Trying to Float
Authors: Nicolaia Rips
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To Michael, Sheila, and everyone else who gave me something to complain about
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
âGROUCHO MARX
PROLOGUE
IT WAS 11:00
p.m. on the Saturday night just before Christmas, and I had been sent out by my parents to buy ice cream from the nearby Aristocrat Deli. As I waited for the elevator, I amused myself with a favorite activity: seeing how far I could pull the clasp on the ancient fire alarm without breaking its tiny glass tube.
But that night, my chubby seven-year-old fingers slipped, and I clamped down hard on the lever.
The fire alarms exploded through the hallways, and I kicked the pieces of glass behind a nearby garbage can. Neighbors swelled from their apartments; they carried guitars, guns, furs, paintings, and manuscripts, labored under mannequins and giant antique cameras. They yelled and grumbled, rubbed sleep from their eyes, and jostled each other, angry at having been forced out of their snuggeries. My mother, in a nightgown, picked me up in a one-arm hold that would shame a running back, and raced us down the hotel's peeling iron stair
case. In her other arm was a stack of brightly painted journals that documented her thirty years of travels through Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Spices and flora she had dried and pressed in them escaped in a puff of fragrance as we ran. My father, trailing behind us in a mink-lined smoking jacket, cradled a bottle of gin.
In the lobby, we were greeted by a crowd of men and women in silk dressing gowns, with smudged eyeliner and wigs awry, and in the middle of them, The Angelânaked but for a white cloth wrapped around his groin and a luminous spread of feathers attached to his back.
With no chance of returning to our rooms until firemen had canvassed the ten-story building, the mood in the lobby turned from communal annoyance to collective intoxication (drinks courtesy of my father's bottle of gin and El Quijote, the ancient Spanish restaurant next door). People milled about, catching up with neighbors.
Relieved that I had not yet been arrested (which is not to say that others weren't that night), I walked outside. It was snowing. Not white flakes. Rose flakesâsteeped in the dozen red letters that hung over the front door:
HOTEL CHELSEA
.
THE FLEDGLING YEARS
MY FIRST TRIP
EIGHT YEARS INTO
my parents' marriage, my mom discovered that she was pregnant. This seemingly joyous event was dented by my dad's denial that such a terrible thing could happen to him. Convinced that he wasn't responsible, he accused my openly gay godfather, Tom, of fathering the child.
My mom was an extraordinary traveler, and though excited about the pregnancy, feared that a baby would signal the end of her journeys. She began to plan a trip to Iran.
Because she needed a visa to get into Iran and couldn't get one in the United States, she flew to London and applied for her visa there. She was five months pregnant.
In London, the Iranian consulate informed her that a visa could take months. Never one to wait around, she decided to travel the Uzbek silk road while waiting for her visa to arrive in Tashkent. An Iranian doctor in London gave her a note that said she could travel until seven months pregnant. With this, she and I were off.
Back in New York, my dad refused to admit that he had a wife, much less a daughter on the way. This fantasy came to an end when he picked up his mail to find a postcard from a grinning woman, with a swelling belly, firing off automatic weapons with a group of equally happy Uzbek men. The caption read, “Enjoying the afternoon with your daughter!”
Acknowledging the imminent arrival of his daughter, my father, who had previously handled my mother's trips to the most dangerous parts of the world by confining himself to a two-block radius that included the Chelsea Hotel, his favorite café, and his barber, now added visits to a psychiatrist to the mix. What she thought of his reflections on his childhood in Nebraska, vivid and unexpected, like pimentos in the center of olives, I dare not imagine.
On July 19, exactly four weeks before I was born, my father opened the door to find a woman wearing a burka. When my mother went into labor at St. Luke'sâRoosevelt Hospital, my dad was finally forced to venture outside his circle of comfort. Having done soâand meeting meâhe realized it wasn't so bad out there.
ITALY
MOTHER LOOKED AT
Father, Father at Mother, both at me (in my crib), and they decided that the best thing for the three of us was to move to Italy.
To this day I do not understand why, but I spent the next couple years crawling around a small town north of Rome called Sutri, while my mother painted and my father did God knows what. Mostly, he sat with the old men in the square. He spoke no Italian, relying instead on an array of confusing facial expressions.
After Italy, we moved to North Africa and then to India. We lived in villages. My babysitters there didn't know the few words I'd learned in Italy, so I became fluent in the same language of baffling facial expressions as my father.
When we finally returned to the United States, we moved back to the Chelsea Hotel, known for its writers, artists, and musicians, but also for its drug addicts, alcoholics, and eccentrics. At any given time, at least one from each group was in the lobby. Since there were few children in the hotel, it was with these people that I spent my time.
PRESCHOOL
MY EARLIEST MEMORIES
of my father are of him sitting in an armchair, me on his lap, reading to me from various books. Instead of the stories with which you and I are so familiar and fond (
Charlotte's Web, The Little Prince
), he would convert whatever he was currently reading into a children's story.
I suspect he did this not because he was lazy, which he most certainly was, but because he liked the challenge of turning
The Idiot
or anything by Thomas Carlyle, his favorite, into a tale for five and under.
This would have been harmless enough had he not believed that reading adult books to a childâfollowed by a Âdiscussionâwas a more effective means of developing his daughter's mind than any of the usual methods.
There were two effects of this (noticeable to everyone but my father): the reading and chatting continued well past when other parents began to teach their children to read; and the language of Carlyle began to seep into the soft brain of his child (me).
After reading to me for a couple hours, my father would pack me up and take me to his favorite coffee shop on Eighth Avenue. The Big Cup was brightly painted, filled with broken chairs and sofas, and, to my delight, had Barbie dolls nailed to the doors of the bathrooms. The dolls, mostly Kens, were naked.
The coffee shop was popular with young men who looked like Ken and older men who wanted to meet young men who looked like Ken. I was the only child there, and as one of the first regular customers, I became a sort of mascot.
â
By the time I was four and it had occurred to my parents that I should be in preschool, the schools near the Chelsea Hotel were full. So my parents put my name on waiting lists (with my father placing asterisks next to those schools closest to his favorite coffee shops), but there was little hope. In the meantime, I passed my days in the hotel lobby and The Big Cup, talking to the residents and regulars.
One day my parents received a call from a school in the neighborhood. A spot had opened up, but because there were others on the waiting list, the head of the school wanted to interview us all before deciding who would be admitted.
Though a foreign concept to me at the time, parents in Manhattan are beset with the school system, believing that the right preschool is essential to getting their kid into the right elementary school, middle school, high school, college,
and so on. The competition is so great that parents pay people to prepare their families for the interviews. The coaches go so far as to pick out the clothing the family will wear.
The school that called my parents was on West Fourteenth Street in an area called the Meatpacking District. It was once a center for butchering meat and is now filled with fancy shops. Because of the school's reputation as creative and safe, it was attended by the sons and daughters of famous actors and actresses who lived in the neighborhood. So well known was the school that the headmistress was a neighborhood celebrity, fawned over by conniving parents.
Upon entering the school, my parents and I were escorted into a waiting room. The headmistress, we were told, would be with us in a few minutes.
Also in the room were another mother, father, and a young boy. The child was wearing khaki pants, a blazer, and a tie.
I was wearing my favorite skirt and top, made of a bright, shimmery fabric which my mom had bought for me in Morocco. Since the outfit was several years old, the top was no longer within sight of the skirt, and the skirt was much tighter and shorter than it was meant to be. There was a matching headscarf.
The secretary instructed me and the other child to take a seat next to each other on the couch. Sitting there, he in his khakis and blazer and me in my ensemble, we gave the appearance of a psychiatrist and his patient, who, six months after Halloween, was still wearing her genie costume.
What's more, after a few seconds of pointed whispering, the other parents explained that this was
their
interview, not ours, and that if we wished not to embarrass ourselves, we should leave before the headmistress arrived.
Not a chance, replied my mother. They were the ones who had it wrong.
As long as I had known my mother and father, they had not once been in the right place at the right time. So I was surprised to see my mother reach into her pocket and pull out a calendar, with which she intended to demonstrate that these people had made the mistake.
There was no time to settle this. The headmistress had arrived.
Surprised to see two families at the interview, she announced that there was clearly a mix-up, but no matter. She would be happy to interview the two children together.
She may have been happy, but the boy's parents were not. My mother, on the other hand, had not heard any of it; having arrived at the relevant dates in her calendar, she realized that she, her husband, and her daughter were precisely one week early to the appointment.
The headmistress began by asking the boy's parents to describe their son. What they said shocked me.
The young gent, Ethan, could not only read (I, as you know, wasn't close to it), but he was nearly fluent in a second language and was, according to his parents, beginning to read picture books in Greek. Ethan's parents assured the headmis
tress that they didn't think it necessary for their son to learn Greek, but that he had insisted. With this, Ethan tossed a smirk in my direction.
But that was not the amazing part. What knocked me out was this: no matter what Ethan's father or mother said about Ethan (great personality, athletic, two languages and ancient Greek), nothing seemed to impress the headmistress.
I was sunk. America was obviously stuffed with superinfants, against whom I could never measure up and in whose shadows I would spend the rest of my life.
There was only one hope. I glanced at Ethan's khakis for the familiar bulge of Huggies Little Movers.
I'd overheard Mom tell someone that the most important thing for any preschool interview was to make certain the school knew that your kid was toilet trained. Schools were, according to Mom, more likely to admit an idiot with bowel control than a little genius who needed to have his diapers changed.
For me, there was no possibility of going
sans
diaper to the interview. I hadn't yet graduated to the toilet and couldn't imagine being without protection at such an important appointment. Mom, though, had made sure my diaper was expertly hidden under my genie skirt.
But no luck. Ethan's khakis were bulgeless. In between his tutorials in ancient Greek, he had learned to control his sphincter.
After Ethan's father had concluded his recitation of Ethan's
accomplishments, the headmistress turned to my parents and asked them, with not a hint of interest, what they thought I could add to the school.
It was my father who responded.
“To be honest, not much.”
Traitor!
My mother touched his arm, but there was no stopping him.
“She is hard to understandâeven to those who love her; she can't follow the illustrations in picture books, much less learn all twenty-six letters of the alphabet; she isn't athletic and is getting chubby; and, between us, she doesn't have any friends.”
The headmistress stared at him.
“But there is one thing . . .”
Good God.
“If you need someone to deliver an after-dinner toast, there is none betterâat least in her age group.”
And what he said was true: I couldn't read, wasn't athletic, and didn't have friends, but there had been no shortage of dinner parties in whatever part of the world we had been living, and I'd heard enough people stand up and speak that I'd gotten the hang of it.
To this day, I'm not sure what caused my father to say what he did to the headmistress. My guess is that he sensed that she, despite her upright manner, was no stranger to the liquor cabinet and had probably spent more than a few hours throwing back drinks with her friends while entertaining them with
stories about the school. She may have been amused at the idea of having a toddler who could perform a passable toast after milk and cookies.
To clinch the deal, and to my parents' amazement, I turned to the headmistress.
“Where is the ladies' room?”
What I would do there, I had no idea.
The next day I was admitted.