Читать книгу Iris Has Free Time - Iris Smyles - Страница 30

This is almost everything that happened since I last saw May in New York:

I got even more serious with Martin; took a job teaching sixth grade in a public school in the South Bronx; moved to a new apartment at the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel; took a new job teaching at a private school on the Upper West Side; earned my teaching certificate; applied to graduate school; discovered Reggie on line behind me outside the Halloween store on Fourth Avenue—“I’m going to be ‘white trash,’” he said; broke up with Martin after nearly three years (Not right after Halloween, but pretty soon after. He was surprised; he loved me, he explained, and figured we were in it for the long haul, which was why he resented me so much); moved to a new apartment in the West Village; accepted the third invitation sent by Caroline to join Friendster; quit my teaching job; began a master’s program in Humanities after every other graduate school rejected me; tried to write another novel; updated my Friendster profile to include under Favorite Films all three Amy Fisher movies (Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story; The Amy Fisher Story; and Amy Fisher: My Story) and summarily accepted one hundred or so “friend requests” from former college and high school acquaintances I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years; read up on “lucid dreaming” and began first by just trying to hover low, still pretty close to the ground; cried when I told Martin I didn’t want to get back together though I definitely still loved him, that I’d really only come over to collect my Tupperware containers and my train tracks; took to crying sporadically on the subway when I thought about how much I missed him; and learned to live an otherwise quiet, fairly responsible life that included veggie burgers (to make sure I was getting at least one serving of vegetables daily) prepared on my George Foreman Grill (a Christmas present from my parents), the occasional jog along the Hudson river, and hanging framed reproductions of Bruegels and Manets, or whatever I could find on sale at The Salvation Army, up and down the walls of my new West Village one-bedroom apartment in an ongoing effort to make the place look more like how I felt, which was, increasingly, like having a party, before I decided to throw one in celebration of my twenty-fifth birthday.