and the rest of the patrons dropped their forks for a round of applause.
Mom stepped up beside me bearing the pink cake box, now tied shut with red-and-white baker’s twine.
“Dude,” I said, grinning at her, “I fucking love New York.”
2
It was Sue who’d found our apartment originally, back when she was still a film student at NYU. I’d known her since boarding school when she’d walked up and introduced herself to me one September morning because we were both class presidents that year—her freshman and me junior, respectively. I’d asked her to look out for my little sister when Pagan came east with me to join Sue’s class the following year.
The apartment was a prewar two-bedroom in Chelsea—West Sixteenth between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, no doorman. Sue now hustled her ass off shouting into phones for a production company that made TV commercials, uptown, which taught her how to wring maximum juice from the city on our pooled crappy paychecks.
She briefed us on who had the best Chinese delivery (Empire Szechuan Greenwich, not Empire Szechuan Village, though they were a mere block apart), the best bagels (H&H), and the closest place we could get same-day dry-cleaning without paying extra if we showed up by seven and made nice with the counter lady.
Pagan and Sue shared the smaller bedroom, and when they’d needed new roommates in June, my husband, Dean, and I had schlepped down from the Berkshires.
We’d come to New York hoping he’d get into a management-training program with the Transit Authority. He’d done contract work on the subways during his Upstate youth, but to garner a permanent gig it turned out you needed an Uncle Vinnie in the union. So now I was taking book-catalog phone orders while Dean sent out résumés and did odd carpentry jobs for our friends’ bosses and parents around the city.
There was money to be made for any likely young man with a power drill, given the stunning proportion of shop-class flunkees amongst Manhattan’s well-heeled—one guy even paid him fifty bucks to hook up a VCR—but the gigs weren’t exactly leading toward anything Dean wanted to be when he grew up.
And then there was the whole bored-boomer-wives-ogling-the-strapping-young-blond-guy-in-coveralls routine, which didn’t sit any too well with me despite my intrepid spouse’s continued reassurance that, say, being met at the door of a strange apartment by some fifty-year-old StairMaster-fiend wrapped in nothing but a bedsheet left him rather more embarrassed than titillated.
I was explaining all this to Mom as I followed her into the lobby of our building.
“Not a fitted sheet, I hope,” she said, as we reached the stairs.
“Dean didn’t specify,” I said. “Except to say it had cartoon trains on it so he figured it was from her son’s room.”
“Trains? Good God… hardly seems as though she was even trying, does it?”
Mom laughed, but the idea of my marriage being even vaguely at risk made me dizzy with angst. Dean was my refuge, the bulwark of my very sanity.
“That still means it was a twin sheet,” I said, my voice echoing in the stairwell as we climbed upward. “So she wasn’t exactly, like, swamped in fabric.”
My mother shrugged. “Probably didn’t have the figure for a negligee.”
“Way to be maternal, Mom.”
Having been raised in a landscape of divorce-shattered families, I considered matrimony a construct of gossamer fragility—equal parts swan’s down, lighter fluid, and willing suspension of disbelief.
Mom and I had reached the landing and I opened our apartment’s front door, following her into its narrow front hallway.
“I’ll just put the cake in your icebox,” she said, ducking around a half-dozen trays jammed with the tiny paper cups from Sue’s dentist that awaited vodka-spiked liquid for the evening’s Jell-O shots.
I thanked her for buying the cake, which I hadn’t expected, and wandered toward the living room.
Pagan and Sue were rolling on a second coat of the paint we’d picked out that morning at Janovic, up near Twenty-third, Sue precarious on the top rail of a stepladder, Pague balanced all nonchalant on one thin arm of the hideous seventies-Danish-tweed sofa that had been gleefully abandoned by the previous tenants.
A stranger would’ve pegged me and Sue as the sisters. We weren’t each other’s long-lost secret twins or anything, but we both had green eyes, darkish blonde hair, and beaky noses.
My actual sibling, meanwhile, was brunette like Mom and looked straight out of Gauguin, had the man ever happened to paint the girl’s All-Tahiti soccer captain carrying her surfboard down the beach.