“How come we don’t see old ladies? All we see are old guys. And old ladies outnumber old guys by about ten to one. At the projects there are no old guys at all.”
Irving did his close-one-eye-lift-the-lip-what-kind-of-moron-are-you? look. It’s very effective. I saw him give it to the governor once at a press conference, and the governor deferred on the next three questions to the commissioner. “There are no guys in the projects over the age of twenty-five. Dead or incarcerated or got the hell out.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“It’s that bad. Here it’s a different thing. Those guys on the benches are the last living husbands. Every day their wives throw them the hell out so they can wax the kitchen floor, then have lunch with their girlfriends. They got into a routine when they were younger: the husband goes to work, the wife cleans, watches the soaps, talks to the other girls. The husband retires, it’s a nightmare. So they tell them—go out, exercise, get some fresh air, pick up some milk. You come out here in February, these poor sons of bitches are freezing in Russian hats and scarves and gloves, the whole nine yards. When my nana was here, there was one guy, been married fifty-seven years, he goes and leaves his wife for one of the widows in the building, lives three floors down. His son shows up, yelling, carrying on, says to his father in the lobby, What the hell are you doing, Pop? The guys says, She lets me stay inside during the day.”
“You’re making this all up.”
“Swear to God.”
Irving finished the last bit of my dog and crumpled up the trash. It was one of those deceptive spring days when the sun shines down so confidently that you begin to think of putting your winter coat away, one of those days that gets the weatherman an additional minute or two on the evening news, with film of kids playing ball in the park, a couple walking amid the daffodils. Irving and I walked beneath the roller-coaster supports. The roller coaster at Coney Island looks like it’s built of two-by-fours and spit. Irving swears by it. A homeless guy wearing a NEW YORK CITY MARATHON T-shirt with a mongrel dog lying alongside him held a sign: GULF WAR VET, AGENT ORANGE, NO BENEFITS, MY DOG IS HUNGRY, AIDS.
“Sign sucks,” Irving said, dropping the twenty the Nathan’s people had passed up into the guy’s cup.
“I guess marriage is a mystery,” I said, looking at two old men huddled together on one splintering bench as though for warmth in the thin May sunshine.
“A misery, more like it. Yo, Mr. Kanterman. Mr. Beck.”
“Irving,” one of the men called. “How’s your nana?”
“She’s dead,” the other snarled at him, hitting him in the side with the back of his hand. “Four years ago. You sat shivah.”
“It’s okay, Mr. Kanterman. I forget everything, too.”
“How’s the wife?”
Again the hand, like a martial arts expert. “He’s divorced! Idiot!” The man I assumed was Mr. Beck peered at me. His eyes were a blue so light that he would have looked blind had he not fixed them so accusingly on me. “Unless there’s a new one.”
“I’m just the girlfriend,” I said. Mr. Beck looked disgusted at the notion that I actually talked, but Mr. Kanterman nodded and smiled and said, “That’s good.”
As we started down the boardwalk, Mr. Beck called, “Irving? Irving! You got your gun? You be careful. They’re everywhere now.”
“Your nana just died four years ago?” I said as Irving lit a cigar and puffed energetically into the wind off the ocean. On the horizon were two big tankers, bookends to the two big apartment towers where the old people lived. Maybe someday the buildings would be unmoored and sail away south, to Miami maybe. Maybe that was what all the residents were waiting for.
“She died in 1988. Mr. Beck thinks everything happened four years ago. He hits Kanterman so often I’m surprised the poor guy isn’t black and blue all up and down his side.”
“All that time and they all still remember you?”
“Nothing changes out here. The city, everything changes all the time. Here, it might as well be four years ago.”
“That’s what it was like on City Island. Remember when I told you I once lived on City Island?”
“Jeez, that place,” Irving said, holding his cigar down at his side and throwing an arm around my shoulder. “That’s an embalmed place, City Island.”
“I loved it,” I said, which like most simple declarative sentences was an oversimplification merged with a lie and overlaid by the mists of blessed memory. I had been invited to house-sit in City Island by my landlord, who had acquired a small home on the water there from an aunt who had recently died. He hadn’t decided whether to keep the place or sell it, and he was convinced that, uninhabited, it would be vandalized or flooded or mysteriously decrease in value. The day I told him I was moving out at the end of the month, he’d asked me if I wanted to live rent-free for a while in this City Island house. It was the first time I’d ever heard of City Island, and because I was a New Yorker, it was the first time I’d ever heard the words rent-free.
“How do I get there?” I’d asked.
It’s not easy to get to City Island. A train to the bus, the bus over the bridge. There’s a reason for that. City Island is so different from the rest of the city that, on the few occasions during those three months that I left it, I would not have been surprised if it had disappeared into the mist, a mirage from a Broadway musical, a small New England fishing village within spitting distance of the blocky Soviet high-rises of the central Bronx. The house in which I lived was just as difficult to find, down a narrow, dead-end block tucked in behind the avenue overlooking the ocean. It had blue carpeting, a plaid couch in the kind of early American style the Puritans might have embraced had they shopped at discount stores, and a recliner chair in green Naugahyde equidistant between a small low-ceilinged kitchen and the television.
“Young girl like you, you won’t last a week here,” said the druggist at the corner who sold me Tylenol and maxipads.
It was the perfect place to live after a job dismissal and an abortion. I had a little money left over from my job at Stinson, Reilly and Jacoby. (“The name alone is a history of ethnic progress in New York,” Meghan had said one night at dinner.) It was no wonder I’d been asked to leave, sandwiched as I was between two groups of enthusiasts, the older women, high school graduates whose vocation had been found in being handmaidens to a senior partner, and the young sharpies in black skirt suits, Ivy grads who were putting in the obligatory two years before going to Columbia law school and leaving SRJ in the dust of their seven-figure ambitions. A New York paralegal who thinks she shouldn’t have to work weekends, or for that matter fewer than eighty hours a week, and who insists on wearing peasant skirts and clogs is a New York paralegal awaiting work as a waitress. I did that for part of the time I was living on the island, did the breakfast shift at the island diner from five until ten. But most of my time was spent lying on the couch covered by a brown-and-orange afghan with that unmistakable sweet, musty old-lady smell, watching TV and eating donuts. God, do I love donuts. I could eat donuts all day. And did. By the time the bleeding had stopped, I had gained ten pounds and become inextricably enmeshed in the story lines of One Life to Live and the rerun episodes of, ironically, L.A. Law. I was thirty-three years old, growing fat and stupid in Brigadoon, my only human contact a request for more butter on rye toast or more coffee as the sun rose halfheartedly in an always overcast February sky.
“God, this place is really a dump, isn’t it?” said my landlord when he brought a friend in to give him an appraisal, and I nodded dumbly, although I had been thinking of asking him whether he would give me a two-year lease.
When Meghan arrived, I had just gotten home from my shift, taken off my uniform of white shirt and black pants and dropped them into the back of the closet, where they gave off their familiar smell of syrup and butter, and lain down on the couch in what my aunt Maureen would have called a housecoat. I’d even begun to wear clothes that had been left in the closet, smocklike shirt
s that snapped up the front, shapeless pants in slippery synthetics, robes with zippers and big patch pockets.
“Are there pancakes?” she said as she took off her black wool coat and tossed it over a chair. “Coffee?” I shook my head dumbly. She’d been misled by the aroma of the diner that clung to my hair and hands. I heard her rattling around in the kitchen, and finally she came out with a donut and a warm Coke. Meghan is adaptable, in part because of the time she has spent in war zones. She ate horse once, and dog, too, and maybe snake.
“You watch the show?” she said, looking at the game show on the small set.
“I work from five to ten. Waitressing.”
She chewed thoughtfully. She still had a trace of TV makeup on her jawline.
“Mary Todd Lincoln,” Meghan said. She was answering a question on the game show. “The theory of relativity,” she said. “1914. The Boston Red Sox. David Copperfield. The Nineteenth Amendment.” The windows were rattling in the frames, and outside I could see a small, half-dead apple tree in the yard of the next house bending at its gnarled waist. The weather is the constant background music of life on an island.
Meghan leaned over and turned off the set. “This place is like a little piece of Nantucket,” she said, “before rich people ruined it.”
“I love it,” I said as unthinkingly as I said it years later to Irving. I suppose it was that that set her off.
“What’s with you?” she said, pacing the carpet. “Look at yourself. You look like her. Don’t you remember what it was like, her lying up in her bedroom all day, the smell of Chanel No. 5, God, it would kill you when you went in there, like dead flowers and Scotch all mixed together.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, come off it, Bridget. Do you think if I spent all day, every day, in my bedroom reading trashy novels and having my meals on a tray and seeing Leo once a day to say, Oh, how was your day, darling? he wouldn’t remember it?”
“I’m just saying, Meghan. I don’t remember what you remember.”
“You don’t remember me getting your uniform skirts out of the closet in the morning? You don’t remember me helping with your homework at night? You don’t remember me showing you how to do division?”
“I guess.”
“You guess? You guess?” She was yelling at me now, and for some reason I thought of how she had done a broadcast in the dark from someplace in Central America, whispering, “The rebels are firing all around us, yet for a moment it’s so quiet you can hear your own breathing.” Not a person in the world but me could deconstruct that sentence. If Meghan could hear her own breathing, it meant she was breathing fast. And since Meghan has a resting heart rate of somewhere between coma and sleep because of all that swimming, if she were breathing fast, it meant she was afraid, which meant there was truly something to fear. She’d been pregnant with Leo when she went on that assignment. She said she didn’t know until afterward, but I’d wondered.
When Meghan was yelling, it meant that something—or someone—was very, very bad. I hadn’t told her about the abortion, but she had probably figured it. She pulled the afghan off me and tossed it onto the floor. “Get up!” she cried. “Get up and take a shower and put on some decent clothes and get on with it. Get out of bed and get out of the house and do something with yourself.”
“I’m not you, Meghan.”
“No one wants you to be me,” she said. “Least of all me. But Jesus, Bridge, isn’t it time for you to be something? The pottery, the stupid jobs, the apartments. I’ve crossed you out and written you in in my date book what, nine times? Ten? Now this place? You might as well live in Asshole, Arkansas, as this place.”
“So maybe that’s where I’ll go.”
“No you won’t. You’d miss Leo too much. He’d miss you. He keeps asking when you’re coming to see him. He has Grandparents’ Day on the twenty-seventh. Don’t get me started on why a school in which most of the parents are in their fifties would have an event dedicated to grandparents, most of whom are dead or in a home or have Alzheimer’s or are in Boca Grande.”
“I always come to Grandparents’ Day. Last year I even came to the mother-son softball game.”
“Look, I was going to go to that, but I had to be in Washington for that Senate thing. You remember. That thing.” But the truth was neither of us remembered which thing it was, only that it had seemed important at the time.
At the end of the month, I moved back to Manhattan. I started in the social work program in September with a loan from Aunt Maureen. At least I had refused to let Meghan and Evan pay for it, although they had pushed hard to do so. For six years I had been living in the same apartment. For four years I had been seeing Irving. Once he had wanted to go to a clam bar on City Island, but I had decided better not.
As he was beginning to breathe heavily that night, exhausted and content from a surfeit of sea air and processed meat, I said, “I’m going to have to go get my sister and bring her home.”
“See, when you do that I can’t get back to sleep. I’m like on the edge of sleep and then you interrupt it.”
“Sorry.”
“Besides, you keep thinking your sister is in exile. Maybe she’s not. Maybe she’s just resting.”
“Meghan doesn’t rest.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
ON MY DESK the next morning were three enormous piles of paper, the price I’d paid for a day’s vacation. Irving had left his three cell phones and his pager on top of the bureau, looking back at them only once as we walked out of the apartment. He let his deputy handle all crises for the day; according to one of the papers, the deputy had called the shooting of a civilian “an error,” which is a term they teach you in public information school never to use. Both of us had gotten to the office early.
Atop one pile was a fax. In block letters it said, MOVE INTO MY PLACE WITH LEO. Somehow, somewhere, my sister had remembered that late May brought the end of the college year. I wrote NO on the back of a take-out menu for a deli and yelled, “Tequila!”
“Don’t be calling me like I’m some slave,” she mumbled. She was wearing a big T-shirt over capri leggings. The shirt said “PMS.” It was the official shirt of Pelham Manor, the charter school which Tequila’s youngest attended. Sometimes people just don’t think things through.
Tequila held up the fax. “Don’t you be snippy with that poor girl,” she said.
“She’s a forty-seven-year-old woman with a whole lot of responsibilities who has dropped off the face of the earth. She’s lucky she’s even getting an answer.”
Besides, Meghan and I had a long, rich history of this form of communication. At various times during our childhoods, we had been temporarily estranged, an estrangement that had only become richer and more baroque when we moved from our parents’ house to the smaller one our aunt and uncle had borrowed heavily to buy. There we needed to share a bedroom. There is no feeling quite like refusing to speak to a person only a nightstand apart. Meghan said years later that it was good preparation for marriage.
“Please return my mechanical pencil,” a note on my pillow would read.
“Don’t have it,” I would reply, leaving a torn corner of loose-leaf paper on her desk.
“Liar.”
“You lose everything.”
“I saw it in your backpack.”
“Stay out of my backpack.”
It was always Meghan who would break the logjam, rolling over in bed and sighing, as though the last four days had never happened, “Why does Aunt Maureen think anyone wants to eat fish sticks?”
There was no need for me to move into Meghan’s apartment, which had taken on a faint Miss Havisham air of both desertion and taxidermy, the elaborately maintained façade of something that had ceased to live. Leo had already moved into my apartment for the summer, which meant that my sofa now had that faint perpetual boy smell, not unlike the underground cheese room at L’Occidental.
One lucky asp
ect of being a grown child in Manhattan is that your parents and their friends will employ you in a variety of high-profile, albeit nonpaying, positions during the summer months of college. Leo had always had a certain contempt for the phenomenon, and as a result, while friends from the Biltmore and Crenshaw schools had lined up internships at Time magazine, U.S. Trust, the networks, the museums, and even Bergdorf Goodman, Leo had found himself at a loose end with the expectation that he would catch up on his sleep until well into the afternoon and early evening hours in my living room.
Fortunately, two happy accidents had dovetailed: the van driver who transported our clients around the onerous scavenger hunt required of the poor decided to move to Florida, and I discovered that Leo had a driver’s license. To those who live in other parts of the country that might seem unremarkable, but in New York City, where teenagers think of transportation as the subway, and Leo’s peers considered it driving when a man in a black suit with a black car took them from one location to another, the discovery that Leo not only knew how to drive but was legally able to do so came as a great shock.
“That program I did in South Carolina last summer, where we built the houses? We all had to be able to drive,” he said, eating Corn Pops out of the box by pouring them down his throat. Something about the sight of his Adam’s apple always made me feel tremulous. My sister had somehow given birth to a man.
“Get dressed,” I said. “You’re hired.”
We took the subway together in the morning, walking past the Cuban sandwich place and the bridal shop and up the hill to the WOW offices. Leo had a schedule for the day that took him from the shelter to the hospital’s satellite clinic to the welfare office and the housing projects. The first thing our departing driver, LeMar, taught him to do was lock the doors from the inside.
“You carry?” LeMar asked Leo.
“Nah-hah,” Leo replied.
“You know what he was talking about?” I asked Leo on the way home on the subway. Leo rolled his ambery eyes.