say, “Madam, I have no idea what these children saw.”
The skinny boy says again, “He lying—he the one that pull the brake.”
And this is when the woman with the beauty spots speaks.
She says, “Excuse me? I saw it from right here. All this man did was close the box. Those boys are the real, like, troublemakers.”
That like—very sexy. Sexier than the sweat rings in her shirt. Like, the watchword of eternal youth. But—what a gorgeous and irrepressible snitch! Cooperating with the authorities! To save my sweaty and luckless hide! Again I ask you: What was she doing there?
JENNICA GREEN still fails to explain what she was doing on an uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
All right, so, the letter.
Dear Jenny,
I’m sorry to send you such a possibly weird letter.
And then Nadine tells me everything that’s happened to her in the last ten years. She got a divorce four years ago from the guy she married when we were twenty, so maybe it’s for the best that I didn’t go to that wedding after all, she says. She doesn’t know if I ever realized how upset she was at the time, that I didn’t come. She apologizes, anyway, for having been angry with me; she knows I was at Princeton and it was hard for me to find the money to fly home on short notice. Anyway, she promises to forgive me if I come to her next wedding.
His name is Oscar Seventeen-Other-Last-Names Dicochea.
She says he works as a counselor in the prisons and he is devoted to fixing up Mustangs, which is how they met, and he is an avid birdwatcher. Also he has two kids from his first marriage, who stay with them weekends. She adores the kids, who are super-smart firecrackers, but it’s hard, she says, because by the time the kids get used to living by Nadine and Oscar’s rules, the weekend is over and they have to go back to their mother. Also Nadine is pregnant, due in late December. Oscar’s kids are convinced that they get to name the baby, and they want to call it Dick O. Dicochea. Also Nadine and Oscar bought a house in Fresno, which needs a lot of work.
This kind of a letter. Your best friend’s life story.
The whole thing just gives me this feeling that I am … un-reachably far away from the place where real life is carried on. And that I have nothing to report. Like, what have I been doing here in New York? Playing with water? While everyone was back in California, working with … redwood? There are as many kinds of homesickness as there are kinds of common cold, and that’s one of them: the sudden feeling that you could have been so much happier if only ten years ago you had stayed put.
I almost forgot the best thing!
George (that George) just bought an apartment in Manhattan, and he says he wants to meet you. He says he forgives you for standing him up in 1989. How hilarious if the two of you hit it off.
And it was like, am I finally going to meet George Hanamoto? And will he be as funny as Nadine, and as exotic and good-looking? So I am thinking this … in my perfectly silent apartment, my broiling hot but perfectly silent apartment … there is this noise. Like, someone is in my apartment. A burglar is in my apartment.
And, from my kitchen and bedroom, you can hear everything that happens in my neighbor’s kitchen and bedroom. I tell people that I can hear what happens in my neighbor’s bedroom, and they immediately think, Ooo! As if what you hear from your neighbor’s bedroom is always Ooo! It’s more like, if your neighbor has a dog, you can tell when the dog needs its nails clipped. Or, in my case, you can hear your neighbor building his loom, or whatever. But all the noises that come from my neighbor’s apartment are muffled in this particular way, and this sound, the burglar sound, as I’m sitting at the kitchen island with Nadine’s letter, is not muffled at all. It’s crisp, it’s in-the-room-with-me crisp. Someone is standing in the alcove behind my refrigerator, where the recycling is, which is the one part of the kitchen I can’t see, and is taking a knife out of a crinkling plastic bag.
And my reaction? My brilliant reaction? I freeze. Not, like, I grab my cell phone and run out the front door. No, I freeze. I sit there and wait to get hit over the head by the intruder. And then there it is again, the noise. The burglar is definitely in the alcove, and he definitely has a knife in a plastic bag. And apparently he’s having serious problems getting the knife out of the plastic bag …
So anyway, it’s a mouse. In my recycling.
I don’t even try to actually spot the mouse. I just leave Nadine’s letter on the kitchen island and run to the pet store on 6th Avenue. And I do mean run, because it was almost eight o’clock, and I didn’t want to wait another day for my cat. Because I’ve always wanted a cat, and I’m tired of never doing the things I most want.
GABRIEL GREEN discusses whether or not his sister does the things she most wants (early August 2000):
After college, she didn’t take any time off; she didn’t go to Thailand or Peru or anywhere. Three weeks after graduating, she started her first job, as an analyst for Hoffman Ballin. And the result was, for three years she never left America, never had a real vacation.
I would tell her, “Jennica. Take a leave of absence. Go to Thailand for a month. You can have massages every day, you can do an intestinal cleanse, you can take cooking classes, you can go to a yoga retreat on the beach.” She said she couldn’t take off that much time until she quit, and she didn’t want to quit until she found a new job in the arts, because the arts were her passion. I would tell her, “So start applying! You need a vacation.” But she didn’t want to start applying until she had paid off her student loans and saved up an emergency fund. I told her, “You don’t need an emergency fund. In an emergency, you can move to Vietnam. You can live the life of Riley there on nothing, on, like, three thousand dollars for six months.”
But no. Instead she had an apartment in Greenwich Village without any roommates, and she bought herself clothes, and every month she put the maximum amount into her 401(k). And so it took her three years to finally pay off her student loans and quit her job at Hoffman Ballin.
And yes, then she got herself a job in the arts, doing “development” at the New York Public Library. Meaning she was organizing parties for the library’s rich donors. But between when her job at Hoffman Ballin ended and when her job at the library began, she only gave herself ten days of vacation, which she used to go to Paris. And because of how little the library paid, she converted her emergency fund into an emergency clothes-and-restaurants fund.
And after barely two years at the library, she decided to quit. She said, “The library has some serious staffi ng problems.” What she meant was, “I am the best employee the New York Public Library has ever had; I’m the last one to leave every day; I do my own work and everyone else’s work too; I’m working harder at the library than I did at Hoffman Ballin.” She said, “If I’m living this sort of life, I might as well be making enough money not to have to deplete my emergency clothes-and-restaurants fund.” It’s like Jennica is so concerned with living sustainably in some financial-slash-prestige sense, but she doesn’t even think about whether she is living sustainably in an emotional sense.
See? She makes interesting decisions. She always wants to dress and eat and live so that everyone will think, “Oh, she’s friends with successful people.” But at the same time she wants to pay her own way. Rachel says, “A lot of women feel like that; money is different for women than it is for men. Women aren’t raised on the assumption that they will always be able to just make as much money as they want.” That’s one theory, but another theory is that Jennica is a Green and that we Greens all have money issues. If you put a Green in New York City and tell her to pay her own way and keep up appearances, of course she is going to work all the time.
For years, whenever Jennica came out to San Jose, which were the only vacations she would take, Rachel and I would beseech her to move to Santa Cruz. Last year, when everyone in America was moving to the Bay Area, we told her that if she moved to Santa Cruz, I