come to mind are not 'I still believe all people are really good at heart' but 'Who do I have to knock off in order to get this apartment?' That's not to say that I wouldn't have made a few changes, but the components were all there and easy to see, as they'd removed the furniture and personal possessions that normally make a room seem just that much smaller.
Hugh stopped to examine the movie-star portraits glued to Anne Frank's bedroom wall — a wall that I personally would have knocked down — and I raced on to the bathroom, and then to the water closet with its delft toilet bowl looking for all the world like a big soup tureen. Next it was upstairs to the kitchen, which was eat-in with two windows. I'd get rid of the countertop and of course redo all the plumbing, but first I'd yank out the wood stove and reclaim the fireplace. 'That's your focal point, there,' I heard the grandmother saying. I thought the room beside the kitchen might be my office, but then I saw the attic, with its charming dormer windows, and the room beside the kitchen became a little leisure nook.
Now it was downstairs for another look at the toilet bowl, then back upstairs to reconsider the kitchen countertop, which, on second thought, I decided to keep. Or maybe not. It was hard to think with all these people coming and going, hogging the stairwell, running their mouths. A woman in a Disneyland sweatshirt stood in the doorway taking pictures of my sink, and I intentionally bumped her arm so that the prints would come out blurry and undesirable. 'Hey!' she said.
'Oh, 'Hey' yourself.' I was in a fever, and the only thing that mattered was this apartment. It wasn't a celebrity or a historical thing, not like owning one of Maria Callas's eyelashes or a pair of barbecue tongs once brandished by Pope Innocent XIII. Sure, I'dmention that I was not the first one in the house to ever keep a diary, but it wasn't the reason I'd fallen in love with the place. At the risk of sounding too koombaya, I felt as if I had finally come home. A cruel trick of fate had kept me away, but now I was back to claim what was rightfully mine. It was the greatest feeling in the world: excitement and relief coupled with the giddy anticipation of buying stuff, of making everything just right.
I didn't snap out of it until I accidentally passed into the building next door, which has been annexed as part of the museum. Above a display case, written across the wall in huge, unavoidable letters, was this quote by Primo Levi: 'A single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way. If we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.'
He did not specify that we would not be able to livein her house, but it was definitely implied, and it effectively squashed any fantasy of ownership. The added tragedy of Anne Frank is that she almost made it, that she died along with her sister just weeks before their camp was liberated. Having already survived two years in hiding, she and her family might have stayed put and lasted out the war were it not for a neighbor, never identified, who turned them in. I looked out the window, wondering who could have done such a thing, and caught my reflection staring back at me. Then, beyond that, across the way, I saw the most beautiful apartment.
Put a Lid on It
IN A BATHROOM at La Guardia Airport I watched a man take a cell phone from his jacket pocket, step into an empty stall, and proceed to dial. I assumed he was going to pee and talk at the same time, but looking at the space beneath the door, I saw that his pants were gathered about his ankles. He was sitting on the toilet.
Most airport calls begin with geography. 'I'm in Kansas City,' people say. 'I'm in Houston.' 'I'm at Kennedy.' When asked where he was, the man on the phone said simply, 'I'm at the airport, what do you think?' The sounds of a public toilet are not the sounds one would generally associate with an airport, at least not a secure airport, and so his 'What do you think?' struck me as unfair. The person he was talking to obviously felt the same way. 'What do you mean, 'What airport?'' the man said. 'I'm at La Guardia. Now put me through to Marty.'
A short while later I was in Boston. My sister Tiffany met me in the lobby of my hotel and suggested we spend the rest of the afternoon at her place. The bellman hailed a cab, and as we got in I told her the story of the man at La Guardia. 'I mean he actually placed a callwhile sitting on the toilet!'
Tiffany is big on rules but allows a pretty wide margin when it comes to mortal sin. Rape, murder, the abandonment of children: these are taken on a case-by-case basis. What riles her are the small things, and in denouncing them, she tends toward proclamations, most beginning with the words 'A person doesn't.' 'A person doesn't just go aroundmaking things out of pinecones,' she'll say, or, 'A person doesn't use the wordweenie when talking about a hot dog. It isn't cute. It isn't funny. It isn't done.'
In telling Tiffany about the man on the toilet, I expected a certain degree of outrage. I expected a proclamation, but instead she said only, 'I don't believe in cell phones.'
'But youdo believe in placing calls while sitting on the toilet?'
'Well, it's not abelief,' she said. 'But I mean, sure.'
I thought again of the La Guardia bathroom. 'But can't people guess what's going on? How do you explain the noise?'
My sister held an imaginary phone to her mouth. Then she scrunched up her face and adopted the strained, broken voice commonly associated with heavy lifting. 'I say, 'Don't mind me. I'm just trying to get the. . lid off this. . jar.' '
Tiffany settled back against the seat, and I thought of all the times I had fallen for that line, all the times I had pictured her standing helpless in her kitchen. 'Try tapping the lid against the countertop,' I'd said, or, 'Rinse it in hot water; that sometimes works.'
Eventually, after much struggle, she would let out a breath. 'There we go… I've got it now.' Then she would thank me, and I would feel powerful, believing myself to be the only man on earth who could open a jar over the telephone. Appealing to my vanity was an old trick, but there was more to it than that. Tiffany is an excellent cook. Shortcuts don't interest her, so I'd always assumed that her jar held something she had preserved herself. Jam, maybe, or peaches. The lid released, I had imagined a sweet smell rising to meet her nose, and the sense of pride and accomplishment that ultimately comes from doing things 'the ol' fashioned way.' I had felt proud by extension, but now I just felt betrayed.
'Daddy's been thinking about things a little too hard,' she said.
'Daddy?'
'Yeah,' she said. 'You.'
'Nobody calls me Daddy.'
'Mamma does.'
This is her new thing. All men are called Daddy, and all women, Mamma. At the age of forty she talks like a far-sighted baby.
My sister lives in Somerville, on the ground floor of a small two-story house. There's a chain-link fence separating the yard from the sidewalk, and a garage out back, where she keeps her bike and the homemade rickshaw she regularly attaches to her bike. It's a cumbersome, chariot-like thing, with a plywood body and two wheels taken from a scrapped ten-speed. There are a lot of rules involving the rickshaw, most decreeing what a person can and cannot do upon seeing it. Laughing is out, as are honking, pointing, and tugging at the corners of your eyes in an attempt to appear Chinese. This last one is a lot more popular than you might think, and it irritates Tiffany the most. She's become fiercely protective of the Chinese, especially her landlady, Mrs. Yip, who encourages her to defeat fat by rhythmically pummeling her thighs and stomach. Every morning my sister turns on the TV and stands in the living room, beating herself for half an hour. She claims that it keeps her in shape, but more likely it's the bicycle and towing that heavy rickshaw.
'She's got a beautiful voice,' my father says. 'I just wish to hell she'ddo something with it.'
Asked what that something might be, he says that she should put out an album.
'But she doesn't sing.'
'Well, shecould.' He speaks as if not releasing an album is just laziness on her part, as if people just walk in off the street, lay down a dozen or so tracks, and hand them over to eager radio stations. I've never heard Tiffany sing so much as 'Happy Birthday,' but when it comes to speaking, my father is right — she does have a
