How Did You Get This Number Read online

  It was the indignity of it all that bothered me. Consequence-wise, the experience of getting lost is not the end of the world. Unless you do it imprudently, veering toward poorly lit parking garages and uncovered manholes, nothing terrible beyond tardiness is going to happen to you. But that’s the thing. A learning disability doesn’t exactly qualify as an emergency. It’s a subtle problem for everyone except the person who has it. Standing in the middle of the aisle with the shoppers buzzing around me, I told myself I would trade breaking a bone just once rather than continue with a lifetime of this crap. Because at least with a broken bone you get a cast or a sling. People see your problem coming. But how do you explain an eighteen-year-old trapped and teary-eyed in front of a pile of seasonal gourds? Where is her excuse?

  It would get a little better as I became an adult. I learned my right from my left and my up from my down. Unfortunately, that school psychologist, in defiance of the grand tradition of incompetent childhood professionals, turned out to be correct about my functionality cap. Even now, I do all public counting with one fist under the table, preferably in a jacket pocket. If there is no pocket to be had, I twitch my knuckles instead of fully extending my fingers. It’s less obvious that way. And I still can’t tell time on an analog clock. Or, rather, I can, but it takes me ten minutes, a lapse that defeats the purpose of the exercise. This remains unbelievable to most people, as demonstrated by the well-meaning but misguided response, “I’ll teach you right now!” Oh, no, really, I... Okay, let’s get this over with. I try to avoid the kitchens in other people’s apartments, as this is where most analog wall clocks live, and apparently there are few activities so fun as herding a cocktail party full of people into one room to watch a grown woman try to tell time. Of course, age grants you a whole new set of loopholes. You mean that wall clock there? Sorry, I can’t read shit without my glasses.

  My terrible sense of direction also remains. To live in New York City is to never be able to meet someone on the northeast corner. It is to never, ever make a smooth entrance, always getting caught looking lost on the street. The only subway I can exit and begin striding forth with confidence is the one by my home, as there is a gigantic park on the right-hand side. And I know I don’t live in the trees with the pigeons and the butterflies. Otherwise, I always go the wrong direction. The trains were slow, I complain, when in actuality the trains were fine and I went the wrong way down Broadway. Again. I dated someone who lived near the Seventh Avenue stop in Brooklyn, and an odd phenomenon occurred every time I’d visit. When I left his apartment, I’d go into the subway through the same entrance. The next time I arrived, I’d find the entrance, go up the familiar staircase, and it spat me out across the street from where I needed to be. I have no idea why. We’re all mad here, says the Cheshire Cat. I’m mad. You’re mad....

  It’s not a disability, it’s life. We are complicated creatures with larger matters on our plates than tip calculation. I grew up watching TV with my mother while she diagnosed the characters as having hyperactivity or attention-deficit disorder. I rolled my eyes and wondered why there weren’t any stupid kids anymore. Why did there have to be something to explain everyone? Were the cave people on Ritalin? I didn’t think so.

  But waiting for my father to find me in the supermarket that day, I started calculating how many times I had embarrassed myself, how many perfectly functional watch faces I had defamed. Whatever natural inability I had to orient myself I had doused with a self-made need to cover it up. People get lost and invert numbers. They make plans for Tuesday the sixteenth when the sixteenth is a Wednesday. Most people would claim they are “terrible with” something. Names, dates, faces. Even make-believe characters on TV had these problems. But did they feel the need to lie about them afterward?

  WHEN I CONFESSED MY SAT METHODS TO A FRIEND, she said she knew someone who had facial blindness, a kind of recognition agnosia that makes it impossible for her to recall faces of casual acquaintances and old friends. To compensate, she goes through life taking photographs and being dangerously friendly to strangers on the street. How cool, I thought. If anything, this is a convenient way to snub people. I also found this woman’s existence oddly reassuring. I wondered how many of us there were out there with severe disabilities walking among us, like anti—X-Men with disadvantageous powers.

  Recently, my sister had a barbecue, and the best means of getting to her house is to take the bus. I took the opportunity to leave the country for the weekend instead.

  “We were making fun of you,” my mother recounted. “I thought, She’s going to Canada because she doesn’t want to take the bus.”

  “No one would go to Canada over that, Mom. It’s a ladies’ weekend in Montreal.”

  “You can’t fool me,” she said. “I know how much you hate the bus.”

  “Mother, I feel as strongly about the bus as I do about the Canadians.”

  “No,” she reveled in her rightness, “I think you’d rather sit on a Canadian than on a bus.”

  “Well, sure,” I gave in. “That’s probably true.”

  Fine, I thought. Let them think I’m a snob. Let them think I’m lazy. See if I care. It’s better than the fear of falling down the rabbit hole and realizing the smiling cat has a better sense of direction than you do, and then running into the white rabbit only to realize that he has facial agnosia and doesn’t recognize you, and it’s not as if you can read his pocket watch, anyway.

  Then my mother, forever the parent of a genius toddler, laughed and said, “But I know you, and I thought, She won’t get on a bus because it’ll take her too long to translate the schedule. And then she won’t know which direction to go when she gets off. And then I thought, I wish I could tell her that it’s no problem—I’ll just stand at the corner, and when she walks down the stairs I’ll be there to meet her.”

  Take a Stab at It

  A week before college graduation, I made plans to live in New York with my friend Mac. Mac’s parents were intent on buying him an apartment. The idea was for them to pay the mortgage and for me to pay the monthly maintenance. On average, we were talking about a good four hundred dollars less than renting from scratch. Though not the real estate equivalent of winning the lottery, it was certainly the equivalent of finding a bunch of money on the street and keeping it. Over the next few months, most of the New York—bound members of our graduating class had also paired off—or, in some cases, quadrupled off—erecting fake walls out of bookshelves and pounding the underdeveloped fishy quadrants of Red Hook, tearing phone numbers off the paper fringe on lampposts. They divided spaces that were never meant to be divided. It was like splitting a wasabi pea in half with your thumb. Doors opened into bed corners more often than not. Watching TV was a bet with gravity, as sets hung from the ceiling for want of shelf space. Flat screens existed, but they were prohibitively expensive for the people who needed them most, people who needed their heads uninjured and their hallways unblocked. All immediate hints of purpose went out of the rooms themselves. Showers in kitchens, toilets in living rooms, sinks in bedrooms. It was as if Picasso were born a slumlord instead of a painter. Nothing was where you thought it would be, which would be eccentric in a mansion but was disarming in an apartment. Once, at a party, I opened a door expecting to find a toilet but found a stove instead. Just a closet with a stove in it. And a bare bulb hanging, as if to say, “Here is where we roast the children.”

  Meanwhile, Mac and I were taking tours of rooms that made sense, in apartments with full-on hallways. I took the train in from Westchester, dreaming of where I’d meet Mac and his parents next. Home was just around the corner. I had set sail on a little ship called Sponsorship, part of the Fleet of Parental Enablement. The horizon of happiness was as clear and measured a line as the walls that met the floors without wobbling. Mac and I could even pick the neighborhood, a fantasy I indulged by going on real estate websites and hovering my giant arrow over the lower portions of Manhattan. I amused myself with the concept that there would be
a “minimum” a tenant could pay. I liked to imagine myself as one half of a couple, both of us in panther-skin shoes, storming out of a converted candy warehouse upon discovering that it was too cheap. It was all very Brewster’s Millions.

  And, oh, the apartments I saw! The appliances gleamed in defiance of our slovenly and disaffected youth. Faucets arced up from the backs of sinks, stopping in midair to fan out wide. They seemed more comfortable in the world than I did. I understood I was about a decade too early to live a life in which I casually washed my hands in freestanding square sinks. There were living rooms with dark wooden floors and vaulted bedrooms with skylights. A few of the apartments were duplexes with winding staircases that led us to roof decks, where upon arrival our broker would apologize for an archway covered in roses.

  “We can get rid of this.” She’d gesture at the problem without deigning to look at it. “You are a person of importance, and if you want us to behead flowers for you, we’ll gladly do it.”

  I knew I could be a healthy, successful, content person in these apartments. And Mac knew it, too. I could see it in his face. We would be generous with our friends—come, use our rooftop sauna! Come, pull up a stool to the kitchen island and drink our small-batched liquor! Spend the night in a room with a door! But when they left, we would have the secret to life: all the perks of comfortable adulthood and all the joie de vivre of people who eschewed landlines and partook of Scorpion Bowls. Like polar bears in the Arctic, our friends were content to float on blocks of ice no bigger than their butts. But Mac and I were destined for something greater. A refrigerator taller than our hips, for instance. As we toured apartment after apartment together, me happily playing the role of stray animal, all I thought about was that my bedroom would have a knob that was housed in a door that was housed in a wall that was housed in a building that probably wouldn’t fall down. What else could I need?

  There were, as there almost always are, signs this was never going to work. As it was with the leaking Red Hook ceilings I had narrowly avoided sleeping under, the cracks were beginning to show. I was dealing with normal people. In situations like this, it’s best to deal with the obscenely rich or the obscenely stupid. Preferably both. But Mac’s was a more-than-nice family of more-than-moderate intelligence. They rationalized an additional mortgage as an investment. At heart, they were not a buy-my-grown-child-an-apartment kind of people. Though ... at one point they did express concern that their freshly minted adult would be sleeping on a futon. They went on and on about the ramifications of this, both physical and psychological. Apparently, footing the entire bill for his housing glided down a separate stream of consciousness, a ship with no raised flags. But a futon? How juvenile.

  The problem began with the fuzzy moral area of contributing to someone else’s mortgage, knowing your short-term funds were being poured into their long-term venture. With each apartment we viewed, my contribution incrementally increased. For a while this was an easily overlooked dilemma. I was still paying less than I would have on my own, and I was not particularly concerned with their financial compartmentalization. I had no concept of how long it took to actually purchase and move into a home (months) vs. how long it took to rent one (seconds, depending on how fast you could sign your name and throw an elbow at the prospective tenant coming up the stairwell behind you). Before the economy imploded, renting in Manhattan was a boxing match between how you were raised and how much money you had from week to week. You would pay and do just about anything for a livable space. A room of one’s own was probably not in the cards, but a bamboo folding screen might be nice. As you flipped through the backs of local magazines en route to the crossword, you’d find yourself hovering for a moment over the escort agency ads and thinking, How bad would that really be? And with thoughts like these in the mix, the lesser moral infractions seemed less infractiony. In this corner, measuring all the life you’ve led by all the life you have yet to lead, weighing the sum total of your sense of right and wrong, is your Morality. And in that corner, containing a twenty-dollar bill and a half-stamped coffee card, is ... And we’re done.

  Plus, Mac was my friend. Friendship is a Spackle in itself. You’ll forgive your friends a lot, and if you’re a woman, you’ll forgive your straight male friends even more. They represent the possibility of mutual toleration between the sexes, a keyhole into the mind of the Other, and the promise of one day meeting someone just like them except that you want to sleep with them.

  The situation became palpably tense as Mac’s parents began to feel a sense of unfairness that I would be paying so little each month, even with the steady increases in my contribution. It was not a buyer’s market. Mortgages would have to be recalculated. Bathrooms would have to be retiled. Places were too small or too dark or too far away from the subway—a henna tattoo of a problem for a renter but a more enduring concern for a buyer. As their comfort faltered, unsubtle suggestions that I contribute more were floated my way.

  “They think you should pay more,” said Mac.

  “How much more is more?”

  We had long since blown past the monthly maintenance mark. We had doubled it. And yet, miraculously, the dimensions of my closet remained the same. I was a second-class citizen paying first-class prices. One evening, after his parents had gone back to their world of doormen and digital cable, I offered to buy Mac a slice of pizza. I put down our tiny cups of water and reached for my wallet. The only cash I had on me was a one-dollar bill.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Mac said. “You’ll get me next time.”

  But I was worried about it. Disproportionately so. He wasn’t the one with the frowning face of George Washington folded into the fetal position in his back pocket. If I felt this indebted over pizza, how was I going to cope with floor-to-ceiling French doors? I could feel the resentment bubble. Not like a cheese bubble, which is very noticeable, but like a little pocket of raw guilt heating into something altogether different, something that muttered, You’re not even paying rent, asshole, your parents are.

  I had to get out. I cited my own impatience with suburbia and my call time at my first job, which remained stubbornly at eight-thirty a.m. ten months into it. I couldn’t keep waking up before sunrise to get to the train station, deactivating the alarm in my parents’ house like I was in high school. It wasn’t him, he had to understand, it was me. Maybe we could, you know, try to see other roommates. Fortunately, Mac accepted this. But it was too late. I had watched all my other viable roommate options, those vetted by the four-year background check called “college,” chip off the real estate glacier. I was stranded. So I turned to that mecca of desperation, the Internet. But instead of tormenting myself with panoramic videos of views I’d never witness from balconies I’d never stand on, I went on Craigslist and found Nell.

  Nell was a closet anorexic and a casual kleptomaniac. Neither affliction you’d think would be a problem when considered carefully. For starters, I’d never have to worry about her eating my food. Indeed, on more than one occasion I’d be brushing my teeth and she’d appear in the bathroom door with two versions of the same product in each hand.

  “See, my peanut butter has more carbs”—she’d raise one container like a barbell, her parenthesis of an arm muscle straining from the process—“but your peanut butter has more saturated fat.”

  Our refrigerator was becoming a condiment ark. We had two of just about everything. It was like we were kosher but instead of doing it out of piety, we were doing it out of hostility. I would turn to face her in slow motion, still brushing. And she’d wait for my reaction. Wait, brush, wait, brush. Until I’d spit and say something through the toothpaste foam like “That’s a solid point you make” or “Yeah, I’m thinking about switching.”

  What can I say? Anorexics are very neat, and they pay their bills on time.

  The kleptomania had also not been cause for concern. At least not at first.

  A. None of my clothes would fit her without the aid of belts or a staple gun.

>   B. Her thievery was so open, I never had that panicky feeling that I’d left a sweater in the bar or lost it to the dry cleaner. A quick peek in her room would reveal the item, cuffs rolled up, laid tidily on her bed.

  But what I hadn’t taken into account were accessories. Nary a woman has bloated earlobes. Handbags, in particular, are one-size-fits-all.

  The result was a lot of conversations that went like this:

  “Nell, is that my necklace?”

  “Yes,” she’d say, touching her neck to confirm the fact.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “In your jewelry box.”

  It seemed ironic that someone who adamantly eschewed all street foods could possess such sticky fingers. If I bought clothing, I’d sneak the bags into the apartment. If I left for the weekend, I’d drop off my laundry at the laundromat beforehand to get my stuff off the premises. When Nell took a shine to my loofah, I started using a plastic shower caddy, which I made a big show of escorting from my bedroom to the bathroom each morning. Instead of growing into my first year of adulthood, I was reverting back to freshman year of college. It was a futon mentality.

  Thus commenced a passive-aggressive note-leaving campaign in which I found myself doling out unwelcome life advice like the old man in the Werther’s Original commercials. Timmy, sometimes, when people own things, they like to keep track of them. And sharing is different from stealing, even if, as you say, I wasn’t here to ask.... We’re not possession-renouncing monks, Timmy, much as we’d like to be.

  Alas, the notes fell on deaf ears. Deaf ears with my earrings sticking through them. I found myself storing my grandmother’s pendants in half-empty jars of fatty peanut butter.

  Then came my big break. Nell packed up her Purell and her Luna bars and left for a monthlong trip to Nepal to find herself spiritually. I felt as if I’d won an all-expenses-paid, all-nude-all-the-time vacation in my own home. Or at least the right to leave my headphones on the coffee table, safe in the knowledge they’d be there when I returned. Every roommate feels a sense of unexpected calm when they are given a reprieve from the mate and left with the room. It’s not that you do anything more scandalous than walking around in ridiculous outfits, leaving cereal bowls in the sink, and smoking something low-grade out the window, but the air is filled with the idea that you could stay up all night blaring Hall & Oates, that you could sacrifice a live pigeon in the bathtub, that you could have a crazy scarf orgy in which you invite a bunch of people over and each person takes a scarf from your roommate’s closet and has sex wearing their scarf of choice.