Read Online I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Nora Ephron
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caffeinated romance of this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, you experience change as a betrayal. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you’ve always been loyal to, and the bakery’s gone. Your dry cleaner moves to Florida; your dentist retires; the lady who made the pies on West Fourth Street vanishes; the maître d’ at P. J. Clarke’s quits, and you realize you’re going to have to start from scratch tipping your way into the heart of the cold, chic young woman now at the door. You’ve turned your back for only a moment, and suddenly everything’s different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveler, a purveyor of inside tips into the good stuff, and now you’re just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on the Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of La Guardia. Meanwhile, you read that Manhattan rents are going up, they’re climbing higher, they’ve reached the stratosphere. It’s seems that the moment you left town, they put a wall around the place, and you will never manage to vault over it and get back into the city again. Finding the apartment in the Apthorp seemed like an urban miracle. I’d found a haven. And the architecture of the building added to the illusion.
The Apthorp, which was built in 1908 by the Astor family, is the size of a full city block. From the street, it’s lumpen, middle-European, and solid as a tanker, but its central core is a large courtyard with two beautiful marble fountains and a lovely garden. Enter the courtyard and the city falls away; you find yourself in the embrace of a beautiful sheltered park. There are stone benches where you can sit in the afternoons as your children run merrily around, ride their bicycles, fight with one another, and threaten to fall into the fountain and drown. In the spring there are tulips and azaleas, in summer pale blue hostas and hydrangeas.
Most people who don’t live in New York have no idea that New Yorkers have exactly the same sense of neighborhood that supposedly exists in small-town America; in the Apthorp, this sense is magnified because the courtyard provides countless opportunities for its residents to bump into one another and eventually learn one another’s names. At Halloween those of us with small children turned the courtyard street lamps into a fantasy of pumpkin-headed ghosts; in December the landlords erected an electric menorah, which coexisted with a Christmas tree covered with twinkle lights.
As it happened, I had several acquaintances who lived in the building, and a few of them became close friends at least in part because we were neighbors. The man I was seeing, whom I eventually married, managed to tip his way to a lease on a top-floor apartment. My sister Delia and her husband moved into the building; she too planned to live there until the day she died. When Delia and I worked together writing movies, it was a simple matter of her coming down from her apartment, crossing the courtyard, and coming up to mine; on rainy days, she could even take an underground route. My friend Rosie O’Donnell took an apartment on the top floor and became so captivated by a doorman named George, who had a big personality, that she booked him onto her talk show. Like most Apthorp doormen, George did not actually open the door—which was, incidentally, a huge, heavy iron gate that you often desperately needed help with—but he did provide a running commentary on everyone who lived in the building, and whenever I came home, he filled me in on the whereabouts of my husband, my boys, my babysitter, my sister, my brother-in-law, and even Rosie, who painted her apartment orange, installed walls of shelves for her extensive collection of Happy Meal toys, feuded with her neighbors about her dogs, fought with the landlord about the fact that her washing machine was somehow irrevocably hooked up to the bathtub drain, and moved out. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that anyone
The Apthorp, which was built in 1908 by the Astor family, is the size of a full city block. From the street, it’s lumpen, middle-European, and solid as a tanker, but its central core is a large courtyard with two beautiful marble fountains and a lovely garden. Enter the courtyard and the city falls away; you find yourself in the embrace of a beautiful sheltered park. There are stone benches where you can sit in the afternoons as your children run merrily around, ride their bicycles, fight with one another, and threaten to fall into the fountain and drown. In the spring there are tulips and azaleas, in summer pale blue hostas and hydrangeas.
Most people who don’t live in New York have no idea that New Yorkers have exactly the same sense of neighborhood that supposedly exists in small-town America; in the Apthorp, this sense is magnified because the courtyard provides countless opportunities for its residents to bump into one another and eventually learn one another’s names. At Halloween those of us with small children turned the courtyard street lamps into a fantasy of pumpkin-headed ghosts; in December the landlords erected an electric menorah, which coexisted with a Christmas tree covered with twinkle lights.
As it happened, I had several acquaintances who lived in the building, and a few of them became close friends at least in part because we were neighbors. The man I was seeing, whom I eventually married, managed to tip his way to a lease on a top-floor apartment. My sister Delia and her husband moved into the building; she too planned to live there until the day she died. When Delia and I worked together writing movies, it was a simple matter of her coming down from her apartment, crossing the courtyard, and coming up to mine; on rainy days, she could even take an underground route. My friend Rosie O’Donnell took an apartment on the top floor and became so captivated by a doorman named George, who had a big personality, that she booked him onto her talk show. Like most Apthorp doormen, George did not actually open the door—which was, incidentally, a huge, heavy iron gate that you often desperately needed help with—but he did provide a running commentary on everyone who lived in the building, and whenever I came home, he filled me in on the whereabouts of my husband, my boys, my babysitter, my sister, my brother-in-law, and even Rosie, who painted her apartment orange, installed walls of shelves for her extensive collection of Happy Meal toys, feuded with her neighbors about her dogs, fought with the landlord about the fact that her washing machine was somehow irrevocably hooked up to the bathtub drain, and moved out. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe that anyone
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