Learning experiences, Cleveland, TN

When I first got here, people were constantly asking me where I was from. It is a question that comes with some weight in the South– it is not simply small talk, especially when asked by certain people. Your answer means something, it places you in certain categories, it allows you a certain level of understanding of the asker, and they are acutely aware of that.

In New York, I don’t remember fielding the question as much as I did in the first few months of being here. Or perhaps it was because the answer was not as complicated or as alienating. Or perhaps it is as George said some months ago, that New York swallows where you’re from. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, as long as you’re there.

I made split second decisions about whether to say New York, or Miami, or some awkward combination of both. I realize now that it doesn’t matter what I chose, the answer puts me in the same category. Miami, despite being on the southernmost tip of this country, is not the South and never pretended to be, and is demographically quite similar to New York. I do maintain that the two are sort of the twin cities of bagel artistry, the only places in the country where you can get an authentic one (they ship the bagel-boiling water down from New York to Miami to ensure quality), which says more than most of you know about their relationship.

Whichever one I answered, the asker would inevitably say something, with a smirk, about culture shock. I always resisted agreeing with that comment. I didn’t feel like I was in culture shock; I suppose I never really experienced that. Shock, like a lightning bolt, implies something short, immediate and fleeting. Almost four months in, I realize that what I am feeling is a sensation more kin to being in a large pot of water, just starting to realize that the burner is on under you, and that you, in slow gradients, are going to be boiled.

This past weekend, I accompanied Brian to the wedding of two of his close friends in Cleveland, Tennessee. Beyond the apparent uneasiness of attending a three-day wedding weekend of two people you have never met, there were other kinds of unease– a feeling of difference that is hard for me to articulate. I won’t even try. What I will do instead is provide a list of moments when, for whatever reason, I felt the farthest away from my current environment, the moments when I realized, not in a shock, but in a dull, but constantly escalating marination– something deeper and slower– that I am here, that I live here, but that I am not from here.

1. I have made an appointment at a Spartanburg salon for a blow dry and a flat iron. Curly hair is not formal, at least not in New York, and I plan to wear my hair straight at the wedding. The woman who washes my hair is also my hairdresser and while she rubs her fingers in my scalp, she asks me where I’m from. She says something about culture shock. By the time I sit down in the chair before the mirror, she is telling me, over and over, as if a kind of proud mantra, “Girl, I ain’t never been nowhere.”

She looks at my hair, pulls her fingers around in it, nervously. She tells me she’s never really seen hair this curly. That hair like this is “not her cup of tea.” Soon that becomes her mantra, “not my cup of tea, not my cup of tea,” as she stretches my hair cursorily with a round brush, waving the blow dryer over it. She doesn’t understand why it is so poofy– this technique always works fine with the straight-haired girls. We are frustrated with each other. I have tried to tell her the way it needs to be done– she tries to convince me that my hair doesn’t get that straight, as if it was all some part of a childish fantasy, a desire to be like the other girls. She apologizes profusely, but not like she is actually sorry, but like she is sorry for me. “Not my cup of tea,” she says as I hand her my credit card. She charges me $13 for the blow-out. I wash it out before the wedding. I have earned my curly hair this time.

2. Brian’s friends have rented a cabin near Cleveland so they can spend the whole weekend together. They are mostly blonde, mostly from the rural or suburban South, they are all athletic and healthy and their exchanges are light and pleasant. I cannot help but think how things would be different if this were my friends in a cabin. I think of Marco, who called while I was in the car on the way up, how we laughed a little thinking about how depressed we all were, the whole New York lot of us. It would be fun in our cabin; we would try to build a fire, but likely none of us would know how. We would talk about things, we would stay up all night, talking– some of it would be funny, and some of it would be dark, and some of it would be about art and some of it would be about people, but almost none of it would be “pleasant.” Someone would likely cry at some point, and that would be ok, and someone might start laughing and never stop, and the love would be tangible through the intensity.

3 . I have little to do before the wedding, while Brian spends the day taking pictures in a tux. I have already wandered through a yard sale in a church parking lot. There were Sunday school books, gospel records from the 70s (people named the Florida Boys in Polyester suits and women with high poofy hair), boxy ladys’ housedresses, and trinkets with varying degrees of concrete biblical reference. I decide to journal. In a strip mall, I notice a place the size of a Barnes and Nobles that says only “BOOKSTORE” in thin, large letters, high over the doorway. I realize only after I have bought my iced tea and sat down to write that it is a Christian bookstore– I suppose it goes without saying around here– and I chuckle to myself as I put pen to paper. If my mother could only see me now.

4. My first Catholic wedding. In fact, my first non-Jewish wedding. There is a lot of standing up and sitting down and a lot of talk about Jesus, and even a mention of hell. They serve pulled pork at the reception. I eat coleslaw.

5. At the wedding, Brian introduces me to a middle aged woman that he is acquainted with. She smiles as she tells me that she teaches public high-school, that they bus a lot of her students in from elsewhere, and that they “all look just like me.” I wonder what that means.

6. “You’ve never been to a Huddle House?!” So I go. I am nauseated most of the day.

7. NFL Sunday, the first of the season, and people from Miami and New York are calling all day to see if I caught this play or that play. I have not. Instead, I am sitting by the Ocoee River watching the kayakers, my wedding date and most of the other people who slept in the cabin amongst them, “playboating” in a defined dip in the water called Hell’s Hole. Some of the girls are kayaking, and the ones who are not sit on the rocks with me and take pictures of their boyfriends. I don’t know what there is to take pictures of, I don’t understand what the objective is. They paddle into the hole, they hang out there for a little while until they get pushed out, or until they flip over, and then they wait in a line of half-man half-kayak creatures until they get to do it again. The girlfriends are all good sports. They all kayak with some level of skill. I am too afraid and anxious to try. I am seething the whole ride home. I can’t get any of the games on the radio because there is barely a signal with all the trees.

8. Later, back in Mill Spring, at the house that I can find only with the help of landmarks: two enormous roadside crosses, the kind that have words going down the vertical plank and across the horizontal one, spaced before key turns. While I drive, I like to mix up the words, placed at confusing intersections, and see what other phrases I can get: “Secured Redemption Blood,” “You Died For Jesus” and so on. I know I will stay there that night, because it is already getting dark and there are no lights out there. I have driven home from that house in the dark before and I did breathing exercises to ward off the anxiety. You feel in a place like that like you are likely to vaporize and disappear.

9. “What made you think you could leave New York?” Brian asks me. There is some resentment in his voice, like he is sick of hearing about it. It is late and we have just eaten a salad and watched another kayaking video. “I don’t know,” I say. “Well why did you leave in the first place?” he asks. “Because I was so miserable.” “Well then why do you want to go back?” It is hard to answer this question– the short answer is that there is nothing like misery in New York, even though you feel alone, you feel a part of something, you belong. I don’t think I could explain this. I cry a little and say, “I’ve just never loved anything like I loved New York” and hope that I am not crying for something that is already over.