“…I was talking to my therapist and, well, she thinks our friendship is another place where I don’t have good boundaries, so… I’m not saying you’re trying to take advantage, L,
I know you’re a true friend, but, you see, the thing with Bob was just such an eye-opener for me. My therapist says I need to learn to learn to take better care of myself. I need to stop trying so hard to please others so… Well, anyway, you know I love to have you live here, but, you know…”
My stomach hurts. I wish she’d leave so I could curl up on my bed and cry. If I still have a bed, that is.
“Look, L, I don’t mean to be a hater,” G continues. Another word she stole from me. A word I borrowed from the music Alex blares in his room whenever he’s home from college. I wish I could snatch it back from Gretchen’s mouth and claim copyright or something.
“Anyway, L, you seem to be doing so well with your job, buying new things and, well, all this time you’ve never offered to contribute. I mean, I know I own this place, but the maintenance comes out of my estate, you know? And maintenance in this building is not cheap. I think if you contributed a thousand a month that is way reasonable for Manhattan, especially for a place like this, right by the park. And well, you know, you’ve been here three months, and let’s say the first one was on me, but after that, really… What I’m trying to say is: You owe me two thousand dollars in back rent for June and July, and then August just started, so that’s another thousand… I think it’s a fair deal, and I’m only doing this in order to be, you know, fair, and honest, and good to myself.”
She takes in a deep breath, as if recovering from a huge effort.
I don’t know what to say. I shift my weight from one foot to the other. To think I walked into this trap, eyes wide open. How could I believe I would really live here for free? Like a parasite. Ca un parazit.
“Gute Rechnung, gute Freundshaft,” I finally say.
Gretchen gives me a blank stare.
“It’s German, G. It means something like good calculation, good friendship.”
Maybe the mention of German will make Gretchen soften up. After all, it was my interest in the language that started our friendship. It was in high school that I decided I didn’t fit into American society, and that my entire family would be better off if we moved back to Europe. I used to scan the names of kids in my class, singling out the ones that sounded European. Gretchen’s stood out. I walked up to her and asked timidly: “Are you German? Were you named after Gretchen in Faust?” Gretchen had once fallen asleep during Faust, and had absolutely no German origin to claim. But she thought I was very interesting at a time when she herself was very bored. That’s how we became friends.
The silence in the room is heavy. I guess I have to produce more in way of a response than a German saying.
“Well,” Gretchen says, “It’s important to get uncomfortable matters out of the way, in order to be good friends. And really, L, it’s such a ridiculous amount, it’s just symbolic, you know. Kind of like a symbol of the trust and …er, friendship between us, you know?”
I stifle a sigh. In the circles I grew up in, nobody would talk of two thousand dollars and counting as a symbolic amount.
But it’s nothing to Gretchen. I’ve seen her donate clothes to charity that had price tags higher than that still hanging on them, clothes she had never worn.
It’s an understatement to say that she is filthy rich and obnoxiously spoiled. She got a BMW for her high school graduation, and a two-bedroom apartment overlooking the park for barely making it through college, which really just meant surviving four years of intense partying.
I myself worked hard in school. I had a full scholarship in high school. Then I went on to CUNY because it was cheap and in the city, but I graduated summa cum laudae. It’s true that I lived at home with Mami, and unlike American kids, I was never pushed, or even encouraged, to get a job, or even to do my own laundry. Mami never even let me wash the dishes. All I had to do was go to class, schlepping used copies of paperback novels, and my dog-eared Italian dictionary back and forth on the subway. At home, Mami would cook delicious meals, keep the house clean, and not just wash, but actually iron every little piece of clothing I used. Even my underwear. Tati would give me a weekly allowance. He’d come get me on weekends and take me to visit his friends in ‘the community’, or take me back to Manhattan to go to the park or the museum. A few times a month he made sure he took me to what he called a real cultural event, a play, or a concert, and Momo sometimes joined us.
Yes, my life has been good and sheltered. But what was given to me always had its limits. Mami cooked the most delicious meals, but insisted we eat the leftovers. She was meticulous about ironing, but would never ever spring for a new outfit. The house was clean, but there was never enough money to get cable, or the internet. We watched a small ancient TV, hooked up to an antenna. Tati gave me an allowance, but it was never more than a hundred bucks or so. I could shop at TJ Max, but never at Bloomingdale’s, not to mention Barney’s, or any of the designer stores on Fifth or Madison.
My college graduation present was that both parents attended. Even Alex came from upstate, looking presentable and acting less obnoxious than usual. Mami baked one of her famous chocolate cakes, all made from scratch, decorated with candied hazelnuts (alune) and laced with real rum. She stayed up most of the night to arrange the layers, and still had to work the next day, so she looked frail and tired. Tati gave me an envelope containing not one hundred dollars, as usual, but actually two (!), and brought an excellent bottle of red wine that we all loved. My parents, like most Romanians, don’t give a damn about underage drinking.
A cake, two hundred dollars, and a bottle of wine! That’s all I got. That, and a rather uncomfortable silence around the table when I announced my future plans: working at Bella in order to save money for a trip to Italy, and living with Gretchen in Manhattan. After the long silence, Mami exclaimed with carefully contrived cheer: “Well, that sounds like lot of fun! You should be enjoying the life when you are young.” She raised her glass to toast to Italy.
Tati gave her an angry look:
“Go on, encourage her! Don’t you see she’s completely irresponsible?”
Then Mami and Tati started arguing.
Alex and I cleared the chocolate covered plates and placed them in a pile on the kitchen table. It didn’t occur to us to actually wash them. We just stood there with a table full of dirty plates between us. I was trying to think of a topic of conversation, just so we wouldn’t have to listen. But we both really wanted to listen, in the same way that people feel compelled to slow down and look at a car wreck on the highway.
Tati kept his voice low. His anger tends to be controlled. Mami usually makes up for it by being quite dramatic. She’s a screamer, a thrower, and on occasion a hitter (She never spanked Alex or me, but I’ve seen her hit Tati a few times). Every now and then, we could hear her crying out in an exasperated, almost pleading voice:
“What she is doing wrong? She just wants to live the life!”
It was Mami’s rule early on, that only English would be spoken in our household. Yet of all members of our dysfunctional family, she’s the only one still struggling with it. Still, she will not give up. That is Mami’s way.
So basically, for graduation, Gretchen got a lovely apartment. I got a cake, some wine, two hundred dollars, and courtside tickets to yet another championship fight between my parents. All of these things, however, I can never say to G. What’s the point of telling people how much your own life sucks?
So I smile, shrug, and admit she caught me off guard.
“Gee, Gretchen. I never thought of it that way… I mean, I thought I could just crash, but I don’t want you to feel like I’m taking advantage. I’ll just, well, you know… I’ll just give you the money.”
Gretchen is still standing there, expectantly. Does she think I’ll write her a check right now? Does she imagine in her crazy little head that I have that much mone
y in my checking account? Or that I have a hidden pile of cash in a shoebox in my closet, prepared for just such an emergency?
It’s a long awkward moment before she finally bids me goodnight and leaves.
That night I cannot sleep. Good calculation, good friendship. Where am I gonna get that money from? I mostly earn commission at Bella.
I was really planning to save for Italy. But there is just too much expensive fun to be had in New York City proper. Having to commute all the way to Queens, I never before enjoyed this much freedom, the excitement of so many things to do, so many places to go to. I’ve been spending my paycheck before it even gets deposited into my account. I’m always struggling to make minimum payments on my credit card, and the only thing I can be proud of is that so far I’ve somehow managed to make due. Other than that I have nothing to show for myself. Most of the time I try not to think of this. After all, I’ve only been on my own for three months. Nobody would expect me to have saved enough for a trip to Italy in such a short time, would they?
But now suddenly the situation is beyond disastrous. Now I’ve accumulated a monstrous debt towards my best friend, a friend who has been kind enough to give me clothes and shelter. And sheets of a gazillion count Egyptian cotton. I’ll have to find a way to pay her back. And then I’ll have to find a way to keep paying to live here.
I toss and turn all night. I don’t know if it’s the coffee, the hideous burger, or Gretchen’s unexpected demand for money that’s keeping me up. I only fall asleep close to dawn, and then I have the most disturbing dream. My parents are sitting on a park bench together. Mami is wearing a lovely red silk dress, a dress she used to wear in Romania, in the 80s. She’s holding a cheeseburger, wrapped in yellow wax paper. She holds it as if it were a curious object, and looks at it with disgust. She takes a small bite, and chews slowly, with obvious discomfort, as if she were chewing a mouthful of cotton. “You call this food, Victor?” Her voice is shrill, her eyes angry. She throws the burger at Tati. “You call this a life?” I wake up nauseous, wanting to cry. Throughout the day, Mami’s voice echoes in my ears. You call this a life?
4
It Is What It Is.
Maria hates the subway. It’s hot, it smells bad, and there’s always construction. And she saw rats, on more than one occasion. Unfortunately, she has to ride the subway every day. If she added up all the hours of her life she’s wasted on the subway… But no, she’s not going to think about it right now. She’ll try to forget that she’s even here. She’ll continue reading, and she’ll imagine herself somewhere else. She takes another sip of coffee, trying not to spill the contents of her travel mug on her paperback novel.
She likes to get to the store early, so she can slip into the back room and change out of her sneakers. She hates the look of sneakers, always has. But life is too short to put up with sore feet. She’s no longer that young. After all, she just turned forty-four.
She slips into a pair of black patent leather flats. She then rinses her travel mug, washes it, dries it with paper towels, and places it in her tote bag, which she stashes in her locker. Next, she brushes her teeth using her favorite cinnamon flavored toothpaste. She takes a minute to arrange her dark brown hair in the mirror, pretending not to see the strands of white, pretending not to care. She applies a fresh coat of lipstick. Lastly, she removes her black work blazer from its hanger, puts it on, and dabs her wrists with her signature musky fragrance, the name of which she would not even reveal to her best friend.
When the store opens, Maria is, as usual, at her station, smiling, ready to go. She’s good at selling scarves and gloves. Not that it’s something she ever aspired to, but it’s a job. It gets her out of the house, and it pays the bills.
She has a special power over customers, and she likes that. It will end, of course, soon enough, when her looks are gone. But for now, she can still charm people into buying expensive things they don’t need. And after all these years, she still gets a thrill from the thought that they envy her, these rich women who buy five hundred dollar scarves with the same ease that she would buy a loaf of bread. It’s more than flattering. It’s actually ironic. Envy, of course, is nothing new to her. She’s always been beautiful, so beautiful, in fact, that even she herself could not ignore it. She’s been the object of people’s jealousy all her life. She has suffered great pain and loneliness because of it, especially when she was very young. But in the gloves and scarves department, envy works in her favor. Here envy is empowering, enjoyable almost. Sometimes she feels like an exotic princess who is only selling gloves as an act of generosity, giving of herself to women who so desperately need to borrow a bit of her glamour.
If only they knew how little glamour there is to her life! But she’s not going to allow herself to feel sorry for herself. Self-pity is forbidden. She banned it from her life a long time ago. She’s made of steel these days. Yet still, sometimes, her former self creeps in, the woman she used to be when she was younger. The woman who was unable to contain her disappointment when she saw her dreams ruined, her life stretching dreary before her, like a pile of dirty dishes to be washed in cold water day in and day out.
She’s tried for years to let go of her anger and frustration. In fact, she’s almost made peace with herself. Still, every now and then she feels pointless and all alone. An aging woman whose looks are rapidly fading, whose husband has traded her in for a newer, fancier model (though she’s aware of the gross unfairness of such claim, she still allows herself to think it every now and then), whose children no longer need her, and seem to not like her enough to want to see her, who has very few, and rather distant friends, who works hard at an overall shitty job meant for a girl half her age, who lives alone in a depressing apartment, in a neighborhood she detests.
These are the thoughts that keep her down on bad days. On good days, however, she sees herself as a relatively young woman with grown children who are finally out of the house. She might have done a bad job at it, but the ordeal of motherhood is over, and though she has not excelled at it by any means, she deserves some credit for trying her very best for the past twelve years at least. Her children might even come to realize this, once they truly mature. Maybe once they have children of their own and see for themselves how hard it is. Not that she necessarily wants them to have kids of their own. She’d rather put up with them being ungrateful and unappreciative forever, than watch them sacrifice themselves to parenthood the way she had to.
She has to catch herself whenever she starts thinking like this. She has to make herself stop. There’s no use complaining, after all. It is what it is.
That phrase irritates her son to no end. He declared it the ultimate platitude.
“Literary, my ass. You’d think a woman who studied fucking poetry and shit would find a better way to express herself.”
She so wishes he didn’t hate her. But she is powerless to change it, so it is best to just not think of it at all. After all, this too is what it is.
All she can do now is let go of the past and try to enjoy the prospect of her future. She’s waited many years for it, and her time has finally come. At last, she’s free. And she has to remind herself that she’s still young enough to enjoy it.
The thrill of new-found freedom puts a smile on her face. A genuine one, not a customer-service goddess one. Not that anybody knows her well enough to tell the difference. Victor might have, at some point. Or rather she desperately wanted him to. But now she’s old enough to pry apart her own wishful thinking from harsh reality. Victor was never as fine-tuned to her as she assumed him to be. She knows now that Victor never saw anybody as clearly as he sees himself. But then again, can she blame him? Aren’t people inherently selfish? Especially men. Women, sadly, were raised to revolve around the men they love, and, of course, around their children, to read their thoughts before these are even formed in their heads. It took her a long time to realize she was trying to do that constantly, while Victor mostly just saw through her.
M
aria opens the glass counter. She starts rearranging her favorite gloves, letting herself enjoy the scent of fine leather. She tries to relax, to liberate herself from all her toxic thoughts. She hates it when her mind starts spinning around the same ideas, distilling them into hideous clichés. She smiles. It’s L’s word. Hideous. Hidos. Which one has she just used, in her thought process, the English, or the Romanian? Funny how whenever she tries to figure out what language she thinks in, there is no way of telling. She probably thinks in broken English. Hideously broken English.
She calls L on her lunch break, while eating the roast chicken sandwich she brought from home. She’s hoping L is also taking her break. Will she also eat a home-made sandwich she’s packed carefully in the morning? She tried so hard to teach her about proper nutrition, something Americans seem really clueless about. She’s also explained how much money one could save by not eating out. When L started going to CUNY, Maria packed her a healthy lunch each day. But she soon discovered that L was feeding it to the pigeons, or throwing it in the trash, or best-case scenario, bringing it back untouched. She preferred to spend her allowance buying all sorts of crap she’d eat in unsanitary places. Maria eventually let the issue go. It’s one of the frustrating facts of raising children, that they refuse to follow perfectly good advice, and that there is no way of making them.
Then again, it is what it is.
The Italian lady finally summons her daughter to the phone.
“L, my sweetie! How is my beautiful girl?” Maria chirps into the receiver. She realizes how retarded she sounds, but she can’t help herself, she’s too excited to be talking to her baby girl.
Besides, she’s cool in her own way. For example, she is the only member of the family who agrees to call L L instead of Lili, or the much dreaded longer version, Liliana. Maria is very good at indulging her children’s harmless little eccentricities. This earns her quite a few points in L’s book. On the other hand, it is one more thing that irritates Alex.
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