Mergers and Acquisitions by Cate Doty

Author:Cate Doty [Doty, Cate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

At Last, Sort Of

I came back. I called Michael from the taxi stand at the airport. “Do you want to come over?” he asked, and I knew everything hinged on what I said next.

“Yes,” I said, shakily, resolutely. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say until he asked me. The stand operator pointed me to a cab, blew his whistle twice, and waved more cabs down the curb. “Sixty-first Street in Woodside,” I told the driver.

“Sixty-first and what?”

“I’ll show you when we get there,” I said, and I strapped in. We barreled down the BQE past St. Michael’s Cemetery, where a photographer had once given me a tour after we finished a Neediest assignment. “Lots of neediest in there,” Ashley had said while we made the loop around the graves. I was fascinated by how cemeteries seemed to thrive in a city that probably had to dispose of dozens of bodies a day, but where we were all crammed in, each longing for our own bit of green and sky. Why were New Yorkers just not all cremated? I guessed the people who opted for coffins and mausoleums were used to living on top of others, and didn’t mind doing it for eternity.

The cab finally pulled up to Michael’s house in Woodside, a two-story thing that he shared with three roommates in their upstairs apartment, two people in what amounted to cells in the basement, and the owners, Nafiz and Shirah, who lived on the first floor. They were lovely people, Indian immigrants who were generous to the young strivers living above and below them. During the blackout of 2003, Michael and his mother, who was visiting from Florida, had to walk across the 59th Street Bridge to get home. Peggy, who had hypoglycemia and the beginning of multiple sclerosis, had reached her breaking point and couldn’t walk anymore. Nafiz found them in the dark among the throngs, piled them into his minivan, and brought them home, as people who lived along the 7 train, the immigrant express, streamed across the bridge. They were much better people than my Brooklyn landlord, who refused to fix the giant swelling coming from our kitchen ceiling that we had nicknamed the polyp, which she claimed just added character. But the other thing that Nafiz and Shirah owned was a very loud parrot that didn’t bother Michael. His mom and stepdad were bird people, and he lived for years with a lovebird named Scooter, who specialized in flying into the ceiling fan, and a neurotic African gray parrot named Gizmo, who was in such a sad state that he picked off all the feathers on his chest. It bothered me, though, in part because I am terrified of birds and don’t need to be in the same house with them, even—or really especially—if they’re behind bars. As far as I could tell, this parrot’s cage was right under Michael’s bedroom, which made for some interesting evening serenading.

Michael was waiting for me

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