We live in the Village, off Christopher Street. The greeting card store has cards with jokes I’m not sure I totally understand and there is a bakery with X-rated cakes. I want Carvel. My mother is experimenting with baklava.

The city is filled with perverts, junkies, pushers, muggers and arsonists but, at the same time, we roam freely. My best friend’s mother has left her conservative husband behind in the suburbs and her boyfriend is bisexual. They live in a loft on the boundary between the West Village and the meatpacking district. It had been the office for a gay magazine and they kept the original bathroom, complete with urinals and a toilet cubicle sporting graffiti with drawings of penises. Their father recalls my friend and her younger sister to the suburbs the next year. The city, clearly, is no place for children to grow up. I missed her.

I am friends with a man who works in a store on Christopher Street called The Soap Opera. He has salt and pepper hair. He goes to drag balls in Alphabet City, which is where he lives. It seems then like a faraway land. He loves the glamor and the illusion. I see how the store itself is like a stage set, with a brocade curtain covering a squalid and miniscule bathroom, a tiny kitchenette, a painted-over window, the shop cat’s box and food. It is the opposite of the boudoir atmosphere of the shop, though its products are destined to sit on the tiled windowsills of so many tenement bathrooms just like it. He sells lip balm that comes in a little tin with a sliding lid and Victorian lettering. They become popular at school and I take orders from friends to buy them, always getting the new flavors as soon as they are in stock.

I had all of this in mind when I wrote Lunch in Brooklyn, a novel of a pre-coming of age in the late 70s, commuting to school, feeling in it and not of it, at the age of extreme social conformity in an era of hedonism. I set the book in my friend’s loft because it expressed that better than our townhouse flat. I loved being on the roof. From the roof, it’s all beautiful and it all makes sense.

...

The Gift of Tongues
I go up to the roof after dinner, after the dishes are done. I tell them I come here to think, which is true, although it’s not the whole truth. My mother thinks it’s important to give me private space. From the roof, which is five stories up, you can see down to the river, although, because of the old West Side Highway, you can’t really see much. This is the edge of Greenwich Village. On one street is a row of little townhouses with planters of ivy spilling down from the window boxes. Around the corner, on Hudson Street, men are carrying in the antiques they had displayed outside their store. They have a cat called Sheba who sleeps in the window.

Across Hudson is the meatpacking district. The street widens for the trucks and the loading docks, where sides of beef are connected to pulleys, and the spaces between the cobblestones shine with blood in the morning. In the evening, when the meat-packers are gone, men dressed as disco queens and Catholic schoolgirls appear. They stand on the corners and stroll down the side streets, swinging their purses by the straps, dragging their satin jackets along the pavement.

From the roof, the loading dock looks more like an abandoned railway station. It feels quiet up here, despite the fact that you can still hear the rattle of trucks and the rush of traffic. An airplane tears slowly across the sky. Down in Corporal Seravalli Playground, the boys play basketball. From here they are graceful and you forget the way they show you their tongues, French kissing the air. Hey baby, come sit on my face.

The sky is a dark, streaky, polluted turquoise. I sit on a wooden crate, like a raft in the curling, blistering, tarpaper sea. My mother used to want to have roof parties until she learned how much it would cost to deck it over. My father has carefully explained to me how the upstairs neighbors will sue us if I walk on the tarpaper and damage the roof and they get a leak.

“They’ve heard you moving around up there,” my father has told me.

“Fred,” my mother says, “Kate is very responsible.”

I started smoking in sixth grade with my friend Stephanie. She lives in New Jersey now. I miss her a lot. Stephanie was my best friend more than Monica was. She used to come over all the time. My mom was happy for me to be “entertaining.” She bought us frozen yogurt bars and didn’t tell us when we had to have lights out. We shaved our legs and practiced with makeup. We read the instruction book that came in Tampax so we would be prepared. We pored over my mother’s Erica Jong books for the sex scenes. Some days, anything made us laugh, especially the recipes for game in The Joy of Cooking:

“Place rabbit on serving dish and pour sauce over it. Serve with: noodles, 213.”

“Use young animals only.”

“After scraping away blood clots...”

“You guys are so sick,” Monica would yell us when we phoned, laughing so hard at first we were just gasping, making her think it was a prank call.

“Singe and clean the insides well: Pigs’ ears,” Stephanie joined in.

“Lucky indeed is the cook with the gift of tongues!” I retorted.

“The testicles of young lambs are a great delicacy. To prepare, first cut into the loose outer skin for entire length of the swelled surface.”

Seventh grade was not as good without her. I had tried to cheer myself up with the notion that I would go back to school a woman of the world and all the cute, new boys would fall in love with me. I was tan and blonde and knew what an erogenous zone was. But there were only the same old boys and it was harder to stay a changed person in your mind when you realized you were still plain old, flat Kate.

This fall, starting eighth grade, I have vowed not to be disappointed. Everyone is ruling the middle school, but if you ask me, it’s a hell of a domain. Sixth graders are practically lower schoolers; seventh graders are either your friends or you ignore them. But at least we no longer have to worry that the eighth graders are having all the fun.

I drop my cigarette into the can with all the others and slosh the liquid around to be sure it’s out. It’s almost dark now. A boy runs through the park. The basketball he is carrying under his arm slips and he swoops down to retrieve it while still running. It is an amazing moment of total coordination. Harry Finch has this grace, flicking his hair over his shoulder, tapping his pencil on the desk in time with whatever music is playing loud in his head. The boys are bigger this year. Maybe, at long last, this will be the year that I find someone. Lucky indeed.

Rebecca Moore blogs at wertis.wordpress.com and is author of Lunch in Brooklyn, (lunchinbrooklyn.wordpress.com)  available on iTunes, Amazon and Smashwords.

We used to sometimes go to Atlantic City.  Neil would play at the low stakes table while I wandered around with the baby strapped to my chest and poked my nose in the shops.  I liked the colorful lights and sounds.  I found some of the people fascinating, particularly the women who stayed all day and played with the same quiet intensity as the men.  I was particularly enamored of anyone in unusual hats or sparkly outfits or giant earrings or long, gaudy painted nails or leather fur-trim designer clothes – I would love these people for dressing the part, for wearing things that told me how important it all was to them.  I would usually vow at some point or another to learn to play poker myself but, to this day, have not gone through with it.  Too busy to learn, to busy to play, always too busy.

                When our second child came, it became impractical to go to Atlantic City so my husband contented himself with the faceless opponents he found on his phone.  But there was no reason for this, he realized – the city is full of underground gambling clubs.  After nosing around a bit among friends, he discovered one in midtown that was a good fit.  And so, one night a week, he would leave me with the kids and venture out at night to go and play poker for a couple of hours.  But one night, to satisfy my immense curiosity, he took me with him.  We called a babysitter for the kids and made it a date night.

                I don’t know what I was expecting, Guys and Dolls, some sort of swanky mobster affair.  Men in fedoras with guns tucked in holsters.  Curvy women in velvet and lipstick.  Cocktails and cigars.  Gangsters.  Or maybe James Bond.  Roulette wheels and blackjack tables.  Men in dinner jackets, their women dripping with diamonds.  I had my best shoes on, Tory Burch boots with four inch heels, and wore a tight skirt and my hair down in cascading curls.  We took a cab to midtown, then wandered around for a bit because we were lost.  I was beginning to regret wearing those shoes.  Then we found it, a non-descript office building that was easy to miss.  We took the elevator up and got off at a floor that looked like any other floor in any other office building in Manhattan, one with old, linoleum floors, peeling paint and noisy, grit-laden radiators in the bathroom.  Our destination was off to the right.  We pushed right through – the door was open.  No secret knocks or nefarious looking men guarding the front.  I saw my mistake as soon as we walked in.  My perception of what I would find had been a complete fantasy.  I shot my husband a look – he had been encouraging it.

                The “underground gambling den” was really just one dark-walled room that served as a small business during the day.  Office equipment had been pushed to one side.  The windows were covered with drapes, the lights bright.  There were three large oblong tables that seated about 10 – two tournament tables and one cash table.  There were about 30 people in the room, almost every seat filled.  They used rolling office chairs.  There was a single screen mounted near the ceiling that showed a timer that counted down the minutes left in each tournament.  The guy who runs the poker club greeted us -  he couldn’t have been more than 25 years old.  He was tall and bean-pole thin and wore glasses and had a bit of a moustache that looked like it might have taken him days to grow.

                “Jordan!”  My husband clasped his hand.  “This is my wife.”

The young man looked at me appraisingly but respectfully and with obsequious interest.  Neil had told me that Jordan was very excited about his fledgling business and took it seriously and wanted it to succeed.  I could see it all in his demeanor.

“Welcome.”  He said.  “Can I get you a drink?  Water?  Soda?”

                “Water.”  I said.  “Thanks.”

“You have a cash game going?”  Neil asked.

“Of course.”  Jordan gestured to one of the tables.  “Do you want to play?”  He asked me.

`               “No, thanks.”  I said.  “I’m just going to watch.”

Jordan pushed two chairs closer to the table and I set mine away from the table, behind Neil.

The dealer cut the deck, flipped the cards and began to throw them to the players.  I looked around the table.  It was composed almost exclusively of young single men in their twenties.  They were white, black, Asian, Indian – all American, all dressed in jeans and sweats.  There were only two other women in the room besides me, both of them in their sixties, both heavy and dressed in pants and big sweaters.  “Regulars.”  Neil whispered to me.  “They’re here every night.” 

                There was only one person dressed in any way that was interesting to me, a young man in his twenties, enormously overweight, who wore a dirty baseball cap with a Ron Paul pin in it and a Ron Paul sweatshirt.  He had large jiggling cheeks and smooth-shaven white skin and gigantic dark eyes that made him look like a very intense, overgrown baby.  After his cards were dealt, he put a lucky charm on top of them – a small chess piece, a knight, made of smoked glass.  He did it every time.

                “So do you think Ron Paul’s going to get it?”  Neil asked him.

                “Nah.  I wish.”  

                “What about Romney?”

                “Nah.”  He said dismissively.  “Might as well vote for Obama.”

                Neil had only put in for $40 worth of chips but the young men on either side of my husband and the young man in the Ron Paul hat each had at least $300 or $400 worth of chips before them.  As time wore on, it became clear that, though there were 10 people sitting at the table, the contest here was between these three people.  My husband held his own for awhile but, in the end, was no match for them.  Seeing him flounder was a new experience for me.   He is a decade older than me and always seemed to know things I didn’t know.  This is probably why I’ve always seen him as the kind of guy who, in every situation, wound up holding the reins.

Jordan sat down across from us.  “So what do you think of this?  Monday is going to be ladies night.”  He was not looking at me when he said it but I could tell it was for my benefit.  “I thought I would offer a prize for the best player that night.  Maybe, like, a gift-certificate for a mani-pedi.  And I’ll offer a prize for best female player in any quarter – like maybe a full day at a spa.  So what do you think?”  He still wouldn’t look at me.

“I think Monday should be strip poker night,” said Ron-Paul-hat, grinning in his fat cheeks.

People snickered but Jordan ignored them.  Then everyone fell quiet.  The cards had been dealt, the players now taking it all in.  I sat and watched, understanding little.  I had been sitting there for over an hour watching my husband lose his chips bit by bit.  I was getting bored and was ready to go but then he won a moderate-sized pile and so we decided to stay a bit longer.  More chips to play.

                At one point, a buzzer rang out.  The poker clock up on the screen near the ceiling, set for ten minutes each time, had, again, run itself down to zero.  The three dealers, one at each table, all young men, collected their chips and stood up and new dealers, also young men, took their places.

                “They are all taking breaks?”  I asked.

                “Yes.”  The young man to my right said.  “It gets, mentally, very tiring.”

                Jordan stood up then and addressed the room.  “How about pizza.  Anyone want pizza?”

                “Yeah, pepperoni.”  Said Ron-Paul-hat.

                “How many for pepperoni?

                “No, wait!  Anchovies!”  Ron-Paul-hat, grinning again.  He had little, corn niblet teeth.

                “You’re buggin’”

                “Put up your hands if you want pepperoni.”  Jordan said.  “Okay.  Pepperoni it is.  Anyone want anything else from the outside world?”

                “Hookers.”  Someone called out from another table.

                “Coke!”

                “Yeah, aw right!  Hookers and coke!  The Friday night special!”  Laughter.

                “It’s Wednesday.”

                “Wednesday is meth night.”  Jordan cracked.  More snickers all around.  The dealers kept dealing.  Everyone fell quiet.  Calmly, the young men flipped up their cards at one corner and took a look.

 Elioutte Green is the pen name for a writer based in Manhattan. She holds a MFA from Columbia and her work has been published in various small journals. She is presently completing her first novel.

It takes a while to settle into a new place when you move. The way you think furniture is going to work within a space isn’t usually how it ends up, so we spent a lot of time rearranging. We finally decided we were happy (for now) on where everything was and we would just live with it (for now).

I was meeting people at work, but it was on a professional basis and Susan was writing again, which means she spent a great deal of time by herself. We would cook dinner, have some wine and talk about what we did that day. Susan told me of the progress on her book and how she hoped to wrap it up by the end of the year. I told her stories about my boss and colleagues at the investment firm. We are settling in, we would say, finding our place here.

Warmer weather and longer days had come as we approached Memorial Day. Every morning when I got up, I would look out the kitchen window at the flower boxes. By now, the plants had grown and I could see buds appearing. The promise of summertime flowers.

One day, Susan called me into the kitchen as soon as I got home. “Hey, look at this,” she said. Across the driveway, a woman was weeding and watering the flowers in the flower boxes. She had on a light colored, flowing dress and her long hair would spill over as she tended to her plants. Behind her, I could see two place settings on the table with candles and a small bouquet of flowers. A date?

As we were cooking our dinner, a car we hadn’t seen before, a grey BMW, slowly pulled down the driveway and parked awkwardly on one side of the parking area.
As Susan finished sautéing the salmon, a man with a bottle of wine in his hand carefully made his way toward the balcony, unsure of where to go. Our neighbor appeared, greeted him and asked him in.

We ate our dinner and after the last sips of wine, decided to take a walk through town. It was still warm out with almost no breeze. A perfect evening. As we made our way back up to our place, we heard talking and laughing. We went into our kitchen and took a peek out the window. The date was going well. The candles were flickering, the wine was flowing. But before we went to bed, the BMW started, and the man was gone.

For the next few Saturday nights, this pattern continued. Spring had given way to summer and the flowers in the boxes were now in full bloom. The colors were spectacular and our neighbor made sure her plants were well cared for. Then I woke up early one Sunday morning in July. I thought I heard a noise outside and took a look out of the kitchen. A dog was digging around in the bamboo. After giving up chasing whatever he was chasing, the dog lifted his leg on the tire of the not-so-awkwardly parked grey BMW.

Later that morning, I told Susan that BMW guy had spent the night. “Good for her”, Susan said. “Good for him”, I said. We decided that we would get to know our neighbor a little. I am constantly amazed at how much information Susan can come back with after what always seems to me to be the most idle of chats. Later that week came the report: her name is Pamela, she is about our age, she works at the jewelry store in town, she likes classical music, she moved here 12 years ago and is, or maybe was, single.

August was hot. Early, before the heat of the day would melt everything and everyone, I would go for a run on the beach. On my way out, I would admire the flowers in the boxes, standing bright and colorful, hopeful before another day of baking in the sun.

Cool evenings became the norm as fall pushed summer into the past. The days got shorter. Susan’s book was almost on schedule and the editors at the publishing company were pleased with the progress. For me, it was business as usual. Markets go up and markets go down. There is opportunity in both.

Pamela and BMW guy were together every weekend. While Susan and I cooked and ate in our apartment, they would sit out on the patio, even when it got chilly, late into the night, talking and sipping wine. Good for them.

Then, for several weekends, there were no late evening conversations, no sipping of wine on the patio. Maybe BMW guy was away on business. Then, he was back for a weekend.

We were expected to get a cold snap in the last week of October. Pamela had, in the past covered her plants with a plastic cover to protect them from the cold. I was surprised at how well it worked. The flowers were still beautiful. Then, one weekend, we had a storm. The temperature dropped to freezing and the wind blew 40 miles per hour. The plastic got blown off of the flower boxes. The next day, the sun came out, but the temperature struggled to get into the 30’s.

After a couple of days, it was obvious that the flowers had died from exposure to the wind and cold. We never saw the grey BMW again.

So, when he arrived at the door of my tenement apartment at 1AM, unexpected, unannounced, I didn't say no. I let him in, against all my instincts.

"Hi. I was at the community center. We just finished working. We were painting and doing construction. I'm exhausted. It's too late to go home. Can I stay here?"

He stood there right before me, Jay Martinez, about 5'10", dark-skinned, a little pockmarked. His hair was close-cropped and curly. His ears were extremely small and curled up at the bottom. He was stocky, but he had a sloppy-full belly that spilled over his belt. Though he looked strong and muscular enough he would always let the other men do the hard work and heavy lifting I'd noticed.

And now, here he was. I had gone to school that day, attended three classes at Hunter, worked at my waitress job on the usual 7-hour shift, taken the subway home to the Court Street station at Borough Hall. I'd just gotten in from a very long day a half hour before. I had hoped to do evening prayers, put on my pajamas, watch a little tv and then fall dead asleep. His arrival ruined those innocent plans.

He was a Headquarters Chief in what was then called NSA. Now known as SGI (Soka Gakkai International), it was and is a group founded on Buddhist principles. Many New Yorkers are familiar with NSA/SGI from their time in the 80s when they conducted huge campaigns to recruit people. They could be found in every neighborhood, out on the streets, handing out pamphlets and intruding upon people with the question, posed with a big smile, "Have you ever heard about Nam myoho renge kyo?"

I had been drawn in not by this method of "street shakubuku" (introduction), but through a girl I worked with, Anna. We were both waitresses in a burger restaurant on Court Street in Brooklyn Heights. She intrigued me. She had a young son, was a single mother, worked for the same tips I did, and yet managed to maintain an apartment in the Heights.

Even more importantly, when everyone else was stressing out about not having a date on Friday night, she seemed genuinely happy and at ease, unconcerned with her single status. She seemed buoyant.

"Oh my God, you will not believe what happened today!" she announced to the lunch shift table as we had breakfast before the restaurant opened. "I was $300 short on the rent. I didn't know where I'd get it. So, I just chanted and chanted Nam myoho renge kyo and what do you think happened? I got a check in the mail this morning - a refund from the telephone company!!! for $296! Can you believe it? Isn't that wild?"

She had stories like this on a regular basis: a friend sending her $50, a birthday card with $100, finding $20 on the street when she had no money for dinner for her son and herself.

I was impressed. It didn't hit me until years later to ask why a young woman with an MA in Psychology (fairly rare in those days) was working as a waitress and not in her own field.

Everything about her seemed to be unencumbered by weighty convention, even her physical being, her lack of breasts (which would have bothered other women), her height (5'1"), her very short hair. She had a Peter Pan quality that men found fascinating.

Anna had tried to introduce me to her "Buddhist beliefs" a number of times. "Maggie, you'd love this." I would never give her a hearing. I thought she was a Hare Krishna or somesuch. When I finally told her that, she cried, "What? No, no. That's a cult!"

And then one day she left one of her NSA magazines open to an article she knew I'd be interested in. She left it right where I'd be sitting to have lunch after the shift ended. My eye naturally alighted on it and I read. It was well-written. My English major prejudice was impressed by the grammatical correctness and fluent style. This was no Hare Krishna klaptrap with appalling spelling and uneven font. This was sophisticated stuff.

And so, I was seduced. One day shortly after she invited me to her apartment to see her altar. She led me to the bedroom where she had a small, unobtrusive altar, laid out artfully with fresh green leaves in a vase, fresh fruit in a wooden bowl, a small vessel filled with water. Suspended on the wall above the altar was what looked like a wooden curio cabinet, in blonde wood. It had an elegant simplicity.

"Do you want to see my Gohonzon?"
"What's a Gohonzon?"
"Gohonzon means 'highest object of worship.'"
"Oh. Yeah. Yes."
"OK," she said in the charming, wry, smiling way I'd become familiar with. She looked happy.

She knelt down in front of the altar, put a small leaf between her lips, reached up over the altar toward the cabinet and opened it.

I was floored. The scroll before me was astonishingly beautiful. It was a little mandela. I'd been taking a course at Hunter in Buddhism and we'd studied these. They were meditation objects, meant to help the practitioner concentrate, meditate. This one was awesome. In length it was about 12 inches, in width, about 6. It contained only characters - Japanese? Chinese? The characters were gold, printed on a tannish brown background which had some kind of pattern emblazoned on it. It had such presence! Such charisma!

I remembered how our professor told us that, after his enlightenment, even Shakyamuni's detractors were compelled to rise up and greet him respectfully because he had such charisma, such power.

"It's beautiful."
"Would you like to try chanting?"
"All right."
"Nam myoho renge kyo.... Try it. Repeat after me...Nam myoho renge kyo."
"Nam myoho? renge kyo. Is that right?"

And now it was 3 years later. The "honeymoon phase" had ended abruptly the moment I finally acquiesed and became an official member. At first, I'd been treated like the loved and wanted golden child who could do no wrong, whose every move was pure delight. Upon joining, the pressure began.

Calls at 7AM Saturday morning: "Where are you? We're doing a 5 hour daimoku toso (chanting session). You have to be here!"

Calls at 11PM: "Tomorrow morning at 8AM you have to bring 40 sandwiches for the Youth Division."

"Our district has pledged to have 12 new members this month. Do shakubuku (introduction)!"

"We have a target of 150 subscriptions to the World Tribune (organ newspaper). So, your target must be 50. Get on the phone!"

"No! Of course you can't have a Christmas tree!"

I was 28 when I first met Anna and was introduced to her beliefs. I'd had a pretty difficult life. I'd been a foster child, aged out of the system without a penny to get started in the world and no one to lean on. But I'd been getting things together. I'd finally decided to go to college and was doing it, enjoying it. I was a waitress at a restaurant that was not bad to work at, at all. You could have your meals there. And I had friends there.

Restaurant people were fun: real, unassuming, with an irreverent sense of humor. Whenever you had an annoying customer you could curse your head off in the kitchen and return to the dining area calm and composed. A typical kitchen conversation during rush would sound something like this:

"Shit. I have that asshole again on Station 2. He's trying to impress his date by running me all over the fucking place. I feel like telling her I heard he has a small dick."

Wild laughter.

"I got that cheap bitch. She was here yesterday. Can't she find another place to go? She wears a cashmere coat and leaves me a dollar."

"You're lucky. I got Sam again. He's sloshed."

After the intense pressure of the rush we'd all calm down, turn in our books, count our tips, and settle in for lunch together. It was during one of these lunches that I discovered the NSA magazine.

Three years later and I was a kumicho, a unit chief in NSA. On the first day I was appointed, I was given a list of 30 members who had left NSA and told I was to get them back. "Start calling. Don't forget to get their World Tribune subscription money. Don't forget your target."

I learned immediately, as all members did, that questioning was considered negative and destructive, "destroying the unity of believers." Good fortune was determined by one's fidelity to NSA, one's unquestioning loyalty. In fact, one's eternal soul was connected to being an active member, a true believer.

It was an important element in the life of a true believer to "receive guidance" from a "senior leader." With any life crisis you were encouraged to do this. Senior leaders were allowed, even encouraged, to scold, ridicule, castigate, scream at junior members. A senior leader who wasn't willing to be resented by their junior members was irresponsible.

And so it was that I went for guidance to Jay Martinez when the relationship I was in was not going well. I trusted him. He was a Buddhist leader, revered and loved by all the members. He was there to protect me, to guide me, to keep me from harm. I was safe with him.

I confessed to him all my hurt and despair over the broken romance, along with details. He was like a father. After this, he began turning up in odd places and at odd hours. I didn't question it. I was flattered: I felt special. This important man wants to be friends with me. He's so busy and a father of 2, a husband, a Headquarters chief and yet he makes time for me.

So, at 1AM, I wasn't completely surprised. He'd come other times, once in the afternoon, once around 5PM or so. But he had never asked to stay over. What was I to do with this request in my little apartment? I had a tiny bedroom with room only for a bed, and a pull-out couch in the living room.

It was awkward. He sat on the couch awhile and recounted his day. I was so tired. After about an hour he asked if he could take a shower.

"Sure."

He came out of the bathroom wearing only a towel. That's when I finally realized his true intention. I scrambled around frantically thinking what can I do, who can I call. It was 2AM. My friends would all be asleep. And what would I say? What could they do? He was a Headquarters Chief! You didn't say no!

"Do you mind if I lay down?"
"No, go ahead."

What would Anna be doing now? Could I call Liz? 2:05 AM. Don't call anyone. You'll be disturbing people. Just avoid him. Wait him out. He'll go to sleep. Maybe you're imagining things. He's married. He has 2 kids. He's a Buddhist. Wait him out. Clean the house. Study. Sort out your finances. Do the dishes.

I vacuumed. I did the dishes. I cleaned, dusted, sorted. I attempted to study. After a long, long, long time he called out, "When are you coming to bed?"

When I heard his voice, so strong, so awake, so insistent, everything inside me collapsed. I knew I was defeated. I was exhausted and completely alone. It was 4AM, the darkest hour of the night. There was no one to call to, no one to help. And you didn't say no to a leader.

Afterwards, he got up, dressed, and went home. Suddenly, it was not so far away that he couldn't make it there.

The days that followed were days of despair. What had I done? It was all my fault.

After 3 weeks I could endure it no longer. I needed help. I went for guidance. Since my problem involved a Headquarters Chief I went to the most senior leader in New York.
In slow, almost whispered tones I told him what had happened. He was Japanese-American. He listened with a sympathetic face, deep brown eyes, tilting his head compassionately toward me. Finally, he spoke, after a long silence in which he seemed to be deeply and wisely ruminating.

"This is your karma. Be glad he didn't use violence."

I left the center that day determined to turn this negative experience into something positive. In the days that followed I chanted more and more to expiate my negative karma. At every meeting I saw Jay. He gave "final encouragement." I saw him giving guidance. He led prayers. He bantered with members. He was introduced as an important leader and an excellent role model. All the time I struggled with my anger, disappointment, hurt, shame.

One day I returned to the New York senior leader to speak with him about my "negative life condition" and to ask why nothing had happened to Jay Martinez. Again, he looked so sympathetic. He seemed so compassionate as he considered my situation.

And then he said, his long lashes lowered over his half-closed eyes, as if rousing himself from deep meditation, "You must protect the organization. You understand? You must never tell anyone about this."

M. O'Connell grew up in Brooklyn. For a time she was a member of NSA/SGI.

Our paths intersect just west of the median. My cellphone is glued to my right ear, and I continue chattering because if I pretend not to notice Tim Gunn, perhaps I will actually be invisible to one of the world’s best-known authorities on fashion and possibly Heidi Klum’s BFF. But I can’t resist; I look up. Our eyes meet. I see his glance flicker to my flip flops and my sincerely unmanicured, unwinterized toes. His examination is similar to that of one who involuntary swivels to check out a roadside accident when the traffic slows and you see the flashing lights of the highway police at the scene - but quickly checks himself. For a second -- do I really see it? -- a scintilla of a shadow of a moue crosses his elegant face, and then it’s gone. I almost expect him to tell me that I’m so deliciously low, so horribly dirty; would that he were the Higgins to my Eliza.

I should have known; looking that unkempt, I was bound to cross paths with Tim Gunn. Ever since he moved to the Upper West Side maybe a year ago, he’s classed up the place just by being here, but I seem to never see him when I look good. I actually spoke to him the first time I saw him; it seemed so unlikely that I would ever see him in person again, having never seen him around before, that I thought it would be ok to gush a bit. He was shlepping a massive laundry bag, which proved to me that (1) despite his godlike looks, he’s human and (2) he looks godlike even shlepping a massive laundry bag. As I confessed my admiration, I remember a voice in my head saying, “Let. Him. Do. His. Laundry.” When I finally, reluctantly, tore myself away, Leo, seven at the time, asked me who the man was. I giggled, “I know who he is because he’s on TV but he doesn’t know who I am.”

“So he’s a stranger?”

“Yes. He’s a stranger. I was talking to a stranger. You still can’t.”

It’s not like I haven’t been cautioned since I was at my mother’s knee to look good when I left the house. The first iteration of the rule was rather obvious: you never knew who would see you outside, which, when I came of marriageable age, emphatically included possible suitors who might somehow apparate onto Main Street, Harry-Potter like, just in time to check me out. That morphed into the more sinister, if slightly unlikely rule that if you left the house looking bad, you would of necessity encounter someone important, like the aforementioned phantom suitor or one of my mother’s friends. This latter rule seemed akin to the one that leaving the house without an umbrella would guarantee rain. I never completely understood the causal relationship at work here, but apparently, leaving the house bare-faced caused the planets to subtly realign so that when the shifting slowed to a stop, there was Mrs. Englehoffer, staring at me disapprovingly.

These thoughts were in part prompted by reports of a recently released study which found that a woman who wears makeup is perceived as more likable, competent and provided she doesn’t overdo it, more trustworthy. Researchers at Harvard were among those who designed the study, which was paid for by Proctor and Gamble, makers of among a billion other things, makeup. Their sponsorship of the study leads me to wonder, perhaps uncharitably, whether the study would have seen the light of day had it concluded that makeup makes no difference in the perception of one’s abilities. But the findings shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Certainly, the idea that makeup can make you look better isn’t new (that’s why you buy it), and studies have found that more attractive people get better jobs and earn higher lifetime salaries (see, for example, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, by the economist Daniel Hamermesh). This study just connects the dots: if (1) makeup makes one more attractive, and (2) attractive people are considered more employable and, implicitly, more competent, then (3) a bit of artful shading and contouring should cause you to be perceived as more competent. I confess that the fact that you can paint on a face and be thought of as actually better than one who doesn't, is kind of mind-spinning to me. I’ve never been completely comfortable wearing makeup. But maybe that’s just a vestige of the child in me who was distinctly unhappy with her looks and believed that brains could combat plainness (as Jane Austen might have called it) and were therefore, somehow incompatible with beauty.

The P&G study does make me wonder if I’m short-changing myself when I walk out of the house without so much as a smear of lipstick. One day last week, on impulse, I tried on some cheapie drugstore makeup I'd recently bought. Then, of course, since a made-up face demands commensurate accoutrements, I put on my black leather jacket and heels, fluffed my hair and walked out of the house. I felt great, if a bit conspicuous. I heard someone call my name. It was my friend Karen, who looked me over quizzically as she walked toward me. Finally she carefully told me that I looked good. Knowing her, I’m pretty sure she tread lightly because to squeal “You’re wearing makeup! You look great!” is to imply, “You know, when you don’t wear makeup you look sooooo awful.” But as we spoke about the usual stuff, in her eyes was the unasked question: Why? And in my own mind, I’m still not sure if the answer is that I’m selling out or being smart enough to accept reality. Maybe I’m just doing my part to spruce up the neighborhood for Tim.

Sharon Silver is a wife, mother, lapsed lawyer and aspiring writer.

Mindy? she asked, half turning her face from the TV set. I could hear Ed Norton calling out, Hellooooo, ball.

Yeah? I answered from the doorway.
You know about sex, right?
Yeah, Ann told me about it.
You don’t have any questions, do you?
I guess not.
Good.

For the record, Ann was my friend who was a year older and more worldly, and always smelled like a combination of Rive Gauche and Big Red gum. Her lesson on the birds and the bees had gone like this: The man sticks his pisher into the woman’s pisher, and something comes out of his pisher that makes the woman pregnant.

When we informed my brother Harry about this state of affairs, he ran straight to our father to ask him if he really stuck his pisher into our mother.

Who told you that? my father demanded.
Mindy and Ann.
They’re lying.

Mindy Greenstein is a clinical psychologist and writer. She is the author of The House on Crash Corner and Other Unavoidable Calamities (Greenpoint Press, 2011).

“Feed me some vocab,” I whispered.

He started, turned to look at me. Blue eyes.

“Vocabulary,” I said.

“There’s no more port wine left,” he whispered back.

I looked at him.

“Port, left,” he said, looking down at his left hand, palm up. “Starboard, right.” His right hand held an invisible plate next to the first.

“I’m really good at physical stuff,” I said. “Work. I mean, farms. And sports.” I gestured over his palms, indicating winds and oceans and the muscle memory it took to move safely through both. “I learn fast.”

I left orientation early to make an apartment interview in Brooklyn. My brother was moving to the city in a week. The apartment had bars on the windows, but the sublettee had cat-eye glasses and a tiny ponytail.

“Jessie,” she said with one downward handshake. She apologized that her roommates weren’t home but assured me they were the greatest, bestest friends from art school in the south. I am from Kentucky. Her voice rang with sensible but persistent joy, and really, my only responsibility was to ensure the place wasn’t a crack den.

“Above and beyond,” I said, reaching for the deposit.

A week later my family arrived to shuttle their second child from landlocked horse farm to concrete island. My mom and I stood outside my Park Slope apartment, the base camp, loading the Subaru with boxes. She was taking pictures because she believes her children will find home here. A memorialized beginning supplies faith in what follows; you insist it is, in fact, a beginning. I was posing on the sidewalk when the guy, the sailor, Mr. Vocabulary, exited the building directly across the street. He mounted a red vintage motorcycle, kicked it into gear, and drove past us, uphill, into the morning.

“Oh my God,” I said.

Right after orientation, I had emailed my new boss to apologize for the tardy arrival. He had replied, saying all fine, but how much sailing experience do you actually have? We struck a deal involving the company’s adult sail camp and blitzkrieg training. I bought a book and a length of practice rope. I read the book and started calling the rope ‘line.’ Class started the Saturday after the Subaru’s departure. My sailor was my instructor.

“You’ll never guess,” I said. “Red motorcycle, 8 AM, Tuesday, Twelfth Street?”

“My girlfriend lives there,” he said toward the boathouse. He followed his voice inside and deep into a tide book

To his triangle back, I said softly, “I live there.”

On the water, somewhere around the cross-town canyon of 42nd Street, he taught me the choreography of the bowline with a rhyme about rabbits. Lessons and landmarks disappeared. We swapped the basic details, then stories. We echoed each other. We both had studied photography; he had taken it much further and was completing an MFA. Both our mothers were forgiving Catholics who had shopped for our school clothes at Goodwill. For a glossy magazine, he had photographed the southern horse show circuit.

“Oh, my brother just moved in with some southern artist types,” I said. “Shitty block, very happy people.”

“Where?” he said.

“Off the G,” I said. “Gates.”

He looked at me like he had during vocabulary lessons.

“Where exactly?”

“Oh, a good walk, Gates-and-something,” I said. The sun filled everything. The wind moved us toward the Statue of Liberty.

“Did he take Jessie’s room?”
“What?” I said. “Jessie Sears?” She had such a tiny ponytail.

He laughed the way you do when a miracle shakes your shoulders. “Chris,” he said. “Your brother, Chris. He lives in my house. Your brother is Chris.” I wanted to hold his grin in my hands. I or that girlfriend, one of us was sunk.

On charters for the forty-two foot Beneteau, there is a captain and a mate. When you work a sail, you captain or you mate that sail. My boss paired my sailor and I together for a few real jobs, trial runs. After that, when Mr. Vocab agreed to captain, he called to see if I wanted to mate. Yes, sure, absolutely. We captained and mated all summer.

Late June is proposal season, so every sunset job is a guy with a diamond and a woman with ready hands. The breathless couples invited us to weddings, included us in their engagements photos, confided the Statue of Liberty was their self-imposed deadline, asked us if everyone did this, left us in the cockpit while they made out on the bow, left us with the last of their champagne so we could toast the night after we docked. They all wanted to believe we were together. An older couple even assured us we would have kind, beautiful children. Blue eyes! I wanted to shout.

Aside from sharing his motorcycle downtown for tacos, we still hadn’t touched each other when we stole the dinghy for a midnight tour of the Jersey coast. And still not when we drove two hours upstate to buy orchard apples in the rain. I had memorialized our beginning, though, and maybe this was the wrong time, but this was definitely the start of something, meant for some time.

When I returned to Kentucky for Christmas, he was driving cross-country. He stopped for a night. Finally, finally. One night would turn to three. As we settled beneath the blankets, I imagined my mother in the morning, with a grin of conspiracy, whisking pancakes, something she did not do for other boyfriends.

Some six hours later, sooner than I imagined, she shouted, “Kate?” Then, immediately panicking, “Kate?”

“Oh boy,” I said into his chest.

“Chris?” she called. “Kate? Chris?” She was near the top of her register.

“Okay, okay,” I said, pulling on yesterday’s clothes.

I arrived to the kitchen as my brother streaked through, literally, with a soup pot full of water. The water sloshed onto his boxers. The back yard billowed black smoke.

Mom rushed after him, extending two saucepans awkwardly in front of her. “The compost was frozen shut. I dumped the fireplace ashes in the trashcan.” She shouldered open the storm door. “Leaves inside. It was leaning against the shed.”

The shed was, indeed, in flames. My bedmate appeared.

“What’s going on up here?” he said.

“Mom lit the shed on fire. Apparently the hose is frozen.” I revved, reached for the decorative tin pail above the fridge. As I filled the pail in the tub upstairs, I heard him opening and closing cabinets below. When I exited the backdoor with my full bucket, I was following him across the yard. Thinking he had nothing to offer, I scooted in front and pitched my water onto the almost-under-control flames. He sprayed something from a red cylinder until the something and the flames died completely. A fire extinguisher.

“Melinda,” he said, handing the extinguisher to my mom. “You’ll want to get that recharged.”

“Where did you get that?” I said. My heart awoke all over again.

“Always under the sink.”

My brother rolled his eyes. My mom beamed exactly like I had imagined. We were half-clothed around a melted trashcan, breaking the grass’s frost in borrowed shoes. I wanted to high-five the clouds.

Back in New York, in our winter lives, things were not the same. Things were horrible. We spent months in an indecisive dance. He was moving in the summer, at the completion of his MFA, and we had a hard time talking when there wasn’t a physical task to talk around and through. We had communicated in lessons and word games and stories of miraculous similarity. In the sloppy cold, walking to an unremarkable movie, how were we to believe where—or whether— we were going? We were at the stage that takes work, and we were overbundled in unflattering coats.

When the cold broke, our friendship—much less any sort of relationship—was a mess, but he asked me to sail with him, the first sail of the season. The charter was two middle-aged French women who didn’t speak a lick of English or boats. The winds were fifty miles an hour. The Beneteau would never tip completely, but the French women wanted to float lazy-river style, so we scrabbled to keep the boat from heeling deep into the Hudson.

“You’re wrapping the wrong way,” he said over the jib’s luffing.

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” I snapped the sheet to wrap clockwise.

The poor women could only understand the tone of our voices, which said something was capsizing. Not you, us, I wanted to tell them.

“It’s really fine,” he said to the two women, who had moved near the life vests. “Just wind,” he waved his hand in the air. “Wind.”

“Remember stealing the dinghy?” I said.

“I steal that dinghy like it’s my job,” he countered.

I persevered. “Do you remember how we met? Do you remember exactly?”

“You took a sailing lesson.” He lunged into trimming the main.

We finished the tack. The French women hugged each other. Instead of hanging behind him on a shroud, like usual, I joined him at the wheel. We bounced over wake. Steadying myself, I reminded him of the typed orientation packets and my frazzled rush down the dock. The sound of the fenders against the wall, my bad haircut, the springtime smell of wet polyurethane. I reminded him there’s no more port wine left. My litany of details was a plea, next time, to risk. At the very least, pay attention. Two people only get one beginning.

Kate grew up in Kentucky and now lives in Brooklyn. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Press and The Accidental Extremist.

I stood on 125th street, listening the rumble above me as the train rolled into the ground. McDonalds smelled behind me. Cabs, like giant ants formed an army up Broadway. Crossing the street, the sun staring between train tracks, I hear a voice laced with the Grant Projects and affection.

“Yo, Ms. D!”

I knew her as my own immediately.

Gisele Henriquez-woman. She had the same sexy Harlem gait that I remember being alarmed about when she was my student (a girl her age with a body like that shouldn’t walk like that). Her face was unchanged: she was still beautiful; black opal eyes against the backdrop of alabaster skin, the slight curly patch that joined her eyebrows in the middle of her forehead, her long thick black hair alluding Taino heritage was in a ponytail, exposing her small ears which hung “banji girl” gold doorknocker earrings.

She ambled toward me, glowing and very pregnant and kissed me hard on the cheek.

She had house keys and Chico Stix in her hand, and as her face re-emerged from the nape of my neck I watched her seductive lips exclaim some statement of happiness adorned with expletives. This is how Harlem girls address each other, in affection, in nostalgia. In profanity. The train gargled uptown on top of us and I grabbed the Chico Stix from out her hand. I couldn’t stop smiling. When the 1 ran past she repeated herself.

“Mira, Oh my God, how you doin? Oh fuck!!! Ms. D”!!!!

I grabbed her hand and crossed Old Broadway, the small inlet that gave itself over to Grant projects and grand tenements, that housed so many of my students. We walked towards the sunshine, away from our train, next to the bodega that sells loosie cigarettes to all the hard faced man-children that plant themselves on the corners under the train when they should be in social studies class. I stopped and opened up the Chico Stix, bit down, and took my beloved student in, fully.

She started talking slowly, holding my arm, she complained about her feet being swollen, I told her how beautiful her hair looked-it really did. We walked towards the diner before the firehouse, where cars park at an angle when the cops are busy stuffing themselves with Dunkin Donuts.

-The diner, where all the waiters speak Spanish, the corner where the Citerella just didn’t quite take.

I walked with her and listened to her tell me about her life, and him.

I know this beauty. I know this woman from her 15th year as an angry and sarcastic and beautiful hold over- an overage school kid- a hot mouthed, neck swinging thing with a chip on her shoulder and signature Dr. Jay jeans that were way too tight. I liked her immediately.

And she liked me too, Thank God. I never got cursed at or fought like so many other of my District 5 colleagues, and plus, she loved my music class. She had a beautiful voice- clean, chimy, but nasal, like a true Latina. She joined chorus, and my Saturday morning community service outreach, and got into a pretty good high school, thanks to two recommendations from the principal and guidance counselor that I almost had to sell my soul to get.

She was on her way, I thought. She was fixed. She was going to break the cycle of degradation and miseducation that has plagued far too many young women of color in Harlem or any ghetto in the USA for so long. She was the story I told to skeptics and naysayers who wanted to scrap NYC’s public education system completely.

Gisele went to A Philip Randolph High School, next to City College. She also won a scholarship to Harlem School of the Arts (HSA). She was a vocal major, excelling in her studies. She enjoyed high school, remarked how much easier it was that middle school, both socially and academically.

“There were girls there my age. None of these little bitches who gave me shit looks cuz they was jealous.”

She loved voice class very much, and was even crazy about music theory and appreciation class. She was asked to tutor students in the learning annex because of her prior community service experience. The end of freshman year found her on the Dean’s List. There was talk about putting her in accelerated college prep classes.

We sat down in the diner, she remarked about “Precious” being filmed there- I laughed when I remembered the bucket of chicken scene.

“Word,” I smiled bigger, and ordered some coffee to compliment her san cocho.
I asked her if her mother is still at 26 Old Broadway, where she was living in junior high school. She nods, and smiles.

“Yo, you remember when you showed us “Fame” the last week of school in 8th grade? I loved that movie, yo. “

“I remember, Ms. Thing.” I sipped my coffee slowly, watching her square-cut French manicured nails wrap themselves around the soup spoon.

“We was in vocal class last year tryna harmonize Body Electric n’ I thought of you. I sounded mad good too,” she smiled, and finished her compliment with a lip smack that would make all of West Harlem proud.

Then, She told me about Peter. She describes the first time he kissed her like she’s reading script from a novella, her street-Spanglish cascading out over tumescent lips.

“I fell in love with him the night he gave me this,” she points to necklace she wears, with a medallion, of Saint Peter, patron Saint of what, she isn’t sure. It was enough that he entrusted this necklace to her. From that moment, she entrusted her heart to him.

I asked her when she realized she was pregnant.

“I know from that day he would be the father of my children. We NEVER used anything, Ms. D, we just knew it was right.”

Peter subsequently dropped out of school, and has a job now at the new Costco that opened up in East Harlem. Gisele still lives with her mom and younger siblings in that house on Old Broadway and plans to attend Missions School, for pregnant teens. She says she still sings, and wants to name her baby, India, after her favorite Salsa singer.

“Its gonna be ok, Ms. D, you’ll see.”

I smiled again and looked away, not wanting her to notice the worry in my face. I stared out the window and I watched the baby banji girls on the corner headed towards the Old Navy and the braid spot, licking innocently on the deliciouso the Mexican woman pushes on the corner (“$1 mix coco/cherry”!). I eye them closely, like I did Gisele, and wonder if they really know what they’re doing, licking the ice like that, pretty sugar stained lips adorned beautiful ethnic faces full of attitude.

She reached across the table and touched my hand.

“He loves me.” She said it, I realized that after all these streets had thrown at her, after all the clawing over broken glass and racing under booming train tracks and fighting for a meager public school education has done to this girl, that was all she really wanted.

I told her I was happy for her.

Her phone rang, her face lit up, and she told me she had to go. She waddled up, saying her goodbyes way too loud for the small corner diner. She kissed me goodbye and left me with my coffee.

I sat for a minute, stared out the window, and watched this beautiful woman-child venture down a coolly-lit Harlem side street that seemed to me as precarious as her future.

Breeanne Elizabeth Daniels is a native New Yorker. She is taught middle school in New York City for 11 years and community college for 3. She is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the City College of New York.

“Let them see that big yellow head of yours,” Tiffany would say. We broke tradition only once, separating at a corner during a light summer rain in Greenwich Village. The ugly truth left me stunned and incensed. The cab, a canary yellow mini-van with sliding doors, slowed to a crawl. Tiffany reached for its handle just before the driver gunned his engine, bolting past her for a white couple thirty feet away.

We started taking cabs back to Brooklyn from Manhattan because, as Tiffany explained, I stared too much on the subway. If a father trained his son to do cartwheels for change on the Q train, I stared. If a man spoke to his wife in Russian while casually shaving his neck in the reflection of her compact, I was mesmerized.

I grew up in a suburb where everyone drove. Tiffany said my gaze wandered too much. I didn’t have my ‘train eyes’ yet. The two of us always enjoyed a healthy rivalry when it came to our respective upbringings yet it was the interracial aspect of our relationship, the burden and beauty it supplied, that needed to soak into our pores over a stretch of time. Regardless of how well my train eyes developed, I would never truly know what it meant to be black in America, but I was now part of a team that did.

We both taught English at a large high school in New York City under Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral control. When the Department of Education declared the building unsafe and its students failing, we vehemently disagreed with city politics and got to know each other better. Every year the building lost another wing to a trendy boutique academy and every year Tiffany and I grew closer. By the time there was nothing left of the place and our classroom belongings had all been packed, my ring was on her finger.

Initially, I just wanted to know the beautiful teacher who shared my classroom a little better. Yet when things progressed and it was time for Tiffany to inform her parents of the new boyfriend, she made a conscious decision to do it in stages. First there was a new man in her life, and his name was James. It wasn’t exactly a lie. James was indeed my first name. I just rarely used it, opting for my middle name instead. So now I was James on my birth certificate, James on my taxes, and apparently James to a loving couple in Brooklyn with strong Southern roots whom I never actually met. It was simply an easier crossover name than Bryan, which served Tiffany well until her parents demanded to know who this James character was exactly.

“You’ve been dating this guy for months now,” her mother finally said. “How come we’ve never met him?”

“Well, James lives very far. Way out on the Island.”

“Tiffany?”

“Yes?”

“Is James white, by any chance? Because you know that’s perfectly fine.”

Back in our respective classrooms, diversity was never handled quite so delicately. The students simply had no use for political correctness of any kind, producing an atmosphere of equal parts honesty and madness. Moments of tolerance could turn ugly and raw in a New York minute, occasionally taking precedence over a lesson.

“Okay, who can tell me why Macbeth wants Duncan dead..?”

“Hey, Mister, what are those white ladies doing?”
I peered down at my book. “What ladies, the witches from the opening scene?”

“No, those three witches outside!”

Heads turned. Desks and chairs groaned across the floor. Deep inside our texts, Macbeth waited patiently inside Duncan’s chambers, dagger in hand, for the twenty-first century to get back to him.

“Those aren’t witches, Tyrell. Those are secretaries and you know it.”

“But what are they doing out there?”

“Getting some sun on their lunch break.”

“Why?”

“Because they think it looks good.”

My answer was greeted with snickers and smirks. Someone said something about white ladies and wrinkles. Someone reminded the rest of us that ‘black don’t crack,’ then thankfully we were allowed to return to the much easier topic of Macbeth’s ambitious mayhem.

For the most part, my relationship with Tiffany or ‘Miss Young’ was greeted as a fun novelty item by the students. Although the union was never confirmed or denied, each year graduating seniors gleefully awaited their wedding invitations in the mail or demanded we start producing as many ‘Obama kids’ and pretty ‘Derek Jeter babies’ as possible. Light heartedness aside, Tiffany and I did plan on having children one day yet I still had much to learn about race relations. After seven years of teaching in New York City, I could not produce a suitable response whenever a student informed me that I was a ‘good white man.’

The death of a New York City high school turned out to be a long drawn out process. Once a building was declared ill there was nowhere to go for a second opinion. As the years wore on, the school’s troubles only increased. The population took its final plummet once the faculty was required to pass out flyers to students stating that we were a dangerous, failing institution and it would be best if they transferred immediately. For Tiffany and me, it was akin to studying for years to be gourmet chefs, landing dream jobs in a wonderfully diverse restaurant, then being forced to hand out leaflets saying PLEASE DON’T EAT HERE. Our student body changed dramatically. It was simply no longer the same place and it broke our hearts.

We received our letters of excess at the same time. The school where we found each other would close its doors for good in three years, operating with a small skeleton staff until that time. It was now a matter of finishing up the school year with dignity, to not let feelings of confusion and resentment filter into the classroom. Frankly, it was exhausting.

To offset the final months of our teaching time together, we began to see a lot of theater on the weekends. Here again was another lesson to be learned. Even the plays I selected for us needed to be done with an awareness I had never considered before. Tiffany had no problem sighting performances, even audiences themselves for a lack of true diversity.

She did have a valid argument. Just this past June we saw a performance of Larry Kramer’s 1985 drama, The Normal Heart, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, less than twenty-four hours after New York lawmakers voted to legalize same-sex marriage. The audience that evening was so eclectic and charged with victory that when a wedding ceremony took place in the final act the house broke down and sobbed as one entity.

It would be foolish to deny ourselves similar experiences on a stage or even in our teaching lives. We’ve since made a point to seek out theater that will enrich our relationship, as well as our careers. It was at a recent performance of an August Wilson play, an author both of us have taught for years, where the audience mix was as interesting as the performance.

“Oh, Mom,” Tiffany said, making a quick phone call in the lobby. “You should see this. We’re out in full force tonight!”

So it was on that wet little corner of Greenwich Village where I suffered a momentary setback. As I watched the driver pull away, stopping quickly to retrieve his desired passengers, my immediate response was frustrated rage. It was our last weekend together as teaching colleagues. Rather than celebrating a job well done and looking forward to our future, I instead discovered the true nun-chuck capabilities of a closed umbrella. It bounced off the cab’s back window, skidding harmlessly into traffic. I haven’t thrown anything that hard since the little league all-star game.

My reaction was immature and slightly insane, and in the end only made me feel worse. I wasn’t the one the driver elected to pass by. Mine was anger by association, something I would simply have to process better in the future, especially once children were involved. I should have realized that Tiffany and I had long since formed a unit by then. We needn’t be concerned with foolish cabbie stereotypes or Department of Education numbers games for that matter. We didn’t have to teach together in order to stay together. And as I went through all the machinations of the angry male, the huffing and puffing, the bleating heart and racing adrenaline, a tiny hand rubbed the nape of my neck until I was normal again.

“What exactly did you think you were doing?” she said, smiling up at me. “That guy has nothing to do with us. You know that… Come on. We’ll take the train home tonight. Try not to stare, okay?”

J. Bryan McGeever’s essays have appeared in Thomas Beller’s Lost and Found: Stories from New York. He lives in Brooklyn.

The building, one of those depressing residential hotels, housed a variety of colorful wayward denizens, including destitute students (like myself), drug addicts, alcoholics, and the elderly. There was one communal bathroom per floor. I shared my bathroom with an oddball cast of characters. One of them was a forty year old Male-To-Female pre-op transexual named Crystal.

“Are you getting off on sixteen?” A deep James Earl Jones-like voice reverberated from Crystal’s thin-lipped mouth like a bassoon. The elevator doors could never open up quick enough for me.

I always felt bad for Crystal because she was not attractive as a man and it was pretty obvious that she wouldn’t be any more fetching as a woman. Crystal was infamous for wearing loose fitting hospital pajama bottoms accompanied by a sheer yellow bathrobe that clung tightly to her gangly body. The robe’s billowy, faux-fur sleeves added an appropriate element of femininity to Crystal’s otherwise manly persona. Donning thin, drawn-in, eyebrows and just a hint of pink lipstick, Crystal took appearances very seriously and, despite the deep baritone voice and thinning spindly hair, Crystal made a concerted effort to always appear ladylike.

Crystal’s body language and flirtatious vibe made me feel ill-at-ease, but that didn’t stop me from admiring her. “How brave,” I always thought to myself after encounters with her. She was undergoing a major life transformation in front of all the building’s residents and staff. This was a gutsy thing to do. I thought so anyway.

One summer evening after an exhausting day of classes, I was on my way to use the communal facilities. I needed to take a shower and get ready for work (an evening shift of scooping ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s). Crystal suddenly approached me in the hall ...

“Don’t bother. It’s locked from the inside. He’s been in there for hours. I think he’s shooting up again.” It was common knowledge that the Russian residing in room #1605 had a penchant for heroin and other hard street drugs.

“Oh. OK. Thanks.” I said.

Defeated, I turned around and sheepishly walked down the hall towards my crackerbox-sized room, my toothbrush, washcloth and towel all in hand. My shift was to begin in less than an hour. What was I going to do? I was a complete wreck. I was dripping with sweat (not to mention the smell) due to the challenging tap dancing class that had just ended moments before.

“Now what?” I muttered under my breath. I was just about to reach for my room key when I heard Crystal’s voice again ...“Don’t go. I want to show you something. Come here.” Like a mystical sea nymph, Crystal waved me on. She wanted me to come inside her room.

Call me crazy, or just plain naive, but something told me it was safe to follow Crystal into her apartment that evening. There was something so genuine about her overture and, I have to admit, I was a bit curious.

Crystal’s room was a pathetic little chamber facing the north side of West 75th St. The space was packed to the gills with women’s shoes, scarves, and stacks of hospital pajama bottoms. Plastic Rubbermaid containers on the floor housed dozens of prescription pill vials. But what I saw in the corner of this 100 square foot space took my breath away. Inside Crystal’s humble little boudoir was a fully operational sink!

“You can clean up in here,” she said. “I’ll stand outside, in the hallway, and give you some privacy. I don’t mind. I need to make a phone call anyway.” She shut the door and sashayed herself down to the rotary pay phone located at the end of the corridor of the sixteenth floor.

Crystal had saved the day.

As I turned the faucet knobs of Crystal’s modest wall sink an overwhelming sensation suddenly came over me. The feeling was so huge I had to turn the faucets back off and collect myself. I almost began to cry. With one genuine random act of kindness Crystal had rescued me from the embarrassment and humiliation, of showing up at my job looking and smelling disgusting. But it wasn’t just that. It was something deeper. In that moment, at Crystal’s humble, avocado-green sink, I felt a sense of appreciation and gratitude that I had never experienced before in all of my nineteen years. It was like something right out of Buddha’s teachings. The strangest thing about it all was my epiphany was not occurring under a tree, or by quiet stream in the woods. It was at a transsexual’s sink on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I embraced the experience. I lowered my head into Crystal’s chipped porcelain sink and allowed the water to douse my hair and alleviate my worries. I had reached my personal nirvana. “Maybe tomorrow I can go to the building manager and request a room with a sink in it, too,” I thought to myself as I gave my entire body a much-needed washing. I took liberty in using some of Crystal’s sweet scented soaps. I didn’t think she’d mind.

While drying off, something occurred to me. This was the first time since moving to New York City that I felt things were finally beginning to look up for me. I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to stick it out and survive after all. I wiped up the remaining water and exited Crystal’s apartment.

On my way back to my room I mouthed the words “thank you” to Crystal. She was still on the phone.

“Anytime handsome. Anytime. Now don’t you work too hard!” she said.

“I won’t.” I replied back.

“Hey! You wanna know something? You clean up pretty good! Too bad I like older men.”

“Me too!” I replied.

Crystal let out a schoolgirl laugh and played with the pay phone’s long spiral cord in a coquettish manner and then blew me a big kiss from down the hall.

She was right. I felt like a million bucks.

Jackob G. Hofmann has lived and worked in Manhattan
since 1988. He is a theatrical director, produced playwright,
and essayist. www.JackobHofmann.com