A Special Place for Women

by Laura Hankin

  As Nicole began to speak about why female leadership was so important, Miles and I grinned at each other. I snuck a glance around the room. Everyone leaned forward, as if Nicole were a magnet pulling us all in. Some of the women watching had tears in their eyes. Only one other person was looking at the audience instead of the speaker: Margot Wilding. Her lips curled into a strange, secretive smile.

  As Nicole wrapped up her speech and the thunderous applause began, my phone vibrated with a text from my mother. How is it???? she’d written, the text accompanied by roughly a million emojis. (She’d gotten very into emojis.)

  I showed it to Miles. “I think someone is excited that I’m here.”

  He smiled wide. “I’m glad.” He nodded to where Nicole was shaking hands and posing for pictures as the applause continued. “I know we’re supposed to try to remain neutral, but she’s incredible, isn’t she?”

  “She is. Thank you so much for bringing me.”

  “Of course. We miss you around the office,” he replied. “I can’t wait for you to come back to writing full-time and blow everyone away.” Suddenly I had a hard time meeting his eyes. Dammit, I was developing a very inconvenient crush. I turned back to watch Nicole, and Miles turned too. As he brought his hands up to clap for her, his ring flashed in the light.

  Yes, in addition to being so kind and so dreamy, Miles was also so married.

  * * *

  • • •

  Now, at Raf’s opening, Margot took in my worn black tights, then my frizzy hair, then the delicate silver chain I wore around my neck. Something shifted in her face at the sight of it. “Oh, your necklace. It’s so beautiful. May I?” She didn’t wait for an answer, simply leaned forward and lifted it up to look at it. The audacity of her, to touch a stranger’s neck! She was probably the kind of person who thought it was no big deal to use her roommate’s toothbrush, except that Margot Wilding had never needed to live with a roommate in her life.

  “I’ve been looking for a piece like this. Something antique-chic,” Margot said. She examined the necklace’s pendant—a small art deco flower in silver and green—as another well-wisher pressed up against Raf, monologuing about plantains. “Where did you get it? Is it Prada?”

  “No,” I said, suppressing a snort at the thought that I could afford something like that. “It was my mom’s. Or, actually, my grandma’s, and then she gave it to my mom, and now it’s mine.”

  “Sweet of your mother to give it to you.”

  “Well, she was dying, so she didn’t have much use for it,” I said, the words coming out like a joke, spiky and flippant.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Margot said, letting go of the necklace. She kept her hand where it was, though, and in a soft, quick movement brushed one of her warm fingers against my cheek. “I also lost a mother too young. It’s a shit club to be in, isn’t it?”

  “It really is.” For a moment, we truly looked at each other. She seemed on the verge of saying something more, but then one of her hangers-on approached, whispering into her ear. As Margot turned her head to listen, I caught a glimpse of a tattoo behind her other ear, a dark bird in flight. A raven, maybe? Margot nodded, then put her hand on Raf’s shoulder. The other person who’d been talking to him ceded the floor immediately.

  “I have to go to another event,” Margot said, “but I’m glad I got to see what all the hype was about.”

  “All the hype?” Raf said, and flushed, tugging on his cap again. “Oh man. I hope we lived up to it.”

  “Adorable,” Margot said. “You’re totally a Virgo, aren’t you?”

  “Um, I think so?”

  “Well, you more than lived up to it. I’ll be eating here all the time, if I can get a reservation.” She smiled, then widened her eyes as if the most wonderful idea had just occurred to her. “I’m having a party Thursday night. Just an intimate gathering. You must come. I’m sure my friends would love to hear about the restaurant and support you in any way they can. Let me give you the address.” She dug in her bag for a pen. “I don’t have any paper . . .” She looked around, then grasped Raf’s forearm and scribbled an address in Soho onto his bare skin, marking him, writing the street name in looping cursive. No apartment number. Was she having it at a restaurant, or did she simply live in the entire building?

  Maybe the address that Margot was scrawling on Raf’s arm was that of the Nevertheless clubhouse. No, they wouldn’t have a party with men allowed in there. Their clubhouse was reserved for more secretive things. Worshipping one another’s menstrual blood or sitting around feeling smug about their successes while professing to feel concerned about the world.

  “Come by any time after nine,” Margot said. Power move to have a party on a weeknight, declaring that the benefit of being around you was worth the hangover at work the next day. “It was nice to meet you, Rafael.”

  “Oh, you can just call me Raf, everyone does,” he said.

  She smiled. “I’ll see you at the party, Raf.” As she turned to go, she glanced my way. “You should come too, Julia.”

  She waved, then swept out the way she’d come, people’s heads turning to follow her. Raf looked after her, somewhat flummoxed. “Okay, so she’s famous?” he asked, and I nodded. He looked down at the address on his arm. “I’m going to sweat this off in about five minutes.”

  “You must go,” I said, rolling my eyes, as I pulled out my phone and took a picture of the number for him. “God, I bet all the Nevertheless crew will be there. Maybe if you get really lucky, they’ll make you their male sacrifice.”

  “What are you talking about?” Raf asked. “What is Nevertheless?”

  “Oh, Raf, you pure and beautiful boy,” I said. “It’s a secret club of elitists who’ve crawled so far up one another’s assholes that they’ve bought themselves pieds-à-terre up there.” Raf knitted his eyebrows together in confusion, so I went on. “A bunch of rich women who like to feel influential. Though I guess some of them really are. Like Margot, who, if she tweets about your restaurant, will create a line down the block. So you should go to her party.”

  “Well, then,” he said, shooting me a sly look. “You should come with me, Julia.”

  “Right.” I snorted and took one more gulp of my drink, the mint at the bottom flooding into my mouth. I picked it out, less than gracefully. “And go hang out with all of Margot’s friends and feel terrible about myself? No thanks. Besides, it’ll leave you free to get yourself some very important ass. I think she thought you and I were dating, and I think she was disappointed.” A crowd started gathering, shooting me little looks to wrap it up so that they could have their turn with the man of the hour. “Okay, I’ve taken up enough of your time. Talk to your other adoring fans.”

  He grimaced. “Do I have to? I thought part of the deal with being a chef was that you got to hide in the kitchen.”

  “Tough luck.” I gave him a kiss on his scratchy cheek. “Congratulations again.”

  TWO

  I stumbled out of the restaurant, drunker than I’d planned on getting. The cool night air knocked reality back into me: I no longer had a job. It came in that sudden electric shock of remembrance. You know the one? You manage to forget for a little while that your life has changed irrevocably and then: zap. Your heart sinks, your stomach drops, insert-other-shitty-but-true-clichés-here. Like all those mornings over the past couple months where I’d woken up thinking that I still had a mother, and then had to reorient myself all over again.

  God, my finances had already been a mess. All of our savings had gone to medical bills. And all the proceeds from my mother’s house, where I was still living (squatting?) while wrapping up the sale, would go to those bills too. But the money stuff wasn’t the scariest part of Quill shutting down. I could probably get my old bartending job back, from the place where I worked during grad school.

  The scariest part was that I had already fallen so far behind
on my writing during the years I’d spent caretaking and grieving. Now it was going to be even harder, if not impossible, to catch up. And there weren’t exactly a million stable journalism jobs floating around.

  I headed to the subway, feeling lonely, lonely, lonely. Happy for Raf—he deserved all the success in the world—and also resentful, because how dare anyone I knew have success when I didn’t? No, I wasn’t going to become one of those people who just offers themselves up to jealousy like an all-you-can-eat buffet. I was going to figure something out.

  My coworkers all had good clips, some contacts at other media outlets. I had exactly one contact: Miles, who’d left Quill for a job at a respected print magazine—the New York Standard—just a couple weeks ago.

  Miles probably didn’t want to hear from me. Still, with tequila and rum buzzing in my system, I pulled out my phone and typed up a text to him: Hey there, assume you heard the exciting news about Quill—coffee next week so I can pitch you some stories for the Standard?

  I stared at the screen. “Just send the text, bitch,” I muttered to myself, and did.

  The train came, its cars sparsely populated at this time of night. I checked the nearest open seat for suspicious liquids and, coast clear, collapsed onto it. Then I took out a leather journal and began to scribble down story ideas, word vomit. Might as well use the hour-long subway commute for something productive. As the train lurched, the thrum of actual vomit started up in my stomach. I took a slow breath to hold it off. No puking on the train. This wasn’t my twenty-first birthday.

  As we crossed over into Brooklyn, the door between cars slid open, and a man came through, dragging a bag on wheels behind him. He was middle-aged, with unfocused eyes, wearing a weathered Windbreaker. He sang to himself as he dragged his bag from one end of the car to the other, singing slow and serious, like a hymn. The sweetness of his baritone voice distracted me, so it took me a moment to place the song: “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by The Four Seasons.

  My mother and I used to sing that song all the time. We did it to make each other laugh when we were going stir-crazy in hospital rooms, or when we felt hopeless and sharp. And I sang it to her the day we watched Nicole Woo-Martin’s inauguration on TV.

  Because even though the establishment candidate had every advantage, somehow Nicole had won. “Mark my words, that woman is going to be president someday,” my mother had said as Nicole raised her right hand and became New York City’s first female mayor, her supportive, schlubby husband at her side. Tears rolled down my mother’s cheeks. She’d spent hours making phone calls to voters on Nicole’s behalf. She’d ordered herself a T-shirt with Nicole’s face on it. “I’m grateful I’m still alive for this.”

  “Hey, it’s okay,” I said. When her tears kept coming, I put on my most terrible impression of a Frankie Valli falsetto and began to warble our song.

  “This is different, Jillian,” my mother said. “This is history.”

  But as I sang the chorus like a cat in heat, her tears turned to laughter. We stood up and shimmied in front of the TV while Nicole smiled in her scarlet peacoat, and the room was incandescent with hope.

  Now, as the subway slowed down at the Jay Street–MetroTech stop, the singing man paused by the door. Then he turned his head and stared at me, his green eyes locked on mine, as he continued his song. His eyes looked like hers, so gentle, like they wanted to wrap me in love as he sang our song to me. When the doors opened and he jaunted off the train, I didn’t want him to go.

  Because he wasn’t only himself. Somehow, my mother’s spirit had gotten inside of him. She had floated down and attached herself to an unlikely host so that she could see me again.

  My phone dinged in the window of belowground cell service, startling me back to reality. A response from Miles. Awful about Quill. How about we meet up Monday for a coffee?

  Perfect, I typed back.

  I was being drunk and ridiculous. My mother was dead, and whatever spirit she’d had was dead too. Maybe we all had souls while we lived, but they didn’t carry on after our deaths, riding the New York City subway, brushing past Showtime dancers and creeps with their dicks out. There was no need for me to have a mental breakdown. Plenty of women lost their mothers much sooner, or lost much more than their mothers. The fact that the great tragedy of my life so far was losing my mom at age twenty-nine actually meant that I was luckier than most. Big girls don’t cry.

  And big girls don’t vomit on the subway either. They unlock their front door, run to the toilet, and hold back their own hair. So that’s what I did.

  THREE

  On Monday morning, I dressed in my professional yet attractive best and took the subway up to the midtown coffee place Miles had suggested, a soulless chain with rickety chairs and bored baristas. Had he picked it because it was convenient or because it was the least romantic spot in the neighborhood? I grabbed myself a coffee, black, and sat at a table to wait. The coffee I’d already downed before leaving home was making my limbs jitter and my heart race, but I sipped at my new drink anyway, as if the solution to Too Much Coffee was MORE. I crossed my legs and then uncrossed them, trying to remember how to sit in a chair.

  Miles walked in the door, his button-down shirt a little rumpled. He spotted me and ambled over. “Beckley, hi,” he said as he approached.

  “Hi!” I stood up, and we did the awkward dance—should we hug? Handshake? We settled for waving at each other from across the table.

  “Let me get a drink,” he said. “Want anything?”

  “Double whiskey, neat,” I said. He smiled weakly. “Kidding! Bad joke. I’m all set.”

  I studied him as he waited to order. Miles had grown up a high-achieving prep school boy, taught to worship at the altar of Thoughts and Words, assured at every step that his mind was worthwhile. Once he’d landed in New York, his guilt at his privileged beginnings transformed into a healthy antiestablishment streak. At Quill, he’d come to work in faded T-shirts, his hair mussed, determined to hold the people in power accountable for their excess, pushing all of us under his purview to dig deeper, to be better. He was our hard-ass high school English teacher, our cool boss, and our extremely talented friend.

  Now, his brief time at the New York Standard had already turned him distinguished. He’d started trimming his beard more neatly, strands of it beginning to gray. He looked grown-up, every inch the married thirty-nine-year-old intellectual he was. Goddamn, it was sexy.

  He settled into his seat. “So, how are you doing?” he asked. I could not wait for the day when people stopped asking me that with such concern in their eyes.

  “Fine,” I said. “I mean, it sucks about Quill.”

  “I always knew Peter was liable to pull a dick move with the company, but I didn’t think he’d handle it quite so horribly.” He shook his head. “Anyway, how can I help you?”

  I dug my nails into my thigh and took a deep breath. “Obviously I know that the Standard has very high . . . well, standards. But I have a bunch of long-form ideas that I think could be a great fit.”

  He nodded, his expression serious. “Sure, tell me what you’re thinking.”

  I pulled out my notebook. “Okay. The New York water supply. Turns out the aqueducts that carry it here are crumbling. I could get into the dysfunction of replacing any kind of big system in New York City—”

  “We’ve already got a regular staff writer on a similar assignment. Water is in right now, strangely. What else?”

  “Right,” I said, swallowing. “Well . . .” I moved to the next pitch on my list. “The plant market for millennials. Like, the new Crazy Cat Lady is a Crazy Plant Lady, but why are people so obsessed all of a sudden? Is it because—”

  “As it becomes harder to dig oneself out from under student loans, traditional markers of stability like children are getting pushed back, and plants are an easy substitute?” he asked.

  “Well . . . yes.�
��

  “Already been done.”

  I pitched him my other ideas, each one progressively less fleshed out, and he had a kind but firm rebuttal for all of them. Finally, he folded his hands in his lap.

  “Look, I think you’re a great writer, and I want to help you. But we’re getting a flood of pitches right now, and I have to be incredibly selective since I’m so new. Maybe you need to take some time to think about the thing that only you could write.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Got it.”

  “Now, I have to get back to the office.”

  I was an idiot. He’d come into this meeting hoping to hear ideas that he could dismiss, so that he could tell himself he’d given me a fair shot. But he wasn’t going to put himself into regular communication with me again for a story on the stupid water supply, not after what had happened between us.

  * * *

  • • •

  When I came back to work after my mom died, everyone treated me like I might break at the slightest poke. Sympathy is nice and necessary when it’s fresh. But if you leave it out too long, it curdles like old milk. For the first few days, I was happy enough to take the offers of free coffee, the With deepest condolences cards that people left on my desk. But by the end of the week, when a coworker looked at me like I was a baby seal trapped in an oil spill, and asked me yet again, “No, really, how are you doing?” I snapped.

  I stood up at my desk and yelled, “Office announcement!” Heads turned. Miles spun around in his chair and cocked an eyebrow. “I’m planning to get extremely drunk at happy hour today, and if you want to do something to make me feel better, you can come ruin your livers with me. Otherwise, please start treating me like a normal human being again, or I’m going to rip apart the water cooler with my bare hands. Okay?”