“My parents got divorced when I was eight,” Julie added.
“Uh-huh,” I said again.
“Are your parents still together?” she asked me.
“Uh . . . yeah,” I said, feeling so ordinary.
“Wow! That’s kind of unusual, don’t you think?” she said.
It was true. My old friend Kristin had divorced parents, and I could probably name at least five other kids I knew who lived with their moms and hardly ever saw their dads.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “But my parents fight all the time. Sometimes I wish they’d get a divorce!”
“No you don’t,” Julie said solemnly.
“No, I guess I don’t, but my sister and I wonder sometimes if they might.”
Then nobody said anything for a second as the train stopped at 66th Street and more kids got on, probably on their way home from school, too. My eyes wandered over to a set of subway doors where only one door opened; the other was stuck shut. This always surprised and annoyed the people on the platform. When the single door closed again I could read the giant silver spray-painted graffiti: CHRIS 217. Chris 217 really got around the West Side. He left his mark on the tile walls of the 103rd Street stop, too. I knew ’cause I walked by it about a thousand times a week.
“Does your mom have a boyfriend?” I asked.
“Yeah, Harvey,” Julie said. “He’s pretty cool. I probably see him more than my dad.” She laughed. “My dad lives on Eighty-Eighth Street. But Mandy and I mostly like to stay at his place when he’s out of town.” She laughed again.
“Wow. Your mom lets you do that?” I asked.
“Well . . .” She smiled mischievously. “Let’s just say she doesn’t really know. If you know what I mean.”
“Oh.” I nodded, smiling back. “Where does the rest of your family live?”
“Well, Ruby’s the oldest; she’s an artist and lives in Tribeca. My brother, Hudson, and his wife, Renee, live on Eighth Street. And Liza lives with her boyfriend on a boat at the Seventh-Ninth Street boat basin.”
“Wow,” was all I could say again. I wondered if I would ever meet these people.
“I grew up with all of them around, so I don’t consider any of them ‘half,’ even if we have different dads. Well, except Mandy and me,” Julie said.
“So you’re the youngest?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Me, too. I just have one older sister. Ellie.”
“Is that short for Eleanor?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Eliza.”
“Oh. Cool.”
Then we stood there holding the pole not saying anything again, listening to the conductor say something over the PA system, but all it sounded like was really loud static. I was wondering if Julie liked me, which I knew was pretty stupid since she was totally spilling her guts. That must have meant she felt comfortable with me.
As we approached 96th Street, Julie’s stop, she said, “Well. I’m next.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow,” she said as the subway doors opened. She stepped onto the platform, and I watched her shiny, straight brown hair swing from side to side as she disappeared into the crowd.
2
Wasn’t She Cross with You on Account of Your Fighting?
That first week of school I only saw Julie Braverman in acting or French or when passing her in the halls in the drama department. Though we talked a little bit, I thought I’d probably never really get to know her. She was too cool and exotic to be my friend and she always seemed to be with somebody. Everybody liked her, especially the boys. I once overheard Wally, this guy in my acting class, saying he had a huge crush on her.
In Mrs. Zeig’s acting class we got our first assigned scenes. Mrs. Zeig was a tiny woman with beautiful dyed black hair that she kept pulled into an extremely tight ponytail at the back of her neck. This accentuated her big forehead. Mrs. Zeig sat in her chair very straight, kind of regal-like. She wore a lot of really tan foundation, and her eyeliner was always a little smudged, like she put it on without a mirror. She spoke in an almost British accent but not exactly—it was just kind of proper-sounding. She said it was called “Eastern Regional Speech,” and her goal was to get us all to sound like that. Good luck.
“Julie Prodsky and Max Friedberg. You will do a scene from a play called Tomorrow the World.” We were all spread out on the floor in our black leotards and tights or sweats, the required dress for acting class. Max was a few kids away from me, over by David Wine and Reggie Ramirez. I could tell the three of them were going to be friends. I remembered David Wine from my audition because he had such great hair (it was kind of like Scott Baio’s, but blond), and he was kind of cute.
At the audition to get into P.A., there were like a thousand kids waiting in this big open area in the basement. They called it the basement even though it was on the first floor, near the lunchroom. The audition to get into the drama department had four parts, and you knew your chances were getting better if you kept moving on to the next part. The first part was the two contrasting contemporary monologues.
When I read the Performing Arts audition letter that said, “Please choose two contrasting contemporary monologues; for example, one dramatic, one comedic,” I asked my dad, “What do they mean by ‘contemporary’?”
“Something current, modern,” Dad said. “They just don’t want you to come in and perform Shakespeare or something too difficult.”
“Oh, thank God,” I said. Dad taught Speech and Drama at St. Andrew’s College in New Jersey, so he was my drama coach; I was going to perform Anne from The Diary of Anne Frank and Snoopy being the Red Baron from You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown. Every time I even thought about my audition, I got nervous.
Then the big day arrived and I sat there in the basement near David Wine with the great hair, waiting for my name to be called. Dad looked funny sitting in a wooden school chair with his legs crossed reading the paper, and my stomach kept doing flip-flops. We had rehearsed my monologues a million times and I knew I was ready, but I had to keep running to the bathroom anyway. I probably had to go, like, four times. Thank God my monologues went pretty well. (One of the auditioners, a drama teacher, even laughed out loud at my Snoopy monologue.) By some miracle, I made it through all four parts of the audition, but I never stopped feeling nervous until Dad and I got on the subway to go home.
And now I couldn’t believe I was actually sitting in my first acting class at P.A. When Max and I got picked to do our first scene together, he looked at me, gave me the thumbs-up sign, and murmured, “Julie . . .” I think we were both relieved to get each other. Max was a little bit of a hippie-druggie but also a pretty good actor. At least that’s what I had heard. Sometimes he talked too softly, which annoyed me, but I could live with that. As far as scene partners went, I got lucky. Reputation was everything. You just kind of heard about people.
Then Mrs. Zeig announced the rest of the partners, and reminded us that we would perform our scenes on Scene Day for the whole drama department.
“Scene Day for Freshman Acting is January nineteenth,” she said, and I heard this kid William gasp. This redheaded girl named Donna sucked her teeth.
“We have plenty of rehearsal time,” Mrs. Zeig said. “And if you mind your three Ps—if you’re always prompt, present, and prepared—you’ll do fine.”
I hoped so.
The next Monday after school, sitting on the platform bench at the 50th Street subway station, I was thinking about how the hell I was going to make the first moment of my scene with Max work. We were playing a brother and sister, and Max’s character, Emil, was always getting in trouble. My first line was, “Wasn’t she cross with you on account of your fighting?” and it just seemed impossible to say without sounding totally fake and actory. But that’s my job, Mrs. Zeig kept saying, “To make the words your own.” Jesus.
Suddenly I looked up, and there was Julie Braverman standing in f
ront of me.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“How goes it?”
“Um, pretty good, I guess.” I felt a little startled. “How ’bout you?”
“Just peachy,” she said. “Hey, I tried calling you last night. I looked you up, but I guess I spelled your last name wrong.”
She tried calling me? “Don’t you have the class list?” I said.
“I left it in my locker,” she said breathlessly, lightly smacking herself in the head. “Sometimes I’m a total space cadet.”
She started to dig in the pockets of her bag, just as the train pulled in with a loud whoosh.
“I forgot to copy the French homework off the board!” she yelled over the noise. “Do you have it in your book?”
“No problem!” I nodded. Oh. That was all she called for—the homework. We got on the train and grabbed two seats next to each other. I took out my French notebook as Julie swung her dark blue bag into her lap, looking for a pen.
“Did you get that bag at Chocolate Soup?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I love it. Wasn’t it expensive?”
“Umm . . . no, I don’t know. I don’t think so. Everyone at Riverdale had them,” she said, flipping through her notebook, looking for a blank page. “I think I have an extra one—you want it?”
“What?”
“I have an extra Chocolate Soup bag. Only it’s light gray, not navy. I don’t know why I got two, since I, like, never use the gray one, so you can have it.”
Chocolate Soup bags were so cool. They were canvas shoulder bags with a big flap that covered over a huge inside pocket for all your books and then two outside pockets that snapped where you could keep pens or your makeup or whatever. Julie’s was pretty worn in—part of the outside flap was a little frayed, which made it even cooler.
“Really?” I said. “Thanks. That’s so nice of you!” I couldn’t believe she was going to give me a Chocolate Soup bag for free! I mean, she barely knew me.
“No biggie,” she said. Then my eye wandered over to three kids about our age sitting two doors down from us. They were the ones I had seen hanging out outside of school on the first day smoking clove cigarettes. Julie looked where I was looking.
“Have you met them yet? They’re in our class.”
“They are?” I said. “I thought they were, like, juniors or something.”
“Nope. They’re freshmen—Daisy Curerri, Jennifer Smalls, and Gordon Pomeranian. They’re in my dance class. I heard Daisy’s been in an ABC Afterschool Special already. And she’s got an agent,” Julie said. At P.A. you weren’t supposed to work professionally as an actor until you graduated, but plenty of kids did.
“Wow. Are they nice?” I asked. “They seem kind of tough.”
“They’re okay,” Julie said absentmindedly. “A little cliquey.” Then her face lit up like she got an idea. “Hey, what are you doing right now?”
“Just going home,” I said.
“Wanna come over for a little while? For, like, a snack or something?”
“Right now?”
“Yeah. My mom won’t be home yet. She gets home late on Mondays. And I could give you the bag.”
“Okay, sure! Oh, but . . .” I hesitated. “I’ll have to call my parents when we get there to tell them when I’ll be home. Okay?” I hoped she didn’t think I was a total dork or something.
“No problem.”
“Okay, then,” I said.
“Great!” Julie said.
Her apartment on Riverside Drive was huge: three bedrooms, a living room with a view of the Hudson River, a dining room, and even a maid’s room off the kitchen, but they didn’t have a maid. They called it the sewing room ’cause it had a sewing machine in it, but it was also full of clothes. Like an extra giant closet. There were three bathrooms and Julie had her own nineteen-inch color TV in her room with a video cassette recorder! My parents were so behind the times, we still had a black-and-white set in the living room and no VCR. I tried to hide my awe and jealousy. Julie had her own vanity table sprinkled with little baskets of earrings and bags of makeup and perfume bottles and lipsticks, two closets stuffed with clothing and shoes and boots, and a dark purple bureau that looked crammed with more clothes.
“Sorry, as you can see, I’m kinda messy,” she said as she scooped a couple of T-shirts and some underwear off her strewn-about rainbow comforter and tossed the clothes into a closet. On the walls were a Bruce Springsteen Born to Run poster, a Fiorucci poster of two angels (I had the same one), and a small painting of a squirrel in a square frame.
“My sister Ruby did that,” she said pointing to the squirrel. “There’s lots of her art all over the apartment. She’s really good.”
We left our jackets and bags in Julie’s room, and she led me to the kitchen. I sat down at the table while Julie stood staring at the contents of the freezer. They had the fancy kind of fridge where the whole right side is the fridge and the whole left side is the freezer, which, by the way, was packed: bags of Zabar’s fresh-ground coffee, frozen bagels and croissants, leftovers in Ziploc bags, and, like, five pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. She pulled out a pint of Swiss Almond Vanilla and showed it to me, raising her eyebrows.
“Yum,” I said.
“So what do you think of Mrs. Zeig?” Julie asked as she put down some light blue ceramic bowls and spoons.
“She’s pretty good,” I said. “Kind of formal, I guess. But I like her.”
“Yeah, me, too. You know that guy Reggie Ramirez? He was telling me that he heard Mrs. Zeig was the best of the freshman acting teachers.”
“Cool,” I said. “I thought I would recognize more kids that I met on my audition, but I only knew one guy—David Wine. Do you know him? He’s pretty cute—I love his hair.”
“Totally. I think he’s friends with Reggie Ramirez. Who is also cute, by the way. I haven’t seen anyone from my audition. Maybe that shows you how few kids actually get in,” Julie said, smiling, like weren’t we the coolest.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “And isn’t it cool that we have so many periods of drama classes each day?”
“Uh-huh. But I think it’ll be better when we’re juniors, because by then you can be in a play, and you can stay and rehearse after school. I heard some days when you’re rehearsing you have to stay as late as six o’clock!”
“Wow. That’ll be cool, to be juniors. It seems so far away,” I said.
“I know,” Julie said with her mouth full of Swiss Almond Vanilla.
Then we went through almost every other freshman drama student whose name we could think of: who we thought was probably a good actor; who would suck; who seemed like a druggie (Max, my scene partner); who’d be good to be friends with; who seemed cliquey, popular, slutty, conceited, materialistic; and so on. We started cracking up so much I totally relaxed and didn’t notice that time had flown. Before we knew it, we had eaten the entire pint of ice cream and it was almost five o’clock. Then we heard the keys in Julie’s front door.
“That’s my sister Mandy,” Julie said.
“Hello?” Mandy called from the living room.
“In here!” Julie shouted. I could hear Mandy walking down the hall to the kitchen. Her walk sounded slow and soft, like a saunter.
“Oh my God, Julie!” I gasped. “I never called my parents!”
She pointed to the phone on the wall and I picked up the receiver and quickly dialed my number. As I listened to the phone ringing, I looked up and saw Mandy in the doorway. She was loaded up with a Chocolate Soup book bag like Julie’s but in dark brown, a guitar, and a big stack of mail. She was a little taller than Julie, and a little thinner, with shoulder-length dark blonde hair in tight, tight curls.
“That’s Julie,” Julie said.
“Hi,” I said, checking out Mandy’s vintage burgundy suede jacket. It had a ripped pocket hanging off one side. She dropped her jacket and stuff into a chair. I put my hand over the receiver and whispered
, “I’m calling my parents.”
“No sweat,” she said, peering into our ice-cream pint. “Anything left?”
“In the freezer,” Julie said.
“Hello?” said my dad’s voice.
“Hi, Dad. I’m so sorry I forgot to call. I went home with a new girl I met at school, Julie Braverman. She lives on Ninety-Ninth Street. Actually, we met at Caitlin’s Bat Mitzvah last year.”
“All right,” Dad said, but I could tell he wasn’t really listening ’cause I heard Mom’s shrieky voice in the background saying, “Is that Julie? Where is she?” Mom was always cranky when she got home from work. She was the book editor at Ladies’ Home Journal magazine, and she hated her boss, Angela Woo, who was really mean and uptight. I thought Ladies’ Home Journal was a totally stupid magazine, because it always had knitting or cookies on the cover.
Dad put his hand over the receiver and I heard a muffled, “Helene, relax, she’s at her friend’s.” Then I heard my mother say something else that I couldn’t make out, but it sounded angry.
“Hold on a sec, Jule,” Dad said to me. Then loudly to my mother he said, “Please! I am on the phone! I can’t hear her when you talk to me when I’m trying to talk to her!”
Then Mom screamed one more thing, but it sounded like she was walking away. I rolled my eyes at Julie and mouthed, “My mother,” and she smiled.
“Sorry, Julie,” Dad said to me, sounding exasperated. “Are you coming home for dinner?”
“I’ll be home by six or so.”
“All right. It’s your night to set the table, you know.”
“I know. I’m not completely irresponsible!”
“No one thinks you are,” he said calmly. “All right. See you later, pussy cat. Have fun.” I hung up.
“I’m glad he’s the one who answered,” I said, breathing a small sigh of relief. “He’s the more reasonable one. I think my mom had a cow.”
“Does your mom freak out a lot?” Julie asked.
“All the time,” I said.
“That’s funny,” she said, laughing.
“Our mom never freaks,” Mandy said, opening a Fresca. “You could, like, call her from jail, and she’d be like, ‘Well, when you get out, can you stop at the drugstore for some Apple Pectin conditioner? We’re all out.’” Then Julie and Mandy started cracking up. “Speaking of Mom, where is she?” Mandy said.
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