The Fixer Upper

by Judith Arnold

  “What if he’s not there?” Kim asked. She was always worrying about stuff not going the way it was supposed to.

  Reva didn’t worry too much. Things usually seemed to work out, one way or another. “If he’s not there, we’ll go home with a bunch of leaves,” she said. “And then we’ll go back to the park tomorrow. You know he’ll be there on the weekend. That’s where the money is—the weekends.”

  “I wonder how much he makes,” Kim said, kicking a few brown leaves on the paved walk. Her sneakers had little rhinestones glued on the toes in star shapes, and when the sun caught them they sparkled. Reva had considered getting sneakers like that, but her feet weren’t the sparkly type. They were too large, for one thing. She already wore the same size shoe as her mother—not that her mother owned any shoes Reva would ever want to borrow. For work she wore low-heeled pumps, and at home she wore flats with wide toes, like the shape of your actual feet. They were ugly, but she said they were comfortable, and someday Reva would understand that comfortable was more important than stylish when it came to shoes. Reva hoped that day wouldn’t arrive too soon.

  Her mind drifted back to Darryl J—specifically, Kim’s comment about how much he made. Reva had heard that some street performers actually earned enough to live on just from the coins and bills people tossed into their instrument cases. She’d also heard that serious musicians had to audition for spots in the subway stations. The real money must be there, she figured.

  “Hey, maybe you and your sister and brother can set up a trio on the sidewalk and make some bucks,” she teased. “You could play…I don’t know. Who writes music for piano, violin and cello?”

  “Mendelssohn,” Kim said glumly. “Well, lots of people, but we’re all learning a Mendelssohn trio now. My parents want us to perform at a holiday party they’re hosting this December.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.

  “Leave your brother’s violin case open at the party,” Reva suggested. “Maybe the guests’ll throw some money into it.”

  Kim laughed. That was another thing Reva could do—say things that made people laugh. Most of the time, she didn’t think what she was saying was all that funny, but if people laughed, that had to be a good thing. About the only person Reva couldn’t make laugh was her stepmother, Bony. Her real name was Bonnie, but she was so skinny Bony fit her better. One thing Bony would never need was breast-reduction surgery. She always picked at her food and gave Reva warning looks when she took seconds. Okay, so Reva didn’t wear size-two jeans like Kim. She wore size four and sometimes six, depending on the style. Like, she should put Weight Watchers on her speed dial.

  “The thing is,” she said, “Darryl J is going to be rich someday. He’s going to be discovered, and then he’ll get a huge contract and do concerts and sell lots of CDs. Tracy Chapman used to sing on street corners in Boston, or somewhere around there, and then she got discovered and she wound up famous.”

  “Who’s Tracy Chapman?” Kim asked.

  Of course Kim wouldn’t know. Her parents listened only to classical music, Mendelssohn and that stuff. Reva had nothing against classical music, and Ms. Froiken, who taught music at Hudson, told interesting stories about how Haydn wrote the “Surprise Symphony” to wake up people in the audience who nodded off during concerts, and how Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring” caused a riot the first time it was performed. She made classical music fun.

  But other music was fun, too—not just the stuff Reva listened to but also the stuff her mother listened to. Old rock. Some of it was pretty good. Her mother had a Tracy Chapman CD that was full of wistful, plainspoken songs that Reva could just imagine someone singing while strumming an acoustic guitar on a street corner in some city and hoping people would throw money into the open guitar case at her feet.

  Tracy Chapman wasn’t poor anymore. And someday Darryl J, because he was so talented and so incredibly gorgeous, wouldn’t be poor, either. He’d be riding to concert arenas in a limousine. And Reva would be riding with him, because he’d be in love with her.

  The mall at the heart of Central Park wasn’t as crowded as on the weekends, but since the afternoon was mild and sunny, people were out. Maybe they’d left work early—folks liked to do that on Fridays. Maybe some of them were unemployed and had nothing better to do than hang out and search for someone to play chess with, or feed the pigeons stale bread, or just stroll along the paths that meandered through the park. Maybe some were so rich they didn’t have to work. And the younger people, the punky boys on skateboards and the girls like Kim and Reva, had probably just been let out of school. Maybe they’d told their mothers they had to collect leaves, too.

  A mime stood at one end of the Band Shell, doing that whole icky-jerky-movement thing. Why did mimes paint their faces white? And the silly black hat with the flower sticking out of the hatband, and the striped shirt—what was that all about? No one was interested in this mime, anyway; people walked right past him. Poor guy, trapped inside an invisible box and no one cared enough to watch him break out.

  She and Kim hurried past, following the twangy sound of a guitar. There was Darryl J, surrounded by a small cluster of people. The mime must be jealous, Reva thought, but that was his problem.

  She and Kim joined the crowd gathered around Darryl J. They didn’t move directly to the front—that would be too obvious—but found a spot that offered a good view of him. He was as handsome as ever, his hair in neat, even braids, his skin smooth and the color of caramel, his guitar and mike plugged into a small amp. He wasn’t too tall—Reva liked that about him—and he had dark eyes that glowed like mood-ring stones, and a smile that could turn solid rock to lava. His jeans were baggy, but they weren’t torn, and the crotch didn’t droop to his knees. On top he wore a kind of woven hippie-ish shirt.

  He couldn’t be much older than eighteen, she estimated. And in January she’d be fourteen. A few years from now, they’d be perfect for each other.

  He was singing something fast and catchy, the words spilling from him in a cascade of rhymes that almost sounded like rap, only he was singing instead of just chanting them. “‘When I see you, I wanna be you, so I could know you inside out, and I could show you what I’m about,’” he crooned.

  Reva sighed and clutched Kim’s arm. Kim was beaming. She probably loved him as much as Reva did, but she was too well behaved and obedient to follow through. She’d never ride in a limo with him, because her parents would shit a brick if she did, and for all her fussing and complaining about stuff, she never liked to upset her parents.

  Reva didn’t care. True love was more important than her mother.

  His guitar case, open at his feet with his little white Darryl J sign propped up inside it, contained a fair amount of coins and paper money. Reva wished she had enough money that she could toss some into his case, but she got only five dollars a week allowance—probably the smallest allowance of anybody in the entire eighth grade at Hudson—and if she gave Darryl J some money, that would mean no ice cream cones or lattes after school with her friends, and nothing to set aside for a movie outing or mascara, which she really desperately needed because her eyelashes were pale at the tips. Her mother said she was too young for mascara, which meant Reva had to buy her own and sneak it on when her mom wasn’t looking.

  If she got together with Darryl J, she wouldn’t have to worry about budgeting her puny allowance to pay for mascara. Not that he was rich now, but he would be. She had faith. He was that talented. He’d fill arenas. No—more intimate settings, cooler places. Downtown clubs, and then maybe Roseland. Not Madison Square Garden, where the performers were just tiny dots on the stage and the only place you could actually make out their faces was on the JumboTrons.

  Of course, she wouldn’t be seated out there in the vast darkness of the upper tiers, staring at the monitor. She’d be backstage in the wings, where Darryl J could see her. He’d glance her way between numbers and send her a secret smile that said, “I’m pretending to sing these songs for all th
ose people out there, but I’m really singing them for you.”

  That was how she felt today, standing with maybe twenty other appreciative listeners as he sang, “‘If I could be you, then I could free you. One and one are one, flunk the math and feel the sun.’”

  Reva felt the sun, burning deep inside her. One and one are one, she thought, allowing herself a grin at how Mr. Rodriguez would react if she ran that equation by him in math class. He wouldn’t understand. He was married and paunchy and he was always making stupid puns: “Where do rectangular trees come from? Square roots,” and “I will now sing an imaginary number,” and he’d pretend to sing, mouthing the words but not making a sound.

  Darryl J made golden sounds, sounds that planted the sun right inside Reva’s heart. One of these days, when she was just a little older…

  Reva totally believed that anything was possible.

  Vivienne had come to talk Libby into attending Saturday-morning services with her, but Libby had instead talked Vivienne into skipping services and having a cup of coffee. Libby wasn’t exactly the most observant Jew in the world. She hadn’t been in a synagogue since Reva’s bat mitzvah last January—and that had been organized and overseen by Harry, who for some reason had felt that ushering Reva through this ritual was his paternal duty. Also, he’d gotten to host a fancy reception afterward, to which he’d invited assorted clients and colleagues, thus turning Reva’s coming-of-age observance into a useful networking opportunity.

  “I’m not trying to convert you,” Vivienne said, settling into her chair at the minuscule table Libby had managed to wedge into one corner of her kitchen. She and Reva ate a fair number of their meals there, which enabled Libby to boast that she had an eat-in kitchen.

  How much longer she would have an eat-in kitchen was anybody’s guess, of course.

  Vivienne crossed one leg over the other. She wore tailored wool slacks and a multicolored tunic that hurt Libby’s eyes. No one should have to look at that many colors at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. The slacks were boring, at least, a dark blue as restful on the eyes as the top was painful. That was Vivienne in a nutshell—a combination of traditional and zany, boring and wild, restful and painful. Libby deeply hoped that Vivienne would be restful and not painful this morning.

  “You want a bagel or something?” Libby asked. She was still in her robe, a faded green wraparound beginning to fray at the collar.

  “A bagel?”

  “I bought them fresh at Bloom’s yesterday on my way home from work.”

  “In that case…” Vivienne fingered her hair. It was a garish red, cut spiky and short. Ever since Vivienne had gotten married, she’d been experimenting with different hairstyles. Libby wondered what Leonard thought about that. Maybe he liked it. Maybe each time she changed her hair, he felt as if he was sleeping with a new woman. “I was planning to eat at the kiddush,” she said, “but if we aren’t going to synagogue, sure, I’ll take a bagel.” She leaned back in her chair, which bumped into a counter. “What’s this, dead leaves?” she asked when her hand accidentally brushed against the plastic bag of foliage.

  “Reva collected them for a school project,” Libby said as she sliced a second bagel.

  “Is she still asleep?” Vivienne glanced toward the doorway. Maybe she expected Sleeping Beauty herself to materialize there. “You spoil her, Libby.”

  “She’s allowed to sleep late on a Saturday morning.”

  “When you could instead be bringing her to shul. Actually, no.” Vivienne contradicted herself, waving a manicured hand through the air, pretending to erase the thought from an invisible chalkboard in front of her. “You don’t want to bring her with you right now. There are some new members of the congregation. Single men. A nice Jewish man, Libby—you could do worse.”

  “I married a nice Jewish man,” Libby reminded her as she arranged the bagels in the oven to warm.

  “That wasn’t a nice Jewish man,” Vivienne argued. “That was my brother.”

  For some reason, Libby had received custody of Harry’s family along with Reva and the apartment in the divorce. Gilda and Irwin and their daughter, Vivienne, all believed Harry had been a first-class schmuck to leave Libby. At the time, Libby had agreed wholeheartedly with them. But when she thought about the kind of man he’d become—the kind of man he’d probably been all along, although she hadn’t had the luxury of noticing that at the time because she’d been pregnant and eager to tie the knot—she realized she was better off without him. He seemed much happier with Bonnie, who was so unlike Libby she knew he couldn’t have possibly remained happy with her.

  “I just think you ought to be a little more socially active, Libby. You’re, what, thirty-five years old? Time is gaining on you. You wait too long, no man is going to be interested.”

  “What apocalyptic women’s magazine did you read that in?” Libby joked as she filled two mugs with coffee and carried them to the table.

  “Have you got any Splenda?” Vivienne asked, nudging the sugar bowl away. “I’m trying to lose five pounds.”

  Vivienne was always trying to lose five pounds, which was why Libby always kept packets of artificial sweetener on hand. She pulled a few from a cabinet shelf and set them on the table next to Vivienne’s elbow.

  “So these gentlemen, these new members of the congregation…All I’m saying, Libby, is you could do worse.”

  “I’m not looking for a boyfriend,” Libby said. “If one comes along, fine, but I’ve got too much else on my plate right now. You want any orange juice?”

  “If you’re pouring…” Vivienne accepted a glass of juice with a shrug. “What do you have on your plate that you don’t have time for a love life? And don’t tell me Reva. If she can adjust to her father getting remarried, she could adjust to you going out on a date every now and then.”

  “I do go out on dates every now and then,” Libby said, silently acknowledging that her dates were more then than now. “And Reva doesn’t dictate my life.” Yeah, right. Reva was the first thing Libby thought about when she woke up every morning and the last thing she thought about before drifting off to sleep every night. Reva was the light burning in her soul—and the headache burning in her skull. Who had time for dates with all that burning?

  Still, she shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the opportunity Vivienne had laid before her. “Tell me,” she said casually as she slid the bagels out of the oven and onto a plate. “Are any of these nice Jewish men at your synagogue rich? If they are, I could be interested.” She laughed to indicate she was joking.

  Vivienne didn’t join her laughter. “You need money? That hoo-ha school isn’t paying you enough?”

  “The pay is fine.” Libby settled into the chair beside Vivienne and smeared some cream cheese onto her bagel. “It’s not the school.”

  Vivienne examined the tub of cream cheese. “This isn’t the low-fat kind, is it? Well, what the hell. You only live once.” She scooped a large dollop of cream cheese out of the tub and slathered it onto her bagel. “So, what is it? Reva’s running up big bills at Bergdorf’s?”

  “It’s the apartment,” Libby told her. She hadn’t mentioned the problem to anyone yet, and even though Vivienne was aggressively opinionated, she was a true and loyal friend, a better sister-in-law than her brother had ever been a husband. Libby trusted her, and she needed to unburden herself. “Remember when the building went co-op, maybe eight years ago?”

  “Way behind the curve,” Vivienne recalled. “Everyone else was going co-op in the ’80s, but this building hung on until much later. You never bought, did you.”

  “I couldn’t afford it. We were divorced and Harry let me keep the lease. I could manage the rent, but buying, even at the insider’s price, was out of the question.”

  “But anyone who didn’t want to buy at the time got to keep their leases, right? You were grandfathered in.”

  “Well…” Libby sighed. “Grampa died.”

  Bagel poised in midair, Vivienne gaped at her.
“He died?”

  “The company that owned all the apartments that didn’t go co-op overextended itself. They have properties all over the city, and the market isn’t as strong as it was a few years ago, and they had to raise cash. So they sold their ownership of the units in this building to another company, which claims we either have to buy or move out.”

  “Don’t they have to honor the terms of your lease?”

  “My lease comes up for renewal next January, and they’re not going to renew it. I’ve got to figure out a way to buy this place, or else Reva and I will have to move.”

  “You’ll never find a place like this for what you’re paying,” Vivienne said, words Libby certainly didn’t need to hear. She knew she was paying a remarkably low rent for her six-room pre-war, with its nine-foot ceilings, its tall, sunlit windows and its fireplace. She could afford a rent increase. She could even afford the monthly costs of a mortgage. But she didn’t have the funds for a down payment, even at the cut-rate insider’s price the new company had quoted.

  “And you need how much?” Vivienne asked her.

  Libby winced. “A quarter million, minimum.”

  “Oy vey.” Vivienne dropped her bagel and pressed a hand to her chest, as if to contain the convulsions of her heart. “Where are you going to come up with money like that?”

  “You know any rich single guys?” Libby said, then grinned so Vivienne would understand she was kidding. Vivienne tended to take things literally. If Libby wasn’t careful, Vivienne would start interrogating the new bachelor members of her synagogue about their net worth.

  Vivienne’s heart must have calmed down, because she lowered her hand to her mug and sipped her coffee. “I know a rich married guy,” she said.

  “Thanks, but I’m not that desperate.”

  “Harry,” Vivienne said.

  “Harry?” Libby’s ex-husband?