There’s No Place Like This Rent-Stabilized Home

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/opinion/sunday/rent-stabilized-home.html

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As if New Year’s Eve isn’t wonderful enough, it’s also the night I’m getting kicked out of my apartment. I’ve had a magical year, a year of living in a gorgeous two-bedroom apartment overlooking Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, for the same price as my previous place in East Harlem, which I shared with a lovely roommate and his disrespectful cat, Bobbi.

A red-haired child named Dahlia put the deal together. I was babysitting her and complaining about Bobbi constantly trying to break my laptop, and she advised me, as she so often did, to move out. Then, leaning back in her chair with some hot chocolate on her top lip, she explained that her father’s friend was moving upstate for work, but wanted to keep her rent-stabilized place in Park Slope because she’d been there “forever.” It turns out that, to a 9-year-old and every other New Yorker, forever means 26 years. Dahlia took my phone and organized a meeting with Jenn, the friend, and I moved into heaven last November.

I lorded it over everyone, inviting friends to look at the Statue of Liberty from my spare bedroom, doing this whole bit where I pretend to lock them in and tell them to scream all they want, because I won’t be disturbed in my other rooms, far away. I’m mortified to tell you that, sometimes, on the bus near my building, I take my house keys out of my purse and hold them in my hand. In other neighborhoods, women do the same thing so that when they walk home, they can thread the keys through their fist to use as a defense against an attacker. I do it so that other bus passengers will see and think, “Oooh, she must live right here, at the stop on the park.”

Which I do, for now. I can stroll four or five steps, safe and smug, from the park right to my golden double doors. Then I turn the key and slip into the green-tiled lobby before gliding into the elevator that smells like fresh coffee in the morning, and dignified perfume in the evening, and up I go through the building to my sanctuary, my stroke of luck, my home. Dec. 31 is when the magic stops.

I knew the risk before I took it. I talked it through with my therapist, who told me about another one of her clients: a very elderly lady who had sublet for decades from an even more elderly lady, one who had actually died, and somehow it had all worked out. Whenever I felt anxious, I pictured myself 50 years from now, a brazen old broad, still scamming.

It wasn’t to be. The lawyer’s letter arrived in September, explaining that the landlord knew I was subletting, and that it was illegal, and I had to “cleanse the situation.” I was the fly in the ointment, the trouble in Paradise, that first impossible rabbit that caused all the hassle in Australia.

I wondered if someone in the building had ratted on me. I never had parties, I always smiled at the middle-aged people, and the children liked me because I made funny noises in the big echoing lobby whenever I saw them. Did my boyfriend and I have one too many arguments, followed by that inevitably passionate makeup? Perhaps the noise disturbed a neighbor. Then I remembered I don’t have a boyfriend.

Earlier this month, on my way to dinner, I looked back with longing at my darling building, its windows warmly glowing with menorahs and twinkling brightly with Christmas lights, and I felt cold and morose. A modern-day “Little Matchstick Girl,’’ I thought crossly, as I stomped all the way down to Shake Shack.

I did what we must all do when New York rejects us. I went to New Jersey. I stayed there for an hour, signed adoption papers for a small rescue puppy, then brought her right back home, to our beautiful big apartment across from the park. “I actually always wanted a Great Pyrenees-Border collie cross,” I insisted, whenever anyone questioned me closely about my seemingly impulsive decision. Now I see that I’d hoped her leash would tether me to this life I’d made.

Surely a neighborhood that means the world to me will think twice before throwing me out? Surely solid routines and imagined futures and entire buildings made of concrete can’t just disappear from my sight? Of course they can. People lose entire countries and lives and each other every day. I filled out a change of address form for my mail, but I don’t have a new one to move to. I put all of my stuff into storage, and the ever-growing puppy and I are going to stay with friends who are not allergic to either of us.

Last week I stood at the lake in Prospect Park and watched as a flock of plump white snow geese launched themselves out of the water in unison. Well, would you look at that? I said to my now gigantic puppy, splayed out beside me. My breath caught at the cold, or maybe at the majesty of the creatures flying overhead. They’re leaving, too. The geese flew no more than 200 feet and settled happily on the scrubby winter grass behind us.

Geese, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry I shouted at you in the park. I don’t blame you for staying as long as you could, for bustling in close and comfy and chatty on the grass, for savoring a few more minutes on the earth, because I guess you already know that, sooner or later, we all have to leave.