But how much was actually in the closet? And what if it was marked? The phrase had always brought to mind a big black spot on the corner of the bill, but my keen legal instinct sensed that that was probably an inaccurate image. Was this money planted by cops who had recorded the serial numbers? Oh, the shame that would befall my parents if I was found stealing stolen money!
The bedroom door creaked and I gasped.
“Nervous Nelly. Stealing contraband?” Mercedes asked. She pressed her lips together. “Mmm, I smell vintage pizza somewhere.”
“This door is locked,” I told her ominously. She came over and rattled it. She squatted down and studied the doorjamb. Then she pulled harder and the door flung open. My heart jumped and for a moment I actually conjured up stacks of cash. Then my brain righted itself and my excitement abated. There were clothes in the closet. Shoes, belts, shirts, baseball caps, jeans, work gloves.
“Nervous and weak,” Mercedes concluded.
“You know, with friends like you—”
“You’re so much more interesting. Any keys, Sherlock?”
Just as I was shaking my head, we heard a raspy French voice call from the front door.
“Allo? Ees anyone zair?”
I darted out of the bedroom and found Roxana poking her perfectly messy topknot through the police tape.
“Mrs. Hannaham thought she smelled smoke!” I burbled, my face heating with unwarranted guilt. I had a legitimate reason for traipsing around a crime scene, damn it. “And also, I needed to look for the keys to the garbage hold.” I nodded my head toward the window and wrinkled my nose for emphasis.
“What happeent last night?” She furrowed her pretty little brow, scanning the living room nervously.
I shrugged, feeling, as I always did with her, inexplicably eager for some sign that she liked me.
“James was arrested.”
She nodded, waiting for more.
“Uh, it turns out he was embezzling? From the oil delivery company?”
She shook her head slightly and raised her eyebrows as if to say, And?
I racked my brain, wanting to appear knowledgeable. “Well, we’re going to look into whether he was stealing from the building,” I added, realizing at that moment that we should look into whether he was stealing from the building.
“Do you sink I could … ?” She gestured at the apartment, and a shock of adrenaline jerked through me.
“No ! I mean …” Although I was entirely comfortable with my own nosiness, I held others to higher standards. I was the co- heir to these four stories, and now the overseer of them, but Roxana had no business poking around a crime scene. I was disappointed in her.
My disapproval must have shown, because she stepped back and said, “Naw, naw, of course nut. I was jus kewriaus.” Her instant demurral made me feel like I had the upper hand at something.
Mercedes appeared from behind me, triumphantly brandishing an enormous ring of keys.
“Roxana, Mercedes. Mercedes, Roxana,” I said.
“We’ve met before.” Mercedes nodded agreeably.
Mercedes and Tag and Lucy and Abigail had only ever encountered Roxana while passing her on the stairs, but the Gaul Gal, as Abigail had dubbed her, was a never- ending source of fascination for the Sterling Girls. She exuded a smoky, husky aura that we could only ever hope to achieve via a DNA transplant. We wanted the gravelly voice without having to smoke. The lissome figure without having to forgo Oreos. The cheekbones without getting implants.
But more than her looks, we wanted her air of mystery. She was reserved, private, and, therefore, sophisticated. In contrast, the five of us couldn’t keep a secret from one another for more than the time it took to think “I’m going to keep this to myself.” We were open books, and nothing was off- limits. Not the unrequited crush Abigail had nursed for her married thesis advisor. Not the gruesome details of Lucy’s father’s fatal cancer. Not the description of the stomach virus Tag acquired during a twenty- four- hour journey to the east coast of Africa. Not the blow- by- blow accounts of the shedding of our respective virginities.
We also never hesitated, with Lucy’s embryonic expertise at the helm, to analyze anyone’s relationship with her mother, or her approach to dating, or to make sweeping declarations about how each of us ought to approach life.
“Abigail, you spend a lot of unnecessary energy trying to be the academic star your mother is. Just be good to yourself.”
“Mercedes, you spend a lot of unnecessary energy trying to be someone your father wouldn’t have left, but it was his fault, not yours. Be good to yourself.”
“Lucy, you spend a lot of unnecessary energy telling people to be good to themselves. Some of your clients really are homicidal criminals who don’t deserve to be good to themselves.”
To anyone else, we would be deathly repetitive and unforgivably self- involved. But we never tired of ourselves. I was pretty sure, on the other hand, that Roxana and her friends didn’t analyze one another ad nauseam and without a license. Come to think of it, I’d never seen her in the company of anyone else, Mrs. Hannaham’s accusations of promiscuity notwithstanding. Did you have to drop all your friends to be sophisticated? Was it immature to have so many people to keep track of, as though you weren’t discerning enough? Was I guilty of quantity and not quality? Which of my girls could I possibly live without?
“Ah, yis, how are you?” Roxana said now, eyeing the jangling tangle Mercedes was clutching. There were about twenty keys on the ring.
“One of these has to be for the garbage bins, right?” Mercedes asked.
“Are those James’s?” Roxana asked.
I nodded, but Mercedes said, “Well, technically, they belong to the building. They belong to the Zuckermans.”
Roxana raised her arm as if she was going to ask something else, but changed her mind.
“Aw kay. Well,” she gazed at the keys, “keep me on zuh post.”
Mercedes looked confused, but I answered, “We will, we’ll keep everyone posted.”
I should get a job at the U.N., I thought. I was really good at bridging cultural divides. I could start out as a hostess of some sort, shepherding the wives of foreign leaders around the city, showing them the true gems. Not the Olive Gardens and the Gaps and the other insidious chain predators that had tragically devoured New York. Not the stifling department stores or the Empire State Building, but the excavated, 17th-century ruins beneath Broad Street and the spice markets in Jackson Heights. The hidden gardens behind the Church of St. Luke in the Fields on Hudson Street and the peaceful, abandoned stretch of Pier 40’s western end, one of the few places a New Yorker could be alone outside. The ex-cons playing chess with the stockbrokers in City Hall Park and the sunset on the Brooklyn Heights promenade. The aquatic memorial of the Merchant Marine who drowned over and over, each time the Hudson River lapped over his head.
The first lady of Iran/Iraq/Libya would confess during a stroll past the Chelsea Market waterfall how refreshing it was to speak candidly—a decade and a half with the Sterling Girls would turn out to have been training for my true calling—and we’d forge a plan for peace between our countries. I would pitch my idea to save the world by getting young boys in aggressive countries to read novels. If these potential terrorists could only read something besides the Bible or the Koran, all the energy spent learning how to blow themselves up would instead be spent blowing their minds with Steinbeck, Defoe, Marquez, Dickens, Lahiri, Eliot, Fitzgerald, and Patchett. We would share the Nobel Peace Prize.
Roxana took a last glance around the room, studied Mercedes and me carefully for a moment—which I found immensely flattering—and then headed upstairs.
“You think we’ll ever be that hot?” Mercedes wondered. I shook my head.
“Ready to be super?” Mercedes asked, and slipped through the tape and out onto the landing.
“No. Not at all.” She laughed, but I wasn’t kidding. I wanted to go stick twenty keys into a garbage hold about as much a
s I wanted to be a lawyer or a doctor.
Mercedes considered me across the police tape. For the first time in the fourteen years I’d known her, I detected the faintest hint, the barest trace, the most infinitesimal squeak of… disapproval. My heart sank. Since the age of six, she had sawed away at her viola for an hour every morning before school and then for four hours—four hours—every day after school and what seemed like all day on weekends. Summers were filled with music camps and competitions and auditions and more practicing. At every turn, from her auditions for conservatory to her acceptance as third chair violist in the New York Philharmonic, she had battled the subtle prejudices that no one in the music world would ever admit to harboring. And not once had she complained.
I sighed. I could live, just barely, with my parents’ disappointment, but I could not wake up in the morning if I thought my friends were disgusted with me.
Lemonade. I had to go make lemonade. Out of garbage.
FIVE
ONE WEEK LATER, I’D NOT ONLY BECOME AT EASE IN JAMES’S apartment, I’d begun to think of it as my office. Every inch of the living room was covered in crumpled, smudged paper, and not one single scrap reflected anything I’d ever, in my dullest, tamest dreams, given a second thought to: receipts for washers and extension cords and faucet handles and drill bits and plywood and Sheetrock. Old invoices and canceled checks to electricians, exterminators, the fire department, an ironsmith. Tax assessments, water/sewer bills, battered repair logs, sprinkler inspection reports, fuel oil storage permits.
In the few moments that weren’t riddled with panic, anxiety, and confusion, I sometimes felt like I was perusing the unearthed papers of an old friend and discovering clues to the parts of him I didn’t know. Finding an old engineer’s report was like coming across an EKG— I didn’t know Joe had a heart murmur! I didn’t know the bricks of my building’s east wall needed to be repointed! Occasionally, sifting through James’s questionable record- keeping meant learning about the essence of my childhood home. But mostly, it meant a passionate new relationship with antacids.
Before I’d spread them across the floor, the tatty records had lived in close quarters in three large file boxes, all jumbled together. When Lucy, who admitted she probably had just a soupçon of OCD, heard about this, she snuck out of her office and was at my door an hour later to minister to me. She arrived dressed for work: sweatpants, one of her father’s old army T-shirts, and her thin blond hair pulled back in an eighties- era terry-cloth headband.
Lucy had insisted on helping all the Sterling Girls move into their respective apartments, and she was still peeved she hadn’t been able to fly to California to help Abigail unpack out there. We all knew where to find things in one another’s homes because they were organized in almost precisely the same manner. Our dressers held underwear and bras in the top drawer, sweaters and foldable shirts in the next drawer, and jeans in the bottom one. In our closets, from left to right, were pants (by weight), skirts, dresses, and at the far right were blouses and random un-foldables. Sweaty workout clothes aired out on permanent hooks on the back of the bedroom door. It was the same story with the kitchen, the bathroom, the bookshelves, and the CD racks.
“Here’s another plumbing- looking thing,” Lucy said, handing me a coffee- stained yellow carbon copy to put in the “plumbing stuff” pile. Only after every last scrap had been laid out and organized would Lucy let me start putting papers away in the color-coded folders with color- coded labels to store in the color- coded rolling storage crates she had bought. Lucy was the only non- CPA I knew who had her own personal stash of “sign here” stickies. She wandered through the aisles of stationery stores the way some women haunted shoe stores: longingly, lovingly, and always leaving with something she didn’t need but couldn’t live without.
I surreptitiously glanced at my watch. Tag had promised to unexpectedly stop by to tell us how gorgeous it was outside and suggest we go kayaking from Pier 66.
“Do you or don’t you want me to help you?” Lucy demanded, following my glance.
“No, I do,” I assured her. “This is great. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You’d still be sitting here in a near- catatonic state.” She handed me an invoice. “This goes with tax records. Do you have any snacks?”
I jumped up. “I’ll go get some!”
“Sit down. We’ll take a break at two- oh- five.”
Deep breath. “Okay.” I reluctantly grabbed another mush of papers and started smoothing them out. We’d been at this for two hours already. But just as I started running a bored eye down a tax assessment, the intercom buzzed.
Tag!
“I’ll get it!” I yelled, jumping up. Lucy just shook her head in disgust. I bounded down the creaky, carpeted steps to the front door.
On the stoop was a tall man who immediately scrambled my social sensors. He wore a navy blue jumpsuit embroidered with the name “Ridofem” and an image of a cockroach and a rat holding their antennae and paws to the sides of their faces in a Munch-like The Scream pose. He was carrying a spray can with a long hose. I would have confidently concluded that he was an exterminator, but, all avowals of class- blindness to the contrary, I knew blue collar from white collar, laborer from lawyer, and something about this young verminator didn’t compute.
He was angular and pale, but not unattractively so. His nose was just big enough to keep him from being vain—I guessed— but not so big as to be a deal- breaker. He had a mop of chestnut hair that needed a trim, a brooding brow, and big eyes— ish-colored, like mine—fanned by thick black lashes. The long, bony fingers wrapped around the nozzle looked like they should be covered in paint splatters, caked in ceramics mud, or leafing through precious, rare books. He looked, I realized, Jewish, and I didn’t know Jews could be exterminators.
I must not have been the first person to regard him with some degree of surprise, because he sighed as if he was waiting for me to finish my mental computations.
“I thought I rang James’s bell,” he said a little impatiently.
“You did, you did. But James isn’t here right now. Can I help you?”
Now he looked confused, and I realized he was trying to figure out what I was doing in James’s apartment. Was he wondering whether I was James’s girlfriend? Did he deal with Brooklyn James or English James? Which one did he think I dated? What would it be like to date James anyway? Did he escort his women to Hooters or did he invite them to swirl mojitos at Gotham? I was finding a fleeting satisfaction in presenting this oxymoronic Jewish exterminator with a mysterious front. I was rarely—no, never—mysterious to anyone.
He lifted up his spray can. “I’m supposed to do this building today.”
I had no reason not to believe him, especially since I’d seen bills from Ridofem in the mess upstairs. But the new me, the responsible, lemonade- making, Super me, figured I should ask some questions before allowing a stranger to spread poison throughout my building.
I nodded at his canister. “What do you use?”
He looked at me squarely. “Are you familiar with pesticides?”
“Somewhat,” I lied.
“Will it make a difference if I tell you we use cypermethrin instead of bendiocarb?”
Now, I could have been a chemist for all he knew. Or a public health researcher, or maybe my best friend in grade school had been a DDT baby. My hackles were up, but rather than directly address his impudence, I chose instead to take my pique out on a passing double- decker tour bus that had turned illegally onto our narrow street.
“Sign on the corner says no commercial traffic!” I shrieked, bolting out onto the stoop in my bare feet. “Get out and walk, you fat Americans!” Carl, a neighbor who ran a biofeedback therapy clinic out of his living room across the street, waved cheerfully to me.
The exterminator stepped back and pretended to wipe spit from his cheek. “So you’re doing your part to improve New York’s image.”
“We’re the most helpful peopl
e on the planet,” I retorted, self- conscious about my outburst, which, on some very uncomfortable level, I immediately knew to be a show of bravado for this guy I’d just met. Why, Zephyr? Why?
“As long as other people don’t drive down your block.”
“Not when they should be walking, no. Not when those polluting buses wreck our air and break the branches on our trees. If they want to sit on their asses, they should stay back in Idowa. I mean Idaho.”
The exterminator grinned. “You don’t know the difference between Idaho and Iowa.”
“Of course I do.” I sneered unconvincingly
“Where’s Idaho?”
“I can’t explain it.”
“Sure you can.” He crossed his arms.
“There are three ‘I’ states in a row in the Midwest,” I said impatiently. “It’s one of them.”
“You mean Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana?”
“Yeah.”
“Idaho isn’t any of those.” He looked so smug I wanted to smack him.
“What… ? Why are we— This is ridiculous!” I waved my hands as if to erase the conversation.
“I’m from Idaho,” he said victoriously.
“You are not.” I inspected his face for signs of Idaho- ness, but I realized that I had no clue whether he was really from the potato state, and that we both knew I had no way of figuring that out.
He looked directly at me and before I could stop myself, I pictured myself kissing him. A delicious flutter hit my belly and I jumped back, as surprised as if we had actually locked lips. He raised his eyebrows in a question and then pointedly looked at his watch.
Super in the City Page 6