Heels of Steel

by Barbara Kavovit

  On the worst days at school, when the girls teased and the boys leered and the teachers droned on and on, Bridget would sit at her desk and look out the window and longingly wonder what project her father would decide on next.

  Chapter 2

  Bridget made it through high school, but just barely. She was smart, but wildly distracted. She regularly got into trouble, cutting classes to make out with boys under the bleachers, failing tests, mouthing off, picking fights with bullies. She bet her father sometimes wished he’d never taught her to make that fist. Years later Bridget would realize that she probably had an undiagnosed case of ADHD, but at that time she was just told she wasn’t trying hard enough.

  The neighborhood was beginning to make her feel smothered. She knew everyone and everyone knew her—Bridget Steele, the girl with the big boobs and even bigger mouth. This meant that her every move got reported back to her parents, that she never had the luxury of making a mistake that she didn’t immediately have to answer for. She started dreaming of getting out, of hopping the 6 train and heading into Manhattan, where she would be a stranger to everyone she met, where she secretly and desperately started to believe that she really belonged.

  But her parents had a plan for her first—Hostos Community College and then transferring to a four-year CUNY. She went along with it. Good girls went to college, after all, and, despite everything, deep down, Bridget still wanted to be a good girl.

  She met Ethan Jackson on her first day of Business Org 101. He was tall and handsome, with dark brown skin and close-cropped hair. He sat directly behind her and poked her in the back with his pencil.

  “Ow!” Bridget turned around and glared. “What the hell?”

  “I’m Ethan.” He smiled. She had to admit that it was a killer smile. “What’s your name?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Bridget Steele. What do you want?”

  He blinked at her innocently. “Pardon me, Bridget Steele, but your hair is too big. I can’t see the chalkboard.”

  Her mouth dropped open, then she turned back around in a huff. He poked her again. She whirled back around.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “I was just kidding about your hair. Want to get a cup of coffee after class?”

  Ethan was from Queens. His black father had died young and he’d been raised by his white mom. He was smart and a little nerdy and spent his childhood lonely and between worlds, just like Bridget had. They went out twice before he kissed her.

  They were at the Bronx Zoo—in front of the bear exhibit. The grizzlies were rolling around like fat old men in their wading pool and Bridget and Ethan were laughing hysterically. Bridget turned, giggling, to check if Ethan saw the little brown bear that was trying to sneak into the pool, too—and Ethan leaned toward her, a question in his eyes. Their lips met midlaugh.

  The kiss was a disaster. All wrong. Like kissing her own hand or her reflection in the mirror. Bridget pulled back, her nose wrinkled. She could tell from the comical look on Ethan’s face that he felt the same way.

  “Wow,” said Bridget, “that was really, truly terrible.”

  Ethan laughed. “Truth. You want to try again? Make sure?”

  Bridget shook her head. “Nah.” She already knew they were never going to be more than friends, and actually, she was more than a little okay with the idea.

  Ethan nodded. “Fair enough, Steele. Wanna go see the giraffes? I hear they look frigging hilarious when they run.”

  * * *

  Despite making a friend for the first time in years, Bridget continued to live at home and grimly battle her way through college in much the same way she had battled her way through high school, mainly doing it to please her parents—most especially her father. But she was bored, restless and broke, and nothing she was doing seemed to get her any closer to her dreams of getting out of the Bronx.

  If she kept following the path set out for her, she knew exactly what would happen: graduation, some sort of half-decent, excruciatingly boring office job until she met the “right” guy, got married and took an apartment, maybe even in the same building where her parents still lived. Kids, bills, temple, Friday night Shabbats split between her parents and her in-laws, an occasional family vacation to somewhere not very far away... It was a fine life; she knew that. One her parents desperately wanted for her. Good, basic, decent and safe. And the thought of it made her want to jump out the nearest window.

  One night, close to graduation, struggling through yet another paper she had no interest in writing, Bridget thought about that bunk bed, and she came up with a plan.

  She skipped classes the next day to visit Danny Schwartz, the friend of her father’s who used to come over occasionally and help them build. Danny was a fixture in the neighborhood. A lifelong bachelor, he worked the night shift as a security guard so he had his days free, and, most important, he could fix almost anything. He was the guy her father called when he’d exhausted his own extensive knowledge of carpentry. Danny had always been more than happy to help, and sweet to Bridget when he visited, bringing her rolls of cherry Life Savers, and teasing her good-naturedly as they worked.

  After Bridget visited Danny, she had a stack of business cards printed up: “Don’t fuss! Call us! Stand-Ins. Let Bridget Fix It!” and then drove all the way out to Westchester, where she knew people had more money. She stood in shopping center parking lots all over Scarsdale, handing out those cards to rich, harried housewives.

  She never forgot her first job. Replacing all the trim around the interior doors for Mrs. King. Bridget still wore the tool belt her father had bought her. It hung neatly just below her slim waist. She hovered by Danny’s side as he mitered pieces of three-inch clamshell casing and handed them over to her. She carefully took each piece and nailed it onto the wall jamb around the door. When they were finished, she stood back with a huge grin on her face, and only just barely stopped herself from dancing around the room. It was perfect.

  She kept handing out those cards for months, getting more and more projects and combing the local newspaper for tradesmen available to work. She would interview them and try to match the job description of the ladies who called with the trade. She sealed driveways, tightened doorknobs, hung ceiling fans, fixed cracked ceramic bathroom tiles. One satisfied customer referred her to the next, until she had a steady trickle of work.

  Bridget made it a policy to never turn anything down. She booked the jobs, bought and delivered the supplies in her brown 1975 Buick LeSabre and made sure the clients were happy. Danny was Bridget’s right-hand man and dependably fixed anything beyond Bridget’s capabilities. They usually split the profits 60–40 in Bridget’s favor.

  Time passed, she graduated college by the skin of her teeth and instead of accepting the safe assistant financial analyst job at the local bank that her parents wanted her to take, she invested in power tools, traded up her LeSabre for a Ford Econoline E-250 van, convinced Ethan to come on as her assistant and eventually realized that her little handyman business had grown into something much more than she had expected. They weren’t just painting bedrooms and hanging shelves anymore—they were taking down walls, renovating kitchens and then finally, after she delighted a client with a bathroom renovation that came in ahead of schedule and under budget, she was hired to renovate their entire house. It needed a complete gut and rebuild, and they were willing to pay her one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It was the biggest job she’d ever been awarded.

  * * *

  On the day Bridget got the deposit for the house renovation, she went to the bank, thrilled to see so many zeros below her name. The bank teller was the same woman she always dealt with, probably twenty years older than Bridget, small and sweet-voiced, with brown skin and a neat, shining cap of silver hair. She had a melodious accent that Bridget assumed was Middle Eastern.

  “Oh!” exclaimed the woman when she saw the check. “Very good! Very goo
d, indeed! Your business must be doing well, then?”

  Bridget laughed. “It really is,” she admitted. “Finally.”

  The older woman hesitated, her hand hovering over her computer keyboard. She looked up and met Bridget’s eyes. “You know,” she said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper, “pardon me for saying this, miss, but I see you coming in every week and depositing your checks. And I see that you are making excellent progress. And I just want to tell you that you really should have a business account, not just be using your old savings account.” Her eyebrows knit as she looked at her screen. “It says here you opened this fifteen years ago with your parents?” She shook her head. “This really won’t do for building a successful business. And there are many other options rather than just savings, you know? Ways to invest where your return will be more satisfying than this piddling percentage.”

  Bridget smiled. Building a successful business. She loved the sound of that. She glanced at the woman’s name tag and read, Bibi Hashemi.

  “You sound like you know what you’re talking about, Ms. Hashemi.”

  The woman shrugged. “I had my MBA in Iran. I helped run my husband’s tea business until we had to leave. It was very successful.” She laughed ruefully. “Not that my degree does me any good here. Here, I am just a bank teller.”

  Bridget bit her lip, thinking. “Maybe I could buy you lunch one day? Pick your brain about investments? About the best way to financially build my business?”

  Mrs. Hashemi gave her a shy smile in response. Her cheeks went pink with pleasure. She shot a look at the teller next to her, who was watching them through a suspicious squint. “I would very much like that,” she whispered as she hurried to deposit Bridget’s check.

  * * *

  Her parents were increasingly alarmed as they saw their daughter getting more and more entrenched in her business. Bridget’s mother begged her to stop this nonsense. Whoever heard of a lady contractor, anyway? It was ridiculous and probably dangerous, too. How was Bridget supposed to stay safe in this kind of world, surrounded by nothing but men? What would the neighbors think? She begged her daughter to stop dreaming, get a grip and do exactly as she had done: get a decent, predictable job, find a decent, predictable man, get married and settle down in the neighborhood and be the respectable woman she had been raised to be.

  Bridget’s father was less worried about what the neighbors thought and more concerned about the lack of a dependable weekly paycheck.

  “What if something happens? What will you do for health insurance? How will you put anything away in your retirement savings? We just want you to be safe, darling,” he said to her over bagels and coffee at the breakfast table one morning.

  They were arguing over whether Bridget should apply for an office job at her mother’s school.

  “We want to be sure you’re taken care of,” chimed in her mother.

  Bridget took a bite of bagel and shook her head. “Guys, the whole point is that I can take care of myself.”

  Her mother sighed, her hand to her heart. “But why in the world would you want that? That sounds so terribly lonely.”

  * * *

  The house was a mammoth job, bigger than Bridget had initially imagined. Suddenly, she wondered just what she had gotten herself into. What if her parents were right? It was one thing to be running a little side hustle helping housewives hang some wallpaper—but a whole three-story house that needed to be demoed to its studs and then built out again? Who was she to think she could pull this kind of thing off? For weeks she worked all day and worried all night, meeting with the owner and the architect, poring over the blueprints, reviewing the bids of various subcontractors and vendors and finding the extra crew she would need.

  Half the men working for her were new. Some had been recommended by Danny, but some of them had simply answered the ad she’d put in the local paper. Bridget almost laughed at the looks on their faces when they came in to interview and found themselves nose to nose with a twenty-three-year-old general contractor wearing a ponytail and red heels. A couple of the men had simply turned and walked out when they saw her; one had immediately suggested that she suck his unmentionable parts, and more than a few had condescendingly sneered through her questions, their eyes bouncing between her lips and her chest like they were watching an X-rated tennis match. But worried about having enough manpower, Bridget hired them, anyway.

  The first day of demolition was the worst. Bridget felt the mood change as soon as she walked through the door. She was wearing tight jeans and a fitted black tee, a pair of cute little heeled Timberland work boots that she’d found half off at a fire sale and a custom purple hard hat that Ethan and Danny had presented to her after she signed the contract on this job.

  The room was bustling with activity; the men were laughing and teasing each other, setting up their equipment, taping up windows with plastic and protecting the floors. However, as she walked from room to room, pointing out a corner they had missed, a scrap of floor still exposed—this, Bridget would soon discover, was her superpower: noticing the smallest bits and pieces of a job and never letting them go undone—she could see their faces go stony, the darting looks and eye rolls exchanged behind her back. The men needed these jobs, yes, but that didn’t mean they had to pretend to like or respect the woman who hired them.

  “Hey, Joe,” Bridget said to the project manager she had painstakingly vetted and hired, “I heard the architect dropped off some updated sketches for the downstairs powder room. Can I see them, please?”

  The older man turned to her, a big, shit-eating smile on his face. “Right there on the table, missy.”

  Bridget decided to ignore the flutter of anger in her belly at the word missy as she bent over the table and unrolled the blueprints. She smelled Joe’s cheap cologne as he stepped up next to her, a bit too close for comfort. He reached over, took the papers out of her hands and flipped the pages.

  “I think you’re reading those upside down, dear,” he said with a wink.

  The room erupted into hoots of laughter as Bridget rapidly blinked, her face aflame, thinking for a moment that he had been right—that she was the idiot who truly didn’t know what she was doing. But then she shook her head. Of course the sketches hadn’t been upside down when she was reading them. They were upside down now. He’d done it for a cheap joke. To make her look like a fool. And, judging from the continuing laughter of the men who were supposed to be working for her, it had worked.

  Bridget went still, recognizing that her response to this moment was going to be everything. She could laugh it off, pretend that she was in on the joke rather than the butt of it, be the good-natured boss with no grip on her men’s respect.

  Or she could make a fist like her father taught her to do.

  She swallowed, straightened her shoulders and tilted her chin up so that she was looking Joe square in the eye.

  “You’re fired,” she said quietly.

  The laughter instantly died. Joe’s grin faltered. “Wait, what?” he said.

  “You’re fired. Pack up your stuff and go.”

  The man’s puffy cheeks flamed red, and a dangerous glitter came into his eyes. “Are you freaking kidding me?” he spat out, taking a step toward her.

  Bridget felt, rather than saw, Ethan and Danny walk up behind her, building a wall of support. She made a little sign behind her back, warning them not to step in. “Don’t worry,” she said, smiling sweetly into Joe’s irate scowl. “I’ll send you a check for the—” she checked her watch “—twenty minutes you were on the job.”

  There was a smothered bark of laughter from one of the men, and then silence again as they waited to see what would happen next.

  A muscle in Joe’s jaw twitched and leaped, his eyes darting to the men standing behind Bridget, and then back to Bridget herself. Finally, he turned his back on her.

  “I didn’t want to work
for a bitch like you, anyways,” he muttered as he stepped away.

  Danny and Ethan surged forward, but Bridget caught their sleeves, holding them back. She turned toward the rest of the room. “Anyone else?” she asked. “Anyone else not want to work for me? Because I’m not getting any less bitchy, and if that’s going to be a problem, now’s your chance to go.”

  The men shifted uneasily, avoiding her eyes. No one said anything.

  “All right, then,” she said. “Get back to work.”

  It was only after she got home that night, after she’d smiled and nodded at her parents when they asked how her day went, calmly ate her dinner and helped her mother clean up, removed her carefully chosen work clothes, slipped into the shower and turned it on full blast, that she finally let herself cry.

  * * *

  It wasn’t exactly easy after that, but it was better. The men settled down and got to work, and if they had negative opinions about her, they mostly managed to keep those opinions to themselves. For the first time Bridget realized that, if she was going to make it in this business, and be considered equal, she was going to have to be twice as tough, five times as competent and ten times as smart as any man. Good enough was never going to cut it for her. There would be no second chances; she didn’t have room for even one misstep. But strangely, this kind of pressure brought out the best in Bridget. Every time she caught another mistake before it happened, signed a contract for a larger job, stayed a little later, came in before anyone else showed up—she felt an unfamiliar thrill.