But back to her dressing table. On it, my friend’s continued to collect objects like a curio cabinet of stuff that together becomes something. Her gallery. For the next five months, this parish of miscellany will provide my friend with the familiar. The way bedside tables become altars, and objects become testimonials, and candy bowls in dive restaurants: the perfect manifestation of Until next time. My friend’s dressing table is what happens when the uncollected becomes a village of items, like a skyline formed from a row of shapes: the vile of dandelion fluff, a tube of lotion, a canister of Wet Ones. A yellow rose, now dried and dead, and somehow gilded as if when parched, the rose becomes royal.
There are the lucky few who zone out their windows and stare at brinks. The faraway intrigue of a forest—how it conspires—or the streaked lines of an ocean fringed by its horizon, or a city with more sky than scrapers, or even the informality of a backyard at dawn. But there are those—my friend and I—who can zone out, quite easily, to whatever’s right in front of us, no matter how unspectacular. A poorly painted wall. Its cracks. The ceiling fan’s chop. A woman on the C train pulling her ponytail through its tie, not once or twice, but six times. Six complete loops; her fingers closing into a claw each time. It’d been months since I’d been to a museum, but watching this woman mechanically tie her hair was softly enormous. Like the Apollo, the Lincoln Center at night, Film Forum’s marquee—its lobby, its popcorn, perhaps not its seats. Like Rucker Park; like the screaming woman on East Seventy-seventh Street; like Dyker Heights at Christmas or the psychic with prime real estate and inexplicably zero clients ever; like the line outside Levain; like jumping out of the cab and walking instead; like speakers facing out apartment windows come summer and neighbors watering their plants, and sometimes watering their downstairs neighbors too, and like fire escapes in general; like an old eccentric in monochrome; the pinkness of Palazzo Chupi and Bill Cunningham blue; like a couple fighting for blocks, gesticulating crosstown and finally Cold Warring on the Hudson. Like Eastern Parkway on Labor Day; like Café Edison and Kim’s before they were gone; like bodega cats and a bacon, egg, and cheese—a woman grooming on her subway commute is a New York institution.
I don’t require much to feel far-removed; to impose my wanderings on what’s close. Because of this, my friend and I have started calling ourselves nook people. Those of us who seek corners and bays in order to redeploy our hearts and not break the mood. Those of us who retreat in order to cubicle our flame. Who collect sea glass. Who value a deep pants pocket. Who are our own understudies and may as well have shadowboxes for brains.
We remember the soapy swoosh and high-pressure jets of car washes fondly. Of sitting in the backseat, near-worshipful of its cooped, walled-in chaos. We see a baby, burrito-wrapped in her blanket, and think, Now, wouldn’t that be nice?
Nook people express appreciation in the moment by maintaining how much we will miss what is presently happening. Our priorities are spectacularly disordered. A nook person might spend the last few years of her twenties thinking she is dying. Convinced of it.
Nook people might be terrible at giving and receiving hugs despite often feeling—on the whole, at home and in public—as though we are holding on tight. Nook people sense slight tremors or the onset of a neck rash when faced with people at parties who yell-speak. A nook person catches sight of the quiet cranny at any gathering: the arm of a couch, a sill to perch on, the corner of a counter where the vegetable platter—only celery and ashy carrots are left—has been abandoned. A nook person finds the dog at the party; drinks wine from a mug; sits on the floor and braids carpet tassels only to become self-conscious and unbraid them. From afar, even nearby actually, a nook person can seem like a real bore. The last person whom you want to meet. A fun-killer.
A nook person plays catch-up when someone’s joke lands, embarrassed that her laugh isn’t proportionate to just how funny she thought the joke actually was. That was funny, she’ll say to compensate. Despite her many efforts, a nook person often suffers from a few-seconds lag.
Nook people know the words to a movie by heart but never say them out loud because anticipation is an asset. Because there’s no interrupting Katharine Hepburn when she’s interrupting herself: “Aren’t the geraniums pretty, Professor?”
Nook people can overstate their love for a movie, having only watched it once. They are alert to how some spectacles become basically unbearable the second time. And, well, there are benefits to claiming something you’ve only experienced once as your favorite. It’s useful to have many favorites. So many that you’ve depreciated the use of “favorite.” Favorite. Favorite. Favorite. Who cares? At any rate, substantiating favorites is an absurd practice. The genius of the word is that it’s more of an expression than a word.
Nook people have tricks. For instance, if I’m experiencing panic brought on by someone who leaves me fainthearted, I picture that person carrying with caution a just-filled ice tray back from the sink to the freezer. That image, on its own, can sometimes get me closer to where I’m meant to be. Just beyond the jam. Less impatient to compare myself. If I’m at an impasse and suddenly immovable, and unable to smile, I picture a plot of daffodils; how alien and dumb-eager they seem. Craning the way gooseneck lamps on desks—those too—look keen. I think about Little Flint introducing himself to Jane Goodall. Grown siblings being kind to each other. I wonder if penguins have knees.
Nook people are those of us who need solitude, but also the sound of someone puttering in the next room. Someone working on his project, down the hall and behind a door left ajar. We look away from our screen and hear him turning a page or readjusting his posture, and isn’t it time for lunch? Resurfacing is nonpareil. And splitting a sandwich with someone you’ve said maybe two words to all morning is idyllic. A brief belief that life picks up after a few bites of toasted rye.
Though if I’m honest, the thought of splitting a sandwich suddenly makes me enormously sad. How long has it been since I’ve enjoyed the company of someone else enjoying his food? The way he’d toss chips in his mouth and savor the crunch, and then wipe his hands on his jeans, and smile—not at me specifically, but at this wonderfully unspectacular event: the sandwich, the chips, the crunch, our appetites.