The View From Penthouse B - By Elinor Lipman Page 0,2

won new readers. Though she’s not much of a stylist, her writing is lively and her pen poisonous in a most engaging way.

Living here is interesting and soothing. It’s a beautiful apartment with what Margot calls “dimensions.” Hallways veer this way and that, so you can’t see from one end of the apartment what’s going on in the other. The building has doormen, porters, and a menagerie of fancy purebred dogs. Edwin and I lived more modestly in a ground-floor, rent-controlled one-bedroom on West End Avenue. The Batavia shares its name with a Dutch ship that struck a reef off the coast of Australia in 1629. Amazingly enough, most of its shipwrecked passengers survived.

I Next Considered

MY ONCE-RELIABLE FREELANCE job was writing copy for bill inserts issued by utility companies, the slips of paper that offered tips on insulating and reducing customers’ carbon footprints. Occasionally I’d get to write 250 to 300 words about a heroic, lifesaving deed, usually CPR or a Heimlich maneuver performed in the field by a hard-hatted employee. When customers switched to e-bills, my assignments dwindled to nothing. Every day I read front-page stories about professionals combing every inch of second-fiddle job listings, and there I am.

I don’t like to blame what pop psychologists call “birth order” for my situation and motivation. If I did, I’d have to accept that being the middle child has a major influence on how I approach the world and those gray areas that fall loosely under the heading “relations.” Still, I wonder if some of my professional dead ends had to do with my growing up between perfect Margot and formidable Betsy.

I majored in education in college, a safe and appealing concentration—until I got into the classroom. Even as a student teacher, I dreaded every minute, every smart-aleck eighth grader, the smoke-filled teachers’ room and its burned coffee, the married gym teacher who liked me and his guidance-counselor wife who did not.

I lived at home, in Hartford, which might have contributed to my less-than-amorous twenties. Like today, I helped around the house and read the classifieds. After my retirement from education at twenty-two, I took the summer off, sleeping late in my childhood bedroom, the empty parakeet cage and The Partridge Family poster reminding me that time had passed. I lunched with unemployed high school girlfriends who hadn’t moved away, either. My father, one of dozens of vice presidents at one of the city’s insurance company’s world headquarters, gave my anemic résumé to what in those days was called Personnel, despite my objection that I didn’t want a job because of nepotism or mercy.

Soon enough, when asked in a social setting what I did, I could answer “administrative assistant.” My boss wrote the magazine-size glossy annual report and I typed it all up, correcting his grammar and punctuation. Within six months, he told someone in Personnel, whether out of admiration or annoyance, about my eye for typos, and soon I had my own cubicle, dictionary, thesaurus, and pencil sharpener, proofreading insurance jargon all day long in what felt like solitary confinement.

I lunched with my father almost daily until there wasn’t a single cafeteria worker who hadn’t heard him say a half-dozen times, “This is my daughter, Gwen-Laura. She works here now.” I’d nudge him and add “His favorite daughter” in such a way that always elicited a chuckle and at the same time signaled to our audience that Jim Considine loved all his daughters equally. It was at one of our lunches that he asked if I had any desire to get my own place. Margot, for example, struggling to make ends meet, had nonetheless found that garret in the Bowery. And Betsy, too, was happy living with people her own age.

I reminded him that Betsy was still in college, living in a dorm, so I didn’t think she should be held up as a paragon of residential courage. I said that I did want to be on my own, a white lie I hoped would soon be the truth. Again, looking back, I wonder: birth order. Middle child. Brown-haired daughter between two hazel-eyed blonds. Maybe I needed extra parental attention to make up for . . . well, for nothing. Every one of the three Considine girls, we would discover after first my father’s death, then my mother’s, thought herself to be the favorite child.

As Margot contemplates various angles for a possible memoir, I’m thinking of writing something, too. My premise is good: A woman widowed relatively young moves from