Overheard in the elevator, between a young couple going up to the ninth floor with me. Same weight and height, this couple, woman and man both 143 pounds, five six and a half, and I wondered if this commonality had brought them together.
Books, the man was saying to the woman, 9B consults on books and culture. He tells you what you could write about and how you should think about yourself in this cultural moment.
What cultural moment? I asked, and the couple turned around. I said I lived in 9A but had nothing to do with 9B, I was just eavesdropping, just curious.
Curiosity killed the cat, said the woman.
Actually, it was cancer, I said, thinking of the former cat of 9B.
The man looked at the woman and vice versa. They both turned from me and we got out on the same floor, but diverged.
He did recommend a lot of titles to me. One evening, he dropped off a stack of books that he had multiple copies of but couldn’t bear to just donate. Books that he’d read in school that had been helpful and enriching at the time. Not necessarily his favorites, but classics that everyone should read. The bag was bulky, and he went through each title with me at my doorway, starting with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
I turned the book over and read the description: a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, transcendental gospel about the Great Depression.
Whose grapes again? I asked.
No, the author’s name is Steinbeck. John Steinbeck.
When I stared blankly back at him, he ran a hand frantically through his hair.
Dozens of books in the bag, some thick, some thin. I tried to pretend that I knew most of them. Oh yes, that one, I would say, pointing, when the last humanities class I took in college was the last time I had to read a book that did not contain only facts.
A page a day, Mark suggested. But well worth it. That was how he finally made it through Proust, he said.
And I said, Me too.
Besides books, he had many thoughts about the city and the kind of person who chose to live here. New York was a true melting pot, but what made a true New Yorker was this or that, a unified belief system of tolerance, of live and let live, that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else. New Yorkers weren’t rude, they were brusque, witty, sharp; they told you exactly what they meant, no bullshit or fake pleasantries. From here, somehow, we wound our way to the Yankees. Every New Yorker has an opinion about them, so what was mine?
I asked if he was talking to me about baseball.
Baseball? he said and kept tucking brown locks behind his ear. They didn’t look bad there nor did they undercut anything he’d just said. Brown with streaks of chestnut, thick and slightly wavy, no frizz. By a certain age I was told to stop playing with my hair in public and especially while I spoke. You don’t want to grow up into one of those, do you? a teacher or other adult would ask. A woman who twirls her hair while speaking is a woman never to be taken seriously.
What other sport is worth watching and discussing? he continued in a deeper, more somber voice. Football is too militant. The gridiron, the idea of gaining yardage and gaining ground. Baseball is in every way more perfect; there are no flaws in the game, hence why it’s America’s sport and pastime. Just consider how pastoral baseball is. It’s all about going home.
Huh, I said, because I’d never thought about baseball like that nor had anything profound to say about sports. Did a person then need to watch baseball to have America be her home? Neither of my parents had watched any and neither considered this country home.
That I didn’t have a television also surprised him.
You don’t have a TV? But how do you watch…He listed out the things I was supposed to have watched from both past and present. I was missing out on the ubiquity of NY1 news, game shows like Jeopardy!, famous movies set in this city （where to even start? he said）， and famous sitcoms （only one place to start）。 The show about nothing. Jerry and Kramer, two neighbors who live across the hall from each other, like he and I, long-term pals who get into all sorts of shenanigans. And George, he ends up working for the Yankees.
When I asked if the show was actually called About Nothing, Mark fell into what resembled a catatonic state of shock. Then he looked down, for a long time, at my doormat. During the period of his shock, I thought about doormats and how mine was made from a fibrous weave and, if I was remembering the back label correctly, from the furry husks of coconuts. So, did my doormat also have hair, since it shed continuously like a human head? Those poor sacrificial coconuts, cut off from their trees to make wiping mats for feet. The long silence continued. I touched my neck and felt the flush of anxiety, felt my new cultured neighbor was about to tell me that I perceived the world all wrong.