the habit of being

My paternal grandparents’ house, on the outskirts of a quiet Southern town, was called New Coton Hall, and the name of the place was a subject of many meaningless rambling conversations among their children and grandchildren and nephews and cousins and second-cousins-once-removed, who sat in the whicker rockers drinking lemonade and iced tea on the endless front porch overlooking the pond and the ducks and the swans. The swans were a bit much, it was whispered, and so was the name, but once the gin came out the idea of being able to holler after the house if it should ever run away was sheer genius, a punch line worth laughing at once a year at least. The explanation that the house’s name was not a misspelling of “cotton,” which would’ve made sense, and the reminder that there had been an old Coton Hall somewhere in the depths of History One Ought to be Familiar With circulated with as much regularity as the lemonades and the cocktails, and I always forgot again, and asked again, what the name was supposed to mean, anyway.

New Coton Hall contained many halls of its own, most of whose walls were covered from floor to ceiling with family photos, diplomas, deeds of sale and aerial photographs of the Land, and calligraphic genealogies, with the outstanding names on limbs in bold - General Robert E. Lee, for example, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The halls lead to rooms filled with antiques, to cabinets with shelves that were lined with nothing but hand-carved marble chess sets, to closets packed with vintage dresses on soft hangers, to rugs with heads on them.

One year in late 1980’s, Easter Sunday found me, still a girl, jumping on the trampoline out back of New Coton Hall with endless cousins whose names I’d never learn, decked out in the reddest flapper dress from the upstairs closet, fringe and beads flying as I attempted the Swivel Hips (my father was uncontested master of this jumping stunt) and avoiding the old women who were always trying to teach me to dance the Charleston. A massive egg hunt was orchestrated out in the fields and among the grape wines, with dozens of real hard-boiled eggs we’d dyed ourselves that morning and one plastic one, the Money Egg, containing a $5 bill. Dinner, a marvelous spread for a family gathering of what must’ve been at least 50 people, was rung in with a bell and served by a black woman who’d been with the family since my father was a child.

It’s Saturday, so I order the Falafel Super Combo “to stay.” The Super Combo costs 25 cents more than the regular Combo, because I get some taboulleh, a square of feta cheese, and whatever the singular of “grape leaves” is. I’m convinced New York City is the only place in the world where you order things “to stay” instead of “for here.”

Tahini sauce is dripping down my fingers when the falafel man asks me a question. It takes him three tries to get me to understand that he wants to know how long Spring Break is, whether it’s one week or two, whether the students will be back next Monday.

“One week. Not this coming Monday, but next Monday, everyone will be back. You’ll get more people in here.”

Here is Nile River Falafel, Inc.

“You NYU?” he asks.

“I work at the University. I don’t get to leave for Spring Break.”

“You work at the library?”

“No, I work in a lab. A science lab.”

“You live around here?”

“No, I live in Astoria. Queens.”

He wants to know how far it is and what my rent is, and I can only assume he’s looking for a place, so I tell him all this: what we pay for a two-bedroom, what we would pay if the apartment weren’t so far away from the subway, how long my commute is.

He says, “That’s no good for you. Too much time, too much money.”

I say it’s a lot cheaper than Manhattan.

He says, “I see nice lady, I want to help her. I know a room. 14th street. Near your work. Arab landlord. I know him. $500 a month.”

I try to explain that I have a lease and a roommate, that I can’t move. He keeps telling me how cheap it is and how much he wants to help me.

“Where on 14th Street?”

“Between 5th and 6th.”

“Wow.”

“You live with a lady or a man?”

“A woman.”

“One bedroom. You can share.”

“Our lease doesn’t end until August. We’d get in trouble.”

“You lose two hours of your time. Every day. Is not good for you. You change your mind, you come back here. I will help you.”

Hipsters and businessmen let go of their faces. Old ladies do their plastic rosaries in the morning. Sometimes I can just stare at someone, lock eyes for minutes with no expectation of speech. These are our real, slouching selves, with our sad eyes and our earbuds protecting us from the noise of the City.

A Hispanic girl is crying on the R. She has a large purple bruise across her right cheekbone. Her hair is pulled back so tightly she seems to be going bald around the edges. She pulls tissues out of the side pocket of a motled brown bag with cultural embroidery. She knows I know she’s crying, even if no one else is noticing. She has a really wide nose and I wonder if it’s ever been broken. Her lips are swollen and her knees have dirt on them. Our else they’re designer jeans spray-painted to look dirty. She looks at herself in a compact mirror; she has large silver rings on both hands. We get off at the same stop and I follow her down the sidewalk a couple blocks. I think about asking her if she’s alright, but she’s on her cellphone talking cheerfully to someone she calls Baby, someone she’s meeting in a few minutes.

There’s a crazy guy masturbating on the W. His hair is greasy and his eyelids are droopy and he’s jacking off like a woman. With two fingers, he’s tracing quick tight circles on his inner right thigh, in a spot where I can only imagine the head of his penis lies beneath his bluejeans. While he does this, he’s slowly sliding over the hills and valleys of the bucket seats on the other side of the car, which is nearly empty. His head is tilted upward. When the train stops, he snaps out of it and gets off.

I climbed out of the plastic lawn chair I’d flopped into, hitting my head on a short curtain of bent wire clothes-hangers, dangling from a low tree limb above. Two of them fell to the ground, next to a pile of broken glass that might’ve been a table lamp.

The doorway wasn’t quite in line with the three wooden steps I climbed to get through it. Perhaps the same God who dropped down the first trailer we’d passed on the way picked this one up and gave it a little shake, like a snow globe.

“Jus’ call me Lyn,” said the old woman, motioning to three saggy armchairs with cigarette burns and blobs of stuffing sticking out. “Ain’t much, since the vandals got to it, but it’s a roof over yer head. We got five trailers and ‘leven cars on the property, two of ‘em runnin’. Here, have a sandwich. All we have’s buns for bread, but it’s quick, you two mus’ be plum starved.”

In addition to the chairs and a TV set, the living room contained a washing machine (or maybe a dryer) with boxes piled on top of it, a cassette tape that had vomited up a couple feet of ribbon, a hammerhead with no handle, small white feathers of the sort that fill pillows, an alarm clock blinking noon, and two striped dress shirts with buttons. There were curtain rods, folding chairs, dead houseplants. There was an awful student’s painting of water lilies, a box that had once contained frozen State Fair brand corn dogs. A clock on the wall ticked too loudly. Big plastic sheets billowed as the wind came though glassless windows and doorframes. There were holes in the walls.

I could hear the raven squawking squawking from the kitchen. His newspapers hadn’t been changed. He was hidden away in a corner, where the flies plagued him. She didn’t explain where he came from. I stared at the sandwich that had been handed to me, half-wrapped in a wrinkly napkin. Brown and purple mush escaped the gap between two bottom halves of a hamburger bun. Peanut butter and jelly. The sight of it made me feel nauseated again. The old woman was already on her second peanut butter hotdog.