Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [19]
The same holds true here in the city. What’s more, we all go around preaching our allegiance wearing the post-college equivalent to Greek letters (Gawker T-shirt, YSL ski goggle sunglasses) and pledge pins (skull pendant, Tiffany solitaire).
Some quick and totally subjective free association:
UPPER EAST SIDE=ARISTOCRATIC
UPPER WEST SIDE=ACADEMIC
LOWER EAST SIDE=ADDICTED
These are totally biased observations, of course. Certainly there are welfare moms on the UES, college dropouts on the UWS, and triathletes on the LES. (Then again, maybe not.) I should really make a better effort not to stereotype, especially since I fall victim to such casual assumptions. We happen to live in a very desirable neighborhood, but not one that comes close to accurately reflecting who we are, because:
PARK SLOPE=BREEDERS
Yes, the Slope is known for having more sidewalk-hogging sancti-mommies than any other neighborhood in all five boroughs. Whether this is really true, I don’t really know. It seems to me that annoying mommies are hardly limited to the confines of Fourth Avenue, Prospect Park West, Flatbush Avenue, and Fifteenth Street. Still, Ursula has lived here for twenty years, and often waxes nostalgic about the good old days, when “zere were more dykes den tykes.”
The Park Slope Mommy is a peculiar, oft-ridiculed mommy, one who is stereotyped as both crunchy and uppity. Oh woe to the straggler who stands between her double-wide Urban Mountain Buggy and the seminar on sustainable permaculture at the Food Co-op. And when it’s a dozen Maclarens deep at Tea Lounge, do not even think about apologizing if you accidentally brush an elbow up against the shrieking red bundle slung across her body. The Park Slope Mommy will mow you down and Croc-stomp your ass, because Park Slope Mommies don’t play. (Seriously. They don’t. They engage their children in “multidisciplinary explorative colloquia.”)
Again, I don’t know how much of this is really true. But childless singles like myself swap PSM stories all the time. Creating these urban legends is a big part of this neighborhood’s appeal because New Yorkers just love to one-up one another in their tales of metropolitan woe.
In that vein, I get a lot of mileage out of the fact that I’m sharing a bedroom for the first time in my life, and bunk-bed style at that. But at least I’ve got the bottom bunk, and the top bunk is Hope’s. And really, at only $550 a month, all grievances are moot. Considering my income-to-debt ratio, I’m lucky to be living anywhere at all, let alone in relative comfort in one of the more desirable neighborhoods in one of the acceptable outer boroughs. I love this apartment so much that it almost didn’t bother me at all when I heard the biggest drawback to living here unlocking the front-door dead bolt before I was even halfway through my first cup of coffee this morning, my silent prayer unanswered.
“Good morning,” said the biggest drawback as she half-walked, half-shuffled toward me with a weary grimace, as if she resented the very idea of complying to the laws of gravity, of actually having to lift her limbs off the ground.
“Good morning. Uh. Manda.”
fifteen
I’ve defended this choice before, and I’ll do it again.
Yes, I’m well aware how the only thing more unlikely than Hope and me sharing the rent with Manda Powers, our promiscuous Pineville High classmate, is sharing the rent with the promiscuous Manda Powers and her lesbian girlfriend, Shea. Or rather, her genderqueer boifriend, as Manda prefers, that is, if I insist on using labels because I am brainwashed by the heteropatriarchal paradigm.
For someone so devoted to hedonistic pleasures of the flesh, Manda sure has a knack for lecturing us in a self-righteous tone that instantly drains the fun out of everything. Case in point: On that very first afternoon outside the apartment, she showed