by Jane Heller
“I understand,” I said, wishing I had the nerve to ask: Whose dinner party? Who else will be there? Can I come too?
As I was getting up from the sofa, her phone rang again. She picked it up. “I said I’ll have to call you back,” she snapped at the person, not even bothering with a hello. She was testy suddenly, jumpy. I wasn’t sure if I was the irritant or the caller was. Either way, she seemed eager for me to shove off.
“This was just a quick how-do-you-do,” she said as she handed me the Kmart bill and hustled me toward the door. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again soon.”
“At the very least in the elevator,” I kidded. “Or the laundry room.”
“Not the laundry room,” she corrected me. “I have a washer and dryer here in the apartment.”
“Of course you do,” I said. And a laundress to operate them, I’ll bet.
“It was a pleasure meeting you,” she said. “If I get any more mail that belongs to you, I’ll give you a call. You do the same, all right?”
“Absolutely,” I said. It wasn’t until I was back in my apartment that I realized she hadn’t honored me with her phone number.
I polished off the Chinese food that was left over from the night before and then called Janice.
“How’s the eye?” she asked.
“Gorgeous. I’m the spitting image of E.T.”
“Poor baby. You didn’t miss much in school today if that’s any consolation. I only had to put Fischer in Time-out once.”
“That’s progress.”
“When do you think you’ll be back?”
“I’ll definitely be there Monday,” I said, figuring that since it was Friday, I’d have the whole weekend to recuperate. “Now, before I forget, I’ve got to tell you about the other Nancy Stern.”
“You finally met her?”
“I had a drink with her. At her penthouse. Talk about loaded.”
“She was drunk?”
“No. Loaded, as in rich. God, you should see the apartment, the clothes, the jewelry.”
“Where’d she get all this money?” asked Janice. “I mean, so she interviews celebrities. She’s not exactly Barbara Walters. I’ve never even heard of her.”
“Neither have I. But I don’t pay any attention to bylines. For all I know, she writes for People magazine.”
“Or for one of those really cheesy publications that’s inserted in Sunday newspapers.”
“Right. She could be the type of ‘journalist’ who only does flattering celebrity profiles—puff pieces. Which would explain the gooey thank-you notes she gets from people like Kevin Costner.”
“Thank-you notes from Kevin Costner,” Janice sighed. “That wouldn’t be hard to take.”
“Neither would long-stemmed red roses from someone named Jacques.”
“A French guy sent her roses?”
“Yes, but they were delivered to me, naturally.”
She sighed again. “Getting back to her money, say she does write for a fan magazine. I still don’t see how a journalist nobody’s ever heard of earns that much.”
“It’s possible that she has family money. Or a generous ex-husband.”
“Or she could be one of those people who writes everything off as a business expense, even the boob job.”
“Could be.”
“Okay, so tell me about the apartment. And don’t leave anything out.”
I proceeded to give Janice an exhaustive account of Nancy Stern’s penthouse, as well as her wardrobe. After we had gorged ourselves on her material attributes, we moved on to the men who appeared to adore her.
“That woman leads a charmed life,” said Janice. “The career. The money. The looks. The boyfriends. She’s a lucky lady.”
“I should be so lucky,” I said, then laughed.
“What’s so funny?” asked Janice.
“I just remembered the old expression: Be careful what you wish for,” I said.
“That’s a stupid expression,” she said. “Wish for whatever the hell you want.”
Chapter Four
Penelope Dibble, the director of Small Blessings, sat in on our class on Monday, presumably to monitor the Fischer Levin situation. While she watched from a tiny chair in the back of the room, I carried on with the daily plan, which included another rehearsal for the Thanksgiving play. Fischer performed the “Oh, Turkey Tom” song with great flair. I was proud of him. It wasn’t until later in the morning, during snack, that he acted up.
He and Todd Delafield were sitting next to each other, eating raisins, when Fischer threw a handful of his at Todd, who reacted with such surprise that he proceeded to choke on the one he was in the process of swallowing. In a replay of the previous week’s incident, Fischer punched Todd in the stomach. However, on this occasion, the punch paid dividends—it dislodged the raisin from Todd’s windpipe and saved his life.
“You see that, Nancy?” Penelope said, fingering her pearls. “Fischer’s a hero, a good boy. There’s no reason whatsoever to bother his parents.” And then she left the classroom.
Knowing full well that Fischer’s motive for socking Todd in the stomach had not been noble, I summoned him for a little chat.
“Fischer, you made a poor choice when you threw raisins at Todd and hit him,” I said. “Tell me what you were feeling.”
“Mad,” said Fischer, “because he wouldn’t believe me.”
“What wouldn’t he believe you about?” I said.
“My daddy,” said Fischer. “That he’s a pirate.”
“Your father is an investment banker, not a pirate, Fischer,” I said firmly. “Didn’t we decide you were going to stop lying?”
“I’m not lying,” he insisted. “My dad has buried treasure in a special room where we live.”
Here we go again, I thought. The buried treasure fantasy.
“What am I going to do with you?” I asked, shaking my head. Fischer was a bright, imaginative boy, just as I had told Penelope. It frustrated me to see his potential wasted, made me feel helpless and ineffective as a teacher.
“Are you putting me in Time-out, Miss Stern?” he asked.
“Is that what you want?” I said. “To have to sit outside the circle, away from your friends, while Miss Mason reads them a story?”
He said no, that wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was for Todd Delafield to come over to his apartment after school and play with his turtles.
“Then go sit with the others,” I said, letting him off the hook. “But first, I need a hug.” I drew Fischer to me and squeezed him. He did not pull away. I realize that I appeared to be rewarding him for misbehaving, but I was trying to change the pattern we had established, do something different. “You don’t get many hugs at home, do you?”
“No,” he acknowledged, still in my arms.
“Then we’ll make sure you get some at school, okay?”
He nodded and I released him. He was about to go and join the rest of the children when he stopped in his tracks.
“What is it, Fischer?” I asked.
He hesitated, then replied, “Miss Mason is a nice lady, but I’ll probably marry you when I grow up.”
As he hurried away, I felt a rush of pleasure. I had finally connected with Fischer on an emotional level, finally made contact with his feelings. All that and a marriage proposal too. Maybe things were looking up.
I was home for barely five minutes that afternoon when the doorman buzzed me.
“Dry cleaning delivery on the way up,” he bellowed through the house phone.
“I don’t have my dry cleaning delivered. It’s too expensive,” I bellowed back. To no avail. Seconds later, a young man carrying a garment wrapped in plastic was standing at my door. So much for the building’s tight security.
“You’ve got the wrong Nancy Stern,” I said churlishly as he handed me the bundle. Now I was even referring to myself as the wrong Nancy Stern.
“Whatever,” he said, ignoring me.
“Aren’t you forgett
ing your tip?” I called out to him as he beat it down the hall, to the elevator.
“It’s included in the delivery charge,” he yelled. “You already signed for it.”
Of course I did, I thought as I slammed the door and lugged the cleaning inside.
I wasn’t going to open the bag, really I wasn’t, until I noticed the fur. The garment that had been dry cleaned was a coat, it turned out—a completely gorgeous, full-length shearling coat with a mink collar and matching cuffs. Clearly, the other Nancy Stern wasn’t an animal rights activist, but she certainly had good taste in clothes.
I’m embarrassed to tell you that after I tore open the plastic and removed the coat from the hanger, I tried it on. (Please don’t judge me harshly. You would have done the same thing, be honest.)
Since Nancy was a giantess as well as a beanpole and I am neither, the coat was too long for me, not to mention a bit snug. But as I stood there in front of the mirror, modeling it, striking various poses in it, having imaginary conversations in it, I felt like a contestant on one of those game shows—the contestant who wins the fur coat and then “comes on down” to claim her prize, drapes herself in it, caresses it, and thanks God she didn’t get stuck with the luggage, the refrigerator, or the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Enough, I commanded myself. Take it off. It doesn’t belong to you.
I ran the exquisitely soft mink cuffs along my cheek one last time and then took the coat off, placed it back on its hanger, and re-wrapped it as best I could.
“The dry cleaning was for Nancy Stern in 24A,” I told the doorman, after dragging the coat downstairs to the lobby. “You should have buzzed her.”
“Sorry,” he said, lifting the coat from my arms. “I’ll buzz her in a little while.”
“Why not now?” I said.
“She’s under the weather,” he explained. “She said she was going to take a nap.”
“Does she have a cold?” I asked. “Everybody seems to at this time of year, although I can’t picture our glamorous celebrity journalist with a red nose.”
“Then picture her with a red eye, because that’s what she has,” said the doorman. “Conjunctivitis.”
“Oh,” I said and slunk back upstairs.
That night, I went over to Janice’s. She was hosting her monthly reading group at her apartment. Since the book up for discussion was Cold Mountain and I had already read it on my own, she suggested I participate, even though I wasn’t an official member of the group.
I had been to a couple of other meetings of Janice’s reading group and had not particularly enjoyed myself, which was why I wasn’t a regular. My feeling was that Janice’s reading group was a fraud; that, rather than critique books, what the women really wanted to critique was men.
However, since I didn’t have any plans for the night that Cold Mountain was on their agenda, I went.
There were five other women present in addition to Janice and me and, like us, they were single women with baggage. After roughly twenty minutes of back and forth regarding the book’s hero and his endless trudging through the Civil War-torn South, there was a split decision as to whether the endless trudging rendered the novel a literary masterpiece or a crashing bore.
“Speaking of crashing bores, I had the blind date from hell the other night,” said one of the women.
And they were off. There was talk that all the good men in New York were married. There was talk that all the good men in New York were gay. There was talk that the term good men was an oxymoron.
Janice told everybody about running into Gary, the nutritionist, and his not remembering who she was. Her anecdote led to one of those unfortunate, extremely repetitive Mars/Venus discourses, which, in my opinion, are far more boring than Cold Mountain could ever be.
I know that “women’s consciousness-raising groups,” as my mother’s generation used to call them, are meant to be uplifting; that having other women listen to tales of your failed romances and then shout: “You go, girl!” is supposed to be a show of support, of solidarity, of validation. But as I walked home that night, I felt disenfranchised, alienated, and the only thing that got validated was my instinct never to go to one of Janice’s reading groups again.
When I entered the apartment, I found there were two messages on my answering machine. I replayed them. They were both from men, they were both for the other Nancy Stern, and they were both proof that there was at least one woman in the city who was having absolutely no trouble in the romance department.
I sighed as I wrote down the callers’ names and their requests for an audience with Ms. Stern. And then I sat at the foot of my bed in the dark, staring out the window. It was a clear, crisp night in Manhattan. I could see the lights twinkling from the building next door, see the TV sets blinking, see the silhouetted bodies moving from room to room, see the people living their lives, and the whole thing depressed me more than Janice’s reading group.
What’s your problem? I asked myself. What in the world is wrong with you?
Normally, I took comfort in the scene outside my window. Normally, I felt an odd kinship with my neighbors, as if we were all in it together, as if we had all made the decision to come to New York and put up with the craziness so we could be part of the action in some tangential way. Normally, I enjoyed the sense of specialness that being a New Yorker bestowed upon me.
But on this night, I felt distinctly unspecial—a grain of sand, a speck of dirt, just one from among the throngs of New Yorkers struggling to “make it.”
I had grown up in small-town Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, and had found it utterly claustrophobic, suffocating. It wasn’t that I yearned for stardom or wealth or The Big Time. What I yearned for was possibility, promise, hope, and I sensed I had to go elsewhere for that. The “elsewhere” turned out to be New York. I spent a week here with my college roommate during our senior year, and the minute I caught a glimpse of the city I said, This is it, Nancy. This is the place for you.
Corny, no doubt about it, but true.
Since I’d always loved kids, I got a degree in education, settled in the Big Apple, and found a teaching job at Small Blessings. A year later, I married John. Six years after that, I was single again. But even after the divorce, even after having to start over in my own little apartment, even after the heartache, the loneliness, and the therapy, I never considered going back to Pennsylvania. I still felt the possibility here, still felt the specialness.
But now there was the other Nancy Stern—a quasi alter ego living on the twenty-fourth floor of my building, a woman who bore my identical name and address but who, unlike me, appeared to enjoy a genuine specialness. Now I was the lesser of the two Nancy Sterns at 137 East Seventy-first Street. Now my specialness—my very uniqueness—was being called into question.
Maybe I should start using my middle initial, I thought, getting up from the bed to make some tea. From here on, I’ll insist that I be referred to as Nancy Z. Stern.
Of course, I quickly ruled out the idea because the Z is for Zelda and who wants everyone knowing that?
God, would you listen to me? I thought. What a hypocrite! I’ve just gone on and on about the tragic loss of my identity when a side of me—the side that drooled over the other Nancy Stern’s shearling coat—is dying to trade places with her, dying to see what it would be like to be her.
What would it be like to step into her shoes? I wondered as I plunged the tea bag into my mug of hot water. What would it be like to shed my Birkenstocks and slip into her Ferragamos, if only for a little while? It’s human nature to live vicariously through others, isn’t it? Particularly if the person you hope to live vicariously through lives right upstairs?
Don’t get me wrong. I had no desire to trade places permanently with the other Nancy Stern. I wouldn’t have dreamed of giving up my job at Small Blessings for an invitation to some movie screening. Still, maybe spending day after day with four-year-olds was growth stunting, as she had insinuated. Maybe I would have felt drab
, colorless, ordinary, even if I hadn’t been forced to confront the dramatic contrast between my life and hers.
I was pondering these weighty matters when the phone rang. I glanced at my watch: ten thirty-five. Couldn’t her suitors call at a decent hour? I thought. Or were they so filled with ardor that they simply couldn’t contain themselves until morning?
I padded to the phone. “Hello?” I said without enthusiasm.
“Hi. Is this Nancy?” said a man.
“Yup,” I said, bracing myself for the I-must-have-the-wrong-Nancy-Stern routine.
“Oh. Good. Great,” he said, sounding a little anxious. “I hope I haven’t called too late. Have I called too late?”
“That depends,” I said. “Who are you?”
“A reasonable question.” He laughed apologetically. “Sorry for the fumbling around, but I’m not very adept at this blind date stuff.”
Blind date stuff. My heart leapt.
“I’m Bill Harris,” he said. “Joan Geisinger suggested I look you up when I got to town. I’ve just moved to New York from Washington.”
Joan Geisinger. Joan Geisinger. Joan Geisinger. I racked my brain. Nope. No Joan Geisinger.
“She said she hasn’t talked to you in a while,” he went on. “She didn’t even have your new number, so I got it from Information. She gave me the impression that you two have drifted apart since you worked together at—which magazine was it? Cosmo? House & Garden? Ladies Home Journal?”
Damn, so he is calling the other one, I thought, feeling a surge of disappointment. He had such a nice voice. A kind voice. The sort of voice that made you reluctant to hang up on it.
“Nancy? Are you there?” he asked. “I was trying to remember which magazine Joan—”
“Cosmo,” I heard myself say in a moment of madness. “Joan and I started our careers there. In the secretarial pool.”
What the hell do you think you’re doing? I asked myself. Are you out of your mind?
“According to Joan, you’re a freelance writer now,” said Bill-Harris-with-the-kind-voice. “Celebrity profiles, isn’t it?”