Our New Neighbor

Big news on the AMAM front. Huge. Colossal. My grandmother has moved into our building. Nonnie is now our neighbor.

For forty years Nonnie’s been kicking it in Bensonhurst, buying her fruit and vegetables from Two Guys from Brooklyn, enjoying the best cannolis in the US of A, hanging out of her window and yelling in Italian to her friends, most of whom are named Maria. But when her landlord who was a good friend, and incidentally also named Maria, died, things started to change at the old homestead. Maria’s granddaughter moved in, took over and brought a certain seediness to the attached house. Where my grandmother and her friends used to sit on the porch clucking their teeth at passersby, there is now large gatherings of young people smoking and drinking and playing music loudly. Nonnie’s friend, Lucia, who was living there when Nonnie moved in, fell and broke her hip a year or two ago and went to live with her daughter in Florida. Some of the new landlord’s friends moved in, in her place, and a few months later my grandmother gets a knock on her door at 11pm and it’s the cops looking for her downstairs neighbor.

None of that would have pushed my grandmother out of the place she’s called home for so long. She’s a tough broad. But then the landlady raised her rent by 30% overnight and she doesn’t have a lease so she is what you might call up shit’s creek without a paddle. At precisely the same time, we started looking for an apartment to buy, the market being what it’s been, mortgage rates at an all-time low, prices plummeting and our family much too large for our current rental. And that’s when somebody – I don’t remember who started the ball rolling – suggested my grandmother might be better off living near us, than in her walk-up crime den.

Let me tell you who DOESN’T think my grandmother is better off. My grandmother.

“You’re living in the lap of luxury over here,” I tell her, “You have a dishwasher and an elevator.”

“It’s so small! No room for anything!” she says.

I advise her that maybe she feels cramped because she brought forty pots and pans and enough plastic Tupperware to run a Chinese restaurant for a week.

“When was the last time you used this?” I asked her yesterday, holding up a spearmint-green Jello mold that is from the 70s. Literally, I ate Jello from this thing my whole childhood.

“I’m gonna start using it again one day!” she replied defensively.

When we packed my grandmother’s apartment, we unearthed:

A hand-powered meat slicer
Six aluminum mugs from the Playboy Club circa 1973
Every single Halloween costume worn by her five granddaughters, from their birth 'til they outgrew Halloween
My baby tricycle
Two unopened DVD players
A Remington typewriter circa 1930
Enough canned food for my kids to survive on ‘til they graduate high school

I can’t even describe the extent of stuff crammed into every nook and cranny of her apartment. Her closets were like clown cars – we just kept pulling out large items that you couldn’t imagine ever fitting in there. A meat slicer, for the love of God! The kind they have at Key Food that gets your honey-roasted turkey breast sliced nice and thin! We found every single item of apparel I ever wore as an infant, which would have been useful about 4 ½ years ago when my son was born, but has been impossible to reach until we spent three days digging a tunnel through her bedroom closest. I’m surprised we didn’t find members of our family trapped in there, under all the fabric scraps and baby shoes.

But I don’t know why I’m surprised. This is a woman who has been using her dishwasher, which hasn’t worked in over twenty years, as a kitchen cabinet. So when you went over to her place and she made you dinner, she’d open the dishwasher and you’d see dozens of boxes of Ronzoni penne, crushed tomatoes and Stella D’Oro cookies.

Her new dishwasher works, which I point out to her, but she says she’d prefer to use it as storage space. She needs to find a spot for that Jello mold, after all.

Movin' On Up

We have done it readers. We have moved. And not just moved, but moved on up, to a deluxe apartment, not exactly in the sky, but one story higher than before.

The move is behind us. Shipped the children off to their grandparents for a weekend of non-stop fun or if not fun, at least guardianship (“Mommy, Nana is like the Redcoats, she is always telling me what to do and I have no freedom!”)

Meanwhile David and I packed like fiends. Emphasis on “fiends.” The night before the movers came, I was a mini Mephistopheles, hissing at David to GET MORE FUCKING PACKING TAPE AND HURRY!!!!!!!!!! My neatly-labeled and impeccably-filled boxes became haphazard, desperate. I threw my meat tenderizer in my Uggs and stacked those on top pf David’s CDs and threw in a handful of stray Legos on top. Seconda’s potty went in with the toaster which went in with my wedding album.

“MORE PACKING TAPE AND STEP ON IT !!!”

The movers came with dollies and bins and they transported our goods speedily, carefully, a marvelous job. In three hours we had changed houses.

Then David wanted to have sex. But guess what was the only thing I hadn’t packed?

“How it is that you packed the juicer we have never used but you didn’t pack condoms?” he wanted to know.

“Those are your responsibility!!! I had to pack the rest of the whole house!!!!!”

I don’t recommend this level of bickering as foreplay.

So we decided to drive back to the old place and load up the car with a whole pile of shit we hadn’t taken the time to pack, including the air purifier, bundt pan, iron and condoms. And the broken alarm clock. By the time we’d packed that stuff and filled the car and unloaded it all, it was dinnertime and we hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch so I had to break the news to my husband that before I could engage in anything resembling sexual activities I need victuals. I am a human, after all, and not a Stepford wife.

So off we go to grab a burger at the pub. And then, filled to the brim with fries and cheeseburger, and safely armed with protection, we blessed the new home.

Now I don’t want this shit to end up on STFU, Parents. In the event that you are thinking, “TMI Nicole, TMI,” let me share why I reveal these gems of personal information with you.

In the movies, couples move into a new place and still sweaty from their manual labor, heady with the thrill of their new residence, they fall to the floor and rip each other’s clothes off, Then they lie around afterwards and regard the haphazard piles of boxes and unassembled furniture and smile and make plans for the future.

This is a big ole’ steaming load of bullshit. Or at least, it is after you have kids. Because once you have two children that are two years apart, nobody is having any kind of carnal relations without some protection. That’s one. And finding a condom in a post-move maelstrom is like finding a needle in a haystack. Unless you keep one in your wallet and I thought we all learned in high school that that’s the worst spot to keep a condom. Though I should point out, a potentially distressed but conveniently-placed condom is significantly better protection than no condom at all.

Number two: once you have two kids in two years, you’ve got no time to dream of the future. The future is now and you have 10 hours and counting down to get the furniture right side up and the toothbrushes unpacked before the Jabberwocky and the JubJub Bird get back from their grandparents. So what that all boils down to is a quick burger and a quick roll in the hay and then marathon sessions of Ikea assembling.

But when the wild things did return, their room was fully configured and I swear it looks like some bedroom from a spread in Cookie magazine. Outer space themed. Walls painted ogre-faced green (that’s what Primo calls the color), Silver blackout blinds. Alien decals. And a hanging light fixture which shines little multi-colored moons and stars and plants all over the room.

David and I have room envy/ If our big asses could fit in the twin bed, we’ve trade with them.

The moving is done. Expect a slight decrease in the complaining. But only slight. I’ll be unpacking, after all.

Smelling Salts

Since I know the saga of my packing is of extreme interest to everyone out there, I will continue it today by sharing with you the fact that the other night, I packed until I passed out.

I actually fainted.

First I should mention that I am prone to fainting, as is my mother. I mean, it doesn’t happen all the time, but every so often, say once every three years or so, I’ll faint. There is always a cause – I say this in case you’re concerned I am the victim of a rare, undiagnosed disease, which is precisely what I would assume.

The first time David was privy to one of my fainting spells was right after we’d moved in together in LA and I slammed the car door onto my finger. I said to David, “I am going to faint.” And then I did, right to the floor – a slow fall, thank goodness, because he didn’t make the slightest effort to catch me whatsoever.

“Why didn’t you CATCH me for God’s sake,” I shrieked afterwards, “I told you I was going to faint.”

“But you’re such a drama queen I didn’t think you would actually DO it,” was his reply.

I absolutely loathe being called a drama queen, as every drama queen does. So I told him, “Look, in the future, if

I ever say that I am going to pass out, I really truly mean it and I’d appreciate it if you would save me from slamming my bones to the hard and unforgiving earth,”

And to think he considers me histrionic. . .

Another fainting spell of note occurred when I was about 10 weeks pregnant with Primo, right in the middle of the very worst, most ravaging, awful phase of my morning sickness. I was throwing up 2, 3 times a day, and couldn’t keep anything down at all, so I actually lost weight in my first trimester. I was skinnier pregnant than not pregnant. So I got on the subway to go to my temp job and I’d already thrown up once or twice that morning and by the time I got to Wall Street I wasn’t feeling too perky. By Park Place I was in bad shape. And when the train pulled into Chambers Street I remember thinking, “Get off the train Nicole, it’s your stop,” but I couldn’t move my legs.

Then I fainted. David wasn’t there, which was probably for the best because had he neglected to catch me then, when I bore the seed of his son, I think I would have performed a criminal act on him. Some other nice people caught me though, and offered me a seat and then I got off the subway and ate a donut from a cart on the street and then I threw up. Ah, pregnancy.

So this weekend, on Friday night, I was packing like it was closing time, which it was, considering the movers were coming at 8 AM the next morning. I hadn’t eaten much and drank almost nothing because I was in the packing ZONE where all that mattered was accumulating filled boxes labeled with my deranged handwriting. It occurred to me that I wasn’t feeling altogether too strong and as I walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water, I had that old familiar light-headed feeling. I happened to be just passing the sofa where David sat, resting. He’d been taking furniture apart all day so I can’t call him a slacker but he was, at that particular moment, sitting on his ass. And that is when I fainted.

“What happened to you?” he asked me.

“I PASSED OUT!” I cried, as a huge surge of self pity rolled over me, “FROM FATIGUE!!!!!!!!!!!”

And then I cried a little bit in self pity and insisted on laying on the floor until David brought me a glass of orange juice, for my blood sugar.

“There’s none left,” he called from the kitchen.

“YOU FINISHED THE ORANGE JUICE!” I shouted, although I was too weak to get off the floor, “And here I am FAINTING????”

It was kind of divine, I have to admit, a spectacular demonstration of my martyrdom. And really, that’s what marriage is all about.

Master Packer

There is one thing I have to clarify right off the bat.

This is not a picture of David and I. We are hotter than this couple and much more stylish. If you passed us on the street you would definitely be more interested in taking us out for coffee than these guys. The other way you can tell that it is not David and I featured in this photo is the fact that when David and I pack, we do not smile at each other. We grimace. We scowl. We bitch and yell. Ok, I bitch and he yells. We are not one bit happy, like these bozos.

It’s really all my fault. I can be low-key about a lot of things but packing is not one of them. When it comes to packing I have rather severe control issues. In fact, the last time we moved, when I was six months pregnant, I literally packed the entire house, every dish, ever book, every article of clothing, despite my terrific girth. This is because David has such a haphazard packing style (at least compared with mine) and watching him pile books up in unaligned, precarious towers -- a bunch of dime novels on the bottom, a Riverside Shakespeare on top of that and a bunch of board books on top of that – was so deeply unsettling to me that I fired him from all packing duties in perpetuity.

Whenever we take a vacation, David knows to simply select the items he would like to take with us, and place them near, but NEVER inside the suitcase.

It is awful of me to be so controlling, I know, and even worse to resent him because being so controlling means I end up doing a mind-blowing amount of manual labor, but the truth is, I am a master packer. Master. I learned this art from my father who can fit the entire contents of a studio apartment in the trunk of a Subaru Outback, with enough clearance for the driver to safely navigate the FDR. I am freakishly talented at maximizing storage space. Like, that’s one of my great talents in life. For instance, if I left it up to David he would commit the number one biggest mistake when packing a suitcase which is to put clothes in folded. A more TERRIFIC waste of space I cannot begin to imagine! Lay the clothes flat and you can pack in twice as many. I mean, this is beginner stuff here.

So here we are, a few days away from our moving date, maybe 10% of the way packed. I have been preparing myself to hand over some of the packing duties to David because, despite what I may have led you to believe, I am actually only human. It won’t be easy. It will probably give me a bleeding ulcer. I may end up shoving him into a large box and sealing it closed with super-strength packing tape. Or maybe I’ll drink a few glasses of wine to settle my nerves and pass out with bubble wrap in my hand. Who knows how it will all turn out.

One thing I can tell you for sure. We won’t look like these guys.