Alternate Side(10)
“What about the double-parking? Won’t I get a ticket for double-parking while I wait?”
George shook his head. “I’ve never seen it happen.”
There were many measures of the insanity of living in New York City: private school recommendations for four-year-olds; co-op boards that asked the question “What do you think you will bring to the gestalt of this building?” But those cars circling the block behind the mechanized, rotating whisk brooms and spray of the street-cleaning truck, wagon trains on a pitiless paved frontier, were one of the most ubiquitous and conspicuous. The drivers were mainly men, cultlike in their understanding of the underpinnings of their work. The high, grubby walls of cindered, hardpacked snow that foiled those who parked in the lot, the municipal plows leaving a huge berm atop the curb cut, were a boon to the hardcore alternate-side parkers. Alternate-side parking was suspended when snow accumulated. This being New York, it was also suspended not only for Memorial Day and Christmas but for Chinese New Year, Purim, the Hindu festival of lights called Diwali, and the Feast of the Ascension.
“That’s just ridiculous,” Linda Lessman, who had grown up Catholic, had said one year at the block barbecue. “Ascension Thursday is a minor holiday.”
“More minor than Shavuot?” Jack Fisk said.
“You’ve got me there,” Linda said.
Of course once George had gotten a space in the lot, he had forsaken all others. “Suckers,” he said when he saw someone sitting at the curb at 8:45, sipping coffee from a go-cup and checking his mirrors for the street cleaner. Almost overnight he had gone from being the alternate-side aficionado to the parking lot overseer, so that people sometimes made the mistake of thinking that he owned it. One of the things Nora hated about Charlie’s new space was that it had made him friendlier with George. The trade-off was that it had made Charlie friendlier in general.
“Which is a good thing,” she said to Jenny, their conversation punctuated, as usual, by the occasional click of their wineglasses against their respective phones. Nora found it the ideal way to end the day: a little Chardonnay, her comfortable club chair, Jenny at the other end of the line.
“I’ve never really understood the car-in-the-city thing,” said Jenny, who was a professor at Columbia and lived in university housing a block from campus. “It’s so male. But whatever. How are my godchildren?”
“Much the same.”
“Which means Rachel is making you totally crazy, and Oliver is completely chill. But don’t ignore the fact that the newest research shows your best chance of being well cared for when you’re aged is having a daughter.”
“I feel aged already. This is going to be a big house for just two people. Although complaining about something like that makes me feel like a terrible person. I should count my blessings.”
“Oh, honey. If you can’t complain to me, who can you complain to? And blessings are all relative.”
“My first-world problems. That’s what they call them. ‘First-world problems.’?”
“Who does?”
“Rachel and her friends. One of them will start complaining about how she needs a manicure, or she has salt stains on her boots, and somebody will say, ‘First-world problems,’ meaning, ‘There are real problems in the world and your nails don’t qualify.’?”
“I don’t think being worried about your kids leaving home and your husband’s moods is commensurate with salt-stained boots. Although I’m surprised that none of my students has used that turn of phrase. First-world problems. That’s actually a good phrase. Not to be pendantic, but it reminds me of the research showing that societies that eschew material possessions are happier overall.”
“God bless you.”
“What?”
“Eschew. God bless you. Ollie did that with my father once, and he thought it was so clever. Although my father thinks everything Oliver does is clever. And has anyone told poor people that they should be happier overall?”
“Ah, that’s the thing. The entire society has to eschew—don’t say it; now I’ll never be able to use that word again without cracking up—the entire society has to eschew material wealth.”
“Do those societies exist?”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Jenny said. “They’re all matriarchal, too.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” Nora said.
“It’s true, but if it makes you feel better, I don’t even care that it’s true. Hold on.” Without Jenny saying a thing Nora knew she was opening the refrigerator to take out the bottle of wine and pour some more into her glass.
“I’m back,” Jenny said. Always.
“My children are almost exactly the same age I was when I came to New York,” Nora said. “They’re almost exactly the age we were when you and I moved in together. Doesn’t that seem like a long time ago?”
“It does,” Jenny said. “It seems like a million years ago, and it seems like it was just last week.”
“Oh, Mrs. Nolan, Mr. Harris just called you,” said Nora’s assistant, Madison. “He’d like you to call him back as soon as you can.”
“Who?” Nora said, standing in the doorway of her office.