She is in love with the place and can't believe she's spent so many years living away from it. Now she wants me to see it all--in a minute.
Even after I step off the plane, I start running up and down blocks, subway stairs, and in and out of taxis. We go to the many places on my sister's to-see/do list:
1. Mulberry Street for pizza (authentic Italian with white cheese, tomato slices, and sprigs of fresh basil).
2. Carlyle Cafe for dry martinis and to meet her date (a famous photographer she met on the 1 train), who has kindly allowed me to tag along.
3. Brooklyn Promenade (from the promenade Manhattan looks like a board game with buildings made of cardboard boxes) to meet another date, a man she has been seeing for awhile who also allows me to join them.
4. Party at artist friend's in a loft in Gowanus, Brooklyn (a space in a secluded and converted industrial space with a balcony overlooking more of a far away Brooklyn at night).
5. Walk across the historic Brooklyn Bridge (it is just like Georgia O'Keefe painted it)
6. Read "before I die" wishes written on boards in downtown Brooklyn ("smoke pot," "marry my true love," "be with Kim").
7. Visit our mother in Maspeth, Queens.
8. Walk by the fancy windows of fancy stores on Madison and 5th Avenue.
I forget I am tired because I'm in a state of constant activity (my sister loves the word activity). The air is cool, and it all but makes up for my exhaustion from dealing with kids, students, and work back home in Florida.
I am in New York for three days. Really, I am not in the city for a mini-vacation but to sell my diamond ring (a 3.1 carat gifted to me during my marriage. A ring I sell because I need the money to pay bills after my classes were cut due to the economy. It is a diamond I get a check for $10,000 from a broker on 5th Avenue). My sister and mother, though, think I'm in New York to visit them.
I am in New York for three days. Really, I am not in the city for a mini-vacation but to sell my diamond ring (a 3.1 carat gifted to me during my marriage. A ring I sell because I need the money to pay bills after my classes were cut due to the economy. It is a diamond I get a check for $10,000 from a broker on 5th Avenue). My sister and mother, though, think I'm in New York to visit them.
Then I stop by the banya on Wall Street to relax. There are two young Russian women bathing each other in the dry heat sauna. They are blonde and pretty and can easily be mistaken for surfer girls with teen weeny bikinis in colorful wavy patterns. But it is the care they take with the ritual of bathing that sets them apart from others at the bathhouse.
The tall blond feels her way through her friend's body using the fingers and palms of both hands to knead and work the massage oil onto the skin, penetrating its surface as if to coat every muscle. The woman being bathed lies on a concrete slab, which is covered in a white towel, while her friend works steadily and constantly on the large surfaces of her body--width of the back, chest, legs, and arms.
They are both focused wholeheartedly and enthusiastically on giving and/or receiving the pleasure of bathing. Neither hears the wood door of the sauna creak as it opens and closes, or see the men who ogle over them, or notice those who run out complaining of intense heat.
Sometimes, the one doing the bathing pours cold water collected in a pail from the running faucet over both their heads to avoid overheating. After the oil is massaged, the bather puts on white plastic gloves and scrubs the girl on the concrete slab with the soapy water she mixes in a bucket, reaching every groove--back of the elbows, blades of the back, back of the knees, soles of the feet. Then she rinses off the soap with more buckets of cold water.
For the platza, she grabs a bundle of oak tree twigs, soaking in a pail of water, waves it in the air to collect pockets of heat and slaps it on the body, pushing its hot leaves into the small of back and legs and the chest. Through it all, the girl on the concrete slab never moves or winces as if she has died and gone to heaven.
They speak in Russian in a whisper, and in the barely lit sauna they sound like sparrows. It is my NYC moment.
Memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TT5DDWO
The tall blond feels her way through her friend's body using the fingers and palms of both hands to knead and work the massage oil onto the skin, penetrating its surface as if to coat every muscle. The woman being bathed lies on a concrete slab, which is covered in a white towel, while her friend works steadily and constantly on the large surfaces of her body--width of the back, chest, legs, and arms.
They are both focused wholeheartedly and enthusiastically on giving and/or receiving the pleasure of bathing. Neither hears the wood door of the sauna creak as it opens and closes, or see the men who ogle over them, or notice those who run out complaining of intense heat.
Sometimes, the one doing the bathing pours cold water collected in a pail from the running faucet over both their heads to avoid overheating. After the oil is massaged, the bather puts on white plastic gloves and scrubs the girl on the concrete slab with the soapy water she mixes in a bucket, reaching every groove--back of the elbows, blades of the back, back of the knees, soles of the feet. Then she rinses off the soap with more buckets of cold water.
For the platza, she grabs a bundle of oak tree twigs, soaking in a pail of water, waves it in the air to collect pockets of heat and slaps it on the body, pushing its hot leaves into the small of back and legs and the chest. Through it all, the girl on the concrete slab never moves or winces as if she has died and gone to heaven.
They speak in Russian in a whisper, and in the barely lit sauna they sound like sparrows. It is my NYC moment.
Memoir, "The Continent of Ruby," available at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TT5DDWO
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