in cigar factories and pencil factories, my father’s family has that whole fascinating side in Venezuela, the ranchers, and the one cousin in New Zealand. And she says, “It’s just you guys who are boring, it’s just my parents. The whole Green family is interesting except my parents.” What do you say to that? But you see what it is she likes about New York City.
M: And since when aren’t we interesting?
NADINE HANAMOTO weighs whether or not the Greens were illustrious (early August 2000):
I don’t think Jenny ever appreciated that she lived in a house where no one was insane. I mean, you’d go over to the Greens’, open their refrigerator …
My family’s refrigerator was, like, some gross, burned fried rice that my mom made, my dad’s beer, and some limp celery. You know ants-on-a-log? Where you fill a celery stalk with peanut butter and sprinkle it with raisins? If you made ants-on-alog at my family’s house, the celery would be the least crunchy part.
But you’d go over to the Greens’, open their huge new refrigerator, and in the condiments compartment, like: pickled herring, pickled grape leaves, four kinds of mustard, salsa de no-pales, anchovy paste, smoked Riga sprats, some jar fi lled with Susan Green’s homemade mayonnaise, every single possible variety of salad dressing. Susan Green’s homemade jams, with these labels that Gabe created with their dot-matrix printer. And that was just the condiments. In the meat drawer, all these white packages, deli wrapped: smoked salmon, Havarti, roast beef, head cheese, two different kinds of salami, a whole, real liverwurst, blood sausage, Gorgonzola, three kinds of Brie, deli pickles.
You open up their pantry doors: Nutella. Three kinds of rye bread, six different kinds of vinegar, and a complete Tupperware dream set filled with three kinds of rice and two kinds of sugar and four kinds of flour, and whole-wheat wagon-wheel pasta and tomato-infused fettuccine and spinach-infused spaghetti and a mountain of ramen. The Tupperware sales guy would open this pantry and stand tippy-toe with pride.
This is the Greens’ kitchen.
I’d be over there, and I would be pleading with Jenny to let me eat, but there was always some reason why we had to wait. I’d be like, “Please, just let me put some blue cheese on these Wheat Thins.” Jenny’d be like, “No, I think my mom is making Schmüchlblärchl tonight, so we should wait. You can have an olive maybe.” So I’m devouring the Greens’ olives, famished. Jenny’s eating nothing.
Susan Green would come in with a paper sack full of groceries. I’d be like, Why? Why? Why is she buying more? When there is this whole gorgeous picnic in the fridge? And Susan Green would be like, “Well, Nadine, you can have those olives if you want, but tonight I’m making Schmüchlblärchl.”
It didn’t matter what was for dinner, it was always worse than what was already in the fridge. Because Susan Green cooked some weird shit. Jenny and Gabe were totally brainwashed. Susan would be like, “You should stay for dinner, Nadine. Tonight we’re having the Apricot Dish.” And she’d be chopping apricots into a frying pan full of ground turkey sautéed in cumin. And Mitchell Green would come home from work and be like, “Smells like the Apricot Dish! Let’s put on La Traviata.” Then they’d all start arguing about which opera to listen to while eating the Apricot Dish. Gabe would say, “So long as there are no arias in a minor key, because minor keys inhibit digestion.” I’d be like, What are these people talking about? And Jenny would be saying, “The best thing with the Apricot Dish is the goat’s-milk yogurt.” And Mitchell would be like, “I agree,” and start burrowing through their fridge for the goat’s-milk yogurt.
Jenny and I would set the table. With napkins and napkin rings and wooden bowls for the salad. And then, at seven P.M. sharp, they’d all sit down together at this table for six. Susan, Mitchell, Jenny, Gabe, me, and one chair where they would balance all nineteen kinds of salad dressing they had brought out for Susan’s shiitake mushroom and red bean salad. And out would come the Schmüchlblärchl and the Apricot Dish and some mashed potatoes. They’d all be like, “Yum! The Apricot Dish!” I’d be like, Why? Why are we eating fried apricots and turkey with goat’s-milk yogurt? When there is deli meat right in the fridge? And rye bread in the breadbox? The Greens aren’t insane, like my family, so why, why must we suffer? Meanwhile, Mitchell would be like, “Nadine, this is an important aria. This is where Violetta declares the folly of love,” and he starts singing along. And I’d be making myself swallow the Schmüchlblärchl and thinking about the pastrami and the mustard.
At my house, dinner was at eleven P.M. My mom would burn some rice and eat it in front of the TV. Setting the table meant asking my sister to move over on the couch. My sister, who would be eating ants-on-a-log.
JENNICA GREEN again fails to explain what she was doing on an uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
And here’s why I can’t explain it just like that: because I have to explain about California before I can explain about New York. Or, like, about San Jose before about Manhattan.
I mean, San Jose.
I am from San Jose, California. A city of never quite one million people. Well, city? Municipality. Sunny, and quiet, and always a little brisk at night, and the summers never humid. With lawns and lanes, all spread out sort of low, across the flats of this valley, the Santa Clara Valley. Where before I was born there were orchards.
And there was such a sense of shame about the orchards! The first mention by any of my teachers of, like, the deportation of San Jose’s Japantown in World War II? Junior year of high school. But the first mention of the annihilation of Santa Clara Valley’s orchards? Second grade, Ms. Rappe, Trace Elementary. We thought Ms. Rappe was mean, because she made us do multiplication a year early. And because she yelled at us sometimes. She had an allergy to chalk dust and so she used the dust-free kind, which was shinier and crumblier than regular chalk and which made that horrible noise on the chalkboard, but if we even peeped when her chalk inevitably scratched, she would yell at us. And she would yell at us if we called her Mrs. instead of Ms., like, “I learned your name, you should learn mine.” But despite all that, she still maintained some popularity because of her two Great Danes, these mammoth Great Danes that she would bring to school a few times a year and let the smallest kindergarteners ride like ponies during recess. For example, Nadine Hanamoto was tiny enough to get to ride Ms. Rappe’s Great Danes when we were in kindergarten, although she and I only became friends later, in the ninth grade, when we had English together. Anyway. Ms. Rappe was forever nostalgic about the orchards. Cherry and apricot and pear orchards. And, along the ridges of Santa Clara Valley, to the south and east, cattle ranches, on estates granted by the king of Spain. She was forever waxing sappy, and forever making us do coloring projects involving the Spanish missions and local fruits and fruit blossoms. She told us it was our civic duty to save the coastal redwoods because they were the last real trees left.
The history is, between the world wars, developers started cutting down the fruit trees in Santa Clara Valley and subdividing the orchards. So by the time I got to high school, in 1986, you could tell the age of the shade trees in San Jose by the age of the houses. Like, “That’s an Eichler from the fifties, so that maple must be in its thirties.” Eichler was this notorious developer, to be mentioned only with distaste. It was a point of ridiculous pride in my family that our house was built in 1924 and was in the Rose Garden District, which Eichler hardly touched. And that our house had wood-frame windows, not aluminum. And that instead of having a swimming pool in our backyard, we had cherry trees, and a cement fountain of a shepherd pulling a thorn from his foot that came from a 1920s Sears, Roebuck catalogue. I knew about all of this before I knew how to multiply, about Eichlers and wood-frame windows and fruit trees versus shade trees.
And if there was a big earthquake, I knew how to turn off the gas.
I mean, just, this atmosphere of desolation, in San Jose, as a teenager. In 1985, when I was thirteen, the City of San Jose started a redevelopment campaign, “San Jose Is Growing Up.” With a purple-and-pink logo that was the exact color combination I would have picked for my bat mitzvah if I’d had a bat mitzvah. The city planted these sycamores,