I Totally Meant to Do That Page 11

  Don’t be shy at the buffet. The chicken fingers, deviled eggs, roast beef sandwiches, potato salad, shrimp cocktail, and tomato aspic are not the appetizers served during what people up north call cocktail hour. There is no cocktail hour. There is no sit-down dinner. There is only buffet. Where would five hundred people sit? Right, yes: You’ll probably have to eat that standing up.

  Don’t clink a fork to your glass. That is not the cue for the bride and groom to kiss, as it is in the North. If you clink, everyone will stop talking, turn around, look at you, and wait for a speech—which would be weird because toasts are done on Friday night during the elaborate pre-wedding-party wedding party, replete with another live band and buffet.

  Don’t ask about the “bachelorette party”; we call it a “girls’ weekend.” People aren’t lined up to visit an electrical generator; that’s actually a fancy three-room portalet. And don’t expect the couple to be announced; it’s considered tacky to draw attention to yourself in that way, so instead there will be fireworks when they leave.

  Oh, and that pale bunch huddled by the bar wearing black? Those are the New Yorkers. They are friends of the bride from that year she spent getting a postgrad degree in partying New York style. They are discussing the town’s quaint way of life. They are drinking vodka sodas and hitting on the cater-waiters. They can’t believe that the men in this part of the country dance without dropping ecstasy first.

  Now, I didn’t fly all the way down to hang out with other New Yorkers, but occasionally I do flee to their dour corner, the way a kid runs to the safety of home base in a game of freeze tag. This is because, as long as I am with them, I am guaranteed not to have one of these conversations:

  “So what you do for a living in New York?”

  “I’m a writer.”

  “Oh, just like Carrie Bradshaw!”

  “I hear you’re writing a book.”

  “Yes, I’m really excited about it.”

  “Your ex-boyfriends must be getting nervous!”

  “Is your book about trying to find love in New York City?”

  “No. Actually, it’s not. It’s not about dating. Or sex. Or boys. At all. Not at all.”

  “Ahh, I see. It’s about how you don’t need men.” [Winks] “You go girl!”

  What? No! That … that’s the same thing!!! Although I admire women who can write about their New York love lives, I am not one of them. But I can’t expect people back home to understand this, because Sarah Jessica Parker ruined it for the rest of us.

  Years after Sex and the City has been canceled, it still exerts its influence, spreads its myths. I am nothing like Carrie Bradshaw! First of all, I can’t afford to live in Manhattan. Also: I have more than three friends, I do not squeal, my gay friends aren’t bitchy, and this phrase has never been a part of my audible inner monologue: “I couldn’t help but wonder.…”

  Regardless, again and again, I encounter people back home who imagine that my life in New York is spent pouting at rich men from inside a too tight, two-tone poof dress, which I will later stain with tears.

  Aargh!

  I wish I didn’t know that experience so well, but it is part and parcel of being Southern-wedding omniscient. I have seen it all before. Whether you need to know about HBO-perpetuated stereotypes, or choreography as part of a cheerleading-squad-sized bridal party, I’m your gal. And let’s be honest, you don’t have a lot of other options. If you get an invitation to a rehearsal dinner party and the dress code is listed as “Delta casual,” you can either come to me or hike through the Mississippi swamps seeking answers from an ancient shaman, because one thing is certain: You cannot ask the bride.

  I began to experience these weekends as unique only after moving to New York, when home began to appear strange. Of course, most of the weddings I’ve attended have been during that period anyway—the postcollege period—twenty-eight of the forty-one, to be exact. That’s a lot of plane flights.

  In one particularly busy summer—weddings happen in waves, one of the many patterns noticeable from a macro view (another: the canonization of “Hey Ya”)—I flew south for seven ceremonies. I was like a bird that couldn’t grasp the fundamentals of migration. Whether on a sparrow’s constitution or a girl’s wallet, that is expensive behavior. So I picked up a second job waiting tables; this was that time I told you about, the summer I worked at Chumley’s. When I revealed the aim of my enterprise to a coworker, her eyes grew twice their size.

  “How many weddings?” she asked.

  “Seven.”

  “In one summer?”

  “Well,” I said, “there are actually eight but two are the same weekend and, unfortunately, in different states.”

  “You mean you’re going to all seven?” she stammered. “Couldn’t you have said ‘no’ to some?”

  I gave her a quizzical look. The inner question instigating my expression was: Why would I say no? But that did not come out of my mouth, for although I am slow enough to have never before considered that the “regretfully declines” option on a wedding invitation is in fact an option, I am quick enough to know that admitting such would betray too much. Instead, I uncrossed my eyes, made up an excuse that I needed to be home anyway over some of those weekends, and skillfully steered the conversation toward the flies.

  “I know, so gross,” she replied and tottered off to seat some balding yuppies.

  After that I did not broadcast my plans so liberally. It only raises questions, whose answers the interrogator would find insufficient. I was acting like one of those dogs that digs holes through the living room carpet: exhibiting a behavior beyond the borders of its correlating environment. This sort of disconnect would eventually have far-reaching consequences. Flying back and forth so frequently taxed more than my wallet; it turned me into a psychological mess. It would be difficult enough to oscillate between two different lifestyles, but in my case, these lifestyles were both extremes.

  Weddings are intense and euphoric, an amplification of a culture’s best attributes. Think of the positive Southern stereotypes you know. Hospitable? Five hundred guests. Traditional? When the band plays beach music, my parents’ generation crowds the floor with ’60s era shagging. Colorful? There is a slightly senile woman in Wilmington, North Carolina, who invites herself to every local reception, and family after family only smiles and says, “Yes.” Look for her next time you go; she’ll be the one asking what sushi is.

  New York is also an extreme—except it is that way all the time. This city is an amusement park: Everything is concrete, it’s full of tourists, and food vendors line the sidewalks. It’s like living in a casino: The lights never dim, there’s an incessant din of bells and horns, and there’s always someone, somewhere, crying in a bathroom.

  What I’m saying is, a Southern wedding is like the South on heroin. And New York City is like life on crack. Therefore swinging between them rendered my brain a speedball.

  There were so many behavioral changes to make with each transition, so many little things to remember! When I went home, I had to pack an alternate wardrobe in my bag, including elegant shoes, and a different vocabulary in my head, one with words such as “please” and “thank you.” I had to learn to walk slowly. I had to learn to wait. Then, of course, two days later it’d be back to the city where people who “wait” meet the vocabulary get out of the goddamn way, and shoes are chosen based on their ability to step over those who didn’t know in which direction “the goddamn” was.

  At first, I screwed up. I’d bring home Chucks instead of heels and forget the difference between begonias and azaleas. I landed my proverbial rump in the mud on more than a few occasions. But this gave me an idea. Just as I’d done with the ins and outs of the weddings themselves, I would let repetition be my guide. If you experience an outcome frequently enough, you can memorize its preceding cues. Then, you will always know how you are supposed to behave. Yes, I realize that this is how sociopaths blend in. And that is exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you.<
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  Here’s how it works: If the woman at the checkout counter looks at me, smiles, and says, “Hot day out there, ain’t it?” I am supposed to settle in for what might be a long conversation, even if there are people behind me in line.

  However, if the woman at the checkout counter avoids eye contact, chews gum sullenly, and talks through me to the woman bagging groceries behind me, I’m supposed to continue texting.

  Sometimes I must rely on tone. If the phrase “The body of Christ, the cup of salvation” is delivered monotonously, I eat the wafer and drink the grape juice because I am taking communion in my church back home. However, if the same phrase carries self-righteous judgment and aggression, I do nothing because I am riding the F train.

  And if a woman asks, “How do you get around New York City in heels?” I know that I’m in the South, and also that I’m about to disappoint her. She wants me to respond by saying something like, “I take cabs” or “I carry flip-flops in my purse” or “Pain is the price of beauty, sweetheart.” But all I can say is, “I don’t wear heels.” Because I am not Carrie Bradshaw!

  The long manicured fingers of that show find and pinch me wherever I go:

  “Do you go to all the hot restaurants?”

  “Do you hang out with fashion designers?”

  “Do you know anyone like Mr. Big?”

  What? Are you kidding me?! The answers are no, no and … well, sure, but so do you; charming narcissists exist everywhere.

  I do hate to disappoint these women; their questions are an act of kindness. They wish for me to lead a glamorous life. It’s a self-fulfilling optimism. They want me to be like Carrie Bradshaw, so they assume I am.

  And they want it for themselves. They imagine that if they’d moved to New York, they’d live the Sex and the City life. Therefore they need to live vicariously through someone who does, and that person may as well be me. So … they couldn’t help but wonder … can’t I at least do them the favor of occasionally drinking too many cosmos and throwing myself at emotionally unavailable men?

  Surely my days are spent dining next to celebrities, dashing in and out of Diane von Furstenberg, and cutting velvet-rope lines, because otherwise, why would I be in New York when I could be home with them? By assuming the answer to this question, they don’t have to ask it. And I don’t have to tell them otherwise.

  Of all the tiny readjustments, however, of all the cultural alterations necessary for me to pull off this constant back and forth, there is one I cannot master: the volume of my voice. I leave New York for the pastoral silence of North Carolina, crawl into a car or sit down at the breakfast table, and wail. “WHAT CD IS THIS?” “WILL YOU HAVE SOME SALT?” “WHY ARE YOU WINCING?”

  I don’t realize I’m roaring, of course, not even after I’ve heard my own bellow. But then my patient mother covers her ears and I apologize—in dulcet tones. Sometimes she even closes her eyes in some synesthesia defense mechanism: “Please, Jane, you’re screaming so loudly I can’t see.”

  Still, fifteen minutes later I’m hollering again. Rinse and repeat. Here’s the disconnect: Although the background noise in New York is prodigious, it is also omnipresent; I cannot perceive that I am raising my voice to overcome it, because I do not recognize it’s there. And I’m not talking about one’s learned ability to tune out sirens or horns. There is a base-level, low-decibel constant buzz in New York that you literally cannot hear.

  In an upstairs bedroom in my parents’ house, one-third of my laptop’s total speaker capacity is loud enough to enjoy music. Meanwhile, in my third-floor Brooklyn apartment, after midnight, when there are no screeching buses, screaming drunks, or cooking roommates, when, if I strain to listen I catch only occasional wind, full laptop volume is not even sufficient; external speakers are required.

  Eight million whirring refrigerators add up to a whole lot of nothing. How voluminous this lack of volume! It astonishes me that a collection of sounds so large goes completely unnoticed, exists beneath the surface, affecting us in ways unknowable. It’s like dark matter in space: We can’t find the stuff but we know it’s there because it alters gravity. Just like we only know “dark silence” exists because it turns New Yorkers into eighty-year-olds when they leave.

  But in the city we do not know we’re screaming. We merely aim to supersede the din. And then, in our collective ignorance of the sonic deluge, we slowly grow louder and louder until, eventually, no one hears anything but his or her voice. In the right place at the right time, you can yell bloody murder and disturb no one.

  One night, after closing down a dive bar in Chelsea, my friend Shawn and I took to the streets with my iPod, one tinny earbud for him and one for me. As we reached Port Authority, Guided by Voices’ “Glad Girls” came on and although we could hardly hear the music, or maybe because we couldn’t, we sang—“Hey, glad girls only want to get you high”—and jumped in place and stamped our feet and wailed at the top of our lungs—“In the light that passes through me.” The subway rumbled beneath, trucks bellowed beside, and no one could hear us scream.

  This was my quintessential New York moment, standing next to a puddle of piss. So now you understand my reluctance to share such a defining motivation with my friends back home.

  “Surely, Jane, the reason you’ve forsaken home for all these years is because your life in New York is fabulous. Right?”

  “Nah, it’s because in the middle of the night, in the part of town that smells like diarrhea, no one can hear you scream.”

  Who am I, hobo Freddy Krueger? Better not to say, not to let them know that I feel like a foreigner in what used to be my home.

  And when I first moved to the city, it was the other way around! North Carolina was concrete, was reality. Therefore, New York felt strange: It was the weirdest dream. I was in the West Village, and then all of a sudden I was on a train underground. And there was this guy talking on a cell phone—somehow, even though we were underground—except then he turned into a homeless guy … and the cell phone was actually a tin of mints … and the next thing I knew I was in Midtown! That’s when I woke up.

  Then, during my urban tenure, a reversal: North Carolina became the alternate universe, the foreign land so peculiar it must be a dream. So, we were in a car, right? Looking for a parking place. And the lot was enormous. It was like the biggest shopping center I’ve ever seen—but all of the stores were exactly the same. And we couldn’t find a spot, so we just kept driving around and around in circles … endlessly. I remember thinking, Can’t we just walk? And that’s when I woke up.

  I no longer know which is terra firma and which incognito; neither can I choose which one I want. In all this back and forth, I constantly change my mind. Every time my plane touches ground down south, I breathe in air so thick with humidity and sweet with plant-produced oxygen, it feels like ingesting a cloud. People smile, and when they speak it sounds like singing. I become convinced that I must move back. But when my plane touches ground again at LaGuardia, my whole body buzzes with this electric Technicolor energy, the cars on the BQE look like they’re dancing, and I’m all, like, This cabbie and I are vibing on the same wave; we don’t even need to speak.

  The distinction between home and destination has disappeared. I’ve lost my inner compass. I mistake up for down and contrary for contrariwise—I do not know which is the real world and which is the Looking Glass world where books are written backward and the sun shines at night.

  It’s as if each airplane is a passageway between two realms that are, to me, opposites, mirror images. And if that is the case, then every time I travel from one of my home/destinations to the other, the mirror image of me—the version of me that everyone at home thinks I am—must be traveling at the exact same time but in the opposite direction.

  Oh dammit! I went and created the Carrie Bradshaw version of myself. I called the her-me into being. I should’ve left well enough alone. But it’s too late now. She exists—and, boy, must she be disappointed every time she has to take my
place in my crappy Brooklyn apartment with nowhere to fit her shoes.

  While I’m toasting beautiful newlyweds in elegant clothes with expensive champagne, she’s cleaning my deaf cat’s litter box. While I party at fancy receptions into the wee hours of the morning, she sweats through the sheets because the air conditioner broke, she’s trying to block out the souped-up stereo systems of teenage thugs.

  And while I toil at my laptop, trying to write my way into understanding which life to choose, she clacks away on hers with confident clarity: Men are like cities. Some will cook you dinner and spoon you to sleep; they’re the hometowns, overweight in a cuddly way and always smiling. They’re safe and dependable—but claustrophobic. They’ll ask for a key to your apartment, come over while you’re out, and then wait up all night just to ask where you were. They’ll always be there; they’ll never change. And then there are the New Yorks, those bastards we chase like bad habits. They’re charismatic and dashing and they never stay in on a Saturday night. They don’t call and they don’t sleep over; sometimes when you talk it’s like they don’t even hear you. But they leave you completely weak in the knees and just when you’ve sworn off them, they show up in a limo with flowers and tickets to the Met. They’ll only give you a New York minute, but I couldn’t help but wonder, isn’t that enough?

  Maybe for her. It’s an attractive argument, but as I keep telling you, I am not she. I’m not ready to choose. So thank goodness for all these audacious Southern weddings that keep me coming back. Every summer, the invitations pour in, and every time I respond, s’il vous plait, “yes.” When one ends, another begins, on constant repeat in my life. They’ll always be there; they’ll never change. I’ll always go.