Joanna Rakoff - A Fortunate Age

The front door led into a nice-sized kitchen, with the sort of flimsy, off-brand stove and fridge you saw in every rental in the city, a gleaming new butcher-block counter, and a few shiny wire shelves screwed into the wall above it. A Soviet propaganda poster hung gloomily above the kitchen table, which appeared to be another piece of butcher block, with legs—of unfinished, jaundiced pine—nailed into its corners. On this table and on the wire shelves sat bottles and bottles of vitamins and herbal tonics, outlines of large capsules just visible behind the amber glass. The shelves also held dozens of boxes of soy milk in different flavors, and cloudy plastic bags of rice and beans. In a far corner, three tall paper canisters of something—Sadie stepped closer to make out the words—called “Spiru-tein.” The sort of stuff, Sadie thought, that athletes take to enhance their performances. But Caitlin, with her dark circles and her pallor, didn’t quite look the athlete, and a pack of American Spirits sat on the table. The dog came over and shoved his head between Sadie’s knees. She reached down and petted the creature, running her hand along its short, coarse fur. “What’s his name?” asked Sadie.

“Mumia,” Caitlin told her, fiddling with the coffee machine, a German drip.

“Mumia?” Sadie repeated.

“Yeah, you know, Mumia Abu-Jamal?”

“Yes,” Sadie said. “I know.” She seated herself at the kitchen table, though Caitlin seemed dead intent on letting her stand for the entirety of their interview.

“He was a stray,” Caitlin explained. Of course he was , thought Sadie acidly, though she herself was against purchasing pets, when there were thousands of unwanted ones in the city’s shelters. “We found him tied up under the bridge, completely covered in blood, and brought him home.”

“But he’s okay?” asked Sadie, inspecting the dog, who was sweet, sweeter than he looked, for scars.

“He’s fine. But he infested the place with fleas.”

Sadie immediately withdrew her hand from the dog, who let out a long whimper and settled, heavily, by her feet. “ Really ,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” Caitlin told her. “We bombed. There are still some in the bed—they like warm places—but the rest of the house is clean.”

“Oh, good,” said Sadie.

“He’s a great dog,” Caitlin continued. “He’s in love with the little Chihuahua downstairs. Did you see her?” Sadie shook her head. “Mrs. Jimenez brought her up from Puebla. She was quarantined for, like, three months. Did you meet them when you came in?” Before Sadie could answer, she went on, “They’re the nicest family. A mother and father, and eight daughters…” Breathlessly—while Sadie irritably wondered whether or not the coffee machine was actually brewing coffee, for it was ominously silent—Caitlin proceeded to provide a comprehensive history of the building’s inhabitants, their ailments and financial problems, and the various ways in which Caitlin and Rob had helped them out at one time or another. The third floor housed a Chinese family. The first had, until recently, been the home of a second Mexican family. But this clan had mysteriously—to Caitlin’s mind—moved out. Caitlin and Rob suspected the landlord of reporting the family, all here illegally, to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in order to have them deported, thus leaving the apartment empty and allowing him to rent it for three times the price. Last week he had finished remodeling it and yesterday the new tenants had moved in. “Some hipsters,” Caitlin scoffed.

Just two years earlier, this specific section of Williamsburg (east of Bedford, but west of the BQE) had offered deliriously cheap rents: run-down apartments for $300 or $400 per month, nicer ones for $700 or $800. Now, Caitlin said—as if Sadie wasn’t aware of this—the area was being gentrified at warp speed. Developers had broken ground on two new apartment complexes, one two doors down, on the site of an old chicken processing plant, the other a block or so down Havemeyer Street, next to Will Chase’s building (or, really, Will and Beth ’s building, since Beth had pretty much moved in), which was itself a fairly new structure, home to white professionals. The Latino families—most from Puebla, some from the Dominican Republic—who had occupied the area in recent decades were being pushed out. Landlords who hadn’t replaced a sink or stove in years were now hiring laborers—the same Mexicans, Caitlin said, who were being pushed out of their homes—and putting granite counters and steel appliances into the old railroad flats and charging $1,800 for them.

“And how long have you lived here?” asked Sadie, glancing at the gleaming butcher-block counter.

Caitlin paused and wrinkled her brow before responding. “Since last June, so about a year. Which makes us old-timers in the neighborhood.” Caitlin gave Sadie a meaningful look. “The place is filled with trust-fund kids who moved here, like, a week ago. All the old Italian ladies are being forced out. It makes me so sad.”

In the years since graduating, Caitlin had acquired the raspy, cigarette-tinged voice of a fifty-year-old alcoholic. It was hard to believe that in her early, enthusiastic college days, she’d sung with Nothing But Treble, an all-female a cappella group that wandered around campus, subjecting passers-by to high-pitched renditions of Edie Brickell and Suzanne Vega songs. Before long, though, Caitlin had fallen under the spell of Hortense James, the English department’s lone radical feminist, and made herself over in her idol’s image, lopping her hair into a severe bob, and donning men’s shirts and work boots with her long skirts. She stopped singing (too frivolous, presumably), dropped her boyfriend—a short, hirsute person who had no compunctions about publicly displaying his affection for her—and announced that she was bisexual. But the queer contingent on campus—whose circles overlapped with Sadie’s—had regarded Caitlin with suspicion, and she generally could be found with the little group of strange, sad-eyed girls she’d gathered together as comrades, presumably because none of them fit into any of the campus’s larger social circles. They were timid or angry persons, all underweight or overweight, with out-of-date eyeglass frames and odd nicknames, like Kitten or Poodle or Candy and real names that seemed more suited to those in middle age, like Judith or Peggy or Trish. If they took acting classes, they did scenes from The Glass Menagerie or Our Town . If they took creative writing classes, they turned in stories about old ladies in small Southern towns making horehound candy (famously, the one called “Poodle,” had inspired George Wadsworth, Sadie’s mentor, to say, “The first sentence of a short story should convey an emotion. Cute is not an emotion”). They sat in the nonsmoking section of the snack bar, drank hot chocolate, studied on the library’s second floor, among piles of brightly colored cushions and “womb” chairs, attended “Early Eighties Night” at the Disco, obtained their meals from the campus’s stale dining halls, and, come weekends, ate pizza at Lombardi’s, which served fluffy, buttery pies reminiscent of those available at Pizza Hut. Sadie and her friends sat in the smoking section of the snack bar (even if they didn’t smoke), drank coffee, studied in the library’s basement lounges or in private scholar studies on the third-floor gallery, brought their mentors to the Disco on Friday afternoon for “professor beer,” ate their meals at co-ops, and ordered stromboli from Uncle John’s, a Chicago-style hole-in-the-wall staffed by aging punks.

“Coffee’ll be ready in a sec,”said Caitlin, placing a pastel box of soy milk on the table. “We’re vegan,” she announced. Sadie, of course, had heard all about Caitlin’s eating habits from Lil, who thought Caitlin and Rob were pathological about food. Caitlin sat down in the chair next to Sadie, perhaps a little too close.