Maeve in America Page 13
I soon figured out that to make real friends I needed to have real conversations with people, to spend actual time with them. It’s like dating: small talk needs to get big at some stage, so perhaps I should not complain about these deep and meaningful questions being tossed around at first sight. The brutal truth is that time and energy are resources, and New Yorkers never have enough of either because of capitalism and self-absorption, so their technique, inasmuch as they have one, is to get straight to it. I’m fanatically curious about other people and I, too, want to know all sorts of things about strangers, but there’s something off-putting about how quickly and carelessly the prodding begins.
Besides, believing and acting on this no-nonsense “who exactly are you?” school of conversation neglects the fact that small talk, when done correctly, is an extremely efficient way of getting to know somebody. You may not find out where they work, or who they know, or whether they have a good relationship with their family, but you’ll get some idea of them, the person, that odd-shaped part of a human being that’s invisible to the eye and impossible to articulate. You know, their spleen or spirit or personality or whatever doctors call it nowadays. Are they kind, hurting, silly, bad? Some combination of all of those? You can find out, if you ask them about the party food, or tell them about your subway ride, or bring up the oddly cloudless sky outside, and simply take it from there.
I found one of my good friends when, right after we were introduced, he said in a low voice, “I’m just over here trying to get my chip-to-dip ratio right; not sure you can help me with that.” I was all in. We talked about layered dip for a solid fifteen minutes, and while it won’t play well on paper, I assure you it was both fun and informative. It somehow led to him telling me that Vladimir Putin has fillers in his cheeks, and to us discussing the cosmetic surgery we wanted. Not in a serious way, not at all. He wants an extra elbow put in so he can wave around doors after he’s left the room, and I want eyes surgically placed at the back of my head, peeping out from just over my ponytail. I appreciate that factual information is crucial in order for us to understand the world around us, but there’s plenty of time and opportunities for that. The real mystery, the one we should be most curious about, is just what exactly is going on in someone else’s mind and heart. The best parts of a person are buried too deep to be uncovered by as blunt an instrument as a direct question.
My first year here was a busy round of collecting and processing: new people, new places, new foods. I mean, it took me almost a week to recover from the existence of this one particular chicken torta at my local Mexican place. That’s not some kind of scatological joke, it’s an astonishingly good sandwich that I planned my day around for a week. I was full of gratitude for my new city, and determined to make the most of every opportunity it offered. To live in this fast, beautiful, ambitious city, I would have to take on those qualities.
As is the way of an all-or-nothing brain, I developed a dual obsession. I wrote on my refrigerator, in permanent Sharpie, that I needed to GIVE BACK AND GET IN SHAPE. In one fateful twenty-minute Google session, I applied for a yoga teacher training course and a mentoring program for girls. I was accepted into both. The latter proved to be one of the greatest decisions ever made in the history of womankind. Instead of being upset about not being supported in my work, I started supporting others. It worked really well, still does, even if it does sometimes involve my editing thirty thousand words of sci-fi fan fiction about characters I will never understand.
The yoga teacher training course, however, was a disaster. Now, before you slam this book shut in disgust at my complaining about a yoga teacher training course I paid $3,000 to take, please know that it abruptly ended six weeks later, at least for me, right after I slipped two disks in a very deep forward fold I should definitely not have tried. But that was all ahead of me. The same week in September saw the first day of both courses, yoga on Saturday mornings, mentoring on Saturday afternoons. It was all falling into place; soon I’d be some kind of supple superhero flanked by a bevy of intellectually powerful young women who would look upon me favorably after they’d successfully taken over the world. That first Saturday, I noticed the same woman in both places, a serene-looking person with a resting saint face. I was struck by what I thought was an incredible coincidence—can you even imagine two nice, helpful, white writer ladies who are also interested in deepening their yoga practice?
Well, you don’t even have to imagine, because it happened! We were taking part in the same programs at the same time. I introduced myself to her after the mentoring workshop and we chatted about the funny coincidence, which seemed much more remarkable to me than to her. In fact, she seemed borderline weirded out and I regretted slightly that I was the one to notice and say it. I wondered if, just a couple of years into my crash course in American small talk, I had somehow become an advanced practitioner, and opened up a smidge too much without realizing. The saint-faced lady certainly seemed a little put off. Although I kept it light, she seemed pained. Little did she know how valiantly I struggled to resist saying, And we’re both curly girls! and ask her how often she washed her hair.
After yoga in Brooklyn the following week, it made sense to walk together to the subway to get into the city for the mentoring, so we did. She sighed a tiny bit as we waited for the F train, and I sensed the sigh was not directed solely at the tiresome weekend MTA schedule. The train arrived and we found seats side by side. We sat nicely in our expensive, comfortable clothes and I confessed to her that my heels have never touched the ground in a downward dog. Harmless little opener, I felt. She had her phone out as fast as you could say So what? and just as effectively. She did a quick smile and said she was super-busy. You know, with yoga and mentoring and her part-time job. I asked if she was from New York and she said no, and reflexively asked where I was from. Ireland, I told her. She seemed despondent, but soldiered on. “When did you move here?” “Almost two years ago.” Suddenly exhausted, she said, “Remind me to ask you about your story when I’m less, like, crazy busy.”
That is how it came to pass that instead of some warm small talk leading to an easy quietness, Warrior One sat beside Warrior Two in tense silence as they both trawled through their phones. My reluctant companion believed that conversation had to be all or nothing, either teetering on ice or plunging into the unknown waters beneath. She didn’t know she just had to pull on a pair of skates and twirl around for a while. That elegance was not accessible to her, I thought, as I spied a dog in a bag under the seat opposite us. His little black eyes shone. I get it—words are laughably inadequate when it comes time to express ourselves. My brain is so close to my mouth, yet in the time it takes for a thought to travel between them and become a sentence, the meaning is diluted and fudged to something I don’t really mean at all. Be that as it may, words are all we have when it comes to telling someone who we are, so we are duty-bound to at least try. I didn’t want a vapid exchange; I’m easily bored and would have made sure to steer away from one. An in-depth conversation wouldn’t have been appropriate either, but I had no intention of launching into my whole biography, or asking her to do the same. The perfect in-between connection was small talk, but we missed that connection and now I was just a woman alone on the subway, smiling at a schnauzer.
In Ireland, small talk does not just happen between the newly acquainted. It’s the preferred way to communicate with even our nearest and dearest. Admittedly that is annoying if you genuinely want to know how your friend is doing, what they’re up to in work, who they’re seeing. But just try saying, “How are you, though, really?” to any Irish person and I’m warning you, you will be decimated. When you’ve been gone for a while, navigating these ways of communicating can get confusing, and I forget the codes. I forget myself. Or maybe America is rubbing off on me. At Christmas, with three generations of family around the table, I was feeling schmaltzy. I love them so much! I always do, but this time I was flooded with a seasonal type o
f love, the misguided one that makes you think this time of year is different from others. I was a Christmas cracker, ready to absolutely explode. I remembered an American tradition, one from Thanksgiving, and decided to just go for it. “Why don’t we all go around the table, and say what we’re thankful for?” The year was a drama-filled one for our family, featuring illness, weddings, babies, as well as the thousands of miles between us. But we’d made it, and now sat around a table laden with delicious food, safe and sound.
But talking about this? No. No way. Looks were exchanged. Those dreadful looks! Those wordless looks! At least seven pairs of eyebrows were raised. “I’ll start?” I offered, my voice less sure. “Oh, I forgot we were the Kardashians,” muttered one sister, mashing butter into a potato. “Um, I’m grateful for my nieces and nephews . . .” One sister loudly asked for the Brussels sprouts. I ground to a halt and my mother remarked that Cate Blanchett was really too old to play Maid Marian. Hot and furious tears filled my eyes. How could I be so stupid? I had forgotten myself. One sister noticed me wiping my eyes with a holly-print napkin and saved me further embarrassment by not referring to my tears directly, instead whispering to another sister that I was crying. They glanced at me in astonishment, and averted their eyes. Ffffuck, I thought. The least natural and most stupid thing to do is to try to be serious, to force sincerity onto others.
This Anaïs Nin quote that I heard on an Alicia Keys album comes to mind. “And then the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” But Anaïs Nin and Alicia Keys, my dear ladies, aren’t you worried that if you don’t stay tight in the bud your blossom will be gobbled up by a hungry little billy goat or you’ll be shut down on a train or your family will have you committed to a mental hospital? I am. My timing is all off. Throughout the rest of the day, confessional-style, different family members told me in low urgent tones what they were thankful for. “Too late,” I said, eyes fixed on It’s a Wonderful Life as I absolutely shoveled trifle into my mouth. As well as the compulsive need to express oneself as loudly and quickly as possible, there’s another great mystery of American life I will never solve, and that is, just why isn’t trifle more popular here? Some Americans don’t even know what it is. When I meet them for the first time at Christmas parties I explain it’s made by lining a bowl with sponge cake soaked in booze, adding some berries for color, then a thick layer of custard, followed by a thicker layer of whipped cream dotted with maraschino cherries. Just a little something light to finish off a rich festive meal. It’s small talk, really, something trivial but full of clues, perfectly trifling, perfectly rich.
Wildflowers
I ONCE MADE A PROMISE I couldn’t keep. I didn’t mean for that to happen, but it did. It wasn’t a small one either, but it’s like Abraham Lincoln said, “If you’re going to make a promise you can’t keep, at least make it a big one.” Or was that Nixon? I’m not American, so I’m not sure. In any case, I made that big promise to the man sitting opposite me in a chocolate-colored leather booth in a diner just off Union Square. To be fair, I’d just had the rug pulled out from under me by said man and I hadn’t even touched my first coffee of the day.
“It’s just not working,” he said, and gazed at my face for a reaction. I’d heard this from men before, but not in relation to work. Turns out it stung worse when it was. He was talking about the show I’d been developing for the past year, a podcast about immigration. The first season had just aired, we were producing the second, and the show was apparently . . . not working. He was my producer, sitting on the financial side of the podcast boom that was well under way among the many start-up and new media companies sinking money into them. The question was, how to make their money back on a free product? They could sell advertising, but they had to have a hit to make anything like the money they’d put into the production in the first place.
I argued back, at first. “Okay, but immigration is so important right now, Trump was elected on an anti-immigrant ticket and I really feel that if you could just promote it more or—” He interrupted, “Absolutely, and I completely hear you. But the issue here is that the show is just not working.” Our show began to air the same week Donald Trump was elected as our next President, and I had a rising sense of panic that we weren’t doing enough to amplify the voices of my immigrant guests. I worried that my producers didn’t share my urgency, and had said as much in a late-night email the previous evening. “Don’t you adore late-night emails?” I’d asked when I saw him in the office that morning. “Not this one,” said my producer through a tight smile, and suggested we go for a coffee. Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and confused as to what was going on, I forgot what Oprah had taught me. I forgot that I should never let them take me to a second location. Even if that location is known for its really good lattes.
He explained to me quickly, with precision, that I was wrong about everything. The show wasn’t working. There was no problem with promotion, it’s just that the show wasn’t working.
“The show is too serious. Nobody wants to listen to a show that feels like taking medicine, they want to listen to a super-fun show!” I had no idea this was coming, and am terrible at any kind of conflict, so I said something mild. “But don’t you think it’s quite good even if it’s not, like, ha-ha funny? And, like, maybe we just need to do more promotion so people can find it? I’m sure they’ll like it when they find it.” He was insistent. His company had bought my pitch, a comedy podcast about immigration, and where was the comedy? Also, where were the famous people? Surely there were some famous immigrants, and everyone loves celebrities, that’s how people would discover the show.
“I hope we can work to fix this, or . . .” He spread his hands and gave a quick shrug. The threat was never uttered, but I understood that there would be no third season if I didn’t fix it. It was around about then that I flung my principles right out the window, with such little care that they surely crashed among the chess players and Hare Krishnas dotted throughout the park outside. I promised him then. I said, “Okay, cool, this has been great! I’m about to make a trip to the West Coast and do some taping out there, and I promise you that season two is going to be super-fun.”
It was definitely true that I was about to make a trip to the West Coast, but the rest, I could not be sure of. Like many Americans and immigrants alike, I’d had a sense of foreboding after the election results were announced. Our new President had made many threats and many promises during his campaign, and we did not yet know which he would act on.
Super-fun. The Muslim ban was about to drop from the White House, stranding immigrants and refugees all over the world. Eight hundred thousand kids who had been granted DACA (deferred action for childhood arrivals) by an executive order created by President Obama, were in danger of becoming deportable when President Trump rescinded the order a few months after this conversation. Neo-Nazis were planning rallies where they would chant, “One people. One nation. End immigration.” A month after I made that promise, two Indian immigrants would be shot, one to death, in a Kansas bar by a white supremacist screaming, “Get out of my country.” I didn’t know all of that then, but even if I did, I probably would have lied, because I just wanted to make the show.
“Awesome.” He paid for my untouched coffee and said he would see me back at the office, then flashed a smile as he left. I smiled back, but felt my face crunch into a frown before I realized he was still standing there looking at me. He patted my shoulder, definitely on his way out now. “And get some fish tacos if you visit San Diego, for real. You’ll die.” “Yummy!” I screamed after him, but I don’t think he heard.
Back at the open-plan, glass-walled office full of silent people working in all areas of new media, the only way I could relay a message of this magnitude to my little team sitting right beside me, my junior producer Erika, was on the internal messenger Slack. We’re fucked! I typed, getting straight to the point. I promised hi
m a super-fun second season WITH famous people. Do we even have guests in California lined up? Is Javier Bardem an immigrant? Nicole Kidman is, right? Turns out we didn’t have any celebrities booked. We had an Iranian poet and a Romanian cleaning lady. Both of them are wonderful guests, Erika typed, I’ve done the pre-interviews and their stories are kind of incredible. I remembered those guest ideas from our pitch meetings weeks earlier, and looked up the notes.
They did have incredible stories. The poet had been flung in jail during the Iranian Revolution, his wife executed a month after that. He’d fled to the U.S. and claimed asylum, raising his son here and finding love once more. Meanwhile, his eyesight had completely failed, he was now blind, but still wrote poetry. The Romanian lady was a lawyer working in the highest offices of Bucharest, the parliament, when she left for Los Angeles for a work opportunity that never came through, and she ended up cleaning houses and selling baseball caps on Santa Monica Boulevard.
These kinds of stories? Not what I’d promised. I bashed my keyboard. Oh great—like so super-fun. Erika looked at me across the desk, wide-eyed. I glared back and shrugged, What? She stood up and said she was going to Chipotle, did I want anything? I asked her if they did fish tacos, but it turns out they don’t, so I got a burrito the size of my forearm to tamp down the stress of the day.