Little Gifts
I love Three Decker Diner. I love a pastrami sandwich and pickles and a coffee with oat milk and sitting on a little swivel stool at the counter. I alternate between reading the news (how chic) and the library’s copy of Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds (due in three days, so I read as fast as I can). The man next to me reads Barak Obama’s autobiography, and even though it’s not a contest, I feel slightly emasculated by the fact that his book is twice the size of mine. I hate that I’m wearing my ratty stained Taylor Swift sweatshirt. I try to avoid wearing it in public, because I feel like it sends the wrong message about myself. One, that I’m currently a massive fan of Taylor Swift, enough to spend an unconscionable amount of money to emblazon her name and a sketch of her cat across my chest. Two, that I’m a republican, or some sort of disinterested right-wing apologist. Nowadays, I feel like openly dickriding for Taylor is akin to playing Morgan Wallen on the jukebox at your local Bushwick dive. You’ll get some LOOKS. Unfortunately, it’s the warmest and most comfortable sweatshirt I’ve ever owned, and Brooklyn is mostly anonymous until it’s very embarrassingly not, so I decide to pretend not to care.
It’s the right decision, probably. It’s busy for a Friday afternoon, the waitresses only glancing at you long enough to allow you to order as fast as you can. I’m jealous of them, uniform-less and carrying a sense of un-performative easy cool. I’m often insecure about just being a woman without a category. Too straight-edge for tattoos and face framing money pieces, too indelicate to be a doe-eyed waif. Oh, to be a woman with a black bob!!! I’m so jealous of the women who sketch and knit and paint and do pottery, artfully ink stained delicate fingers handing you a piece of practical modern folk art just for you.
I show Stefanie my dream hat, a little knit red hood that ties under the chin. It’s $40, but she says she can make it for free. We pick out the yarn together at Michaels and she finishes it the night we decide it’s too cold to visit the tree at Rockefeller Center and stay inside watching Love Actually instead. I have never loved a hat so much in my life. I wear it every day, telling everyone it was made for me and don’t I look like an extra from “A Christmas Story”?
“I can’t quite figure out what it’s giving” says the man sitting at the bar as I bundle myself up and prepare to go back into the cold.
“I was sort of going for one of those creepy figurines that lives on the shelf at your grandmother’s house. Precious moments.”
He snaps his fingers. “That’s it!”
The hat is mine for 2 glorious weeks before I lose it, sometime in that terrible and breakneck week before Christmas. I am a chronic loser of things I really love, second only to my ability to stain every white item of clothing I own. Stefanie promises she’ll make me a new one, but I am still wracked with guilt. I don’t want another hat, I want my hat. I try not to be too upset with myself, instead choosing to be grateful that I have a friend that doesn’t mind making the same hat twice.
One summer, I shared a dressing room and a cot with 6 women, talking and laughing and shouting at each other, listening to each other snore while we waited for curtain call. It was a three-hour affair, and all in all I was onstage for less than 1/5th of it, so I spent a lot of time learning about what it would mean if I could become like them, working and living and having children and growing old with famously the most frustrating profession, chosen only by the most delusionally optimistic. A week after my birthday, Kate placed a little gauzy drawstring bag in my hand, containing a bracelet covered in silver and little glittering gemstones. It meant everything to me. I wanted what she has. So fearless and funny, so unapologetically talented. I felt so small, but here was a real actress, who gave me a real gift for no reason other than to be kind. I imagined she had imbued it with some of her magic. I wear it when I’m lucky enough to be invited to an opening night, just to feel like I belong.
I work a slow shift at the restaurant the day after New Years. I am grumpy and tired and not in the mood to speak to anyone, which is a deeply unhelpful quality when you’re playing Maître d’. I am relieved when one of my favorite regulars comes in, the one with the kind face who always asks about my writing. Before I can seat her, she hands me a book, the inscription on the front cover reading, “To Molly- Happy New Year 2026”. I hide behind the desk for the next half hour, as I am so touched I’m afraid I’ll cry. It is so nice to be reminded that you are a person outside of “how would you like that cooked” and “would you like that up or on the rocks”.
I finish my sandwich as un-sloppily as a can, a surprisingly difficult feat as the gluten-free bread practically wet with mustard disintegrates in my fingers. I give up on finishing my Cole slaw (I always forget I don’t like it until I’ve already ordered it) and ask for the bill, before bundling myself back into my hideous and practical coat and heading back out into the cold. It’s Friday, but my work week has only just begun. I walk through McCarren Park feeling a little better than I did before, because I hate to tell you but a lot of the best dates I’ve ever been on have been with myself. It’s amazing, the power of pastrami.
