Doin' Just Fine

'Rona diaries II

I will go to my grave insisting it was the rats who gave me COVID. One night, on the way into Manhattan from our Bed-Stuy Airbnb, where we schlepped our family for spring break, I walked by a fat one, freshly dead and belly up, in the middle of the Nostrand Ave sidewalk, and imagined stepping on him with my nike blazers and releasing a tidal wive of rat guts, city ickies, poison, maybe even a family of worms or roaches, out into the Saturday night traffic.

That rat was flat by 1am. No sign of worms.

We saw live ones too. Day and night. Subterranean and above ground. They are not afraid of people anymore, or sunlight. My son asks “Would you rather have a live rat or a dead one? Would you rather have EIGHTY live rats or EIGHTY dead ones?” In the words of my sweet nephew circa age four, “I choose no thank you.”

The city is attempting to outsmart the rats by not letting anyone dump their garbage on the sidewalk until nightfall. There are PSAs all over the city with an image of a rat carrying a suitcase, getting out of dodge, which will probably not happen. My kids love this rat, and scream “THE RAT!” every time they see it, which is a bit alarming.

who does new york city’s ad work and can we send them a condolence card?

But it probably wasn’t the rats who got me sick. It might have been the actress at other Sarah’s birthday party on the Lower East Side. We had to scream just to hear each other over the ironic pop soundtrack at the bar. She had a rare night between shows to go out and socialize. It might have been the woman on the A train, who otherwise seemed very put together, yelling “GET AWAY FROM ME” louder and louder and louder, directly at us, while my daughter covered her ears and I said “this person seems to be having a hard time but you’re safe. want to get off at the next stop?” Or the old man who waited with me for the F, unfazed that there seemed to be a person on the track causing the delay, who told me about his life growing up in Brooklyn and going out to San Francisco in the 60s and who made fun of the names white people give New York neighborhoods (“what is SOHO, anyway???!”). I really hope it wasn’t him. It could have been the young hottie with the guitar on the Staten Island Ferry. His voice was honey-like and I thought we are so lucky to live in a world where people will just sit down on their commute and play music for us.

It could have been anyone, really.

New York with my husband and kids was dreamy, before the whole covid thing, of course. It wasn’t that every moment was easy — kids don’t sleep, they are mostly terrible at traversing long city blocks, they don’t follow any rational laws about what they will and wont eat, and you do have to be vigilant about the rats— but the textures of a place like that throw all your petty humanities into relief.

People keep telling me my daughter is my spitting image. She has blue eyes, a dirty blonde mop like mine (though we have spared her the all-gender standard issue bowl cut that the Wheeler children were subjected to). She is creative and sharp and deeply empathic — she feels big, for better or worse. She knows the name of every one of the 70 kids at her preschool, and the names of most of their parents (and “au-parents” as she call the nannies). She makes friends with a lot of strangers. She is kind of a weirdo. All of these things track as echos of me, but I don’t like it. I don’t want the presumed self-satisfaction, nor the responsibility, of having a “mini-me.”

There is an old neighbor of my brother’s here in Bed-Stuy, where we are visiting, a retired female cop who is just top notch humanity. Her nickname for me, though I can’t remember what exactly I did to inspire it, is “Name That Tune.” I know all the lyrics to all the songs, she claims, something I have always prided myself on but pretty much no one but her has ever mentioned.

On the walk to the subway Monday morning, two older men perched on a banister. One, with headphones on, began to sing, very loud and very, very off-key:

There was a time when I thought life was over and out
When you went away from me
My dying heart made it hard to breathe

I stopped. “I know this song” I told my daughter. Was it Babyface? We listened for a few more moments, because she’s cool like that, and on the train I found it. “Do you want to hear the man’s song with mommy?” We each put in an earbud, closed our eyes, and jammed out.

It wasn’t Babyface. It was the song Doin’ Just Fine, from Boyz II Men’s 1997 album, Evolution, which doesn’t have the historical significance of Cooleyhighharmony or the endless number ones of II (the first album I owned on a CD, btw). But it has Song for Mama and 4 Seasons of Loneliness and Can You Stand the Rain. It’s Boyz II Men without the hushed, somewhat-rugged sexiness of the early New-Jack Swing era (Please Don’t Go anyone? An actual song entitled Uhh Ahh??!!!!) but still making solid R&B. You have to remember that, though we love Dru Hill, and no one was sexier than Jodeci, and we appreciated Tyrese’s contributions, these guys perfected the genre of male-led 90s R&B and just churned out song after song after song that checked all the boxes effortlessly. No one held a candle to them.

Did you know Boyz II Men were first called “Unique Attractions?” Did you know they added Michael, the dude who does the bass-tone talking and uses the cane, who actually has MS, after an “encounter” in the bathroom of their highschool? What the hell did that encounter consist of??? Did you know this one dude you’ve never heard of, Marc Nelson, got impatient when they were recording their first album and left to pursue his solo career and was probably crying and singing Doin’ Just Fine unconvincingly to himself for like, 20 years???? I digress.

The song was better than I remembered, and I did, somehow, remember all of the words. Like all the best B-II-M songs, it had Wanyá (you know him as the hot one, pronounced wan-yay) referring to himself in the first person (“just as sure as my name is WAAAAAN-YAY!!!”). (Aside, but the video is also the epitome of 90s R&B music video steez: Nathan paddles this hot queen around on, like, a Hawaiian gondola? Michael finds, I think we’re meant to understand, the business card of another dude in his 1940s pilot girl’s old-timey car and they break up??? CLASSIC. One Youtube reviewer says: “Future Generations....pls dont let masterpieces like this die...”)

Here’s the thing about my daughter: she also knows all the words, immediately, presciently, finishing some of their lines for them. By the time the second chorus comes around, she has it down.

Sitting on the A train, sharing my headphones with this child who is surely not my copy, who is really her own person, a lovely and terrifying fact, listening to the boys/men sing about how they aren’t taking me back even though I really tore them up inside, I felt flooded with well-being.

The next day, when Ramona completely fell apart as we attempted to leave our Airbnb for Penn Station, I stayed behind. I remind myself all the time that I am me and she is her, but I do know a thing or two about melting down, and I got her out in the fresh air and sat with her and breathed and yes told her ‘I can’t do the screaming but if you can bring down the volume I’m right here.” It was a long one. It was a loud one. She wasn’t trying to get anything. She was just—-overwhelmed.

Then I asked “do you want to listen to some music with me?” We walked to the subway like that, playing our “Girls Bike” mix, holding hands, giving each other secret smiles at our favorite parts of Let It Go, or looking at the other with glee when the magic Spotify shuffle chose M.I.A.’s Bad Girls. Parenting is hard, as my friend without kids gently pointed out once, we did it to ourselves so no one wants to hear us complain about it. Sometimes my daughter says “I hate you” and “no one understands me” and it is devastating because, for that second thing, she’s absolutely right. But sometimes, it’s pretty fucking great.

The other day, Ramona said she had a secret to tell me, but I didn’t have to come close, she could say it out loud. “When I’m sad or lonely, or happy,” she said, “I make up songs and then I feel better.” I used to do that too, but I didn’t mention it.

I am counting down the minutes of COVID isolation. Though I’m in Massachusetts now, my computer still thinks we’re in California, and adding those three hours to my day is a such a delight, knowing it is almost over and I can get on to the next one and the next and maybe be living again.

But this is living, too. All of it. At this very instant, my friend’s wife is in labor with their first child. It is going slowly, he reports. It is so annoying when things take their sweet time. In my inbox today, Austin Kleon reminds me that time is not a butler, holding out a silver tray, and Jenny Odell is criss-crossing the country trying to get anyone who will listen to watch how a single branch transforms over many months and my son just came back from my parents’ art studio, knocked on my door to show me what he created (“Mama, do you still have COVID?”) and he said he doesn’t know what he made, it just made itself and my step-dad tells me, his hand on his heart like this idea makes him almost burst, that be believes Max found the zone, like a real artist, the place where time stands still and there is only you and the thing you are birthing.

My sister-in-law, after several days of my quarantine, somewhat facetiously asks me “well, what have you learned?” I think I’ve learned the lessons of the pandemic over and over and over in the past few years, and you know what, I’m good. It’s not that I don’t think I could stand to learn them again, but I just, I get it. Life is fleeting and unpredictable. Humans are beautiful and tragic and often, pretty dumb. You are not in control.

But it’s still hard, isn’t it? On the first night, when I was really very sad and disappointed and somewhat ashamed, I tried making up a song about it. It was about being trapped, being the cause of other people’s distress, not having any clean socks. After I sang it, very off-key, I did feel better. In fact, I felt just fine.

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Want to know what I’ve done in quarantine? Mostly refreshed Instagram and bothered my editors and friends. But also, this:

• I finished Samantha Hunt’s “The Unwritten Book,” which is a book about the book her father was writing when he died but really about mortality. Hoo lordy, what a strange, brave, exciting little book. I can’t believe brilliant people like this make art and I get to consume it (from the library, for free, no less). Samantha says, of her parents:

  • “How many ideas did the abandon because they were making breakfast, washing up, doing laundry, working? What projects don’t exist because I exist instead? How many unfinished works have I abandoned? More than I can count.” Jesus.

• I dutifully completed my assignments for the Freelance Writing for Creatives course I’m taking with Amber Petty. Amber is an absolute delight and chock-full of wisdom. If you’ve ever wanted to do any kind of freelance, she has a bunch of free and cheap workshops and I cannot recommend enough. I have sold five pieces since I’ve started learning from her!

• I watched all of Sex Lives of College Girls, Mindy Kaling’s show on HBO. The first season is unbelievably good for a show this ridiculous. Second season dips and finds its footing again. Totally delish. I also went back and watched a bunch of early Mindy Project and it is mostly still great but I’m so glad all of the horrible body-shaming is out of her repertoire now. Lord, you can’t believe how bad it is. Lots of plot lines centering around how funny it is that she’s fat. Makes me glad we live in 2023 when this great book is among us and we at least acknowledge we can’t do that shit on national television.

• I made an excel spreadsheet, with some friends, to track our rejections. Inspired by this gem by Kim Liao.

• I prepped (mostly emotionally) for the most wonderful time of the year! The NBA Playoffs are heeeeeeeeereeeee!!!!!!!!! For the next two months I’ll be watching for Ja Morant’s dad, relentlessly trying to uncover the truth about Jaylen Brown’s hand, and eating ALL the chips and dips. LET’S GO CELTICS!