Actually. Upstairs at Aritzia, the Boyfriend Couches are assembled into a Boyfriend Living Room, and someone is asleep, mouth open. The live DJ ushers him through his dreamworld, and us through ours: the Greige Girlboss Athleisureslop of Broadway between Houston and Canal; the police lineup of Netflix exposé subjects. Where tween girls from Beijing, Budapest, and Connecticut come to molt.

On a rainy April Tuesday, I searched for a story in SoHo, but found nothing. Or, non-things. Non-beds; non-DJs. Products indistinguishable from their byproducts. Matching sets of matching sets.

Byung-Chul Han says that things have proliferated so relentlessly that we no longer notice them disappear. (Into our oceans and organs.) (Incinerated by the metric ton.) When he says “non-things,” he means information, data – the digitalization disembodying the world.

In SoHo, he might mean the screens twisting around every corner like a pothos scouring for sunlight – like a thing. The vast majority of them mimic the dimensions of an iPhone, their looping videos extruded into content. The screenscape creeps down the sidewalk, into bodegas, subway stations, train cars. Floating hands generate cake pops with just three ingredients. Non-food, nowhere, for no one.

Not just glossy – Glossier. Acrylic, glossmaxxed, ass-crack-sculpting, one-size-fits-the-people-we-want-you-to-see-through-the-window. Banana. Republic. We turn our glossy cheeks.

Hannah Arendt said that things stabilize human life. On that rainy day in SoHo, without anything to put them into, our umbrellas littered every threshold like a flock of drowned birds.

very hot

very hot

is this–

what is this–

peanut?

ok: peanut

boy, this peanut

it’s

it smells

good

let’s see

pfwhhhh!

ugh!

that is–

disGUsting!

yeah

no

send this back

tell the chef–

wait, who are you?

ok: jake

got it

jake from paw patrol

got it

jake, please send this

peanut

back

yeah, thank you–

oh.

sure–

sure.

in that case–

sure.

I’ll be the nurse.

Good acting takes many skills; improv is just one of them. My parents told me a story once (and I never even Googled to verify) about Alec Baldwin telling the SNL cast that he loves comedy but please, do not make him adlib. Give him lines, and he will nail the delivery. But do not make him invent them. He can’t do that. I think that’s perfectly acceptable. Not every standup can do improv. Not every improviser (improvist?) can do sketch. And so on.

Anyway, I’m fine at improv. I don’t freeze up. I say yes. I think of funny things, and I do them. The problem is that I always start dying (wheezing, keeling) laughing. Because what I’m doing is so funny. I’d always start strong, and then I’d start laughing, and everyone would groan. Teachers and friends would say Violet, stop laughing, that was going great and you ruined the scene. I just couldn’t. I wasn’t meant to act.

But I don’t beat myself up for this anymore. In fact, I feel lucky to think I’m hilarious; I’ll always have me.

Which brings me to these headlines.

I’ve written headlines for Reductress for years. As you can imagine, it involves a lot of me cracking myself up. But they have a huge pitching pool and distinct house style, so my best stuff usually lives and dies in my Notes app. Until now!

I hope we can laugh at these together.

Stockholm Syndrome? This Woman Just Bought MTA Merch

“On The Rocks” Says Woman Who Thinks The Bartender Asked About Her Situationship

Woman Drives Without Seatbelt After Walking Through Parking Lot With Keys Between Her Fingers

Woman Soft Launches Ugly-Ass Shirt

I Lived It: I Wore Socks In My Own Kitchen

I Lived It: I Accidentally Saw The Underside Of A Piece Of My Furniture

I Lived It: My Friend Sent Me Something To Read And Then Quizzed Me On It

I Lived It: I Bought Nine Snickers To Meet The Card Minimum At A Bodega

I Lived It: I Tried To Find A Meme By Googling A Description Of It

I Lived It: I Had To Manually Type Out Why I Was Unsubscribing To My Aunt’s Newsletter

I Lived It: My Celebrity Look-Alike Is A Comedian

Girl Who Reads Pissed That Wuthering Heights Movie Isn’t As Boring As The Book

Audiobook Too Slow But Own Brain Too Weak

Woman Reading History Book Appalled By Plot

How I Stopped Having To Give Head By Getting Adult Braces

How I Get Into The Holiday Spirit By Showering At Weird Times All Week

How I Reverse My Aging By Eating Froot By The Foot

How I Talk To Strangers At Bars By Pretending I Don’t Know My Friends’ Names

Nice! Half Of This Recipe Is Cleaning The Food Processor

Woman Finally Confronts The Mirror (There Is Toothpaste All Over It)

Aw! This Guy That’s Hitting On You Actually Held You As A Baby

“I Only Date Older Men” Says Woman Who Bought Her Boyfriend A Lego Set For His Birthday

Aw! Mom Still Has Infomercial Toy You Apparently Made Her Buy At Gunpoint

Hinge Now Collects Your Top Matches And Holds Them At Gunpoint

I Called My Grandma To Let Her Know I Never Think About Her

New Depression Snack Unlocked!

Nice! Woman Uses LinkedIn For Absolutely Fucking Nothing

Whoops! I Accidentally Watched An Entire Season Of A Show Through 440 Instagram Reels

“Who Is This Content Even For?” Asks Woman Sending It To All Her Friends

Suspicious? Me And My Favorite Influencer Own All The Same Shit

“Have We Met Before?” Woman Asks The Landlord She Makes Her Boyfriend Talk To When He’s In Her Apartment

I Was First To Fall Asleep At The Sleepover And They Stole My Identity

Chillness. Show no drive; reveal no agenda. “She’s a chiller for sure” is the highest honor in the land.

Rivalry and Camaraderie. Everyone from NorCal is mad they didn’t get into Berkeley; everyone from SoCal is mad they didn’t get into UCLA. All insist they were waitlisted at Davis. All built a model Mission in fourth grade. Liberal my ass.

The Planet of NYC. The only other student at UC Santa Cruz not from California was from outside Boston. He told me “We’re special here.” Who’s we? What’s outside Boston? What’s inside?

Americana. Marching bands are not made up for television. My classmates showed me photos of themselves in the hats.

“Deli.” Means nothing. Sandwich shops have nothing to do with candy or cigarettes over there.

Pedestrian Life. Nobody jaywalks. They wait at empty crosswalks like the lights are watching. And nobody walks at all unless you call it a “hike.”

In-N-Out. Everyone’s there. The vegetarians order cheese on buns and the vegans order fries. It’s close to literary utopia, especially with the religious undertones. Liberal my ass.

Wait. My sophomore-year roommate’s boyfriend was a professional tree climber. My friends actually surfed, foraged for mushrooms, and worked stalls at farmer’s markets. When they took bathroom breaks, they used the honor system for payment. They traded honey for bread and flowers for lotion.

People let their dogs and babies freely explore the cliffed edges of the beach. They hold lab meetings on the sand. They drive along Highway 1 if they have a free hour. People wait for each other there; they waited for me.

Several times a year, my Brooklyn family drove five hours upstate to visit my grandparents. On some pre-selected Friday, my mother would arrive home and swiftly change out of her corporate attire, while my stay-at-home father fetched our sickly-colored Camry from a nearby lot. My parents used to claim that the lot’s annual fee was bankrupting us, but they also said that about how much cereal and milk my brothers and I consumed. My father would park next to the hydrant in front of our building, and we would race inside, gripping ziplock bags of Frosted Mini-Wheats. Without milk, they’re pure sawdust, but if you’re hungry enough, they’re delightfully filling. We kids would fight until one or two of us fell asleep; the prize for Last Man Standing was a single, silent hour to gaze out the window.

Once, on the Taconic, my older brother threatened to give my American Girl Doll an unattractive haircut, and in a desperate attempt to save her looks, I threw the six-pound doll into the front seat. Her head smacked against the steering wheel, and we all but spun off the road. I didn’t care about that; I was sure I had just killed her.

In the dead of night, we would finally turn into my grandparents’ suburbanhood, and crawl past fifty identical driveways before rounding their cul-de-sac. During wintertime, in those last few moments before parking behind my cousins’ car, we would pass directly under the shadow of The Mountain.

On those pseudo-vacation mornings, the world through the windows was blinding. The grass was buried under three feet of snow at least, and the sunlight bounced forever between the smooth, white lawns and two-story houses, as if the cul-de-sac were inside a snow globe. Dead-center was The Mountain – a colossal, icy mass – the snowplows’ refuse accreted over many days. The Mountain was a few feet taller than even my uncle, and when I stood beside it, I could not see its summit.

For the adults, upstate was a real vacation. My parents, aunt, and uncle would drive to the furthest possible shopping mall and abandon us with Grandma, and technically Grandpa, though he was in perpetual symbiosis with his recliner. I had four playmates: my callous older brother, my two blonde cousins who went to private school and told me my butt was too big to do ballet school with them, and my younger brother, who exclusively played with stick-shaped things.

Grandma would drag all five of us into the foyer and zip us into industrial-strength, hand-me-down snow gear, pulling scarves under our eyes and hoods over our hats. She dealt with our feet last, and the floor was so cold I had to balance on my tiptoes during all the zipping and pulling. Not ballerina material my ass. Pun intended. Eventually, Grandma double-socked us, wrapped each foot in a plastic bag, and shoved the whole mess into boots. By then, we’d be drenched in sweat and completely immobilized.

The first step outside was a smack to the face; the few inches of exposed skin around my eyes would instantly go numb. We were like a herd of blind, clumsy Oompa Loompas, teetering towards the lawn and then godlessly flinging ourselves into the powder. After a single plunge, there would already be a layer of snow between the Price Chopper bag and the inside of my boot, and I would curse our parents, who were surely frolicking through a food court, spending our college money on kitchenware. Bankrupt my ass.

Despite all the fuss it took to get us outside, there was nothing to do there. We could make snowballs, but if you hit someone on the body, they wouldn’t even feel it, and if you nailed them in the eye, they would start crying, and you’d get in trouble. With enough morale, we could pull each other on the red plastic sled for a few seconds each, but on the snow, we sank too quickly, and on the gravel, the disk made a terrible screeching sound.

We would always end up around The Mountain – the five of us encircling its base as if performing a sacrificial dance, breaking off big chunks of ice and hurtling them into the blacktop to admire their glorious shattering.

The parents would return around then, and our dads would lift us onto The Mountain while the moms carried shopping bags inside. Though I would never forgive him for his part in my doll’s death, I was impressed by my older brother’s ability to navigate The Mountain’s precipitous terrain. He found handholds no one else saw and could work around its entire circumference like a koala.

And there was even one time he began to carve out a mysterious lump on the side of The Mountain. The rest of us watched wordlessly as he gathered snow from around the ‘sac and climbed one-handed to pack it into the lump. He worked diligently, intermittently leaning back and dangling off The Mountain to assess the lump’s symmetry.

Once satisfied with the mass’s shape and size, my brother carried the red sled on his final ascent. For a long while, he struggled to get himself and the object high enough, taking breaks to rest his forehead on the snow. Finally, he was at The Mountain’s peak. The cousins cheered; my dad whistled.

Then, slowly, he raised the disk above his head, and a hush fell over the crowd. With a sudden jerk, he threw his head back and cried out:

“THE BIG! MAMBA!”

I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by that, but I knew what he was about to do. “The Big Mamba” could have meant The Mountain, or the hump, which I realized, in that moment, was a ramp, or the stunt he was about to pull. Nevertheless, it was perfectly named.

My brother popped the sled under his butt and pushed himself forward. He slid down, picked up speed, and then launched off the ramp and into the air. He landed on the snowy lawn with a muffled thud. I had never seen anything so fearless.

Nancy was the most anxious person I’d ever met. Her eyes were glued wide, her gaze erratic and pointed like an épée. Her mouth hung slightly open, her inhales frantic and exhales strained. She needed something, she needed help, she didn’t know.

“Who are you?” she asked me all day. “Who is that? What are you doing? What are you doing?”

It was a mantra, an accusation, an omen.

“That’s why no one will sit with her,” my boss said. It was my first day of training; I started there as a server in the grand dining room.

“She annoys people with that what-are-you-doing thing she does.” My boss perfectly imitated Nancy’s monotonous timbre as she demonstrated how to scoop ice. Then, she led me on a tour of the villa, both of us in our aprons. I probably didn’t need to know which floor the library was on, but she wanted me to see how beautiful and manicured it all was.

She introduced me to every resident we came upon, and I began to collect their names. The older you are, the more you look like your name, so it was easy to learn who was who.

I took an extra-long peek at Nancy each time we passed her, noting her stylishness and religious veneration of manners.

“What are you doing? Why are you eating in the living room?”

The other residents angled their bodies and snacks away from Nancy – their sunhats rotating together like a flock of diving birds. My boss was right; they despised her, but they were also afraid. Nancy was their mother, their grandmother, all of the people they had finally escaped in their old age. Plus, they had all abandoned manners already; dementia takes manners first.

“Nice boobs,” Nevin told me. Still my first day.

“Coffee gives me the shits,” Rosemary added.

I took their orders. I was assigned to Section Two.

A woman sitting in Section Three flagged me down, and I checked for my boss behind me before going over. I wasn’t supposed to leave my section.

“My name is Leela,” she said uneasily, leaning forward in her wheelchair. “I’ve been sitting here for hours, and no one is taking my order. It’s humiliating. What did I do?”

All my organs twisted together, and I had to look away from her, down at her seafoam green loafers.

“Sorry. Let me get your server.”

“I’m not a dummy,” she said.

I hurried back to the servery to – I don’t know – slap whoever was in charge of Section Three. But everyone was dashing around like mad. It was 5:30, so the dining room was filling to its maximum capacity. All one hundred and twenty residents were seated, hungry, and had no idea where they were. I didn’t know any of my coworkers yet, so I just stood in the middle of everyone and spoke aloud. Another server, around 40 years old with wispy bangs, cut me off mid-rant.

“Leela always says that. Ignore it.”

“She says she’s been sitting there for hours, and servers are just walking by–”

“She likes to hang out in here. We gave her lunch and then another sandwich half an hour ago. She won’t eat again if we serve her.”

“But–”

“She’ll be fine. Stick to your section.”

So I did, for four months.

It was the most unadulterated nonsense. Eddie would order a “7-7-3 no white,” which meant a BLT with no mayo. He asked for “cold red,” which was strawberry ice cream, unless he said “white and red,” meaning he wanted one packet of regular sugar and one packet of Sweet ‘N Low.

“Where’s my little girl?” he would ask me. He meant Shirley.

“Shirley is sitting at the wrong table. I’ll go get her.”

“Are you the little bitch?” Shirley asked as I approached her. She was sitting in Patsy’s seat, and the two Judys were fuming over it.

“Shirley! I’m so glad to see you. We reserved a table for you right over there.” I pointed to the other side of the dining room, where she had sat every day for two and a half years.

“Oh!” She was suddenly smiley. “Wonderful! And where is he?”

“Who?” I asked.

“My...my dad. No, not my dad. My grandpa. No–”

“Eddie is there,” I motioned to him, “He’s already sitting down.”

“Thank you, sweetheart.”

Shirley had forgotten that she screamed, “You’re fired!” at me the day before as she hurled my phone across the dining room. The staff called Shirley “The Boss.” Sometimes, she’d find some employees in a meeting and take a seat or just open the door, ask how everything was going, and close it again. She had fired me many times at that point, and I didn’t take it personally.

Shirley fucked with everyone, even Nancy, who was ninety-two. Someone told me she pushed Nancy to the ground once, and Nancy’s walker went skidding across the carpet.

I hated the walkers; I was like the Walker Valet. Before each meal, I wheeled the awful things into the hallway, and after dessert, I fetched them again. Squeak, squeak, thunk, sorry, thunk. I could match Walker-to-Resident blindfolded. Nancy’s walker had tissue paper flowers hanging from the top bar. She made the flowers in an art class at the villa, despite her tremor and intermittent “What are you doing?”

I remember the way Nancy’s flowers swayed when Margie T-boned her. There were always traffic jams, and Nancy was always involved.

“Don’t be such a pill,” Nancy had hissed, turning her head in slow motion like an owl. Margie rolled her eyes but backed off. Despised, but feared.

After the final shift of my first week, I was stepping into a bathroom stall when I noticed Nancy’s walker in the middle of the room. It was positioned as if peering at itself in the mirror.

“Nancy?”

I checked under all the stall doors and down the hallway, but couldn’t find her. It made no sense – Nancy couldn’t move three feet without it. I jogged to the front desk, where Henry, who had a shaved head and a racist bumper sticker, was watching YouTube on his phone.

“I found a walker in the bathroom, but there’s nobody in there,” I said.

“Whose walker?” Henry asked without looking up.

“Nancy’s.”

He snapped to attention and unsheathed his walkie-talkie.

“Thanks, you can go home. We got it.” He was already running.

Apparently, they found her an hour later in her room, which they had already checked twice.

I think she teleported.

I worried about Nancy a lot, especially when she got ganged up on or when her tremor reemerged. She shook like she was leaning against a counter with the blender on. Not like Jane, for example, who shook like she was on a wooden roller coaster. Jane always shook and always talked business.

“Did you make sure the package was delivered to their department?” she would ask me.

“Yes, everything is settled,” I would say.

“And where do I sign for this?” She motioned to nothing.

“No need, you’re our guest,” I assured her. I never knew what she meant, but she always seemed to know what I did.

Some people at the villa had no short-term memory. Some had no long-term. Nancy had a unique variety of confusion that I still struggle to describe. What are you doing? And there were a few like Eddie who knew exactly what was going on but just didn’t have the words. 7-7-3 no white. Ethel always ordered Calamari Tea, which meant Chamomile. Judy would introduce herself to me eight or nine times during our afternoon strolls.

“New York?” she asked. “You’re a ways away from home! What’s your name?”

“Violet.”

“Where are you from, Violet?”

“New York.”

“New York? You’re a ways away from home!” We always stopped in front of the same garden so she could look at the orange roses.

When I went out with Don, we took a different route to see the ocean. He liked to put one hand on my upper back and explain how to train bird dogs in excruciating detail. He and his wife had the same diagnosis, and both thought they were staying with us temporarily, which their daughters solemnly admitted wasn’t true.

They were the only couple at the villa who didn’t meet there. Pat had a new boyfriend every few months, usually after one of them died. She liked to do outlandish things like take her shirt off or kiss men in the living room.

“Don’t pay attention to her,” the head of the activities department told me, “She likes making a spectacle of herself.”

War, baseball games, working at the villa: Long stretches of nothing punctuated by the occasional, horrifying spectacle. When residents interacted, they effectively said nothing. It went on and on.

“I hear people sing here,” Rick – short for Richardene – whispered to a group of women in the courtyard.

“Yes, yes,” Margaret agreed, “and there’s a cat over there.” She pointed to a stuffed animal someone dropped on the grass.

“Isn’t he a nice man?” Rick added.

Who? The cat?

Elwood was one of the few men whom the villa ladies tolerated. He minded his own business. In fact, Elwood came into the dining room every night to get dinner “to go” so he could eat alone in his room. He always instructed me to place a bowl of Rice Krispies, half a glass of heavy cream, and a banana onto the seat of his walker.

“It’s the best. The best,” he insisted. “You cut up the banana, and it sits in your stomach right here. Then the Rice Krispies sit on top – they are delicious. Then you drink the cream – it goes over everything, like this,” he waved his hands around his abdomen.

The ladies also liked Chuck, except, of course, for Nancy, who was hoping he would die before her. She told me that.

Chuck was tall, slim, ninety-four, wore tracksuits, and “jogged” around the villa. It was more like marching. He taught Frank Sinatra how to play tennis and dated several starlets in the 50s, including Eva Gabor and Janet Leigh. He was obsessed with cookies. He stuffed them into his pockets and left a trail of crumbs wherever he marched.

Once, when he and Nancy got into a screaming match at lunch, I thought back to one of the dementia training videos about how the music-storing part of the brain never erodes. “Scientific mystery,” the voice-over had said.

Before one of them choked on their Chicken Cordon Bleu, I stepped between Chuck and Nancy’s tables and started singing. I went with the National Anthem because I couldn’t remember how “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window” started. In a trance, they joined in. Just seconds later, the entire dining room was erect, hands over hearts, belting away. The other servers gawked at me and then laughed so hard they had to hide in the servery. Finally, the residents applauded at nothing and returned to their plates.

Sometimes, I got in trouble for talking to residents too much during dinner. Even Miss Liz, who had microscopic glasses and no patience, warmed up to me eventually. Once, when waiting for her tablemates to arrive, she started ripping on her late husband like we were old friends. “He was a pastor,” she cleared her throat, “Who much preferred the company of the organist.” I nearly dropped her apple juice.

I was a much happier employee after switching to the activities department. It paid two more bucks an hour, and I was freer to chat. I even got to teach a seated exercise class on Monday mornings, which involved pool noodles. My students were constantly whacking each other in the face and then taking sides about it, so I leaned into the tribalism and facilitated balloon volleyball games instead. That activity also involved things bouncing off heads, but no one minded in that context.

On my last day at the villa, a girl who worked at the front desk shadowed me as a potential replacement. Her current job was to keep people from escaping, and she was tired of arguing and locking people’s wheelchairs. I think she also wanted the extra two bucks.

We took the elevator down to memory care, where residents in the more severe stages of dementia live. “Don’t make eye contact,” I joked. She did not think it was funny.

Everyone was eating lunch and watching Rick Steves on the TV. As I knelt to greet a longtime resident named Jean, someone came up behind me and grabbed a fistful of my hair. It was Ethel. She had just that week transitioned downstairs and was disoriented.

Her bony hand felt like a talon against my scalp. She leaned down, which was an impressive move for most residents, put her mouth to my ear, and yelled, “Get in the car!” I stayed calm as my coworkers frantically detached us. The front desk girl was completely frozen in fear.

Ethel lunged at me a few more times, but her aids stopped her before she could get to my ponytail. I’m still not sure who she thought I was that day, but she sounded a lot like my mom in grocery store parking lots. I don’t think the front desk girl ended up replacing me.

I made sure to get a long goodbye with Nancy.

I sat in her room, admiring photographs of her and her husband, John. Her daughter told me that after he died, Nancy “went crazy.”

“That’s when my mom started repeating things, you know, the way she does,” she told me with a mouthful of trail mix. “She loved John more than anyone. They traveled the world together.”

Nancy and I talked about her adventures in China and Japan. She sometimes remembered those trips. There was a lot less eye-darting and gasping when she was alone with me. “Who are you? Violet,” she answered herself. “You’re Violet.”

“Right.” I ran my hands over her colorful, chunky jewelry on the dresser and organized the teddy bears on the armchair.

“I’m ready to lie down,” she said. “Can you cover me?”

I pulled the knit blanket over her floral pantsuit, and she immediately closed her eyes.