“Wow, cool. Is that your interest, or is this a career move?”
“I want to open a spa, for ladies,” she said, still looking sidelong. “For health and beauty.”
“That sounds great.” I smiled at her. I could hear Bill and Sam behind me, chatting away like old friends—“Of course, the German outlook is always going to be the grimmest.” “Well, the Scandinavians, they’re not the most fun-loving bunch.” The foot traffic in the East Village was thick, the energy Friday-night high, as our improbable foursome wended its way through the familiar streets. I knew this was an emergency in progress, but it was going so well, it almost felt like a party.
We got to the hotel, and I proffered my credit card to the clerk behind the Plexiglas barrier as Sam and Valentina huddled behind me with Bill. “One room, for two people, overnight please.” The clerk looked around me to see the three of them—a clean-cut guy in rectangular glasses with two grubby, luggage-toting street rats. He looked at me, at my credit card, and back at them. “The room’s just for the two girls,” I clarified. “My nieces, from out of town.”
American Express approved of me, even if the clerk was still unsure. He slid a key and a receipt through the slot. “Checkout is at eleven,” he said.
We helped them get their bags to the room, Valentina and Sam thanking me with every step. “We’re gonna get a place tomorrow, Janice, I swear it, and we’ll totally pay you back.”
“I know you will,” I said, smiling. Sam unlocked the door to reveal a small, cruddy room with two twin beds and a TV. “But this is home sweet home, for tonight.”
They threw their luggage on the floor and started investigating the room. “Ooh, there’s a tub,” cooed Valentina, shucking her beat-up sneakers. “I’m going to take a bath.”
Sam sniffed her pits. “I could probably use one, too.”
“All right,” I said. We’d leave them to their bathing, but I told them I wanted them to stay in the room, not go running around the streets or anything. They had a long day of apartment hunting ahead of them, and I didn’t want to have to worry about where they were. And they had to promise to call me in the morning before they checked out, and let me know what the plans were. They swore they’d stay put for the night, bathe, watch TV, and fall asleep, so Bill and I accepted another round of Thank yous and You’re so awesomes and headed home.
I felt like skipping down the sidewalk, elated by my crisis-management skills and by Bill’s burgeoning friendship with Sam. “Wow,” he said, walking briskly beside me. “She really is unbelievable. Where does she get all that philosophy stuff from?”
“The public library,” I gloated. Sure, all parents bragged about their kids, but the one I’d picked out for us really was the most special.
“Wow.” He’d caught it, I could tell; he’d gotten the Sam bug. He had the same excited flush as I did—the flush of discovery, of success. “She seems like she’s in good shape, too, considering.”
So she did, now that he mentioned it—she looked better than I’d ever seen her. “I think she’s happy to be out of that place.”
We got home, and the first thing I did was call their hotel room. Valentina answered, sounding sleepy. Not drug sleepy, I told myself. Just tired. She put Sam on the phone. “Hey.”
“Just wanted to make sure you aren’t getting into any trouble.”
It had been twenty minutes since we left them. “We’re all right,” she protested. “We’re just watching cable. Don’t worry about us. We’ll call you in the morning.”
“All right.” I let her go.
Still, I called the hotel first thing the next morning, after an anxious night spent wondering if I’d just enabled a huge binge for them. Maybe they left the room after my call, went out pickpocketing or shoplifting or tricking for money, got a bunch of drugs, and ingested them in the hotel room I’d paid for. How better to celebrate your elopement from a halfway house?
“They checked out already,” said the clerk. “Not too long ago.”
Fuck. “Thanks.” I dialed Sam’s new phone. “Hey, it’s me. I thought you guys were going to call me. Let me know what’s up.”
Bill monitored the phones while I ran and showered; then, while he did the same, I puttered around, cleaning the house. Noon came and I called again. “Me again. Listen, just let me know where you are.”
We made brunch, and Bill had to leave for a Saturday-afternoon shift at the paper. I wasn’t going to sit by the phone all day; I took my cell phone and followed him out of the apartment with the grocery cart, intent on doing some chores. “Don’t forget, we have to approve the wedding programs today.”
“Seven o’clock,” he confirmed, kissing me good-bye in front of the subway stop. “I’ll meet you at the printers.”
I crossed the park to the grocery store, grateful for the roaring blast of air-conditioning that hit me upon entry. It was another beastly, roasting July day—not the day to be carrying all of your worldly possessions on a three-borough quest for a residence. I started combing the store aisles for staples, remembered a gallon of low-fat milk for Bill. And stopped still, laughing.
There they were in the dairy aisle, Sam and Valentina, carrying a bag of hamburger buns and a pack of sliced baloney. Valentina was eating a donut from the bakery display. They both stopped with their mouths open when they saw me. “Well, hello, ladies,” I said, gleeful. “So good to see you again.”
“We were gonna call you,” protested Sam, brow lined with sincerity, the corners of her mouth edged with powdered sugar. “We just wanted to wait until everything was worked out.”
I pointed at their baloney, still smiling. “Having some lunch in the meantime?”
“Well…” She grunted a little in frustration. “See, here’s what happened.”
I put up my hand: Enough. “Why don’t we go to my house for lunch, and we’ll discuss the situation.”
Sam’s already wide eyes got wider. My house? Here she expected me to chastise her, and I was offering them this bonus instead. Valentina’s eyes widened, too. “Do you have air-conditioning?” she asked.
“Plenty,” I assured her as we breezed through the rest of the aisles and headed to the checkout. Valentina reached out for a jar of mayonnaise, but I stopped her. “We have that, too.”
They insisted upon paying for their own groceries, not including the donuts they’d eaten. Valentina, I noted, had a supermarket bonus card. She counted change out of her coin purse like an old lady: “Sixty-three, sixty-four, sixty-five…”
We pushed the cart back across the park, Sam trotting at my side. “So the problem is, the check didn’t come today, and it’s not gonna come till Monday now. And we’re screwed. We found a place that’ll rent to us, but we don’t have enough to put down the deposit.”
“I see.” I indicated my building—in here—and noted the look they exchanged. I was acutely aware of how ritzy the place must have looked to Sam and Valentina, and how unritzy they must have looked to the doorman. Nothing to see here, just my nieces from out of town.
“This place is fancy,” noted Sam in the elevator.
“It’s not too shabby,” I agreed. I stopped and sorted through my keys at the door. “Here we are.”
All three cats peered up at us, the three humans, entering and then stopping in the doorway. “Holy shit,” said Sam, awed. “Look at your place.”
I pushed the cart toward the kitchen, flipped on the air conditioner, and started unloading groceries. “Well, put your stuff down, come on in. Bathroom’s in the hall, if you need it.”
They took a few tentative steps into the living room. “Holy shit,” said Sam again.
“It’s very lovely,” whispered Valentina.
I smiled, lips tight. It is lovely, far lovelier than I deserve, I’m sure, which has caused me no end of guilt, especially when faced with Valentina and Sam gawking like it was the Sistine Chapel. “Thank you,” I said. I stopped myself from saying, Make yourselves at home.
They looked aro
und for a minute, then Sam flopped down in the easy chair and Valentina perched on the couch. They ripped into the baloney and buns I placed on the coffee table before them. “Man, it’s comfortable here,” Sam enthused.
“So, what’s the plan?” I inquired quickly, perching on the edge of a chair. “How much are you short for the deposit?”
Sam took a huge bite of her makeshift sandwich and swallowed. “We have three hundred dollars, and we need five. But we just need it through Monday, because Monday the check’s coming. If the stupid city services hadn’t fucked it up, we wouldn’t need anything! And we didn’t want to ask you for it—that’s why we didn’t call. You already did so much for us.”
That much I believed—they really didn’t want me to have to bail them out again. They would rather have resorted to eating food in the store and camping out in the park. “So how were you planning to get it?”
Sam and Valentina looked sideways at each other. If they were planning to employ subterfuge to get the money, they were going to have to learn to communicate more subtly. “Uh, we thought maybe Alita could wire it to us, Valentina’s trans mom, but she hasn’t called us back. Or I could walk some more dogs, see if I could raise some cash that way. We haven’t figured it out yet.”
“I see that.” I looked at the clock: almost 3 P.M. Time to act, before the day faded away and they were rolling crackheads for nickels, or I was paying for another hotel room. I stood up, and they looked up at me, expectant. “All right. Let’s go meet this broker.”
“What?”
“I said, let’s go see these rooms for rent, and if you haven’t heard from Alita by then, I’ll put down the deposit. Finish your sandwiches, and we’ll go. And leave your bags here. You can pick them up tonight.”
There. Look at me, solving things again. I wanted to brush my hands together—finis. Maybe I wasn’t a trans mom, but I was some kind of mom. Sam and Valentina exchanged another look, happier this time. “Awesome. Thanks so much, Janice. You shouldn’t have to do this—”
“Come on,” I interrupted. “Time’s a-wastin’.”
It was a merry subway ride uptown to the broker’s office, the girls taking turns one-upping each other with gross stories about the residents of their former home. “How about Wally,” said Sam, eyes gleaming. “When he first came, he had, like, orange wax dripping out of his ears. And the wax had these dead gnats in it. So disgusting.” We got off the train in Harlem, walked a few blocks to the Broadway address Sam had written on an index card. It was a barbershop, with an easel in front reading CUARTOS PARA ALQUILAR, ROOMS FOR RENT, IMMIGRATION LAWYER, NOTARY PUBLIC.
We walked past the haircutting chairs to the small, walled-off office in the back, where several people sat slumped in plastic chairs as two women at desks made phone calls and photocopied IDs. “Can I help you?” asked one of the women, hand cupped over her receiver.
“We called before,” said Sam. “You said you had some rooms in the Bronx?”
The woman nodded, said something in Spanish into the phone, hung up, and pulled out a few index cards, which she sorted and dealt on her desk like a blackjack dealer. “Here they are.”
I peered over their shoulders to read the cards. 1 bedroom, window, clean, near D train, one person $100, two $150/week. 1 bedroom, no window, TV, quiet, near 4 train, one person $100, two $150/week. A sign on the wall read NO REFUNDS ON BROKERS FEE. Sam and Valentina debated the merits of the places, as I watched the woman at the next desk complete her transaction with a customer—she photocopied his ID, he signed an agreement, and off he went with his index card.
“What if they choose a place and they get there and they don’t like it?” I asked our broker.
“They come back and get another for the same price. But no refund on the fee if you don’t take any place at all.”
“We want this one,” decided Valentina. Clean, window, TV, shared bath, near 4 train, two $150/week. Two weeks in advance, plus the broker’s fee. Valentina opened her coin purse and pulled out a roll of bills held together with a rubber band, as I counted out a stack of twenties from my wallet.
“I need your ID and signature.” Valentina pulled out a nondriver’s license bearing the name Jesus Colón and a picture of someone who could have been her brother; she tittered to me and Sam when the broker reacted with the slightest look of surprise. The broker made a photocopy of the ID, and Valentina signed the typed agreement as Jesus. Meanwhile, Sam was writing her own agreement on a blank index card. I owe Janice Erlbaum two hundred dollars, July 16, 2005, signed: Samantha Dunleavy. “Okay,” said the broker. “And if you don’t like it, come back for another one. We’re open till seven.”
“Congratulations,” I said to them, shaking their hands. “You’re one step closer to living indoors.”
Unbelievable, I thought, as we walked toward the subway together; they were really going to pull this off. I thought the cheap, readily available room for rent was a myth; I had no idea what kind of real estate deals went down in the backs of barbershops. Valentina’s benefits could cover them both for a few weeks, and at seventy-five dollars a week for rent, Sam could easily live off her own benefits—since she was HIV-positive, she was entitled to a few. Of course, she was already talking about the jobs she was going to get.
“This one place I’m going on Monday, they give you paid training to be a security guard. I’d be great at that. Then I’m going to this other place to be a foot messenger, then I got an interview to be one of those street canvassers that raise donations for the environment.”
“I hate those kids,” I said. “They make me want to club seals.”
“You make a good commission, though. You can also do it for gay rights. Everybody thinks I’m gay anyway; maybe they’ll give me more money.”
We got to the subway, and I checked the time again: almost five-thirty already. No time for me to look at the room with them, but it seemed plausible that they’d actually find a place to sleep before nightfall. “Hey, I’m going to have to go downtown; I have wedding stuff to do, and then we’re going to a friend’s party tonight. But you guys have to call me this time, ha ha, because I have all your stuff. So let me know when you’re in your new place, and you’ll come down and get the stuff late tonight or in the morning, okay?”
“Okay.” Sam was grinning again, only slightly abashed. “Thanks, Janice. I know I say that a lot, but I mean it. And I promise I’ll call later. I would have called before. I just didn’t want to bother you.”
“Always bother me,” I instructed. “Good luck, and call me later.”
I was optimistic on the way downtown—this was working; this could actually work. On Friday morning Sam was still incarcerated with no contact in the halfway house until god knew when; now here it was Saturday night, and she was getting ready to turn the key to a room of her own. Well, a shared room of her own. Better than the last room she shared with Valentina.
Bill met me outside the printers. “Let’s hear it,” he said, upon seeing my face.
“Okay, so I leave you this afternoon, right, and I go to Food Emporium…” I caught him up on the story—running into them, the missing welfare check, the barbershop, the index cards. “Anyway, they just left me a message while I was still on the train; they got to the place, they liked it, they’re taking it. They want to pick up their stuff tonight around midnight, after we get back from Noah’s party.”
“Great.” He swung the door open and held it for me. “Good thing you decided to do the grocery shopping, wife.”
We entered the printers, and the clerk showed us the programs Bill had designed, the picture we took on the night of our engagement on the front. “Don’t you look happy,” the woman said.
Didn’t we, though? We’d just handled a successful elopement. Bill looked at me and grinned, rakish.
“We are,” I said, my hand over his. “We really are.”
Chapter Ten
Make a Wish
I was sitting with Sam on a thick log bridging the
Bronx River, our feet dangling above the black water. Sam had led me here from her new place—a clean, decent-sized bedroom with wood floors and a window, a double bed and a TV, in a nondescript apartment carved into three Sheetrocked spaces, each locked from the outside with padlocks. There was a small, shared kitchen, and a shared bathroom with no toilet paper; the residents of the three spaces supplied their own. Sam showed me around the place like it was Trump Tower. She’d been particularly proud of the “balcony”—actually a fire escape, accessible from their window, which overlooked the busy street below. “This is better than the TV,” she bragged, inviting me to climb out and see for myself.
“It’s great,” I agreed. “I’m really happy for you guys.”
The log was the next stop on our tour of their new room and its environs. “This place is awesome,” Sam promised, as we descended a stone staircase by the Grand Concourse, shuffled down a steep, muddy embankment, and navigated through the muck to the banks of the river, where we clambered up the damp branch. And now here we were, sitting comfortably on the smooth, curved limb, surrounded by the dark green summer trees, the river hurrying excitedly underneath.
“This is awesome,” I marveled. “How did you find it?”
Sam’s mouth twisted into a suppressed smile—she’d impressed me yet again. She shrugged, like it was nothing. “Me and Valentina found it the other day. We were fencing with sticks right over there; it was so fun.”
“Ah.” I smiled, enjoying the idea.
We sat and watched the river, let our toes point, felt the slight mist from the stream tickle our legs. I had something to ask her, something Bill and I had been discussing, but I had to work my way up to it. “So. You saw the pulmonologist on Thursday?”
She gave me the shrug again, and I saw how bony her shoulder was getting, the weathered PSALMS 22 tattoo sticking out from her sleeveless black shirt. “He says I’m doing all right. I just have to be careful about infections aggravating the asthma. As long as I take the prednisone and stuff, I should be all right for a while.”
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