A Lighter Note

I am often asked by many of my relatives, all 5,000 of whom still live within a 20 miles radius of my hometown, why I choose to live in New York City. Now there are certainly many reasons not to live in New York City, and I am even willing to admit some of them as time goes on, although I won't now, as the purported purpose here is to alleviate tension (yours and mine) after tonight's downer of a debate. I'd also like to steer away, far away, from my melancholy reminiscences of my so-called former self. Self: You're still here. Deal with it or put a sock in it. We were all twenty-five once. It wouldn't be good if it lasted more than a year, and as a few wise if annoying friends have reminded me, it wasn't even all good. So moving on.

I'd like to recount a brief anecdote that serves as a partial response to that question, the "why New York question," that comes with a bonus: total obliteration of my self-satisfied if minutes-long career as a sociologist.

I was riding uptown on the subway this afternoon to work, and for some reason I left my magazine in my bag. I was people-watching instead, a hobby I picked up from my father (my mother pretends to disdain people-watching; she prefers eavesdropping in restaurants). A trio of teenagers across from me caught my attention, and I checked them out pretty aggressively, which was possible because they were--as teenagers I guess are wont to do these days--entranced by some video clip on one of their i-pods.

One was a Hispanic girl with long glossy brown hair, the kind of bad skin that makes you want to hug kids when you see it and tell them that they won't be seventeen forever, tight jeans and sort-of sad eyes. She seemed less a part of the unit than the short skinny kid with the black beret, an enormous belt with metal grommets, a smattering of eye makeup and dyed black hair that appeared to have been ironed straight. It was the middle kid who had all the charisma, who had caught my eye in the first place. He was a he, but about as intentionally feminine a he as you can imagine: permed long hair pulled up in a loose ponytail, huge gold dangly earrings, lip gloss, seemingly women's jeans, plaid cloth sneakers and a yellow cotton vest. He was the one holding the i-pod, the power. It was easy to tell.

But I was interested not in the dynamic between the kids, but by the fact that nobody else was watching them. When the women seated next to them accidentally slid into beret kid when the train skidded to a stop, she checked them out for an instant, then smiled, indulgently, even fondly, and said, "So sorry, guys." Politely, the kids smiled back, said it was no problem, and a few people around us smiled too.

This lack of attention, the lovefest, struck me as a bit odd; I am realizing that unless you were born here, one is always new to New York. Not that I grew up in a Leave it to Beaver episode or anything. My parents sent me to a progressive, super artsy high school where having a mohawk, dyed blue hair, was par for the course, if not de rigeur. I hung out in Harvard Square, where punk-looking kids with safety pins in their ears and shredded jeans skateboarded around looking tough. But at the end of the day, these kids took the train back out to Weston, showered, and ate dinner with their pediatrician and attorney parents in colonial homes with central air conditioning and a golden retriever named Brandy.

My hometown was about as homogenous as you can get without finding yourself deep in Klan country. I will never forget the story in our town paper about the afternoon when the class valedictorian from a neighboring town was sitting in his own car, in his own driveway, reading his own mail. In the space of about thirty minutes more than a handful of passers-by called the police to report somebody stealing a car. By somebody they meant a black kid. The number of black families in our town when I was growing up seemed to be in the single digits. My family, as I may have mentioned before, has lived in this town since before there were dinosaurs, and to be totally honest, I can only think of two.

And cross-dressers? Casual, ethnically and racially diverse cross-dressers, not one but two of them, sitting on the subway with a girl, jabbering away about a video clip and nobody so much as batting an eye? Not where I come from, baby, not even at my high school, where a boy wearing a skirt for a day happened once in a while, not in Harvard Square, where you always felt like one of the punk's mothers was about to show up on the spot with a Talbot's bag to retrieve little Theodore and make him go back home and finish his algebra homework.

So this is what I was thinking as I watched these three teenagers: that in spite of increasing disillusion with certain factors of life in Manhattan, that it was still a place where teenagers, lots of them, look like extras in an even more liberated version of the movie Fame, a place where--if you are not on the Upper East Side (my spies report that the Nanny Diaries is not actually a satire)--you have much more important things to do than worry about conforming to social norms. I was thinking: Not only is New York a place where kids who look like this would never get spit on or beat up, which I happen to know happens in lots of places, when kids even dare to look like this, they are celebrated, beamed at by women with expensive handbags and men with briefcases and shoes with leather soles.

I was feeling really great about this in a sort of misty, Lifetime movie in my head kind of a way, when I both realized I had been staring unabashedly and was now in a veritable stare-down with the middle kid, the most femininely artfully styled boy I had ever seen in my life. My first thought, typically, pathetically, was: Oh my god, he thinks I'm judging him. How can I make it clear that I'm not, that I too embrace his right to wear lip gloss, that I was just thinking how great it was that this is where I'm raising my kids in spite of a recent New York magazine article that referred to a family with a $2,000 annual membership at an exclusive kids club that doesn't include any of the classes for kids as "middle class," but without appearing like a white, upper middle class, over educated, condescending ass (too late, so too late, I know), when he spoke.

"Hey girlfriend," he said. I straightened my spine, stiffened my jaw. Was he challenging me? Was he going to take me to task for checking him out? Was I going to have to attempt my inclusion speech on the B train, with an audience, no less? I smiled, awkwardly, waited for him to continue. I could take it, whatever it was. I just needed to know.

"Either you are some kind of a crazy zookeeper or you live with waaaay too much dog." He turned to his friend. "You feel me? Sister needs to buy herself a lint roller."

I was mortified. But not in the way I'd expected. When I got off the subway, I had ten minutes to spare. I went into Duane Reade and bought lint rollers. A three pack.