After my parents moved back to Jamaica from Marblehead, they had become friendly with four other couples in the neighborhood, all of whom lived within a three-block radius in buildings owned by my grandfather. The relationships revolved mostly around their all having kids about the same age, and after my parents split, my mother inherited them. The women had been the ones who spent the most time together—taking the kids in their strollers to the park for walks, planning our birthdays, and going to each other’s parties.
Now a single mother, Linda also grew closer with some of the neighbors who shared our corner of the ninth floor, especially Meghan Spencer, a tall, thin woman who looked like she’d never spent time in the sun. She always wore sleeveless sheath dresses and kept her light brown hair swept off her forehead with a black or tortoiseshell headband. I barely remember her husband, Jim, except that he was a solid, quiet man who wore glasses with heavy black frames.
They were a mild, boring couple, but I think it was Meghan’s equanimity that drew my mother to her after her own marriage became more volatile. (Jim and Meghan eventually moved to a house far out on Long Island. They divorced years later, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that they continued to live together in the same house but slept on different floors. It seemed like the kind of passionless thing they would do.)
Meghan started teaching me how to read when I was three, and we spent a lot of time together with The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham. During our lessons, we sat side by side on the couch in her living room or ours, she with a cup of tea perched with its saucer on her knee and me with the book in my lap, tracing the words with my finger. She taught me how to create islands of calm, but more than that, she opened up worlds I could not only escape to but would eventually inhabit. I was drawn to her quiet, no-nonsense approach. In those hours she spent patiently sitting on the couch with me as I sounded out syllables and she hummed her approval or gently corrected me, I felt a great deal of affection for her. And because of her persistence, I was able to read by myself by the time I was three and a half.
Mrs. Kohner could not have been more different from Meghan. An older widow with a dyed black bouffant, oversize Coco Chanel eyeglasses that she kept attached to a long chain around her neck, and a sarcastic edge, she lived in a one-bedroom at the end of the hallway.
Her husband, the inventor of the board game Trouble, had been dead for years. If she had children, I never saw them. She seemed lonely, and I had the sense that her fortunes had changed for the worse after her husband died. She was not shy about her resentment at having been reduced to living in a rental building in Jamaica, Queens.
Mrs. Kohner also happened to be a chain-smoking alcoholic. When sober, she could be gloomy and misanthropic. But she took my mother under her less-than-maternal wing, and the two of them spent long afternoons alternately commiserating with each other and railing against their lots in life.
My mother’s parties were pretty mild affairs, but Mrs. Kohner was almost always the life of them. I’d seen enough of my father’s drinking to know what drunkenness was, and Mrs. Kohner never failed to get absolutely plastered. My mother tried to cut her off and encourage her to go home, but Mrs. Kohner—who, when sober, didn’t have any particular interest in me—always insisted she be allowed to put me to bed.
She followed me and my mother into my room, and after I jumped into bed and my mother tucked me in, Mrs. Kohner sat unsteadily on the edge of my bed, a lit cigarette in one hand, a highball in the other. Mom went back to her other guests. As Mrs. Kohner talked and smoked and drank, she leaned heavily on my twin bed, pinning me beneath the comforter, so I couldn’t shift my little body away from her, her cigarette ash, or the occasional splash of scotch.
In addition to her eyeglasses, Mrs. Kohner wore long necklaces fashioned out of large, highly polished river stones, and as she swayed back and forth—putting her drink on the floor or getting closer to me when she had a particularly interesting point to make (I don’t remember a word the woman said)—the stones clicked together, marking her unsteadiness. She had a guttural, phlegmy smoker’s cough, and the way she was talking and slurring and falling and catching herself from falling, I lived in terror that she was going to throw up all over me. From time to time, my mother came in to check on us. I tried to signal to her with my eyes that I wanted this to stop, but she only shrugged and looked at me helplessly before going back to the party. What, after all, could she possibly do?
This was my first lesson in propriety. Mrs. Kohner would stay as long as she wanted. If she got cigarette ashes or scotch on me, so be it. If she threw up on me or set my bed on fire, at least we hadn’t made her feel unwelcome.