How to Be Chill, When You’re Late
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The strangest thing has come over me. I believe it’s called a sense of calm.
Allow me to rewind a bit. The other morning, I was sitting at my desk not working. I was four days late, and not with any work. Every so often, I’d take a break from trolling the Internet and sneak a peek at the home pregnancy test perched in a corner of my desk.
Should I take it?
I called Andy and asked: “Should I take it?”
“Do you want to?” he so not answered.
Of course I wanted to. But I didn’t even know if the results would be valid? The box said you could start testing the first day you missed your period, but also cautioned that this could be too early and, if “Aunt Flo” had still not arrived, advised you to keep on testing. At $13 a pop, the logic seemed a bit too convenient.
Besides, there were bigger issues. After a few months of attempting to get pregnant while everyone around me was announcing their pregnancies, I’d spent a nightmarish day babysitting my friend’s screaming toddler. And so developed my new, chill attitude towards baby-making. All in good time, I’d decided. A watched pot never boils. When the going gets tough, the tough get cliches.
But a low-pressure stance was no excuse for lackadaisicalness. Thanks to a book recommendation I’d gotten from my Pilates trainers, a Siegfried-and-Roy-like gay couple who were a veritable phenomenon in the Pilates world, I had been charting my fertility signs. You don’t want to hear about it, but let’s just say: I know a whole lot about cervical mucus.
I also knew I was way too late to just be late. So why bother taking the test?
“I think I’m gonna go park,” I said to Andy on the phone. I had to move the car for alternate-side street-cleaning that day.
“Did you see a spot out the window?” Andy asked, a reference to my usual trick of waiting to hear a car engine turning over, then running to see if a spot had opened up. It was the best – and possibly only – way of getting a Beautiful Spot – a spot within spitting distance of my brownstone stoop.
“Nah,” I said. “I just feel like parking.” All I needed was to avoid a ticket – why not just give up the game?
Once in the car, I realized I didn’t feel like parking. I felt like driving. But where to? Liberated from the need to park, the borough was my oyster. I headed down Dean Street towards Park Slope, thinking about how nice it was just to drive down brownstone-lined streets, and how not fun it was to drive in our old Manhattan neighborhood. There, one always had to be alert.
The car behind me honked, alerting me that the light had turned green. It was a quick little tap of a honk, not a long, hostile move-your-butt wail, and it struck me as neighborly, so I waved to the driver behind me as I hit the gas.
At Fourth Avenue, I was no longer in cute brownstone Boerum Hill. But I knew exactly where I was going. The McDonald’s near First Street had a drive-thru. Tooling in for a snack seemed a treat nothing short of a heavenly.
It was totally wrong on an obvious level, but that documentary by the guy who did serious damage to his health by eating only McDonald’s for a month had increased my desire for fast food exponentially. There he was on the screen gorging on a Big Mac, and all I could think was “Big Mac, mmmmmm” (provided they held the sauce and the cheese – I don’t like orange with my burger).
But the tooling itself, not the food, was the treat that day.
This was the way most of the rest of the country lived, but to me it felt lazy and gloriously decadent. Could there be anything less New York than hopping in the car and getting fast food? I was filled with a love for Brooklyn. Only here, it seemed, could I dip my toe in suburbia on a harmless whim.
In the car with my shake and fries, I headed back home knowing I would not be taking the pregnancy test. What was the point? Time would tell soon enough if I was or I wasn’t. The test could only confirm what I already knew: That I might or might not be.
As I turned the corner on to my block, I mentally patted myself on the back for this resolution. Surely this new, non-neurotic attitude was a wonderful first step in the direction of motherhood. But, before I could venture on this train of thought any further, I noticed a Subaru station wagon pulling out of the Beautiful Spot right in front of my building. That it was one of those forest green numbers with the sporty side-detailing that make you want to tap its owners on the shoulder and say, “Dude, you live in Brooklyn, not Vermont” hardly mattered. The Parking Gods had smiled upon me! Perhaps this was the first of many rewards to be reaped by the new, chill me.
I assumed the Preparatory Parking Position, complete with Territorial Blinker. The Beautiful Spot was mine.
As I was awaiting the Subaru’s departure with a triumphant sip of McDonald’s milkshake, I caught sight of something – or, I should say, someone. It was my Parking Nemesis – the woman with scary-clown dyed-red hair who lay in wait in the brownstone across the street trying to beat me to Spots Beautiful. She was sitting in her rent-a-car green Taurus, halfway out of her spot on the not-good-for-tomorrow side of the street, shaking her head in frustration. She’d clearly anticipated the Subaru’s exit and run out of her house and into her car to get the spot, only to be bested by my lucky timing.
We made eye contact. Her look said, “You got me this time Camry, but I shall have final victory.”
Normally, I would have felt a surge of triumph and basked in its swell. But instead I did something truly baffling. I mouthed, “Did you want this spot?” then lifted my hand in the universal peace-amongst drivers “how” gesture and drove away, giving the Beautiful Spot to her. Instead of basking in the triumph, I basked in the shocked but grateful look on my Parking Nemesis’s face as I passed her.
Was I pregnant? Who knew. But with my newfound sense of calm and my newly established good karma, I had no problem finding a decent spot further up the street.
The Brooklyn Chronicles appears each Friday. The author can be reached at kschwartz@nysun.com.