Nicotine (11 page)

Penny leans back, elbows on the railing, to look through the front window into the house. “I don't get your Jordan thing. Tell me. How are you Jordanian?”

“Most people in the West Bank have Jordanian passports,” Sorry says. “Like sixty-five percent. They only started revoking their citizenship and making them stateless a few years ago. The king's trying to turn up the heat on Netanyahu.”

“But you're Jewish, and super American—”

“My mom's from a really backward area of the Transjordan. She
converted to marry a settler from Brooklyn. She thought Maale Nakam was the Paris of the Middle East. Now she's not allowed to leave it.”

“Ouch,” Penny says. “But can't you be American if your dad is?”

“He gave up his citizenship when he emigrated because he thought it would cancel his credit card debt. What can I say? At least I'm not stateless. But I had to get out of there. My whole family thinks I'm a radical feminist freak. And not for hanging out with trans anarchists. I mean like for thinking women should have the vote.”

“I wish I was from one of those cultures. You know? Where you can be a feminist badass by riding your bike or playing soccer or whatever. I'd be like the Sudanese girl with cleats and a ponytail who speaks at the UN and people would be like, wow, let's give her NGO a lot of money. I'd have this NGO that teaches girls to interrupt boys when they talk.”

“Global feminism,” Sorry says. “Also known as back to square one.” She leans close and adds sotto voce, “Don't mention sports around here. It's more taboo than dieting. Never let a transsexual think you might have a negative body image.”

Penny laughs.

“Accept yourself,” Sorry says. “Find your tribe and burn your bridges.” She extracts an American Spirit from the breast pocket of her T-shirt and lights it.

Penny says, “Wait. If this is so totally not your crew—why are we here?”

“I used to live here. I love this house!” Her hand perches casually on the railing so the ash falls into an azalea. “All my friends moved out around the time I did, but the house lives on. And I love it. And now I'm going to stand right here and party on until our bowl is empty and we can take it home.”

“Where'd they move to?”

“All different houses with projects that weren't explicitly feminist. We decided to take the fight to arenas where we wouldn't be fighting women all the time.”

“Any of them here?”

“Yeah. One. She's a man. We don't fight, because we stopped talking.”

“Is there an asexual house?”

“No. Why would they band together? They just want to be alone with their TVs and squee over Benedict Cumberbatch.”

Penny nods. “I'm getting hungry. I'm going to go find something bland and stuff myself.” She drops her bag at Sorry's feet and goes back inside the house.

She drifts along the buffet, looking at the food, sneaking glances at the people. Between the peach fuzz and the push-up bras, it reminds her of junior high. People seem uneasy and a little too excited about their new and unfamiliar bodies. She hears the sound of maternal instincts being vigorously applied to cats on the Internet. Another conversation, pitched deeper, revolves around grants available to emerging filmmakers. It all seems rather gender-polarized.

She searches in vain for her favorite feminine gender (tomboy).

To the extent that she can pull it off, her gender is babe. But at Stayfree her babe outfit (long hair, big shirt, leggings, flats) makes her feel like an interloper—like some rude woman-born-woman intent on boycotting femininity because she can take it for granted. The girly-girls on hand have spared no pains. They are as polished as knights in armor, bodies pierced, coiffed, tattooed, shoehorned into heels and dresses. The manly-men are gruff and earnest in word and deed. She's the only babe in sight. She lacks an audience. It's not her gender that's underrepresented. It's her species. Like a dog at a party for birds, or a hip-hopper at a party for Pagan bisexuals.

She is thinking too much. The air around her, thick with music and conversation, starts to thrum.

She takes a vegan brownie and sits down in an armchair, tucking her feet up under her without taking off her shoes. Her nerves are loud enough to block out the noise, and she thinks vivid thoughts: Sorry's mother trading her veil for a wig to keep house for an American. Her own mother, earning her keep from the day she was born. Norm's feminism—his not wanting her to be a girly-girl—that dovetails so neatly with Amalia's traditional culture, where women labor day and night. The workaholic-Disney-princess model of femininity that makes all the tomboys stay home with Sherlock. Is emergent filmmaking so very unlike chewing coca leaves and smearing it on a gourd? She finishes the brownie. It's good. Vegan brownie technology has moved on, she thinks.

She still has spoken to no one but Sorry. She returns to the buffet. Their salad is doing well—already nearly half gone. Maybe people are eating around the walnuts. She piles two plates high with pasta and pesto and takes them out to the porch.

They fall into girl talk. She entertains Sorry for half an hour with a succession of podgy and squirrelly local men on a GPS-enabled dating app.

IT IS SATURDAY. PENNY SITS
at her mother's kitchen table in Morristown. She has a plan.

“I want to thank you for looking after that house,” Amalia says. “I tried so hard to forget the whole thing. I didn't want to think about all the work it will take, and then to sell it for nothing. How bad is it? Is there much water damage?”

“I don't know where you guys got the idea that the roof is gone. The house is in terrific shape.”

“You mean livable?”

“With a couple exceptions. The plumbing is an issue, and the heat, I don't know.”

“Did you get an appraisal?”

“We'd be fools to put it on the market now. Jersey City is changing fast. There's high-rise condos going up, and art centers and stuff. Who knows where the prices will be in five years? And that's why I wanted to ask you something. Remember how Matt suggested that I could live there and fix it up? You know, keep it in shape with fresh paint, until the time is ripe to sell? Keep the yard nice?”

“You know I would prefer to settle the estate.”

“But, Mom, there's a question of equity. It's
your
fault I lost the lease on Dad's apartment, and now I have nowhere to stay. You won't let me stay at the summer place, and you inherited a big empty house. Doesn't it make sense?”

“You could get a job, and rent yourself a place that's nice.”

“I'm trying! But the job market's not easy. I don't want another internship.”

Amalia sighs.

“The issue right now is, I need a place to stay by the end of next month.”

“The summer place is not mine to give. I told you, it belongs to Matt and Patrick. It was their mother's.”

“Who wants to be way out there anyway, when I can be close to the PATH train in Jersey City? The Palisades suck in cold weather. Two snowflakes, and I'm trapped. I couldn't get to work or anywhere else.”

“Eh,” Amalia says. “Maybe you're right. But if you move into Norm's childhood home, I'll never get you out. You'll be sentimental.”

“I could get sentimental about anything with a roof on it, and this place definitely has a roof. I'm just being pragmatic. A pragmatic interim solution, so I don't become
homeless
.”

“Oh my god, don't use words like that on your guilty old mother,” Amalia says.

“You're not old. Dad was old.”

“I could get you a job at the bank. We have a purchasing department, you know. You could have a good lifestyle. Don't move into that messed-up old house.”

“Oh, please no, Mom. That would be too much. I don't want to be dependent on you for everything. I want to stand on my own feet. I just need a place to stand. Everybody would know it's nepotism. Word would get out, even if we didn't look like sisters. But we do.”

Amalia puts her fingertips on her cheekbones and pushes her skin toward her ears. “Maybe I'll get a face-lift,” she says. “Then we'll look alike.”

“You don't even have any gray hair,” Penny says. “I don't know what your problem is.”

PENNY'S PLAN HITS A SNAG:
all the bedrooms at Nicotine are taken. There is a long waiting list to move into Stayfree.

Sorry invites her housemates and Penny to eat lasagna on a Sunday night and brainstorm a resolution.

On Sunday afternoon, Penny helps her prepare the lasagna. She expresses surprise that it involves alternate layers of white sauce rather than ricotta. Sorry explains that her dad converted to Judaism from being Italian American. “Not his fault,” she says. “These Hasidim accosted him on Fifth Avenue on Hanukkah. They thought he was an apostate. He was in default and on the rebound. Next thing you know, he's living in a settlement. Anyway, he says ricotta in lasagna is an abomination.”

“So you're not actually Jewish.”

“Jewish is a lifestyle. It's an attitude. What they used to call a religion. Anybody can be Jewish.”

Penny laughs, because of course she's right.

At suppertime, Rob brings a six-pack and Jazz, a bottle of Chianti. Penny finally meets Anka and Tony. She has never seen either
of them before. Anka works a full-time job and has friends at another house, and Tony sometimes vanishes for days. His housemates attribute these absences to women.

Sorry introduces them by pointing. “Anka,” she says. “Tony. This is Penny. She's looking for a house.”

Anka says, “Hi! Nice to meet you!” and waves.

She is in her midtwenties, the child of a research biologist and an American Red Cross executive, a graduate of Quaker day schools and Penn. She is an accomplished painter, using her talents to make portraits of acquaintances, which she gives away for free. She doesn't think of her painting as art because she majored in public health. She is lovely in the most conventional way—tall and blond—but so often troubled by serious thoughts having to do with her AIDS advocacy that she seems forbidding to people who don't know her. Consequently, she sees her boyfriend from high school when she goes home to celebrate national holidays. They have furiously passionate sex behind his wife's back. They know each other and the lay of the land so well, they've even done it in the baby's room while his wife was cooking. But Anka isn't easy, and she doesn't look it. No New York metropolitan–area single has ever persisted past the fifth date.

Tony—who says he's heard a lot about Penny, and shakes her hand—is a self-described “working stiff,” currently unemployed and open to odd jobs of any kind, interested in staying off the grid. Never says why. Maybe (Rob tells Penny later) the problem is as simple as the threat of garnisheed wages for delinquent child support. He might be an escaped convict, or just violating probation. An undocumented immigrant with unusually good language skills? Nobody knows. And nobody cares, because he is laid-back, amusing, clean, and tidy. Tony is old, chubby, and balding by anarchist standards, but not by the standards of the New York metropolitan area.

As planned, the dinner-table conversation centers on Penny's
residential options. Rob proposes DJD and Tranquility, two CHA houses devoted to alternative energy sources and the rights of indigenous peoples, respectively. Each is less than half a mile from Nicotine, inconvenient by public transport but amenable to biking, and not fully booked, for lack of suitable activists.

“Tranquility is vegan,” Sorry points out.

“I can handle vegan food, except sometimes dessert,” Penny says. “What's DJD stand for?”

“Donald Judd Daybed,” Rob says. “There was this guy moved into the house, which at that point was called Pangaea, with this huge sofa called the Donald Judd Daybed, which is like a car shipping crate made of teak or some shit. It weighs more than a waterbed. It's like a house-within-a-house. So when he set it up on the third floor, the whole place started to list to one side. You couldn't close the inside doors. DJD is not brick like this place. It's wood frame. So they put it back on the ground floor, and when it got a scratch it came out that it's worth like a
hundred thousand dollars
.”

“It's truly very comfortable,” Tony says.

“Half the house wanted to break it up for firewood,” he goes on. “The house theme is alternative energy, with pellet stoves and a heat pump, and they were always freaking out about the price of wood, and they were like, ‘Free wood!'”

“Petty bourgeois ascetics,” Jazz says.

“In the end they got mediators to come in from Movement for a New Society,” Rob continues, nodding, “and they reached a consensus that it's ‘super comfy.' And so overnight, the whole focus of the house changed from insulation and solar panels and everything like that to bundling up together with a lot of blankets on the DJD. They called it ‘passive' something—passive recombinant thermal something—”

“And then Trine got pregnant,” Sorry wraps up the story. The whole room (except for Penny) laughs. For several seconds Sorry,
Jazz, Anka, Tony, and Rob laugh. The laughter subsides to latent giggling.

“That was one sneaky bitch,” Tony adds, giving his homemade cigar a few swift puffs. They laugh again.

“Trine was this woman nobody liked,” Sorry explains. “I mean, nobody but
nobody
was fucking her. But somebody knocked her up. By accident! Like Leah in the Bible. I guess people were disoriented.”

“Sorry, Tony my man, it
never
gets that dark in the city,” Rob says. More laughter.

“What I don't get,” Penny says, “is why they don't sell it and do something useful with the money. I mean, if it's really worth a hundred thousand dollars.”

“So speaks a woman who never lived in a squat,” Sorry replies. “Okay, they unload it. Who gets a share—the guy who brought it? The guy he lifted it from? Everybody who lived there when he did? The people who live there now? CHA? It's like what happens when squatters have a chance of getting title. The second and third generation is always like, ‘
Whatever-squat stays!
'”—she puts on a melodic whiny voice—“because they do the math and figure out that not paying rent is worth it. If a room would rent for five hundred, that's six thousand dollars you're saving every year. Stay in the house for twenty years, and it's a hundred and twenty thousand—way more than your share would be if you sold the house. And meanwhile there's inflation and attrition. The longer you wait, the more likely you're going to end up walking off with a million. Same thing goes with the DJD. People are biding their time.”