The Bag Lady Papers

by Alexandra Penney

  Of course I was plenty worried about money. These weren’t bag lady fears; these were fears that came from being a mother, with a primary responsibility to be a good parent. I believed that feminist fairness called for me to pay half of my son’s private school tuition and to contribute as much as I could for his food and clothing. My husband, who still had his job as an industrial designer, would give us as much as he could for child support. If we didn’t have enough, we would apply for a scholarship so that our child could go to his uptown school without interruption. Separation and living downtown in a dramatically different style, away from his friends, was an enormous upheaval for a child. Our son needed as much familiar continuity as possible. Throughout this period, I was convinced that even if I had to work four jobs and sell Avon cosmetics door to door, I would make enough money to start a new kind of life.

  And that is how I feel—most of the time—these days. I will do it. I will earn enough money so that I won’t become a bag lady. I’m not sure exactly how but I will make it happen. I will write; I will make art. I will set up a Web site. I will create something that will bring in money. When the demons stage a full-scale assault, I yell at myself that I can do it—over and over again. And I convince myself. And I will do it.

  Although I painted the new living quarters white, they were a major comedown from our uptown home with its spacious living room and stone fireplace, its formal dining room, and its large windowed kitchen. On most weekends my son would head to Vermont with his dad and then my place seemed pretty grim. I was lonely and uprooted but I kept my spirits up by thinking, This is all my own and I’ll find something great as soon as I’m more settled financially.

  I slept in the living room, my son had the bedroom, and every day we made a game of the long subway trip uptown to his school. I would drop him off and head back to look ceaselessly for a better and larger space so I would have room to work. Lofts abounded but they all needed “fixing,” which meant painting the walls, putting in lights, bathrooms, and kitchen—installing everything needed for a bare-minimum existence.

  I couldn’t afford to pay “key money” for the lofts that were available with the basic improvements. Looking for a place to live was, as it always is in New York, a discouraging process. I went street by street, building by building, asking supers, owners, artists, anyone I could collar, if they knew of space for rent. I thought I was running my life, but then I realized real estate was completely in control. It was a depressing time. Often on weekends, when my son was away, I would lie in bed for hours and not want to eat or move. Finally I heard from a building owner that a small-job electrician might want to rent a space on West Broadway. The gallery scene was just beginning to flourish and SoHo’s wonderful cast-iron buildings were about to be developed by uptown real estate barons. The wide street was in a central location and, most important, it was safe.

  It wasn’t a loft, it wasn’t an apartment, but it was perfect. It had been a small outbuilding on a farm a hundred years ago. Two floors, each one far smaller than my uptown living room, were newly painted with titanium white walls. The kitchen was made for very small people: it measured less than five feet square, but it had a window. All in all, it was about six hundred square feet. The rent was $350 per month, not including electricity. In addition, Irwin, the landlord and electrician, wanted a security fee of $475.

  I didn’t have the money but I desperately wanted the place. P, my assistant from the days of the French photographer shoot, happened to be with me when the electrician had shown me the space. She offered to lend me the money. It was the first and last time I have ever accepted a loan. But she was gracious and insistent, and I wanted the place so much that I took her up on it. I paid her back, fifty dollars a month plus a tiny bit of interest, over the next year.

  My son and I and our Norwegian elkhound, Pookabee, moved in. I adored the creaky steps, the uneven wooden floors, and the windows that looked onto the night-and-day industrial busyness of West Broadway. We had no furniture to speak of, as I had paid the last of my savings for a bed and bookshelves for my son, who had a room of his own.

  I rented a huge industrial floor-sanding machine and shined up the old wood, then cleaned and waxed and scrubbed until the entire place was as spotless and gleaming as I could make it.

  Metropolitan Lumber was around the corner and they gave me a great deal on some unusable wooden doors and sawed them to size at no charge. I sandpapered, painted, and painstakingly gold-leafed them, and then devised a way to install them as sliding panels on the windows so we had privacy at night. I slept on a mattress on the floor next to my son’s room, and organized my paints and canvas rolls and stretcher bars on the floor below.

  Every morning after I returned from taking my son to school, I stood at the window of my sweet small space on West Broadway, where I could watch the famous painter Alex Katz walking down my street with his black dog, its tail wagging nonstop. I was on my way to becoming a genuine artist. But I needed money. The cosmetics project had come to an end. I had to pay for half of my son’s school tuition plus rent, gas, electricity, food, phone, subway fare, my own tuition at graduate school, and art supplies.

  I decided to call Alexander Liberman, an artist and sculptor as well as the legendary editorial director of Condé Nast. While I was at Glamour we often discussed the art scene, and I had told him about wanting to be a painter full-time.

  When I phoned his office, his secretary remembered me and gave me an appointment to show him slides of my paintings. He didn’t end up furthering my career as an artist, but he did something that was more crucial for me at the time. Mr. Liberman offered to pay me a thousand dollars a month as a “roving editor” for Vogue. My responsibilities were light: a meeting once a month where I would present ideas that other editors could produce, and one written article with any shoots necessary to illustrate it. It was a perfect job!

  A guaranteed twelve thousand dollars a year was good money but not nearly what I needed to make ends meet. I scoured the Help Wanted section of The New York Times every morning on the subway coming back from my son’s school. I was limited to jobs that allowed me to pick him up in the afternoons. And somewhere and somehow I had to find the time to finish my master’s thesis at Hunter and paint.

  I found a listing for teaching English to aspiring models. I researched the borough of Queens, where I’d never stepped foot, and figured out a way to trek by subway to the outer reaches, for an interview at a shopping mall. The “school” was two small ramshackle rooms situated on top of an outlet store. The classroom consisted of twelve brown metal folding chairs and two overhead fluorescent light fixtures. I landed the job at fifteen bucks an hour for two hour-and-a-half sessions per week.

  Another stroke of good luck from the Help Wanted ads found me two subway stops away teaching journalism at a junior college. Sixteen bucks an hour for the same two days a week.

  The roving editor routine plus the two Queens jobs broke me down. I was thrilled to have the work, but soon I felt that I was counting out my life, not in coffee spoons but in endless subway loops. The time spent belowground added up to far more than the time I spent in class.

  After a semester of this grind, luck again came my way. A friend told me that Bloomingdale’s needed a copywriter. They liked my credentials and hired me for two full days a week, and I could still leave early enough to pick up my son at school.

  Around the same time, The New York Times posted a listing for a journalism teacher at the Fashion Institute of Technology. After four interviews I acquired a new title, Professor Penney. I told my Queens colleagues that I had found work in the city for the next semester, and the aspiring models air-kissed me good-bye. I was switching employers at a dizzying rate, but I finally began to feel some financial stability and that, at last, my life was definitely on the right track.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Kindness of Friends and Strangers

  MF + 5 WEEKS

  Since the MF, I wake up every morning a
t 4:46 by the red lights of the digital clock. Anxiety twists through my veins. I imagine that if I curl into the tightest ball maybe I can crush it away. But it’s no good, of course. To short-circuit the demons, I snap out of bed, pull open the curtains, gaze out onto a magnificent platinum moon in the luminous gray-blue sky.

  The world appears to be exactly the same as it was BMF. Some skyscrapers are already alight with worker bees booting up their computers—or maybe they’ve been there all night on overtime hours to make ends meet. Suspendered, bespoke, pin-striped-suited, John Lobb–custom-shod bankruptcy lawyers are making big bucks in this economy so they, too, are probably arriving before dawn to strategize their day. More windows are illuminated by early-rise type-A moguls frantically counting the millions they are losing in the meltdown. At first glance, the scene may look as it always has for the last ten years, but inside those offices, everything may actually be very different.

  I pad into the kitchen with its gleaming granite counters and its maple and glass cupboards loaded with beautiful china that I’ve collected over the years. My mother, although withholding in many ways, gave me trays and plates and bowls made of sterling silver from the time I was a young girl. She was certain, I’m sure, that I would lead a life in which these items would be in constant use. Hence I developed an early delight in fine things, and I embarked on the high road to the slow accumulation of Baccarat glasses and exquisite china—all potential items for eBay now. As I wait for the coffee to drip into my mug and peer out the window, I can see the Lipstick Building, as New Yorkers have nicknamed Philip Johnson’s rounded, pink edifice. What an irony! From my own window, I can see directly to the MF’s offices, where he did his scheming and stealing and where my savings disappeared. As I look at it, I feel the now-familiar gutsickening rise of panic. What am I going to do? What if I fall ill? What will happen to me? SNT—now!

  An adjoining apartment building obstructs a small part of my view but I am always tracking the light in a unit that is a few floors above me. Summer, winter, fall, and spring, a light is always on. I can see the glow at all hours of the night, and during the day if the sun isn’t shining. Rays of chilly fluorescence emanate from the window. I imagine they’re from an old staticky television with bent rabbit ears or from an institutional overhead unit that sheds an unblinking cold light onto a dreary room with old stained brown Barcaloungers facing the decades-old television set and tables full of yellow prescription bottles and greasy bifocals.

  The sad light has beamed out of the windows for at least a dozen years. I’ve always wondered who lives there. I visualize an old woman who sits in one of those chairs, with a raggedy crocheted blanket at her feet, unable to read because her eyes have undiagnosed cataracts or macular degeneration. She is afraid of the dark.

  The building is in a good neighborhood and quite fancy, with its own part-time doorman, so I imagine that she has enough money to have an aide come in during the day a few days a week so that she can be found in case she should fall and break a hip on her way to the bathroom. The aide, an unsmiling woman, would have her own family in Ecuador or Colombia and is sending money home to her children; she makes sure the TV chatters nonstop to give a feeling of life in the airless room. She cooks some canned soup for her client, who never complains. But maybe there’s no aide at all, and it’s a social worker assigned to the woman’s case who stops by weekly.

  This old woman of my imagination is lucky. She has a roof over her head, enough money to pay the rent, maintain minimum electricity, and pay the aide, if indeed there is one. She probably has a telephone to call 911 and of course she has her television.

  When the demons descend on me, the image is starkly worse and more tormented. I’m alone and abandoned in a state hospital with some sort of slowly suppurating terminal illness, with attendants who don’t care about anything except a paycheck to feed their families. I’m just waiting to die and wishing I had had the foresight to get my hands on some capsules of almondy cyanide to wipe me out of the horrible world I’ve found myself in.

  I wonder if my fear of institutions comes from the year my mother spent at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic after her nervous breakdown when I was six. I heard whispers about “electroshock” and words like “convulsive,” but no one would tell me what they meant. I knew they were something scary. From my grandmother’s house in Boston, I would talk to my mother every Sunday on a staticky phone with a gummy black receiver by an old brown sofa with lumpy springs. Her voice was always sad and far away. My grandmother had very little time for me, and one of the clearest visions of my childhood is of my aunt’s tall green oxygen tanks and nurses caring for the dying woman with scary, blue-blotched skin and small atrophied legs, whose large airless room was next to my small dark one.

  It’s close to six a.m. now and the papers have finally been deposited at my door. I must remember to stop delivery today, as I need to save every dollar and I don’t read them anyway. Since the MF terrorized me, it’s impossible to read the news because that rictus smile of his is everywhere, with hundreds of inches of print about him dominating the pages. Plus, if I start reading, the unbelievable irresponsibility of the SEC will overwhelm me with anger.

  I down my coffee to the dregs, stuff a load of laundry into the washer, and spy the shiny canister of a new rug cleaner stowed under the sink next to the box of Tide.

  I get to work scrubbing out every spot—even the pinpoint-size ones—on the carpets in the bedroom and living room. I will have these carpets for the rest of my life. The furniture better be polished and each new crack tended to. No breakdowns or scratches or wine spills allowed. How could I pay for refinishing, reslipcovering?

  Everything must last until my last minute on this earth. It’s not an upbeat thought. But eradicating the stains is cathartic, and reminds me that I still have some control. It’s the loss of control that really is the root of all my panic and wild imaginings. When I had my hard-earned money, starting way back in those years when I was working multiple jobs to support my son, I felt I had some control over what would happen to me. This morning, however, I at least have some control over my rugs.

  Saturday and Sunday are mostly spent in more bouts of terror and body-paralyzing panic, with calls and e-mails from Richard and Alex to calm me down. This weekend is a low point—the shock is over, the adrenaline of the first weeks has waned, the noise about my blog has quieted, and I’m alone with my new reality. I am swilling down tranquilizers but at the same time being careful not to take too many. I worry about addiction—another problem that I surely can do without. I need to find a psychopharmacologist who can tell me about the safety of the Klonopin I’ve been taking, and whether there’s anything else that might help with this horrible anxiety.

  When I called my internist the morning after the MF catastrophe, I mentioned my dark ideas about hemlock and almondy-smelling capsules.

  “Thoughts are not actions,” he said. “You haven’t done anything to hurt yourself. But there’s another way to look at this. Right now you have very little control over what’s happening to you. By telling yourself you have an out you are saying you have control over something, your own life. You are actually doing something healthy, exerting control. As long as your thoughts don’t translate into actions, you’re fine.”

  I have no control over what happens with the SIPC money, and it torments me. Because I had money in an IRA account, my situation is different from most of the other investors. Each day yields a different response—different and, maybe, worse. I’m often told, “Don’t expect a cent.” Other lawyers and victims I’ve met through e-mail say “Maybe $100,000, but don’t count on it.” On a great day, someone will respond, “It’s possible you could recover the full $500,000 from the SIPC.” But no one can say anything for sure. There are no rules about who’s getting—or not getting—what or when, if ever. It could be a decade or more before the bureaucrats at the SIPC decide what to pay out and to whom.

  Everywhere I look I face uncertaint
y. Before December 11, when I saw the market going haywire and the newspapers writing about a “deep recession,” I believed that even if I lost a good percentage of my savings, with extremely careful budgeting I would still have enough money to live on, even if I had to make major changes. But to lose every cent? To be robbed? I’d never conceived of robbery or theft, they weren’t part of my bag lady fears. A reasonable amount of money in my Madoff savings made the terrors lose some of their potency and I had been pretty sure that, even with the meltdown, I could survive decently.

  Now I live in a claustrophobic shroud of ambiguity. Will I receive the SIPC insurance proceeds? How much money can I reasonably expect to earn—if any? Will it ever be possible to have a small but reassuring amount of money in the bank, so if another catastrophe occurs I can weather it?

  This skyrocketing uncertainty is the most debilitating and disheartening aspect of what I’m now facing and I’m certain it’s the cause of my four a.m. anxiety attacks. A psychologist at Harvard, Daniel Gilbert, recently wrote about uncertainty in an op-ed piece in The New York Times. He described an experiment involving shocks in which some participants knew in advance they would always get an intense shock, while others knew they would have only a few intense shocks along with a series of milder ones. Those who had been told beforehand they would always receive an intense shock showed fewer symptoms of fear, such as rapid heartbeat or profuse sweating, than those who did not know when the intense shocks were coming. Gilbert wrote, “People feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur.”