Age of Anxiety: LES Food and High-School Trauma
Past the bar in front and down a hall filled with small tables, Paladar opens into a mock garden beneath a dome. It's a little brighter here than the indoor dining room. Plants peek from behind large bamboo fans. There are red polka-dot cloths on the tables. A string of multicolored pepper lights hangs from the convex ceiling. Fans whirl overhead, spinning in silent, hypnotic rhythm; while waiting for dinner, my eyes swung around and around in my head, distinguishing the individual blades from the blur of white they formed, until Annie asked me what I was doing.
We were sitting near a corner, next to the wall, and the temperature kept changing. I would feel warm air from a vent above me, heating the dome for a moment before tapering off into wintry wind. I kept slipping in and out of my cardigan. The tables around us filled with men in sweaters and thin women drinking red wine and eating salads. A couple passed a baby back and forth across their table. Annie and I were noticeably younger than everyone. Bits of conversations about vacations and bosses drifted past our table. Even sipping wine amid young professionals, we were high school students, with our too-careful makeup, our giddy desire to drink, our neurotic college preoccupations. By the time our waitress brought us a plate of calamari, Annie and I were already ticking off lists of schools, reciting their average SAT scores, their acceptances rates?all the information we'd memorized reading and rereading U.S. News & World Report. We stopped paying attention to the generation gap that separated us from the other patrons?attractive people with money who came through doors wearing black and talking about weddings and jobs they hated.
Calamari is the same everywhere?the rubbery, resistant texture, the slithering, buttery, tough tearing of tentacles, the greasy caloric overload. Paladar's calamari was uniquely good because it came with a bowl of some weird-colored mango sauce with a semi-spicy kick. Between bites of squid, Annie and I discussed reasonable acceptance rates for backup schools. When our main courses arrived?Annie's sauteed shrimp forming an enormous ring around rice and vegetables, my fish half obscured by leafy something or other?we were already on to financial aid and scholarships.
Annie and I always get this overanxious edge about schools. Her hands get flighty and I bite my nails, a habit I was supposed to have broken when I was 12. We rehash everything that made our fall semesters hell?those SAT prep tomes, the prosaic essay questions about influential works of art, the mock interviews with parents in preparation for the real thing. So our dinner had the monomaniacal edge that most high school seniors' lives have?that relentless, lurking college obsession. We think about it all the time; we talk about first-choice schools and second-choice schools and the schools our parents made us apply to. When we hear back, there's that awkward moment on the phone with friends who applied to the same places, a moment in which we feel out whether or not they've been accepted. Then we strike a balance between happiness and arrogance, or swallow unspoken jealousy and offer congratulations.
I ate juicy, steaming fish in a red sauce and rice kept warm with a cap of green leaves and onions, and I thought about acceptance letters, rejection letters and tomorrow's mail, which would arrive at my parents' house 800 miles away in Indiana, be opened by my mother and reported to me via voicemail message.
The sauce was tangy and full of little pieces of sweet onions and something else that might have been mushroom. The steam from the rice made the greens kind of droopy and wilted, but it's possible that their sole purpose was to keep the rest of the food warm, and that I wasn't supposed to eat them at all. Annie finished her meal, which is impressive. I eat out with Annie all the time and I've never seen her finish anything before.
I'm used to being in "college town" neighborhoods in the evenings?I live in Morningside Heights, and often end up taking the train down to Greenwich Village?and the Lower East Side isn't such a place. When we left Paladar, still thrashing through the possibilities of our academic futures, we didn't pass loud bars or bookstores teeming with English majors. The streets were dotted with people too old to be in school. In store windows, mannequins wore $200 pre-ripped plaid pants and tanktops with silk-screened pictures of Marilyn Monroe. A banjo mural stretched across a building. We walked through strips of color cast by convenience store signs.
No college kids. When I leave home, there's always someone reading Hamlet on the subway. My neighborhood is several blocks of expensive, drafty brownstones and a few nice restaurants; bars and cafes fill up with students in slacks. Mid-morning they sit at sidewalk tables, smoke cloves and eat bagel brunches. They carry fat novels in leather bags. Young men in peacoats and expensive shoes drink specialty teas. In most Indiana high schools, a young man would be branded a "faggot" and stuffed in a toilet for dressing like the male student population of Columbia. Students read brilliant dead white men on the subway and complain loudly about their classes.
The Village students are a little more familiar to me. NYU classes empty onto the streets and kids who look like so many displaced Midwestern high-schoolers lean against the buildings and smoke. They have pasty pale skin and thin hair. They hold their cigarettes with the casual comfort of kids who swiped packs from their parents when they were 13 and smoked them on the top floor of a parking garage after school. On NYU sidewalks, college students who had traded in their backpacks for platforms disappeared into bars and clubs, music throbbing out to the street. Annie and I spent too much time thinking about their reality?dorm rooms, coin laundry, roommates.
We'd had a little to drink?Annie slurping something that looked and tasted like a melted jolly rancher, me drinking white wine, even though I wanted red. I can say "pinot grigio," but stumble over "haut Medoc." Mispronouncing a drink seems like a good way to get carded, especially if you look too young to drink in the first place, which I do?I have a nervous smile, I fidget with my ring, I bite my lip. I get a displaced, first-day-of-school look on my face when I'm anxious. So I drank white wine and worried a little less about being carded. Annie looks older than I do and seemed comfortable ordering her daiquiri. She only likes drinks that are sweet, fruit-flavored and bright red, or mixed with a lot of Coke.
Out on the street, watching college students who seemed to lead lives impossibly different from ours, our anxiety wore off. My index finger had turned red from my restless hands twirling the ring around and around my knuckle. I put my fists in my pockets. Annie's hands were still. My nails could heal.