Thanks to the nice people at my local newspaper, many of you know I recently sold the book based on my blog, Confessions of a Counterfeit Farm Girl. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, my parents are very proud of me. In fact my mom’s already pinned a copy of my contract with Penguin to the bulletin board in the kitchen. Weird as that is, it’s a huge improvement over the macramé pot holder and hand towel she had hanging there since I made them. In middle school.
What you don’t know is that the day after a major chunk of New York City exploded, killing one person, maiming dozens of others, and forcing many of my friends and former colleagues to work from home as their offices were in the “frozen zone,” I had to travel into the big, bruised apple for my first meeting with my editor.
Like I wasn’t nervous enough. Now I didn’t just have to worry about blowing it, I had to worry about being blown up on the way to blowing it. Wasn’t it stuff like this that forced me to flee the city for the sticks in the first place?
Now what you need to know about me, and I promise this will all tie together shortly, is that I’m one of those people who likes to talk to people. Even if I don’t know them. I figure you’re a person, I’m a person, we share the same planet, maybe we can be pals. So I strike up conversations. Here in the south, this trait does not immediately paint me as mentally suspect. But in New York, among my fellow straphangers on the Grand Central shuttle, it always did.
Once while riding the subway, I saw a woman wearing the most beautiful pair of pumps. I couldn’t help staring at them. And then she started staring at me, staring at them. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, so I decided to put her at ease by doing what I do best: hurtling into fast-forward friendly mode.
“Your shoes are beautiful,” I cooed. “Are they Prada? No, no. Let me guess. They’re the new Kate Spades, aren’t they? I saw them in InStyle. Did you get them at the downtown store or Saks? I love Saks but they just don’t have the selection, you know?”
I took a brief pause to breathe, (but somehow managed not to take in the mounting fear on her face), before plowing on. “They look great on your feet,” I gushed, leaning in so close I could literally smell the leather. “I’d kill to have such high arches. Have you worn them with jeans? I’ve got a pair they’d be perfect with. What about the bag? Did you get the matching bag?” This was followed by yet another split second stop while I caught my breath but not the fact that she’d tucked her feet—and those perfect pumps—all the way under her seat.
“So, do they run true to size?” I blather on, oblivious to her DEFCON 4-level freak out. “I’m a seven. Did you know that seven is the most popular size? It is,” I add, gazing fondly at my fabulous, and fabulously pricey, Stuart Weitzman stilettos and wondering just for a sec if she’d swap shoes. “Do you think they have any sevens left? I’m sure they don’t. I’m sure they had a bunch, but they’re probably out, right? Right?”
Surprisingly, she never actually replied. She simply reached down, plucked those puppies off her feet, and ran carrying them into the next car.
It’s unfortunate, the freakish response some people have to friendliness.
Of course this friendliness is something my buddies frequently badger me about. They want me to knock it off and get my “New York” on. For the uninitiated, this means snarling and not smiling, being taciturn, not talkative. And absolutely, positively not offering condolences to a Pakistani cab driver who bemoans the state of his beloved country, leading me to believe he means the war and strife and poverty of the place, when in fact he’s just grumpy because they haven’t got a Gap.
Believe me when I tell you it was tough extricating myself from that conversation.
In my defense, I must say that I really do know how to “New York.” I went to college there and I worked
