In his 1953 essay, “The Making of a New Yorker,” John Steinbeck writes:
“New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it—once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough. All of everything is concentrated here, population, theater, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy.”
As I sat on the J train in mid-January, tears frozen onto my raw, exposed cheek, and looked out the train car’s window at the heavy snow clouds mangling the sunrise over the Williamsburg Bridge, I thought, that John Steinbeck’s full of shit.
* * *
A few years earlier, I was on my way to meet a new flame for drinks at an absinthe-focused, loosely French-Revolution-themed speakeasy in who-knows-where Brooklyn. I fixed my lipstick in my phone camera—24, happy, and buoyed by that glamour New York has when you are falling in love and it is the backdrop to your own personal Singin’ In The Rain. I checked the time, put my phone in my pocket and looked up.
A man wearing blue scrubs and holding a bouquet of flowers holding the pole caught my eye. He was maybe a decade older than me, of average height, and had little slivers of gray threaded through his black hair. He was crying—quietly—but clearly distraught. There were bags under his eyes. Looking at him, I felt my giddiness deflate. I wondered how long he had been standing there, and whether he had observed me, obnoxious, happily preening. My first thought was that I should look away; this kind of pain was not something to be gawked at. I glanced down the train car to see if anyone else had noticed. If they had, they didn’t show it: Everyone seemed absorbed in their own tasks at hand—shushing babies, reading, crushing candy.
I couldn’t help but turn back to the man and watch him. He looked like he had money. I’ve always had trouble imagining what rich people have to be sad about.
I considered asking him if he was okay. I thought about how much time I had before I was supposed to meet my beau and dismissed the idea. What if (shudder) he wanted to talk about it? I felt bad for him, but I didn’t want to engage. I instead tried to imagine what might have caused this display. Maybe he’d just been stood up? Broken up with? Maybe he lost his fancy doctor job, fired for sleeping with his nurse anesthetist and his wife was taking the kids to her sister’s? Maybe I was just an asshole. Maybe—I thought—he was a good man on his way to see someone he cared about. Someone also in pain.
Suddenly we were at the station and out he went, whisking my stories away with the rush of air from the closing doors. I tried not to think about it, but an uneasiness lingered for the rest of the evening. His teary face floated up into my head while I drifted off into a fitful, anise-soaked sleep in someone else’s bed.
* * *
Now, Saturday, my alarm goes off. I am working a double, looking down the barrel of a 14-hour shift of being nice to strangers who, after six Bloody Marys, will assign a dollar amount to my personality. I roll over, lower the pads of my feet to the cold hardwood, shuffle into the bathroom, pull on clothes and brush my teeth with one eye open. Socks, shoes, scarf, gloves, hat, headphones. Lock the door behind me. It’s snowing. Of course it’s snowing.
There’s a hole in my boots—well, a crack, really. Goes from the toe down to the middle of the arch of my foot. The snow isn’t sticking because it’s really just cold-ass rain, not the Thomas Kinkade painting I was promised. Melted snow sneaks into the crack of my boot and the chill branches like a wet lightning bolt all the way up my body. I have a scar there, on my left arch, from the time I was home for spring break and got drunk at Ricky T’s with my high school friends and slid down a 6-foot sand dredge barrier in the middle of the night. Everyone else was already in the ocean, they’d jumped off the dredge, no problem. I was scared of falling so I sat down on the edge and slid down feet first, but I didn’t realize there were razor-thin barnacles growing down the slope onto the beach. My friend Ty took off his Guy Harvey T-shirt and wrapped it around my foot like a tourniquet. The next morning my dad cleaned out the cut with peroxide and I cried.
Now I tiptoe my way up the metal steps to the above-ground subway station. I swipe my Metrocard. The turnstile tells me to swipe again. I am going to be late. I swipe again. JUST USED. I put ten more dollars onto my card and hear the train approach above me. I get my card after a thousand years and run up the second flight of stairs only to see the train pulling away from the platform.
I wonder what would happen if I just went back home. There, nothing waits for me but my empty bed and my empty refrigerator and the detritus of my recently broken heart.
My phone vibrates. My sister Nickie is FaceTiming me. I sit down on the wet wooden platform bench and pick up, flecks of snow melting onto my glasses and the screen of my phone. When the call connects, my nephew’s face appears. He has underwear on his head and is yelling my name.
“Ra-RAAAAAA!”
My sister smiles behind him, the bags under her eyes bigger and darker even than mine.
“Hey. Sorry, I know you’re probably on your way to work, but he woke up with Thomas the Tank Engine down his pants and thought it was really funny. He asked if he could call and tell you.”
They are in Florida, in short sleeves with the windows open. An iced coffee sits on the kitchen counter next to a Publix shopping bag. I feel a hot surge of jealousy and homesickness. When she hands the phone to my nephew he tries, sloppily, to kiss my face on the screen and accidentally hangs up.
It feels like someone has slapped me. The train comes and I walk onto the car. Before I can even sit down I am sobbing with all of my body, big phlegmy heaving gasps. People look at me. I am aware that they are looking but can’t stop and snot is running into my scarf and I think that New York City is a stiletto on your face when you’ve fallen down the stairs and what kind of person would leave permanent sunshine and canoeing through the Everglades and ceiling fans and job security and manatees and their nephew’s sticky little lips on their cheek for this?
I am aware I am making a spectacle of myself and this makes me feel worse. There are other people on this train with actual problems, I think. You are a New Yorker now, for better or worse. Get yourself together. Everyone has to work. Everyone is cold. A deep breath and furtive look reveal that not a single person is looking at me anymore except an old Hasidic woman, who makes no attempt to hide her stare. Her mouth hangs slightly open. I remember the man in scrubs those years ago, and wonder if the woman is thinking, “What the hell does she have to be sad about?” She says nothing, closes her mouth and looks away. I am grateful.
* * *
After he moved to New York from his home state of California, Steinbeck worked construction at Madison Square Garden. His body was undoubtedly suited for manual labor, having developed under the desert sun in fields and farms alongside migrant workers and ranch hands. Few authors are linked as inextricably to their homelands as Steinbeck. His name conjures dusty vistas and tending to soil. Regions of Salinas and the San Joaquin Valley are commonly referred to as “Steinbeck Country.”
I fell in love with East of Eden during a particularly crippling battle with bronchitis. By the time I cracked the edition my sister had given me years before, I’d already lived in the city for a year. I was surprised to learn, in my feverish search for an explanation as to how this novel hadn’t burrowed its way into my brain before, that Steinbeck wrote East of Eden in its entirety on East 72nd Street, newly divorced and alone.
Of course he did. The whole book is one long flashback, the past rendered in perfect sun-bleached strokes. How else can you write so tenderly, so searingly, about a place you love unless it is far away from you? The best way to tell a remembered love story is when there is a new one happening. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, sure, but it also blurs its sharp edges, reduces its nagging voice to a soothing hum, greases the lens and slides a Kodachrome filter over the monotony of everyday life.
* * *
I walk the nine blocks from the train in a daze. After opening the side door of the restaurant, I duck my head into my chest and try to make my way to the changing room without anyone noticing. It’s Saturday, so all the nosey front-of-housers are hungover, making this feat unusually easy. I stuff my bag into my locker and peel off all the layers in reverse order: Remove and wind up my headphones, take off my hat and pull back my hair, peel my gloves off finger by frozen finger, untangle my scarf from my neck, replace my socks and shoes with baby powder and non-slip clogs. Incrementally, my breath becomes less shuddery. I wrap my apron strings high around my waist in the Jacob’s ladder pattern I prefer, leaving a rung for my hand towel and a clean divide between my chest and the rest of my body, a waxed canvas shield from the inevitable deluge of tomato juice and maple syrup to come. I put my hand on the stair rail, sigh, and drag myself up the steps to the dining room.
* * *
In a few weeks, or months, I will be okay again. It will be my day off and I will lay on my most stained sheet in a sunny patch of grass in Maria Hernandez Park with a thermos full of Lambrusco and a bacon-egg-and-cheese, a stack of books and the empty afternoon laid out before me. All around me will be other New Yorkers, lounging, kissing, slurping happily at melty pouches of Mamitas, shirking responsibility for another hour outside. We roll around in our appreciation, knowing that we’ve earned it this winter, that everything tastes better with salt, especially if it comes from sweat or tears. I’ll think about something my sister said several months after giving birth to my nephew:
“I barely remember the pain, just him crying, which is pretty genius from an evolutionary standpoint,” she said. “If every woman had a clear memory of being split open instead of ‘the fog’, we would never do it again.”
I’ll sip my thermos wine and look around the park. Eventually, it will be time to go back to work and rest our noses firmly against our grindstones. For now, we’ll have conveniently forgotten the bitter cold. Good days in New York are Gilead’s balm, emotional amnesia, the hazy fog of love for the baby that split you in two. We’ll think: How could we live anywhere else?
What the hell do we have to cry about?