Godmother

  After another few moments I sat up, throwing the covers off of me. I looked at the clock. It was five A.M. I lay back on the bed, tossed and turned and sat up. I was exhausted but knew I would not get back to sleep again.

  I heaved myself from the bed. I clenched in my wings, as hard as I could, and then slipped on a shirt and long skirt, the gypsy kind I always liked to wear, and a pair of comfortable sandals.

  I was empty, starving. I thought about going to the diner for breakfast, but I was low on money, bills were due, rent was already late, so I shuffled to the refrigerator to see what was there. The shelves were empty except for some milk, a few eggs, a jar of pickles, and a bottle of ketchup. I would go shopping later, I decided, at the Gristedes between here and work—buy a whole chicken and boil it with celery and carrots and a few bay leaves, cook it up in a large pot and have soup for the week.

  I pulled out three eggs and cracked them into a frying pan, then cut off a hunk from the loaf of French bread I'd bought a few days before. I pushed the eggs around, watched the whites fill out, the oil pop and fizzle. Cooking was a necessity with my income, as much as I loved having dinners a few nights a week at the diner or ordering large extra-cheese pizzas from the shop on the corner. I was always hungry, it seemed.

  I ate standing by the front window, shoving the food into my mouth, soaking the bread with the split-open yolk. The street was just starting to fill with workers. I stared out: the brown brick buildings like rotten teeth, the old-timey slogans and advertisements painted on the sides, the round water towers perched on the rooftops. Smoke puffed from the buildings. It didn't feel like it was real, like any of it had anything to do with me at all.

  I closed my eyes, thought of my sister hovering over me, beckoning me to come play.

  What I would give, I thought, to go back.

  I couldn't wait to get to the bookstore. On a morning like this, the apartment was unbearable. I had been raised with my sister and my friends all around me. Every day, all of us, down by the lake. Now it was just me. I turned on the television to hear the sound of voices, and they soothed me as I folded in my wings, clenched them against my back until they hurt. I pulled off my shirt. Then I lifted an Ace bandage from my dresser and slowly wrapped it around my body, from the front to the back, over my wings and my breasts. I stood in front of the mirror, facing to the side, to check. My back looked flat and normal. Human. Wrinkled. Old.

  I shook the image away, rinsed my plate, the pan. I watched the water stream over the grease and the dish soap cut through it. I stacked the clean dishes in the rack by the side of the sink, then wiped the counter and stove. For the millionth time, I wondered what it would be like to live this life with someone, to have someone to cook for and clean up after. In the shop, people asked all the time if I had children or grandchildren, and usually I said yes, smiling warmly, because I knew that I looked as if I should. People saw me and imagined their grandmothers pulling steaming casseroles or piping-hot pies out of the oven, old ladies clucking away as they deposited fragrant dishes onto hot pads decorated with roosters and ducks. I made them feel safe. When I told them about a book they would love, or quoted them a price on a book they were selling, people felt they could trust me.

  Nobody knew that I wasn't really old like this. That it was all a mistake.

  George, of course, knew that I was an old lady who had never married, never had anyone. But that was something he liked about me, he said. George believed he was meant to be alone, too.

  I could hear laughter from the television and went back into the bedroom. The sheets were strewn through with feathers. On the screen a morning talk-show host was laughing with a guest. Behind them the city seemed slick, ferocious. Like a different place. I sat down, lay on my back.

  I stared up at the ceiling, the cracks shooting out in every direction, like my legs with the spider veins bursting over them. My apartment was caving in on itself, dark, falling apart. The old velvet-lined wallpaper—probably lovely at one point, carefully selected by some romantic soul—crumpled up at the edges of each wall and peeled down in strips across them. I turned my head, felt a feather brush against my face. I leaned into it, let the long strands graze my cheeks.

  I could feel it come over me then, a terrible grief. Like a wave that rises from nowhere and pulls you into itself. On the television the women talked about their children, the way that one woman's five-year-old begged for Peking duck for his birthday and then refused to eat it. Everyone laughed. I had no idea why they were laughing.

  I stood up quickly, clicked off the television, and brusquely made the bed, swiping the feathers onto the floor. I swept them up into a dustpan and dropped them in the trash. Smoothed the covers, the old-fashioned quilt that lay over them. I needed to get to work, to get out into the world before I was sucked under completely. At night my apartment became a haven and a sanctuary; in the morning it was the bleakest, emptiest place in the world. Grabbing my keys and wallet, I headed to the door.

  I had just finished locking up—my two regular locks and two dead bolts—when I heard my name.

  “Ms. Lillian?”

  I focused in on the gray, badly lit hallway, the man stepping up to me. It was Leo, my landlord's grandson.

  “Hello, Leo,” I said, breathing out and attempting to sound normal. “How are you? I almost didn't recognize you.”

  “I've been trying to reach you,” he said. “My grandfather passed a few months ago. Did you get my messages?”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn't. But I heard about your grandfather. I'm so sorry.” Instinctively, I clenched my wings, ground my teeth. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, we have some things to talk over. You know, I own the building now, all my granddad's buildings. How long have you lived here? God, you were here when I was a boy.”

  “A long time,” I said slowly.

  “Ahh,” he said. “My mother said you used to tell her her fortune once a month or so. That you predicted I'd be a boy.”

  “Did I?” I said.

  “Well, that's what I hear.” He smiled. He couldn't have been more than twenty-five. It had to have been several years since I'd seen him last. “I was trying to find your original lease, but my grandfather's papers are a bit messy. When did you sign one?”

  I hesitated. “I don't quite remember,” I said.

  “It's amazing—it must have been some time in the seventies? You don't even seem as old as that. No offense, of course. But you seem younger. My grandfather said you could walk for miles, like a teenager.”

  I stared back at him. “It was around then, yes,” I said. My voice seemed to stick in my throat. “I'm not sure I have a copy.”

  He smiled again, friendly. “Well, I haven't come across any record of it yet. I've found some other stuff, though. Some photos, paraphernalia. My grandmother kept every-thing, God rest her soul. I hadn't realized you and she were so close.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That was a long time ago.”

  “So. How much rent do you pay again?”

  I cleared my throat, wiped my palms on my shirt. “Five hundred dollars,” I said.

  He laughed, then whistled, low and long. “What a deal, huh? I'll bring the papers by again. Some other things for you, too, that you might be interested in.”

  “That sounds fine,” I said. My mind flashed to the bathtub, my bed. Had I cleaned up the feathers? I reassured myself that everything was as it should be.

  “Where are you off to now?”

  “My job. I work downtown, at a bookstore.”

  He looked surprised. “Oh, I just thought …”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling. “I'm old, but I can still hold a job. I have to, even with this rent.”

  He looked embarrassed. “Of course,” he said. “Well. Have a good day.”

  “You, too,” I said, and moved past him, down the stairs. When I looked back, he was still standing there, watching me.

  EIGHTH AVENUE was coming to life. The sun was just startin
g to break and spill over the buildings. Pigeons swooped down from the tops of buildings, attacking garbage on the street. Commuters lined up for bagels and doughnuts at the carts outside of Penn Station, walked by with coffees in one hand, purses and briefcases in the other, cell phones at their ears. Already the tourists were out, whole families stopping on the sidewalks as harried workers pushed past them and salesmen tried to lure them into souvenir shops to buy all manner of I ♥ NY bumper stickers.

  I just walked, trying to shake my anxiety. I had lived in my apartment for decades without problem. Lived in this neighborhood with its garment workers and office buildings and souvenir shops, the seediness of Port Authority just up the street. I was safe here. I couldn't even imagine living anywhere else. I thought of consulting with a lawyer, and my stomach split up in knots. I couldn't possibly afford to pay a lawyer.

  Probably it was nothing. In New York tenants had rights. Landlords couldn't just throw them into the street.

  I walked past the post office, the lines of people waiting for cabs, the bodegas and Irish pubs and hardware stores that populated this part of the city. As I walked down into Chelsea, past leafy cafes with courtyards, storefronts with sex toys or jewelry in the windows, the steady rhythm of my feet hitting pavement calmed my nerves a bit. Of course I had rights. Landlords can't just throw you out in the street. I breathed out. He was young. He was excited to own a building. That was all.

  By the time I got down to the bookstore, I felt okay again. I had my routines. The apartment, the store, the diner. I was lonely, but I was surviving. In the evenings I had my baths, my books, the television. I loved the television, spent hours in my room curled up on the bed, my wings wrapped around me like a blanket, watching anything and everything that flickered across that dull screen. I hadn't always done so well in the world.

  I turned onto Jane Street and admired, the way I always did, the trees that swooped over the sidewalks. The bakery across the street already had patrons sitting outside, eating croissants and sipping coffee. A few I knew from the neighborhood. One man had bought a Manzoni novel the day before, and I nodded as he looked up at me, smiling.

  I opened the store with the keys George had given me and stepped in, breathing in the scent of must and bark, letting it soothe me the way it always did. Sometimes I thought about how much I would like to live in this space and how I envied George. To think that he could come down here whenever he wanted, wake up in the middle of the night and slip down in his socks and robe. But he never did that. He almost never appeared in the shop before it opened, and often not until after lunch.

  I unlocked the case behind the register. Moved my palms over the rarest books, with their covers like saddles, their fragile pages. My favorite on the far right with those words scribbled in the back: All my old loves will be returned to me. Yes.

  THE GIRL came in hours later. I spent the morning sweeping and dusting—the dust multiplied every night, as if by magic—and organizing the books George had left in front of his office. Boxes for the store he marked with a large L and set by his door; the others he stashed away to go through himself. They were for private collections, libraries, collectors, crazy people, and often just for George himself. I sometimes wondered what George would have been like had he not been born into a family of booksellers, if that passion had been directed toward something else, like corncob art or mathematics, or if he would have found his way to books no matter what.

  I was sitting at the register ringing up a college boy when the door banged open and a tall girl strode in, birdlike, balancing a large box in her arms, bags dangling from her shoulders and wrists.

  I could not help but stare. She was wonderful. Her mouth was a glossy red bow, her skin so pale it was almost translucent. Her eyebrows arched like the span of a bird's wings over her eyes, which were blue and glittery. Her hair, the color of russet potatoes, streamed from her scalp and towered over her like a strange crest.

  “My God these are heavy,” the girl said, exaggeratedly dropping the box on the counter and smiling up at me. The warmth of her smile took me by surprise. “Do you think you'd take any of them?” She winked at the boy, who blushed as I handed him his change.

  “Give me a second and I'll look,” I said.

  The boy took his copy of Transmetropolitan and turned to leave, smiling at the girl awkwardly as he passed.

  “Not bad, huh?” she whispered to me, raising her eyebrows and making a face. He was still in earshot. I laughed despite myself. “I like them in all shapes and sizes,” she said.

  She made me feel comfortable right away. The only other person who'd done that was George, the day I met him, a few years before. I blinked. “So what do you have here?” I asked.

  “Oh, all kinds of stuff,” she said, waving her hands. “I just want to get rid of it. Start fresh. My apartment's like a Goodwill store right now. I could slap a price tag on everything and open shop. I thought about trashing it all, but you can't throw out a perfectly good book. Bad luck, you know.”

  “It is?”

  “Sure it is,” she said. She laid her hand on the counter, and I saw that her nails were black, covered in glitter. She had rings on every finger, and I thought how beautiful her hands were, like peacocks. “Like throwing away a photograph. How can you own a bookstore and not know that?”

  “Oh, I'm not the owner,” I said.

  “That's no excuse. Goodness, imagine the havoc you could wreak not knowing that.”

  I laughed and started sifting through the box—the novels, the histories, the fashion books with titles like Vogue Knitting Stitchionary and Reader's Digest Complete Guide to Sewing. I lifted out an illustrated book on botany and a slip of paper fell out of it. The faint scent of cloves wafted up from it.

  “Oh!” she said, reaching out for the paper. “How embarrassing. These books are probably full of my indiscretions. All my illicit affairs, my drug contacts … I'm totally kidding. This is probably … Yep. A shopping list.” She turned the sheet over and could just barely make out the word milk scrawled across it. “So sad.”

  “Don't worry,” I said. “Your secrets are safe with me.”

  “Hmmm,” she said, smiling, squinting at me. “I think you might be busy enough with your own, missus.”

  I looked at her, surprised, but she was smiling. In the sunlight streaming through the window, her eyes looked shockingly blue. Such a strange girl, I thought. No one paid attention to me like this.

  “You remind me of someone …” she said, then stopped herself. “Wow,” she said. “Your hair.”

  “What?”

  “It's, like, pure white. A crazy sort of white.”

  I touched it, suddenly embarrassed. “I guess it is,” I said.

  “No, I mean, I love it. Sorry.” She shook her head, pointed at her mouth. “I need a built-in editor sometimes.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You really remind me of my grandmother. She was my favorite person when I was growing up. She had this glamour about her, the way you do. And pure white hair. White by the time she was twenty.”

  I smiled. “That's sweet of you to say.” The girl seemed familiar to me, too, but I couldn't place her. There were so many faces in my head, of people I'd forgotten.

  The door opened and a man and a woman in their thirties walked in holding hands. “Good afternoon,” the man said, nodding to us, and the two disappeared into the stacks.

  The girl watched after them, then turned back to me. “She's so going to dump him.”

  I laughed and began stacking her books to the side of the register. I felt self-conscious suddenly, standing around talking when she'd come in to sell books. But she did not seem to mind. She even seemed to be enjoying herself.

  “I'm Veronica, by the way,” she said. “Oh, and I do hair. I've got a little salon on Avenue B. Let me give you my card.” She opened her huge black purse and began rummaging through it, peering into it as if it were a mouth. “Ugh, I can never find anything in here.?
?? She spread the purse on the counter. I was mesmerized by the scattered trinkets inside, thought of a beach covered in gleaming shells. She had makeup, little pots of lip gloss and glitter and eye shadow, a large old-fashioned compact with a line down the center. She had all kinds of sewing and knitting paraphernalia, too: thread, yarn, thimbles. Black knitting needles that clinked together.

  I just stood, watching. I suddenly felt as if I wanted to be young like her. Young, alive, with rings like hers. Black nails. An overflowing bag full of a million things.

  “Ah!” she said, pulling out and handing me a pink and white card. “Veronica,” it said, in pink, next to an illustration of a chair with an old-fashioned hairdryer hanging over it, and an address, phone number, and website address.

  “Thank you,” I said, studying it for a moment. “I'm Lil.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” She gathered up her purse and slung it over her shoulder, then dropped one of her shopping bags onto the counter. She should have seemed sloppy, I thought, but she had a grace to her that somehow seemed to match her wildness.

  “Doing some shopping?” I asked, reaching into the box for more books and stacking them beside me.

  “Oh,” she said. “I was just in the garment district. I'm making a new dress. Ragged full skirt, all these layers that float on top of each other. Laced-up back.” She reached in and pulled out a swatch of lavender fabric—organza, I thought—setting it on the counter in front of me. “See?”

  “It's beautiful,” I said. “What's the occasion?”

  “Oh, nothing special, probably some show,” she said. “I wish I had somewhere fabulous to go, though. You know what I mean? Some amazing place, like El Morocco, where men wore suits and women swung over the crowds on trapezes. I bet you hit a few places like that in your time, didn't you?”

  If you only knew, I thought. I picked up the fabric, let it run over my skin. “I live in the garment district, but I don't think I've ever gone into one of those stores.”

  “They're great,” she said. “It's a completely unappreciated part of town, don't you think? Someone told me it's the only neighborhood in New York that never changes, where you can walk down the street and feel like it's the nineteenth century. I mean, except for the Gray's Papaya and the White Castle and the triple-X peep shows that cost twenty-five cents. But still. I like that.”