Two Sisters Times Two

by Jeffrey Anderson

2

  Penni’s head was in a swirl as she tried to sync her legal pad’s list of decisions to be made and subcontractors to be scheduled with the blurry image she had of a beautiful and inviting home. Everywhere she looked in the unfinished condo were more questions than answers, more loose ends than finalized choices, more unease than peace.

  She had a firmly established model for managing such diverse demands, and years of close witness, as she’d watched her mom effectively direct everything from the conservatory addition to their house to a fund-raising push at church to her high school class’s gift of a computer center (bypassing the PTSA and her class council) to her picture-perfect wedding (and she had the videos and photo albums to prove it, now in storage, somewhere). Trouble was, she’d always watched her mom do her director dynamo act—like watching a juggler keep three bowling pins and two balls in the air while balancing a chair on her head—but never tried out the role herself. She’d never chaired a committee at school or captained a ball team or even served on the church’s youth-group planning board. She was a dependable and, if given a task, highly effective and resourceful team player, as in contributor not leader. Leadership was what her mom did; or, if mom was unavailable due to prior engagement, dad or any of her brothers. They could plot the strategy, make the critical phone call, give her the plan, which she would then carry out.

  But today there was no one to give her that plan, no one to call for decision-making or guidance. Randall was on rotation at the hospital and in any case had made it clear that he had no interest in or aptitude for decorating a condo. “It’s your money,” he’d said as a final, and non-negotiable, evasive maneuver, by which he meant it was her dad’s money and he would do nothing whatsoever to risk the accusation of squandering or misappropriating those funds. While this was a matter of irrational sensitivity on his part, she’d given up trying to dissuade him (it was their only significant disagreement, and cause of all their tiffs). She now placed her hopes on time, and Randall’s eventual earning power, to erase not only his huge student debts but also this marital impasse.

  But waiting would not magically resolve the list before her. The painters needed her wall color choices today! But to make the wall color choices she needed the carpet (color and pile) decided. But to make the carpet decision she needed the furniture (style and fabric and wood species and stain) decided. And to do that she needed the draperies picked out, each of the bedrooms plus the living room, each their own pattern, color, fabric, and density. Density!

  They had a room at the fabric store that allowed you to sit in a chair and see the amount and color of light any fabric they offered would allow through in any compass orientation at any given latitude and longitude at any given time of any given day (or night) of any year. She hadn’t known the exact compass orientation of their condo, though the windows did seem to face south. The helpful attendant had said, “No problem” and dialed in their address and came up with GPS coordinates and orientation and showed her scenes from different seasons and different times of day for her five favorite fabrics. She had swatches of those fabrics on the kitchen counter now. But of course she’d forgotten which was darker which lighter, which let in gold light which orange which green, which was soothing in summer which oppressive in winter; and her voluminous notes (three pages back on her pad) were an indecipherable jumble. So now what was she to do?

  She sat on the unfinished hardwood floor with the fall’s early morning light (south-southwest orientation, forty-two degrees north latitude, seventy-one degrees west longitude, minus three point six degrees solar declination, nine twenty-two AM EST on November twelve) striking the walls primed white to her right but not yet her spot of floor. She crossed her legs, flexed her arms, pressed her hands flat against the floor, and took an instinctive cleansing breath.

  She recalled last being seated so in one of her public policy seminars at Georgetown last spring. The fifteen students and their vivacious professor, a woman hardly older than she, were seated cross-legged in a circle not in a classroom or at a retreat center or even in a park. They were sitting smack in the middle of the plaza of Dupont Circle at the height of rush hour. Pedestrians and dogs and baby carriages and bicyclists and skateboarders were weaving around and through their ring. Cars sat stopped or creeping along in the dense traffic just a few yards away. Blaring horns and roaring jet engines punctuated the drone of human voices, car and truck engines, and the gurgle of the Circle’s central fountain. And above this noise the instructor announced in a voice that was not loud but nonetheless distinct, “Now close your eyes and imagine the order that defines this human chaos.” It was an exercise in group visioning that Penni would never forget, even though it didn’t last long as a cop came by and, receiving no assembly permit, told them to disperse—which they did, to seats on the rim of the fountain.

  Had the profound if momentary peace she’d felt that day come from some elusive vision of order she’d grasped, or from the collective effort of a disparate group of individuals brought together by circumstance? Penni had always found meaning in shared effort, and her life had provided abundant opportunities—all her years in the heterogeneous pool of public schools; her undergraduate years in college with its mix of suitemates, dorm-mates, classmates; her semesters abroad, first in South Africa then in Prague; then grad school in DC, sharing apartments with different girls each year, and her wide range of acquaintances drawn from both fellow students and the surrounding melting-pot populace. Her purpose came from endeavors with, and on behalf of, others. She had no idea how to act alone and in her own interest. Worse, the process seemed so empty compared with her ideal of communal effort.

  The sun had partially cleared the left edge of the living room window and now, unfiltered by any drape, sliced the floor and her seated body cleanly in two. Her right half, from the ankle-high boots to the charcoal stretch-cord pants to her belted plum-paisley peasant’s smock and suede vest, seemed on fire, while her left side seemed locked in shadow all the deeper for its contrast to the lit side. She couldn’t help but see this cleaving as a sign, but of what? Her present locked in tense impasse? Her premarital life set in stark contrast to her married one? Childhood divided from adulthood? What did this division mean for one who’d always thought herself of a unified spirit and outlook? And perhaps hardest of all to determine, what was the darkness, what the light? And which to be nurtured—fire or shade?

  She stood quickly before the sun claimed her whole body and moved into the lingering dimness of the kitchen. The paint color sheets were laid out on the granite counter beneath the low-voltage pendant lights. Each sheet showed a “family” of colors, and the sheets were arranged in ascending order of boldness from left to right. She’d named each family, partly to help her remember the colors but also to help her break from the crushing monotony of this chore. Thus the beige-brown family on the far left were the Smiths, the yellow-golds next in line the Murphys, the aqua-teals the Ridenhours, and so on to the rose-vermilions at the far right labelled as the Hacienda Echeveria. She grabbed the Smith family sheet and quickly wrote the names of rooms on the array of muted earth tones—kitchen on the light beige, living room on the medium beige, master bedroom on one of the browns, until all rooms had colors, albeit nondescript ones, designated. She left that sheet on the center of the counter for the painting contractor to pick up later that morning. She gathered all the other families into one pile and slid them into her soft briefcase. She switched off the lights and was returning the key to the realtor’s lock box when she paused, pulled the Echeveria family out of her briefcase (it was on the bottom), wrote dining room on the deep burgundy swatch then tore it free from its kin and clipped it over the dining room designated taupe of the Smith family. “A little cross-cultural fraternization never hurt anyone,” she said to the frowning Smith family sheet. Then she left.

  She had precisely twenty minutes for the twenty-five minute walk to her meeting at the State Street Tower. But she embraced that challenge with an enthus
iasm and a spring in her step that had been missing these past few weeks. If she’d been prone to self-examination, she might have attributed this sudden zeal to the bright and crisp fall day or to her executive decisions on paint colors or to the vague recall of her class in Dupont Circle. But the truth was she had no idea why she felt this burst of energy and optimism, though her mother’s image occasionally mixed with the faces in the crowds she joined in rushing along the streets of the financial district.

  She was actually a minute early when she emerged from the elevator into the local office of an international development firm. She was there in her job as a part-time intern serving as an informal liaison between developers and the city planning department. Her meager salary was paid out of a pool funded by a consortium of big-time developers, but it was administered out of the planning department. As if this wasn’t confusing enough, she was never clear if she was advocating for the developers or for the citizens of the city as represented by the planning department. Her supervisor at the department had answered on her first day, “There needn’t be a difference.”

  But at every meeting since (about a dozen so far) she’d registered countless differences, all revolving around the developers’ desire to maximize profits and the citizens’ desire to get public improvements for free. The devil was, of course, in the details—which was where she came in: to take the details of a given proposal from the developer to the planning department or vice versa. These preliminary exchanges could have been transacted by legal advisors (at much higher cost) or via e-mail or courier pouch (deprived of the nuance and context of a liaison’s summation). Instead, they were communicated by her, along with written requests and proposals, so that the developers could say they were working with the city and the city could say it was cooperating with developers. In the end, Penni figured her efforts didn’t amount to much, since the proposals she shared would be extensively reworked before being presented, and maybe reworked again and again, before finally being voted on and rejected or approved. But in the process of all this, she was getting in-depth exposure to both sides of the development equation, at least as practiced in the city of Boston. And she wasn’t sure she liked what she saw, on either side.

  The young receptionist (she was maybe a few years older than Penni) ushered her into the conference room. Penni declined her offer of something to drink.

  The six men seated around the large oval brushed chrome and etched glass table all stood. Five of the men were over fifty and dressed in suits. The sixth man, an administrative assistant serving today as note-taker, was in his thirties and wore a V-necked sweater over his dress shirt and tie.

  Mark Duncan, the project manager and also head of this office, left his seat at one end of the table and came forward. “Penni, so glad to see you again.” He shook her hand. “Move into the condo yet?”

  Penni did her best to match the firm grip of his very soft hand. “Not yet, but soon. Thank you for asking.”

  “You have any problems with those trades, give Bart a call,” Mr. Duncan said, referring to Bart Seiferman, their field enforcer once a project was underway. He’d been at the prior meeting but wasn’t here today.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’ve got his card in our apartment.”

  Mr. Duncan, a lifelong New Englander originally from Connecticut who put on or shed his Boston accent depending on the company, dispensed with it today as he summarily reintroduced Penni to the others in the room, all of whom she’d met two weeks earlier at the first meeting. He then pulled a chair out for her to sit, and slid it gently under her then lightly grazed her shoulder before returning to his place at the head of the table.

  Penni looked up and realized she was the only one sitting and felt briefly embarrassed. But Mr. Duncan put her at ease with a friendly grin and a short nod before gesturing for the others to sit and finally sitting himself. Then they got down to business.

  The developer already had preliminary approval for an eight-building, four hundred unit waterfront condo project. It would involve the demolition of some old warehouses and filling in a small section of polluted marsh. They’d somehow breezed through the tallest hurdles normally thrown in front of waterfront projects of this magnitude—the environmental and water-quality impact studies. But now a small but committed coalition of neighborhood business and home owners, perhaps sensing that the developer had pulled a fast one with the speedy environmental approvals, were making a loud stink and demanding all manner of concessions—tied to the stated goal of preserving the neighborhood’s “tradition and quality of life.” Penni and everyone at the planning department not to mention those in this room, understood this claim as a ruse. That section of waterfront had no traditional identity—unless broken warehouse windows and floating litter were an identity—and the quality of life, whatever it was now, would be irrevocably changed—by most measures, for the better—by the addition of four hundred exorbitantly priced condos and the associate upscale services they brought.

  But the neighborhood coalition had gained some traction around two requests—that ten percent of the condos be priced below market as affordable housing made available to existing residents by lottery; and that the last building in the string, the one to be built on the filled in marsh, be deleted and replaced by a waterfront park. At the earlier meeting Penni had brought the planning department’s suggestion that the developer consider these two requests in greater detail.

  At that meeting, there followed an hour-long listing of all the reasons why such eleventh-hour changes were impossible, with each person present at the table offering highly detailed justifications from his area of expertise. But at the conclusion of this unified show of resistance, Mr. Duncan had said, “We are not going to send this pretty young lady back to Planning with a perfunctory ‘No’. Run the numbers and check with the bean-counters and prepare a formal response for her to take back to City Hall, to be ready in two weeks.”

  So today she was here to receive their response—first verbally, then in written form to take back to her supervisor and the department.

  They were willing to give on the waterfront park idea, but only in exchange for killing the community center they’d agreed to build on a piece of property they’d optioned across the road from the condo complex. Penni figured this wasn’t a concession at all but probably a net-savings to them and a net loss to the neighborhood. A community center was year-round and for all ages. The park would be seasonal and accessible to only the able-bodied with daylight hours to spare. Further, she figured the change of heart was linked to an in-house engineering study she’d inadvertently been given access to, that revealed the challenges, and steep costs, of building a high-rise on the marsh.

  On the question of affordable housing, they were adamant in their refusal. They cited numerous studies that such initiatives did not increase diversity but did degrade value for the entire complex. According to their research, in a comparable development in North Carolina, more than half the affordable units were unoccupied after five years, putting a drag on the sale of the market-priced units. “The locals don’t want to live in these luxury condos,” Ted Riley, head of sales, concluded. “They don’t feel at home there!”

  Penni nodded but said nothing. Her job was to listen and relay information. But she did write on her pad Why not?

  At the end of the hour, she thanked the men for their efforts and their time, gathered up the two binders containing the details of the responses, and headed to the door.

  Mr. Duncan caught up and escorted her to the elevators. “Who knows? You might like to upgrade to one of these units a few years from now.”

  She laughed. “I could never afford it. But even if I could, my husband and I will probably be a long ways from here.”

  He shrugged. “Keep it in mind. It will be a good investment, if you get in early.”

  She nodded as the elevator doors opened. “Good day, Mr. Duncan,” she said from the elevator, without shaking his hand in farewell.

 
His piercing stare held on her till the doors closed and blocked it.

  Her walk to City Hall was somewhat more leisurely than the one down here, as she had no appointment time to meet and happily let the sun, now high enough in the sky to penetrate the canyon of skyscrapers, warm her shoulders and soothe her muscles. Her earlier inexplicable optimism persisted though now was tempered by her reflections on the meeting just completed. She was torn between her indignation at being outrageously manipulated—most overtly by the old-enough-to-be-her-father Mark Duncan with his smooth mix of condescension and flirtation, but also by the entire commercial development industry—and her secret elation at having been the focus of attention of six (well, five and a half) bright and highly paid men for an hour’s time on the twentieth floor of a gleaming tower of capitalism with a gorgeous view of the harbor and the airport. At some level, she understood that both extremes of response were inappropriate for her, the one being too cynical and jaded, the other too preening and narcissistic. But her natural identity of affable and enthusiastic cooperation, which had thrived for years—since high school at least—without conscious thought or effort, was under assault in her new life in this harsh and lonely city.

  At City Hall she went to the tiny office she shared with three other interns (the others were unpaid—at least she got a little income, a cause for both pride and guilt). The office was empty. She sat down and typed out a detailed summary of the meeting from her notes and fresh memories. At the bottom of her report, under the sub-heading Conclusions and recommendations, she paused for many minutes in silent contemplation. She was once again confronted with her job’s ill-defined and contradictory priorities. Was she an advocate, however miniscule, for the citizenry in general—of Boston and perhaps beyond—or for the citizenry of the waterfront neighborhood or for the Planning Department or for Mark Duncan and all his fat-cat cohorts and investors that paid her salary? And what about her—what rights did her conscience and character and education and goals have in this equation? In the end, she summarized these far-ranging conscious and semi-conscious thoughts into the following two sentences: Push for the park and the community center in return for withdrawing the affordable housing. They’ll squawk a little then concede.

  She printed her report, slid it into an inter-office envelope along with the developer’s detailed responses, and took it upstairs to her supervisor’s office. The door was locked with a note on the door pad indicating the planner was out for the day. Penni breathed a sigh of relief, glad not to have to provide a verbal assessment to go along with her written one. Her supervisor, a pragmatist from thirty years’ experience in urban planning, had a way of undermining her idealism. She slid the envelope through the slot in the door and ran out into the rest of her day, free from obligation at just past noon.

  But free to what end? She considered calling Randall to see if he could get away for lunch, but quickly abandoned that idea. Twice in the first week of his residency she’d arranged to meet him at the hospital only to arrive to find him in the midst of some emergency. The second time he’d totally forgot about the appointment and she’d waited outside his office for an hour, repeatedly calling his phone to leave messages that weren’t returned. When he’d finally stopped by his office, to pick something up before rushing off to another set of rounds, he’d spotted her and apologized profusely for his oversight. She forgave him and sent him on his way with a kiss but decided that day not to bother him at work with anything short of a dire emergency.

  She could go back by the condo. There were plenty more decisions to be made, and she could check on the painter. But that idea had less than zero appeal and no necessity. None of her other decisions had to be made today, and all of them might benefit by seeing the walls painted in the colors of her choosing—or so she hoped.

  She could return to their Back Bay apartment rented on a three-month sublet. She had a stack of books waiting from the Public Library. But the apartment was dark and lonely; and her preferred time for reading was night, in bed with the covers pulled up. She could spend the afternoon leafing through cookbooks and planning dinner and buying the ingredients and making the meal—all in hopes Randall actually got home sometime before ten. But what if he didn’t?

  So when she hit the broad brick plaza outside City Hall’s main entrance, she had no idea what she would do. Worse, she had no idea what she wanted to do. The beautiful day had somehow conspired with her morning activities to bring her drifting life into focus, as sharply defined as the lamppost against the crystal blue sky, that lamppost’s black shadow against the earth-toned pavers. For the last two years, she’d seen marriage as her destination and convinced herself that once she’d arrived at that destination her future course would be obvious. Now on the other side of that milestone, she saw that indeed her near-term future was determined, defined by the requirements of Randall’s career. But she’d made no provision for her own needs or goals. She could subordinate some of those hopes to Randall’s career, was doing so. But was she meant to place her whole life on hold till his settled down?

  She sat on the low wall beside that solitary lamppost that seemed now not only a symbol for her plight but at the moment an anchor. She wanted to clutch it. Instead, she pushed her hand hard against its wrought-iron base where it socketed into the brick of her seat. The metal, on the side away from the sun, was cool to her touch and surprisingly rough.

  Safely moored, she looked out at the smattering of people scattered about the broad plaza. Most were either head to or exiting from the Government Center subway stop across the way. Some were City Hall employees heading out to lunch. A handful—most solitary, a few in pairs—were eating their box or bag lunches on the plaza’s steps or low walls. Penni was happy to see all these midday pedestrians in their wide range of attire and pursuits. She was glad for their companionship, however remote. A year ago this would have seemed a very lean diet compared with her full engagement with roommates, classmates, and friends of wide-ranging background and profession. But a recent hard-learned lesson was that one takes what one is given.

  A commotion from the Beacon Hill side of the plaza drew her eye. A young woman leading five nursery-school aged kids had somehow got them across the street and safely into the broad plaza. But once there, the kids decided to scatter in all directions—that is, except for the one clinging to her legs and keeping her from chasing after the others. She was shouting for the rest—one, maybe the group’s leader, was apparently named Adrian—to stop running and return to her, even as she tried to comfort the little girl wrapped around her legs with pats to her head and attempts to lift her upright. It almost looked like a conspiracy, with the plaintive girl charged with immobilizing the adult while the others escaped. Unfolding in the unobstructed expanse of brick—the kids knew enough to steer clear of the road—it appeared a harmless game, perhaps one played out many times before, and soon a comic relief as the errant four—two boys, two girls—settled into an undulating line lead by the biggest boy, presumably Adrian, who extended his arms mimicking a plane and swooped teasingly close to the woman, who almost got a hand on him but not quite, as he raced past and out into the plaza trailed by the other three, all now with their arms extended and making the whoosh noises of jet engines in the otherwise quiet mall.

  As the line of flying children passed close to her bench, Penni suddenly jumped up and took the lead, extending her arms like theirs and heading back toward the young woman, who by now had given up on shouting commands and had lifted the girl from her legs up onto her hip. The four kids all stopped their flying, piling into a small cluster, and stood staring at the adult daring to play their game. Penni used their pause to swoop around behind the last girl in line to block a possible escape attempt. She stopped her antics and stood smiling as a rear guard to the approach of the woman carrying the last child. Adrian eyed this interloper suspiciously and seemed torn between making a dash to freedom and remaining to protect his peers. In the end he appeared reassured by Penni’s smile
but remained cautious and watchful.

  The woman approached, huffing from her exertions. “Thank you so much,” she said to Penni, then looked to the oldest boy. “Are you going to behave or do I have to put you back on the leash?”

  Penni saw four short woven leashes hanging from the woman’s belt and now understood how she’d got the herd safely across the road.

  The boy nodded to the woman with a grin caught between bemusement and grudging cooperation.

  “My own son and he’s the worst of the bunch!”

  Penni nodded. “Of course.”

  The woman was now close enough to extend her free hand. “Molly Dorsey.”

  “Penni Redmond; I mean, Penni Coulter.”

  The woman laughed. “I use to be Molly Brennan. Took me forever to get used to the switch. Took Adrian’s birth. If he was Adrian Dorsey, then I must be Mrs. Dorsey.”

  “Is that what it takes?” The woman appeared a few years younger than Penni, and with a son maybe four years old.

  “For me. But everyone’s different.” She set the little girl in her arms on the ground. “This is Elise.” The blond girl turned from Penni and buried her face in Molly’s legs. “And Sasha and Lauren and Michael and you met Adrian,” she said, pointing up the line of now stationary children all watching this newcomer.

  Penni nodded to each in turn, then said, “Not all yours?”

  “Oh, heavens no. Just Adrian. He’s more than enough. The rest are from our building. I take them on Thursdays.”

  Penni nodded.

  “I brought them out here for a little exercise and lunch in the park.” She patted the backpack slung over her shoulder. “Maybe a little too ambitious.”

  Penni laughed. “I think he’s got everything under control,” she said, looking at Adrian.

  Molly nodded. “That’s what I’m worried about.”

  “What if you and Adrian lead the way, and Sasha and I bring up the rear?” The dark-haired lead girl’s dark eyes hadn’t left her face the whole time.

  “That would be great,” Molly said with obvious relief. “You don’t mind?”

  “What do you think, Sasha?” Penni asked.

  The girl nodded enthusiastically.

  “Adrian, can you show us the way to the park?”

  “Walking, please,” Molly added.

  Adrian pretended to ignore both women but found his way to the head of their group and began a steady march across the bright plaza toward the green of the park on the far side, beyond City Hall.

  Penni grabbed her briefcase from the bench then Sasha’s hand, the two of them trailing at the end of the somewhat orderly line.