Heiresses of Russ 2011

by JoSelle Vanderhooft

  At least until the eating-each-other stage started, Fell thought.

  “We’ve been watching the television, and we just wanted to let you know the good news,” Mrs. Sziemencewicz said. “Everything is fine. Just keep staying inside, they said. Help is on the way.”

  Mrs. Abreu beamed and bobbed her head. “The Red Cross,” she said.

  “The paratroopers, dear,” corrected Mrs. Sziemencewicz. “The 101st Airborne.”

  “No, that was this morning,” Mrs. Abreu insisted.

  “Thank you,” Fell said. “That’s great, I’m glad to hear it. Thanks for keeping me updated.”

  “It’s nothing,” said Mrs. Sciemencewicz. “Don’t mention it, darlink. You know, we’re keeping an eye on you. Making sure everything is OK. Don’t be so worried.”

  Mrs. Abreu stepped forward and actually patted Fell’s cheek. How are you supposed to respond to having your cheek patted, Fell wondered. She tried to smile.

  “There is one thing,” Mrs. S. said. “You know, I didn’t get a chance to go to the store before all this business started. I was wondering if I could borrow a little something for supper.”

  Fell opened her mouth and then closed it. “Why not,” she said. She was standing in her kitchen and it was only three steps to the cupboard, where she got a blue can of Annie’s brand organic ravioli. She handed it to Mrs. S., then noticed Mrs. A’.s glittering eyes. She quickly got the second can and gave it to Mrs. A.

  “Oh thanks so much,” Mrs. S. said, grabbing the door and swinging it closed as if she were afraid Fell would change her mind. “We’ll let you know what we hear. It’s a pity you have no TV.”

  The door slammed. Fell clicked the lock behind her.

  Why had she given them the food?

  Every time they gave her an update, it was always the same. The details changed, but the essentials remained. The radiation will only harm you if you go outside. Don’t worry. At the appropriate time, the police or the army will come and get you and bring you food. She wondered if her neighbors really believed it. Everyone had stopped doing their jobs and gone home to stay with their families or friends. So who was going to come save us? Fell figured that all the police and soldiers were huddling at home with their kids like everyone else.

  Fell had always boasted about how prepared she was for any disaster. When water stopped coming out of the tap, that was okay because Fell had lots of bottles stockpiled. If all else failed there was clean water in the toilet tank. There was still electricity, but no more phone or cable or internet. Fell could accept that, maybe some lines had gone down. Maybe everyone else had service except for Clay Street. It wasn’t like Verizon was going to come fix things. But why was everyone’s cell service out? Wasn’t cell phone service kind of automatic, even if no one was doing a job? Just satellites in the sky or something?

  Fell’s girlfriend would know. Soo Jin would scold Fell. She would say, “You’re a college graduate? Oh right, Political Science. Yeah. You should crack open a science book sometime. A children’s book. How Things Work.”

  Here’s what Fell’s political science knowledge told her: the people in charge had cut off all the phone and internet. They didn’t want the people communicating.

  Here’s what else Fell knew.

  She had given food away to the neighbors because she was leaving. It had taken a while for Fell’s heart to catch up with her brain. Did she really believe that her Tyvek walls were going to keep out the Evil Radiation? With these leaky window frames that the wind whistled through all winter? Please. Did Fell want to die alone in her three-room railroad apartment? Or did she want to spend her last days in Astoria, Queens, with the woman she loved, in her three-room apartment? Mrs. Abreu had told her there were $500 fines for going outside, but who exactly was going to be giving out tickets?

  Once Fell made up her mind, she packed quickly. Only the things that she thought were really necessary. Water, some tinned food and a can opener, a lighter, first aid kit, a shiny reflective blanket. A jar of Nutella. Fell just loved the stuff and she’d be damned if she was going to die without eating as much of it as she could. A charger and lot of batteries. Soo Jin never had any batteries.

  Fell copied out the same note twice:

  SOOJ, I WENT TO YOUR PLACE (THURSDAY AT 2PM.) -F.

  The idea that Soo Jin might come looking for her and they could miss each other was a depressing one. Fell taped one note to her apartment door and the other to the front door. She saw the curtains in Mrs. S’s apartment twitch and knew she was being watched.

  At the last minute, Fell felt in her pocket for a Sharpie and scrawled the date on the note. “Thursday” might not be helpful. Then she wondered how Soo Jin would feel if she came all the way here and saw this terse note. She added lots of little hearts and XXs and OOs. Great, now it was a note from a twelve year old.

  Fell turned away from the note before she could fiddle with it any more.

  It was so strange to be outdoors. She wondered if everyone was observing her, not just Mrs. S. Fell had watched the streets a lot the last few days and hadn’t seen a single person.

  It smelled a lot worse out here. It was really foul. Fell knew this was from the Newtown Creek sewage treatment plant, now neglected. She pulled the bandanna she’d tied around her neck up over her mouth and nose. Didn’t really help much.

  Despite the bad smells, she felt her spirits lift. It was so good to be outside. It was a gorgeous summer day. The bricks of the factory across the street were bright in the sunlight. Fell unlocked her bike from the sign post in front of the factory and thought about how she would likely never see Clay Street again. Not everyone would say that the combination of industrial buildings and three-story residences of various colors was beautiful, but Fell was very fond of it.

  At the corner of the street was the Pulaski Bridge, which passed over Newtown Creek and brought you into Queens. Fell was dismayed when she looked up and saw the roadway of the Pulaski Bridge sticking straight up into the sky. The Pulaski was a drawbridge, and it was raised. Why? To allow tall rescue boats to chug down the creek? Just to mess up Fell’s plans?

  There was another small drawbridge a few blocks away. Fell decided to cruise past and see if that one was raised as well. No, she saw from Greenpoint Avenue that this bridge was up too.

  It would have to be the Gore Memorial Bridge, then. On the way to Meeker Avenue, Fell saw a dog tied up to a lamp post. It barked feebly at her. She thought of letting it loose but she was a little afraid of dogs. She found a ramp leading onto the BQE. After several days of sitting in her apartment doing nothing, Fell was winded and out of shape. She had to get off her bike and walk it up the ramp.

  Once on the BQE, it was kind of fun to be riding where usually only cars could go. The BQE led onto the Gore Memorial Bridge. Fell had ridden her bike over the Gore many times since it was built in 2014, but of course only on the bike path. Now was her chance to really own the nine-lane bridge! To get a better view of the skyline of Manhattan, she lifted her bike over the concrete divider. Now she was on the side that should have had oncoming traffic. Below was Newtown Creek. It seemed to have more oily swirls in it than usual, and that was saying a lot for the little creek that had been designated a Superfund site.

  Just as Calvary Cemetery began to loom into view on the Queens side, Fell saw a car idling on the road, parked perpendicularly smack in the middle of the roadway. As she drew closer, Fell saw that the car was running but there was no one in it. Fell couldn’t see anyone around, and she peddled as fast as she could. The driver must have jumped. Only as she was whizzing down the ramp past Calvary Cemetery did it occur to her that she could have taken the car and driven to Soo Jin’s. But she didn’t want anything to do with that spooky car. What if there was someone hiding in it?

  The giant vista of graves that was Calvary Cemetery seemed to go on forever. She’d heard that in the nineteenth century, twenty-five immigrant children were buried there every day. No one was going to be buried anym
ore in this city, unless you counted apartment buildings as big tombs. Fell started wondering if Soo Jin even really loved her. Why did Fell have to be the one to go and find her? It suddenly seemed clear that she cared much more about Soo Jin than Soo Jin cared about her. Fell remembered that Soo Jin’s ex also lived in Astoria. What if her ex strolled over to make amends so she could die with a clean conscience? Fell recalled that the ex was a lingerie model and wondered if Soo Jin ever really got over her.

  Fell was pretty sure she was in Sunnyside now, but her knowledge of Queens geography was a bit underdeveloped. She wished the Citigroup building was still standing. It had been such a good landmark, the only really tall building in Queens. It had been like a polestar that told you where you were. Fell remembered shopping in Chinatown with Soo Jin and giggling at gaudy commemorative wall plaques of the Citigroup building that were for sale on Canal Street. They had joked that soon there wouldn’t be a skyscraper left in the city, just lots of commemorative plaques. Soo Jin had worked as a math tutor to a little girl whose parents both worked in the Citigroup building. Soo Jin never heard from them again after the attack, and refused to look at the names of the dead.

  The thing was, it was a pretty big declaration of love to travel across the city when the government was telling you to stay indoors because of the radiation. Fell didn’t know if she was ready for that yet. The declaring her love part. She might be marginally more ready for radiation. Lesbians were supposed to move really fast. The cliche was that the second date was renting a U-Haul truck so they could move in together. But it hadn’t been that way with Fell and Soo Jin. If only she could have had a chance to talk to Soo Jin when the bombs fell on Pennsylvania. They could have made some kind of plan. But Fell had only been able to speak to her father in California, and then the phones had stopped working. She should have called Soo Jin first. She didn’t even really care about her father all that much. Just thinking about this was making Fell feel nauseated.

  Every way Fell turned she was confronted by a fence with some train tracks behind it. It seemed to go on and on, and Fell was getting frustrated. Then she started hearing music. She knew it might be a mistake to go to it, but she was curious. It was hard to tell where the sound was coming from. Then she turned on to Skillman Avenue and saw the playground.

  The two men in the park looked so natural that Fell wasn’t even surprised to see them. They were two middle-aged black men. One was doing chin-ups on the jungle gym. The other, less fit-looking, was sitting reading the Daily News. It must have been an old copy, but the man seemed engrossed. A boom pod was next to him, blasting out the music on its tiny, high-quality speakers.

  Fell approached cautiously. The chin-up man saw her and acknowledged her with a slight nod. He continued his workout, dropping from the bars to knock off a few pushups.

  “This guy wrote to Dear Abby,” newspaper guy said. “He’s in prison and suspects his girlfriend is seeing another man. He’s got two more years and he’s asking her what should he do.”

  “There’s nothing he can do,” chin-up man said, not even out of breath. “He’ll sit there in prison one way or the other.”

  “My point exactly. Two years is a long time. He went and bought a stamp from the commissary, and sent off this letter to Dear Abby. Now he’s waiting in his jumpsuit for her reply so he can find out what he’s supposed to do!” The man slapped his newspaper and laughed.

  “That’s off the hook,” said the other man. He was finally panting. He lay down on his back and begins to do some sort of sit-up.

  “Excuse me, do either of you have cell phones that work?” Fell ventured.

  Chin-up man barked out a laugh. “No one does,” he said. “And I’ll tell you something. That’s a satellite station we’re listening to. No DJ, all music. So the radiation isn’t interfering with no waves.”

  It was what Fell expected, but she was disappointed. “Can you tell me the way to Steinway Street in Astoria?”

  “Just keep going the way you’re going and take a right on 39th Street,” chin-up man said. “That’ll take you over Sunnyside Yard. You cross Northern Boulevard and boom, you’re there.”

  “You have a blessed day,” newspaper guy said sternly, as if he knew she would disobey him and not have a blessed day.

  “Thanks, you too,” she said. Was that the right thing to say? It didn’t sound right. The man’s directions were excellent. Soon Fell was coasting along Steinway Street, lined with its familiar shops. A black car with TLC plates was speeding along the other way, and honked at her as he passed. The car was going so fast that a blowback breeze made Fell’s hair stand up. The only moving car she had seen all day.

  Fell turned off onto 25th Avenue and there was Soo Jin’s building. More classy than her own, brick not aluminum siding. Now she was sick to her stomach with nervousness. If Soo Jin wasn’t there, she had no Plan B.

  She dismounted and leaned her bike against the fence of the building next door. There was a sign reading NO BIKES! but what were they going to do to her? She locked the bike, feeling extremely silly as she did so.

  Fell walked up to Soo Jin’s front door with its fancy glass paneling. The panel was an oval with three beveled triangles inside. Fell had never noticed that before. If she’d been on a witness stand, she’d have testified that it was rectangular. Was she losing her mind? Above the door was a stained glass transom depicting flowers. That looked more familiar. She and Soo Jin had argued about it. Fell thought it was elegant but Soo Jin said it was cheap, American-style crap.

  Fell realized that she was standing in front of the door, staring at it. What was the matter with her?

  She rang Soo Jin’s bell and waited.

  “Hello?” crackled Soo Jin’s voice.

  “It’s me. Fell.”

  Soo Jin buzzed her in. As Fell pushed the door open, she heard a door slam upstairs and then feet pounding down the steps.

  They both reached the bottom of the steps at the same time.

  “I was just in the neighborhood,” Fell joked. She lifted Soo Jin up off the bottom step and hugged her.

  Another door opened. It must be Awilda, Soo Jin’s landlady. She was stingy with the heat in the winter and often had complaints about noise, particularly the door slamming.

  Fell didn’t turn around, just kept hugging Soo Jin.

  “Oh, it’s you!” Awilda said. “If only I could be so lucky, and my Ernesto came back to me.”

  Fell didn’t care about the widow Awilda’s problems. She kissed Soo Jin and presently Awilda’s door clicked shut again.

  “Put me down,” Soo Jin demanded, kicking her feet.

  Fell did. Soo Jin led her upstairs and into her apartment, letting the door slam again. Just like in Fell’s apartment, the first room you walked into was the kitchen.

  Clothes, food and various items of electrical equipment were scattered all over the room. There were used matches and burnt paper all over the kitchen table. “What is all this?”

  “I got worried,” Soo Jin said. “I was packing up to go look for you.”

  “What’s all this Radio Shack junk? You building a robot or something?”

  “No, bozo, I had a few ideas about making the phone lines work.” Soo Jin kissed Fell again. This time Fell got a hint of menthol from Soo Jin’s Blistex.

  “Oh, you’re overheated, you poor thing,” Soo Jin said, running her hands over Fell’s forehead and the back of her neck.

  Suddenly Soo Jin was crying. This unnerved Fell every time. She sat down on the rickety chair and pulled Soo Jin onto her lap.

  “It’s going to break,” Soo Jin complained. “Where am I going to get a new chair under these circumstances?”

  Fell brushed tears off Soo Jin’s cheek with her thumb.

  “I’ve been so upset thinking about my family,” Soo Jin said.

  “Really?” Soo Jin’s parents lived in Korea. She hadn’t been in touch with them in years. They had quarreled over Soo Jin’s sexuality, lack of Christian beliefs, c
areer aspirations, and anything else they ever discussed. Soo Jin hardly ever mentioned about them.

  “Yes. I wish I could make things right with my parents. I’ve been writing messages and burning them all day. Do you think that my mother can somehow sense that I’m thinking of her? Do you think she understands how I feel?”

  “I’m sure she does, Sooj,” Fell lied. “She’s probably thinking of you right now too. I expect she’s thinking the same thing.”

  It was sort of alarming to hear Soo Jin talking woo woo spiritual garbage like this. Fell had nothing against that sort of thing, everyone should live the way they wanted to live. But it was really out of character for Soo Jin, her little cynic. She hoped Soo Jin wasn’t cracking up.

  Soo Jin let out a long, shuddering breath.

  “Of course,” she said. “That makes sense. I feel so much better talking to you. The version of you that’s in my head is not as nice as the real thing. I’m not bonkers, you know. Burning the papers isn’t literal, like smoke signals or something. It’s supposed to be symbolic. I just thought there should be a ceremony for this unprecedented situation. I burnt messages to Hyun-ki too. I feel okay about him. I’m glad he doesn’t have to go through this Book of Revelation-style crap.”

  Fell kissed her cheek. Hyun-ki was Sooj’s little brother, who had died many years ago.

  “Did you burn messages to me?” Fell asked.

  “No, don’t be silly!” Soo Jin said, and laughed. “I didn’t have to do that. I knew you were coming.”

  Fell laughed too. This was more like it. How could she have thought Sooj would run off with the lingerie model?

  “Then why were you packing up?”

  “I panicked!” Soo Jin said. “I was sure today was the day you would decide to come and that you wouldn’t leave any later than 3pm. So I had set a little deadline in my head, and you were half an hour late!”

  “That was the Sunnyside Yards’ fault!” Fell complained. “I would have been right on schedule, but I didn’t know about them. It was in my way! How did you know when I would leave?”