New York City has the best drinking water in the country, except maybe for water from rain-catchment devices, and what she said was, “Obviously I know that, Gabe. But you can’t trust the pipes in old buildings.” What she really meant was, “Everyone I know drinks their water from a Brita water purifier.” So yes, Jennica buys her organic fair-trade coffee, but when she makes it, she makes it in a drip machine, with Brita water, with a plastic cone, and with a reusable nylon filter, so she’s basically pouring boiling hot plastic water through a membrane of plastic and then ingesting it straight.
Not that the consumption of plastic polymers that mimic human hormones necessarily will play the same role in modern America that lead poisoning played in ancient Rome, or necessarily contributes to infertility or dementia. But it’s possible. I’m only saying it’s possible. So that is another theory about Jennica’s phone calls: dementia.
Anyway. Jennica will call me up. It will be four-fifteen in the afternoon for me, but in New York City it’s seven-fi fteen, so Jennica will be walking home, and she’ll be all perky and needy. But in California, I’m still at work, and in my IT Department, four-fifteen is the catatonic hour. I’ll be like:
“Beh.” And perky Jennica will be all:
“Gabe, I need you to tell me everything you can remember about George Hanamoto.”
And then it’s my job to tell her everything I can remember about George Hanamoto. We don’t talk about Rachel, or the baby, or the latest ridiculous thing that Mom and Dad said about the fact that Rachel and I are having a baby, or anything else; we have to talk about George Hanamoto. What I remember about George Hanamoto is pretty much nothing, except the fi stfi ght with Old Man Bersen on the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Jennica’s on her cell phone, walking through New York City. In the background, what I’m hearing is sirens and screaming people and drivers leaning on their horns and trucks with no suspension hitting potholes and motorcycles without muffl ers. It sounds basically like Jennica is walking through rush hour in the apocalypse, but what she wants to talk about is George Hanamoto. Or, like, my phone will ring:
“Beh.”
“Gabe, I need you to do that voice that Nadine Hanamoto used to do with her Peugeot.”
When we were in high school, Nadine had this Peugeot, some mid-seventies model. It was a loud car, and when Nadine drove it, she would always be coaxing it along, like, “Oh, you want to be in third gear, don’t you? You want to know why I won’t take you out of second, don’t you? Oh, poor baby. You wish Mommy would give you the unleaded gasoline, but Mommy can only afford the regular. Let Mommy put you into third. Yes, yes.”
Jennica hated the voice, because she couldn’t do it right, which became a joke in itself. But now, ten years later, Jennica suddenly wants to hear me do the voice. It’s as if she can’t cross the street in New York without thinking about California. Where is all this nostalgia coming from? And yes, one theory is that all siblings have these conversations with each other, but another theory is that Jennica just isn’t happy in New York City.
JENNICA GREEN continues to fail to explain what she was doing on an uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
About the letter from Nadine.
Nadine’s father was Japanese and her mother was Mexican. Which is fascinating, come to think of it, but which I hardly thought about at the time; at most, I envied how exotic Nadine looked. Her father was hardly around, but Nadine’s mother, Perla Hanamoto, was always there, and always formidable, with huge reserves of energy to direct against Nadine. Unless she was making the effort to smile, Perla had these deep lines from her nose down to the corners of her lips, the lines of discontent. Whenever I went over to their house … this ranch-style house with aluminum windows, at the border of Willow Glen … she always interrogated me about my academic plans, as a way to needle Nadine. Was I planning on graduating with my class or taking the equivalency exams to graduate early, like Nadine? Was I going to a university or to a community college, like Nadine? Was I going to Junior Prom or was I skipping, like Nadine? She would open the door to Nadine’s bedroom, her boxy, eastern bazaar of a bedroom, to nag Nadine about something, and Nadine would just say:
“Later, Mom, okay? Bye.”
That was alien to me, that refusal to engage your parents. But Perla Hanamoto certainly loomed judgmentally enough around that house, and Nadine’s older sister, Theresa, was their mother’s, like, deputy.
And, Theresa and Nadine. Really, they were the funniest people I had ever met. It’s hard to explain, but when they got going with each other? Like, Theresa would come into Nadine’s bedroom because, whatever, their mother was angry with them about the refrigerator. And Theresa would have a plastic takeout box with her, holding it like clinical evidence. She’d kick herself a path through the Salvation Army sheets that Nadine had hung from her ceiling and whatever random mannequin parts Nadine had lying around her floor, in order to get to Nadine’s bed to confront Nadine with the takeout box.
“Nadi, regarding this specimen from the fridge.” And Nadine would be like:
“I said I’m going to eat it.”
“Right. You said that … last week.”
And I would recognize the box. It would be from a month before … some enchilada from El Cacique, which was Nadine’s favorite taqueria. Theresa would be like:
“Nadi, when I asked you about this specimen of enchilada last week, I figured you knew about … the mold. I told myself, Nadi’s not squeamish, she’ll scrape the mold away. I fi gured, Nadi is tough enough.” And Nadine would say:
“Would you just shut up and put it back in the fridge? Because the longer it stays out, the faster it will go bad.” And Theresa, like, pressing ahead:
“So, Nadi. Last week the mold was only on the left, on top of the rice. Now I observe three kinds of mold, all of which have spread from the moist lower regions where the rice was to this large lump in the middle, which I believe to have once been an enchilada. I am going to attempt to lift the lump.” She’d be, like, prodding the enchilada with the handle of a fork and making a face. “I have successfully lifted the lump. And my question is, Nadi, have you smelled this? Are you … tough enough?” Like, pressing the tray in Nadine’s face. And, Nadine would fi x her face against the odor and say:
“I’m totally going to eat that.”
Which, maybe you had to be there.
And then there was their brother, George. The oldest sibling. Who had been gone for ten years. He had run away to San Francisco when he was fifteen or sixteen, and he was never mentioned. And the day his name finally came up was the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake.
MAYNARD GOGARTY tells the story of what happened on the uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
Enter the subway conductor.
She is young, black, with one of those tight, heavy MTA uniforms on. She is a buxom conductor, but her uniform has compressed her chest into a flat breastwork of civic authority. And—the redbird trains are designed such that the conductor has to hustle back and forth from one car to another, depending on whether the train has pulled up to an express platform or a local platform. I mention this because apparently we were in the car that the conductor used as her headquarters at express stops, so the fact that the conductor was investigating our car implied that she had already searched one entire half of the train looking for her culprit, the entire down-track half of the train, and had found nothing.
So! Enter the subway conductor. Those doors between subway cars are always hard to get apart, but she just thrusts them wide with one wrist and shouts at the whole carload of us, “Anyone here touch the brake?”
The woman with the beauty spots—looks at me. She wants to verify that I will confess that I did in fact close the cover of the emergency brake. I realize that either I turn myself in or I will be denounced. So as the conductor is hurrying past, I say, “Madam? The cover on that brake there? It was open, and