Walk This Way...I Think

I don't always deserve the confidence I walk with in New York. 

Once, while trying to get my mom to the airport, I hurried us onto not one, not two, but three trains going in the wrong direction because we were so deep in conversation. By the time we got to the last train, which would take her on her own from the subway to the terminal, she was so late we hardly had time to hug.

"Go!" I urged, pushing her toward the turnstile.

She looked back at me, bewildered.

"I don't know where the f*#$ I'm going!" she cried.

"The train only goes one way!"

On an outing during her most recent visit, I changed my mind twice at one above-ground intersection, trying to decide which way to cross a street. Oblivious to my uncertainty and trying to finish some thought or another, my mom mimicked my every move like a shadow so that a crowd of people stepped back to watch. I think they thought we were some sort of pop-up vaudeville act. They don't know that's just how we are.

Anyway, being in charge of logistics in Manhattan can be exhausting, but it's more exhausting if the people you are logisticating don't feel like they can trust your decisions.

Last Saturday, Tiffany and I led my mom and five other members of my family and friend-family from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side and back up the middle to join throngs of other people for photos in front of the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. Of course, they could have found the way themselves. But they were deferring to us as their hostesses.

"Do you think they can tell we have no idea where we're going?" I whispered to Tiffany as the group trailed behind us through an underground subway passage. 

"No," she said. "Walk confidently, and they never will."

This worked perfectly until we walked with confidence into an exit barricaded with a metal gate.

But I'll tell you what, you have never seen a U-Turn so masterfully executed.

Packing a Pumpkin

I packed a pumpkin in my carry-on for my friend-family's Thanksgiving in Florida this year. First, I packed my cowboy boots, and then I put in my jeans and my one nice outfit, and then I made a little hole in the layer between my running clothes and my pajamas, and I put the pumpkin in the hole.

"You know they have pumpkin in Florida?" my friend Teresa asked. "In cans?"

Yes, of course I know it's possible to buy pumpkin. It's the reason I left my sweet potatoes at home (also, a several-sweet-potato-sized hole proved difficult to find in my small wheelie bag, and Tiffany said if I insisted on making pumpkin and sweet potato pie from scratch, "You're on your own.").

Anyway, it didn't seem ridiculous at all to me to bring the pumpkin until we got to the airport and I began to wonder if the squash in my carry-on was going to look like a bomb in the security x-ray. After all, a pumpkin does look a little bomb-ish, if your bomb reference is from old cartoons: a ball with a sizzling wick on top. My pumpkin's stem didn't sizzle, but still...

Would my pumpkin be confiscated?

No.

Years ago, my friend-family slid down hills in turkey pans for fun. Now we are a little more mature. On Wednesday night, we went to the bar where everyone but me downed lemon drop and Fireball shots (when I kissed Tiffany she tasted like a piece of Big Red gum.). We danced and debated whether any of us could twerk and learned pretty quickly that I, at least, cannot.

When we got home at midnight, most of my friend-family went to bed, but I went to get the pumpkin out of my carry-on because I knew there wouldn't be time or oven space to bake it in a few hours. For a minute, I regretted the whole endeavor, but then Little Rebecca and Sam and Tiffany and I started slicing pumpkin and scraping out seeds and talking and laughing. Soon, Tiffany went to bed, and Little Rebecca and Sam and I moved on to sweet potatoes, checking the oven often enough to slow the baking process down even further.

I'm not sure our homemade sweet potato and pumpkin pies were any better than the canned kind. But, in my mind, you can't beat cooking from scratch. If all I had to do was wield a can-opener, I never would have stayed up until 2 a.m. with my friend-family, scooping soft sweet potato and pumpkin into bowls.

And if you don't stay up until 2 a.m., you don't learn certain things, like the fact that Little Rebecca, the former bald-headed baby, can twerk. Upside down against the wall, standing on her sticky pumpkin hands.

With a Little Luck

The first time I played horseshoes with Tiffany she got a shoe stuck in a tree. I've never seen someone aim so carefully and miss so completely. Her u-shaped piece of iron didn't make it even halfway to the pole across the way. Instead, it went straight up in the air, shooting through a leafy oak until it came back down to ring a sturdy branch.

"How did you do that?" I asked her, after I had removed my hands from my head and stopped laughing.

"I don't know," she said. "I held it just like you did and then I let go."

We weren't even dating at the time. Lucky for her, I wasn't looking for a permanent horseshoe partner.

Still, it turns out I found one.

Over Thanksgiving, the grown-up boy I used to play time machine with brought a set of shoes to keep us busy on the beach. When he and his mom ended up on one side with Tiffany and I on the other, I had a moment of preemptive competitive panic, visions of horseshoes being accidentally hurled into the ocean off to our left.

"You sure about your partner choice?" I called.

Tiffany glared at me.

"Remember to let go a little earlier than you did that one time," I whispered.

But it turns out the four of us were pretty evenly matched. We all hit the pole and we all missed it, and if Tiffany sometimes missed it more than the rest of us, well, a zero score is still a zero score. After we were tied for a while, we called sudden death. The first team to ring the pole would win. None of us had done so yet.

"Oh, so close!" we yelled back and forth until it was Tiffany's turn.

"Guys," she said, "I've got this."

And, would you believe it, she was right.

We all walked over to look down at the winning shoe in the sand as the sun began to dip into the water.

It was so lucky-looking and pretty that I had to take a picture. It felt like a sign of anything good to come, even if all that means is better hand-eye coordination. 

Sicky Sick Sickerson

I used to like being sick when I was little. It meant staying home from school, spending all day in my pajamas sipping Coke or slurping Campbell's chicken noodle soup, and watching old Bette Davis movies with my mom.

I don't much like being sick as a grownup. It means going to work anyway.

Tiffany, on the other hand, loves being sick. Well, she likes being middling sick--somewhere between scratchy throat and bedridden. She likes coughing in my direction until I look up from whatever I'm doing--

"Are you hearing this? I think I'm getting sick..."

--losing her voice--

"It's literally gone!" she croaks--

and generally playing up whatever ailment she has developed--

"Can you take my temperature?"

Luckily for Tiffany, she's adorable when she's sick.

"I'm sicky sick sickerson," she said to me a couple of weeks ago when I got home as she sucked on a cherry-flavored cough drop. "Sick sick sick!"

The next morning I left her tucked in bed while I went to the gym. But when I got home again she was up and moving.

"Get back in bed!" I said, "go!"

"But I want to spend time with you!" she whispered, her voice like sandpaper.

"You just want me to notice you have no voice," I said, fighting a smile as I pushed and prodded her.

"It's literally gone!" she croaked.

I wish I could tell you I rented a bunch of suspenseful black-and-whites and served Tiffany a piping hot bowl of chicken noodle. But Tiffany doesn't like scary movies and she had to make do with cabbage.

Rabbit Food

Tiffany and I recently left a head of cabbage sitting in our fridge for three weeks (don't worry--we picked it from the farm ourselves, so it was nothing if not fresh). Every time I opened the door and saw it, I felt it judging me:

"You are not creative enough to cook me."

It's true; I'm not inspired much by cabbage. I love sauerkraut, but sauerkraut takes several days to prepare and, even by my standards, our cabbage would have been old by then. Another choice, coleslaw, felt too summery for the fall weather.

One night we finally decided on cabbage soup because it's easy and we had most of the ingredients. When I say cabbage soup is easy, I mean there's nothing to it.

Like, actually nothing. I googled cabbage soup on my way home to make sure I had everything and all the top results were: DIET DIET DIET. A little uncertainly, I bought some carrots and leeks. My stomach growled.

When I walked in the door, Tiffany had already started making the soup.

"Smells good!" I cried, willing the soup to satiate me.

"I think I put in too much cabbage," Tiffany said, warning me away from the pot with her spoon.

"Impossible," I said. "Apparently cabbage soup is for people who want to starve...HOLY COW, that's a lot of cabbage, babe!"

"I told you."

"How about adding more water?"

"I did."

After we each finished a bowl, we looked at each other. Tiffany estimated it would take us each another three bowls to feel full.

"Or we could just have leftover pizza," I said.

And that is why there is now at least three weeks worth of cabbage soup in our freezer.

Playing Catch

I gave myself a blister throwing a frisbee with my brother Brandon and our best friend Zac in Miami a couple of weeks ago. 

I'm actually a pretty good frisbee thrower. But when you have an older brother, pretty good isn't good enough. You have to be:

"Wow!" Brandon said, "I didn't even have to move my hands for that one!"

Once you make a throw that good, you have to keep making throws that good, until you get a blister.

Of course, nobody can throw that well every time.

Soon my throws were sailing over Brandon's head and way to the right of Zac, near the couple making out under an umbrella.

Unlike me and Brandon, Zac has never been obsessed with being the best in ridiculous physical activities like frisbee. He understands, innately, that sometimes being the best means blisters, and so he sat down in the beach chair when Brandon and I headed into the water to practice our "diving catches."

"You're overthinking it!" Brandon yelled as he waded into the deep for the umpteenth time to retrieve one of my bad throws.

"That's because I'm having flashbacks to when we were little and you would say exactly that!" I screamed back. "I feel like I'm 7 years old again!"

Still, no matter how many bad throws I made, Brandon stayed across from me trying to catch them. There is no passage of time with siblings. You are always one throw away from the best throw ever.

And a blister.

Look Before You Lock

Stop in the name of love.

That's what I wrote on a sliver of a sticky note to put above our top door lock recently. I had no choice. That morning, like several other mornings in the past few months, I found myself locked in our apartment by my gorgeous, kind, terribly forgetful fiancee.

A few months ago, Tiffany and I locked ourselves out of our apartment and paid several hundred dollars to have new locks made. But apparently it takes several hundred more dollars to make the inside lock match the outside lock. I'm not sure, really, since we weren't given that choice. What this means is that we cannot lock (or unlock) our top lock from inside our apartment. We can only lock it from outside our apartment, which Tiffany does quite often when she leaves for work, and I'm still sleeping inside.

The other day I dialed Tiffany's place of business.

"Hi, this is Rebecca, and my partner Tiffany is training someone in your gym. Can you tell her she locked me in the apartment... again?"

"You're locked out?" the receptionist said.

"In."

"Wait, hold on, let me take this down. What happened?"

Sigh.

By the time Tiffany got home--sprinting up the stairs and apologizing from the hallway while I waited inside with my backpack and sunglasses on--I had forgotten that I once thought the situation was funny.

But later that night we both remembered that it was. Still. I'm not taking any chances.

Hence the sticky for Tiffany:

Stop [locking me in our apartment] in the name of love.

Bad Hair Day

I recently got my latest bad haircut.

"Oh!" Tiffany said when she saw me. "You cut your hair! It looks..."

"I hate it," I said, preempting her lie.

"I still love you."

You might not think someone could be bad at hair, but I am. I'm not talking about other people's hair although I must admit I'm bad at that too. I'm notoriously bad at my hair. After nearly 32 years, I haven't the faintest idea of what to do with the stuff on top of my own head. This is especially egregious since, because I prefer my hair chin length, I cut my hair quite often. I should be a hair genius.

There are multiple factors at play. First off, I don't do anything to my hair. Second, I don't know what should be done to my hair. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, I don't have a hairdresser I love to do my hair. I almost walked into a salon the other day because I like the fact that the owner's dog lies outside the entrance.

"Forget the dog--what does the owner's hair look like?" Tiffany asked me when I told her my idea.

I tried somewhere else.

The truth is, most of the time it's a moot point. I usually wear my hair up in a bun-for-people-who-are-bad-at-hair (make a ponytail and don't pull your hair all the way through). So when it's time for a haircut, I convince myself that it doesn't matter where I go since I don't care that much about my hair. That works out fine until I see the final result and get home to Tiffany who says:

"Oh! You cut your hair! It looks..."

"I hate it."

"I still love you."

Check, Please. I Mean, Check-Mate

For Christmas last year, Tiffany's mom Patty gave us a hand-painted Peruvian chess set. It's beautiful. The pieces are stored inside the board, which opens and shuts like a box.

Tiffany and I don't know anything about chess. That's not true. I did love the movie Little Man Tate, and my mom's stepdad showed me how to play once or twice as a young girl...you know what, I really feel I must stick with:

Tiffany and I don't know anything about chess. But we decided to play a few nights ago.
While I was finishing the dishes, Tiffany found an app that explains the rules of the game and also lets you play against an unknown, unnamed, virtual competitor. When I came out of the kitchen, she was sitting with her phone in front of her face, giggling:

"Oh, shoot," she said. "He got me!"

"Tiffany, let's play."

"Yeah, hold on.. it's so nice because he suggests moves for me...Whoops! Bad move!"

"Do you want to, like, play a real person?"

As beautiful as our board is, it's not quite regulation. Tiffany didn't have all her pawns (little kneeling men), but she had three bishops (slightly taller, non-kneeling men). So we made one of her bishops a pawn by coloring a "P" on his underside.

The app said the player using the white pieces always goes first. But our Peruvian pieces are reddish and blue-ish. Except for my two rooks, which were grey and looked kind of like the ghosts in Pac-Man.

"You go first," I said. "You're wearing a white t-shirt."

Early in the game, things went poorly for Tiffany.

"Is that your queen?" I asked politely.

"Yes, I think this is her hair."

I took her queen with my knight (a bucking horse).

Tiffany's knights were actually llamas. And she lost them not too long after her queen when she put them in spots diagonal from my pawns.

The app said kings are weak because they can only move one spot at a time. But Tiffany's king was even weaker because even though the app specified that kings can capture, he failed to take my bucking horse both times he was next it.

"I need suggested moves," Tiffany said.

Ultimately, our kings were a couple of spaces apart in the middle of the board by themselves. I began to wonder if they might negotiate a peace accord underwritten by their humans' incompetence. 

But then suggestion-less Tiffany moved her king right next to my ghost.

(Full disclosure: Tiffany beat me in about 5 moves the next night.)

Halloween: No Rush Orders

I was never huge on Halloween. Asking people for things still makes me uncomfortable, so I always felt a bit awkward about ringing the doorbells of even neighbors we knew and holding out my pumpkin-shaped bucket. Also, I watched a lot of "Unsolved Mysteries" with my brother and was terrified of ringing the doorbells of people I didn't know. 

I gave up the holiday much earlier than my friends, preferring to stay at home and pass out candy with my mom.

The 5-year-old daughter of our friends is another story altogether.

Julia loves Halloween. 

On one of our recent visits, Julia told Tiffany and me she was going to be a celebrity this year. She pointed to a picture of a girl in a silver-sequined dress on a well-worn page in her Halloween catalog (did you know there are Halloween costume catalogs?). 

"Cool!" I said, "I wore a dress just like that for prom one year."

Julia looked at my soccer shorts and tanktop and raised her eyebrows. I think she may have been slightly impressed.

I pointed at a cowgirl on another, much less well-worn page.

"I was a cowgirl once," I said. "Maybe I'll be a cowgirl again this year."

"I wish you had told me sooner," Julia said solemnly. "Then we both could have been cowgirls."

Now it was my turn to be impressed.

"We have plenty of time," I said, thinking I could make her a cowgirl in a couple of hours. A hat. Some boots. A bandana. Yee-haw. 

She shook her head and smiled at my ignorance of the time it takes to assemble a proper Halloween costume. There were shoes to consider, she explained. And make-up. And the perfect bag.

"Maybe next year," she said kindly, turning back to her sequins.

Fly-By

For Christmas, Tiffany's dad gave us an electric fly swatter shaped like a tennis racket. All through the winter and spring, it sat in the corner of our apartment, untouched. But Tiffany finally unsheathed it one night when the summer flies came around to spoil our deck time.

"Is it dangerous?" I asked her.

"Hold out your finger," she suggested.

"No way! Test it on yourself!"

There were lots of flies circling our dinner that evening. But Tiffany, whose hand-eye coordination leaves something to be desired (she once got a horseshoe caught in a tree), couldn't hit a single one. And, I, unwilling to swat anything to its death, wouldn't take the racket from her hand.

I guess the flies told all their friends what a great hangout they'd found because, later that night, just as we lay down, an enormous fly rose above the foot of our lofted bed. It looked--and sounded--like an Apache helicopter. 

"Disgusting!" I yelled.

"Get me the zapper!"

I scrambled down our ladder and came back up with the Racket of Death. It turns out it is dangerous. Before I had time to take cover, Tiffany wound up and swung, narrowly missing my head. 

"Watch it!" I cried, diving across her body to get out of the arc of her swing.

She swung again and again, letting out little screams each time. 

"Is it possible you are missing it every time?" I asked, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. "Maybe it doesn't work."

ZAP!

The fly suddenly dropped, lifeless. Onto my pillow.

"Disgusting!" I yelled again.

"Ha!" Tiffany laughed. "I knew I could get it!"

Childless Adults

"So, how many kids are going to be there again?" I asked Tiffany as we packed on Thursday for a weekend in Cape Cod with some of our best friends and their children.

"Seven, I think," she said.

I considered the number in my head.

"Weren't there seven dogs at Thanksgiving last year?" I asked.

"I don't think it's the same thing," she said.

It's not.

First of all, at last year's Thanksgiving, humans outnumbered dogs 18-7. In Cape Cod, children outnumbered parents 7-6. When you count Tiffany and me, grown-ups outnumbered small people by one sleep-deprived body. But I'm not sure you should count us. Tiffany and I are not parents. We are childless adults. I have a new appreciation for what that means after this weekend. It means:

1) We can go to bed when we want.
2) We can wake up when we want.
3) We can leave when we want.

But we didn't want to do anything without the kids. So we went to bed late and got up early and didn't walk out the door without holding the hand of or carrying someone's child.

As non-parents, Tiffany and I are extra cautious. Whenever we left one child to attend to another, we made an official hand-off to a mom or dad:

"Molly, your son is sitting in your car in the driveway with headphones on. The keys may or may not be in there with him."

"John, does your daughter eat sand?"

"Darren, your son took his pants off. Again."

"Bobby, your daughter tried to pee in her bathing suit behind that tree. You might want to get a hose. And some soap."

"Teresa, your youngest is starting his 1,000th ascent of the hard wooden stairs."

"Megan, your youngest bit that one."

Releases of liability aside, the truth is, we had a blast. When Tiffany and I got back to the relative calm of Manhattan (we aren't in charge of anyone here), it felt weird to just hold each other's hand as we walked to dinner. When we came out of the restaurant, I saw a baby in a stroller and had to think for a second:

"Am I partially responsible for making that baby smile?"

And I was kind of sad that I wasn't, so I made a funny face at her anyway.

"C" is for Cookie...

"I bet Brandon hated you when you were little," Tiffany said the other night while we were eating our dessert on the couch.

She was looking at my plate, which I had balanced on my knees.

"Why?" I asked. Then I looked at her plate. "Ohhhhhh."

Tiffany only had one bite of her Peruvian cookie left. And by left, I mean, the bite on her plate was the only bite she had left in this country. Her aunt had brought the cookie over on her most recent trip and wouldn't be returning any time soon. I had my entire Peruvian cookie, plus most of the frozen banana we had split in two. I was eating the banana first because, although it was delicious, the Peruvian cookie was much better. I'm a big believer in self-deprivation, as you might have guessed by now. (And, yes, "hate" is a strong word, but my brother was bothered that I could make my Halloween candy last until Valentine's Day)

"I am slow," I agreed, proceeding to eat my banana slice by slice before moving onto my cookie. This I pulled apart and ate bite by bite, in between sips of milk.

"Come on," Tiffany groaned.

"I'm savoring!" I cried.

Soon I forgot my slow eating was driving her crazy, fascinated as I was by "So You Think You Can Dance" (for the record, I do not think I can).

When I ate my last bite, I felt a little sad, as I always do.

But I felt much worse when Tiffany yelled: "YES! I knew I could do it!" and then popped her remaining cookie morsel into her mouth.

Sunny Days

Tiffany and I went to visit my brother and some friends in Florida last weekend. As usual, I got too much sun (see here and here). I didn't realize just how much I'd gotten until Tiffany and I went into the bathroom to brush our teeth together before our early morning flight home.

When I looked up from applying toothpaste to my toothbrush, Tiffany was staring at my reflection in the mirror.

"What?" I asked.

"Your..." she tried to finish her sentence, but burst out laughing. "Your... look at your..."

"Oh my god, my lips!" I yelled, when I saw what she was talking about. They were huge. I looked like Goldie Hawn after her collagen injection in the movie First Wives Club.

"'Mustafa!'" I said to Tiffany in the mirror, puckering my mouth at her.

Soon we were both giggling, and that's how Brandon found us when he came out of his bedroom.

"What is going on... oh my god, your lips!" he cried.

"Don't tell mom," I warned him, pointing my toothbrush at him.

Then we all laughed until I had to stop because the skin on my lips was cracking. It was easy to stop because leaving my brother makes me so sad.

But later we had to laugh again when Tiffany--my Greek/Peruvian sun goddess--realized how burnt her back was.

"You did a horrible job putting block on my back," she complained.

I looked at her, confused.

"Did I put sunscreen on your back?"

"Oh my god, no wonder!" she cried. "Nobody was looking out for me!"

"Mustafa," I answered. 

If It Isn't Heaven, It's...

Tiffany and I are pretty good in a car (see the posts on our epic cross-country move here).

But we disagree on the rules of a roadtrip. Specifically, she feels that the passenger should never be allowed to sleep, under any circumstances, while the car is in motion. I disagree. The advantages of having two drivers include having the chance to take a nap when you are not driving, which I did on a recent Sunday when we drove back from New Hampshire.

"Are you sleeping?" Tiffany cried.

"Huh?" I asked, jumping in my seat.

"I was waving my hand in front of your face, and you didn't even flinch!"

"Yes, I was sleeping! That's what you get to do when you're not driving. As the driver, you get to control the radio."

She was not persuaded.

"Let's play a game," she chirped.

But, soon after we began 20 Questions, playing a game became troublesome too.

"I'm thinking of a person..." I started.

"Is the person famous?"

"No."

"Then what's the point of picking this person?" she complained.

During her turn, she thought of a place.

"Is it in the United States?" I asked.

"No," she answered.

"Is it in another country?"

"No."

"Impossible," I said, then: "Is it in Outer Space?"

"No."

"What?? What kind of a place... wait, a minute... have I been there?"

"You may get there eventually," she said.

I narrowed my eyes.

"Is it heaven?"

She shook her head, smiling.

Hell.

Dignity

The cab driver gestured to the back of his SUV.

"Yeah, I think you're right," I said. "It fits."

He shook his head. We weren't really speaking the same language.

He began gesturing again, pointing at me, then the back of his SUV.

"Ahhh," I said. "Oh, you want me to sit back here...with that?"

I waved my hand at the desk we'd just purchased and crammed into the back-back of his car, eliminating his actual back seats.

He nodded vigorously.

As a kid, I loved riding in the back-back of our Jeep. It felt like an adventure, even if we were just going to the grocery store. 

But, at 31, I have standards. And dignity to maintain. You know, the kind of dignity you maintain while standing on Broadway trying to hail a cab with an Ikea desk you bought from a girl who just graduated from college.

I looked at Tiffany. She shrugged and headed toward the front seat.

I crawled into the back-back underneath our desk.

"Yes, ma'm," the cabbie said, pleased.

Crossing Manhattan takes a long time on a Friday night. Twisted up between the legs of our desk, I caught up on lots of emails and posted a status update on Facebook. I even texted Tiffany, concerned at the hardship she was facing up there in an actual seat, with air conditioning.

"Look in your rear view mirror," I typed.

"What am I supposed to be seeing?" she answered.

"My hand!" I responded. I was waving my hand like a maniac through the crack between our desk drawer and the right rear door, trying to catch her eye.

"Can't see anything," she wrote. "Tinted windows."

I sighed and turned around to find the man in the car behind me staring through our rear windshield, which was not, like all the other windows in our cab, tinted.

I gave him a little wave. 

Dignity be damned.

Home Sweet... Wait a Minute...

Of all the things I don't do well, being wrong is what I'm best at being bad at.

Unfortunately, I'm wrong a lot.

Even, it turns out, about which apartment building I belong in.

We live in a dark brown brownstone on a street with approximately three other dark brown brownstones (and other light brown ones, pinkish ones, greyish ones, etc.). For the first few months, it was easy to tell which building was ours (Apart from looking at the address. That's too easy.) because there was a bike chained up out front. But, once the weather improved, whoever owns that bike must have gotten on it and decided not to come back because all that's left is the lock.

Sometimes, I go up the wrong stairs and even into the wrong vestibule before I realize I'm not actually home.

Take, for instance, the other day when Tiffany and I got into a fight on our run.

It went something like this:

(heading out of Central Park onto a certain street)

Me (exhausted): "Why are we going this way?"

Tiffany: "Why does it matter?"

Me: "Because my way is faster."

Tiffany: "But why does it matter?"

Me: (silent treatment)

By the time we made it to our street, I was a few angry paces ahead, so I was first to slow to a stop and walk (read: stomp) up our stairs.

"Where are you going?" Tiffany called, as she walked past me to our real stairs.

Why does it matter?

Candy-Coated Is Forever

It's official.

Tiffany and I are getting married.

Yes, yes, I know. It's been months since I proposed and put a ring on it. But that all seems a little flimsy now that Tiffany's cousin put a picture of us on hundreds of pink and white M&Ms and served them at an engagement party in our honor.

Forget all that stuff about melting (in your mouth, not your hands), nothing says forever like having your joint-likeness on pieces of candy-coated chocolates.

I didn't even know engagement parties existed until I became engaged. I'm not sure if that's because the few married friends I treasure didn't have engagement parties or if it's because the few married friends I have treasure me so little they didn't invite me to their engagement parties, but, in any case, I did not know what they were.

I knew about showers, bachelor/ette parties, and weddings.

At first, I was nervous about the engagement parties our families threw for us (we wanted to get married to throw a party for all of them!). It turns out they're wonderful. Mostly, when Tiffany and I tell people we're engaged, all anyone wants to know is when we're getting married. Never mind that it took eight years to get where we are.

But an engagement party is all about gathering to celebrate the incremental marital accomplishment of asking (and answering). We're lucky to have so many people we love and who love us back cheering us on.

Also, I feel especially grateful to have leftover bags of candy with our faces on it.

Coconutty

If you've never had an older brother, you probably can't understand how it is that I came to be stuck about 25 percent of the way up a palm tree on Saturday.

But perhaps you will enjoy the story anyway.

The simple answer is my brother and I were celebrating Mother's Day with our mom in Miami and we all wanted to drink some coconut water... you know, the kind they devote entire shelves to in grocery stores.

Brandon says he drinks the magic stuff a couple times a week, whenever he finds a tree low enough to shake down the fruit.

We thought we had found such a tree on one of our walks down the beach.

"Maybe you can climb up, Rebecca," Brandon said.

"I don't know," I hedged, shading my eyes as I peered up the branch-less trunk.

"Yeah, it may be a little too tall," he agreed.

If you have an older brother, my post could end here. You know Brandon's response is the answer to how I came to be stuck up the tree. If you don't have an older brother, here's what you missed:

If an older brother says you can't do something, that means you have to do it. Even if he's right. Over the almost 32 years Brandon and I have shared on the planet, this rule of siblinghood has caused me to be: much too far out in the ocean, accidentally upside down in the air on snow skis, and generally much tougher than I otherwise might have been.

On Saturday, it was obvious to us all as soon as I began my climb that I could not make it up the palm tree. What was apparently less obvious was that I also could not get down.

"Oh well," Brandon said, starting to walk away from the base of the tree.

"Help," I said.

But it was too late. I had already begun the painful slide down, scraping off what seemed like crucial parts of skin on my inner thighs, inner calves, and the tops of my feet.

But I didn't cry. And if you don't know why, you obviously don't have an older brother.

The Orange Door Is No More

I wish Tiffany and I were the kind of people who had the time or talent to turn an orange door into a piece of art. Or the kind of people who had an apartment big enough to display such a piece of art. But we're not. Maybe someday.

Anyway, shortly after Tiffany dragged the orange door up to our apartment, we put it outside on our patio until we could "do something with it." But instead it just sat there. Through rain. And snow. And more rain and snow. We made one half-hearted attempt to peel away the layers of paint and then we made a judgment call. We decided the door had to go. We needed space for flower pots. 

"It's kind of sad," I said, as Tiffany leaned the door up against a tree outside our building.

"Yeah," Tiffany agreed.

"Such a great keyhole."

We stood for a few seconds, and then we turned and went back upstairs.

A few days later, we were on our way to dinner. We passed a woman and a man walking together. I noticed the woman was staring intently at something. I turned and saw the orange door leaning up against a wall on someone else's patio.

"Hey," the woman said to her companion. "That's my mom's door."

She took a picture with her phone.

Tiffany and I smiled at each other.

The next night, someone put four flower pots out on the curb. 

We took them home.

Invisible Stuff

When I tried to step down from the linen closet shelf to the sink, I knew I was in trouble. 

"Help me, Tiffany," I called.

"Seriously?"

I considered my options. I was perched like a koala bear straddling the door jam, several feet off the ground. In one hand, I held on for dear life. In the other, I clutched the bar of Irish Spring soap I'd climbed up for. 

"Yes," I said. "Very seriously."

Tiffany and I have less room for stuff in our new apartment. And all the room we do have is extremely vertical, meaning people like us, who stand 5 feet 3 inches off the ground, can't see it or reach it, hence my unfortunate climb (Tiffany eventually rescued me by lifting me out of the linen closet).

Our storage woes cause all sorts of other problems too.

A couple of weeks ago, we went to Target to stock up on:

Irish Spring

laundry detergent

razors

tampons

dish washing soap

face soap 

face lotion

only to find when Tiffany koala-ed up to put the stuff away that we already had extra quantities of:

Irish Spring

laundry detergent

razors

tampons

dish washing soap

face soap 

face lotion

that we'd forgotten about. 

So even though we have less space for stuff, we actually have more stuff because we can't see any of the stuff we do have.

Donut Money

I knew as soon as we stepped onto the train that we'd picked the wrong car. There was a woman standing in the middle of the aisle and she was bundled up in ten or twenty coats and her skin was like leather and her eyes were black dots, hating. As soon as the doors closed, she began screaming at the top of her lungs. Something about JFK and then:

"You can take your donut money and shove it up your..."

"Did that woman just say donut money?" I whispered to Tiffany.

"Yes," Tiffany whispered back. "Yes, definitely donuts."

I've never had specific donut money. I've had laundry money and lunch money and fun money, which my mom sometimes slips into a card that she mails me with a little note, like: "Get your hair done!" or "Go to the movies!" or "Buy an ice-cream!"

But never donut money, although I do love donuts. I tried not to make eye contact with the woman, but the further I turned my eyes from her face, the closer she got to me physically.

"I don't want your donut money!" she spat.

I changed tactics, trying to express my understanding of her position with a slight nod of my head. Who would want my donut money, if I had any?

She turned away from me suddenly.

"F*#$ you and you!" she screamed, wheeling around in a circle. "I know who killed JFK! F*#$ you!"

"Did she just say..."

"Yes," Tiffany hissed. "Shhh."

Suddenly another passenger began to sing, right at the angry screaming woman.

"Oh god," I whispered.

"F*#$..."

"HALLELUJAH..."

"JFK..."

"PRAISE JESUS..."

"DONUT MONEY..."

"LORD LIFT ME UP..."

But then the lord did something better. He let Tiffany and I out at the next stop.

On Marriage

Despite the red equal rights pictures flooding my Facebook feed, I was in a funk all day yesterday. Little things annoyed me. Like the woman walking too slowly in front of me on the sidewalk. And the man walking too quickly behind me, almost right up onto my heels.

When I called my mom on the way home, I asked her if she'd been following the news on the Prop. 8 case. She hadn't. She'd been so sick with the flu she thought Monday was Sunday when I'd called her the day before.

"No," she said. "What's happening?"

That annoyed me.

My mom almost never annoys me, so I knew I was in a bad mood. I told her the case had been argued that morning.

"And how do you feel about that?" she asked, going straight to the heart of what I'd been avoiding all day.

"Well," I said, steering myself around another pedestrian. "Actually... you know what, I'm kind of annoyed."

"I bet," my mom said.

It's not that I don't think yesterday's Prop. 8 case or today's Defense of Marriage Act case are important. It's that I think the questions in the cases are so important they shouldn't even have to be asked.

In the time that my partner Tiffany and I have been a couple, most of our straight friends have married. Some of them have divorced. Others have stayed together, had children, and celebrated wedding anniversaries.

I first told Tiffany I loved her eight years ago, on the way back from breakfast on the streets of Brooklyn Heights. But we couldn't get married in New York at the time. When I convinced her to spend a summer with me and my mom in Missouri, a constitutional amendment prevented us from getting married in that state. We moved to California next, but we couldn't get married there either. Then the court said we could, and everyone said we better hurry up and do it and...then voters passed Prop. 8 and we couldn't get married again.

I continued to carry my paternal grandmother's diamond ring from one apartment to the next while Tiffany and I loved each other, while we considered what it would even mean to be married in such a confused world.

Eventually, back in New York, we decided we wanted to celebrate our commitment to each other in front of the family members and friends who have been celebrating our commitment to each other from the very beginning. We hope to do so soon.

Which is why it feels so annoying that any decision is left to be made at all, let alone by voters, or legislators, or the nine members of our nation's highest court.

The way I see it, I only needed one person's permission to marry the woman I love.

And my grandmother's ring is on her finger.

The Nice People We Meet on the Subway

I don't usually sit when I take the subway. I find sitting makes me feel more claustrophobic and usually some man's crotch ends up just a few inches from my face. Also, I like to balance without holding onto anything, like I'm surfing.

When I choose to sit, inevitably I do so just as an elderly man or pregnant woman or tiny child is boarding the train. Of course I bounce right back up to offer my seat. Most people are very grateful for an unexpected resting place.

But sometimes being nice backfires.

The other day Tiffany and I sat. Remember that long train ride to Brooklyn? Well, we were on our way back. I was tired and not in the mood to surf, so we sat down in the middle of a bench in a nearly empty car. A few stops later, the car was very crowded. I kept an eye out for incoming crotches, but what came our way instead was an elderly looking woman carrying several bags.

I say elderly looking because of what happened next.

"Would you like to sit?" Tiffany asked, half-rising from the bench.

The woman looked at Tiffany like she was an idiot.

"Do I look like I need to sit?" she snapped. "Do I look old? What makes you think I need to sit?"

I'm not proud to admit that at this point in the exchange I pretended not to know the woman I'm engaged to. Meanwhile, Tiffany began to stammer.

"No, I mean, you don't look like anything... I mean, it's just...we're getting off at the next stop!"

"Actually, we have two more stops," I said helpfully, reclaiming my partner.

Tiffany glared at me.

"But you're right," I hurriedly went on, "we really should start making our way to the doors."

Extra Door

When Tiffany and I lived in San Francisco, we bought almost all our furniture on Craigslist. It seemed like someone was always selling exactly what we needed, so we never saw any point in going to an actual store to buy the same thing for a lot more money. In New York, not so much. People here are too rich to bother selling things. They just throw them away.

Until last weekend, we hadn't bought anything on Craigslist. We had, however, picked up three excellent pieces from our neighbors. Our sidewalk trash finds so far include: a bookshelf that's too big for all our bookshelf spots (we're selling it!), a grocery cart that we have yet to use, a miniature baker's rack to give us extra kitchen counter space in our living room (the rack is not so miniature that it fits in our kitchen), and a bright orange door. We have no use for the door. That is to say, all our door frames have doors, so this door is nothing if not superfluous, but it's so pretty! And antiquey! As soon as we saw the old-timey keyhole, we had to have it. For now it's a decorative door on our patio.


But Tiffany kept scouring Craigslist, and we finally hit the jackpot with exactly the multi-purpose ottoman we'd been looking for. This guy was selling a piece that has a cushion top lid that reverses into a coffee table top. Even better, two smaller ottomans fit inside the piece, providing us with extra seating whenever we have company.

I was suspicious as soon as we approached the seller's apartment--a towering water-front high rise in the financial district.

"Why would someone who lives here need extra cash?" I said. "Should I put a rock in my pocket in case he's a murderer?"

Tiffany rolled her eyes.

(FYI: There are no rocks in the financial district anyway.)

It turns out the guy was just like us. Or he had been just like us until he moved into the towering high rise with the doorman and the swanky red lights in the elevators. Now, he was on the cusp of being someone infinitely more rich than us. But old habits die hard. He was selling his ottoman because he didn't need it anymore (he needed something bigger to go with his enormous new apartment).

Tiffany and I took a minute to breathe in the smell of his success before we hefted the ottoman up and walked awkwardly out of the apartment.

"As nice as it is," I whispered while we waited for the elevator, "it's a studio. At least we have a bedroom door."

And a decorative orange door too.

A Long Day's Journey

Although I have no sense of direction above ground, between Tiffany and me, I am the most competent on the New York City subway system. Except, apparently, when I'm not.

Last weekend, we took an adventure to Brooklyn to see what we could see. But, because of construction on the subway lines, we almost didn't get there to see anything. The express trains weren't running, but they were running on the local track, but only one of them and it wasn't making all stops... We let two trains go by as we contemplated the map in the station, the map on Tiffany's phone, and the paper service-change advisories on the platform.

Finally another train pulled into the station. By now we should have been in Brooklyn, eating brunch somewhere.

"Are you sure this is our train?" Tiffany asked me as we stood between the open doors trying to decide whether to bail.

"Yes," I said, shaking my head no.

We jumped inside.

It wasn't our train. We ended up dead-ending at the bottom of Manhattan, then paying to reenter the station to catch the train going back the way we'd come.

When we got to the transfer station, we saw an express train pulling in at the same time.

"Finally!" Tiffany cried. "Our luck is changing!"

It would have been... if that train had been going in the right direction. That long-awaited express train took us a quarter of the way home before we had the opportunity to switch again.

We could have given up--"I meant to bring snacks!" I cried at one point as we watched ourselves pass the stop we needed and our stomachs growled--but we kept trying until we reached what now felt like a very faraway borough. We didn't make it to the restaurant we had in mind, where the food was so local it very likely came with a side of dirt. But the restaurant we found had no line.

"These pancakes are amazing!" I moaned, scooping up my syrup-soaked crumbs with my fork.

"I think they're Bisquick," Tiffany commented.

Fine Art

I'm very concerned about my carbon footprint.

If I'm not around to do it, I remind Tiffany to crawl under our desk and behind our TV to turn off our surge strips when we're not using all the things that are plugged into them. When our sink had a drip in one of our previous apartments, I kept a pitcher underneath it at all times and drank only that water. Sometimes I turn out the lights on Tiffany when she's still in a room.

But. I enabled an enormous waste of paper the other night when our friends Bobby and Teresa came over with their children, Julia, Peter, and Baby Sandro.

We didn't have time to pick up taste-treats or toys like we usually do. They had been waiting for us so long they were about to be kicked out of the Natural History Museum.

So when Tiffany and I got home, we ran around sweeping our clutter underneath things, looking for anything kid-friendly. I eyed a set of Left, Right, Center dice but decided they were too close to swallowable-size.

"Where are the crayons we bought?" I shrieked. "And paper! Lots of paper!"

Tiffany surfaced from somewhere deep in the closet with a plastic baggy of crayons. The box apparently had been destroyed when Peter and Julia last visited.

They're such good kids they don't need to be entertained, really. But when Peter started throwing our stability ball around the apartment, King-Kong style, we pulled out the crayons and a stack of brand-new printer paper.

"Can I have another piece?" Peter asked after a few swipes of blue.

I handed him one.

"And me too, please," Julia called, sing-song style, as she taped an abstract-style rainbow to our bathroom door.

"Maybe they should use the back of the paper," Tiffany whispered to me as I went for more sheets.

I gave her a half-hearted nod.

But when I suggested as much to Julia, she pointed out that when we hang the pictures on our walls, only one side can be seen.

And since she was exactly right, I kept passing out paper, without a second-thought, until all of our doors were covered in crayon-drawings.

Next time I'll be prepared, though. I'll tell Julia I have a better idea:

Reversible art.

Guggen-heights

I'm not afraid of heights except when I'm somewhere that's up really high in the air. When I was little, I wasn't afraid of heights even then. I was afraid of elevators. I didn't trust them to stop themselves, and so I took the stairs--often dragging the rest of my family or at least one member with me--no matter how tall our destination.

My brother has always been afraid of heights and once stopped me from looking out at the top of a Look-Out we had summited together when we were small children.

"Get back, Rebecca!" he cried, throwing his arm to block me from approaching the safety railing. We went back down again without seeing anything.

I was reminded of this the other night at the Guggenheim. I'd never been there, and the spiraling, ascending design really was beautiful until I looked over the edge at the glittering gala-attendees below. After that it was terrifying. I saw myself plummeting the several stories to my death amid silver tray-laden servers passing chicken satay on sticks.

"Get back!" I cried, throwing my arm to block Tiffany and Rob from approaching the curved railing. I understood my brother's arm from so many years ago. If you love people, a fear of heights is like a blanket you can't help but throw over them to prevent them from seeing anything. It's why I'll never sky-dive. And why Tiffany never will either.

I wanted to laugh at myself, but I didn't see anything funny about our altitude. So I just took Tiffany's hand in my sweaty palm and we three walked on together.

The Notebook (lesbian-wedding edition)

The first time Tiffany and I had a moment to think about our wedding after we got engaged came high up in the air on a plane, somewhere between New York and Miami. Everything about the ring on her finger was still new. That day, we took pictures of her left hand holding a coffee cup at breakfast, a beer bottle at the bar, and a pencil while she studied. We tried to obscure the rubber band she had to wrap around the ring to make it fit (the ring I "borrowed" from Tiffany to use as a model was not one she wore on her ring finger. Apparently it was a thumb-ring for a giant).

Anyway, even though for years getting engaged felt like the Big Thing, now the Big Thing is the Wedding, and we have to plan one. We brought a notebook on our Christmas holiday to jot down our ideas, in case we had any.

"So should we talk about the wedding?" Tiffany asked shortly after take-off.

"Sure, I was thinking..."

"WAIT!"

I looked at her, startled.

"Maybe we should write this down in the notebook. Should we get the notebook? I think we should get the notebook. Can you get the notebook?"

I got the notebook.

Now that we're a little further down the line in our wedding planning (translation: we've planned NOTHING but have talked an awful lot about many things), I've come to appreciate the Notebook. As far as I can tell, it's mainly helpful in that it allows us to cross out what we've written down after we realize how incredibly affordable our ideas are for multimillionaires.

O-M-Double-G-D, It's a Cat

Did I tell you about our cat?

Tiffany and I live in an apartment where pets are not allowed. It is our greatest sadness, which is why I was so happy one day to open the curtain of our patio door to find a beautiful black and white cat staring in at me from outside.

"O-M-Double-G-D, it's a cat," I whispered to myself, using my great powers of deduction (O-M-Double-G-D is oh-my-good-god-damn for anyone who's interested).

I backed away slowly so as not to startle it and then sprinted the 20 feet between me and the bathroom where Tiffany was showering.

"Tiffany!" I yelled. "There's a cat on our balcony!"

Then I loved Tiffany a little more because her first response was not:

"What the hell are you talking about?"

It was:

"Oh my god! We have a cat! Get it some milk!"

I ran into the kitchen and filled a small bowl with milk. When I ran back to the patio, the cat peered at me, and then, when I opened the door, darted away, over the wall that divides our patio from our neighbor's and into an open sliding door.

My great powers of deduction only go so far. Because we've never seen our neighbor and he/she/they has/have nothing on his/her/their patio (not even twinkly lights!) I did not consider that he/she/they might own a cat. Invisible neighbors don't have pets.

"Oh," I said to myself. "It's someone else's cat."

And then I drank my saucer of milk and went back to report the sad news.

In the Closet

This is the story of how Tiffany and I nearly paid $300 for a pair of shelves in our closet. Here's what happened:

We live in a very small apartment. Surprisingly, we have a lot of storage space, but most of it is accessible only with a nine-foot ladder that the tenants of the building share. The thought of having to climb to the top of aforementioned ladder every time I wanted a pair of jeans or a sweater was not appealing. So after weeks of living out of boxes...

(Okay, fine, we're still living out of some boxes)

...we decided we simply had to have shelves in our closet to accompany the bar for our hanging clothes. Tiffany dreamed of Perfect Shelves. In fact, I think she dreamed of a Custom-Built Closet because each day she came home with some more elaborate shelf system that required a set of tracks, lots of screws, and a Stud Finder, which at first I thought was an electric shaver.

After several failed attempts and returns of products, we asked a handyman to appraise our project. He quoted us a hundred bucks for labor. We nodded our heads. We had $100 worth of spackling to do to cover up the holes we'd already made, so this seemed reasonable. When he quoted us $200 for material, I continued to nod, but inside I was shaking my head vigorously from left to right.

"I don't feel good about this," I whispered to Tiffany after we had closed the door on our handyman with a tentative agreement.

"Me neither."

If we were still living in San Francisco, away from the wise counsel of our family, we may have paid that absurd amount of money. But when our New York uncles came over, Rob began to shake his head as soon as we said "handyman."

He told us what we needed, and it pretty much boiled down to:

1) A long piece of wood
2) A handful of nails

Our shelves cost us about $50 bucks. Labor was free, obviously, although it took its toll.

One of our shelves was slightly longer than the other (It's possible the scary-looking man at the hardware store who cut our wood hated us because we looked like we were enjoying life) and our walls are crooked. Before we figured that out, I blamed Tiffany for measuring wrong.

Also, we didn't take our hanging clothes out of the closet to build our shelves, so we were highly irritated with each other, sweating and smushed in among my work suits and Tiffany's going-out dresses, holding nine-foot pieces of wood above our head in a terrible home-improvement version of Twister.

When it finally dawned on us to consider how funny we looked, we started laughing, which made holding the nine foot pieces of wood all the more difficult.

"You should have seen us," I told Rob the next week as we bragged about our work over dinner. "We looked like..."

I paused. Everyone stared at me expectantly.

"Well, you know, we really looked exactly like two lesbians in a tiny closet!"

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep... Carefully

Tiffany and I lucked out with our new apartment. It's in a great neighborhood; it's got lots of great light. Oh yeah, and it's two stories.

Technically, the second story is our bed, but, because we have a set of stairs (attached to a ladder though they may be), I think that counts.

Back when we were looking for places, we got so competitive with our competition--other potential tenants--that we started carrying around blank checks and entire credit reports in order to be prepared if we wanted to put in an application.

When we saw this apartment, a middle-aged woman was seeing it at the same time. I was ready to hip-check her out the door while we applied, but she took one look at the ladder in the bedroom and spun on her heel.

"Oh no," she said, throwing up her hands. "I'm too old for this. It's all yours, girls."

(It's a good thing Tiffany and I don't look as old as we are.)

We could have put our bed underneath the loft space like the old tenants did, but having it upstairs means we get to have a second bedroom/office underneath. And when I say second bedroom/office, I mean a space big enough for our dresser, a desk, and a twin air mattress for whoever doesn't fit on our couch in the living room. But this is way more space than we've had in the past. So be it if we sleep floating in the air on a piece of plywood.

Anyway, so far it's working out. I've only hit my head once, sitting up too far, too fast. And the loft reminds us how much we love each other. Or maybe it's how much we'd rather not have to go to the emergency room.

Every time one of us gets out of bed in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, the other whispers:

"Be careful."

These Boots Were Made for...Not Me

I'm not ashamed to admit I'm not a good shopper. But even I'm embarrassed at how many pairs of rain/snow boots I've bought and returned in the last few months.

"Just get the tall rubber boots everyone else has," my friend Teresa keeps telling me.

But I can't bring myself to do that. I actually had a pair of the tall rubber boots everyone else has--10 years ago. They were as yellow as a bathtub duck, and I wore them exactly twice. Just long enough to figure out I don't like the suction cup-y feel of tall rubber boots.

I haven't needed rain/snow boots in a long time. It never rained in Los Angeles where Tiffany and I first moved together as a couple. And it rarely rained in San Francisco. But since we've been back in New York, already I'm fed up of stepping in puddles, sitting at my desk with soggy pant legs and stuffing my running shoes with newspaper when I get home at the end of the day. In fact, I was fed up with it the first time it happened, the day we pulled our U-Haul into Teresa and Bobby's driveway in August.

I bought a pair of boots right away. When I tried them on for Teresa and Tiffany later, they covered their mouths in horror at the puffy monstrosities on my feet.

"Peter loved them," I said defensively.

"Peter is two," Tiffany pointed out. "And a boy."

My dilemma is this: I can't bear the thought of buying one pair of boots for the rain and one pair of boots for the snow, but in trying to find something that works for both, I keep coming home with shoewear certified for the Olympic ski team.

I put my latest pair on recently with a pair of running tights and Tiffany refused to let me out of the house--to do laundry!

"I guess they are a little ridiculous," I said, rummaging around in my wallet for the receipt, which I had not dared throw away. "Maybe if we lived in Alaska..."