by Tonya Kappes
“Yes,” I did a “Gone with the Wind” fabulous twirl to show her my unity.
“Pathetic.” The words spat out of her mouth sinking my twirl in mid-spin. She sat back down and pointed directly at Pete. “I thought you fired her.”
“I hadn’t seen her yet,” Pete said through his gritted teeth and he pushed his chair back from the table, rolling it next to me.
“Fired?” I dropped my bag on the floor and I fell right into Pete’s lap. “I thought…”
“Time to go, Luvie.” Pete stood up, pushing me up with him and grabbed my elbow.
I flung my arm so hard away from his grip that I think I pulled it out of its socket, but the pain didn’t affect me nearly as much as the shock of getting fired.
“Why am I getting fired?” There was no reasonable explanation. I had done every single thing they had asked me to do. I sewed, retrieved, mailed, printed, and even lied to competitors at shows for this company.
“We are downsizing, and don’t need but one or two assistants in the office. Since you are low-man…er…woman…” Pete shut up when I put my hand out for him to stop.
He sat back down. I pulled my hands down and put them on the conference table to keep Pete from spinning, only he didn’t stop. The entire room spun around like a big Kentucky tornado, and I was used to riding those out.
Oh shit, oh shit. My stomach curled and I was about to puke. I jumped up and made it to the trashcan in time to deposit last night’s celebratory Chinese take-out dinner.
I stood up and turned back around. Sasha and everyone else had the same mortified look on their faces. I took the sleeve of my expensive blue Sasha suit jacket and wiped it across my mouth, leaving a stain of red lipstick along the sleeve.
“You have been fired.” Sasha snapped her lean fingers at Pete. “Get her out of here.”
“Oh no you don’t,” I wagged my finger at Pete as he came toward me. I bypassed him, and grabbed my fifty-dollar Starbucks drink out of Sasha’s diamond-encrusted fingers and used my finger to smear her orange lipstick from the lid. I took a drink because I had to get the old Chinese-food taste out of my mouth. “Mmm…this is good.”
Sasha’s mouth dropped open.
I turned on my heels and with my head held high, walked right out of Sasha Designs…forever.
Chapter Three
“Oh. My. God,” I kept repeating as I tried to scrub the lipstick stain off the sleeve of my overpriced suit. The jungle red lipstick smeared with each swipe of the scrub brush. I moved my head to the side wondering if the salty tears dripping off my chin were causing the stain to get worse or helping with the cleanup.
Whether I wanted to or not, I had to take the damn suit back. Sale or no sale.
Beep, beep. My cell phone text messaging beeped from deep down in my Prada bag. With hopeful thinking, I went to get my phone, and on the way I threw the suit jacket in the sink and peeled the pants off, leaving them on the floor so I wouldn’t ruin them too.
“Don’t you dare, Iggy!” I screamed at the little ankle-biter Yorkie that belonged to my roommate. “No! You go pee on your pee-pee pad!”
It was like slow motion. Iggy hiked up his leg and before I could get back to the pants, he had peed on them.
“Really?” I threw my hands in the air and went back to get my phone. “Could this day get any worse?”
It was probably a question I shouldn’t have asked.
The text message wasn’t Pukey Pete or Sasha apologizing to me and begging me to come back to work because they fired the wrong girl; it was my cell carrier letting me know that I was way past due on my bill and as of that moment my cell was turned off!
“What am I going to do?” The couch cushions wrapped around me like a warm blanket as I fell back and landed on them. Since this was my bed in our tiny apartment, I grabbed the quilt Granny had made and pulled it over me. I made my decision. “I’m not coming out of here. That is what I’m doing.”
Yip! Iggy jumped out of my way just in time before I crushed him when I drew my legs up on the couch and flung the cover over them. Iggy came back over and stood on top of me, licking my tears.
“Where is your mom?” I pushed him off me and glanced at the old plug-in clock with the blue light-up numbers. It was ten o’clock in the morning and Birdie was never gone this early.
“Birdie?” I got up to go look for her and Iggy followed me into the small kitchenette. Suddenly I was hungry or maybe wanting to eat away my sorrows. I grabbed the old Chinese takeout box from the counter and used the chopsticks to separate the cold and hard vegetable fried rice before stuffing my face. Eating Chinese food that had set out overnight probably wasn’t a good idea. Was it going to kill me? No problem. Living wasn’t a good idea to me at that moment anyway. I kicked the bedroom door with my foot to tell Birdie to take out the dog. “Birdie.”
The bathroom door was open so I knew she wasn’t in there, but I checked anyway. There was a note stuck to the mirror.
Luvie,
I have a client! Take care of Iggy; he likes you better anyway. Take your rent to the landlord. I took mine before I left. I will be back in a month or so. If not, spot me for next month’s rent.
Birdie was just that, one strange bird. When I found her ad on Craigslist, I thought for sure it was going to be a temporary stay for me. Three years later here I stood, in the bathroom, holding a crazy Yorkie, and soon to be evicted. All of us.
When I responded to the ad, the only question she’d had was, do you smoke, because she was severely allergic to it. I responded no and she accepted me sight unseen. I sort of wished I had seen her because she was a little scary with her spiked black hair, army boots, and fatigues. That was likely just a phase she was going through until she found her “true calling,” as she put it.
Birdie cleaned up pretty well in cropped jeans, cardigans and loafers after she googled images of suburban mothers on the Internet. Birdie had decided that she wanted to be a donorsexual, a fancy name for an egg donor.
Only Birdie took her new job to a complete extreme of crazy. She carried hand sanitizer everywhere she went so she wouldn’t get sick, used a cheese cloth to cover her mouth from the fumes of the city—even though there was no way of escaping it—and she never hugged anyone. I’d say that was why Iggy was always begging for my attention.
Who was I to knock anyone’s career? Hell, I bet donating eggs paid more than what I was getting paid…nothing.
Rent. That was the last thing on my mind. I took the note and crumbled it up before I threw it on the floor.
“Don’t eat that,” I said to Iggy when he went to grab it and kicked the note along the floor. I held the chopsticks down to the floor. “Here.”
His nails clicked on the old hardwood floor as he danced around trailing the chopsticks as I made my way back to the comfort of my couch.
I sat back down on the couch and Iggy jumped up next to me. I dropped a few pieces of rice in the palm of my hand for him to eat before I sat the old Chinese on the coffee table and pulled the quilt back over my head.
Rent. The word haunted me. There was no way I couldn’t pay. I couldn’t do that to Birdie.
I jerked the cover off my face and glanced over at my Prada bag resting on the floor next to the coffee table.
I reached out, not wanting to move an inch from the comforts of the couch, and dragged the computer bag to me. I put my hand in and dug around for the baggie.
I dumped the coins on the coffee table and sorted out the quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. Unfortunately, there were far more pennies than silver coins, or paper money for that matter, and it was exactly one hundred and twenty dollars short. Every single penny to my name was in that bag.
Suddenly, the fancy Java Chip Frappuccino in a Trenta cup wasn’t sitting so well in my stomach. I needed money. I glanced around at my meager belongings. There wasn’t much more I could sell that I already hadn’t slowly gotten rid of over the past three years.
I ran my hand over my beautifu
l Prada bag. I had even printed off a picture of that exact same bag and put it on my vision board in Kentucky, before I even made my trek to New York.
“No,” I begged my inner intuition to stop talking to me. Was I having one of those Oprah “ah-ha” moments? The ones she said tugged at your gut until something awful hit you in the face and you said to yourself that you should have listened to your gut when it started tugging?
“Oh,” I whined. There was no way I could keep it since I needed to pay my part of the rent. Birdie was counting on me and I couldn’t put Iggy in the doggie pound…could I?
Arrr. Iggy snarled and showed his little vampire teeth like he knew what I was thinking.
“You did pee on my suit.” I pointed to the Sasha blue pantsuit that had a small greenish spot on it from Iggy’s yellow pee mixing with the blue fabric. “But I’d never put you in a doggie pound. Lucia would kill me.” I picked Iggy up. “She’s going to kill me anyway.”
Lucia Beiderman was not someone to cross. I knew it firsthand. After all, she was my mom. She begged me to go in a different direction in my college career, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I had to get out of Lexington, Kentucky and out from under the Beiderman name.
She’d be happier to see Iggy than me. After all, the Beidermans hosted the annual SPCA and homeless shelter fundraiser every year. Telling Lucia I couldn’t put Iggy in a shelter would warm her heart, but not enough to keep her from telling me “I told you so” about coming to New York City to follow my dreams.
“All right.” I peeled the guilt off me and dragged it to Birdie’s room. Iggy closely followed. “Time to go.”
I grabbed the only bag I could find. Birdie’s beloved camouflaged duffle bag was going to have to do the trick. I threw in a couple of clothing items (including my Juicy sweat suit), pee-pee pads and folded up Granny’s quilt, leaving enough room for Iggy to fit in because I wasn’t sure if he could ride on the bus. A bus to Lexington didn’t sound so great but an airplane ticket was completely out of the picture.
I left a quick note for Birdie to find when she got back and grabbed my Ziploc baggie before taking one last look around the apartment. My gut pulled. This was the last little bit of my dream that was going down the drain.
“Since when did my dream consist of a six-hundred square foot apartment with crap furniture and no money?” I looked down at Iggy who was dancing on his hind legs and his front paws were beating my shins, begging me to pick him up. I bent down and pulled him up in the crook of my arm. “Ready?”
He licked my face. I flung the duffle bag over my shoulder. With Iggy in one hand and the Prada in the other, I closed the door behind us. I closed the door on my life-long dream.
Luckily, the landlord lived underneath us, so I dropped off the money and a note in his rent box. In the note, I told him to pawn the Prada and use any extra cash to have the apartment cleaned. Then I headed straight for the Greyhound Bus Station.
***
“One ticket to Lexington, Kentucky.” I held the duffle bag steady across my shoulder. I had stuffed as many clothes as I could possibly stuff into the bag I borrowed from Birdie and Iggy. Unfortunately, Iggy wasn’t like Paris Hilton’s cute little Yorkie that was always calm while being totted around in her designer bag. Maybe being stuck in a camouflaged “save the earth bag” wasn’t Iggy’s idea of traveling in style.
The lady behind the Greyhound ticket counter eyed my bag as I fought to keep it from jumping around like one of the jumping beans you see in the plastic containers in the little food marts all over New York City.
“It’s so heavy.” I smiled and threw in a little more of my southern drawl. When all else fails, pretend to be a tourist. “I tried to stuff everything I bought while visiting this fine city, but hauling it back to my momma and daddy is proving to be difficult.”
There wasn’t another single word exchanged between the two of us. I had taken the money from my share of the rent to pay for the bus ticket and left the rest for the landlord with the Prada bag…hopefully that covered my share.
Chapter Four
The bus station in Lexington was empty when the Greyhound pulled in. Iggy was squirmy and so was I. We both had to pee and did the shimmy-shake dance until we made it to the bathroom. I locked us in the stall and pulled one of his pee-pee pads out of the duffle bag.
“Now what?” I asked Iggy when we got finished doing our business.
The clock in the bathroom read two o’clock a.m. If I called Lucia or Leonard at this hour, they would not be happy. They definitely weren’t going be happy when I told them I had been fired, especially since they had begged me to come home—on a weekly basis.
It wasn’t that they didn’t want me to live my life; they wanted me to live my life here, in Kentucky, and take over the family business. Being on a farm was not my cup of tea. City life? That was way more fun. If only I could afford it.
When I declared Fashion Merchandising as my college major in my second year at The University of Kentucky, Lucia and Leonard freaked out. They thought I would go into Equine studies since they, we, were horse royalty in Lexington.
Leonard Beiderman, my father, was world renowned for his expertise in horse training and all things racing. Daddy didn’t beat around the bush when it came to horseracing or me. It took a little convincing and “daddy’s girl” talks to get my dad to see my side of things. He always had a way of helping Momma change her mind. Reluctantly and with much fussing, Lucia finally accepted, not agreed, but accepted, that I was not going to carry on the Beiderman name or family farm. I was going to be a fashion star.
While living in New York, I had become accomplished at making fake static noises over the phone when they called. It was my way of getting off the phone and not listening to them scold me for living the way I had been…poor.
I would argue that I was learning how to depend on myself and had created a good work ethic not to mention I was an up-and-coming designer…the operative word being was.
At the moment, I was longing for my old Zips tennis shoes that had the little zipper on the side. Lucia used to stuff those zipper pockets full of quarters, telling me that you never knew when you needed a quarter to make a phone call. That was when there were pay phones, which were rare nowadays.
I patted around the duffle bag in case Birdie had left a quarter in the bottom. There was no way I was going to walk home from the bus station. Unfortunately, I didn’t find one.
I sat down on the bench right across from the old phones, all lined up on the wall. There weren’t too many people I could call in the middle of the night.
“Who can we call?” I bit my lip and rubbed Iggy’s fur. He yelped when my fingernail snagged one of the mats in his fur. It drove me nuts that Birdie never gave the poor dog a bath or had him groomed. That was the first thing I would have to do if he was going to live in the Beiderman household—at least temporarily live in the Beiderman household. Temporary would be about all I could take. “Think, Iggy. Who can we call?”
Granny. Was I desperate enough to collect call my mother or scared enough to collect call my grandmother? Granny it is.
I picked up the phone off the hook and uncurled the dirty steel chain that connected the receiver to the base. I carefully dialed, following the instructions on the tag that was screwed in by the push buttons. I had to try to guess the last of the four steps due to someone having carved obscene images on it with a sharp object.
“Caller, what is your name?” The operator’s voice was annoyingly nasal.
“Luvie Beiderman,” I said. The static on the old phone was a reminder of how much technology had changed. I held the receiver away from my ear and quickly untangled the chain cord when I heard the ringing on the other end.
“Hello?” Gloria Beiderman answered the phone. Her chirpy voice made me warm and fuzzy inside. Granny had always believed in me.
“Will you accept a collect call from Luvie Beiderman?” The operator asked.
“Hello?” Granny asked again. M
y stomach dropped. Granny and I texted a lot, but we didn’t talk often on the phone. She was getting up in her eighties. I hoped she wasn’t losing her hearing.
“This is the operator. Luvie Beiderman is asking for you to accept a collect call,” the operator said.
“Gotcha! I’m not here right now. I’m probably playing poker because bingo is for old fogies and just because I live in a place for the near dead, I’m nowhere near dead! Leave a message.” Granny laughed at the ignorance of someone falling for her answering machine.
“I’m sorry, no one is home.” The operator’s voice was flat. “You will have to try your call again later.”
“Please leave a message,” I begged. If only Granny could hear my voice talking to the operator, I knew she’d answer. She was there. She had to be at two a.m. “Please.”
I closed my eyes. I had hit rock bottom. I was not beneath begging.
“Luvie, is that you?” It sounded like Granny had dropped the phone after she really had answered it.
“Granny!” I screamed.
“Ma’am, Luvie Beiderman is trying to place a collect call…” The operator tried to go through her spiel but Granny was good at taking over.
“Of course I’d take a phone call from my granddaughter you nitwit! Don’t you know her name? She’s a big-time fashion designer.”
“I’m sure she is.” The operator wasn’t buying Granny’s story. “Caller, go ahead.”
Granny interrupted, “Are you in that big new apartment? Did you just get back from a fancy party? It’s late.” Granny asked all sorts of questions.
“I’m at the Greyhound Bus Station on New Circle Road.” I had to stop the madness. I was already embarrassed enough.
“I’ll be right there.” Granny hung up before I could even say goodbye. There wasn’t much explanation needed. Whenever I had a problem, Gloria Beiderman was there to pick me up, literally.
After we hung up, I grabbed the duffle bag and went to wait outside in the glass shelter. For a little while, I was entertained by the writing on the glass “call Mike for a good time 555-5555” and the mustache drawings on the models in the advertisements.