Indie Chicks: 25 Women 25 Personal Stories
Page 46
The lobby wasn’t much to speak of, except for the marble floors with a compass rose in the center. She had no idea what the compass was supposed to achieve. Everyone knew Seventh Avenue ran south. Once you were out the door and saw which way the cars drove, a short spate of deductive reasoning made the compass rose redundant.
There was a more modern counter for the doorman, who didn’t work on Sundays. Closed circuit monitors flashed at his desk, even in his absence. Laura did a quick scan of the lobby and found the camera. Thankfully, it was in better shape than the one in the elevator. That would get Jeremy off the hook and expose the killer before tomorrow, for sure.
Encouraged, she stopped by her apartment, then went to her mother’s for a laundry run. She’d forget the whole thing before the spin cycle started.
Chapter 4
Laura’s mother never let the fact that she couldn’t cook keep her from charming her daughters home. The meals were hot and salty, and occasionally solid, but little else. The functioning Whirlpool washer/dryer combo, an aging tin box stuffed in a precious closet of her tiny Hell’s Kitchen two-bedroom, was what brought Laura and her sister Ruby back to the apartment weekly.
Laura remembered the worst shame of her adolescence—the clothesline hung in the hallway, dripping on the decades-old paint that the landlord, Moshe, would not renew, and that Mom scraped, replastered, primed, and painted herself in an effort to stay under the radar and, thus, keep the place rent-controlled. The “wonderful euro wet/dry box,” which cleaned and dried clothes in a swoop, as well as her “dishwashing wheeled thingy,” were illegal in the building because Moshe paid the water bill, and therefore, they could get her evicted. Laura suspected the water-hogging appliances served the dual purpose of drawing her and her sister back to the apartment periodically, as well as letting Mom flirt with eviction, like having an affair so your husband would leave you.
That’s what Ruby had likened it to on her last visit to the euro wet/dry box. Everything went back to men. Ruby could be as interesting as a lump of dried gum. Laura wondered if it was that flatness that attracted good fortune to her sister who, at ten months older, was as close to a twin as you could get without actually being one, and who was as far away from Laura as possible in just about every other respect.
For instance, right out of high school, Ruby had found an illicit rent-controlled two bedroom in SoHo that required little more than a paint job and three-digit rent checks made out to the legal lessee in Parsippany, New Jersey. Laura had ended up with two roommates and a loft bed hung over a doorway in a Lower East Side studio. Ruby had offered her second bedroom to her sister like alms, and Laura had counteroffered that Ruby should kiss her flat white ass, to which Ruby’s best and final response was a set of puckered pink lips sucking the air between them.
Laura could not deny the satisfaction she felt upon hearing that, a scant three years into her lifetime rent-controlled tenure, Ruby had been forced out when the landlord, on a random walkthrough, had busted her taking out the garbage like she actually lived there.
By then, Laura had bitten the bullet and left Manhattan for the somewhat slightly cheaper rental market of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and was in a position to offer Ruby a spot on her couch. But Mom countered that Ruby had spoken with the landlord, spilled the Parsippany address, and negotiated herself a good price on a vacancy he had on Sullivan Street. “And seriously, Laura,” Mom asked, “what would Ruby do in Brooklyn for Christ’s sake? Date coosheens and eat gabbagole and mootzadel?”
“And me, Ma? Why is it okay for me to be boroughed?”
Mom shrugged in a way that let Laura know there was a natural order of things, and that only those that understood it could love two very different daughters the same. But Laura wasn’t hearing it. She was feeling petulant and cranky. Her neighborhood hadn’t seen a cugine since the early ‘80s. It was wall-to-wall butter-skinned art students who had a seemingly endless trove of accessories and the knowledge of how to wear them. Even the lady behind the counter at the Korean market wore bracelets and earrings that didn’t match, but went perfectly together. Gabbagole, her ass.
Laura, a native Manhattanite, lasted a full year in Brooklyn before she found a way-too-expensive apartment on East Broadway. It was a haul to the train, and the rent made ramen noodles her main nutritional source, but she had never habituated to crossing water every day just to go to work.
A month after Laura’s move, Ruby had called Mom to complain about the lady upstairs, whose two little yippy dogs had peed on the floor until urine soaked right through the paint in Ruby’s ceiling. As Ruby’s luck had it, Laura’s upstairs neighbor, Mr. Colella, decided to move to White Plains. He didn’t tell Laura that his apartment was rent-controlled, or that he was offering it as an indefinite sublet, at rent-controlled rates with a few hundred dollars tacked on so he could pay for the utility bills on his Cape Cod. Otherwise, she would have snapped it up. He told Ruby instead, who now lived directly above Laura at less than half the rent.
Ruby had taken a year off of school to give her attention to an engagement with a budding lawyer named Samuel. That put them in the same class at Parsons, as well as the same building.
Which was great, just great, as it coincided with their last year of school—a pressure cooker, especially when she worked full-time at Jeremy St. James and her sister upstairs partied like a musician and seemed to pull magical design projects out of her ass until she graduated with honors. Laura graduated in a pile of sweat, spit, and exhaustion. By that time, the comparisons between them were constant, except Ruby was also two-and-a-half inches taller, two sizes smaller—depending on the time of the month—and had better hair. If justice existed in the world, Laura was at pains to find it.
She knew a Sunday evening wasn’t going to come and go without Ruby and Mom, so she wasn’t disappointed when Ruby texted her—Do you have a load in?—sixty seconds before she blew into the apartment. Laura didn’t even have a chance to text back.
Ruby peeled off her jacket and placed it on a hook by the front door. Her stylish and not-too-unwieldy laundry bag trailed behind her and, when she smiled, the room lit up like noon at the equator.
“Your sister has a load in,” Mom said, pecking Ruby on the cheek. “So, eat first.”
“I’m not hungry,” Ruby responded, poking her head into a steaming pot of whatever. “Wow. Jeremy St. James killed his backer. It’s like the goose with the egg.”
“He didn’t kill anyone.” Laura kept her tone professional. Ruby did not, and never would, know how Laura felt about her boss.
“Hey, are you going to work tomorrow? Is there even a job? We don’t use patternmakers at T&C, but they’re always looking for tech designers.”
It was an open-handed slap in the mouth, followed by a backhand. After Parsons, Ruby wound up designing for Tollridge & Cherry, a huge operation with retail stores, a full-color magazine that showed up in mailboxes constantly with the same products rearranged, and a web presence that kept China in business. Laura ended up a patternmaker at Jeremy St. James, forever a patternmaker, according to Ruby, shut out of designing like a kid with her nose pressed against the candy store window.
“He’ll be in tomorrow,” Laura said. “The show’s next Friday, and I haven’t heard anything about a cancellation. By the way, do you need tickets?” Laura got her own backhand in there. T&C didn’t have shows, naturally. They sold ski caps, pea coats, and striped sweaters in winter. They ran the same khaki pants eleven out of twelve deliveries. The invitation meant Laura felt no fear that Ruby would be able to steal a thing from Jeremy.
“Oh, those shows.” Mom spooned the thick white something into bowls. “They put you girls under all this stress, and then what? You’re just behind on Monday. It’s like a wedding.”
“Speaking of,” Ruby said, clapping her hands together, “I brought my sketch book.”
“Yay,” Laura mumbled. She tried to be upbeat about Ruby’s wedding, and the dress she had committed to make, but
as the date approached, the feeling of dread grew like cheap leather pants.
It wasn’t that Laura wasn’t happy for Ruby. Her envy didn’t go that deep. She could be happy for her sister’s rent-controlled apartment, for the better job, and the two inches and twenty pounds difference between them. But she could not be happy that Ruby was tying herself to a possessive douchebag working ad sales for Fortune magazine.
Ruby ate two bowls of what turned out to be salty potato soup while she flipped through the sketchbook, which had wedding gowns from Martha Stewart Bridal pasted in it and her penciled interpretations on the facing page. The three of them talked construction and fabric for two hours, until the laundry finished and their bellies were full of nondescript starch.
When the doorbell rang, Ruby jumped up to answer the door, giving Michael a big hug he didn’t deserve. He strolled into the kitchen in a storm of navy blue poly/wool blend. He enjoyed working out and preferred to work on his upper, rather than lower body. As a result, his jackets were four sizes bigger than his pants.
“Hey, Ma.” He held the back of Mom’s head when he kissed her on the cheek, which was one of the millions of things Laura hated about him. “I asked one of the lawyers at work, and that bike they got out there in the hallway? That’s against the fire code.” He hated the junk in the hallway, like he hated everything about the poverty Ruby grew up in.
“It’s been there six years, Michael. I’m not telling them to move it now.”
He punched Laura in the arm with a “How you doin’?” He didn’t ask Ruby how she was doing. He loosened his tie and sat with his legs spread. “So who’s this band we’re seeing?”
Laura’s heart sank. There was a show tonight at the Orb, and it looked like Michael would be joining them. Great. She’d managed to forget about the scene at the office only to spend the evening with Super Douche.
Since Michael hated seeing squalor and Ruby was embarrassed by it, and since the last thing Michael wanted was potato soup, they left to go to the club after promising to pick up the laundry the next day.
The Orb was a warehouse once and, sometimes, if you stood in a corner long enough in summer, and the drafts blew the right way, you caught a whiff of the boxes of food that had been left to rot after the building foreclosed. However, it was the stink of Michael’s cologne that choked Laura and set her on edge. He probably wasn’t so bad. It was probably her own intolerance. She vowed to try harder to like him, but was oddly attracted to every place in the room where he was not.
Stu was there, thank God. She’d seen him standing by the stage as the band set up, his blond hair glowing in the stage lights. She excused herself and beelined through the crowd. When he saw her, he took her hand and pulled her into the back hallway. She let him, eyes on his tight biker’s bottom. Stu was a messenger, and they’d met when he delivered her the wrong package two years ago. Since then, she’d discovered he had many talents. He was the lighting guy for the Orb, writer for culture-busting magazines, aspiring journalist, and the owner of property upstate. There were more jobs hiding somewhere in his day. She was pretty sure she’d never count them all.
He stopped in the hallway to the bathrooms. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“What happened?”
“Look, I didn’t invite him, and it’s not like I can tell him to go away.”
“You’re pretending you don’t know I’m talking about the murder.”
There was no denying him. He had a sharp mind and a hippie heart. He’d coddle her until she told him the story, from the beginning. So she told him about her morning, about the dead woman, Jeremy—omitting the way he moved, the way he rubbed his eyes with his fist in the morning like a three-year-old, the way he looked in her face when he laughed—the cops, the rumors in the office, and the pepper spray she had dug out of the back of her junk drawer.
“You don’t think he did it?” Stu asked.
“No!”
“Whatever, Laura. Do you want me to go with you tomorrow to clear your desk?”
“Stu! We got the last runway slot. It’s the best space, and Jeremy practically had to stab Zac Posen in the back to get it.”
“You sure he didn’t?”
Jeremy was ambitious to a fault, and she’d just admitted as much. “You’re being so mainstream,” she said, citing their favorite joke. Whenever one of them thought in simple terms, or acted “unhip”—Laura was usually the guilty party—the stock accusation was “mainstream.” But this time, she meant it. She walked out of the hallway. She didn’t care about the band, Michael, or Ruby. They weren’t going to help her forget. She wanted to go home.
It was a three-block walk that Stu insisted on making with her. The show didn’t start for half an hour, and his part of the lighting was done.
“We all know how you feel about your boss,” Stu said.
She had a sudden pain in her chest. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You think he can’t do anything wrong, and maybe you’re right. Maybe when it comes to the business you’re in, he makes really good decisions, every time. But you’re blinded by it.”
“Thanks for setting me straight,” she said, as they turned the corner.
“You can be pissed at me if you want.”
“I’m not pissed at you.”
He looked at her slyly. “You’re honesty-challenged right now.”
“Well, I had it up to my eyeballs today with this, and no one will let it drop.”
Stu slowed in front of her building. There was a man in a jacket leaning against the mailboxes. “Who’s that guy in your lobby?”
“Detective Cangemi.”
Stu took out his cell phone. “Bart?” he shouted. “I’ll be late. Can you manage it? I programmed everything. Okay. See you later.” He snapped the phone closed.
“You can go back,” Laura said. “He’s a cop, after all. I think I’m safe.”
“If you tell me to go away, I’ll go away.”
“Chivalry noted.” But even though she’d just called him mainstream, he stayed. She knew he would. She wanted a second set of ears on whatever conversation she was about to have, and she could think of no better witness than Stu.
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Sibel Hodge
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Ever since I was old enough to scrawl my first word, which was Halibaaaaa, I knew I wanted to write books. OK, so the word didn’t actually make sense, and it might take a little longer for me to actually string a whole sentence together, but that didn’t put me off. I was going to write books and no one would stop me…
From when I was really young, my mum encouraged me to read. “If you can read books, you’ll never be bored,” I remember her telling me. I secretly think it was a ploy to keep me out of her hair and quiet for a while. I was always a loud kid with lots of energy, and always getting into some sort of trouble with the boys down our street. (Yep, even then I was a sucker for boys!). After discovering the wonderful world of books, I thought I’d have a go myself, and remember scribbling down stories whenever I had a spare moment. Shame I was only six, and there was no way anyone would publish a book with I Want Big Girl’s Knickers in the title.
When I was in secondary school my favourite subject was English language. I’d lose myself for hours. And even though I hadn’t thought about my forthcoming career before I left (apart from being Wonder Woman or an astronaut), I knew, even then, I had a love of creating. I also loved to make people laugh from an early age. In the beginning, it wasn’t intentional. I was always saying ridiculous things that I thought were quite serious. Like the time I went to the butcher’s shop with my nan, and the lady behind the counter asked where I was from. “South America,” I said. (I know, where the hell did that come from? I must’ve had an overactive
imagination from the start.) So when people started laughing at me, I thought, hey, this is pretty fun! We live in such a hectic world and laughter is a perfect way to de-stress. Because my personality is quirky, fun-loving, and slightly nuts, it was probably a given that I would eventually write chick lit, although I have recently delved into the dark side of my brain (which is a pretty scary place to be sometimes!) and written a psychological thriller.
But when I left school no one mentioned writing as a career. It was all boring things like secretarial jobs, travel agents, office work. I didn’t even know about creative writing courses until about ten years ago! I think they considered that writing wasn’t a “proper career.” No one suggested journalism or further education in writing. So what was a girl to do? Although my mum wanted me to go to University and study to be something like a doctor or lawyer (eeek!), I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do for a career, so I flitted from one job to the next, trying to find something that interested me, and eventually ended up working for the police for ten years. So there I was, too busy paying the mortgage, working shifts, and living in the rat race of life to have the proper time or opportunity to write a novel. It didn’t stop me trying, though.
It was drastic things like splitting up with a boyfriend that made me start my first novel when I was about seventeen. I never got further than the first three chapters, though, because I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, other than using a typewriter! Then I started another one (I got dumped again — can you see a pattern here?) when I was about twenty-three, and ditto (I’d hate for those to ever see the light of day). I just knew that I loved writing and therefore it stood to reason that one day I’d do it, didn’t it? And although I look back now and think I wish I’d started writing earlier, actually, I have to say, that it would’ve been bad timing. Back then I wouldn’t have had anything to really write about. A lot of the things that go into my books now are based on my experience of life. People I’ve met, places I’ve been, books I’ve read, things I’ve done, struggles I’ve achieved. At twenty-three, what did I really know about any of that?