Super in the City Read online

  My mother took a step back. She preferred that people listen to her.

  “I have a nephew who’s handy with pipes and tools and such,” Mrs. Hannaham continued, “and he could come be the super. It’s important to have someone. The building can’t function without one.”

  “We know that, Mrs. Hannaham,” my mother said impatiently.

  “Well?” Mrs. Hannaham demanded. “What if something happens tonight? What if some hoodlums come by and break my window? I will not pay the full month’s rent.”

  The mix of sympathy and irritation I saw in my parents’ expressions mirrored my own. She’s a lonely old widow, I could see them reminding themselves. She lives off her cheating husband’s pension (albeit a generous one) and tells anyone who will listen that she cloaks herself in white as a gesture of solidarity with the disenfranchised widows in India. Never mind that she wouldn’t even put pennies in my Unicef box on Halloween when I was a kid.

  “You have our number,” my mother told her, not bothering to disguise her exasperation. “You have Zephyr’s number. If someone throws a rock through your window tonight, call her, okay?”

  And who the hell was I supposed to call if someone threw a rock at Mrs. Hannaham’s window? I was thinking it might not be a bad idea to get her nephew’s phone number right now. I imagined us sweeping up glass together and falling in love after I tended to a gash in his hand (he’d be impressed at my fortitude in the face of a crisis). Nephew Hannaham and I would open a mom- and- pop glazing business together—maybe catering to the specialized window needs of landmarked buildings—and I’d have to defend the class difference to my family. I could imagine my parents saying they didn’t care what we did for a living so long as he was good to me, and me not believing them and accusing them of limo liberal hypocrisy. I looked over at them apologetically and wished I didn’t have to give them such a hard time.

  “Zeph?” asked my mother. “What do you think?”

  “Of Mrs. Hannaham’s nephew? I’m sure he’s great!” I said enthusiastically.

  “I’ve got his résumé inside,” said Mrs. Hannaham.

  “Plumbers have résumés?” asked Cliff. What a snob. But I wasn’t ready to let go of the fantasy of becoming a cabaret chanteuse in an underground club, my eyes half closed, crooning into a mike while my lover’s fingers flew over his bass. On the other hand, what was that he’d said about no one being what they seemed? Maybe he wasn’t really a musician. Maybe that wasn’t really a bass in there. A human body could definitely fit in his case. It was an ingenious cover for a hit man—

  “No, Zeph, what do you think about Mrs. Hannaham—or anyone else—calling you if there’s a problem?”

  I looked at her sharply, sensing an unpleasant maternal proposition forming. “What do you mean, what do I think?”

  “I mean,” my mother said, the enthusiasm in her voice building, “since you’re not as busy as you might be these days, maybe you could help us out by filling in a bit for James from time to time.”

  “Zephy’s going to be the super!” proclaimed my father.

  Surely they were kidding. When I was a child, I imagined that when you dropped a letter into a mailbox on the street corner, it went whizzing along a nifty network of underground tubes and popped up at your local post office, to be hand-delivered by the mailman. The fact that you could clearly see a gap between the bottom of the mailbox and the pavement did not compel me to revise my theory. The physical world was not my friend.

  I had never hung a poster or painting by myself because I was afraid the wall would fall down if I drilled into it. I spent valuable time worrying about all the excrement wending its way through the pipes of Manhattan. I maintained a low- level anxiety that it would all back up, and one day Armageddon would come in the form of a massive poop deluge.

  My distant relationship with form and function had not prevented me from briefly considering a career as a doctor, but I was certain it would preclude me from becoming a super. And while I had accepted and even embraced my humble fashion sense, I was not prepared, no matter how low my standards, to don a tool belt.

  But I looked back and forth between my mother—the certainty of the brilliance of her new idea streaked across her face like the salt residue from her workout—and my enthusiastic father—unmistakable delight at the convergence of need and fulfillment dancing in his eyes—and something grabbed my full attention.

  They were not kidding.

  * * *

  SOMEONE WHO TEMPTS HER PARENTS INTO THINKING THEY’RE going to have a doctor or lawyer in the family had better start combing her feathers to become an Indian chief.

  My abridged stint at Johns Hopkins med school was maybe a 3.0 on the Richter scale of personal disasters. I learned that I could stand the sight of blood and that I was good at, if not especially fond of, rote memorization. Lymphocyte, neutrophil, monocyte, eosinophil, megakaryocyte, Sneezy, Grumpy, Sleepy, Hungry. For a whole year, my mother got to tell people I was at Johns Hopkins, and my father had a direct source of information to fuel his personal concoction of science and spirituality: “Tell me more about the sodium- potassium pump. I don’t believe in God, by God, but I believe in the sodium-potassium pump!”

  In my dreams, I toiled for Doctors Without Borders, traveled to Malawi, and single- handedly saved thousands of distended- bellied children. Or I was at a political rally when shots were fired at the candidate, and I’d paw my way to the front, shouting, “I’m a doctor!” and save the guy’s life. I imagined winning the Nobel Prize for hitting on an AIDS vaccine and making it as widely available as aspirin. Zephyr Salk. I had my acceptance speech mostly worked out.

  Before I had informed my parents of my intention to forgo the privilege of adding “M.D.” after my name, I e-mailed the Sterling Girls. I sought their advice despite the fact that they were all oppressively accomplished and had no firsthand experience of what I was going through. I sometimes liked to torture myself by imagining how the five of us could be introduced as a group. “This is Abigail, the academic. Lucy, the social worker. Mercedes, the musician. Tag, the parasitologist. And this is Zephyr. Um … uh … she likes coffee.” Even in appearance, I didn’t stand out: Tag and Mercedes were long, lean, and striking; Abigail and Lucy were dark and light versions of tiny and cute; I was not quite as tall as the tall ones, not quite as cute as the short ones, and did not qualify as lean, striking, dark, or light.

  It’s not that I couldn’t make a move without the girls. I just preferred not to. We kept one another from being stupid and doing stupid things, and we reassured one another after the stupid things were done anyway. But this time, they told me to just suck it up and get it over with as quickly as possible, like pulling off a Band-Aid.

  I gathered my courage, sat my parents down at their sun-dappled kitchen counter on a chilly March morning, and assailed them with my reasons for leaving med school.

  First, after four years of school, four years of residency, and who knows how many fellowships, it would be too long before I could have children. That was for Dad, who was born to dandle a grandbaby

  Second, I couldn’t bear to accrue so much long- term debt. That was for Mom, the founder and CEO of MWP, which was originally called Money… Women … Profit. She had created a seminar franchise that taught corporations how to speak to their female employees about finance, which, apparently, improved everyone’s bottom line. But after one woman filed a suit against her employers for hiring a consultant with what she considered an offensive name, MWP was officially born and its lengthier predecessor was shredded, deleted, rerecorded. When all else failed between us, I could talk to Mom in numbers.

  The real reason I ditched Baltimore? It wasn’t because medicine was not exciting. I mean, it wasn’t. Luka Kovac was not berating me in the ER while he intubated a crash victim and demanded a milligram of epi. And Dr. Carter, that trust-fund hottie, was nowhere to be found. Instead, Professor Baumbach was sending us off to learn the modified Duke’s staging system for colon can
cer. I could have tolerated all of it, persevered, and become a decent physician. But as I paged through Harrison’s all I could think about was every other door I was shutting.

  I would never design parks. Never defend a wronged soul in a courtroom. Never end homelessness. Never create video games. Never win an Oscar for cinematography. Never direct a Broadway play. Never be the drummer in a girl band.

  In college, I would often fall prey to homework paralysis: if I were to start working on one paper, it meant there were three others I wasn’t attending to. To pick a profession was to let go of twenty others.

  I had never yet let down Bella and Ollie Zuckerman. That was my brother’s job. Gideon had been born with a mutant Ashkenazi gene: he didn’t care about disappointing our parents. He was working in a film- editing lab in Colorado, which is to say he was ski- bumming. The “lab” was a friend’s basement in Steamboat Springs and the film was about a snow-boarder. He was in his third year of “editing” and showed no signs of returning east or of pursuing a graduate degree. (Even he hadn’t had the cojones to turn his back on a B.A.)

  My folks took the news pretty well. I think what did it, what most definitely contributed to their not falling over dead, was the cowardly, impulsive coda to my monologue that went something like this: “So I’m applying to law school!”

  As a deflection method, it was brilliant. Even if my mother had wanted to say boo, my father was instantly over the moon—and once he’s in orbit, no one can bring him back. He’s the guy who put Tommy “The Manhole” Sanchez away for life in a case that began with a traffic ticket and ultimately busted up a fifty- million- dollar-a- year cocaine ring that served snorters from Bogotá to Brooklyn. My dad loves the law. He cherishes it. He venerates it. To have one of his kids follow in his footsteps, so long as we didn’t go the corporate route, was for him to die a happy man.

  “Let’s see how you do on the LSAT,” said my mother.

  “You could work in my bureau next summer!” said my father.

  Applying to graduate school is a gratifying mini career unto itself. First, there is the fresh breath of prioritizing: your vocabulary must be expanded, your reading comprehension practiced, the logic puzzles mastered. (“Construct a family portrait in an oval album with these restrictions: Aunt Minnie can’t be next to Gladys or Grandma Eudora. Teddy can’t be next to Rita, but must be next to Minnie.” How this is a reliable indicator of whether you can ably carry out justice remains a great mystery, especially to convicts.)

  Once the test is over, you vegetate guiltlessly for a few days. And once the scores come, well, you’ve got the whole application process and its attendant fantasy life to enjoy. Will you be moving to California? The Southwest? Uptown? If you go to St. Louis and your future husband is at Michigan, how will you ever meet him?

  So I went to Così Café every day and sat beside the screenwriters who were afraid of Doma Café, and the New School discussion groups who couldn’t afford French Roast, and the salesmen who wished they were at an IHOP. I studied my Kaplan books under the approving/understanding/smarmy gazes of grannies/NYU professors/current law students. Then I wrote pointedly meaningful essays. I began crashing parties with Tag and I briefly dated a fat film student named Jake.

  I got into seven of the eight schools I applied to. Didn’t that mean something? Didn’t that mean my value as a brainful human being was quantifiable? On my parents’ dime—they agreed to support and house me for that “transition” year—I flew to Palo Alto and got some quality time with Abigail. We had late- night, college- worthy conversations over steaming mugs of chai, all in the name of checking out Stanford Law. I felt directed and purposeful and industrious, but I still had time to go to Liquid Strength class with Tag, watch Friends reruns on Mercedes’s rent- controlled couch while she practiced Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 in E Minor in the other room, and catch the Hitchcock festival at the Quad Cinema with Lucy.

  No sooner had I sent in my deposit to the University of Pennsylvania—my passion for a good cheesesteak figuring heavily in my decision—than I began to regret my choice. It’s not that I wished I had said yes to Stanford or Columbia or Northwestern or any of the other places I’d gotten into. I just wished I could have said yes to all of them and gone to all of them while also training to become a member of the Olympic luge team and a vet.

  But still, I had the contented summer you can only enjoy when you have a solid plan lined up for the fall. One of the loveliest sentences a person can utter is, “I’m starting law school.” In late August, I enlisted my friends to help move furniture up from the basement and into a U-Haul. With a close eye on the packed truck, we sat on the stoop in shorts and tank tops, drenched in sweat, inhaling pizza. It felt like college again, except that this time I was the only one moving. I was going off to a place rife with future scholars and judges and activists who would actually be able to help those distended-bellied kids and could feasibly go to The Hague to prosecute the people responsible for the atrocities in Darfur.

  I attributed my shortness of breath to hoisting one too many boxes of CDs.

  An hour later, my dad slid into the driver’s seat and turned to me, beaming. I tried to return his smile, but my stomach began to roil and my mouth felt gummy.

  “Darling daught—?”

  I opened the door and threw up on the sidewalk, just missing the feet of a traffic cop ticketing her way up the block.

  * * *

  SO I COULD SEE HOW MY PARENTS MIGHT BE ENTHUSIASTICabout the prospect of me fixing boilers, sweeping the sidewalk, and plunging toilets.

  I, on the other hand, felt my gizzards asphyxiating. Bella and Ollie Zuckerman were eyeing me with missionary zeal while I could only think of my five- year college reunion, which I was planning to attend in two months. As visions of me wielding industrial cleansers danced in my parents’ heads, I imagined the conversations I would have on campus.

  “… and after Teach for America, I founded a charter school in South Central. It’s been soooo crazy, but soooo great. So, Zephyr, what have you been up to?”

  “I’m the super of my parents’ building in Manhattan.”

  “I thought you were in med school?”

  “I dropped out.”

  Silence.

  “Well, no, that sounds really cool. You gotta do what’s right for you.”

  Or: “… I started out in the mail room and it totally sucked, I mean totally sucked, but one day, I just said, fuck it, and I slipped my script into Grazer’s mail and his assistant actually read it and they optioned it! But now I have this rewrite I got hired for and it’s a total mess and I’m completely freaked out. You were so smart to go to med school. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

  “Well, actually, um …”

  But more than a blow to my pride, my parents’ plan for me to earn my keep—not an unreasonable demand, even I could see that—meant learning things I’d never wanted to learn when there were so many other things I really did want to learn. It meant tenants depending on me, which, if asked on a personality questionnaire how I’d feel about that, I would have said it was fine. But what if, I thought desperately, what if one of my friends needed me in a hurry and I was all tied up with super stuff? I tried to think of any emergency a Sterling Girl might have that would require my immediate assistance (and thus prove the inefficiency of installing me as super). There was none.

  Thinking about becoming the super of 287 West 12th was accompanied by the clang, squeak, and whump of closing doors.

  And the idea of Hayden, ace reporter, chief schmuck, finding out that I was mopping halls …

  I chewed hard on my lip and traced the curlicues of the iron banister with my thumb. I snuck a glance at Cliff, who was ever so slightly nodding to a beat only he could hear. If he couldn’t stay focused on this turning point in my life, was he really going to be emotionally available to our kids?

  “It would just be until you figure out what you’re doing,” my mother said, her voice hitting the high reg
ister that bespoke her grave doubts about when that long- awaited clarity might arrive.

  Mrs. Hannaham put her hands on her hips. I had an urge to kick her.

  “Zephy it’ll be fun,” my dad said gently. “You’re good at this kind of thing.” I looked at him incredulously. “I mean, you’re organized and you’re neat.” If he tells me I’m very special, I thought, I’m going to take to my bed with a jar of Marsh -mallow Fluff.

  “And you’re good with people and very responsible with money,” he continued. “It’s just, what, all of us here, plus Roxana and the Caldwells, right? Everyone’s like family.”

  Was that a subtle way of telling me I shouldn’t reproduce with Cliff?

  “And whoever moves into James’s place,” Mrs. Hannaham added.

  Who would move into James’s place? I hadn’t thought of that. The apartment was a sweet little one- bedroom, the mirror of my place, across the landing on the second floor. If I was super, I bet I would have a lot of say over who moved in. He would have to be single. Taller than Hayden. And have an exciting career. More exciting than Hayden’s. Was that illegally discriminatory? Would I, too, be led away by my wrists like James was? Where would my case be tried? Too many people knew my father in New York. None of his colleagues would touch me. Ha!

  “It’s not going to take much of your time,” my mother said doubtfully. “An oil delivery here, a little sweeping there. Maybe call in an electrician once in a while. I don’t think James ever had much work.”

  “Not much … ? You let him have a whole apartment rent-free! It has to be a big job to be worth that.” I scowled at her.

  She took a different tack. “Of course you don’t have to do this.” Translation: of course I had to do this. “But we need someone we can trust. James just left here in cuffs with an apparent psychiatric disorder, Zephy! This is a small operation that runs on the honor system. You’d be taking a great load off our minds.”

  So that was the story they were going with. Bulletproof. I was not my brother, after all. And my entertainment value—I hadn’t even had a chance to regale them with the St. Regis escapade—was clearly no longer enough to satisfy their standards in the legacy department.