taste. Her car radio was incessantly tuned to this one schizophrenic station, KFJC, that never played any song you knew, so riding in her car there was always some unrecognizable noise happening in the background. I would be like:
“Who listens to this?” And Nadine would be indignant:
“Who cares who listens to it? The point of music isn’t to be able to tell other people that you listen to the same things they do.”
“The point of music also isn’t to be able to tell other people that you don’t listen to what they do.”
“How about the point of music is enjoying yourself?”
“How about I only enjoy myself if I actually recognize what’s playing once in a while?”
“So listen to KFJC more often.”
When she was fourteen, Nadine had lied about her age and gotten a job at a Subway Sandwich, so that by the time we were sixteen, when I was earning $4.25 at the yogurt place, Nadine was already working at the artsy movie house in Los Gatos for, like, $6.85 an hour, which seemed like a fortune in 1988. But which in retrospect … it should have been obvious that Nadine’s finances didn’t really make sense.
She shopped secondhand, of course, which was a revelation to me. I mean, how did she know about the Salvation Army in Redwood City? I guess it was a revelation to me in general, how much one could know about a city. Every Goodwill or Savers in Santa Clara Valley, Nadine had been there and knew what they had. Nadine was the first one to start wearing vintage T-shirts. Like, faded blue, child-sized Garfield T-shirts. She squeezed into them by cutting off the collars. This one Garfield shirt that she wore, when my brother saw it, he was like:
“Garfield?” And Nadine said:
“Garfield’s cool.” And my brother was bewildered. He couldn’t tell if she was kidding. And then there was Nadine’s Peugeot.
GABRIEL GREEN tells us about Nadine’s Peugeot (early August 2000):
I have these conversations with my sister that I don’t have with anyone else. And one theory is that it’s because she’s my sister, but another theory is that it’s because in Santa Cruz I don’t meet a lot of people who lead the kind of life Jennica leads in New York City.
Take how Jennica eats.
Rachel and I have visited Jennica in Greenwich Village a couple times, and there are definitely some pretty good grocery stores near her, but the food is so expensive. Five dollars for a pint of supposedly organic strawberries. Two-fifty for one bunch of kale, and they don’t even have lacinato kale out there, or purple kale, or rainbow chard, or even red Swiss chard, so Jennica’s basically eating monoculture greens. She buys “mixed salad greens” for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get this stuff home, which is only two blocks away from the grocery store, Jennica throws all of it into plastic bags. There is a husk on her corn, corn that Jennica’s store sells in April … there is a rind on her grapefruit, grapefruit that gets flown in from Florida … but still, Jennica puts the corn and the citrus into plastic bags. Her supposedly organic red peppers, which cost six dollars a pound, come in a foam tray under shrinkwrap, but she puts them in a plastic bag. And then the checkout girl puts all of Jennica’s little plastic parcels into two or three more big white plastic bags, and then Jennica walks the two blocks home, where she unpacks all the bags and then throws them in the same trash bin where her corn-husks and citrus rinds go, because they don’t do compost in New York City.
The last time we were out there, Rachel and I gave Jennica a whole set of hemp shopping nets as a present, to use instead of plastic bags. Jennica was like, “They won’t let me use these! Not in New York!” Instead she hung the nets up on her bedroom doorknob, and now she uses them to dry out her dirty gym clothes.
I mean, Jennica drinks her water from a so-called water purifier. Which means that she only drinks water that has been sitting for hours on end in a plastic Brita jug. I told her that New York City has the best drinking water in the country, except maybe for water from rain-catchment devices, and what she said was, “Obviously I know that, Gabe. But you can’t trust the pipes in old buildings.” What she really meant was, “Everyone I know drinks their water from a Brita water purifier.” So yes, Jennica buys her organic fair-trade coffee, but when she makes it, she makes it in a drip machine, with Brita water, with a plastic cone, and with a reusable nylon filter, so she’s basically pouring boiling hot plastic water through a membrane of plastic and then ingesting it straight.
Not that the consumption of plastic polymers that mimic human hormones necessarily will play the same role in modern America that lead poisoning played in ancient Rome, or necessarily contributes to infertility or dementia. But it’s possible. I’m only saying it’s possible. So that is another theory about Jennica’s phone calls: dementia.
Anyway. Jennica will call me up. It will be four-fifteen in the afternoon for me, but in New York City it’s seven-fi fteen, so Jennica will be walking home, and she’ll be all perky and needy. But in California, I’m still at work, and in my IT Department, four-fifteen is the catatonic hour. I’ll be like:
“Beh.” And perky Jennica will be all:
“Gabe, I need you to tell me everything you can remember about George Hanamoto.”
And then it’s my job to tell her everything I can remember about George Hanamoto. We don’t talk about Rachel, or the baby, or the latest ridiculous thing that Mom and Dad said about the fact that Rachel and I are having a baby, or anything else; we have to talk about George Hanamoto. What I remember about George Hanamoto is pretty much nothing, except the fi stfi ght with Old Man Bersen on the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Jennica’s on her cell phone, walking through New York City. In the background, what I’m hearing is sirens and screaming people and drivers leaning on their horns and trucks with no suspension hitting potholes and motorcycles without muffl ers. It sounds basically like Jennica is walking through rush hour in the apocalypse, but what she wants to talk about is George Hanamoto. Or, like, my phone will ring:
“Beh.”
“Gabe, I need you to do that voice that Nadine Hanamoto used to do with her Peugeot.”
When we were in high school, Nadine had this Peugeot, some mid-seventies model. It was a loud car, and when Nadine drove it, she would always be coaxing it along, like, “Oh, you want to be in third gear, don’t you? You want to know why I won’t take you out of second, don’t you? Oh, poor baby. You wish Mommy would give you the unleaded gasoline, but Mommy can only afford the regular. Let Mommy put you into third. Yes, yes.”
Jennica hated the voice, because she couldn’t do it right, which became a joke in itself. But now, ten years later, Jennica suddenly wants to hear me do the voice. It’s as if she can’t cross the street in New York without thinking about California. Where is all this nostalgia coming from? And yes, one theory is that all siblings have these conversations with each other, but another theory is that Jennica just isn’t happy in New York City.
JENNICA GREEN continues to fail to explain what she was doing on an uptown No. 6 train (early August 2000):
About the letter from Nadine.
Nadine’s father was Japanese and her mother was Mexican. Which is fascinating, come to think of it, but which I hardly thought about at the time; at most, I envied how exotic Nadine looked. Her father was hardly
