I thought I should go around to the other side of the building. As soon as I turned that corner, they would not be able to see me, and I could slip out the gate, up the dark block next to school and to the safety of open stores and restaurants.
A clanging sound and a stream of curses. Someone had dropped a heavy tool on a toe.
More curses, but this time, the curser was looking at me. I froze, willing myself to be invisible.
He punched his companion, who looked up, and now they were both walking towards me.
I walked away briskly, acting as if I had not seen them and was just going about my business. I heard them running up behind me and knew they did not buy it.
I ran. Who knew I could run this fast? Fear had completely overcome curiosity. I was far from an entrance, but here, there was only low, stone wall dividing the park from the sidewalk. I could scramble over it easily. I could leap it if I had to.
I passed a trash can at the edge of the patch, and slammed my arm into it without stopping, in some panicked hope that it would crash onto the walk and slow them down.
I was running so fast, and breathing so hard, I wasn’t even sure if I heard it hit the ground. I headed for the avenue, and lights, and safety, afraid to stop to make a call, and burst into the sleek bar on the corner. Lungs burning, I gasped out to the bartender, “9-1-1. Right now!”
THE cops eventually found them. The tools were left behind and identified. Someone else had seen them running. They were, in the end, not so hard to track down. As the nice detective told me, most criminals are actually pretty dumb. I will probably have to testify at a trial, eventually.
I went to see Jacob a few times, and sometimes, I would catch him when he was fully there. Bit by bit, he told me all about the pretty girl he met ice skating in Washington Park, introduced by a Navy buddy who knew her from their block. The hurry-up, wartime wedding. The ecstatic few weeks they had before he shipped out. The cold-water tenement they shared while he was at Julliard. All the long, happy years when he made music, and she made their life.
I could read between the lines to see what happened when she died. There were no children, old friends were dying, she was the sociable one. I guessed that days went by when he did not talk to a single soul.
The night he was attacked was their anniversary. He was sitting there all alone, remembering, feeling her presence in the place where they had met, and he went into a blind rage when some young thugs tried to hurt that place. It felt like sacrilege.
I made him a book, a kind of scrapbook with his own words typed up, printouts of his draft record, the newspaper stories, and old photos of the park. He was fully awake the day I brought it over, and he could not get over seeing his memories made tangible on paper. It seemed to bring out a flood of stories, and when he drifted off he was holding the book and murmuring, “We are . . . still here . . . remembered . . . in here.”
He passed away a few days later, sitting up in bed with the book open to his wedding picture. And I do remember.
THE UNDERSTUDY
Lois Karlin
THEY met at a Talking Heads concert at CBGB, both of them five-foot-eight with hazel eyes that connected above the crowd. Colleen Morgan and Jenna Strickland were skinny brunettes, hair spiked with wax. Funny how lookalikes found each other. Funny how wealthy Jenna-from-Greenwich wanted to hang with a stray from Pittsburgh.
It was ’78 and they were twenty-four, sharing a squat on Avenue C. The neighborhood people couldn’t tell them apart. Colleen knew Jenna was prettier— lips full and eyes outlined— but the two of them looked enough alike to mess with peoples’ heads.
They shared Alphabet City with junkies and artists, who came for the same reason they had: to live cheap in a place the rest of the world had forgotten. Neither of them minded the rusted appliances, the stripped cars that lined the streets, or the burned-out tenements. As near as Colleen could figure, Jenna stuck around convinced that Alphabet City was the way to the writer’s life, and that someday Joey Ramone would return her love.
Colleen taught Jenna to use her wits on the street. Outside a record store, Colleen saved Jenna’s ass when a couple of creeps tried to toss her. She took care of one, with a plank she found on the curb, and kneed the other in the balls. After that, the girls were accepted in the neighborhood, and Jenna followed Colleen’s lead. To get money, they operated as a team, working Bloomingdale’s and Saks, grabbing wallets, perfume, and jewelry they could sell on the streets. They pulled scams on Wall Street junkies, cleaned out their pockets.
Street-smart meant blending in with the neighborhood, keeping the corner boys in business. But Jenna hadn’t expected to be leashed to a dealer. She loved the junk, admitted it settled her wicked moods. Still, she turned on Colleen, the one she blamed for getting her hooked. She pulled rank, treated her low-class friend like scum, rubbed salt into a wound that envy had opened.
When Colleen couldn’t stand the abuse, she would disappear, until Jenna came begging, coaxing her back to the seedy digs they shared.
JENNA’S parents had divorced when she was little, and her half-sister Margaux— her mother’s kid from a second marriage— grew up in Bell Air. Jenna was raised in Connecticut by a father she hardly ever saw. Colleen thought it was kind of pathetic how she scavenged the society pages for events at the Met, where her father was a member of the Board. One paper showed him stepping out of a limo, arm around a woman not much older than Jenna. Colleen would have killed for the woman’s sleeveless satin.
Colleen pegged Jenna’s father as a major-league con artist, cashing in on investment fraud. She felt a grudging admiration for the man, and didn’t understand why Jenna had walked away from all that money. The moron never even went out to L.A. to visit her sister, when the papers reported her mother’s death. If her father came looking for her, he sure as hell didn’t look hard enough. But Jenna never gave up the notion he wanted her back.
“If I cleaned up, he’d take me in,” she’d say, lifting the pointed chin that matched Colleen’s.
“Don’t kid yourself. One time, two times, you might get past that corner. Trust me— third try, you won’t make it.”
In frequent rages, Jenna went on a tear through the cruddy room they shared. When it was over she collapsed, that haunted look in her eyes. Curl around Colleen, make her promise never to leave.
Even so, Colleen was always scared she’d go back to the father she hated or the girls from Vassar she used to hang with. Colleen depended on pretty, once-rich Jenna. More, maybe, than Jenna depended on her.
SHITHEAD ten-year olds with sticks were shoving junkies into line behind a bricked-up building. Heroin sold at a premium there, because the nearby fire house was handy for overdoses. Colleen had turned into the alley when she spotted guys with FDNY across their backs. They were working on junkies who’d crumpled to the ground.
It wasn’t long before spotters on the roof started shouting, “Puerco. Pigs!” and she looked frantically for Jenna among the scattering druggies. Scared, she took off alone with a fist full of unspent twenties.
She would have tried to stop Jenna. She’d have said, you’ll OD, it’s a bad bundle. Instead, fifteen minutes later, when the kids gave the all-clear and she came back to the building, there was Jenna, limp on the pavement, strap still around her arm. Three boys carried Jenna up the alley and down the block, then dumped her in front of the firehouse door.
Colleen hid in a stairwell, trying to stop the shakes, barely noticing the urine stench. Through an iron railing, she watched a firefighter in unlaced boots work on Jenna, push on her chest, give her mouth-to-mouth. He shouted to someone in the firehouse, and then it was the two of them working on her, faces grim, sirens threading through the streets.
She stayed long enough to know Jenna was gone.
SHE left Avenue C when their tenement went up in flames, only a week after Jenna died. She swung Jenna’s duffle over her shoulder and walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, leaving Alphabet City and her own na
me in the ashes.
It took a year and a half to get clean, in and out of a Brooklyn rehab. Counselors got her a job washing dishes. She would have started again with the scams, but she’d lost her nerve. She needed lookalike Jenna.
She stayed on in Brooklyn, companion to an Italian lady, in a dreary house with big furniture. She supplemented her income by pawning a couple of the old lady’s rings. Forcing herself to be patient, she forged references, watched for ads in the papers, and in ’84, got her first job as a house sitter.
Colleen was nervous about moving back to the Lower East Side, trading the security of the Brooklyn neighborhood for an artist’s loft on Bowery and Rivington. The old industrial building—skid row with a touch of whitewash— was a little too close to Alphabet City for comfort. But the loft itself blew her mind.
The three-thousand square-foot space was lined with wide, arched windows. Light flooded the rooms on three sides, the ceiling supported by cast-iron columns. The rent-controlled loft was paid for by a sculptor who spent winters in Santa Fe. Colleen was paid to maintain the place, babysit her landlady’s expensive artwork, feed the squirrels on the fire escape, for god’s sake. Jenna would have wigged out over the tiled bathrooms and twenty-foot ceilings. Hell, she would have wigged out over the second-hand silk around Colleen’s neck.
Over the years, she had got to listening to a voice in her head, the one that said, Trust me. She knew it was Jenna talking. Jenna telling her to take care of herself. With makeup, the furrows in Colleen’s face relaxed. Her skin drank up the cream she smoothed on using her landlady’s lighted mirror.
At first, it wasn’t about the money. She just wanted to be Jenna. She tried to talk like Jenna, dressed in Jenna’s clothes. She realized she’d been acting the role since Jenna died.
COLLEEN was crossing the Bowery in the early winter dark. Steel gates covered every storefront, and the broad street was nearly vacant. A bum whistled and waved a bottle, and his foul odor greeted her as she steered away from his legs. He wore a filthy sweatshirt and a big, leather cap, visor and ear flaps pulled down around his face. She didn’t think he was one of the flophouse regulars who forked over a few bucks a night for a cubicle with a chicken-wire ceiling. She tried to make out his face under the cap, but he turned his head away. When she crossed Rivington, he crossed behind her, against the light.
Never show them where you live. She stepped into the lighted interior of Marie’s Deli and nodded to the graying Puerto Rican man behind the counter. She paid for a lottery ticket and the New York Post, stood awhile by the bodega’s glass door, and then went back out, into the night.
The bum was behind her, face in shadow, as she fumbled with her building’s lock. She shoved and bolted the door against his boot, then waited, shivering, for the keyed elevator to open a couple of inches above the lobby floor. When she reached the sixth-floor loft, she stood outside the elevator and let her heart slow down.
No feet on the staircase. No sound from the rear fire escape.
She bolted every one of her security locks, hung her coat, and pulled off her high boots. She glanced at the newspaper’s headlines, sorry to learn that subway vigilante Bernie Goetz had been arrested. She was about to toss the paper onto her landlady’s Bauhaus table, when she caught a full-page obit and the name Strickland. The page was covered with photos of Jenna’s newly-deceased father, his late ex-wife, her daughter, Margaux— and Jenna herself, presumed dead.
According to the paper, when Jenna disappeared in ’78, the Stricklands had pulled out all the stops, fearing she’d run off to join the Moonies or Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple. After so many years, Colleen read, the family had come to terms with its grief.
Bullshit. Only . . . dear god, her own luck had turned, at last.
She pulled Jenna’s duffle bag out of the closet. The poems and letters were still inside, carbon-copied, as if one day Jenna had expected to be famous. She pored over the journals, recalling details about Jenna’s friends and relatives.
She deserved some of the Strickland money, and planned to go after it the only way she knew how: the same way the two lookalikes had survived Alphabet City. If the family challenged her, Colleen would explain any memory gaps by confessing to the drugs. Dope had damaged her brain. The lawyers wouldn’t find anything crooked, so long as no fingerprints of Jenna existed, and she saw no reason they would.
With a calligraphy pen filled with purple ink, she practiced Jenna’s script, not for the first time, copying the irregular loops and noting again the mood changes reflected in Jenna’s penmanship. She tried to think what to say, deciding to keep it simple.
I’m Jenna. I read about my father’s death. I would like to meet with Margaux.
She wrote Mr. Strickland’s address, sealed the envelope, and— lights out— stood at the window long enough to make sure the bum was gone. Giddy, she started to plan her new life. She’d rent one of the luxury lofts in Soho, fill it with elegant Japanese furniture and real art.
COLLEEN spent the weekend noting every detail she could remember about Jenna. The constellations she glued to her bedroom ceiling at eight, the blue streak she put in her best friend’s hair at thirteen. Her father’s succession of Afghan hounds. The family trips to the Islands that lasted ’til Jenna was fourteen.
Inside Colleen’s head, Jenna barked instructions. Don’t slouch. Wear your hair up. Wind the landlady’s pearls through a scarf. Cross your ankles and rest a hand in your palm. Remember St. Martins, where little Margaux nearly drowned.
THE call came on Monday, an invitation to meet for lunch uptown, with Margaux and the family lawyer. Colleen hardly slept that night, nervous she’d be expected to order off the menu in French. On Tuesday, she was ready. She downed one of her landlady’s valiums to ward off a panic attack, and carried Jenna Strickland’s birth certificate and the driver’s license Colleen had renewed with her own picture. When she saw the creep get up off the sidewalk to trail her, she ran down the subway stairs and ducked inside a train.
At the restaurant, Colleen snuck a look at the tiered mezzanine, and then turned her attention to seventeen-year old Margaux.
Other than her model-thin figure, the girl looked nothing like Jenna. It wasn’t just her coloring or the sweater dress straight off the cover of Elle. It was the confident way she swung her hair, showing off the diamonds in her ears. Before they sat down, Colleen endured Margaux’s hug and double air- kiss.
“I can’t believe I have you back,” Margaux said, tearing up the way Jenna used to.
“Me too, baby.” Colleen had rehearsed Jenna’s favorite endearment, although it made her feel like throwing up. “You’re all grown up.” She tucked a strand of Margaux’s silver-blonde hair behind the girl’s ear. Just the right touch.
She greeted Stuart Whitmore, the lawyer, an older man with a receding hairline. He offered a hand, and his brief examination of her chipped nail polish mortified Colleen. Unnerved, groping for conversation, she asked Margaux about their mother’s illness, told her she was sorry she hadn’t made it to the funeral.
Margaux brushed off her apology. “I had Nana and the family. Anyway, your father . . . He said he’d look for you again. Did he try?”
“I would have been hard to find.”
Margaux looked doubtful. “You look thinner. Old . . . older, I mean. Something.”
“It’s been awhile, that’s all.” Colleen forced a smile, pausing while the waiter placed steaming rolls on their plates.
“But why didn’t you ever go home?” Margaux reached for her arm, resting a hand there long enough that fascination overcame Colleen’s annoyance. Her new sister wore a three-banded ring that quietly said Tiffany’s.
Whitmore kept his eye on Colleen, and she was grateful that Jenna had taught her which fork to use. She ordered the same meal he did, minus the cocktail. He laced his conversation with comments only the family would recognize as fiction, but she was good at reading lies, and Margaux, who didn’t understand the game he was playing, cued h
er without realizing it.
Only once did a blunder cause Colleen to choke on a forkful of deviled crab. She hadn’t known Jenna took a semester off in her freshman year at Vassar. When Whitmore asked about it, she froze, aware of the alarm that flooded her face. She reached for her empty glass, and Whitmore waived a waiter to the table.
In the commotion, she found her wits. She cleared her throat and set down the water.
“That was when . . . it was only . . . I had an abortion.”
Whitman sat back in his chair, patting his mouth with his linen napkin. He nodded, apparently satisfied, and began talking trusts and accounts. She and Margaux planned dinners and plays.
THE three of them left the restaurant together. When Whitmore handed her into a cab headed downtown, Colleen waved her fingers and watched her new little sister cross the street. Her heart nearly failed when she caught sight of her stalker. He must have caught the train she’d taken to the restaurant.
He set off after Margaux with a sure stride, the shuffle gone. Off the junk? She watched with relief when Margaux climbed, unmolested, into a cab and shut the door.
She was afraid to go home. There wasn’t a single person in the city to welcome her, celebrate her good fortune, or advise her about the bum. Cops were out of the question. When the cab stalled in traffic, she paid the driver and took the subway to Chinatown to prowl her regular haunts. She wondered if two planets— the ones she and the overindulged Margaux came from— were ever likely to converge.
ON Canal Street, at an outdoor kiosk, Colleen won a free-for-all over a ‘Louis Vuitton’ handbag and tossed a wad of cash at the vendor. She was browsing the storefronts for jewelry, high on the thought she’d soon be able to buy what she liked, when reflected in a window she caught sight of stained sweats and an overlarge leather cap. She bolted for a subway entrance, wasting precious minutes locating the platform for the Nassau Street Line. By the time she was through the turnstile, the bum was right behind her.
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