“Thanks,” he said, setting her papers in his in box. “So what are you up to this weekend?” he asked, trying to sound casual.
“I’m at the soup kitchen tomorrow night, and then I’ve got two books for the blind to read,” she said. It was polite, Lewis thought, but it was still a refusal. Had she read that book that all the women were passing around the pool a couple years ago, the one that talked about playing hard to get and had caused eighty-six-year-old Mrs. Asher to hang up on him, mid-edit, after declaring that she was a creature unlike any other and that, as such, it was incumbent upon her to end all phone calls with men?
“Well, thanks for the poem. You’re the only one who made your deadline. As usual,” Lewis said. Ella gave him a faint smile and headed for the door. Maybe it was his looks, he thought glumly. Sharla had bought him a bulldog calendar for one of the anniversaries they’d celebrated together in Florida, and he’d accused her of trying to tell him something. She’d given him a resounding kiss on his cheek and told him that while his modeling career was probably dead in the water, she loved him anyhow.
Lewis shook his head, hoping to clear away the memories, and picked up Ella’s poem. “Just Because I’m Old,” he read, and smiled at the line that read “I AM NOT INVISIBLE,” and decided that Ella was worth yet another try.
SIX
Rose Feller leaned across the table. “The usual stipulations, counselor?” she asked. The opposing counsel—a whey-faced man in an unfortunate greenish gray suit—nodded, even though Rose would have bet that he didn’t know what “the usual stipulations” actually were any more than she did. But every deposition she’d ever attended had started out with the lawyer in charge saying “the usual stipulations,” and so she said it, too.
“Okay, if everyone’s ready, we’ll begin,” she said, with a confidence that was more feigned than felt, as if she’d done hundreds of depositions by herself, instead of just two. “My name is Rose Feller, and I am an attorney at Lewis, Dommel, and Fenick. Today I’m representing the Veeder Trucking Company and Stanley Willet, the comptroller of Veeder, who’s present and sitting to my left. This is the deposition of Wayne LeGros—” She paused and glanced across the table at the witness, hoping for confirmation that she was pronouncing his last name correctly. Wayne LeGros refused to meet her eyes. “Wayne LeGros,” she continued, deciding that if she was saying it wrong he’d speak up, “the president of Majestic Construction. Mr. LeGros, could you begin by giving us your name and address?”
Wayne LeGros, who was short, fiftyish, with iron-gray hair in a buzz cut and a heavy class ring on one thick finger, swallowed hard. “Wayne LeGros,” he said loudly. “I live at five-thirteen Tasker Street. In Philadelphia.”
“Thank you,” Rose said. In truth, she sort of felt sorry for the guy. She’d never been deposed, except in law school, in mock trial, but she was sure it wasn’t fun. “Can you tell us your job title?”
“President. Majestic,” said loquacious Mr. LeGros.
“Thank you,” Rose said again. “Now, as I’m sure your counsel has explained, we’re here today to gather information. My client is contending that you owe them . . .” she glanced down fast at her notes. “Eight thousand dollars, for the lease of equipment.”
“Dump trucks,” LeGros offered.
“That’s right,” said Rose. “Can you tell us how many trucks were leased?”
LeGros shut his eyes. “Three.”
Rose slid a piece of paper across the table. “This is a copy of the lease agreement you signed with Veeder. I’ve already had the court reporter mark it as Plaintiff’s Exhibit fifteen-A.” The court reporter nodded. “Could I ask you to read the parts I’ve highlighted?”
LeGros took a deep breath and squinted at the page. “It says Majestic agrees to pay Veeder two thousand dollars a week for three dump trucks.”
“Is that your signature?”
LeGros took a minute to study the photocopy. “Yep,” he finally said. “It’s mine.” A note of petulance had crept into his voice, and he’d pulled the class ring off his finger and was spinning it on the conference table.
“Thank you,” said Rose. “Now, was this project in Ryland completed?”
“The school? Yeah.”
“And was Majestic Construction paid for its work?”
LeGros nodded. His attorney raised his eyebrows at him. “Yeah,” LeGros said.
Rose slid another sheet of paper across the table. “This is Plaintiff’s sixteen-A—a copy of your invoice to the Ryland School Board, marked ‘paid in full.’ Was that account paid?”
“Yeah.”
“So you were paid for the work you did on the project?”
Another nod. Another dirty look from his attorney. Another “yeah.” For the next half-hour, Rose painstakingly led LeGros through a stack of stamped invoices and notices from a collection agency. It wasn’t the stuff of Grisham thrillers, she thought as she slogged onward, but if she was lucky it would get the job done.
“So the job in Ryland was completed, and you paid your sub-contractors?” Rose summarized.
“Yeah.”
“Except not Veeder.”
“They got theirs,” he mumbled. “They got paid for other things.”
“Pardon me?” Rose asked politely.
“Other things,” LeGros repeated. He ducked his head. Spun his ring. “Things they owed other companies. Things they owed my dispatcher,” he said, biting off each syllable. “Why don’t you ask him about my dispatcher?”
“I certainly will,” Rose promised. “But right now, it’s your deposition. It’s your turn to tell your story.”
LeGros stared down again, at the ring, at his hands.
“Tell me your dispatcher’s name,” she prodded gently.
“Lori Kimmel,” LeGros muttered.
“And where does she live?”
He stared down sullenly. “Same place I do. Fifth and Tasker.”
Rose felt her pulse spike. “She’s your . . .”
“My lady friend,” said LeGros, with a look on his face that said, Want to make something of it? “Ask him,” he said, sticking a thumb toward Stanley Willet. “Ask him,” he repeated. “He knows all about her.”
LeGros’s lawyer laid a hand on his forearm, but LeGros would not be stopped.
“Ask him about the overtime she worked! Ask him about how she never got paid! Ask him about how when she left the company, he said he’d pay her vacation and sick days, and never did!”
“Could we take a break?” LeGros’s attorney. Rose nodded. The court reporter raised her eyebrows. “Sure,” said Rose. “Fifteen minutes.” She ushered Willet into her office as LeGros and his attorney huddled in the hall.
“What’s this about?”
Willet shrugged. “The name sounds familiar. I could make a few calls ...”
Rose nodded toward her telephone. “Hit nine,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” She hurried to the bathroom. Depositions made her nervous, and being nervous made her have to pee, and . . .
“Ms. Feller?” It was LeGros’s attorney. “Can I speak to you for a minute?” He pulled her into the conference room. “Look,” he said. “We’d like to settle.”
“What happened?”
The lawyer shook his head. “You can probably fill in the blanks. His girlfriend used to work for your guy. As best I can tell, she left without giving notice and figured she was entitled to all of her vacation and sick pay. Veeder told her to forget about it, and I think that my guy figured he could just bill Veeder for what she said she was owed.”
“You didn’t know that?”
The lawyer shrugged. “I just got this case two weeks ago.”
“So he’ll . . .” Rose let her voice trail off suggestively.
“Pay it back. All of it.”
“Plus interest. This has gone on for three years,” said Rose.
LeGros’s lawyer winced. “One year’s interest,” he said. “We’ll write you a check right now.”
&
nbsp; “Let me run it by my client,” said Rose. “I’ll recommend that he accept.” Her heart was racing, her blood pounding in her veins. Victory! She felt like doing a dance. Instead she returned to Stan Willet, who was staring at her diplomas.
“They want to settle,” she said.
“Good,” he said, without turning toward her. Rose swallowed her disappointment. Of course he wasn’t going to be as excited as she was. To him eight thousand dollars was pocket change. But still! She couldn’t wait to tell Jim how well she’d done! She ran through the terms. “They’re willing to write us a check today, which means you won’t waste time chasing after the money. My recommendation is that we accept.”
“Fine,” he said, his eyes still on the glass frames and Latin writing of her diplomas. “Write it up, send it over.” Finally, he turned toward her. “Good stuff in there.” He cracked a thin smile. “Bury them in paper, right?”
“Right,” Rose agreed, feeling her heart sink. She’d been brilliant! Well, maybe not brilliant in a flashy way, but competent. Extremely competent. Goddamnit, she’d hunted down every last little memo, every single bill, every solitary scrap of paper that proved her client’s case! She walked Stan Willet to the elevator, hurried back to her office, and dialed Jim’s extension.
“They settled,” she said happily. “Eight thousand plus a year’s interest.”
“Nice job,” he said, sounding pleased. Pleased, and distracted. She could hear the click of his mouse in the background. “Can you write me up a memo?”
Rose felt as though he’d dumped ice water on her head. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll have it done this afternoon.”
Jim’s voice softened. “Congratulations,” he said. “I’m sure you were great.”
“I buried them in paper,” said Rose. She could hear Jim breathing, and the sound of other voices in the background.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.” She set down the phone without saying good-bye. Instantly, a message popped up on her screen. From Jim. She clicked it open.
“Sorry I couldn’t talk more,” it read, then—her heart lifted as she read the words—“can I stop by tonight?”
She typed her response. “YES!” And then she sat back in her chair, beaming, feeling pleased, thinking that everything was finally right in her world. She was a professional success. It was Friday night, and she wouldn’t be alone. She had a man who loved her. True, she also had her little sister camping out on her couch, but that wouldn’t last forever, she thought, and started typing up the memo.
Euphoria lasted until four in the afternoon; happiness until six; and by the time nine o’clock rolled around and Jim still hadn’t put in an appearance, Rose’s mood was dipping toward miserable. She headed to the bathroom, where her ever-helpful little sister had left an article from Allure taped to the mirror. “This Season’s Best Brows!” read the headline. And there were tweezers on the sink.
“Okay,” Rose said to herself. “I can take a hint.” At least this way, if—when—Jim came, he’d find her waiting with perfectly plucked brows. Rose peered at herself in the mirror and decided that her life would be easier if she’d just been born a different kind of girl. Not really different, but a better, prettier, more polished, slightly thinner version of the person she already was. The thing was, of course, she had no idea, really, of how to be anything other than what she was. And it wasn’t for lack of trying.
When she was thirteen years old, Rose and Maggie Feller moved into Sydelle’s house. “It just makes sense!” Sydelle said sweetly. “I’ve got plenty of room.” The house was a four-bedroom modern monstrosity painted a flat, brilliant white, and looked out of place on a street full of Colonials, like a spaceship that had crash-landed in the cul-de-sac. Sydelle’s house—and Rose never thought of it any other way—had huge windows and odd angles and strangely-shaped rooms (a dining room that was almost a rectangle, a bedroom that was not quite a square). The rooms were full of glass tables, glass-and-metal furniture with pointed edges, and mirrors everywhere, including a mirrored wall in the kitchen that showed every stray fingerprint, every deep breath—and every bite or nibble that everyone in the kitchen ever took. Plus, there were digital scales in every bathroom, including the downstairs powder room, and a variety of magnets with diet-related slogans on the refrigerator. The one Rose remembered best had a picture of a cow contentedly munching grass beneath the legend “Holy Cow! Are you eating again?” Every glittering, reflective surface, every magnet and every scale seemed to conspire with Sydelle to send the message that Rose was inadequate, unfeminine, not pretty enough, and way too big.
The week they’d moved in, Rose had asked her father for money.
“Is there something special you need?” he asked, staring at her with concern. Rose never asked him for money above the five dollars in allowance she got each week. Maggie was the one who regularly hit him up—she wanted Barbie dolls, a new lunch box, scented Magic Markers and glittery stickers, and a poster of Rick Springfield for her wall.
“School supplies,” Rose said. He gave her a ten-dollar bill. She walked to the drugstore and purchased a small notebook with a purple cover. For the rest of the school year she’d used it to write down her careful notations of what women did. It was her secret project. Sydelle, she knew, would be happy to tell her what women did and did not do, say, wear, and, most important, eat, but Rose wanted to figure it out for herself. Looking back, she figured she must have had some dim idea that she was supposed to have magically absorbed the pertinent information at some point in her girl-hood . . . and the fact that she hadn’t, and that Sydelle felt she had room to issue proclamations on skin care and calorie counting, was an indictment of her dead mother. Which, of course, made Rose all the more determined to puzzle it out on her own.
“Nails curved, not straight!” she would write . . . or “no dumb jokes!” She convinced her father to buy her a yearlong subscription to Seventeen and Young Miss magazines, and she’d saved up her allowance to buy herself a copy of a paperback called How to Be Popular! that she’d seen advertised in the back of both magazines. She had studied those pages as carefully as any Talmudic scholar had ever pored over the sacred texts. She would watch her teachers, neighbors, her sister, even the hair-netted ladies in the cafeteria, and try to figure out how girls and women were supposed to be. It was like a math problem, she told herself, and once she solved it, once she’d figured out the equation of shoes plus clothes plus hairdo plus the right kind of personality (and, of course, once she’d figured out how to approximate the right kind of personality), she’d get people to like her. She’d be popular, like Maggie.
Of course it had been a disaster, she thought, wiping her breath off the mirror and leaning in close with the tweezers. All of her planning and note taking had been for nothing. Popularity was a code she couldn’t crack. No matter how many pages she’d filled, no matter how often she’d imagined sitting with Missy Fox and Gail Wylie in the high-school cafeteria, her purse slung over the back of her chair, her Diet Coke and Baggies of carrots before her, it had never worked out right.
By high school, she’d given up on clothes and makeup, on hair and nails. She quit reading the advice columns and the stories in her magazines that dictated everything from how to talk to a guy to the precise angle of an eyebrow’s arch. She abandoned the hope that she’d ever be pretty or popular, and kept what was left of her fashion focus on shoes. Shoes, she reasoned, could not be worn incorrectly. There were no variables with shoes, no collars to turn up or down, no cuffs to roll or leave unrolled, no piece of jewelry or hairdo that would make or break (in Rose’s case, mostly break) the outfit. Shoes were shoes were shoes, and even if she wore them with the wrong things, she couldn’t wear them the wrong way. Her feet would always look right. She’d look the popular-girl part, from the ankles down, even if from the ankles up she was still a loser.
It was only natural that she’d be thirty years old and clueless about almost anything style-related except for
the relative merits of nubuck versus suede or the shape of this season’s heels. Rose sighed and squinted at herself. Crooked. “Shit,” she said, and raised the tweezers. The doorbell chimed.
“Coming!” Maggie sang.
“Oh, no,” said Rose. She hurried out of the bathroom, shoving past her sister, who shoved her right back.
“Jesus, what is your problem!” Maggie demanded, rubbing her shoulder.
“Just move!” said Rose, groping for her wallet, extracting a wad of bills, and shoving them toward Maggie. “Go away! Go see a movie!”
“It’s almost ten,” Maggie pointed out.
“Find a late show!” said Rose, and flung open the door. And there was Jim, smelling faintly of cologne and more strongly of scotch, with a dozen red roses in his arms. “Hello, ladies,” he said.
“Ooh, pretty!” said Maggie, taking the flowers. “Rose, put these in a vase,” she said, handing them off to her sister. “May I take your coat?” she asked Jim.
Jesus! Rose gritted her teeth and walked to the kitchen. When she got to the living room, Maggie and Jim were sitting side by side on the couch. Maggie showed no signs of leaving . . . and, Rose noticed, the money she’d given her had magically disappeared. “So Jim!” Maggie said brightly, leaning toward him, her bountiful cleavage on display, “how have you been?”
“Maggie,” said Rose, balancing herself on the arm of the couch, which was the only available seating, “don’t you have plans?”
Her sister gave her an evil smile. “Not at all, Rose,” she said. “I’m in for the night.”
SEVEN
On Monday morning, Maggie Feller hopped off the bus, slung her backpack over her shoulder, and wove deftly through Port Authority. It was nine-thirty, and the auditions started at nine, and she would have been earlier, except she hadn’t been able to decide between the caramel leather Nine West boots (with boot-cut jeans) or the Stuart Weitzman Mary Janes (with pencil skirt and fishnet stockings).
She turned the corner at Forty-second Street and her heart sank. There had to be a thousand people out in front of the MTV studio windows, jamming every inch of the sidewalk, crowding the little strip of grass in the center of Broadway.
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