Old Folks at--Home?

I’ll tell you the kind of house I live in, here in the dead center of Manhattan: if I’m rolling out a pie crust. I’m afraid the neighbors will complain to the landlord and ask to have us evicted as undesirable tenants.

I keep having this feeling that making a pie is morally reprehensible, and what I should be doing is beating drums, having a jam session, taking part in a rock ‘n’ roll rehearsal, with plenty of stamping in rhythm, practicing flamenco dancing, having a party with forty people frugging, jerking (it always makes me very nervous to type those words, let alone say them), and smoking marijuana, or, failing that, I should at least be hanging around the lobby in boots, miniskirt, white mesh stockings, fun fur, my false eyelashes (freshly cleaned in false-eyelash cleaner) sticking out pertly in front of me, with my miniature poodle or Chihuahua or Pomeranian on my arm, awaiting gentlemen friends, or anyway acquaintances, or anyway acquaintances of acquaintances.

Oh, there’s an oven in the apartment all right, but somehow I have the strong conviction that it’s not meant for homemade pies, but only for frozen dinners, or frozen canapes, or frozen hot tamales, and if the landlord should ever find out that I’ve used it to roast chickens, or make apple pies and brownies and cup custards from old family recipes, he would chide us for abuse of the premises for which all we pay each month is enough to make the bank blanch when I write the check.

Besides, I’m embarrassed to go in and out and have people sec me right out in plain sight in the elevators and lobby in my natural-colored stockings (well, she’s a nut — in a building this size, you’re bound to find some nuts) and my plain old eyelashes, the ones that just happened to grow there on ray eyelids. Of course I’ve had my hair bleached since we moved here, and that helps some. But my skirts come to my knees, and the only boots I have are for snow and rain, and I don’t have silver nail polish or silver lipstick. It’s red.

The fact of the matter is that the wrong element (that’s us) is moving back to Manhattan as their children grow up, and since all the staid old buildings, still rent-controlled, are unavailable, we (the wrong element) move into the new ones, where we stick out like a warthog in a basket of Siamese kittens.

We’re very quiet people. We can’t have more than two people at a time to dinner because I have a bad back; the last time we gave a party was twelve years ago. Besides, we don’t have enough chairs. If we did give a party, it would have to be in a hotel, and that’s out because with the rent we pay now, we can just barely keep ourselves in cigarettes — the old-fashioned tobacco kind.

We have these gay, mad evenings when we sit down to dinner, watch the news on TV, read, discuss quietly the advisability of getting out of here, watch any special and really important TV shows, like the Miss Teen-age America Pageant, click off the set at eleven o’clock (that’s our big noise of the evening, that click of the TV knob), and go to bed. We make a big racket from about eleven to eleven ten brushing our teeth, and then we read in bed till midnight. I make one last crashing noise at midnight as I set the alarm clock and turn on my electric blanket, and of course there are the two clicks of the bed lamps being turned off.

We then close our eyes, snuggle under the covers, and go to . . .

And POW! That’s when the building comes to life. Buzzers buzz as the doorman announces guests, doorbells ring, feet run, dogs bark with excitement, doors slam, ice cubes clink in glasses, phonographs blast, pianos crash, drums pound, guitars strum and whine, vocal cords strain, walls vibrate, and floors shake, and it’s all like the beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom when the jungle shadows fall — and a voice within me keeps repeating damn, damn, damn.

Finally we make our own noise. “I’ll kill somebody,” my husband says in a low, tense voice.

“I can’t hear you through the pounding of the mashed potato,” 1 say.

“I say,” he repeats, “I’ll kill somebody.”

“I wonder,” I say, “when they’re going to take down the sign on the front of the building that says ‘Soundproof Apartments’?”

About two o’clock he gets up, stamps to the bathroom (but of course nobody can hear him through the crashing of cymbals and the clatter of castanets), and takes a couple of sleeping pills. After a while I get up and get a couple for myself. (I wish we had some LSD, or maybe some marijuana or heroin, so we could fit in better.) About four o’clock we fall into a restless sleep. Doors are slamming all over the building a.s guests drift on home, singing and laughing in the halls; and then, finally, comes the rushing of water in the pipes throughout the building that signals the coming of night just a.s the garbage trucks start crawling through the street, grinding and whining and gnashing their teeth, signaling the approach of day.

Of course we get our own back the next morning, but we’re too pale and exhausted to enjoy it. While everybody else sleeps on (or, more likely, sleeps it off), I probably cause undue disturbance with the shushing of my slippers as I move back and forth from kitchen to dining area, run the water to fill the coffee pot, gulp a couple of capsules of tranquilizer to help me recover from my night’s sleep; and then there’s the clink of cups on saucers, the stirring of sugar, the buttering of rolls that probably disturb people for whole floors around.

(You’re all probably dying to know where this apartment house is by now, but of course I can’t tell you, for reasons mentioned below.)

I live from day to day in terror that someone may discover that we have a carpet in our living room. I didn’t know, when we moved in, that carpets are forbidden. I didn’t notice any clause about that in the lease, so we just plunged ahead and bought it, and it was only after we’d moved in that we discovered that no one has a carpet, and therefore, more than likely there’s some rule against it. Naturally the whole thing worries me. The landlord may raise the rent if he finds out, or call the police and have us taken away. Still, as things are, I’d rather welcome being taken away, because my guess is that in jail everybody has to put his lights out and lay down his guitar at the same time.

“I wonder what it’s like in Wyoming,”my husband says from time to time.

“Or the more northerly stretches of Greenland,” I suggest.

Meanwhile the tub drain in our bathroom is slow and badly needs attention, but I don’t dare mention it to the superintendent. I have a walnut torte in the oven and a chicken simmering on the stove, and I don’t want to risk discovery.

Tomorrow I’m going to buy a pair of boots and a tuba and start lessons.