned and wanted not to be. I had visions of being a real New Yorker. I’d be the kind of girl who knew where every dumpling house in every neighborhood in Brooklyn was. I’d keep my coat on the chair so I could grab it quickly on the way out to meet friends for a slice of brick-oven pizza. I’d impatiently stomp my feet while waiting for the G train because that shit never comes. I’d put on my mascara when the train was making turns and keep my phone in my zipped pocket so nobody would swipe it. A poster girl for belonging.

  As many beautiful things as New York has to offer, it is also a place where you go to feel smaller than you’ve ever felt in your entire life. This idea of the challenge is why I lugged my suitcases up three flights of stairs and said, “Well, this is the start of something very wonderful and very terrible.” It is a place that allows the smallest accomplishments to become the biggest, for the biggest lows to swell into the highest of the highs. Making it is making it, and failing meant you might have to hang up your fighting gloves and move somewhere with cheaper rent. Correction—sometimes failing means NOT moving somewhere else with cheaper rent, of letting the pride of simply being a New Yorker grip the better parts of your judgment.

  There is no open-armness about city life, no kind voices to tell you not to take a certain route at night or where to get the best sandwich at 2 A.M. Instead, there is concrete. There are thick, crumbling slabs of it everywhere you walk, and maybe once or twice you will see a weed growing out of it and appreciate that it is there. The rest of the time you will just keep walking. Everything happens in flashes: There is the prominent smell of both fuel and garbage, which seems to have a miragelike presence in the summer, but the moment you walk by a bakery, you remember what it is like not to live in a place constantly surrounded by carcinogenic fumes. It’s a brief reminder of old places you called home, of bread and toast and the people who served it to you. For me, New York is filled with fleeting thoughts you have for something you miss, followed by memory loss and the complete saturation of being a part of a thick, pulsing crowd that shifts toward no one common goal. You become part of a big, uniformed fish school with no one destination but an underlying thought: Keep going.

  New York is motivated by not just moving toward something but also moving toward something in the fastest manner possible. Until you start to get your legs moving, you will always feel like you are lost. Every time I walked into Union Square or any other square, I would be shoved by old women with walkers and muumuus telling me to speed-the-fuck up. Little children would knock into my knees, and I knew they were born here and I wasn’t. The secret is to keep pushing, to keep looking like you are going to the most important destination of your life, even if that destination is just home on your couch to eat Fritos and watch television. You can know that, but they don’t have to—you seem weak and disposable if you don’t pretend like you’re going somewhere interesting.

  The first couple of times I looped around my new neighborhood to find the bodega with the cheapest soda and the best snacks and the fattest, most pettable cat, I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there, either. I had keys jammed into my pockets and I still felt alien. I got lost trying to find my way to the subway. I told my roommates that the two subway stops near my apartment were equidistant and it didn’t matter which one I took. Wrong. You have to, of course, conquer a part of the city. For me, it started with the eight blocks between my apartment and the bagel store. After a month and a half, I knew the ATM to go to that had the lowest bank fees. I should probably have switched banks, but that seemed too permanent.

  Brooklyn is the land of cash, of handing wads of crumpled bills to the extended arms of bartenders who shake their index fingers at plastic. “We don’t take credit card here,” they’ll say, without even bothering to point out where one can find an ATM. Sometimes they will tell you this after they have slapped your drink down on the tiny cocktail napkin, and at least three times I had to ask my friend if I could borrow five bucks because I was fresh out. It’s embarrassing in a way that I know it shouldn’t be, but I dislike seeming like I don’t know what I’m doing.

  Living in a city eats your money in the most unique of ways. My phone breaks just when the gas bill gets
more expensive. I suddenly decided I needed to “dress nicer,” so I dropped fifty dollars on boots I didn’t really need. I became more of a spender than I ever had before, because New York is a materialistic place to live, a prideful parade of possessions. You eventually get into a groove—the seasons change and you decide to rework the clothing that you already had to create “new looks” by wearing a jacket you bought four years ago and thought you’d always hate. You’ll stop paying for cable or buying something like mayonnaise. You’ll scrimp and hope nobody notices.

  Here, people are more attractive than I ever thought people could be in person. If I get off the J train in some packed part of SoHo that only carries British and Japanese clothing lines I will never afford, I am surrounded with people who look like models. I’d never seen a really beautiful person until I moved into the city, the kind of photoshopped woman who can carry her three-thousand-dollar handbag on the crook of her arm. Like a praying mantis, they walk around the streets as if they were about to rip the heads off of their prey if you bumped into their ethereal, suit-wearing bodies. They aren’t famous, but they look famous. You will feel plain at least twice a day, but every once in a while you will catch a glimpse of yourself in the window of a storefront. Okay, you’ll say, I look busy or important or like somebody thinks I am special. This city is beautiful.

  The subway is the most human contact you will have with people. I have heard that there are lots of creeps on the subway, and every once in a while there will be some heavy-lipped drug addict, smelling like garbage and carrying bags and bags full of aluminum cans. I’ve never seen the guys who pee or the crazy grabbers, and for the most part, on the train that I frequent, it’s just Latina mothers, Asian people sleeping, and toddlers crying about their juice. There is the subway preacher, yelling to the car that we should repent or else; there is the guitar player who ruins your iPod playlist and tips his hat to you, asking you for cash. Mostly, I just ride and blankly stare at the signs, or smile discreetly at whatever tattooed, plaid-wearing guy I fall in love with for three or four stops. There are always tattooed, plaid-wearing guys. I fall in love about ten times a day.