by Sean Ferrell
“I need to eat something,” she’d said. “I can’t go another day without a meal. Please.” When she’d said this, a small ring of other customers formed around her to watch. She pretended they weren’t there, stared at the clerk, who looked away, afraid to meet her gaze.
“If I start feeding you, I’ll have the whole city demanding free food.” He lacked sincerity. He knew she would disappear, not tell anyone. Still he refused.
A woman’s voice came from behind Sara. “I’ll pay for it.”
Sara turned to face a white-haired woman, thick glasses squaring her gray-green eyes. Without another word, the woman placed a bill on the counter. She refused the clerk’s change, gesturing to Sara. The clerk didn’t make eye contact and didn’t offer to bag the groceries. Sara gathered the bananas and apples in her hands and scurried to the door. She was too ashamed to look back at the woman, too stripped bare of who she’d been. She could only think about what she’d become, the very thing her family had told her she would.
She got a few blocks down Broadway before she was bumped and her purchases flew from her arms. Someone stepped on one of the bananas, crushed it into the sidewalk, and an apple shot from sight into the street. She yelled a curse at no one, everyone, knelt on the sidewalk and tried to gather the fruit. By the time she’d recaptured what was left, the white-haired woman had caught up to her.
She picked up the last apple but didn’t offer it to Sara. “You’re clearly starving, and the best you could do was fruit?”
Sara thought about dropping the fruit and running. She normally avoided conversations with people she didn’t know, but she owed the woman for the meal. “I go after what’s available.”
The woman stood back, eyes roaming up and down Sara in silent evaluation. “I can probably get you a job. I can get you an audition at least.”
“Audition?”
“It’s an acting job. I’m Mana, by the way.”
Mana took Sara to a diner and told her about the job over hamburgers. Sara ate hers in giant bites. She didn’t taste most of the meat, limp lettuce, or hard white tomatoes. She relished it nonetheless. Mana told her the job was a short, improvised one-act performance, usually taking less than an hour a day. There were no announced shows. She would always be on call.
“You’ll get a call and you go in immediately. No calling in sick. No excuses. You do your part, then you go home. It might be at any time during the day. I’ve worked as early as eight in the morning, as late as midnight.”
Sara mopped a french fry around her plate. “There’s nothing kinky about it?”
Mana smiled. “No. No one will touch you. It’s me, a young man, and you. And the employer, the man who’s paying us.”
“What’s his name?”
Mana stirred her soda with a straw as if weighing whether to release the name or not. “Phil.”
Mana gave Sara a phone number and a twenty-dollar bill. “If you disappear, that’s your choice, but there is money and security in this. As long as you do the work.” Sara promised her she would call. At first she hadn’t meant to, to do only as Mana suggested, to take the money and make it stretch a few days. Instead she found herself a decent meal and then a pay phone. The man who answered was clearly drunk, but she said, “I’ve heard there’s a role for a young woman.”
The man at the other end, the one who hadn’t answered to the name Phil, coughed. “How old are you?”
“Twenty,” she lied. “But I look younger. I look eighteen.” She would be eighteen in six months. “I can also look older, if you need.”
The man laughed. “Do you have the address?”
She wrote it down. He told her to arrive early in the morning. “Later than noon and you won’t find me here.”
She said she understood and hung up. Fearing she might be late, she headed to the trains and made her way uptown. In Grand Central she found a corner of the main concourse and tried to sleep, failed, listened instead to announcements about closed stations, canceled trains. She arrived at Phil’s address well before noon the next day and knocked at the door. She was in one of the sections of the city that were beginning to empty out. Real estate available but not for sale. Squatters, or no one, claiming entire blocks, buildings staring down like empty skulls.
She knocked at the decrepit door again, then tried the handle. It was open. She stepped into an anonymous lobby, devoid of any furniture. She waited. After a few minutes, the tall figure of Phil emerged. He was hungover, his gray hair and beard pillow-tangled. He wore black pants and a T-shirt, no shoes, no socks. He smelled days removed from a bath. Phil raised a hand to Sara, tried and failed to smile, and said, “Good morning. Follow me.”
The stairs were clean. She followed him in silence from landing to landing, each time thinking the next one must be it, only to find him turning to climb to another flight. At last, at the top of ten stories, he led her into a great room empty except for a long table and four straight-backed chairs. They were well used, paint-nicked and beaten. The chair at the table’s head had been abused more than the others, gouges running the length of both arms. It was in this chair that Phil sat.
White paint covered everything in the room. Not just walls and doors and table. Countertops in the kitchen, windowsills, baseboards, sink, faucet, cupboards. Only the floor provided contrast, sanded bare and unpolished. The room had been scrubbed with bleach. It would never again retain the warmth of being lived in, be someone’s home.
“Please, sit.” He indicated the chair to his right. As she pulled it out, he held up a hand. “I’m sorry, before you do, please turn for me.”
As she gave a slow pirouette before him, Sara reminded herself that Mana had said this was an audition. Phil was some kind of casting director, not a john. She had been looked at by men before, she knew what it felt like to be judged attractive. She knew that most people could find almost anything attractive; she might not fit their descriptions of perfect beauty but would most likely meet some carnal need, some appetite. This was different. From Phil she felt the need for something very specific, that he was checking for correspondence with a predetermined size and shape, like seeking a key for a lock. What that shape might be she couldn’t guess, but she assured herself she already fit it in Mana’s eyes. Most important, she was not afraid of Phil. She could feel that his hunger to do harm had been burned from him and what was left behind was worn through with rubbing against the world.
Phil nodded.
Sara sat and looked at him, became uncomfortable, and looked away. They sat in silence a minute, Phil watching Sara, Sara watching birds outside the window. Parrots, their green flashing in the gap of glass between the white walls. Phil smiled. He explained that the birds were generations removed from parrots set loose when a cargo crate broke open at JFK. The parrots had taken to the air and forged a new home—immigrants, like everyone else in the city—the originators of a new breed of city bird, competing with pigeons and sparrows. They wintered in hidden spaces, forgotten attics and cemetery mausoleums, survived despite their nature, which must have been telling them to head to warmer climates. Their progenitors had escaped and fled in fear, lived despite their terror and uncertainty. Now the parrots, long since expanded beyond Brooklyn into Queens and Manhattan, flew over the city with impunity, as at home as anything might be in New York, more at home than Sara or anyone like her. Phil believed that the parrots, as parrots will, had picked up words here and there as they roosted over the city. Phil said he liked to think the parrots remembered the things people had forced themselves to forget.
The windows of Phil’s apartment looked out over the river to New Jersey. Sara marveled at the light spilling over the river, onto the other bank and beyond, as Phil stood and walked to the refrigerator, from which he pulled a Styrofoam container. He chose utensils from a drawer, placed the container before her, and then reclaimed his seat.
“Please eat,” he said. “I’m sorry it’s cold. Drink when you like.”
Sara opened the con
tainer. Inside was sliced turkey breast, gray mashed potatoes with gravy, limp broccoli spears, and jellied cranberry sauce, all congealed into a cold, solid mass. But Sara was not used to eating full meals, or even many partial ones. She couldn’t be sure, but she might have moaned in anticipation of the first bite; Phil let out a small laugh. By her third mouthful, she forgot that Phil was watching her. She ate the turkey almost entirely before dipping into the potatoes, pulling large scoops free of the mass, and swallowed without chewing. When the container was half empty, she began to slow. She finally remembered her host and looked up at him over her plate, smiling around the fork.
When he spoke, she realized that he was no longer seeing a girl he didn’t know. He said, “What did you do in school today?”
She almost corrected him, reminded him that she was there for an audition. She opened her mouth to say this when she realized that this was the audition, that it had begun the moment he placed the food before her.
She told him the first of the many lies she would come to learn he longed to hear. “Fine,” she said. “Nothing much going on.” She searched for some memories of what school had been like, what her parents, if they had cared, might have wanted to hear if she’d gone to school regularly. “A couple of friends skipped out early.” His eyes flashed with surprise—she’d thought Phil wanted to be the kind of parent who was confided in, but maybe he also wanted a well-behaved daughter. “They wanted me to go, but I couldn’t. I had a test last period.”
Phil smiled. “Good girl. How do you think you did?”
Sara pouted her lips, speared an unfortunate broccoli stem over and again. “Don’t know for sure.”
“You know.” His tone was patient, practiced concern.
“It’s hard. All those dates. I mean, come on, when am I ever going to need to know when some old man in France lived?”
“You never know what you might need. That’s why you need it all.”
She stabbed at the broccoli until she felt bad for it. “Well, if I didn’t do so great, I can always ask for extra credit.”
Phil shook his head and laughed. “You can’t extra-credit yourself through life, Sara.”
Up to that moment, he hadn’t called her by name, any name. Nor had he asked what her name was at all. At that moment he baptized her Sara. She hadn’t realized until that moment that she needed so badly to know that someone cared enough to name her. She smiled at him and said, “I know.” She didn’t say the word, but to think of him as “Father” wasn’t unimaginable.
She finished the meal, every cold piece, as they talked of the minutiae of her pretend life. He asked about teachers she hadn’t heard of, boys she’d never dated. She conjured details as she tapped her fork on the foam container. If she closed her eyes, she could picture the walls of the high school she’d never attended, filling in the stories with faces she collected from wandering the city streets. She discovered that “Sara” had good grades that could be better. She had friends who couldn’t be closer. She had won and lost her heart countless times and knew that more ascents and declines lay ahead. By the time she’d finished the meal, she was sure of one thing: She wanted to stay with Phil, to be the girl he quizzed and coddled.
She put down the fork at the last bite and smiled at Phil. “It was delicious.”
Phil tried to hide an answering smile. His demeanor had shifted, warmed. His eyes sought something to land on and kept fluttering back to her. Then, abruptly, he blinked a few times and the warmth vanished. Old barriers rose up again. He stood and left the room without a sound, then returned with a cell phone, set it on the table beside her hand. She was afraid to look at it, let alone touch it. He pulled a roll of money from his pocket and peeled off two bills illustrated with the faces of men she didn’t recognize, placed them under the phone. She raised a hand to wave the money away and then realized the ridiculousness of the act. This was why she had come here, for money; to refuse it would be to deny the nature of their relationship. She wanted to cry but bit her lip instead.
Phil said, “Give no one else your number. This phone is for me only. When it rings, answer. You’ll be told when to arrive. Do so and you’ll continue in my employ. Otherwise fuck off. Understand?”
She nodded and took hold of the phone and the bills. She understood without being told that it was time for her to leave, that she would leave and come back only when called, that she would leave without his escort or good-bye or even acknowledgment. She left, biting her lip all the way to the street until she realized that it was not holding the flow of tears but was in fact spurring them on.
She stayed for two nights in a room on Roosevelt Island rented to her by a Romanian couple. They ignored her, and she gave them money at the start of every day. On the third day, the phone rang. She answered and heard a woman’s voice. It was Mana. “Five this afternoon. See you then?”
“Yes.”
In a whisper Mana added, “I’m glad he chose you, dear.”
“Thanks.”
She spent the day in her room, stared out onto the East River. A few sailboats passed. The sky over the city echoed with parrot speech: declarations of love, protests, begging, mournful prayers, nursery rhymes, monologues rising and falling as they circled the building. She wondered what new details she’d have to invent about Sara’s life and tried to ignore her building panic.
That afternoon, when she entered Phil’s lobby, she heard voices above her. At the top floor, she found the door open, Mana speaking to a twenty-something man-child whose hair covered one eye. While obviously years beyond prep school, he dressed in a teenager’s school uniform. His one visible eye caught hers. He smiled, and she felt her hands flutter at her sides for something to do, something to grip or squeeze.
Mana turned around and saw her. “You’re here early. Good. Always good, remember that. Follow me.” Mana walked to a hallway connecting the living room to a cluster of bedrooms. She entered the first, the only one with an open door. White bed linens hung from hooks screwed into ceiling plaster. They separated the room into four semiprivate quarters. Mana led her to the quarter farthest from the door and drew a sheet back to reveal a stool and a clothes rack. There was one outfit on the rack, a teenage girl’s school uniform—gray pleated skirt and blue blouse. An emblem was sewn on the right breast: a bird carrying a branch in one claw, a diploma in the other.
“Change into this. If it doesn’t fit, let me know and we’ll have it tailored.” Mana glanced at her watch. “You’d better hurry.”
Sara changed quietly and quickly. The uniform fit, and when she turned to look at herself in the mirror, she started at the youth she saw before her. She headed back through the billowing sheets and down the hall. In the dining room, she found Phil, his hair slicked down over his head, seated beside Mana and the young man.
“I’m glad you decided to join us.” Phil seemed to look through her, not at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. A lie rose to her lips. “I was talking to Mary on the phone, and she wouldn’t let me go.”
Phil’s face lifted, a smile emerged. Mana cast a warm smile and leaned toward her as she sat down. “Good girl,” she whispered, then rose and went to the kitchen. When she returned, she carried large ceramic bowls. One held mashed potatoes with gravy, the other broccoli. She placed them beside Phil, who spooned some of each onto his plate and then passed the bowls to either side. The young man served himself from the broccoli bowl and then set it down in front of him.
Phil said severely, “Joshua, give Sara the bowl. You know how to pass food.”
Joshua, hint of a smile fading from his face, lifted the bowl and held it to her. They exchanged bowls and glances. Mana returned from the kitchen again, this time with a platter of sliced turkey. This must be the meal, always and forever. Within fifteen minutes Sara realized she needn’t have worried about new lies to tell. Little conversation fell across the table, and most of it repeated what she’d shared in the audition.
Mana sat quietly except to p
eriodically encourage Sara and Joshua to sit up straight. Sara noticed that Mana’s eyes always returned to Phil, monitored him, her glances quicker as his mood gradually darkened. Her corrections seemed like a steam valve doomed to fail, the pressure in Phil too great.
He showed little patience with Joshua, whom he chided endlessly. “You sit like that at school? No wonder your teachers all know you’re up to no good. You don’t look like you’re paying attention.”
Joshua rode through it with his eyes on his plate. “Yeah, Pop. Right.” Sara couldn’t help but think he had the air of an actor not caring for his lines rather than a boy rebelling against the father.
Phil’s fingers shook as he watched Joshua roll and unroll a napkin. Sara could practically hear angry words bang against his teeth as he muscled his jaw closed. He put his fork down and leaned back in his chair.
“That’s enough for today.” He stood, walked to the front door. The latch snapped, and the door banged against the wall; Phil’s steps hammered the stairs. Mana and Sara stared at their plates. Joshua, unmoved, stood and left for the changing room, already removing his school jacket.
Mana hissed under her breath, just loud enough for him to hear. “That son of a bitch is going to ruin it for all of us.” She pulled a pack of cigarettes from an apron pocket. Sara slowly made her way back to the bedroom, where curtains blew in a breeze from the open window. The sky outside had turned a bruised purple between the buildings. Traffic sounded small and far away.
Sara removed the school uniform on the other side of the sheet from where she heard Joshua changing. She replaced all the items on the metal rack and straightened them, tried to remove creases that had folded themselves into the shirt, the skirt. She wondered if creases would make Phil unhappy, if he would have them cleaned, or if they would call for her dismissal.
