Elisa Albert's Blog

“‘Refusing to participate on a panel with a Zionist is a bare-assed excuse for antisemitism.’ For state funded-colleges, it also might be illegal”

FREE PRESS
University Cancels Panel Because Author Is a ‘Zionist’
Joe Nocera
September 23, 2024

For the last seven years, the New York State Writers Institute has held an annual book festival at the University at Albany. It’s where notable authors come together and discuss big ideas like climate change, feminism, and immigration. But this year, the festival, which was held on Saturday, was disrupted because two authors refused to discuss their books with the panel’s moderator. Why? Because she is a “Zionist.” The Zionist in question was Elisa Albert, a 46-year-old progressive feminist author whose novels—she’s written three of them—are dark comedies about subjects like modern motherhood and fame. She had agreed to moderate the panel months earlier, and she was looking forward to it. READ MORE

NEW YORK POST Bill would bar colleges from accepting money, gifts from terror-supporting countries Colleges and universities would be barred from accepting financial support or gifts from foreign nations that support terrorism under bipartisan legislation introduced by two New York House members, who said taking such funds is “an act of national self-sabotage.” The ban proposed by Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx) and Andrew Garbarino (R-LI) would cover China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and other countries that support terrorism…“Foreign influence has no place in our education system — especially when it’s aimed at spreading antisemitism and anti-American sentiment on our college campuses,” Garbarino said. “For far too long, radical organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine have been propped up by foreign entities with connections to terrorism,” he continued.

Elisa Albert : After Birth

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O! Small-Bany! Part 4: Fall

Elisa Albert | Longreads | April 2020 | 22 minutes (5,474 words)

The first time I get rear-ended is at a stoplight on the corner of Central and North Lake, around 4pm. One minute I’m on my way to school pickup, the next minute I’m disoriented and sobbing. The at-fault is a 19-year-old dude in a Jeep full of friends. He is nonplussed. He asks, without affect, whether I am okay.

“No!” I scream. “What the fuck?”

My car is badly damaged. I can’t stop sobbing. No airbags deployed. I am worried the dude will get back into his car and flee, so I photograph his license plate in haste, and call the cops. I cannot for the life of me stop crying. My rage and fear and shock and sadness are a tangle. The Jeep doesn’t have a scratch on it. It’s raining. The dude and his friends huddle under a shop awning, laughing.

The cop tells me to calm down: “It’s not that big a deal, ma’am.”

Later, when I call the cop oversight office to suggest that this particular cop go fuck himself, the oversight officer will watch the body cam footage and promise to speak to the cop in question about sensitivity in traumatic situations.

For some reason, I refuse an ambulance. (“Some reason”, ha: I am more terrified of institutional health care than I am of getting back into a smashed up car and driving away with whiplash and a concussion.)

I spend days in bed, in the dark, alternating heat and ice. A haze of phone calls from insurance agents, a hailstorm of Advil, rivers of CBD hot freeze.

You can get rear-ended anywhere. It wasn’t Albany’s fault, per se. But it’s so easy to blame Albany. Fucking Albany! This was God’s way of telling me I’ve done my time in this hopeless shithole of a city, right? Or maybe this was God’s way of punishing me for never utilizing public buses. Or maybe this was God’s way of shaming me for having my kid in private school. The thinks you think when you’re stuck in bed, in the dark, without distraction, for days on end! Meditation is a billion times harder than crossfit, and constructions about “God” are tough epigenetic habits to break.

***

A golden, shimmering autumn. Something about the light, the particular precious autumn light. The garden is still mostly green, but a hint of crunch has begun to sneak into the leaves: beginning of the end. I continue to water the strawberry plant even though there will be no more strawberries this year. If spring is birth and summer is youth, fall is the full bloom of middle age (and winter is death). I’m 41 now, the harvest-time of life. The bright, sunny September of life. Assuming the good fortune of a long life, that is.

If spring is birth and summer is youth, fall is the full bloom of middle age (and winter is death). I’m 41 now, the harvest-time of life.

A trio of youngsters — in, let’s say, the July of their lives — moves into an apartment next door. They’re showing friends around their new digs one afternoon, out on the back deck. They high-five and shout PARTY CENTRAL, BABY!!

“Hey there,” I wave from my garden.

They beat a hasty retreat.

***

I’ve been living here for a decade. That’s 40 seasons.

Seems like only yesterday I marched into the little house on Jay Street, set down my literal and metaphorical baggage, and decided that, by sheer force of will, this was going to be an awesome place to live. Things were going to start happening around here. Some iteration of the old Zionist narrative, all that stuff about making the desert bloom. Did I really think that I could, by sheer force of will, by patronizing every open storefront on Lark Street, by walking to the coffee shop every day and making cheerful small talk with regulars, by becoming a regular even though back then I didn’t much care for coffee, by inviting people over all the time, by flinging my literal and metaphorical doors wide open — transform what is essentially a raped and murdered corpse of a city, a deeply flawed, systemically undermined/ignored infrastructure-impoverished nightmare of a city, surrounded by complicit, anodyne, deaf-dumb-blind suburbs and exurbs, into some kind of Eden!? What a moron.

You’re supposed to move out of this neighborhood when you have kids, that’s the conventional wisdom. Those of us who won’t, or can’t, or don’t, we cluster in private Facebook groups and assure ourselves about imminent improvement, the rising tide that lifts all boats. This is a wonderful place to live, we tell each other, the very best place to live.

But neighborhood booster-ism seems increasingly beside the point when a simple walk around the block is like something out of Mad Max. What does it matter that there’s a delightfully twee craft market in the lake house next weekend if to get to the lake house you have to hazard a faded crosswalk on a road frequented by an endless succession of irate, entitled psychopaths behind an endless succession of wheels, eager to get the hell back to the suburbs or exurbs or wherever. In other words, still no progress whatsoever manifesting better pedestrian safety infrastructure. City Council did finally approve a small budget for putting in some reflectors and a few more signs around the park, but the projected date for installation has come and gone a few times, now, and every time I call the police station to request speed patrol, I get the brush-off.

Prioritizing human-scale existence, aka walking: Is it a lot to ask? Is it unreasonable!? I’m a broken record about this. Are we really supposed to lock ourselves behind gates and lawns to try and ensure that we don’t get mown down by cars!? Is that the answer? If you never have to walk anywhere, it is a lot harder to get run down by a car. Ride around in cars all day every day, yeah, that’s better. You do the mowing down of pedestrians, and you win, right? Because the world is pretty much just a video game at this point, right?

Asshole Patrol, we call it: trying to get across the barely-marked pedestrian crosswalk into and out of our public park in broad daylight twice a day. I’ve (mostly) stopped screaming obscenities, but I do still mutter “fucking douchebag” under my breath when absolutely necessary. Ommmmm. And I spend an embarrassing amount of time contemplating how things unfolded in this country/state/city over the past hundred years to enable the dynamic in question. Conclusion: fuck the cult of the personal automobile. Probably wasn’t a picnic when the whole town was knee-deep in horseshit, either, though.

***

At the park in the mornings and evenings, we’re like religious supplicants gathered to pay our respects to the changing light. A childlike adult person walks alone through the park every morning around 9am and stops at the flagpole to salute and recite the pledge of allegiance. A young man asks his small brown shepherd do you have to go potty do you have to go potty do you have to go potty over and over, as though on a loop, the entire time they are in the field.

Sunrise, sunset. Make meaning, make meaning, make meaning! Why do autumn days feel so uniquely special, sacred, fleeting? The lingering dusks, the sunshine cutting through the cooling air, the cool air cutting through the sunshine. Such pathos in these days! In my tradition they’re known as the Days of Awe. What do we do with these days? How can we make them last? They’ll be gone too soon, too soon, before we know it, and we are all very certainly going to die. (I hope that’s not news to you.)

This is it: savor these days like they are all you’ll ever get. Because we all know what’s coming, don’t we? Winter is coming.

But oh, god, no, let’s not think about it just yet, no, don’t make us contemplate what’s coming yet, please. Surely there’s more time? Surely we can put off thinking about that? We all know it’s coming. But can’t we just forget about it for a little while longer? Just enjoy these beautiful, golden days? It’s just that the beautiful golden days seem to fly by so fast. Sometimes the chill in the air feels merciless.

***

A lady in a fancy administrative office asks me for my address, and when I give it to her she looks startled.

“You live right downtown? Right in the city?”

This lady has spent her entire life living in the skin-crawlingly wealthy suburb nine miles to the north of our murdered corpse of a city, and it is her conviction that my neighborhood is a blot on the landscape, a place to be avoided and ignored by any means necessary, a place where [say it with me in a haunted whisper] impoverished people live. But lo! I do not seem to be an impoverished person! I am wearing lovely knitwear and nontoxic lip-gloss and good boots.

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“Wow,” she manages, at length. “Not many people live down there.”

Um, a lot of people live “down there”!? They just don’t tend to be cloistered assholes!? (I mean, okay, maybe assholes, but definitely not cloistered.)

What the woman is saying, of course, is that not many people who have the choice to live elsewhere live “there”. What she is saying is that, given the choice, anyone in their right mind would get the fuck out of “there”. I shouldn’t take this lady’s worldview personally. But I take everything personally. Which is too bad for me, though useful creatively. Give me another 40 seasons, maybe I’ll figure out another way.

***

But put aside your cares, forget your woes! It’s time for the annual street festival known as Larkfest, which invariably deteriorates from a swell, cheerful, family-friendly block party at 10am to a loud clusterfuck around 1pm, giving way to a batshit bacchanal by 4. Then streets lined with vomit and food scraps and trash for days and good luck trying to keep the dog from trying to eat it all.

“This is a really great place to live if you’re an alcoholic,” someone mutters to her companion on the patio at Café Hollywood. “Isn’t everywhere, though,” the companion responds.

A t-shirt: Albany: A drinking town with a political problem.

There are not enough “amenities” in Albany, as a real-estate developer once developer-splained to me over farm-to-table cocktails in the Berkshires.

You can get rear-ended anywhere. It wasn’t Albany’s fault, per se. But it’s so easy to blame Albany.

It does get admittedly harder to feign excitement about yet another new small business with unreliable hours. The poke bar serves decent food but exclusively in single-use plastic. The new bakery barely has any fresh anything and is furnished with folding chairs; it will be vacant in less than a year. The cute little sweet shoppe lasted about six months and then relocated to a strip mall in Clifton motherfucking Park. The Mediterranean bar and grill had themselves a nice sign above the door, a real actual custom permanent sign above the door, wow, look at that, but the place folded almost immediately. Everything feels so provisional. Set up to be temporary, and barely scraping by. With the exception of the artisanal cider donuts on North Pearl, which proved so wildly successful that they just announced the opening of a new location up in mall-death hell, with plenty of parking, the press release repeats a couple times. Wouldn’t want anyone to break a sweat en route to or from a donut fix. The guy who bought the huge abandoned cold storage warehouse taking up half the skyline made some noise about arts district something-something, but he owes half-a-million dollars in back taxes and has done nothing to get the building up to code. There’s an unfortunately placed billboard advertising our aforementioned private school standing proudly up against this eyesore on the highway: poetry in the wild.

***

But there I go again, focusing on the negative. All those marginally literate new-age feeds I skim must not be sinking in. Hope is where it’s at! Hope! Keep it up, against all odds! There’s tons of great stuff in this town. The best thrift shop in the world and Elissa Halloran’s magical house of treasures and the best coffee shop for a hundred miles and the epic skate shop and the family who makes organic soap and the outrageous vegan deli and the woodworker whose custom tabletops feature mosaic representations of housing projects and the great young couple who renovated and reopened the wine bar and decent yoga and good street art and vintage ‘90’s streetwear shops and local pride, local pride above all, so yes, let’s hear it for the 518.

***

Word travels fast about two armed robberies back-to-back on a Tuesday night around 10. One on our corner, and one on the corner of Lark and Lancaster. We’d noticed a lot of flashing lights and peered out the bedroom window to see what the hell was going on. A few cops walking up and down the block. Nothing too exciting. We shrugged and went back to watching Sacha Baron Cohen play a Mossad spy in Syria circa 1962. A third armed robbery takes place the following Thursday, but this time the cops are on high alert. They immediately catch the perps, who turn out to be children. An 18-year-old, two 15-year-olds, and a 12-year-old. The firearm turns out to have been a BB gun. No less terrifying for the victims, but.

***

The dog has a bad habit of interrogating men who stroll through the field unaccompanied by dogs of their own. The dog finds it necessary to thoroughly question and intimidate said men. THIS IS MY FUCKING PARK, she barks at them. Is it possible that she is the outward manifestation of my private aggression? The dog is an unapologetic misandrist. Some men are unbothered by her interrogation, and walk on. The dog respects this. Other men are badly startled, and these men invariably become enraged, which further enrages the dog. It doesn’t matter how much I reassure them that she will not bite, that she has no history of violence, that she will not hurt them.

One day, a man with a long grey ponytail in a Siena College baseball cap pulls a knife on me and my barking dog. I stay strangely calm. She’s not going to hurt you, I say. She is just barking, just ignore her, keep walking, she’s not going to hurt you, sir, I’m sorry, but sir, please put the knife away, she is not going to hurt you, I would be glad to leash her up but sir, you are holding a knife out at me, so I’m not going to come any closer until you put the knife away. He rants and raves and jabs his knife at the dog, who becomes more and more upset. Finally, at wits end, I take out my phone and inform him that I am filming him now. At this, he walks away, still muttering to himself and waving his knife around. I have zero emotional response until about an hour later, then I’m shaking all day.

***

Yom Kippur, and we endeavor to ride the rail trail, which stretches from Albany all the way to Voorheesville. The problem is: how to get to the trailhead, which is exactly three miles from our back door. Biking to the trailhead would be the logical way. But those three miles are just about the least bike-friendly you can imagine, so to be remotely safe we’d have to ride mostly on sidewalks, which are all busted up in general. There’s the option of driving down to the parking lot at the trailhead. But this makes me petulant, and I refuse on principle. What is the point of a local freaking bike trail to which you cannot ride your freaking bike!? What kind of dystopian nonsense is that? We hazard the sidewalk ride.

It’s fine-ish until we make it down to South Pearl, the heart of the much-maligned South End, where residents seem possibly outnumbered by vacant homes and storefronts. On one block here last year, a fire started in an abandoned house and destroyed five adjacent homes. There’s a convenience store, a streetwear shop, and a wellness studio with, alas, a mold problem. The DMV and a soon-to-close McDonalds cower beneath the grotesque malignancy of Route 787, alongside which run the good old bomb trains. Whose fault is all of this? Impossible to say, though I’m pretty confident they don’t (or didn’t) live anywhere near here.

We cruise along the sidewalks, apologizing to the few pedestrians we see. Past the police station, Baptist church, Family Dollar, Uncle Dan’s Diner, and liquor store, until the sidewalks peter out amidst auto-repair shops, and there’s the 787 onramp.

We stop and look around. We consult our maps. The trailhead should be right here somewhere, but all we can see is ruins and highway and highway and ruins. To find the trailhead do we really have to cross this half-road-half-onramp with no crosswalk, no light, no pedestrian or bike infrastructure whatsoever? Indeed, we do.

We survive the crossing and what do you know? Immediately past the parking lot it’s perfectly serene and pastoral. Two minutes later we are coasting on the trail, wowed by the serenity and peace and abundant beauty of a perfect fall day under canopies of yellow/orange/red trees and the rush of the Normanskill creek. Another world. South Pearl is a distant memory from a different dimension.

The moral of the story is that to have this nice experience without having to directly confront the post-industrial late-capitalist nightmare of a failed American city, you should hitch your bike to your automobile and drive directly from your safe exurban or suburban dwelling directly to the parking lot at the trailhead, your feet never having to touch unhallowed ground.

***

How can I see this place in all its depressing glory and still keep trying to embroider a meaningful life here? I hate it here, and it’s my home. I am raising a family here because of fate, by which I mean: a job. It sucks, and it is my home. It has so much potential! But progress and improvement are slow. I want it to be better. I have to believe it can be better. I do believe that it can be better. One can only bemoan the shittiness of something one believes could be better.

I have a friend who moves every few years because no place turns out to be as cool as she’d hoped it might be: Providence, Joshua Tree, Oregon, L.A., Brooklyn, Woodstock. Each turns out to be lame, lame, lame.

Oh, honey, the places might not be the problem.

Still, how does change really happen? And when? And what’s the difference between nasty gentrification and a rising tide that lifts all boats? Is it just a question of aesthetics? Values? Money?

A suburban sitter asks my son where he’ll go to high school. My son says Albany High. The suburban sitter says Albany High is totally sketchy.

“What does ‘sketchy’ mean,” my son asks later.

I stumble through a weak attempt at explaining racism and classism and exceptionalism and white flight and privilege and the criminally shitty urban planning and pathetically short-sighted real-estate development and political misdeeds that have shaped this murdered corpse of a city, which is itself so typical of so many cities all across our huge, fucked up, murdered corpse of a country, and in closing reassure him that Albany High is awesome.

Prioritizing human-scale existence, aka walking: Is it a lot to ask? Is it unreasonable!? I’m a broken record about this.

Is Albany High awesome? Anecdotal reports are varied, but it had better be awesome, because the attitude of that suburban sitter is what’s actually sketchy as fuck.

***

An officer sits in his cruiser today, facing the horrible crosswalk where we try daily not to die. He watches me attempt to exercise pedestrian right of way. The car coming at me from the left slows to a crawl, but the car coming at me from the right makes it clear that it will absolutely not slow.

A reasonable person, hoping to not get hit by a car, might stop and wait in the middle of the crosswalk for the offending asshole to pass. Might makes right, after all; a body is no match for speeding tons of metal. But I stand firmly in the path of that fucknut, holding up my hand for said fucknut to slow the fuck down and stop. The fucknut does not run me down, thankfully, but he does lower his window and scream, “get the fuck out my way, bitch”.

The officer is maybe 10 feet away, observing all of this from his cruiser, cup of coffee in hand. As I pass his open window, he tells me, cheerfully: “You really want to wait for drivers to pass before you cross, ma’am.”

“That’s a pedestrian right-of-way crosswalk, officer. In our public park. In the heart of our city.”

He shrugs. “They really won’t always stop, ma’am, and I’d hate to see you get hurt.”

“Sir, you’re on duty, yes? And you’re right here next to this pedestrian crosswalk, which drivers are flagrantly disregarding. Do you think it might be possible for you to flag and ticket drivers who blatantly disregard traffic laws and endanger lives? Or maybe get out of the car and escort pedestrians back and forth? Your job is to enforce laws, is that right?”

“Just be more careful in the future, ma’am.”

***

An acquaintance from a nearby storybook creative class weekender enclave posts a photo of Empire Plaza and a derisive caption about how creepy Albany is, and I find myself incited to quick, decisive anger. No, storybook creative, you may not deign to breeze through our (admittedly creepy and, admittedly definitive) city monument and define it as such. You do not get to be derisive about our creepy city. That’s our job, those of us who live here, in what is our home, which is, in fact, a deeply complex and old and noir and gorgeous and diverse and beset and hopeful and dysfunctional and hideous little city, filled with tens of thousands of people who do not necessarily get to choose where they live. Kindly leave the disparaging remarks about my creepy city to me.

***

Deep thoughts whilst walking the dog around the lagoon (we really need to stop calling it a “lake”): 1.Twitter is a great way to reach numbers of people who are always on Twitter. 2. Facebook is a great way to reach numbers of people who are always on Facebook. 3. Instagram is just for fun. 4. Time is a bitch, because the sadder you are, the slower it goes and the happier you are, the faster it goes.

The question is not whether or not you like living in Albany; the question is whether or not you can do your work here. Work is hard and consuming no matter where you do it.

Something about status and money. Something about fashion, ambition. Something about —

Halloween is warm. Throngs of people, big and small. Laughter fills the streets. Dove between State and Lancaster is the best stretch, but Lancaster between Swan and Lark is no joke, either. Everyone is out on their stoops. There is a true spirit of joy and camaraderie. I trail half a block behind my tween and his friend. Everyone’s in a good mood. I love this neighborhood. This fucked up little city is the world’s best-kept secret. I should be more of a booster. The world is a fundamentally kind and decent place, headlines notwithstanding, and we cannot live separate from our communities.

The youngsters in the apartment next door host a monstrous party that night. A hundred people crammed in there, and spilling out onto the back deck. The screaming and laughter and thumping bass keep going past 11, past 12, and eventually I call the cops on them.

***

I forget to lock my car one night and a homeless man spends the night in it. I’m assuming it was a man, but I could be wrong. There’s plenty I’m wrong about.

I find the compartments ransacked. The car reeks of ball sweat and cigarettes and booze. Poor dude found nothing of value, just my registration and a dust cloth and some packing tape and 50 copies of a gorgeous inspirational-quote coloring page my son made when he was 8. I thought I’d give those copies away or put them up on bulletin boards around town or something, but never got around to it. Look Within, the coloring page said, times 50. I guess the homeless guy who spent the night in my car did literally that: he looked within… my car. I hope he was cogent enough to appreciate the humor.

The next night, walking down to Post to get an Impossible Burger (yes, I know they’re not really good for you), we pass a chic, artsy-looking couple walking the other way. Prospectors, it’s clear. Casing the town.

“It’s not as cool as Hudson,” the woman says.

***

Three people are shot in separate incidents on Second Avenue within the course of a week.

The mayor goes around with the Chief of Police, knocking on doors to reassure people, and to listen to suggestions about what they can do to help the neighborhood. God, you have to love the mayor. She bought a wreck of an abandoned house nearby to renovate and empty-nest. Also she’s a redhead, which, well, enough said.

There’s one convenience store in particular that seems to be the locus of much of the neighborhood activity: good, bad, ugly. Close down that store, people tell the mayor. That store is the source of all our troubles.

But it is the only store left in that corner of the neighborhood. All the other stores have already closed down, because this is, lest we forget, a murdered corpse of a city.

***

A young creative from the city (the city) once paid me a visit. We were having a party, and the young creative, having kept mostly to themself all night, left seeming less-than-pleased. I thought them somewhat rude, but a few days later I sent them a thank you note. You don’t have to be Miss Manners to know that this person owed me the thank you note, but I wanted to “close the circle” or something, so I thanked them for coming and wished them well. They offered no thanks in return; just rambled for a while about how great my life seemed, how great that I got to live in the coolest neighborhood in the coolest town, and in such a great house, with such a great community. Everything was so great for me, how great for me, so great for me, so, so, so great for me. Lucky me. Life wasn’t half so great in Brooklyn. Life was hard in Brooklyn. It was impossible to make ends meet and the pressure was unending and everyone was in it to win it and no one was “real” and there was no community and it was exhausting. I read and reread this note in complete bafflement. Perspective is everything, and nobody ever really knows shit about the precise reality of anybody else’s struggle or reward. I sent a link to a list of abandoned houses for sale via the Albany County Land Bank, ‘cause you know what? Life is great here. So why aren’t you lining up to rebuild some small corner of it? Wouldn’t that be great? There are worse ways to spend your time and energy than saving/maintaining/protecting a tiny corner of the world in the shadow of Rockefeller’s arrogant brutalist concrete and marble hellscape for a tiny fraction of what it costs you to live in the glittering cutthroat ultimate metropolis of dreams. Get out a hammer and nail and learn how to use your hands, to paraphrase the Indigo Girls. Not just your head; you’ll think yourself into jail! A refuge never grows from a chin in a hand in a thoughtful pose! Gotta tend the earth if you want a rose!

***

Boundaries are at issue in a small town. Privacy. Anonymity. Which is to say it is a terrible, no good, very bad idea to publish true thoughts and observations and opinions about my neighbors (or my neighborhood). I erased the first version of this essay. Don’t shit where you eat. But true thoughts and observations and opinions are pretty much all I have to offer in exchange for money! And… I still have to live here. You have to get along with your neighbors; it’s one of the main tenets of decent human existence. Where does tribalism come from? Where does racism originate? What was the earliest iteration of war!? How did moronic bullshit like nationalism ever take root in human consciousness!? Because of being judgmental and cunty to your neighbors: that’s fucking how!

***

Huge snowstorm on December the first. Still technically autumn, mind you. But now there’s two feet of snow on the ground. A rare and stunning quiet envelops the neighborhood. School’s canceled. The kids go sledding in the park. We let the dog off leash because the whole town is profoundly silent, and she frolics through the powder, weaving around the dumb holiday lights. She might get tangled up in the wires and electrocute herself. If this fucking piece of shit city kills another of our puppies, I swear to God. But she steers clear of the wires and all is well until later, back at home, when she starts vomiting, and becomes lethargic to a terrifying degree. The internet suggests that she is mortally ill from eating too much snow or possibly ice melt, and that she will either die or be fine. Is she going to die? Please don’t let her die. Not again. Not another dog done in by this town, please, really. It takes a couple days, and she ruins every rug, but she’s fine.

***

The second time I get rear-ended is at a stoplight, again, at 4pm, again, by a 19-year-old dude, again. It’s raining, again. I scream what the fuck, again.

The question is not whether or not you like living in Albany; the question is whether or not you can do your work here. Work is hard and consuming no matter where you do it.

This time the dude feels really bad. This time my car has only cosmetic damage, but his Volvo is all smashed up. “I’m so sorry, ma’am,” says the dude. “My brakes must’ve locked up.”

Bullshit, I do not say, you were texting.

“My dad is going to kill me,” the dude whimpers. “I’m having such a bad day. I lost my job last week. I guess this is how it is: I just can’t catch a break.”

Dude really wants my sympathy right now!? I’m supposed to comfort him!? He can’t catch a break? But sure enough, wouldn’t you know, the old caretaking instinct rises up and I hear myself going hey, hey, it’s okay, it could be a lot worse, it was an accident, obviously you didn’t hit me on purpose, it could be worse, it could be so much worse, it was an accident, everything’s going to be okay, you’ll see, hang in there, shit happens.

Whiplash, concussion, sure, whatever, fine, fine, sure, I know the drill. Ice packs, Advil, darkness, fine, yeah. But this time the physical impact is a footnote to the pure distilled emotional blow. This time the message is loud and clear: down on your fucking knees and stay down, bitch. This time, to borrow the tagline of some Jaws sequel or other, it’s personal.

Rear ended for the second time in six months, almost to the day!?

“Maybe you’re putting out too much negativity and this is some kind of cosmic retribution,” says a friend.

“You do have a lot of hostility about cars,” my husband notes.

“Maybe you’ve done your time in Albany,” another friend says.

Everyone’s right.

***

Had dinner with a friend down in Hudson the other night. Hoppin’ hipster happenin’ Hudson. Such a relief to spend time in Hoppin’ hipster happenin’ Hudson. Why? Because of the fine dining, the sartorial glamour, the aspirational edge, the people-watching, the cutting-edge amenities! Because of the way money and poverty do this interesting masquerade, this tense dance, this stylized gliding right up to and around each other in a way they simply don’t in many other places. Shit: maybe this whole thing, this whole gripe, this whole meditation, these 40 seasons, this whole observational essai, might really just have been a cri de couer about class all along. In which case I haven’t scratched the surface of the truth.

Anyway, my friend spoke about the intense throngs of hoppin’ hipster happenin’ visitors who flood Warren Street on the weekends to prospect and shop and eat and drink and see and be seen. The crowds are intense and unpleasant and uncool.

It’s fucking unbearable, she said. People are starting to talk about moving to Albany.

***

Elisa Albert is the author of  After Birth ,  The Book of Dahlia , and  How This Night is Different . She is at work on short stories and a new novel.

Editor: Sari Botton

O! Small-Bany! —Elisa Albert

Elisa Albert writes about her adopted hometown, Albany, NY. Disaffected stream-of-consciousness reflections that are funny, if you like your commentary a little dark. Not for everyone, but what is?

Part 1: Spring
Part 2: Winter
Part 3: Summer

Don’t feel the need to be chronological; start with Summer.

AFTER BIRTH by Elisa Albert

i read like half the book without realizing it was fiction. too real lol.

Etta or Bessie or Dora or Rose

Elisa Albert | How This Night Is Different | May 2018 | 23 minutes (5,706 words)

October 2004

Dear Philip,

You must be aware of the intimidation factor inherent in anyone’s writing to you, but I wonder if maybe the paradigm is similar to what happens when a stunning woman walks into a room: no one approaches her, she’s simply too beautiful; everyone assumes they have no shot. Maybe you don’t get many letters. Maybe you haven’t received a truly balls-out, bare-assed communiqué since 1959.

You once signed a book for me. That’s the extent of our connection thus far, but it’s something, isn’t it? The book was The Counterlife, but I had yet to read it when I presented it to you for signature. You were unsure of the spelling of my name, and so there’s an endearing awkwardness, a lack of flow, to the inscription. For E, you wrote, and the pen held still too long on the page, leaving a mark at the point of the lowest horizontal’s completion while you waited for me to continue spelling. L, you continued on, and then, again, a spot of bleeding, hesitant ink before the i and the s and the a, which proceed as they should before your slanted, rote, wonderful autograph. I remember being all too aware of the impatient line behind me, people clutching their copies of Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, The Human Stain, the odd Zuckerman Unbound. I tried to meet your eye, I tried to communicate something meaningful. The others, of course, didn’t get it. I wanted you to know: I got it. Later, when I found my way to reading the book, I actually purchased a whole new copy so I wouldn’t sully my signed paperback. I cherish our moment of eye contact, your pen hovering over the title page, my name circulating in that colossal mind of yours.

But wait. This is no mere fan letter; no mere exercise in soft-core intellectual erotica constructed for your amusement. I have an objective. How old are you now, Philip? Early seventies, is it? You are, of course, notoriously private. I have the books, sure, like everyone else. And the reviews of the books, each of which mentions the notorious privacy. And there’s the Claire Bloom debacle, which I hesitate even to mention, given its complete disrespect of the notorious privacy (though you might be happy to know that I couldn’t find “Leaving A Doll’s House” in any of the four sizable bookstores I checked and had to finally order it on Amazon). And The Facts, which I made a point of reading after the Claire Bloom, for balance. A graduate school friend of mine was your research assistant for a few years while we pursued our MFAs and it took her almost a year of post-workshop drinking to slyly confess, to a rapt audience of salivating young writers, her association to you. (Otherwise you’ll be happy to know she was loyal; she professed total ignorance of your life, your private matters, even your address. She seemed, in retrospect, somewhat terrified of you. I half-seriously offered her boyfriend a blow job if he’d get me your address. The table of young writers giggled madly and took big sips of beer.)

Yeah, so I’m a writer. Aspiring writer. And, could you have guessed…? I write fiction about Jews. Jews! Imagine that. When I queried agents I categorized myself thusly: A lobotomized Philip Roth writing chick lit. They liked that. I had a lot of offers of representation. I’m almost done with my debut collection, which has yet to find a publisher. And as for the inevitable debut novel, well. That’s a bit of an issue. I had an idea, see. I spent almost a year fleshing it out, taking notes, outlining, writing scenes. It was going to be so fucking great, Philip; my God was it going to be great! It was a good idea for a novel, a truly good idea, literally stumbled upon and embraced immediately as worthy of however many years of toil it might take me, after half a dozen years crafting clever little ten-pagers featuring women sitting shiva for relatives who had molested them, women sucking their first uncircumcised cock (then going out for bacon cheeseburgers, natch!), women feeling left out and misunderstood at Jewish sleep-away camp, to write a novel. A Great American Jewish Novel.

It happened like this: I was walking along Washington Place, east of the Washington Square park, in the village. A block I’d traversed countless times before, only a stone’s throw from my apartment. It was early spring, still cold. I came upon a huge pile of white carnations just piled – heaped — on the sidewalk. Upon closer inspection I noticed that each was affixed with a small sticker nametag. And then, for the first time, despite having passed it quite often, I saw the bronze plaque affixed to the building just above eye level. It was the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the very sidewalk where dozens of barely post-pubescent immigrant girls had landed in a charred heap after having leapt from the all-consuming fire, where now their names were affixed to ostensibly representative cheap white carnations. A hundred and fifty of them, Esther Goldsteins and Yetta Fichtenhultzs and Gussie Rosenfelds and Ida Jakorskys and Rosie Shapiros and Celia Gettlins and Annie Novobritskys and Unidentifieds, commemorated on the anniversary of the catastrophe that at once embodied and betrayed their naïve, perhaps even as-yet-unarticulated American Dreams. It was perfect. I immediately whipped out my oh-so-writerly Moleskine notebook (thirteen bucks at your local independent bookstore) and began to copy down the names and some notes, impressions of my oh-so-writerly wheels a-spinning.

You once signed a book for me. That’s the extent of our connection thus far, but it’s something, isn’t it?

I got to work that very day, March 25th. I went to the library, looked around online, gathered information about the fire, about New York at the turn of the (last) century, etc. I put together a bibliography. I envisioned something grand, something all-encompassing, something at once contemporary and historical, intricately crafted to reveal a core of overlapping themes of American Judaism, the century-bookending phenomena of people falling en masse from tall burning buildings in lower Manhattan, my own rampant post-adolescent malaise and fear, housed not three blocks from the site in a two-bedroom I shared with my fiancé until I broke my engagement and kicked him out a few months later. It was going to be great. The potential was endless and unbelievably exciting. I was out for some Safran Foer blood, man. I would get a grant, I would go to an artists’ colony, I would sell first serial to the Paris Review, I would have a stunning black-and-white portrait taken by Marion Ettlinger, I would sell the collection in a massive two-book deal which would warrant a clipping in Shtetl Fabulous magazine, that glossy, much-hyped bi-monthly effort to turn cultural Jewish identity into the coolest shtick on the block, the new black. I could not have been more excited, more – if you’ll excuse the expression in this context – fired up.

Anyway, it goes without saying that I love you. I first read you in high school (Goodbye, Columbus — don’t remember it so well, but the chick who played Brenda in the movie was pretty hot, wasn’t she?). I flipped through Portnoy shortly thereafter, disgusted and bored. It enraged me like it had enraged all the good dumb Jews thirty-odd years earlier. I was so idiotic, Philip. This, admittedly, had less to do with your much-maligned opus than with the relatively few years that had elapsed since the end of my own unfortunate, romantically unsuccessful tenure at a particularly vile Jewish sleep-away camp. All I could see in Portnoy was the specter of all those pathetic fucking guys who didn’t want to fuck me, Philip. That was my tragedy at seventeen: no one wanted to fuck me. My Camp Ramah might as well have been your Newark, fifty years later and in Southern California, for all its Jewish insularity and provinciality. The people with whom I came of age in that pseudo-ghetto aspired to meet, screw, and marry each other (but not me!) without ever moving in any respect beyond the psychological, emotional, and intellectual borders of those well-funded, gorgeously landscaped five acres. They have motherfucking alumnae weekends, Philip. I get letters soliciting donations.

“Roth,” I would spit contemptuously whenever the subject of your books came up, “Yuck.” Yuck because in the defensively perceived Shiksa-obsession and sexual dysfunction and casual dismissal of Jewish women and mockery of everything religiously, spiritually meaningful in Judaism itself, I was transported right back to Ramah, to being ignored and overlooked, to being made to feel freakish for my aesthetic, my sensibility, my desire for connection and friendship and love, to the weekly advent of the holy Sabbath as purely an opportunity for us girls to look our prettiest and amass sexually explicit Shabbat-O-Grams from heavily-gelled-and-cologned boys, to the years-long, unrequited torment of a crush on a smarmy staff Rabbinical student whose engaging smirks of dismissal I took as signals of subverted lust. Yuck because in Roth were Justin Steinberg and Eric Landsman and Ron Frank, those United Synagogue Youth fuckwads with their hemp necklaces and hackey-sacks and Phish tickets and body-hair aversions embodied in a universal fetishization of Asian women. I didn’t matter. I was powerless. I was overlooked. I had to hate you. I had to play that easy, tired “misogynist” card. Hating you made me feel better about myself, my Jewish-ness, my femininity, my mattering, the possibility that somewhere, sometime, someone would want to fuck me. In that way, of course, the trajectory of my (one-sided) relationship with you is not unlike that of the world at large, do you see? Because after some years of relaxing into myself and accepting my innate worth and spending lots and lots of my parents’ money on therapy and electrolysis, after finding many men who did indeed want to fuck me (who, in fact, wanted very much to fuck me! So there!), I could pick up The Human Stain and then Operation Shylock and then The Ghostwriter and then American Pastoral and then Sabbath’s Theater and read you simply as the fucking astonishing genius that you are. Substitute the assimilation and success and general relaxing-into-the-safety-and-prosperity-of-the-second-half-of-the-Twentieth-century of American Jewry for my own sexual liberation at the hands of (mostly) non-Jewish men and there you have a rather interesting parallel in terms of our collective eventual appreciation of the writer Philip Roth, no? At present writing, The Plot Against America is number one on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list. Mazel Tov.

So. I am a young Jewish writer who idolizes you, cherishes your books and reads them slowly, considers you the father of us all. Ah, yes: the father of us all –but not actually a father yourself, Philip, so far as I know. Why is that? Do you yourself know? Is there an answer? I realize life is more complicated than that, but still, I wonder. Again and again I find evidence of child-longing in your books. In The Counterlife, especially, our tenuous link, we find pregnant Maria a-glow with Zuckerman’s life growing inside her, the narrative changing and changing until she vanishes from reality, taking Zuckerman’s potential offspring with her. When she reappears at the end of The Facts, she’s still pregnant (more so, even), but there is no birth, no bearing, no fruition.

And in American Pastoral, there’s our man Zuckerman at his Fortieth high school reunion, reporting (obsessively?) on the names and ages of his classmates’ children and grandchildren. “…I seemed alone in having would up with no children, grandchildren, or…’anything like that,’” he says. And one former classmate regards Zuckerman’s reality with what I found to be the saddest two words in that whole tragic book: “Poor Skip.” Poor Nathan, poor Philip.

Nihilistic Mickey Sabbath, too, adds his voice to this sad chorus, commenting on the fact of his having “…never [been] blessed with children,” and, furthermore, “children never blessed with [him].” (p. 326)

And what’s that? Alexander Portnoy? Speak up! “Why then do I live by myself and have no children of my own? …What have I got to show for myself? …Children should be playing on this earth who look like me!” (p. 229)

Bloom, discussing your happier times together, recalls your regret that you hadn’t married earlier, when you and she “might have had a child” together.

Perhaps it’s my own baby-longing that effects mere projection here. Perhaps I am just blinded by my own maternal desperation. I’m twenty-six, Philip. That must seem impossibly young to you – I am, after all, almost half a century your junior — but I don’t feel particularly young. I recently broke up with a guy (the aforementioned fiancé) who I thought I’d be with forever. I am the youngest child of rapidly aging parents who have no grandchildren. One of my older brothers is dead, the other is useless. I have a condition (thanks to the aforementioned ex-fiance) that predisposes me toward cervical cancer (no one knows this Philip; no one except for my gynecologist and now you). I feel doomed. I feel done for. Do you know what I mean? Or do I seem short-sighted and utterly without perspective? I wonder sometimes if my pessimism in this regard is related to the despondent logic that disallows me from reading and carrying around and “wearing out” my signed copy of The Counterlife. No, twenty-six is not seventy-six. If all goes well (but why should it?) I have a great many years still folded unsullied before me. Books are for reading. Clothes are for wearing. Life is fatal for all of us. Sound wisdom, sure. But I feel ripe; I feel about to rot.

What happened with my fiancé, if you must know, is that he flipped out about his representation in my fiction. He looked for himself in all of it, and he found himself in all of it. He couldn’t handle it, couldn’t handle me and my big fat Jewess mouth, told me I was judgmental and ungenerous (translation: that I portrayed “him” negatively). I patiently tried to explain that those qualities are the very ones that confer any prowess I may have as a writer in the first place and that furthermore I was never going to get published anyhow. What’s odd is that I actually always took significant pains to disguise both him and his bizarre-ass family. But he couldn’t see that. He found himself implicated everywhere, in every critically-viewed male, on every sarcasm-laced page. He was a self-obsessed infant of the highest order (and here I’m not disguising him whatsoever, finally, but only because no one but you will ever see this). So even though he was also a big hot strapping Jew – and himself a highly successful veteran of my very own terrible Camp Ramah — I chose the fiction over him. Fiction is forever, Philip. I know you agree. Facts dissipate with changed perspective, reality is ephemeral; Viva la Fantasy! I chose my banal stories and the promise of redemption with my precious Shirtwaist Fire girls over a traditional partnership with a terribly limited man next to whom I’d lie awake sobbing at night, horrified by the stultifying limitations of the life I’d somehow chosen for myself.

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I had been chipping away in relative secret at my Triangle Shirtwaist novel for almost a year when I found out I was too late. This guy in my workshop, AJ, turned in a story about an ambivalent Jew dressing up as Santa for a Christmastime gig at Macy’s, and talk turned, in much the same way it always does, to the quality and quantity of contemporary Jewish fiction. A British girl commented on all the “similar stories” we MFA kikes persist in composing. She was, ostensibly, referring to all my ten-pagers, all my little Jewish-chick-meets-uncircumcised-dick narratives, to AJ’s tired Jewish Santa, to a guy named Dante’s Leon Uris inflected action-adventures featuring Shin Bet.

“All your stories are the same,” she said, waving vaguely toward AJ and Dante and me, we representative Jewish writers. This girl was working on a novel based loosely on the courtship and marriage of her great-grandparents in late 19th Century Oxford.

“It does seem like there’s a lot of this kind of thing out there already,” offered a sweet asian guy helpfully.

“Well, Jews buy a lot of books,” I snapped, somewhat harshly.

“Yeah,” said adorable Andy, my favorite, with a wink. “Jews buy a lot of everything. You have all the fucking money.”

“There’s a big market for Jewish fiction,” Dante said earnestly. On one enormous bicep he sported an elaborate tattoo memorializing the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. “There are a lot of specifically Jewish book awards and stuff.” The English girl looked annoyed, shrugged dismissively.

“I just feel like I read the same stories over and over again from you guys. They’re great and all, but.”

And then it happened. Someone whipped out a copy of Publishers’ Weekly and we conducted a brief poll, flipping through to informally count up all the reported recent book deals overtly by or about Jews.

Dante, hovering over the issue with Anglophile, let out a manly squeal. “Jesus H. Christ, what’s the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire? Some woman named Alana Orenstein just got mid-six-figures for a ‘genre-busting historical novel’ about it.” The word FUCK, which as I’m sure you know is also an emotion unto itself, in all caps, just like that, crash landed in my brain, in my heart, over my eyeballs, in my bowels. FAH. UCK.

What else was I to feel? My whole year, my entire endeavor, rendered pointless. A waste. My brilliant idea, my literary jackpot, my huge undertaking. My Ettlinger portrait, my Vintage trade paperback, my Safran Foer smack-down: all sucked right back out of the realm of possibility as if by some mysterious, capricious, Biblical-scale force of weather. Alana Orenstein was probably, at that very moment, sitting for Ettlinger in stark, beautiful, black-and-white half-shadow. I’d felt something resembling this large-scale FUCK once before, years ago, when I first read Nathan Englander’s heart-wrenching story about an agunah’s endless electrolysis and had no choice but to bury my own greatly autobiographical burgeoning novella about my own heart-wrenchingly endless hair-removal trials.

All I could see in Portnoy was the specter of all those pathetic fucking guys who didn’t want to fuck me, Philip. That was my tragedy at seventeen: no one wanted to fuck me.

I numbed out. I let Andy buy me a drink (read: five) and then I let him take him home and join me in my very own bed, surrounded by the dozens of index cards I’d put up on all four of my walls bearing the names of my sweet Triangle Shirtwaist babes. I had papered the room with them in an effort to truly live with them, those entrancing names: Yetta, Esther, Gussie, Minnie, Celia, Bess, Pearl, Rosie, Ida, Fannie. Quaint names, evocative of the old ladies those girls had not become.

Andy — “my favorite” because he is more than a man, more than a friend, more than a fuck-buddy: he is my favorite of any man, any friend, any fuck-buddy, and that, in a life full of men, friends, and fuck-buddies, is meaningful — blamed his sub-par performance on feeling freaked out by the names, though it was more than likely that his six whiskeys were to blame. Or, come to think of it, the fact that my bed had been only semi-recently vacated by that man I was supposed to have married, a man so “right” for me and yet simultaneously so heinously wrong for me that I can now hardly think of our engagement as anything more than a valiant attempt at arranged marriage.

Anyway, I didn’t mind Andy’s impotence at all. Fucking him was mostly an excuse to be just that close to him, to have him in my space, to feel his arms around me and feel momentarily understood, briefly gotten, in a way that is most rare indeed (somewhat like I feel when I read you, Philip, it must be said). When I’m with Andy I want, more or less, to wrap myself around him and crawl into a deep, dark hole with him and die with him. Have you ever been with someone like that? Amazing. The truth, anyway, is that I was too inebriated and distraught to be feeling genuinely sexual anyhow. So after that sloppy, comical effort at intercourse, Andy and I held each other (this is probably anathema to you, buddy; I apologize) and he passed out while I gazed drunkenly, dumbly around at those proliferate names, my Etta Kornbluth, my Dora Kirshenbaum, my Minnie Gluck. All still obviously long dead, but somehow even more dead now than before, snatched from me (snatched from the beautiful and infinite resurrection I was planning for them) by Alana Orenstein, by my own tardy, common inspiration. I had so wanted to breathe life into those names, Philip. I had experimented a little with their individual ghosts keeping company with my alter-ego protagonist (a twenty-five-year-old high school teacher by the name of Audrey Rubens who’s just broken it off with her immature and abusive fiance) as she traverses the sometimes-rocky terrain of her post-adolescence in Greenwich Village. Yetta-as-patron-saint-of-marijuana, Gussie-as-patron-saint-of-alcohol, Pearl-as-patron-saint-of-career-confusion, Minnie-as-patron-saint-of-one-night-stands, Unidentified-as-patron-saint-of-the-search-for-love, and so forth.

There I was, Philip, all of twenty-six years old, my hard-won infant novel worthless, my broken engagement still haunting and heartbreaking, my parents still aging and aging and aging without the great reward of grandchildren, my cervix a ticking time-bomb, no health insurance in sight, my beloved graduate program almost over, my agent sitting on my collection until Ploughshares agreed to publish a story (read: indefinitely), temp-agency paperwork waiting for my signature. And the thought that kept me awake that entire night was simply that I could not find the strength within myself to start over on any count. Not on another novel, not on another stultifying relationship which might or might not have led to another engagement/marriage, not on any one of the many, many temp jobs lined up like dominoes as far as the eye could see. And yet I want the same things I’ve always wanted: a life of books and writing and writers, a second chance at rescuing and creating a life for those poor fucking Triangle Shirtwaist kittens, and a family of my very own. So here’s the solution to all of the above, Philip; here’s what occurred to me while I stared into the receeding darkness that night, curled up on the edge of the bed to avoid the wet spot, Andy in a whiskey coma beside me, names, names, names on white index cards circulating in my peripheral vision; here’s my objective, finally, the stage set: I want to bear you a child.

I had so desperately yearned to breathe life into those names, Philip. But now I’ve figured out an even better way to do that; a way to produce something literary and lasting; a way to prove, once and for all (while we’re at it) the existence of God. I want to have your child. If I can’t be the heir to your literary throne, I’d like at least then to be the vessel for the manufacture of an actual heir, flesh-and-blood proof, once you’re gone and the books are all that’s otherwise left of you, that you were here, that I read you, and that it meant something special, something singular and personal and only between the two of us. (The overtones here of traditional groupie-hood and falsely-empowering femininity are hard to outrun, but quite frankly, and I hope you can buy this, I really don’t give a shit.)

Last semester, Dante wrote a farcical novella called “Getting Rid Of Roth”, about a group of young Jewish writers who privately enlist ex-Mossad agents to track you down and murder you so that they can be liberated out from under the long literary shadow you continually cast. I suppose you could say my literary response to your legacy (how very post-post-post-whatever) is the flipside of that coin, no?

Okay, now. The practicalities. I don’t want any money. I have a small, livable trust fund courtesy of my paternal grandmother (who I never met, and who invested cannily in the stock market, and who, it would seem, continues here the theme of long-dead would-be old ladies assuming center stage). My sweetly clueless parents, confronted with their only daughter pregnant by no man in sight, will surely help me in any way they can. Frankly, given the awful dearth of naches they’ve gotten from their three children (again: one dead, one useless, and me, trying now to make good after my spectacularly humiliating broken engagement), I expect full-onbubbe/zayde joy, the mystery of conception notwithstanding.

You can change a few diapers or you can be completely absent. You can watch her grow in monthly or annual or bi-annual pictures or you can take her to a Yankee game now and again (I heard about your big abandonment of the Mets) or you can have her up at your house in Connecticut summers. Or winters. We can live with you or near you or we can live across the country. I don’t care. It can be strictly our secret or you can send a press release to the New York Times. You won’t have to worry about a goddamn thing, Philip. I’ve got me some nice birthing hips (apple-shaped, like my mother’s, which she claims makes child-bearing relatively easy) and I’ll be a wonderful, loving, responsible mother. I’ll grow roses and herbs and bake delicious vegan cookies. Send her to alternative day school alongside Hebrew school, sing her Free to Be…You and Me when she can’t sleep, read her books and books and more books, disallow more than an hour or two of TV a week (but not in an arbitrarily authoritarian manner), teach her to be kind, generous, self-aware, inquisitive, ethical, shrewd. Laugh a lot.

The big question, though, is whether you still have the capacity for ejaculation. Did prostate cancer leave you the way Zuckerman’s left him? Has Cancer (or age) made, at long last, a cuddler of you? And if so, (I know I’m grasping here) did you by any lucky spot of foresight (or optimism) take the step of putting away some semen in some lab/clinic/whatever? This strikes me as something you might have done, you freaky old man. We won’t get into the cosmic irony that may have wrested from the century’s most unabashedly virile writer (that was not meant pejoratively) his power to orgasm, his power, even, maybe, to get hard. Isn’t that just like the goddamn universe, though? Christ, Philip. But these technical matters we’ll discuss later. Science is still pretty far from allowing a scenario where we might simply skin your elbow for some DNA, etc. But who knows? Let’s burn that bridge when we get to it.

Anyway, your teacher and friend Saul Bellow sired a daughter when he was a good deal older than you are now, Philip. And no disrespect, but he wasn’t half the writer you are. (Am I implying that he had thusly less of a right to procreate? That the world needs his offspring not as much as it needs yours? Maybe.)

I like Dora, or Celia. Or Etta. Pearl, too, or Yetta. Bessie’s nice. And Rose. Minnie, I think, because of the automatic suffix “Mouse”, would make her life fairly miserable, as would Gussie, for disparate, less concrete reasons. But I’ll let you pick. I will send you the list and you can choose.

I’ve figured out an even better way to produce something literary and lasting; a way to prove, once and for all (while we’re at it) the existence of God. I want to have your child.

I can plainly see that you yearn, even fleetingly, for offspring. I can see that it’s a hole. The longing is there, plain as day, right there in your work, in you like it’s in me. I’m quite perceptive that way, literarily (even my high school English teacher said so!). There were all those abortions, all those near-misses (there really were quite a few, Philip, come on). Your sweet and tender step-fathering of your first wife’s daughter. You yourself were named for two dead uncles, and there’s a pride in that, clearly. And I can hear the voice of Nathan’s self-righteous prick of a brother Henry, in Zuckerman Unbound: “I have a son! I know what it is to have a son, and you don’t, you selfish bastard, and you never will!” You knew just how Henry could get at Nathan where he lived, didn’t you, Philip, because you invented them both? Well, fuck Henry. Fuck Claire Bloom, fuck Alana Orenstein, fuck Safran Foer, fuck the hipper-than-thou editors at Shtetl Fabulous who’ve rejected every single one of my retarded, inconsequential stories, fuck my nutbag fiancé, fuck my sadly lacking family, fuck, even, finally, Andy, my goyische, alcoholic favorite. Fuck the provincial, unimaginative Jews who made both our lives living hell for so long. Fuck Cancer! Fuck the capitalist pigs who locked a hundred and fifty teenaged girls into that fucking factory! Fuck the unions for not mobilizing until after the fact. Fuck death!

Listen. Portnoy had it right. What do you have to show for yourself, you stubborn misanthropic fucking codger? Children should be playing on this earth who look like you! Children should be playing on this earth who look like a lot of people, asshole, and life isn’t the least bit fair. So do your part to make good on your existence while you still have the chance.

Because it’s not too late. It’s not at all too late! Until they put you into the ground you still have the chance to make something real, something alive, something no one can burn up: not in a stack of dried-out paper and ink, not in a grimy locked factory, and not even in a motherfucking gas chamber, you shriveled dickhead. Why would you pass this opportunity up?

A week after the Alana Orenstein bombshell – a week during which I did very little other than watch television, read Star magazine, smoke pot, eat candy, and sleep — I had the following dream: I was eight months pregnant, hugely with child, visiting a midwife for checkup. The midwife, in full white-lab-coat regalia, turned out to be none other than Lorrie Moore, whose story “How to Be A Writer” (from Self Help, 1985) made, at fourteen when first I read it, a writer out of me.

“Lorrie Moore!” I exclaimed. “Oh my God! I love you!” She was inspecting my chart and seemed unimpressed by my recognition of her. Then I had a thought, realizing that Birds of America came out almost six years ago. “Do you still write?” I asked. She looked up at me with those sweet sad eyes of hers.

“Nah,” she said. “Not really. I mostly do this now.” Then she went back to my chart before the obligatory, not (in dream-land) entirely unpleasant pelvic exam. (I have gone resolutely against the dictum of ‘write a dream, lose a reader’ in this instance because a) this dream really did occur! Truly! And b) it’s extraordinarily, perfectly telling, and I am just not writer enough to resist that. If you’d been born to ever-so-slightly different first-generation American Jews and raised on Long Island you’d be Billy Joel, okay dude? So don’t be so goddamn hard on everyone.)

In the dream I left the appointment buoyed, as happy as I’ve ever been conscious, but as I walked (bouncing more than walking, on soft, rubbery earth) I began to hear the ending of that famous Strauss piece (you know the one – Also Sprach Zarathustra, it’s called, relegated now by Stanley Kubrick to ubiquitous diaper commercials and the like?). It was the ending, with its mournful group call and response: violins, harp, oboes, and flutes versus trombones, cellos, and contrabasses, which sounded to me as it grew louder and louder more and more like a Please? answered by No followed by another beseeching please? and another resonant no and then yet another please? until finally there are those three unassailable ending bass answers: no, no, no. It was my alarm clock, set to classical radio, awakening me. And as I came fully into consciousness I was aware only of those last three nos, putting an end to my dreams, to my hopes, to that unconscious joy, evocative of the loss of everything I’ve ever sought: the novel, the marriage, the boyfriend at summer camp. And this too, probably. I’m not stupid. At most, maybe I’ll twist things around and have a funny meta-story with which to close out my collection, if it ever finds a home. And someday maybe I’ll have some other man’s baby, give her some thoughtlessly co-opted, vaguely ethnic, trendy name, write book reviews for my local Jewish weekly, lie awake at night marveling at the stultifying limitations of my life.

Kinky Friedman never had any kids. I’ll write to him.

Fine. I’ll just tear a page from the Roth playbook and simply turn this letter into a kind of post-modern “story” (and I’ll even leave this part in to further confuse and complicate, to experiment with implicating myself, the “Elisa Albert” alter-ego, in all these ways you yourself are so adept with, see how it feels, how you must feel, when people assume fact is fiction and fiction fact, when people read your writing and assume they know you. Am I guilty of that, too? I suppose I am, and I’m sorry, Philip. It’s just that I love you). I’ll write it to Nathan Zuckerman from Audrey Rubens.

In an interview I read somewhere once you speak of writing and publishing fiction as akin to packing a suitcase and then leaving it in the middle of the street, powerless to control its fate, its safety, its order, its intention, its meaning. And that’s what this is. That’s what any human interaction is, isn’t it? “People are infallible,” you wrote in American Pastoral. “They pick up on what you want and then they don’t give it to you.” (p. 278). Isn’t that just what you meant? Anytime you seek connection, want something, make an attempt to explain yourself? A suitcase left in a bus station. So it is. I am the fiction; the suitcase is myself.

 

Yours,

Elisa

 

* * *

Elisa Albert is the author of After Birth , The Book of Dahlia , and How This Night is Different . She is at work on short stories and a new novel.

After Birth, by Elisa Albert

Review:

As we approach Mother’s Day in the U.S., pop culture has lately been reassuring me that my decision to never have children is a good one.

Most recently, I went to see the movie Tully, in which a woman who’s just had her third child struggles to sleep and care for herself until finally she relents and accepts her brother’s gift of a night nanny. Life for her improves markedly, perhaps magically (for a reason).

Inspired by Tully, I consciously chose to read After Birth. Might as well ride this wave of mother-related trauma, I thought. The novel follows Ari, a first time mother, over the course of three months, her son just turning one. It flashes back to when she was pregnant, endured what she feels was a needless C-section, and when what is likely to be post-partum depression ensues.

In its bitterness, its sometimes funny rants and ambivalence about Jewish identity, After Birth felt of a piece with Albert’s first novel, The Book of Dahlia, which I read last year. I admired that book for its stubbornly unforgiving protagonist, dying of brain cancer. Similarly, Ari’s often caustic, volatile voice, her resentment at modern birth practices and various mothering cliques, as well as the unnecessary isolation of motherhood, was often refreshing to read. Sometimes, however, it became a bit much for me.

Ari wrestles with her past, doomed relationships with other women, including her mean mother, who died of cancer when she was young, former friends, roommates, lovers. In the present, she befriends and helps a new mom who was in a seminal feminist band. This relationship enables Ari to “grow up,” to perhaps become less judgmental or bitter about the women in her life, and those who may become a part of her life.

Like everything else, motherhood in the U.S. has become commodified, both as an inextricable part of the health care industry and as a way to sell “stuff” that mothers have done without for ages. The most valuable, engaging aspect of After Birth is the insistence that, however individual birth plans and approaches to mothering may be, women are not meant to raise children on their own (whether there’s a man or not); we’re meant to help each other.

Original post:

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O, Small-bany! Part 1: Spring

Elisa Albert | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,229 words)

They poisoned the water in the lake again. It’s actually more of an enormous pond. They poison it a few times a year. I’m not listening to music, for a change. My battery’s at 10%, anyway, and I want to eavesdrop. Washington Park’s full of people. Just like the Seurat painting, minus the class status and pointillism.

There’s a black man fishing with his tiny son crouching beside him. The man’s biceps are impressively built and inked. The boy says, “Tell me when you see a fish.” There’s a middle-aged white couple with a contented aura, walking a mid-sized grey mutt. There’s a very petite brown woman in tight blue athleisure berating a man who is pushing a baby in a stroller. Not a status stroller. Athleisure woman is on this man about something. He hadn’t been on time to pick her up. He is playing it cool (“Well, I came, didn’t I?”) but she is unrelenting (“Not when you said you would! Not til after you…”) and then they are out of earshot. There’s a young white mother from the nearby cult (I’m sorry: Intentional Community), holding a toddler’s hand. The Intentional Community manufactures the kind of old-fashioned wooden toys for which my bored mom friends and I go wild. They live and work in a huge brick mansion near the park. There’s free literature about their intentionality to be had in a little kiosk at the entrance to their driveway. Books about making peace with death and living in accordance with the laws of nature. When I was a new mother, I used to loiter around that kiosk. Should I join? They wear homemade clothing and raise children communally. I yearn deeply for the latter but I have a quasi-sexual weakness for fashion, and ultimately I’m not much of a joiner. The young mother in her homemade ankle-length skirt and bonnet is talking to a black man on a bench by the boathouse. He rests one arm on yet another stroller (not status), in which sits a toddler with a delightful head of tight, ombre ringlets. The man reaches out his hand to me.

“Hello!” he says, like we know each other; I don’t think we know each other.

“How are you?” he wonders.

I smile, nod: fine, fine, thank you, and you? I do this intuitive sort of bow, and continue on my way. The cult woman slightly glares at me from under her bonnet. Her glare (real? imagined?) trips some anxiety about running into people I’m not fond of, by which I mean people not fond of me. There’s this one woman in particular, your standard bad-vibes-in-small-town situation, and my nervous system goes insane every goddamn time.

***

Officially Albany is a city of a hundred thousand, but it feels like a very small town. Which can make it hard to take a walk sometimes. Small-bany, some call it. Shmalbany, I prefer. Albanality, a friend of mine says, but the syllables don’t work out. There’s not that fantastically freeing anonymity of your big exciting status places. State capitals are often kind of weird places. It’s a small goddamn town. So much chit-chat always waiting to be had. Just around that bend? Just over this hill? Just past that tree? I arrange my face in a blank mask and bland smile, practicing. I catch myself doing so, catch my thoughts circling this dumb anxiety; shake it off. You are safe, I tell myself. My whole goddamn sympathetic nervous system gets caught up in small town anxiety. It’s hard trying to be friends with everyone all the time. It’s okay if not everybody likes you. I used to kind of seek out people with bad energy, try to make them like me, but that only makes them like you less. I learn slowly.

You are safe, I tell myself, and it works. I am safe. Relatively speaking. More often now I seek to avoid or minimize encounters with people who don’t like me, people who bring out the ugly. This is progress, according to the meditation teacher.

Isn’t this the kind of inner drama we all share? Useless, banal. Best kept to oneself, only then how are we to take comfort in the knowledge that we’re all the same!?

***

Two white men are sitting on a bench, sharing a joint. One takes a drag, coughs extensively, sputters, hocks an impressive loogie.

It is the spring of 2016.

There’s the official sign, stapled to a tree: PESTICIDE TREATED WATER. Bright yellow laminated paper. The date is filled in, and the illegible name of some pesticide. Do not swim, 24 hours. Do not drink, 24 hours. Do not fish, 24 hours.

Officially Albany is a city of a hundred thousand, but it feels like a very small town. ‘Small-bany,’ some call it. ‘Shmalbany,’ I prefer. ‘Albanality,’ a friend of mine says, but the syllables don’t work out.

What happens is, people feed the ducks all manner of processed crap and the ducks shit their brains out and the duck shit throws off the PH balance in the water and the algae flourish and everything’s a mess, so: pesticide.

It’s about a mile around the circumference of the lake (enormous pond?), and there’s just that one single, solitary sign. The water smells weird, looks weird. Brackish, with a sort of opalescent film. Sinister, though maybe I’m projecting. I don’t want to be near it. I move through a cloud of weed smoke by the men on the bench, and detour off the lake path.

Once, in Dolores Park in San Francisco, I came upon two tough-looking teenage girls (but affluent; their shoes gave it away) in a cloud of weed smoke. I asked if they knew where I could get some. It was dusk. I was on a work trip, alone and lonely. Offer me a stupid hit, girls.

“Nope,” they said, avoiding eye contact.

“Well fuck you, too,” I muttered as I walked away.

These men would have offered to share, I bet. But then I’d owe them something. Then I’d run into them and they’d know me. Shmalbany.

***

An ice cream truck’s circling the park, trailing its dinky rendition of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” A melancholy pang of missing my kid, who’s at school. Maybe homeschooling is the way. Maybe I should join the cult. Maybe my quasi-sexual weakness for fashion is holding me back. Maybe we could sit in the park all day eavesdropping and eating ice cream, wearing homemade clothing in a perpetual spring.

I worry for the ice cream truck. Is there enough business? Last year, over Sno-Cones, I asked the driver how it was going.

“Not so good,” he said.

I hope the ice cream truck will be alright. What’s a park without an ice cream truck? It would be just like Shmalbany to fail to sustain a goddamn ice cream truck.

When I was 10, 11, 12, living with my mother in a Beverly Hills rental apartment right on Roxbury Park, there was a great ice cream truck. A thirtysomething Persian man ran it. He had a thick, perfect mustache, meticulous comb-over, and melodious accent. He had an eager, unselfconscious grin. He adored me for some reason. Whenever I think of him I am amazed that this story doesn’t take a dark turn. No dark turn whatsoever. This man gave me free Big Sticks two, three times a week, and that’s not a euphemism. He invited me into his truck and he grinned his enormously kind grin and he told me I was wonderful, beautiful, smart, good. He told me I could come to his truck anytime I wanted, anytime I wanted, I could hang out with him, and he would love it. I wonder if I’m suppressing some memory, here. What are the odds? Reader, that man did not rape me.

My mother was I don’t even know what to call it, my oldest brother had gone far away to college, my middle brother had more or less gone to live with friends, and I had no idea where my father was. San Luis Obispo, maybe? The ice cream man was sort of all I had. And I’m so very sorry to tell you that I ghosted him after a while, because what kind of weirdo would adore me? His adoration and his kindness creeped me the fuck out. This, unfortunately, is more or less how I continued to conduct myself in intimate relations for the following two decades.

***

I venture up toward the playground, where the slide’s still busted. It’s been busted for a year. Obviously, the city doesn’t want to pay for a whole new play structure. They’re much too busy widening the highway to better accommodate the bomb trains. The bomb trains run right alongside the projects. Periodically there’s a public hearing to voice environmental concerns, but no one outside the projects gives much of a shit.

There’s an orange cone sitting atop the hole in the slide. A dozen tiny kids from the church daycare on Lancaster are exhorted to avoid the cone, the slide. I’ll have to write a letter. A series of letters. Who do they think they are, compromising the play of our city’s children? Who do they think they are, compromising the air quality of our city’s residents? I am outraged.

(You are safe.)

(Am I!?)

Albany’s a long way from Beverly Hills. What kind of idiot grows up in Beverly Hills and winds up living in Albany!? Might as well be Siberia.

(This idiot.)

This park was conscripted to public use in the city’s 1686 charter. Bordered by Madison Avenue (four-lanes, people driving too fast, pathetic few blocks of on-street bike lanes despite tireless advocacy, lined with makeshift/failing small businesses and the grandest seen-better-days brownstones you can imagine, crosswalks in dire need of repainting), Willett Street (one way, people driving too fast, ditto the brownstones), State Street (same, same), and South Lake (two lanes, way too fast, same).

“Academic bride,” I tell urbane acquaintances who, with subtle grimaces, wonder why. Interesting how many Brooklyn lefties full of self-righteous social media activism wouldn’t think to set foot north of Hudson.

***

PEOPLE LIVE HERE, I occasionally scream at cars going too fast. Call it a hobby. There’s a pedestrian-right-of-way at the entrance to the park from Hudson Ave. It boasts a three-foot-high fluorescent yellow sign that is more often than not lying on its side. Last year I wrote to the Mayor and the city engineer and our councilman and neighborhood association president, got 50 friends and neighbors to co-sign.

Could we please get some speed bumps around the park? (No, because emergency vehicles would be hindered.) Could we please increase signage? (They’d take this into careful consideration.) Could we please get a ton of reflective road-signs installed? (Maybe!) Could we reduce the speed limit in the park? (Maybe!)

I’m so glad you’ve chosen to raise your family here, said the Mayor in her response.

Nothing’s changed. A state worker advises me to resend the same letter twice a week in perpetuity. This I have not done. I should. I will.

My whole goddamn sympathetic nervous system gets caught up in small town anxiety. It’s hard trying to be friends with everyone all the time. It’s okay if not everybody likes you.

If I’m in a pissy mood and people are blowing through that crosswalk, I sometimes holler YOU HAVE TO STOP! Sometimes I even shake my fist.

If I especially don’t want to sit at my desk and work, I’ll occasionally just saunter slowly back and forth across that crosswalk for a good 10 or 15 minutes, making every. Single. Vehicle. Stop. That’s right, fuckheads, the world ain’t your highway.

Once I screamed YOU HAVE TO FUCKING STOP at a black BMW. I hadn’t done my meditation practice that day.

I enjoy my ineffective brand of urban-renewal activism.

At least Rockefeller didn’t manage to build the highway through the park like he wanted to. Nelson A. Rockefeller. Can’t talk about Albany without talking about that piece of shit. Ashamed of the city’s perceived shabbiness (all those “ethnic” neighborhoods!), he decided to transform it, leave his mark, blah blah, eminent domain, blah blah, razed a thousand perfectly good 19th century brownstones, destroyed the South End, desiccated the vibrant immigrant communities therein, paved over the trolley tracks, and installed his massive concrete state capitol complex (which is, admittedly, sort of cool, now that it’s a fact, but if we could turn back time…).

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The dumb highway Nelson did build blocks pedestrian access to the Hudson River almost entirely: one lousy footbridge can take you from Broadway up and over the dumb highway so you can sit or walk on the bank of the river like a goddamn human animal. A single solitary footbridge. Singular: one footbridge. To connect the homo sapiens of the capital city of New York State to our majestic river. In all fairness, the river stank so bad in the ‘60s that no one wanted to be near it. A poisoned river. Save us from ourselves, Nelson A! Save us from the stinking river, Pete Seeger!

***

The year he was 5, my kid was really into Pete Seeger. Also cops. He wore a cop uniform every single day. Had to wash it while he slept. He wrote endless parking tickets and constantly stopped by our local precinct to say hi to “our buddies.” He was in a super-ego phase, I guess.

The cops adored my little guy. They showed him around over and over again, day in and day out, let him sit in squad cars, flash the lights, run the sirens. They gave him blank tickets and violation slips. (“Not supposed to do this,” they always told me.) They gave him patient, detailed tours of their uniforms and squad cars. Eventually they even let him hang out in the break room, which meant that I, too, spent a lot of time in local precinct break rooms. I’d bat my lashes: Thank you so much, guys. Every day the kid would show up with a thank you card for the day before; soon their walls were covered. He knew their names and ranks. They called out to him from squad cars all over town.

It was the height of Black Lives Matter. Cops were very, very bad. Hanging over highway I-90 was a huge, loathsome “Blue Lives Matter” billboard, paid for by the Police Association.

Everywhere my kid went in uniform, without fail, white people grinned and said “Thanks for keeping us safe, son!” or “Keep up the good work, kid!” And people of color grinned and said, “Don’t arrest me!” Or “I didn’t do nothing!” or “It was him, not me!” Or, most shockingly, “Don’t shoot!” We watched identical scenes unfold everywhere we went that year: Albany, Troy, Hudson, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Los Angeles.

One of our neighborhood bike cops worked out of the basement of a flower shop on Lark, don’t ask me why. The girl at the counter has a huge black beehive and makes these neat rockabilly glitter-and-neon tiki mask paintings.

“Is Kevin around?” my little son would saunter in and casually ask.

“What up, buddy,” Kevin would say, emerging from basement stairs carpeted in rose petals. Kevin was an Adonis. Even I was a little obsessed with Kevin.

I asked Kevin and some of the other cops to patrol the pedestrian crosswalk, nail some drivers blowing heedlessly through. At the end of that summer I bought two tiki paintings from the flower shop girl. Neon green on pink glitter and red on turquoise glitter. They hang above my desk. Tiki masks are said to provide protection and luck. I wanted them in the entry hall or the dining room, but they freaked my husband out.

***

I leave the park, walk toward Central Ave, Albany’s United Nations. Caribbean deli, Halal butcher, knock-off brand-name street clothes, cell phone stores, Vietnamese place, Chinese noodles, Pakistani food, Kosher vegetarian place (soon to close). Arty fucks from downstate are always coming up here to shop at the Asian market, then hightail it back to their fifteen-dollar cocktails and farm-to-table.

Right turn onto Lark, which has seen better days. The denizens of this bus stop in particular seem as good a litmus test as any for the health and sanity of our citizenry. Suffice it to say: seen better days.

The regularity of window-rattling bass is a given. Gangs of choppers, modified sedans. There is sometimes an electric sign warning against noise pollution. The sign comes and goes.

Albany’s a long way from Beverly Hills. What kind of idiot grows up in Beverly Hills and winds up living in Albany!? Might as well be Siberia. ‘Academic Bride,’ I tell urbane acquaintances who, with subtle grimaces, wonder why.

There’s Jamella, who works at the espresso place. Hi, Jamella. There’s “The Mayor”, a semi-homeless guy who washes windows and shovels snow for ten bucks. Hey, Mayor. In a few months he’ll go bonkers and smash the front window of the crappy dry cleaner for no apparent reason. There’s one of the Arab brothers who owns NoHo Pizza. Not to be confused with SoHo Pizza, a few blocks down. Hey, pizza guy.

A massive New England banking chain recently ditched their flagship in the grand old savings bank on the corner, and people said this is it, this is really the end of Lark Street. Grim! But soon a church called “New Hope” took over the space, and who could argue with that?

New construction over on Lark and Madison, in a long-vacant lot where they once found “historical artifacts” (read: human remains). The ground floor retail has been empty for three years and counting, because they’re asking laughably high rent. I’m guessing the developer doesn’t live here.

For a while I was convinced that Albany’s salvation rested on American Apparel opening an outpost in that space. I wrote a letter, suggested they “refine their brand” by setting up shop here. It would be their only Hudson Valley/Capital Region store, and didn’t they know about what was happening in this area? All the Brooklyn refugees and so forth? (Lies!) And wouldn’t their brand profit, branding-wise, from being the first to colonize this gorgeous, haunted old city, rife with punks and actual ethnic and class diversity and all kinds of folk for whom not having to schlep to the godforsaken mall to buy underpants would be a serious miracle? Didn’t they like the idea of being pioneers? I kept throwing around the word brand. Brand! Brand! Brand! Then American Apparel declared bankruptcy and closed all their retail shops all over the world.

I know a woman who waged a successful years-long campaign to bring Trader Joe’s to the Capital Region, but of course they opened that puppy way over at the intersection of all the highways, big-box territory, near the malls, which they’re now talking about filling with hotels and indoor amusement parks, since a lot of folks have by now caught on to the fact that malls are gross and dumb and driving everywhere sucks in every physical and metaphysical and economic and environmental way.

We have our resident boosters: Bloggers, entrepreneurs, local celebrities. For a time we had a shop with Edison bulbs and air plants (it closed). Now there’s another shop with Edison bulbs and air plants. We have a couple okay restaurants. Recently a national chain bought out the adorable independent movie theater and now the movies are less interesting, but there’s another adorable independent theater a mile away showing second runs for five bucks. Their popcorn is made with coconut oil! (In a year it will close, too.) We have a vegan deli and a skateboard shop and two whole other parks. We have a public pool and we have libraries and we have farmers’ markets. We have a bike shop. We have a new, beautiful coffee shop with avocado toast, and we have the best used bookstore in the world. And we have communities so outrageously marginalized you just have to sit in your car at red lights on your way to the stupid highway built to assault said communities, bearing helpless witness. And lord, almighty, do we have strip malls a few miles up the road in any direction. Every direction. Do we ever. Lord Almighty.

We cheer for the smallest signs of gentrification and boo when those small signs of gentrification fizzle. We invite people to visit during the spring, summer, or fall. Lilacs in bloom, birds chirping, cobblestones all cobbled, leaves turning. We picnic in the park. We host house parties. We burn wish paper in the fire pit. We run into neighbors. We are always, always running into neighbors. We watch the sun set on Nelson A’s stupid/outrageous/terrifying/beautiful Plaza. We gawk at the insane modern art collection in the strange underground tunnel system beneath the plaza, which belongs to us, because Nelson left it to the citizens of the State of New York.

“Life seems pretty great here,” say our status-weary visitors.

“Yeah,” we say.

“It could be worse,” we add.

“It has potential,” we decide.

At the espresso place I run into a woman, a new mother who just moved here for grad school. She despises it. I know, I say. I totally, totally know. But honestly, all you need is a few good/real friends and it’s hard to make good/real friends anywhere. I rattle off hikes, day trips, festivals, happenings, nooks and crannies. It takes time, I tell her, but if you put in the work this place reveals itself to be alright.

I am no longer a new mother. I suppose now I’m a seasoned mother. Soon enough I’ll be an Amazon, a Crone, and I’ll joyfully reclaim it in a think piece or ten.

***

Last fall there was a little house for sale in a beautiful town in the Berkshires. I wanted to move. Let’s get out of here, I whined. Having traded the dank one-bedroom in Brooklyn with terrible vibes for this Albany townhouse, we could now trade the Albany townhouse for a pastoral cottage within walking distance to a (presumably non-poisoned, or as non-poisoned as anything is anymore) lake and sweet town at the foot of a mountain an hour from any airport.

We didn’t do it.

One of my students tells me the Native Americans avoided Albany, claiming that this place has circular energy. It could trap you, and keep you.

I continue holding forth for the new mother on the excellent local street art: the black-and-white bicyclist on the corner of Henry Johnson and Washington; the stunning elk in the parking lot between Spring St. and Washington; the Bluebirds commissioned by the city on the side of a concrete parking garage facing the highway on the river; the head of Rockefeller assaulted by a Sven Lukin piece way downtown. (“People come to take pictures all the time,” the man in the utterly dilapidated brown row house next door told me when I stopped once to take a picture.)

Oh and had she been to Troy yet? Troy is cool. Troy: forget about it. Troy is so freaking cool it is almost too late for Troy. Get your real estate while the gettin’s good! Or no, wait, actually: don’t!

***

One of the cops who was always so nice to my kid turned up in the news shortly after Halloween. He had used “excessive force” with a 12-year-old, and he had been suspended, at which point it was uncovered that he had used excessive force with an elderly man a few years back. Now he was permanently suspended.

***

I wander over to the used bookstore in search of Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, which I score, alongside Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Montaigne’s Complete Essays, and Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet. I spend a grand total of $19 on this haul.

My whole family lives in West L.A. I think they’re a little embarrassed by my living here. Al-bay-nee, they called it for a long time, like Al the plumber.

***

Time to get in the car to pick the kid up from school. Driving is my least favorite thing.

We have a snack and ride bikes into the park. We dismount at the pedestrian crosswalk, because, as I always tell him, cars are big idiot asshole monsters and want to kill you. The boy has learned to hold up his hand in a STOP gesture, wait for oncoming cars to stop, then cross.

One of my students tells me the Native Americans avoided Albany, claiming that this place has circular energy. It could trap you, and keep you.

“Let’s see if people are gonna be jerks today,” he says. No idea where he picked up that line.

They are not jerks today. He waves to drivers as he crosses, shouts “Thank you!” They wave back, beaming, then gun their engines and burn rubber.

Later, on the way back from the playground, we stop in our tracks when we hear the tell-tale tinkling of “The Entertainer.” Ice cream truck! That direction, over there, heading this way! The tinkling gets louder, and we see the truck approach. Kid gallops toward it, waving his arms maniacally.

“If you get hit by a car I’ll kill you!” I holler. But even the briefest imagining of that makes me fucking nauseous, and I’m immediately on the verge of tears (see also: nervous system), worrying that if he does ever get hit by a car (GOD FORBID) his last thought might be worry that I’m going to be mad at him, and how horrible that would be. This is what it’s like to be a mother. Time to meditate some more.

Hey! Hey! Ice cream truck!! HEY! HEY!!

We’re on a patch of grass by the road, jumping up and down, our hands in the air. But the truck doesn’t see us, doesn’t stop. We watch it speed right through the crosswalk. It must be going 50mph.

* * *

Elisa Albert is the author of After Birth , The Book of Dahlia , and How This Night is Different . She is at work on short stories and a new novel.

Editor: Sari Botton

O, Small-bany! Part 1

Elisa Albert | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,229 words)

They poisoned the water in the lake again. It’s actually more of an enormous pond. They poison it a few times a year. I’m not listening to music, for a change. My battery’s at 10%, anyway, and I want to eavesdrop. Washington Park’s full of people. Just like the Seurat painting, minus the class status and pointillism.

There’s a black man fishing with his tiny son crouching beside him. The man’s biceps are impressively built and inked. The boy says, “Tell me when you see a fish.” There’s a middle-aged white couple with a contented aura, walking a mid-sized grey mutt. There’s a very petite brown woman in tight blue athleisure berating a man who is pushing a baby in a stroller. Not a status stroller. Athleisure woman is on this man about something. He hadn’t been on time to pick her up. He is playing it cool (“Well, I came, didn’t I?”) but she is unrelenting (“Not when you said you would! Not til after you…”) and then they are out of earshot. There’s a young white mother from the nearby cult (I’m sorry: Intentional Community), holding a toddler’s hand. The Intentional Community manufactures the kind of old-fashioned wooden toys for which my bored mom friends and I go wild. They live and work in a huge brick mansion near the park. There’s free literature about their intentionality to be had in a little kiosk at the entrance to their driveway. Books about making peace with death and living in accordance with the laws of nature. When I was a new mother, I used to loiter around that kiosk. Should I join? They wear homemade clothing and raise children communally. I yearn deeply for the latter but I have a quasi-sexual weakness for fashion, and ultimately I’m not much of a joiner. The young mother in her homemade ankle-length skirt and bonnet is talking to a black man on a bench by the boathouse. He rests one arm on yet another stroller (not status), in which sits a toddler with a delightful head of tight, ombre ringlets. The man reaches out his hand to me.

“Hello!” he says, like we know each other; I don’t think we know each other.

“How are you?” he wonders.

I smile, nod: fine, fine, thank you, and you? I do this intuitive sort of bow, and continue on my way. The cult woman slightly glares at me from under her bonnet. Her glare (real? imagined?) trips some anxiety about running into people I’m not fond of, by which I mean people not fond of me. There’s this one woman in particular, your standard bad-vibes-in-small-town situation, and my nervous system goes insane every goddamn time.

***

Officially Albany is a city of a hundred thousand, but it feels like a very small town. Which can make it hard to take a walk sometimes. Small-bany, some call it. Shmalbany, I prefer. Albanality, a friend of mine says, but the syllables don’t work out. There’s not that fantastically freeing anonymity of your big exciting status places. State capitals are often kind of weird places. It’s a small goddamn town. So much chit-chat always waiting to be had. Just around that bend? Just over this hill? Just past that tree? I arrange my face in a blank mask and bland smile, practicing. I catch myself doing so, catch my thoughts circling this dumb anxiety; shake it off. You are safe, I tell myself. My whole goddamn sympathetic nervous system gets caught up in small town anxiety. It’s hard trying to be friends with everyone all the time. It’s okay if not everybody likes you. I used to kind of seek out people with bad energy, try to make them like me, but that only makes them like you less. I learn slowly.

You are safe, I tell myself, and it works. I am safe. Relatively speaking. More often now I seek to avoid or minimize encounters with people who don’t like me, people who bring out the ugly. This is progress, according to the meditation teacher.

Isn’t this the kind of inner drama we all share? Useless, banal. Best kept to oneself, only then how are we to take comfort in the knowledge that we’re all the same!?

***

Two white men are sitting on a bench, sharing a joint. One takes a drag, coughs extensively, sputters, hocks an impressive loogie.

It is the spring of 2016.

There’s the official sign, stapled to a tree: PESTICIDE TREATED WATER. Bright yellow laminated paper. The date is filled in, and the illegible name of some pesticide. Do not swim, 24 hours. Do not drink, 24 hours. Do not fish, 24 hours.

Officially Albany is a city of a hundred thousand, but it feels like a very small town. ‘Small-bany,’ some call it. ‘Shmalbany,’ I prefer. ‘Albanality,’ a friend of mine says, but the syllables don’t work out.

What happens is, people feed the ducks all manner of processed crap and the ducks shit their brains out and the duck shit throws off the PH balance in the water and the algae flourish and everything’s a mess, so: pesticide.

It’s about a mile around the circumference of the lake (enormous pond?), and there’s just that one single, solitary sign. The water smells weird, looks weird. Brackish, with a sort of opalescent film. Sinister, though maybe I’m projecting. I don’t want to be near it. I move through a cloud of weed smoke by the men on the bench, and detour off the lake path.

Once, in Dolores Park in San Francisco, I came upon two tough-looking teenage girls (but affluent; their shoes gave it away) in a cloud of weed smoke. I asked if they knew where I could get some. It was dusk. I was on a work trip, alone and lonely. Offer me a stupid hit, girls.

“Nope,” they said, avoiding eye contact.

“Well fuck you, too,” I muttered as I walked away.

These men would have offered to share, I bet. But then I’d owe them something. Then I’d run into them and they’d know me. Shmalbany.

***

An ice cream truck’s circling the park, trailing its dinky rendition of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” A melancholy pang of missing my kid, who’s at school. Maybe homeschooling is the way. Maybe I should join the cult. Maybe my quasi-sexual weakness for fashion is holding me back. Maybe we could sit in the park all day eavesdropping and eating ice cream, wearing homemade clothing in a perpetual spring.

I worry for the ice cream truck. Is there enough business? Last year, over Sno-Cones, I asked the driver how it was going.

“Not so good,” he said.

I hope the ice cream truck will be alright. What’s a park without an ice cream truck? It would be just like Shmalbany to fail to sustain a goddamn ice cream truck.

When I was 10, 11, 12, living with my mother in a Beverly Hills rental apartment right on Roxbury Park, there was a great ice cream truck. A thirtysomething Persian man ran it. He had a thick, perfect mustache, meticulous comb-over, and melodious accent. He had an eager, unselfconscious grin. He adored me for some reason. Whenever I think of him I am amazed that this story doesn’t take a dark turn. No dark turn whatsoever. This man gave me free Big Sticks two, three times a week, and that’s not a euphemism. He invited me into his truck and he grinned his enormously kind grin and he told me I was wonderful, beautiful, smart, good. He told me I could come to his truck anytime I wanted, anytime I wanted, I could hang out with him, and he would love it. I wonder if I’m suppressing some memory, here. What are the odds? Reader, that man did not rape me.

My mother was I don’t even know what to call it, my oldest brother had gone far away to college, my middle brother had more or less gone to live with friends, and I had no idea where my father was. San Luis Obispo, maybe? The ice cream man was sort of all I had. And I’m so very sorry to tell you that I ghosted him after a while, because what kind of weirdo would adore me? His adoration and his kindness creeped me the fuck out. This, unfortunately, is more or less how I continued to conduct myself in intimate relations for the following two decades.

***

I venture up toward the playground, where the slide’s still busted. It’s been busted for a year. Obviously, the city doesn’t want to pay for a whole new play structure. They’re much too busy widening the highway to better accommodate the bomb trains. The bomb trains run right alongside the projects. Periodically there’s a public hearing to voice environmental concerns, but no one outside the projects gives much of a shit.

There’s an orange cone sitting atop the hole in the slide. A dozen tiny kids from the church daycare on Lancaster are exhorted to avoid the cone, the slide. I’ll have to write a letter. A series of letters. Who do they think they are, compromising the play of our city’s children? Who do they think they are, compromising the air quality of our city’s residents? I am outraged.

(You are safe.)

(Am I!?)

Albany’s a long way from Beverly Hills. What kind of idiot grows up in Beverly Hills and winds up living in Albany!? Might as well be Siberia.

(This idiot.)

This park was conscripted to public use in the city’s 1686 charter. Bordered by Madison Avenue (four-lanes, people driving too fast, pathetic few blocks of on-street bike lanes despite tireless advocacy, lined with makeshift/failing small businesses and the grandest seen-better-days brownstones you can imagine, crosswalks in dire need of repainting), Willett Street (one way, people driving too fast, ditto the brownstones), State Street (same, same), and South Lake (two lanes, way too fast, same).

“Academic bride,” I tell urbane acquaintances who, with subtle grimaces, wonder why. Interesting how many Brooklyn lefties full of self-righteous social media activism wouldn’t think to set foot north of Hudson.

***

PEOPLE LIVE HERE, I occasionally scream at cars going too fast. Call it a hobby. There’s a pedestrian-right-of-way at the entrance to the park from Hudson Ave. It boasts a three-foot-high fluorescent yellow sign that is more often than not lying on its side. Last year I wrote to the Mayor and the city engineer and our councilman and neighborhood association president, got 50 friends and neighbors to co-sign.

Could we please get some speed bumps around the park? (No, because emergency vehicles would be hindered.) Could we please increase signage? (They’d take this into careful consideration.) Could we please get a ton of reflective road-signs installed? (Maybe!) Could we reduce the speed limit in the park? (Maybe!)

I’m so glad you’ve chosen to raise your family here, said the Mayor in her response.

Nothing’s changed. A state worker advises me to resend the same letter twice a week in perpetuity. This I have not done. I should. I will.

My whole goddamn sympathetic nervous system gets caught up in small town anxiety. It’s hard trying to be friends with everyone all the time. It’s okay if not everybody likes you.

If I’m in a pissy mood and people are blowing through that crosswalk, I sometimes holler YOU HAVE TO STOP! Sometimes I even shake my fist.

If I especially don’t want to sit at my desk and work, I’ll occasionally just saunter slowly back and forth across that crosswalk for a good 10 or 15 minutes, making every. Single. Vehicle. Stop. That’s right, fuckheads, the world ain’t your highway.

Once I screamed YOU HAVE TO FUCKING STOP at a black BMW. I hadn’t done my meditation practice that day.

I enjoy my ineffective brand of urban-renewal activism.

At least Rockefeller didn’t manage to build the highway through the park like he wanted to. Nelson A. Rockefeller. Can’t talk about Albany without talking about that piece of shit. Ashamed of the city’s perceived shabbiness (all those “ethnic” neighborhoods!), he decided to transform it, leave his mark, blah blah, eminent domain, blah blah, razed a thousand perfectly good 19th century brownstones, destroyed the South End, desiccated the vibrant immigrant communities therein, paved over the trolley tracks, and installed his massive concrete state capitol complex (which is, admittedly, sort of cool, now that it’s a fact, but if we could turn back time…).

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The dumb highway Nelson did build blocks pedestrian access to the Hudson River almost entirely: one lousy footbridge can take you from Broadway up and over the dumb highway so you can sit or walk on the bank of the river like a goddamn human animal. A single solitary footbridge. Singular: one footbridge. To connect the homo sapiens of the capital city of New York State to our majestic river. In all fairness, the river stank so bad in the ‘60s that no one wanted to be near it. A poisoned river. Save us from ourselves, Nelson A! Save us from the stinking river, Pete Seeger!

***

The year he was 5, my kid was really into Pete Seeger. Also cops. He wore a cop uniform every single day. Had to wash it while he slept. He wrote endless parking tickets and constantly stopped by our local precinct to say hi to “our buddies.” He was in a super-ego phase, I guess.

The cops adored my little guy. They showed him around over and over again, day in and day out, let him sit in squad cars, flash the lights, run the sirens. They gave him blank tickets and violation slips. (“Not supposed to do this,” they always told me.) They gave him patient, detailed tours of their uniforms and squad cars. Eventually they even let him hang out in the break room, which meant that I, too, spent a lot of time in local precinct break rooms. I’d bat my lashes: Thank you so much, guys. Every day the kid would show up with a thank you card for the day before; soon their walls were covered. He knew their names and ranks. They called out to him from squad cars all over town.

It was the height of Black Lives Matter. Cops were very, very bad. Hanging over highway I-90 was a huge, loathsome “Blue Lives Matter” billboard, paid for by the Police Association.

Everywhere my kid went in uniform, without fail, white people grinned and said “Thanks for keeping us safe, son!” or “Keep up the good work, kid!” And people of color grinned and said, “Don’t arrest me!” Or “I didn’t do nothing!” or “It was him, not me!” Or, most shockingly, “Don’t shoot!” We watched identical scenes unfold everywhere we went that year: Albany, Troy, Hudson, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Los Angeles.

One of our neighborhood bike cops worked out of the basement of a flower shop on Lark, don’t ask me why. The girl at the counter has a huge black beehive and makes these neat rockabilly glitter-and-neon tiki mask paintings.

“Is Kevin around?” my little son would saunter in and casually ask.

“What up, buddy,” Kevin would say, emerging from basement stairs carpeted in rose petals. Kevin was an Adonis. Even I was a little obsessed with Kevin.

I asked Kevin and some of the other cops to patrol the pedestrian crosswalk, nail some drivers blowing heedlessly through. At the end of that summer I bought two tiki paintings from the flower shop girl. Neon green on pink glitter and red on turquoise glitter. They hang above my desk. Tiki masks are said to provide protection and luck. I wanted them in the entry hall or the dining room, but they freaked my husband out.

***

I leave the park, walk toward Central Ave, Albany’s United Nations. Caribbean deli, Halal butcher, knock-off brand-name street clothes, cell phone stores, Vietnamese place, Chinese noodles, Pakistani food, Kosher vegetarian place (soon to close). Arty fucks from downstate are always coming up here to shop at the Asian market, then hightail it back to their fifteen-dollar cocktails and farm-to-table.

Right turn onto Lark, which has seen better days. The denizens of this bus stop in particular seem as good a litmus test as any for the health and sanity of our citizenry. Suffice it to say: seen better days.

The regularity of window-rattling bass is a given. Gangs of choppers, modified sedans. There is sometimes an electric sign warning against noise pollution. The sign comes and goes.

Albany’s a long way from Beverly Hills. What kind of idiot grows up in Beverly Hills and winds up living in Albany!? Might as well be Siberia. ‘Academic Bride,’ I tell urbane acquaintances who, with subtle grimaces, wonder why.

There’s Jamella, who works at the espresso place. Hi, Jamella. There’s “The Mayor”, a semi-homeless guy who washes windows and shovels snow for ten bucks. Hey, Mayor. In a few months he’ll go bonkers and smash the front window of the crappy dry cleaner for no apparent reason. There’s one of the Arab brothers who owns NoHo Pizza. Not to be confused with SoHo Pizza, a few blocks down. Hey, pizza guy.

A massive New England banking chain recently ditched their flagship in the grand old savings bank on the corner, and people said this is it, this is really the end of Lark Street. Grim! But soon a church called “New Hope” took over the space, and who could argue with that?

New construction over on Lark and Madison, in a long-vacant lot where they once found “historical artifacts” (read: human remains). The ground floor retail has been empty for three years and counting, because they’re asking laughably high rent. I’m guessing the developer doesn’t live here.

For a while I was convinced that Albany’s salvation rested on American Apparel opening an outpost in that space. I wrote a letter, suggested they “refine their brand” by setting up shop here. It would be their only Hudson Valley/Capital Region store, and didn’t they know about what was happening in this area? All the Brooklyn refugees and so forth? (Lies!) And wouldn’t their brand profit, branding-wise, from being the first to colonize this gorgeous, haunted old city, rife with punks and actual ethnic and class diversity and all kinds of folk for whom not having to schlep to the godforsaken mall to buy underpants would be a serious miracle? Didn’t they like the idea of being pioneers? I kept throwing around the word brand. Brand! Brand! Brand! Then American Apparel declared bankruptcy and closed all their retail shops all over the world.

I know a woman who waged a successful years-long campaign to bring Trader Joe’s to the Capital Region, but of course they opened that puppy way over at the intersection of all the highways, big-box territory, near the malls, which they’re now talking about filling with hotels and indoor amusement parks, since a lot of folks have by now caught on to the fact that malls are gross and dumb and driving everywhere sucks in every physical and metaphysical and economic and environmental way.

We have our resident boosters: Bloggers, entrepreneurs, local celebrities. For a time we had a shop with Edison bulbs and air plants (it closed). Now there’s another shop with Edison bulbs and air plants. We have a couple okay restaurants. Recently a national chain bought out the adorable independent movie theater and now the movies are less interesting, but there’s another adorable independent theater a mile away showing second runs for five bucks. Their popcorn is made with coconut oil! (In a year it will close, too.) We have a vegan deli and a skateboard shop and two whole other parks. We have a public pool and we have libraries and we have farmers’ markets. We have a bike shop. We have a new, beautiful coffee shop with avocado toast, and we have the best used bookstore in the world. And we have communities so outrageously marginalized you just have to sit in your car at red lights on your way to the stupid highway built to assault said communities, bearing helpless witness. And lord, almighty, do we have strip malls a few miles up the road in any direction. Every direction. Do we ever. Lord Almighty.

We cheer for the smallest signs of gentrification and boo when those small signs of gentrification fizzle. We invite people to visit during the spring, summer, or fall. Lilacs in bloom, birds chirping, cobblestones all cobbled, leaves turning. We picnic in the park. We host house parties. We burn wish paper in the fire pit. We run into neighbors. We are always, always running into neighbors. We watch the sun set on Nelson A’s stupid/outrageous/terrifying/beautiful Plaza. We gawk at the insane modern art collection in the strange underground tunnel system beneath the plaza, which belongs to us, because Nelson left it to the citizens of the State of New York.

“Life seems pretty great here,” say our status-weary visitors.

“Yeah,” we say.

“It could be worse,” we add.

“It has potential,” we decide.

At the espresso place I run into a woman, a new mother who just moved here for grad school. She despises it. I know, I say. I totally, totally know. But honestly, all you need is a few good/real friends and it’s hard to make good/real friends anywhere. I rattle off hikes, day trips, festivals, happenings, nooks and crannies. It takes time, I tell her, but if you put in the work this place reveals itself to be alright.

I am no longer a new mother. I suppose now I’m a seasoned mother. Soon enough I’ll be an Amazon, a Crone, and I’ll joyfully reclaim it in a think piece or ten.

***

Last fall there was a little house for sale in a beautiful town in the Berkshires. I wanted to move. Let’s get out of here, I whined. Having traded the dank one-bedroom in Brooklyn with terrible vibes for this Albany townhouse, we could now trade the Albany townhouse for a pastoral cottage within walking distance to a (presumably non-poisoned, or as non-poisoned as anything is anymore) lake and sweet town at the foot of a mountain an hour from any airport.

We didn’t do it.

One of my students tells me the Native Americans avoided Albany, claiming that this place has circular energy. It could trap you, and keep you.

I continue holding forth for the new mother on the excellent local street art: the black-and-white bicyclist on the corner of Henry Johnson and Washington; the stunning elk in the parking lot between Spring St. and Washington; the Bluebirds commissioned by the city on the side of a concrete parking garage facing the highway on the river; the head of Rockefeller assaulted by a Sven Lukin piece way downtown. (“People come to take pictures all the time,” the man in the utterly dilapidated brown row house next door told me when I stopped once to take a picture.)

Oh and had she been to Troy yet? Troy is cool. Troy: forget about it. Troy is so freaking cool it is almost too late for Troy. Get your real estate while the gettin’s good! Or no, wait, actually: don’t!

***

One of the cops who was always so nice to my kid turned up in the news shortly after Halloween. He had used “excessive force” with a 12-year-old, and he had been suspended, at which point it was uncovered that he had used excessive force with an elderly man a few years back. Now he was permanently suspended.

***

I wander over to the used bookstore in search of Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, which I score, alongside Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Montaigne’s Complete Essays, and Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet. I spend a grand total of $19 on this haul.

My whole family lives in West L.A. I think they’re a little embarrassed by my living here. Al-bay-nee, they called it for a long time, like Al the plumber.

***

Time to get in the car to pick the kid up from school. Driving is my least favorite thing.

We have a snack and ride bikes into the park. We dismount at the pedestrian crosswalk, because, as I always tell him, cars are big idiot asshole monsters and want to kill you. The boy has learned to hold up his hand in a STOP gesture, wait for oncoming cars to stop, then cross.

One of my students tells me the Native Americans avoided Albany, claiming that this place has circular energy. It could trap you, and keep you.

“Let’s see if people are gonna be jerks today,” he says. No idea where he picked up that line.

They are not jerks today. He waves to drivers as he crosses, shouts “Thank you!” They wave back, beaming, then gun their engines and burn rubber.

Later, on the way back from the playground, we stop in our tracks when we hear the tell-tale tinkling of “The Entertainer.” Ice cream truck! That direction, over there, heading this way! The tinkling gets louder, and we see the truck approach. Kid gallops toward it, waving his arms maniacally.

“If you get hit by a car I’ll kill you!” I holler. But even the briefest imagining of that makes me fucking nauseous, and I’m immediately on the verge of tears (see also: nervous system), worrying that if he does ever get hit by a car (GOD FORBID) his last thought might be worry that I’m going to be mad at him, and how horrible that would be. This is what it’s like to be a mother. Time to meditate some more.

Hey! Hey! Ice cream truck!! HEY! HEY!!

We’re on a patch of grass by the road, jumping up and down, our hands in the air. But the truck doesn’t see us, doesn’t stop. We watch it speed right through the crosswalk. It must be going 50mph.

* * *

Elisa Albert is the author of After Birth , The Book of Dahlia , and How This Night is Different . She is at work on short stories and a new novel.

Editor: Sari Botton

O, Small-bany!

Elisa Albert | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,229 words)

They poisoned the water in the lake again. It’s actually more of an enormous pond. They poison it a few times a year. I’m not listening to music, for a change. My battery’s at 10%, anyway, and I want to eavesdrop. Washington Park’s full of people. Just like the Seurat painting, minus the class status and pointillism.

There’s a black man fishing with his tiny son crouching beside him. The man’s biceps are impressively built and inked. The boy says, “Tell me when you see a fish.” There’s a middle-aged white couple with a contented aura, walking a mid-sized grey mutt. There’s a very petite brown woman in tight blue athleisure berating a man who is pushing a baby in a stroller. Not a status stroller. Athleisure woman is on this man about something. He hadn’t been on time to pick her up. He is playing it cool (“Well, I came, didn’t I?”) but she is unrelenting (“Not when you said you would! Not til after you…”) and then they are out of earshot. There’s a young white mother from the nearby cult (I’m sorry: Intentional Community), holding a toddler’s hand. The Intentional Community manufactures the kind of old-fashioned wooden toys for which my bored mom friends and I go wild. They live and work in a huge brick mansion near the park. There’s free literature about their intentionality to be had in a little kiosk at the entrance to their driveway. Books about making peace with death and living in accordance with the laws of nature. When I was a new mother, I used to loiter around that kiosk. Should I join? They wear homemade clothing and raise children communally. I yearn deeply for the latter but I have a quasi-sexual weakness for fashion, and ultimately I’m not much of a joiner. The young mother in her homemade ankle-length skirt and bonnet is talking to a black man on a bench by the boathouse. He rests one arm on yet another stroller (not status), in which sits a toddler with a delightful head of tight, ombre ringlets. The man reaches out his hand to me.

“Hello!” he says, like we know each other; I don’t think we know each other.

“How are you?” he wonders.

I smile, nod: fine, fine, thank you, and you? I do this intuitive sort of bow, and continue on my way. The cult woman slightly glares at me from under her bonnet. Her glare (real? imagined?) trips some anxiety about running into people I’m not fond of, by which I mean people not fond of me. There’s this one woman in particular, your standard bad-vibes-in-small-town situation, and my nervous system goes insane every goddamn time.

***

Officially Albany is a city of a hundred thousand, but it feels like a very small town. Which can make it hard to take a walk sometimes. Small-bany, some call it. Shmalbany, I prefer. Albanality, a friend of mine says, but the syllables don’t work out. There’s not that fantastically freeing anonymity of your big exciting status places. State capitals are often kind of weird places. It’s a small goddamn town. So much chit-chat always waiting to be had. Just around that bend? Just over this hill? Just past that tree? I arrange my face in a blank mask and bland smile, practicing. I catch myself doing so, catch my thoughts circling this dumb anxiety; shake it off. You are safe, I tell myself. My whole goddamn sympathetic nervous system gets caught up in small town anxiety. It’s hard trying to be friends with everyone all the time. It’s okay if not everybody likes you. I used to kind of seek out people with bad energy, try to make them like me, but that only makes them like you less. I learn slowly.

You are safe, I tell myself, and it works. I am safe. Relatively speaking. More often now I seek to avoid or minimize encounters with people who don’t like me, people who bring out the ugly. This is progress, according to the meditation teacher.

Isn’t this the kind of inner drama we all share? Useless, banal. Best kept to oneself, only then how are we to take comfort in the knowledge that we’re all the same!?

***

Two white men are sitting on a bench, sharing a joint. One takes a drag, coughs extensively, sputters, hocks an impressive loogie.

It is the spring of 2016.

There’s the official sign, stapled to a tree: PESTICIDE TREATED WATER. Bright yellow laminated paper. The date is filled in, and the illegible name of some pesticide. Do not swim, 24 hours. Do not drink, 24 hours. Do not fish, 24 hours.

Officially Albany is a city of a hundred thousand, but it feels like a very small town. ‘Small-bany,’ some call it. ‘Shmalbany,’ I prefer. ‘Albanality,’ a friend of mine says, but the syllables don’t work out.

What happens is, people feed the ducks all manner of processed crap and the ducks shit their brains out and the duck shit throws off the PH balance in the water and the algae flourish and everything’s a mess, so: pesticide.

It’s about a mile around the circumference of the lake (enormous pond?), and there’s just that one single, solitary sign. The water smells weird, looks weird. Brackish, with a sort of opalescent film. Sinister, though maybe I’m projecting. I don’t want to be near it. I move through a cloud of weed smoke by the men on the bench, and detour off the lake path.

Once, in Dolores Park in San Francisco, I came upon two tough-looking teenage girls (but affluent; their shoes gave it away) in a cloud of weed smoke. I asked if they knew where I could get some. It was dusk. I was on a work trip, alone and lonely. Offer me a stupid hit, girls.

“Nope,” they said, avoiding eye contact.

“Well fuck you, too,” I muttered as I walked away.

These men would have offered to share, I bet. But then I’d owe them something. Then I’d run into them and they’d know me. Shmalbany.

***

An ice cream truck’s circling the park, trailing its dinky rendition of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” A melancholy pang of missing my kid, who’s at school. Maybe homeschooling is the way. Maybe I should join the cult. Maybe my quasi-sexual weakness for fashion is holding me back. Maybe we could sit in the park all day eavesdropping and eating ice cream, wearing homemade clothing in a perpetual spring.

I worry for the ice cream truck. Is there enough business? Last year, over Sno-Cones, I asked the driver how it was going.

“Not so good,” he said.

I hope the ice cream truck will be alright. What’s a park without an ice cream truck? It would be just like Shmalbany to fail to sustain a goddamn ice cream truck.

When I was 10, 11, 12, living with my mother in a Beverly Hills rental apartment right on Roxbury Park, there was a great ice cream truck. A thirtysomething Persian man ran it. He had a thick, perfect mustache, meticulous comb-over, and melodious accent. He had an eager, unselfconscious grin. He adored me for some reason. Whenever I think of him I am amazed that this story doesn’t take a dark turn. No dark turn whatsoever. This man gave me free Big Sticks two, three times a week, and that’s not a euphemism. He invited me into his truck and he grinned his enormously kind grin and he told me I was wonderful, beautiful, smart, good. He told me I could come to his truck anytime I wanted, anytime I wanted, I could hang out with him, and he would love it. I wonder if I’m suppressing some memory, here. What are the odds? Reader, that man did not rape me.

My mother was I don’t even know what to call it, my oldest brother had gone far away to college, my middle brother had more or less gone to live with friends, and I had no idea where my father was. San Luis Obispo, maybe? The ice cream man was sort of all I had. And I’m so very sorry to tell you that I ghosted him after a while, because what kind of weirdo would adore me? His adoration and his kindness creeped me the fuck out. This, unfortunately, is more or less how I continued to conduct myself in intimate relations for the following two decades.

***

I venture up toward the playground, where the slide’s still busted. It’s been busted for a year. Obviously, the city doesn’t want to pay for a whole new play structure. They’re much too busy widening the highway to better accommodate the bomb trains. The bomb trains run right alongside the projects. Periodically there’s a public hearing to voice environmental concerns, but no one outside the projects gives much of a shit.

There’s an orange cone sitting atop the hole in the slide. A dozen tiny kids from the church daycare on Lancaster are exhorted to avoid the cone, the slide. I’ll have to write a letter. A series of letters. Who do they think they are, compromising the play of our city’s children? Who do they think they are, compromising the air quality of our city’s residents? I am outraged.

(You are safe.)

(Am I!?)

Albany’s a long way from Beverly Hills. What kind of idiot grows up in Beverly Hills and winds up living in Albany!? Might as well be Siberia.

(This idiot.)

This park was conscripted to public use in the city’s 1686 charter. Bordered by Madison Avenue (four-lanes, people driving too fast, pathetic few blocks of on-street bike lanes despite tireless advocacy, lined with makeshift/failing small businesses and the grandest seen-better-days brownstones you can imagine, crosswalks in dire need of repainting), Willett Street (one way, people driving too fast, ditto the brownstones), State Street (same, same), and South Lake (two lanes, way too fast, same).

“Academic bride,” I tell urbane acquaintances who, with subtle grimaces, wonder why. Interesting how many Brooklyn lefties full of self-righteous social media activism wouldn’t think to set foot north of Hudson.

***

PEOPLE LIVE HERE, I occasionally scream at cars going too fast. Call it a hobby. There’s a pedestrian-right-of-way at the entrance to the park from Hudson Ave. It boasts a three-foot-high fluorescent yellow sign that is more often than not lying on its side. Last year I wrote to the Mayor and the city engineer and our councilman and neighborhood association president, got 50 friends and neighbors to co-sign.

Could we please get some speed bumps around the park? (No, because emergency vehicles would be hindered.) Could we please increase signage? (They’d take this into careful consideration.) Could we please get a ton of reflective road-signs installed? (Maybe!) Could we reduce the speed limit in the park? (Maybe!)

I’m so glad you’ve chosen to raise your family here, said the Mayor in her response.

Nothing’s changed. A state worker advises me to resend the same letter twice a week in perpetuity. This I have not done. I should. I will.

My whole goddamn sympathetic nervous system gets caught up in small town anxiety. It’s hard trying to be friends with everyone all the time. It’s okay if not everybody likes you.

If I’m in a pissy mood and people are blowing through that crosswalk, I sometimes holler YOU HAVE TO STOP! Sometimes I even shake my fist.

If I especially don’t want to sit at my desk and work, I’ll occasionally just saunter slowly back and forth across that crosswalk for a good 10 or 15 minutes, making every. Single. Vehicle. Stop. That’s right, fuckheads, the world ain’t your highway.

Once I screamed YOU HAVE TO FUCKING STOP at a black BMW. I hadn’t done my meditation practice that day.

I enjoy my ineffective brand of urban-renewal activism.

At least Rockefeller didn’t manage to build the highway through the park like he wanted to. Nelson A. Rockefeller. Can’t talk about Albany without talking about that piece of shit. Ashamed of the city’s perceived shabbiness (all those “ethnic” neighborhoods!), he decided to transform it, leave his mark, blah blah, eminent domain, blah blah, razed a thousand perfectly good 19th century brownstones, destroyed the South End, desiccated the vibrant immigrant communities therein, paved over the trolley tracks, and installed his massive concrete state capitol complex (which is, admittedly, sort of cool, now that it’s a fact, but if we could turn back time…).

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The dumb highway Nelson did build blocks pedestrian access to the Hudson River almost entirely: one lousy footbridge can take you from Broadway up and over the dumb highway so you can sit or walk on the bank of the river like a goddamn human animal. A single solitary footbridge. Singular: one footbridge. To connect the homo sapiens of the capital city of New York State to our majestic river. In all fairness, the river stank so bad in the ‘60s that no one wanted to be near it. A poisoned river. Save us from ourselves, Nelson A! Save us from the stinking river, Pete Seeger!

***

The year he was 5, my kid was really into Pete Seeger. Also cops. He wore a cop uniform every single day. Had to wash it while he slept. He wrote endless parking tickets and constantly stopped by our local precinct to say hi to “our buddies.” He was in a super-ego phase, I guess.

The cops adored my little guy. They showed him around over and over again, day in and day out, let him sit in squad cars, flash the lights, run the sirens. They gave him blank tickets and violation slips. (“Not supposed to do this,” they always told me.) They gave him patient, detailed tours of their uniforms and squad cars. Eventually they even let him hang out in the break room, which meant that I, too, spent a lot of time in local precinct break rooms. I’d bat my lashes: Thank you so much, guys. Every day the kid would show up with a thank you card for the day before; soon their walls were covered. He knew their names and ranks. They called out to him from squad cars all over town.

It was the height of Black Lives Matter. Cops were very, very bad. Hanging over highway I-90 was a huge, loathsome “Blue Lives Matter” billboard, paid for by the Police Association.

Everywhere my kid went in uniform, without fail, white people grinned and said “Thanks for keeping us safe, son!” or “Keep up the good work, kid!” And people of color grinned and said, “Don’t arrest me!” Or “I didn’t do nothing!” or “It was him, not me!” Or, most shockingly, “Don’t shoot!” We watched identical scenes unfold everywhere we went that year: Albany, Troy, Hudson, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Los Angeles.

One of our neighborhood bike cops worked out of the basement of a flower shop on Lark, don’t ask me why. The girl at the counter has a huge black beehive and makes these neat rockabilly glitter-and-neon tiki mask paintings.

“Is Kevin around?” my little son would saunter in and casually ask.

“What up, buddy,” Kevin would say, emerging from basement stairs carpeted in rose petals. Kevin was an Adonis. Even I was a little obsessed with Kevin.

I asked Kevin and some of the other cops to patrol the pedestrian crosswalk, nail some drivers blowing heedlessly through. At the end of that summer I bought two tiki paintings from the flower shop girl. Neon green on pink glitter and red on turquoise glitter. They hang above my desk. Tiki masks are said to provide protection and luck. I wanted them in the entry hall or the dining room, but they freaked my husband out.

***

I leave the park, walk toward Central Ave, Albany’s United Nations. Caribbean deli, Halal butcher, knock-off brand-name street clothes, cell phone stores, Vietnamese place, Chinese noodles, Pakistani food, Kosher vegetarian place (soon to close). Arty fucks from downstate are always coming up here to shop at the Asian market, then hightail it back to their fifteen-dollar cocktails and farm-to-table.

Right turn onto Lark, which has seen better days. The denizens of this bus stop in particular seem as good a litmus test as any for the health and sanity of our citizenry. Suffice it to say: seen better days.

The regularity of window-rattling bass is a given. Gangs of choppers, modified sedans. There is sometimes an electric sign warning against noise pollution. The sign comes and goes.

Albany’s a long way from Beverly Hills. What kind of idiot grows up in Beverly Hills and winds up living in Albany!? Might as well be Siberia. ‘Academic Bride,’ I tell urbane acquaintances who, with subtle grimaces, wonder why.

There’s Jamella, who works at the espresso place. Hi, Jamella. There’s “The Mayor”, a semi-homeless guy who washes windows and shovels snow for ten bucks. Hey, Mayor. In a few months he’ll go bonkers and smash the front window of the crappy dry cleaner for no apparent reason. There’s one of the Arab brothers who owns NoHo Pizza. Not to be confused with SoHo Pizza, a few blocks down. Hey, pizza guy.

A massive New England banking chain recently ditched their flagship in the grand old savings bank on the corner, and people said this is it, this is really the end of Lark Street. Grim! But soon a church called “New Hope” took over the space, and who could argue with that?

New construction over on Lark and Madison, in a long-vacant lot where they once found “historical artifacts” (read: human remains). The ground floor retail has been empty for three years and counting, because they’re asking laughably high rent. I’m guessing the developer doesn’t live here.

For a while I was convinced that Albany’s salvation rested on American Apparel opening an outpost in that space. I wrote a letter, suggested they “refine their brand” by setting up shop here. It would be their only Hudson Valley/Capital Region store, and didn’t they know about what was happening in this area? All the Brooklyn refugees and so forth? (Lies!) And wouldn’t their brand profit, branding-wise, from being the first to colonize this gorgeous, haunted old city, rife with punks and actual ethnic and class diversity and all kinds of folk for whom not having to schlep to the godforsaken mall to buy underpants would be a serious miracle? Didn’t they like the idea of being pioneers? I kept throwing around the word brand. Brand! Brand! Brand! Then American Apparel declared bankruptcy and closed all their retail shops all over the world.

I know a woman who waged a successful years-long campaign to bring Trader Joe’s to the Capital Region, but of course they opened that puppy way over at the intersection of all the highways, big-box territory, near the malls, which they’re now talking about filling with hotels and indoor amusement parks, since a lot of folks have by now caught on to the fact that malls are gross and dumb and driving everywhere sucks in every physical and metaphysical and economic and environmental way.

We have our resident boosters: Bloggers, entrepreneurs, local celebrities. For a time we had a shop with Edison bulbs and air plants (it closed). Now there’s another shop with Edison bulbs and air plants. We have a couple okay restaurants. Recently a national chain bought out the adorable independent movie theater and now the movies are less interesting, but there’s another adorable independent theater a mile away showing second runs for five bucks. Their popcorn is made with coconut oil! (In a year it will close, too.) We have a vegan deli and a skateboard shop and two whole other parks. We have a public pool and we have libraries and we have farmers’ markets. We have a bike shop. We have a new, beautiful coffee shop with avocado toast, and we have the best used bookstore in the world. And we have communities so outrageously marginalized you just have to sit in your car at red lights on your way to the stupid highway built to assault said communities, bearing helpless witness. And lord, almighty, do we have strip malls a few miles up the road in any direction. Every direction. Do we ever. Lord Almighty.

We cheer for the smallest signs of gentrification and boo when those small signs of gentrification fizzle. We invite people to visit during the spring, summer, or fall. Lilacs in bloom, birds chirping, cobblestones all cobbled, leaves turning. We picnic in the park. We host house parties. We burn wish paper in the fire pit. We run into neighbors. We are always, always running into neighbors. We watch the sun set on Nelson A’s stupid/outrageous/terrifying/beautiful Plaza. We gawk at the insane modern art collection in the strange underground tunnel system beneath the plaza, which belongs to us, because Nelson left it to the citizens of the State of New York.

“Life seems pretty great here,” say our status-weary visitors.

“Yeah,” we say.

“It could be worse,” we add.

“It has potential,” we decide.

At the espresso place I run into a woman, a new mother who just moved here for grad school. She despises it. I know, I say. I totally, totally know. But honestly, all you need is a few good/real friends and it’s hard to make good/real friends anywhere. I rattle off hikes, day trips, festivals, happenings, nooks and crannies. It takes time, I tell her, but if you put in the work this place reveals itself to be alright.

I am no longer a new mother. I suppose now I’m a seasoned mother. Soon enough I’ll be an Amazon, a Crone, and I’ll joyfully reclaim it in a think piece or ten.

***

Last fall there was a little house for sale in a beautiful town in the Berkshires. I wanted to move. Let’s get out of here, I whined. Having traded the dank one-bedroom in Brooklyn with terrible vibes for this Albany townhouse, we could now trade the Albany townhouse for a pastoral cottage within walking distance to a (presumably non-poisoned, or as non-poisoned as anything is anymore) lake and sweet town at the foot of a mountain an hour from any airport.

We didn’t do it.

One of my students tells me the Native Americans avoided Albany, claiming that this place has circular energy. It could trap you, and keep you.

I continue holding forth for the new mother on the excellent local street art: the black-and-white bicyclist on the corner of Henry Johnson and Washington; the stunning elk in the parking lot between Spring St. and Washington; the Bluebirds commissioned by the city on the side of a concrete parking garage facing the highway on the river; the head of Rockefeller assaulted by a Sven Lukin piece way downtown. (“People come to take pictures all the time,” the man in the utterly dilapidated brown row house next door told me when I stopped once to take a picture.)

Oh and had she been to Troy yet? Troy is cool. Troy: forget about it. Troy is so freaking cool it is almost too late for Troy. Get your real estate while the gettin’s good! Or no, wait, actually: don’t!

***

One of the cops who was always so nice to my kid turned up in the news shortly after Halloween. He had used “excessive force” with a 12-year-old, and he had been suspended, at which point it was uncovered that he had used excessive force with an elderly man a few years back. Now he was permanently suspended.

***

I wander over to the used bookstore in search of Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, which I score, alongside Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Montaigne’s Complete Essays, and Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet. I spend a grand total of $19 on this haul.

My whole family lives in West L.A. I think they’re a little embarrassed by my living here. Al-bay-nee, they called it for a long time, like Al the plumber.

***

Time to get in the car to pick the kid up from school. Driving is my least favorite thing.

We have a snack and ride bikes into the park. We dismount at the pedestrian crosswalk, because, as I always tell him, cars are big idiot asshole monsters and want to kill you. The boy has learned to hold up his hand in a STOP gesture, wait for oncoming cars to stop, then cross.

One of my students tells me the Native Americans avoided Albany, claiming that this place has circular energy. It could trap you, and keep you.

“Let’s see if people are gonna be jerks today,” he says. No idea where he picked up that line.

They are not jerks today. He waves to drivers as he crosses, shouts “Thank you!” They wave back, beaming, then gun their engines and burn rubber.

Later, on the way back from the playground, we stop in our tracks when we hear the tell-tale tinkling of “The Entertainer.” Ice cream truck! That direction, over there, heading this way! The tinkling gets louder, and we see the truck approach. Kid gallops toward it, waving his arms maniacally.

“If you get hit by a car I’ll kill you!” I holler. But even the briefest imagining of that makes me fucking nauseous, and I’m immediately on the verge of tears (see also: nervous system), worrying that if he does ever get hit by a car (GOD FORBID) his last thought might be worry that I’m going to be mad at him, and how horrible that would be. This is what it’s like to be a mother. Time to meditate some more.

Hey! Hey! Ice cream truck!! HEY! HEY!!

We’re on a patch of grass by the road, jumping up and down, our hands in the air. But the truck doesn’t see us, doesn’t stop. We watch it speed right through the crosswalk. It must be going 50mph.

* * *

Elisa Albert is the author of After Birth , The Book of Dahlia , and How This Night is Different . She is at work on short stories and a new novel.

Editor: Sari Botton