Baby Girl (1983-1983)

There was no way she was going fifteen stops deeper into Brooklyn. That was practically Coney Island. “You either need to move back to civilization,” she told Carla on the phone, “or stop hosting parties in a neighborhood with no matcha cafes.” 

Still, she packed a cheap bottle of white and got on the G before she could change her mind. She texted Carla she’d be there. She was wearing the wrong shoes—heeled boots that looked good getting on the train in Greenpoint but would be stupid for wherever Carla lived now. She half-imagined joining a crowd of Park Slopers in Patagonia and sneakers, her heels clicking loudly among them. Carla said she had big news to share. But sometimes people just say that. It could be anything: a kitten, a promotion, or, if they were lucky, a divorce. 

She got a text from her mom asking if she needed a ride from the airport on Thursday—how many suitcases, what time, Uncle said they could borrow his SUV. Her mom added a string of emojis she’d recently learned to use: sparkly pink heart, plain pink heart, airplane, cat face blowing a kiss. This enthusiasm upset her: she wasn’t happy about going home.

Most of her things were already packed, or gone. She’d deposited the Dostoevsky back at the library, overdue and unread. Her plants went to the Norwegian DJ upstairs, her books to her tutoring students, who she missed already: Jackie, who wanted to be the Poet Laureate of Queens; PJ, who wanted to open an ice cream business near Domino Park. She’d promised to be a taste tester for his opening, if the day ever came. She hated that that would now require an intercontinental flight.

She still had ten classes left on her jujutsu membership, a cracked mug from a Vermont residency, seventeen unopened letters from the bank and ConEd, and a drawer full of receipts from restaurants that no longer existed. A tiny paper graveyard. She had the sense that every apartment she’d lived in over the decade she’d been here had been quietly storing parts of her—hair in the drain, a broken bobby pin behind the dresser—and that one day New York would simply cough her up.

Nassau Avenue. The last time she got off at this station was with Neil, now two years ago. They had waited in line for a Japanese jazz musician, hatless and ankle-deep in snow. Neil pulled out his vape and passed it to her. It was mint. She’d been indignant: “Do you want me to freeze?” He shrugged, then she relented and they stood there exhaling two streaks of pale fog into the air, slowly feathering apart.

The line had barely moved. She blamed it on people in the neighborhood with performative tastes and their insufferable, insatiable pursuit of trends. In the end, the show sold out right before they reached the door. Sorry, the security guy said, an insincere formality. Then he recognized them from past shows and appeared to feel a little sorry for them. They circled the block, their toes stiff with cold. Neil kicked the side of her boot. “What are you doing, you idiot?” she yelled. “You shouldn’t even be yelling,” he said. “You’re too cold to feel it.” He was right: There was a point where cold stopped feeling like a thermal sensation and became a texture instead, a roughness against the bones. When they walked by a laundromat with a blue-tinted window, she said they should stop and watch the moon—its reflection in the glass was perfect, like a trick. Neil said he really needed to pee.

On the train, the bottle of wine sweated against her hip. Twelve more stops. Every New Yorker she knew could be sorted by how far out on the train they were willing to travel. Some people lived their whole lives within three stops of Bed-Stuy; her Upper West Side friend decided Court Square was the edge of his known world; others thought Sunset Park was a better Greenpoint. More and more of her friends had moved farther out. They praised the space, the dog playgrounds, the ornithological diversity in the local parks. They lived like adults, responsible for pets and themselves, while she was crawling around her tiny Greenpoint walk-up, trying to plug in extension cords. Making a big pot of curry for an entire week. Calling her landlord to fix the A/C for the fourteenth time. “Mrs. Szymański, it’s a hundred degrees and I have an important meeting tomorrow morning.” The sweat darkened the cotton of her t-shirt straight through. When she finally stood, her period slid warmly down her thigh, joining the creek of sweat on the backs of her knees. 

But whenever her mom called, she always told her how lucky she felt to be here. The abundance, the museums, the park readings, how she was never lonely or bored or running out of things to try and learn and fail at and sometimes, against all evidence, try again. Of course the racing rats were never mentioned. Or the roaches that crawled out from the drain every time she rinsed rice.

She saw moms on the train. Birkenstock mom. Yale jumper mom. Slavic mom wearing huge sunglasses underground. Exhausted mom reading an LSAT prep book. Mom with washed-out tattoos. Looking at them, you couldn’t quite tell what kind of kids they might raise. One mom in a green Bottega shirt carried the stroller sideways, almost like an empty suitcase. The baby was flattened against one side. 

The train jerked, everyone swayed together, an unchoreographed bow. A guy in a grey hoodie typed furiously, a biz plan for a sustainable toothpaste, she assumed. A young guy in a faded Mets cap clutched a heavy, sloshing Ziploc bag of water against his chest like a baby, or a bomb. A bearded guy in a Goldman Sachs fleece vest ate his yogurt with a fork. A woman loudly narrated her skincare routine into her AirPods: retinol, hyaluronic acid, peptides, ceramides. It was, objectively, disgusting—and she was going to miss it so much she could already feel the phantom limb of it forming, so sharp that she almost wanted to sever it.

By the time the train hissed into Bergen Street, Greenpoint was long behind her. Neil might still be living somewhere along this line, she thought. They hadn’t spoken in two years. People kept asking her why and how, and she wished she knew. She sometimes caught herself drafting messages to him that began with logistics: Did you ever find that laundromat again, the one with the claw machine? or Do you have a dentist you’d recommend? Questions unsentimental enough to earn some sort of answer. 

Smith–Ninth. When the train came out into the open, the borough abruptly unscrolled beneath her: the dark ribbon of canal water, warehouse roofs furred with old snow, rows of lit windows set back at careful distances, Manhattan farther off in its own cold glitter. Then the doors slid open onto the high, exposed platform. The wind was sharp, stinging her cheeks and drying out the inside of her nose; at street level the dirty-mirror puddles and low warehouses rushed up to meet her. A few blocks east, as she walked up the stoop of a brownstone and pressed the buzzer with a gloved finger, she had almost convinced herself she was only attending a party. Just a quick visit. A test run for leaving the city, which surely was another way of staying a little longer.

The buzzer rasped. She stepped inside, unwound her scarf, and followed the waves of voices until the room opened up around her. She could sort of tell how long the party had been going by people’s makeup. Carla’s blue mascara was clumped and shedding small, dark flecks at the corners of her eyes. Kate’s magenta lipstick had faded to a gentle pink, but was still dark around the edges.

“You made it!” Carla said, hugging her. “I thought you’d forgotten us.”

“I never forget free booze,” she said.

A red-haired girl she’d met a few times before—Grace or Gracie—handed her a paper plate of pita and hummus, which she immediately regretted taking: nowhere to put it, no way to eat it gracefully. She tried balancing it on the counter, but it was already crowded: olives sweating in their bowl, a half-eaten carrot cake, seedless grapes swimming in melted ice. Inside, people were leaning on every surface that could hold something. 

She joined a circle that seemed to be discussing their jobs; she heard an alphabet soup of acronyms she only half recognized as types of work: PM, PR, GTM, B2B, SWE. She watched the conversation like one would a tennis match: back and forth, nodding to seem engaged and understanding. Like she cared about someone’s promotion from Account Coordinator to Account Executive. Eventually, they turned to her: “And you? What do you do?”

She’d just run out of lawyer fees to keep her visa, after trying everything: two random certificate programs in northern Pennsylvania she had to attend in person every month, subbing at $50/hour for a friend who taught social studies at an elementary school and was eventually let go too, a few nonprofit jobs that never paid enough or provided an office with good ventilation. And then she broke up with a kind person who had actually offered to marry her, which would’ve solved the visa problem but created a whole different one where she had to be married.

“I’m teaching poetry classes to high schoolers,” she said, taking a long sip from the Budweiser someone had just handed her, “before finding my sugar daddy.” She made sure her tone was unserious enough to be taken as a joke—which, of course, it was. Or should be.

“Honestly? Same,” Benjamin said. He was the kind of tall that made her feel like she was at the bottom of a well. “I just quit my gallery job. They asked me to write wall text for an NFT show, and I was like, ‘that’s it, I’m done.’ I’m starting a community-based art thing now.”

“What kind of thing?” the other guest asked.

“It’s still very, like, emergent,” Benjamin started explaining in hesitant syntax, already bored by his own sentence. “We’re rethinking how space functions in—”

She nodded as if she, too, had rethought how space functions. In a way, she had: the past month had seen her rethink how boxes function, how leases function, how U-Haul late fees function. 

She learned that in New York City you couldn’t just leave a mattress on the curb; you had to seal it in a plastic bag between 6 p.m. and midnight because of bedbugs. She first tried a bag she picked up from the alley behind a hotel on Seventh Ave and 57th, which turned out to be too small. She then bought one from a 99¢ store on Grand Street where the cashier warned her it “probably wouldn’t fit a queen size,” which she had never had in all her years here. 

The night before, at 11:00, she’d texted a guy she’d met at a dive bar a few weeks back who occasionally sent her political memes and videos of that weird dog breed that looks like meerkats. 

Hey, random, but do you still have upper-body strength? Need to move a mattress.

He replied within a minute: lol yeah sure where u at.

Together they tilted the mattress sideways and eased it down the narrow stairwell, one flight at a time. The banister scraped a long line down the plastic. Outside, they propped the mattress by the curb. It slumped forward immediately. She had inherited this mattress from Neil’s college friend, who had been in the same rush to get rid of things. 

There were still ten minutes to midnight. She thanked the guy with the only can of lime LaCroix left in her fridge, declined his half-hearted invite for a drink, and stayed on the sidewalk after he left. She watched the city’s trash piling up quietly, each load bulging faintly through its ivory plastic bag. 

At house parties like this, everyone got ten minutes with everyone else before moving on. They followed a predictable rhythm: Who are you, what do you do, how long have you been here, hobbies, shallow trends, oh I love your work—it looks amazing. People seemed more interested in where they’d come from than where they were going, which worked perfectly for her tonight. She promised Diego she’d definitely check out his solo show back in Greenpoint. And Anna’s yellow sweater was so lovely, reminding her of last season’s Bode. She glided through the crowd, dropping compliments and toxic zingers. She moved quickly. But Sam, an NYU grad in a black turtleneck who wanted to be the next Frederick Wiseman, didn’t seem ready to let her go. “I always think poetry and film are doing the same thing,” he said, leaning in too close. “Just, like, with different anxieties.” She nodded, mostly to flick her bangs out of her eyes, but also as if she too had spent her life worrying about a camera’s anxiety. 

“Anxiety of the frame,” she said.

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” Sam said suddenly, his gaze sliding past her shoulder.

It was so disarming she almost laughed. “Not a clue,” she admitted, and the admission was a physical relief, like unzipping her heeled boots. “I was just thinking how ‘anxiety of the frame’ sounds like a condition you’d get from IKEA furniture.”

He leaned back against the wall, mirroring her posture, creating a small, shared alcove of space. A smile rippled across his face. “Okay. So what’s your anxiety?”

“Right now? The structural integrity of this paper plate.” She was still balancing the sagging mess of pita and hummus. 

They watched the room together for a moment. Someone’s necklace was about to drop. Someone mentioned Portugal. Someone tried to open a bottle with their teeth. “It’s like a human zoetrope,” she said. “All these little repetitive motions. The nod, the sip, the uh-huh sounds.”

“You’re observing.”

“And you’re observing me observing.”

“People are observing when they first get somewhere,” Sam said. “Or when they’re about to leave.” 

Carla clinked two flutes, ringing the whole room. “Okay, okay, everyone!” Her voice took on that performative brightness people use when they're about to share something they've rehearsed, when they are sure about the content but nervous about the delivery. “So, the reason I wanted you all here—”

Her fiancé, Marcus, materialized beside her, his hand finding the small of Carla’s back. She hadn't noticed him before. He had the kind of face you forgot as quickly as hotel art.

“We bought a place!” Carla announced near the counter, “Like, an actual apartment. With a dishwasher and everything.” She kept staring at the cups and plastic lids on the counter as if they might topple at any moment. As if a minor spill would be proof that all of this could come apart.

The kitchen erupted into a froth of festive noise. Carla’s voice occasionally floated to the top: “Can you believe it? We're going to be homeowners. In Brooklyn! Like…actual adults?” Carla made it sound like their news wasn’t a product of her fiancé’s parents’ generosity but of a miracle that just happened, like the city had chosen them specifically, out of all the people. 

She heard herself saying —“That’s AMAZING!”—and knew she couldn’t get herself to continue saying it without chugging a bottle or more. She decided not to tell Carla she was leaving. A permanent address always beats a forwarding one. People who leave New York leave obscurely. Their addresses turn into ghost coordinates on the map. Living in New York, she often felt close to ghosts. The city was full of cemeteries wedged between parks and condos, the dead gridded in like all other residents. 

She and Neil had been to Green-Wood Cemetery in April two years ago, because Neil said the cherry blossoms there were better than anywhere in the city and that it’d be less crowded than the Botanic Gardens. They took the R to 25th Street. A ragged man outside the train station was selling single roses for three dollars each. The gates to Green-Wood, all Gothic spires and dramatic stone angels, looked like they’d been shipped from another city, or another time. 

They sat on a bench near a little pond at the cemetery’s heart. 

“You think they give tours?" Neil asked.

“Of what, the cemetery?”

“Yeah. Like, ‘Here lies a guy who died of war. Here lies some other guy who read a lot of books. That one’s a baby.’” He pointed down at a small flat stone that read “Baby Girl, 1983-1983.” No name. Just two identical years bookending the hyphen. Standing before the headstone, she’d felt, with a kind of odd clarity, that if a place could bury an entire life in a hyphen, it could also bury a decade. It could easily bury the years she’d spent becoming someone here.

Back in Carla’s kitchen, she thought about that inscription. 1983-1983. Did anyone visit that baby’s grave anymore? She wanted to go back, before she left.

By the time she finished congratulating Carla, she’d lost Sam in a mass of moving shoulders. It was getting late. People were still streaming in, bright-eyed from earlier drinks somewhere else, their coats dusted with snowflakes that shook off as soon as they stepped inside. The door kept clicking shut, then opening again. The night was still young. Everything was. At least for everyone else. 

She angled toward the balcony but the crowd’s own geometry kept nudging her around. She migrated through conversations about new bars, new mayor, someone’s hot vet. By the time she got near the balcony, a sharp, metallic taste bloomed at the back of her throat. She sniffed discreetly, but it came anyway, a warmth in the bridge of her nose. For a moment she just stood there, head half-raised, unwilling to commit to the gesture that would confirm it. She couldn’t tilt her head back without drawing more attention. Her eyes stayed locked on Benjamin and Marcus’s friend, deep in heated conversation about a recent art festival. She eased back, trying to keep this minor hemorrhage private. She hovered there, feeling the familiar warmth of it, the taste of iron and salt, the way it briefly pulled her back into her body. Then she saw a grey beanie and a face she could not mistake.

Neil might have just been tagging along with friends who of course had every right to be here. Her stomach dropped and her nose kept bleeding, but neither seemed so bad in comparison. She could turn around right now, walk out with her hand over her face, and he’d never know she’d been here. That seemed like the reasonable thing to do. But she just stood there with more blood coming. Their eyes met across the room. He was wearing a scarf she didn’t recognize. He said something to the person he’d been talking to and started moving toward her. 

This was her last chance to find a bathroom, pretend to take a call, do literally anything else. 

“Jesus,” he said. “You’re bleeding.” 

He grabbed a wad of paper towels from the counter, ran them under the cold tap. His movements were efficient and familiar. 

“Pinch the soft part,” he said in Chinese, the language they used to speak in public when they didn’t want anyone else to understand. The same voice he used to tell her to hurry up, to take the left exit, to get on the uptown side. “And lean forward. Don’t lean back, you’ll swallow it.” 

She did as she was told. The blood soaked through the paper towel fast.

“You got it?” he asked. His voice was back in English.

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak, something hot pressed up behind her eyes. She tried not to picture what she looked like.

“Neil! Come here!” a voice yelled from the balcony. 

He glanced toward it, then back at her nose. “Keep pinching for, like, ten minutes. You’re good.” 

I haven’t been good, she thought. “Thank you,” she managed, tasting blood at the back of her throat.

“Of course.” He was already half-turned away, moving toward whoever was calling him. 

“Neil, seriously!” The voice again.

He gave her a small, almost imperceptible pat on the shoulder, then turned away and was swallowed up by the room. 

She stayed against the counter, waiting for the blood to crust. Another five minutes to rinse her hands and pat her face dry with fresh paper towels. Neil had vanished, and she knew she shouldn’t be scanning for him anyway. 

When she looked up to check the time, Sam emerged beside the sink. “You okay?” he asked.

She nodded. She couldn’t tell if he’d seen the whole thing with her nose bleeding or walked in at the end. “I’m fine.” 

He handed her a Modelo: “I saved one for you before the fridge was raided.” 

She blinked, when? She had been standing by the fridge for the past ten minutes. “Thanks, I was worried about it. The lack of alcohol and the abundance of night.”

“Anxiety of the night.”

“Exactly.” 

He asked her if she wanted to get the fuck out of here. She understood it immediately: sometimes you only go to places to get the fuck out of them. Leaving together could easily pass as a perfect curtain call. A thrilling last hurrah. And he was almost enough, for a night like tonight, for a winter like this one.

“I think I need to go home,” she said instead. As soon as she said it—home—she remembered she hadn’t texted her mom back.

“Oh, that’s too bad.” He glanced at the room, then at her again, like he’d just lost the better half of the night. “Get home safe, then. I’m sure I’ll see you again at one of these soon.” He tapped the neck of his beer lightly against hers in a quick toast. 

“Yeah,” she said. “Next time.”

On the train, the only other passenger gripped the railing with both hands, mumbling to himself as he cried. Over the years she’d seen every kind of crier on the MTA: those with visible tears, those with smudged mascara, evidence of a cry now complete, those quietly trembling. But there were also the sudden wails—people crying for someone, to someone, with someone; crying over what was lost, or what was found; because it felt good, because it helped, because no one was looking. It had never occurred to her that she could’ve been one of them.