I Was Told There'd Be Cake Read online

  “What the fuck?”

  “I know.”

  He turned to face me, the rest of his body still heavy with sleep. It was 7:45 A.M. on a Sunday and the banging was so severe it made us wonder if firecrackers were being set off in the toilet.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t remember leaving any firecrackers in the toilet.”

  “Then, what the fuck?”

  “Look at my head,” I said, pointing to a bloody spot on my scalp.

  We lived on the top floor of a walk-up and our apartment was the only one on our side of the hall. The building faced Columbus Avenue but we faced the old courtyard, filled with furnished gardens, terra-cotta pots, and the wind chimes that rich people had hung outside their brownstones. We were used to blue jays, not disturbance. In fact, prior to the Jurassic Park–style pounding, only one strange thing had ever happened before.

  My roommate had just come home after dropping off his laundry across the street.

  “What exactly is going on on the first floor?” he asked.

  The first floor is really the second floor, which always struck me as very European until I moved in and had to climb an extra flight of stairs each day. Then it just struck me in general. He informed me that the front door of one of the apartments was completely off the hinges and leaning against the wall in the hallway. He said he’d peered into the apartment’s living room, where he saw tiny supermarket bags stuffed round with trash and lined up in neat rows all over the floor. That, and a portal to another dimension. I said I had no idea what he was talking about. “And why does it always have to be another dimension? What’s so bad about this one that a portal to Nepal or Claire Danes’s TriBeCa loft wouldn’t be enough?”

  “Just go look,” he said.

  I went down the stairs to find the door closed, on its frame, with no sign of oddity beyond a bumper sticker beneath the peephole that read: “The weather is here. Wish you were great.” I lugged myself back up the stairs.

  “There’s nothing there,” I said.

  “You’re kidding, right? The door is blown off.”

  He could tell by my weariness of the topic that I was not kidding. When he returned from picking up his laundry a few hours later, he dropped the twenty-pound bag on our doormat.

  “You”—exhale—“have”—inhale—“to”—exhale—“go see.”

  And so I put on shoes and went down and saw the shut door and then I waved to the shut door and marched back upstairs.

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  A few days later, I left the apartment for work, clacking loudly down the stairs in a pair of heels so badly worn down they had transformed into tap shoes. I caught him. An old man who was more or less all ear was parallel parking the door into place with his bare hands, pivoting this giant slab of wood onto its hinges and locking it into place. I held tight to the railing above him and stayed very still. My neighbor Evan came up behind me.

  “Good morning,” he said. Evan paid six hundred dollars a month for his one bedroom.

  I screamed. And then I pointed down to the old man with the door. “Do you know that guy takes his door on and off?”

  He nodded. “Always has,” he said. “He’s OCD. That’s how he gets into his apartment. He thinks that because he’s on the first floor people have been touching his doorknob on the way up all day and so he takes the door off the hinges to open it.”

  “And puts it back on to shut it? You’re kidding me.”

  “I’d make up something more believable than that if I was.”

  “Good point.”

  “He’s also trying to dig a hole to China through the floor.”

  Three years passed before the painting fell off the wall. My roommate and I got used to “the lunatic on the first floor,” and especially to the frenzied sound of the door scraping against the hallway tile when we came down the stairs. Sure, the occasional fashion magazine subscription card and bit of plastic bag would creep out from under the door and, sure, the only roaches I had ever seen were clearly on a foreign exchange program from his place, but we basically forgot about him. The way you forget about things in the city, despite daily reminders of their existence. My roommate called him “gross” on occasion and I agreed. Except on Sundays, when he called him “evil psycho spawn” and I agreed with that, too.

  Because Sunday mornings were the digging hours. The door was shut so no one ever knew what really went on in that apartment and it’s not like life provides you with a frame of reference for the sound of floorboards being ripped up with a pickax as one tries to tunnel oneself to Beijing. Once, in a fit of prematurely awakened rage, I stormed out of my room, threw on my winter coat and a pair of flip-flops, and pounded on the door on behalf of myself and all my fellow tenants. I was livid for all the obvious reasons and some of the not-so-obvious ones. Reasons that went something like: Some people have jobs and can’t just stay home and tear up their bedroom floors because they feel like it. And when they’re not at said jobs it’s their God-given right to get drunk and sleep in on the weekends. I screamed, “Sir! Sir! Our windows are vibrating!” and the drilling came to a halt. Permanently. And there was peace. And it was good.

  A few months later, the Italian restaurant we lived above posted a sign out front that read: CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS. After several years of waving and nodding at the headwaiter while I smoked a cigarette on my stoop or dug in my purse to find my keys, I felt like he was as good as family.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him, nodding at the sign.

  “We’re building a patio out back for people to eat during the summertime.”

  Ah, I thought, the old edible patio.

  “So we’re going to start with the drilling,” he added.

  “When?”

  “Not too early.” He shoved his fists into his pockets. “Eh, maybe seven in the morning. Maybe seven thirty.”

  My roommate and I both knew that this was the beginning of the end. The construction workers, and they always came in the plural, brought with them buzz saws, motorized drills, and loud voices. The wind chimes would go the way of the dodo, the blue jays would seek out more muffled pastures. Even after the banging and the sawing had ceased, we knew there would be the clamor of an outdoor restaurant. This is New York, I reasoned with myself. This is the price you pay. But when they started doing actual construction on the weekends my thoughts turned to 311, the none-mergency services line. I went to reason with them. The sun had barely come up one Sunday and the restaurant door was open. I went straight through among the upside-down chairs and into the kitchen. I sang, “Helloooo…?”

  “…And I know it’s waking up more people than me if I can hear it on the fifth floor. What if you just started even an hour later?”

  “Do you hear it on the weekdays?” he countered.

  “Well, no, but that’s the point, isn’t it? I’m at work on the weekdays.”

  “Eh.” He shook his head and gestured behind him. “And they’re at work today.”

  Shortly after this exchange my roommate suggested we start throwing water balloons at the construction workers. Not really at them because, I know, I know, it’s not their fault. But believe me, it’s hard to look down and see a man with a seven-speed power drill plowing through a brick wall and tell yourself he’s not responsible for the noise. We never actually hit them. The balloons exploded on some cinder blocks. “Assholes!” they’d scream up. “Bunch of assholes!” And this made us feel pretty great about ourselves.

  On the Sunday after the painting fell on my head, they were at it again. My roommate was out of town and I was looking forward to having our tiny apartment to myself. I was developing a perma-headache. And then it began, a series of actions straight out of a Dr. Seuss book. I did not put my flip-flops on, I did not, that would be wrong. Instead, I dialed 311 to tell the cops to come. Our childish reaction of late was affecting my thought process. I told the operator my situation. She asked me if this was a commercial or residential compl
aint and I told her it was a mixed breed—commerce oppressing a residence. Since I didn’t know the address of the restaurant and my weary ears had deduced that our building shared at least one wall, I gave the only one I knew: mine.

  “It’s the Italian restaurant,” I explained, Judas that I am. “You can’t miss it. It’s the one that doesn’t sell flowers or do your dry cleaning.”

  I thanked her profusely and went for a walk through the park to shake off my shame. I thought I’d had another few decades before my noise complaint years. All this postcollegiate getting up early and not wearing jeans every day was starting to wear on my temperament. I thought, what if this city makes me hate the world? I thought of that expression about leaving New York before it makes you hard.

  When I got back to the apartment, the front door of the building was propped open, as it was wont to be in the humidity. There’s a bump in the front hallway tile and when it’s humid, the door swells and gets caught on it. But when I walked through it, I heard voices coming from the first floor. The large-eared man was standing with his head down, his door out of sight. Two cops with static voices coming from speakers on one hip and guns on the other were interrogating him. I froze against the wall and listened. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I crept across the street and under a bakery awning. It had started to rain. I called my roommate on his cell phone and left some message in which I apparently used the word “narc” in reference to myself about eighty times. Why weren’t the cops at the restaurant? Then I remembered giving 311 our address and went back across the street. I held the already-propped-open door for the cops on the way out. The female one looked at me and made the crazy gesture around her temple.

  “Some people are fucking lunatics,” she said and walked away.

  The idea that this woman, a New York City police officer who had seen the worst this world has to offer, thought my neighbor was especially odd made me feel at once relieved and awful. I decided I would knock on his door and apologize. I wasn’t sure why or what I could do about it now, but this was the neighborly thing to do. This is what a good neighbor is, someone who recognizes the odd humanity of sharing the same plumbing and the same front door but never seeing each other. It is not, for example, defined by the willingness to call the cops on each other. I took a breath and rapped gently on the door. I didn’t want him to think I was another cop trying to bust it down. Nothing happened. “Sir?” I said weakly. I felt ridiculous. Had I gone too far? For the first time I found myself sincerely wanting to interact with him. I knocked again, hard this time. As if it had been waiting for me, the door immediately fell backwards into the bags of trash and old clothes, huge but dead silent.

  BASTARD OUT OF WESTCHESTER

  If I ever have kids, this is what I’m going to do with them: I am going to give birth to them on foreign soil—preferably the soil of someplace like Oostende or Antwerp—destinations that have the allure of being obscure, freezing, and impossibly cultured. These are places in which people are casually trilingual and everyone knows how to make good coffee and gourmet dinners at home without having to shop for specific ingredients. Everyone has hip European sneakers that effortlessly look like the exact pair you’ve been searching for your whole life. Everything is sweetened with honey and even the generic-brand Q-tips are aesthetically packaged. People die from old age or crimes of passion or because they fall off glaciers. All the women are either thin, thin and happy, fat and happy, or thin and miserable in a glamorous way. Somehow none of their Italian heels get caught in the fifteenth-century cobblestone. Ever.

  This is where I want to raise my children—until the age of, say, ten, when I’ll cruelly rip them out of the stream where they’re fly-fishing with their other lederhosened friends and move them to someplace like Lansdale, Pennsylvania. There, they can be not only the cool new kid, but also the Belgian kid. And none of that Toblerone-eating, Tintin-reading, tulip-growing crap. I want them to be obscurely, freezingly, impossibly Belgian. I want them to be fluent in Flemish and to pronounce “Antwerpen” with a hint of “vh” embedded in the “w.”

  Why go through all the trouble of giving a ten-year-old an existential heart attack by applying culture shocks like they were nipple clamps? Because, ten-year-olds of the world, you shouldn’t believe what your teachers tell you about the beauty and specialness and uniqueness of you. Or, believe it, little snowflake, but know it won’t make a bit of difference until after puberty. It’s Newton’s lost law: anything that makes you unique later will get your chocolate milk stolen and your eye blackened as a kid. Won’t it, Sebastian? Oh, yes, it will, my little Mandarin Chinese–learning, Poe-reciting, high-top-wearing friend. God bless you, wherever you are.

  Uniqueness is wasted on youth. Like a fine wine or a solid flossing habit, you’ll be grateful for it when you’re older. Naturally, being born in a foreign country is not the only coolness savings bond out there, but it is an automatic vehicle into self-possession if there are no other cars on the road. Maybe you don’t come from the mansion on the hill or the worst shack at the foot of it. Maybe you’re not religious or a spelling bee prodigy. Maybe you’re not the youngest of nine kids or the child of a B-list movie star. Oh, but imagine if you had a South African accent. At least foreign citizenship is something you can point to and say, “This is where I come from. This is who I am.” I almost had it myself.

  A sophomore in high school, I was successfully plodding through my suburban existence when my mother called me into the living room and told me we were moving to Sydney, Australia. For a year my father had been working at a division of his company in Sydney, communicating with us largely via fax. Then one day we had visas and passports and private schools picked out. I was nervous about leaving my life—change was one thing, but this much change smacked of the Witness Protection Program. I expressed concern about finishing high school at an institution paved in gingham, a place that didn’t involve gum under the desks or drug paraphernalia in the halls. What kind of environment was that for a child?

  “Everyone in Australia goes to private school,” my father explained, a statistic that still makes little to no sense.

  But soon Australian realtors were calling the house. I tried to talk to them for as long as they’d let me before I passed the phone over to my mother. They all sounded wonderfully like Olivia Newton-John. Had a pervert called up and faked an accent, I would have told them the truth—that my mother wasn’t home—instead of employing the classic “She’s in the shower.” (Kids across the country have grown up accepting the idea that no one can harm your family if at least one of its adult members is in the shower. No one knows why.)

  When my father first left, he had sent us the standard “Koala ‘Bare’” T-shirts, with mooning cartoon bears, and liquid-filled pens with sliding Opera Houses. He sent us pictures of the Sydney harbor at sunset with fishing boats and yachts suckling the shoreline. We sent him pictures of our blind dog covered in snow.

  It became clear that the prospect of moving to the bottom of the globe for good would require more extensive cultural immersion. Dad returned home for a week with Polaroids of his apartment overlooking the Harbour Bridge, with books by Australian authors, with strange sandwich spreads and rugby hats. I became fascinated with the idea of backward-running toilets but knew better than to determine the validity of this rumor by asking. Instead, I watched a science channel miniseries on the kangaroo and was fascinated to learn they drool on themselves to stay cool. I was anxious to see them bound through my backyard like deer.

  On his second visit home, my father went to get into the car on the wrong side. He went on tangents about Shiraz. When he bought opal earrings for the women in our family, I knew we were being bribed into cultural submission. My parents, much to my general dismay, were never in the habit of bribery-as-parenting. When I opened that velvet box to see two iridescent dots staring back at me, I knew this was real: we were moving to Sydney for sure. I was sad at the prospect of leaving my friends and putting our belov
ed cats and our slightly less well-liked dog into quarantine for six months. Dulling the pain was the knowledge that my imminent foreign experience came at a time when I recognized that this was an investment in coolness—both an adventure and an excellent way to get into an Ivy League school back home.

  I wanted to be Australian as soon as humanly possible. I went on a self-designed immersion program(me). I started watching tapes of post–Kylie Minogue/pre–Natalie Imbruglia Neighbours, an Australian soap opera popular in the UK for its mind-numbing, cliffhanger plots. These were about as intricate as one character’s shoelaces coming untied and the question on the table being if the shoelaces would get tied in the next episode. If you’ve never had the good fortune to see Australian soap operas (Home and Away, another classic), let’s just say they make American soap operas look like Requiem for a Dream. The unrated version.

  This sugar-and-spice programming was in peculiar contrast to Australian Vogue, which boasted bare breasts both in the articles and the advertisements. Not to mention the Australian teen magazines. Thanks to a publication called Girlfriend, I know what “pashing” is. Girlfriend was incredibly informative. I found my new Australian best friends to be fun loving, occasionally nude, perpetually tan, devilishly into neon pink thongs, and frank about yeast infections. They were intimidatingly self-actualized. All their quizzes seem to come to a “girls rule, boys drool” conclusion, whereas all our quizzes lead to a “how to make him jealous” conclusion. I had a full-length mirror on my closet door that I used while practicing my accent. Once I drooled on myself and ran around in circles. Just to see if it worked.

  And then one day it was over. My father loved the country and his love continues to this day, taking the form of random words assigned a Crocodile Dundee panache (See: “Girls! Someone get me a Phillips-head screwdriver from the ga-rahge!”). But just when I had mastered my drooling, my mother called me into the living room again and explained that Dad had decided to return to a career in the States. Ultimately there wasn’t enough reason to pick up the whole family and fling us to the southern hemisphere. She held my hand. I felt the globe shift under my feet as the entire continent of Australia disappeared in a poof of smoke. I removed my opals from my ears and carried them up the stairs in a fist.