TO:Grace Landing ([email protected])
FROM:Colin Yarmouth ([email protected])
RE:Be nice!
Hey,
Just letting you know the morning totally got away from me. My 9 o’clock stayed until almost 11. He was trying to turn our appointment into a personal therapy session, which happens every so often when clients have to change their wills for big life reasons. In this case, his wife just died (spoiler alert: he got the cat), so I tried to be sensitive. But if we’re being honest, I really just wanted to read your stuff! And then Gordon and I had to meet with a guy for an interview. We’re looking for a new bookkeeper. Doing anything with that guy is the absolute worst. Before I knew it, it was noon. Good news is I’m going to grab a sandwich and then lock myself in my office so I can read. I promise I won’t derail your deadline.
If you wrote anything new, feel free to send it over and I’ll add it to this thick stack of paper I just printed out.
Hope you’re having a good day!
Colin
TO:Colin Yarmouth ([email protected])
FROM:Grace Landing ([email protected])
RE:Be nice!
Hi,
Yes—I wrote some more this morning. It’s attached.
Sorry to hear about your client. I hate when my time gets hijacked by something unexpected like that. Well, I won’t take up any more of yours right now. Enjoy your lunch and thank you again for reading!
Talk to you later,
Gracie
I hitsendand stand up, lifting my arms over my head to stretch out my back. I look outside. It’s sunny.I should take a walk, I decide. I slide on my sneakers and grab a hoodie sweatshirt.
I live in an area of Brooklyn called Sheepshead Bay. It’s not close to anything, really. I mean, you thinkBrooklynand maybe you think of huge slices of foldable pizza or steaming hot bagels or Italian meatballs and Sunday sauce. Or maybe you picture the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, or the trendy, laid-back vibe of Prospect Park. Maybe you think about the Promenade, where many a first date has walked hand in hand, gazing starry-eyed at the Manhattan skyline and the pair of bridges that can get you there. It’s possible you consider Coney Island, the Cyclone roller coaster, and the original Nathan’s five-cent hot dog. Or if you’re a die-hard Jay-Z fan, you contemplate the Marcy Projects where he grew up.
But I’d be willing to bet you a slice of Junior’s cheesecake you don’t think of Sheepshead Bay.
It’s sort of an anomaly, really. The Belt Parkway draws the southern perimeter of Brooklyn along the edge of Jamaica Bay. And there’s this one little inlet at exit nine. On one side of the inlet is Manhattan Beach, and on the other? Sheepshead Bay. It’s quiet, by Brooklyn standards, home to a heavy Eastern European population. Lots of attached houses and smallbuildings like mine. On Emmons Avenue, where the inlet lies, there’s a waterfront strip lined with charter boats, fishing boats, party boats, and a handful of waterfront restaurants that are good for special occasions. Lundy’s, which was a famous restaurant known for its seafood, was the cornerstone of the area for dozens of years. But it closed long before I got here.
Anyway, Emmons Avenue is dotted with a row of old-fashioned streetlamps painted blue, and there’s a footbridge you can cross to get to Manhattan Beach. Some people fish off the footbridge, despite the fact that it’s pretty narrow. It’s romantic though: a sweet little wood-planked bridge in one of the busiest-city-on-Earth’s outer boroughs. Not what you’d expect. Once you cross it, you enter one of the most remote locations Brooklyn has to offer, marked by opulent, oversized detached houses that cost anywhere between one and five million dollars. There are three things about Manhattan Beach that I love: 1) The heart of it is the Manhattan Beach Park, which features a small beach with actual sand where I spend hours writing in the summertime. 2) The houses are so big and beautiful that when you walk through the area, you feel like you’re somewhere else—maybe in Florida minus the palm trees, though I’ve never been there so I can’t say for sure. 3) Melly’s parents live right near the park on Kensington Street—which is how I came to learn about the area back in my old college days.
Melly—Mela Andronikashvili—and I met at freshman orientation the summer after I graduated from high school. We bonded over both being New York kids (her from Brooklyn, me from the Bronx), making fun of Bostonians who couldn’t pronounce the R sound correctly and openly judging the lack of good bagels in Massachusetts. We also shared some heritage: my mom is from Albania, to the west of the Black Sea, and her parents are from Georgia (not the peach tree state down south, the independent republic on the eastern border of the Black Sea) so wefound solace in being familiar with ethnic foods from the same region. We also both grew up speaking lots of other languages: I learned a smattering of Albanian and Italian, and Melly spoke Georgian and Russian. We shared a bunk bed for three years, until our senior year when we moved off campus with our other suitemates, Alisha and Tori.
During Parents’ Weekend in September of freshman year, I met Melly’s mom and dad, Boris and Natasha. (I am not making this up—I swear those are their government names.) I learned that Mr. A owned a successful limousine company in Brooklyn and Mrs. A was a traditional stay-at-home Eastern European mother, which meant that Melly grew up doing three things all the time: eating home-cooked meals, studying, and suffering through piano lessons.
Melly was (and still is) a skinny girl. She’s tall too, about five-eight, and probably weighs a hundred twenty pounds fully dressed. She used to joke with us during those first few meals in the dining hall about how nice it was to consume a meal without being scolded for not eating enough or body-shamed by her mother for being too skinny. On Parents’ Weekend, Melly’s mom packed an Igloo cooler full of food: a big tray of meat and cheese blintzes, at least three to four pounds of kotleti (which are sort of like flattened chicken meatballs), several logs of piroshki filled with potatoes and mushrooms, and two giant tubs of borscht. Mrs. A tried to serve us a meal out of the cooler—she brought plates and utensils, and Melly was the only one of all of us to have brought a microwave from home. Melly was, of course, mortified. But I felt bad, and also hungry, so I gratefully accepted her warm, loving attempt to bring us a taste of home. In response, Mrs. A said in her thick, throaty accent, “I like this one. She is strong and meaty. Ready for winter.”
Over Thanksgiving break, Melly invited me to her house for the Wednesday night before Turkey Day: the biggest party night of the year. We met at her Manhattan Beach mini-mansion at 8:00 p.m., where weput on makeup, got dressed in our tightest, shortest dresses, counted our money, and made a plan for the night. At around 9:00, we came down the stairs, and I couldn’t help but notice the dining room table was set with two places. Glass plates were piled high with meats, some fried-looking thing, and a cooked cabbage dish, adorned with a side bowl of borscht and a glass of red wine.
“Wow—your parents eat dinner kind of late, huh?” I asked Melly.
Just then, Mrs. A appeared. “No, no!Youeat. She too skinny, no?” She nodded fervently at me for approval. I shrugged. “You come. Have second dinner,” she said. “Keep you warm in this tiny dress.”
Melly lashed out at her mother in a language that I later learned was Russian, words flicking off her tongue like a frog catching a fly or a snake attacking its prey. Quick. Deliberate. Angry.
Mrs. A responded in kind. Having no clue what either of them said, I felt super uncomfortable. But then, Mrs. A pulled out a chair and motioned for me to sit down. “Have some wine. It is good for your heart.”
Melly sat too, sulking like a little kid. I cleared my plate and enjoyed a second serving.
