I Totally Meant to Do That Read online

  And yes, this back-and-forth behavior is taxing: monetarily, mentally, emotionally. But I am up for the challenge. I’m a brick house.

  into the driveway was a plump jack-o’-lantern with a “W” carving instead of a face. It was Sunday, October 31, 2004, two days before the presidential election, and I was in Jacksonville, Florida. The purpose of my trip was twofold: to volunteer for an organization called Election Protection, which aims to secure the voting process, and to visit one of my dearest friends, Sarah, who’d recently left New York for her hometown. I specifically chose Jacksonville, of the volunteer centers calling for bodies, so I could multitask this way.

  But I miscalculated the reconcilability of my two objectives. Sarah’s friends and family were vocal supporters of Bush. And, although Election Protection is nonpartisan, most of the volunteers, including myself, were rabidly opposed. I hadn’t anticipated the divide because typically politics don’t play a part in my social life. But during the 2004 election, the topic was impossible to ignore—particularly in Florida, where the wounds of 2000 were still open, particularly when the first question any of her friends asked me was, “So Jane, what brings you to town?”

  The trip was schizophrenic. Case in point: Halloween. That morning, I’d whooped and hollered in support of Kerry at a rally in an African American church in one of Jacksonville’s poorest neighborhoods. An hour later, I was riding in Sarah’s fiancé’s SUV to a picnic at her cousin’s beachside house, outside of which stood guard that orange sentinel with an alphabetical scar for a head.

  I have to admit, it was a clever idea. The shape of the letter even resembles a toothy grin. But to me, the carving was also unintentionally appropriate. Jack-o’-lanterns are scary, just like the Bush regime. And neither a pumpkin nor George W. knows how to speak.

  This was my frame of mind when they welcomed me into their home. While I hugged her cousins and met their new infant, all I could think about was that stupid vegetable. I’d known these people since college, spent multiple spring breaks in Sarah’s childhood home. Her parents have literally said I’m “family.” And yet, suddenly they all had new, additional identities: “Bushies.” Some of them were suspicious of me, too. It’s like we were all wearing masks for the holiday. It was a very divisive time.

  Early Tuesday morning, I was dispatched, in a black Election Protection T-shirt, to stand outside a poll in the same neighborhood where the rally had been. My job was to answer basic questions about casting ballots, but I wasn’t allowed to offer opinions or advice. No one asked me anything, though. Essentially, my presence was meant to deter voter-fraud funny business, the perpetrators of which were assumed to be—since these voters were poor and black and therefore predicted Democrats—Republicans. Basically, I spent the morning criminalizing my opponents.

  Sitting next to me was my suitcase. I’d booked my return flight for that afternoon, following this line of reasoning: “If Bush wins, I don’t want to be stuck in Florida.” But I had one more stop to make first. I’d called another college friend, Emily, who was also living in Jacksonville. She and I had lost touch over the years, but we’ve always had a way of picking up where we left off. If I could bum a ride to her home, we’d have a quick visit and then she’d take me to the airport. Deal.

  Emily introduced me to her son, gave me a tour of the house, and then the three of us sat around a plastic preschool table on their porch molding Play-Doh. Within five minutes the election was on our tongues. But I wasn’t concerned, even though she is a staunch conservative, because the two of us thrive on debate. We’ve never been much for small talk, even if it’s not a dispute; we once sat up all night analyzing a Sylvia Plath poem, which I realize is a hilarious cliché. That’s what our early years of college were like, before we drifted apart, or rather, before our interests did. She grew more religious; I experimented with drugs. I once heard through the grapevine that she was praying for my soul. It didn’t insult me; that was just her way.

  “But if Kerry does lose, won’t you accept it and move on?”

  “No way,” I responded. “I disagree with Bush’s policies. Just because he’s the president, I’m supposed to go, ‘Oh well, there’s nothing I can do’?”

  We both shrugged.

  “Is part of the reason why you support him because he’s Christian?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “I don’t know that it matters in a day-to-day way, but if something horrible happens, I’d feel more comfortable knowing that the person making important decisions has Christ guiding him.”

  We shrugged again. There was no point in arguing. Neither of us could have changed the other’s mind. Instead, we probed curiously. In New York, Christian conservatives are as rare as wildlife. I felt as if I’d come across a fawn in Central Park—one that behaved exactly the way I had read it would on the Daily Kos.

  She felt comfortable enough to speak candidly, or perhaps she was just that confident in the veracity of her beliefs. All I know is that, a moment later, this came out of her mouth: “Well, you know, gays aren’t born that way.”

  I grabbed a coloring book and a purple crayon and tried to remain calm. Surely reason would clear this up. “Why do you think that?” I asked.

  “Because homosexuality is a sin. And God can’t create sin.”

  Oh no, she was using a reason—based on a different set of rules, yes—but logic nonetheless. “But that would mean it’s a choice, and how can you explain why someone would choose to live a more difficult life?” I pressed.

  “I think they turn that way because they were molested.”

  “On what basis?”

  “My hairdresser told me.”

  Although it had only been a few years since Emily and I had seen each other, our two worlds had evolved to the point of having different sets of governing physical laws. I wondered, sitting on that sun porch, If I throw a ball, might it fall up?

  I stole a glance at her son. Either he wasn’t listening or he’d heard it all before. Sunlight streamed through the windows. My knees jutted awkwardly from the playschool chair. We all had colored clay under our nails.

  So ended our bipartisan experiment. Conversation remained innocuous for the rest of my visit, full of long pauses and awkward shifts in tone and pitch. Something had changed and we both knew it.

  Soon it was time to leave. She offered me a can of soda for the road, and when I popped the steel tab, a single drop of fizz arched through the air and landed on the kitchen tile. I turned to the roll of paper towels by the sink and tore a small corner from the next sheet.

  “I do that too!” she exclaimed. “Why waste an entire piece on a tiny spill?”

  “It’s ridiculous,” I agreed eagerly. “Use only what you need, right?”

  We were beaming.

  “Exactly. My husband is always making fun of me. He’s like, ‘Just use the whole thing.’ And I say, ‘The perforations on a roll of Bounty are merely a suggestion.’ ”

  No one gets this excited about paper products.

  When I landed at LaGuardia Airport that evening, a voice mail from Emily had traveled with me. She told me she’d enjoyed seeing me and said she was happy we felt the same way about conservation, that in spite of our disagreements, we could still find some common ground on which to stand.

  I sat in my window seat, knees once more jutting awkwardly, and cried—because I was touched by her effort to bridge the divide, because I was deeply saddened by the comments causing that divide, and, mostly, because I was afraid. What we’d found was a very small patch of common ground, indeed.

  If I move home, won’t such small plots of land sit constantly in the shadows of towering differences? While I’m in New York, my life is a mystery to my friends in the South. If they don’t see me sitting in their church in Raleigh on Sunday morning, they don’t assume I’m damned—they don’t assume anything at all.

  As long as I am five hundred miles away, it is impossible to measure the distance between us. Our friendships exist in
a kind of suspended animation. They reside within the benefit of the doubt.

  At home, I would either be a member of a congregation or not, in an exclusive club or not, at a political fund-raiser or not. Inaction is still an action. Not so in New York, where I don’t have to be one thing or the other. Living in purgatory is not about being free to make whatever choice you want; the city offers something more profound, a third option: immunity from making choices at all, and therefore from the judgments accompanying them. Purgatory is Paradise.

  But now that I know, doesn’t that mean I’ll be expelled? Sitting on Emily’s porch, I felt shame. It was cowardly of me not to stand up for my gay friends. And it is cowardly to live a life without making choices.

  But I don’t want to fight—not with strangers on the streets of New York, not with the people I love back home, not with anyone. I just want to high-five. I only want to high-five. If I ever leave Brooklyn, though, there might be spills. And they’ll probably be bigger than a drop. So God grant me a roll of Bounty.

  it we see: my parents, me, a fir tree gilded with ornaments and lights, and a box wrapped in ribbons that bears a card reading “For Jane, Love Mom and Dad.” A priori knowledge enables you to reason that an evergreen decorated as such is a Christmas tree, that gifts are exchanged on Christmas Day, that a ribboned box is a gift, that a gift’s beneficiary is the person whose name appears on an attached card, and that “Mom” and “Dad” are titles for parents. Therefore one can rationally deduce that I get to have whatever is in the box. Right?

  But wait; let’s not be epistemologically rash. To strengthen the proof, I also present empirical, a posteriori knowledge. What if I turned that still image into a video of my mother bending down, picking up the box, handing it to me, and saying, “This is a present. It is for you, Jane, because today is Christmas, which is why we have that tree!”

  Now would you believe I get the box? Plato, Aristotle, and Kant would. But you’d all be wrong (at least you were in good company), because, in this case, that which is, in fact, is not.

  For if there actually were a video of this situation, here is what you’d witness directly after I opened the box.

  “Mom!” I exclaim. “It’s beautiful. Thank you!” I pull from the tissue paper a Herend china dish, a large upturned leaf painted forest green with delicate white veins. It is indeed a beauty.

  “I’m so glad,” she replies. Then she pauses, allowing me a few precious seconds with the item before singsongingly adding, “OK, darlin’: Now wrap it up and hand it back.”

  Then you would see me sigh in resignation and do as I am told, so accustomed am I to the pattern of receiving gifts I cannot keep. It happens most frequently on Christmas mornings or major birthdays, whenever the gift is of a certain class: shiny things, things that shatter, hand-painted objects, stuff that requires polishing, items older than I am … if you and I were playing The $25,000 Pyramid with Dick Clark, and you shouted, “Lady things!” we’d hear Ding! Ding! Ding! and then pump the air with our fists.

  I’m occasionally given such presents; I never get them. It’s like a waiter bringing your dinner, letting you smell it, and then taking it away. It’s like wasting fifteen minutes hitting on one of those married men who don’t wear rings. I hate that.

  Mind you, my mother won’t return the Herend leaf or give it to someone else. She will put it in her basement, with all the others, where it will wait for me until a date TBD when it is TBEnjoyed. Simultaneously, they are gifts and not gifts, mine and somehow not mine. The rules governing the universe do not apply in my parents’ home; I guess when my dad used to say “not under my roof” he really meant it.

  Now, if I wanted to, I could visit my treasures; I could spelunk through the cardboard caves and play with them the way Scrooge McDuck swims through money in his vault. But I am not allowed to take them with me, because, and now we get to the heart of the matter, such items may not travel to New York.

  “It’ll get lost up there!” my mother cries. Clearly she hasn’t seen how small my apartment is; the only thing I lose there is my dignity.

  “It could be stolen!” she’ll exclaim. Because it looks like an iPhone or a wad of cash? What does a crackhead want with china?

  “You’ll break it!” she charges. OK, Mom, you got me there: An item is more likely to shatter if being used than if cocooned in bubble wrap nowhere land.

  Whatever the reason, she didn’t want this particular china leaf to fall too far from the tree.

  Listen, I realize how lucky I am to even kind of sort of get such unique, pricey, occasionally priceless items. This is exactly why I want them! What’s the point of owning something if you can’t enjoy it? How can something have a use if it can’t be used? While the box is closed, it is impossible to determine whether or not the object inside is beautiful, just as it would be impossible to determine whether or not a cat had died from radiation-triggered poison. My mother has unwittingly proved the theorem of Schrödinger’s silver goblet.

  And if she’s in the business of challenging quantum mechanics, then she certainly won’t be swayed by my flimsy pleas.

  “I’m surprised you wouldn’t rather leave it here?” she kindly replies. “Then you won’t have to worry about it. Just let me keep it for you.” Keep it till when?

  Aha: exactly.

  The unspoken purpose of retaining these items is that they will be ready for me when I come home. Crystal vases and Herend figurines are grown-up items; they belong in the houses of people who’ve settled down. This line of thought betrays two assumptions: one, that I am not yet an adult, and two, that when I become one, it will not be in New York.

  The first assumption is uncontested: I wake up at noon. I say things like “duh-ee” and “der.” I tape fortune-cookie fortunes to my mirror and honestly gain inspiration from them. As for the second assumption … I don’t know. I can’t predict. My mother, however, appears to be certain: Brooklyn is a phase. My real life, the one adorned with my grandmother’s pearls, is waiting for me in North Carolina. She doesn’t say so; she would never pressure me. But her actions betray her. She’s hoarding loot!

  And anyway, there is a precedent. My eldest sister, Lou, lived in New York for seven years, and then came home, got married, and filled her house with all of the beautiful things waiting: a table passed on from my father’s mother that had been made out of wood paneling from her childhood home in Wilmington, a set of crystal dessert goblets that my mother’s mother’s best friend smuggled out of Switzerland, a silver breadbasket out of which my mom remembers her granny serving rolls every single Sunday, and various other antique centerpieces, lamps, and pieces of jewelry, all of which have a history and are delivered with origin stories tied to their wrists.

  And Tucker, my middle sister, who’d moved to New York a few years prior after getting her MBA, had just announced that she and her boyfriend were making plans to come back to Raleigh, engagement imminent. After receiving the news, Aunt Jane called me and actually said, “Two down, one to go.” Tucker and her husband now sleep in the bed in which my grandfather was born.

  It’s the reverse of the prodigal son; they parade before me the fatted calves, telegraphing that if I find my way home, there will be one hell of a feast. “But what if I stay in New York after I get married?” I ask. “Or what if I never marry? What if I always have roommates?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” is all my mother replies. The box in the basement may as well be labeled “Dowry: to be paid at the marriage of Jane to Dixie Land.” It’s an incredibly patient bribe.

  Or maybe I’m inferring something unimplied. Perhaps there is no subtle ruse. My mother might honestly believe there are “Borrowers” in Brooklyn who take things while you sleep. She may sincerely fear a tear in the matrix, through which tea-and-creamer sets are pinpointed and vacuumed. And who knows? She could be right; I mean, the woman is bending time and space in her basement.

  Either way, one thing is certain: these items are
currently being protected from the North. Southern families have a long tradition of doing so.

  Toward the end of the Civil War, on his march back north, after the devastation of Atlanta, one of Sherman’s generals, John Schofield, commandeered my father’s grandfather’s house in Goldsboro and turned it into his headquarters. My great-grandfather (yes, there’s only one “great” there; the men in my family procreate late) was six when he watched the Yankees march down Chestnut Street and up to his front door. His mother had already buried the jewelry and silver—which are still in the family—but a horse is harder to hide. The soldiers stole my great-grandfather’s pet Shetland pony. Schofield wasn’t one of the “scorched earth” generals, though, so he made his men return the pony. But then they stole it again … returned it again … and stole it a third and final time when they marched out of the Carolinas for good.

  Curiously, they left something else behind, an anonymous silver samovar, bearing the monogram of some other family who hadn’t been quick enough with the shovel. With no way to find its owner, my great-great-grandmother kept the piece. Later, it moved with my great-grandfather into the house down the street, where my father would eventually fall under its spell. He remembers studying the monogram, inspecting the samovar for clues. But he doesn’t remember the letters or, unfortunately, the cousin to whom it was willed; once again, the heirloom is lost.

  Of course, my mother isn’t specifically, intentionally hiding things from the North. Nonetheless that is precisely what’s happening. And so, for me, moving to New York was like crossing over: One need carry nothing but a subway token for the river Styx. As they say, “You can’t take it with you.”

  In my mother’s defense, if I were allowed to bring that green-leaf dish with me to Brooklyn, I very well might break it. But the suspicion that I’d misplace it is shortsighted. How could I when it would stick out egregiously?