Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Every few Sundays, Segundo, the very short superintendent who lives in the basement at 223 East 32nd Street, opens the back pages of The Village Voice and orders two very tall call girls. He doesn’t know we know. Segundo avoids all interactions with us. At most, Andrew and I might get a muffled response to the “hello” we pitch him when one of us is coming and the other is going, but most of the time Segundo just stays in the shadows. Sometimes we’ll see him taking out the garbage or hosing down the sidewalk. Once in a while, I’ll spot him sitting on the stoop, alone, vacantly staring straight ahead.
     I find Segundo quite remarkable and often speculate about his place in the universe: What does he eat? And does he cook it, or order takeout? Is he Catholic? Has he ever been in agonizing, consuming, can’t-live-without-the-other-person love? His recent haircut (buzzed—I imagine he sheared off his raven-black hair by himself in a dimly lit bathroom of his subterranean apartment) is growing out. Both Andrew and Segundo shaved their heads within the same week; Segundo’s grows faster.
     One recent evening, after arriving home from a walk around the block, five of us—me, my husband, Andrew, our little dog, Maybe, and two leggy women—clogged the narrow hallway of our apartment building. As the ladies slithered past us, I got a close enough look to notice that they weren’t dressed appropriately for the cool October weather. Their skirts were short and sequined. They wore stilettos. They were giggling. To me, they looked like panthers. I nudged Andrew, who was unlocking the door to our bite-sized apartment. As he pushed it open, the two women exited the building and, without even a glance, Andrew said, “Look out front. There’ll be a man waiting in a minivan.”
    There was indeed. I was stunned.
    “They’re prostitutes,” he declared.
    “Two of them?!”
    “Two of them. Segundo’s been getting busy.”
    “No. I don’t believe it.”
    “Right next to our room.”
    Only a thin wall separates one life from another, but unless we are in the right place at the right time, the truths of others remain unknown. Some choose not to think about it, but I can’t help it. The world inside of New York City is just a terribly interesting place.


“Assistant?” Andrew asks from the kitchen.
    “Yes, assistant?”
    “The cabbage.”
    “You got it.”
    Andrew stirs the tomato soup as I step out of the shower and open the door a crack. Then, leaning out of the bathroom, stretching my arm into the kitchen, I take the frozen cabbage from him. As I grab it, I see Maybe hovering on the floor by Andrew’s feet. She’s waiting for fallen scraps. She’s one year old, and a rescue. Andrew adopted her before he met me.
    “Thank you, assistant,” I say and quickly slide back into the bathroom. I’m trying to be polite. I’m trying to be a good wife, but I’m not sure how.
    The bathroom is less steamy than the kitchen. I set the cabbage down next to the faucet, wipe off the mirror and look at my face. To me, it looks worn. I blame it on Manhattan: too frenetic, too cruel. Also, I’m not smiling. I once heard or read somewhere that if you force yourself to smile, the muscles activate something in your brain, trigger synapses, or massage a gland; something that makes you feel good, like a switch to a lever moving a pulley that tilts a bucket and produces a feeling of contentment. All I have to do is turn my frown upside down.
    Dr. Reich explained that if I stuck frozen cabbage in my bra, things would improve. She said that the common green cabbage has some chemical or enzyme that is used for “engorgement therapy.” In other words, something in the cabbage stops breasts from producing milk, and if I consistently wear these leaves, production will cease. I don’t need the milk because there is no baby. All that’s left is the milk.
    Dr. Reich used the word “engorged.” No one has ever used the word “engorged” in the same sentence as my breasts—typically, they’re the size of small plums. But not now. This body is not mine. I used to think I had some say in how it conducted itself. I am twenty-eight years old.
    The bathroom door is closed, so I am alone. With this hollow rectangle of white-painted wood, I’ve created isolation, solitude. This is all I want. Lately, I don’t want to be seen, especially not like this. I don’t want my husband to see my skin. Skin provokes primal urges in humans, urges that, unlike my newlywed husband, I am not having. Naked invites sex, and I don’t want to initiate anything. Whenever I start to entertain the notion of sex, I just get tired. I just want to sleep. So it’s out of the question. He should realize this. How can he not realize this? I shouldn’t have to spell it out. I’m tired. I’m angry.
    I take the cabbage off the counter of the sink and slip it into my bra. It’s not something I’d describe as pleasant—the cold, frosty leaves piercing my nipples on contact. In several minutes they begin to warm, and I will smell like my mother’s gołąbki. At night in bed I sleep on my back because every time I turn onto my side, my arms squeeze my breasts together like an accordion and they leak milk. It’s embarrassing. The stuff goes right through my athletic bra, which I’ve also been instructed to wear. I don’t want Andrew to see any of this. We’re to believe big breasts are lovable and playful, little breasts are cute and sweet, breastfeeding is beautiful and natural, but what about swollen, leaking breasts with no baby to feed? Would you put this in the same category as burping and passing gas—functions that sexy women do not do? Do I keep this a secret since it’s not sexy? What good is a sad, broken machine?
    Andrew told me, in some sort of attempt to make me laugh again, that he would make use of my milk. That he would churn butter or make cheese out of it (what, Parmesan? Brie?) and we would save some money. I did laugh at this. Manhattan is expensive.
    “Maybe! Roll over! Maybe, roll over!”
    “You’ve got to pitch your voice higher,” I tell him. Dogs prefer higher-pitched voices. Andrew says okay and repeats his command, this time in the voice of a man imitating a little girl.
    The dog. She’s what we talk about now. Maybe is the safest topic, the most neutral, the least baffling thing to discuss. You might say we’re avoiding more challenging topics, that we’re walking on eggshells, but there’s nothing left to break. Really, we’re just tired. And we’ve only just begun. We’re trying to wrap our heads around the idea of wrapping our heads around something, quietly trying to accept what is. And when you don’t quite know how to do that with someone you’ve only just met, you talk about the dog.
    “Yes, Maybe,” Andrew says. “Good girl.”
    This month marks the third year since I uprooted from Portland, Maine, the tranquil oceanfront city where I’d moved after graduating college in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In Maine, I had a steady editing job, saved up a good sum of money, and experienced nothing that would qualify as either anxiety or ambition. But I was making my parents proud and, I believe, lowering the collective low blood pressure of my family. In Portland, my days were pleasantly unsurprising. The people focused little on work and a lot on leisure, farmer’s markets, and things like parades. Winters weren’t bad or ugly—you could snowshoe to work—and in the fat of summer, the Atlantic sea breeze would seep through my open window and augment my slumber with a parental embrace. In the mornings, the sun would move across my bedroom floor and bake it like bread before my bare feet touched it. I never felt rushed. In my mud-colored kitchen with uneven shelves, I would brew coffee and polka-dot my cereal with blueberries. And yes, they were local and organic and they were affordable. Life felt flawless. I was at peace. But it wasn’t enough.
    In Maine, all the pine-tree license plates and rest-stop billboards said things like The Way Life Should Be, and Vacationland, which Maine is. The state motto is Dirigo, which means “I direct”—which I did not. In Vacationland, I didn’t live with direction. I didn’t live with force or drive or intensity. In Maine, my life wasn’t so much about dirigo—it was about acquiescence. It was about settling into an uncomplicated life, watching days glide by like little clouds. And even though that’s what I’d been aiming for, even though that’s what I thought I wanted, or was supposed to want, something in me refused to settle. So I left. I came to New York to be a writer.
    “Dinner’s almost ready,” Andrew calls.
    “One more minute! I’m just brushing my hair,” I answer, then put my head in my hands for one more moment of solitude. But right as Andrew is pulling the bread out of the oven, the fire alarm goes off. It happens nearly every time we cook, so we developed a system: knock on our Hungarian roommate Attila’s bedroom door, grab his giant fan, turn it on high, open the front door of the apartment (for air flow), lift the giant fan over our heads, blow air onto the fire alarm, be nonchalant. The situation is taking place inches away from where I am in the bathroom. It seems as if there is no silence in this city.
    In retrospect, I wish I had transitioned into a metropolitan life a little more gradually. My mother had warned me, “Why be small fish in big pond?” My father wasn’t a fan of my sudden upheaval either. He knows how sensitive I am. And my friends all wanted to know what I was going to find in New York that was so important, why it was so much better than our town. I thought I’d figure it out, that I’d show them. In retrospect, I wish I’d understood that one must ease into these things, these giant life changes. I simply thought this was my chance to make something of myself. But I didn’t think much about all the things that it would involve, about what had to happen between the introduction and the conclusion: the body. There was no set path to follow, no guidebook or road map. Back then I thought that in life you either had to comply or act out. Prove something. So I packed up my car and put it on I-95 and just drove. It hurt a little, because tearing yourself out of a nap always hurts, always just a little. New York City. Three years ago this month.
    “Be careful. It’s hot,” Andrew says.
    “Thank you for cooking dinner, assistant,” I say.
    He blows on the soup. “Mmm-hmm. You’re welcome. What’s the plan for tomorrow? Will you get a chance to write?”
    “Doctor’s appointment at eight-thirty in the morning. Will you come?”
    “Sure.”
    “It’s going to be our very last one.”
    “Weird.”
    “I know. Weird.”
    With nothing else for us to say, Andrew and I sip our soup as NPR fills the apartment with talk of bailouts, meltdowns, audacity, hope. Change.