by Melissa Bank
I saw him out of the corner of my eye, and for the first time that night I was glad to be wearing my perfect dress.
I’d envisioned this moment many times: I’d pictured turning my back to him or slapping his face or pretending that I couldn’t quite place him, I’d had so many lovers since him, my first, and all of them so much more memorable.
But when our eyes met and his look asked if I remembered him, my look answered that I did.
He came up to me as I was leaving. He asked if I wanted to go somewhere else for a drink, and I said that I couldn’t.
How was Hugh? I asked. He was fine. Was he painting? He did paint sometimes.
Michael walked me outside, and we stood talking on the sidewalk—or he talked. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t fall under his spell again, but to be safe I kept my eyes on his nose.
He was talking fast—he had a girlfriend but she was in Prague—and anyway they were breaking up—they’d practically already broken up—and I nodded while he talked, the way you do when you’re waiting for someone to finish.
“Well,” I said, “I have to go.”
He said, “Can I call you?”
I waited a long time before answering, though not, of course, as long as he’d made me wait. I let him stand there with the question in the air while I took a good long look at him, let him stand there while I stepped to the street and raised my arm for a cab. At exactly that moment, as though dispatched by some god I didn’t really believe in anymore—the god of drama or god of perfect things—or maybe by my own fairy god god, a cab came. I got in, and closed the door.
20TH-CENTURY TYPING
1.
NEW YORKGAVE ME a feeling of possibility I’d never gotten in the suburbs, driving home from Lord & Taylor with my mother, say. There, when I’d see people in other cars, I’d know they were on their way home, where their choices would be the same as mine: They could watch TV or read. In New York that summer, especially at dusk, in the Village or in midtown or on the Upper West Side, walking in a crowd of people or looking up at all the lit windows of an office or apartment building, I could feel like there were a thousand ways my life could go.
I’d just graduated from college and was teaching myself how to type at my brother Robert’s apartment, a prewar dust factory on 119th Street and Broadway, just a few steps from a bank of pay phones that served as an alfresco urinal.
“Pissoir,” my older brother called it, when he came for dinner; Jack lived by himself in a beautiful one-bedroom in the historic West Village.
Robert had three roommates, including his girlfriend, Naomi, who was quiet and serious. She was an unusually slow speaker, and I thought this might have something to do with her being Orthodox. I wondered if this strictest form of Judaism also dictated her sometimes wearing a bandanna over her long, wavy hair, which made her look like a girl from the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof.
That summer, Naomi was applying to doctoral programs in psychology and Robert was studying for his MCAT; they lived in the library at Columbia and slept in her bedroom. It was the brightest room, but it faced the street and could be loud. Salsa music came in and fought the Mozart on her stereo. I lived in Robert’s room, where I attended my own private secretarial school.
The apartment was big but dingy and full of cockroaches no one but me seemed to notice. It was especially depressing during the day when the sun shone through the dirty windows and let you know just how dirty everything was and always had been and always would be.
I was told that there were separate dishes for meat and milk, but I kept forgetting which was for which. One morning, when I was eating breakfast, Naomi came in and her mouth opened in what looked like a shriek. Instead, one of her ultra-white hands went up to her black hair, as though to calm her crazy self down.
“What?” I said.
I’d been eating my cereal out of a meat bowl.
When I offered to wash it out, she just stared at me.
I said, “What about if I use really, really hot water?”
She said the bowl would have to be thrown away, which seemed a little extreme, but as the criminal I wasn’t in a position to choose the bowl’s punishment.
. . . . .
She got Robert to talk to me about what I’d done, which I didn’t think boded well for her future as a psychologist.
That evening the two of them came through the front door together, but Naomi took a left to her bedroom and Robert a right to the living room, where I sat with his roommate Leah.
He said hello to both of us and went to the kitchen and mixed his evening cocktail, a cranberry juice and seltzer.
He leaned in the doorway, sipping it, while Leah told me about the teaching fellowship she’d start in the fall in Tel Aviv. Her words were boring to me, but her voice, a soft monotone, was so soothing I kept asking her questions so she’d go on: “What does Tel Aviv look like?” “How do Israeli universities differ from the ones here?”
Robert stood there, waiting for Leah to finish, and when it looked to him like that might never happen, he motioned with his head for me to join him in his room.
I did, and he closed the door. I sat on the bed he never slept in, and I wondered about that: It seemed unlikely that the Orthodox leaders who shook their long curls at the cereal in my meat bowl would say, “Fine, fine,” to premarital sex.
I tried to pay attention while Robert explained that Naomi’s strict observance of rituals stemmed from deep religious beliefs. I came to life when he started talking about our family. In Naomi’s eyes we were about as Jewish as Episcopalians. She’d been horrified that we’d had Christmas trees when we were growing up, and, as he told me, I remembered Robert as a little boy, dumping out his stocking of chocolate coins and matchbox cars, and his glee, in contrast to his current gloom.
I tried to cheer him up with a joke about the meatlike cockroaches illicitly lounging on milk plates in the cabinet, but he looked hurt, and when he said, “Sophie,” a reprimand, I got a sick feeling. He’d been going with Naomi to synagogue some Friday nights and Saturday mornings; I’d assumed Robert was just being Robert, i.e., a good egg, but now I worried that maybe he was on the way to becoming a Torah-thumper himself.
He said, “We opened our home to you,” which I knew was a direct quote from Naomi.
I said, “Did you just say, ‘We opened our home to you’?”
His face registered that I’d busted him, and for a second his face belonged to the Robert I knew. Then we heard Naomi go down the hall for her shower, and he fixed his face back to dead seriousness.
I told him I’d apologize to her.
He said, “I think that’s a good idea.”
I asked if I needed to apologize to the other roommates, Leah and Seth, and he said no, Naomi was the only one who kept kosher. He seemed to think it was normal for one person to dictate the dietary laws for five.
In the kitchen, he pointed out which dishes were for what. As it turned out, there was a separate set of milk silverware I hadn’t even known about, as well as separate pots and pans. He found a Magic Marker and wrote out labels on masking tape and stuck them on the shelves and drawers. We both acted like, Problem solved.
. . . . .
After Robert left to go back to the library, I went down the hall to Naomi’s room. The door was open; she was sitting at her desk writing a paper that might have been on conflict avoidance. Her hair hung thick and wet on a towel she’d draped over her bathrobe. It occurred to me that her hair would take all night to dry and that she’d sleep with a towel on her pillow, as I had when I was little. This made me think of her as young and clean instead of strict, which was the word that stuck in my mind from Robert’s speech about her religious observance.
Strict came back, though, in her expression, when I knocked on the door frame and she turned around. She seemed to know that she was not only right in this specific instance, but generally right, righteously right, and I pictured her acting like this with Robert.
I wa
s standing up for him and for my entire assimilated family and even the Christmas trees of my childhood, which I myself found strange, when I said, “Sorry about the cereal,” as in, Let’s not forget we’re talking about Cheerios here.
. . . . .
I was just starting to go out with Robert’s MCAT tutor, whom my genius brother called a genius.
Josh was gentle and polite, a poet and a lover of classic novels and foreign movies. He didn’t drink and had never tried a single drug, and even during the Hades days of July, as he called them, he gave the impression of having just showered; he smelled faintly of baby powder.
He had long hair, which he pulled back in a ponytail, and he was lanky without actually being tall. Robert told me Josh was a great tennis player, and one night I went to the courts to see the two of them play. I loved watching Josh—especially his huge, powerful serve; he had beautiful form.
Afterward, walking home, I said, “You should see me type sometime.”
. . . . .
Along with my father’s huge IBM Selectric II, I’d brought a book called 20th-Century Typewriting that I’d checked out from the library during my brief stint of postgraduation paralysis at home in the suburbs. A faded olive hardback, bound at the top like a pad, this was the book I’d used in junior-high typing class. I’d hoped some of the lessons would come back, but they hadn’t.
On breaks from typing, I studied the résumé book I’d bought, Advertisements for Yourself, though even its encouragement discouraged me. These job-seekers had spent their entire lives preparing for the jobs I only now realized I might want. Tim J. Sullivan had been a journalism major, the editor of the campus newspaper, and a summer intern at a Detroit metropolitan daily with a circulation of twenty thousand. Laura Johnson, whose goal it was to assist a photographer, had already assisted one, worked in a gallery, and received an honorable mention in a juried exhibit at the Minnesota State Fair.
Only Lisa Michele Butler was of any use to me. Though I hadn’t written a prizewinning thesis entitled “Regionalism in the Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett” or spearheaded a volunteer-based literacy initiative, I had been an English major. Therefore, like Lisa Michele, I sought an entry-level position in book publishing, preferably as an editorial assistant.
. . . . .
Following the book’s advice, I had my résumé typeset and was stunned by the effect: In plain, beautiful type, my lack of experience, accomplishments, and honors came across as understatement and modesty. I loved how my résumé looked so much that I forgot my fear about its content and showed it to Josh.
He said, “I don’t know what you’ve been so worried about.”
I said that he should see the résumés in Advertisements for Yourself.
“Honey,” he said, “those aren’t real people.”
I said, “I know that. Now.”
. . . . .
I called the first person on Jack’s list of people he knew in publishing, but either Jack got the name wrong or his friend had left the company; I was transferred to personnel.
I explained that I was looking for a friend of my brother’s. “I’m sorry,” I said.
The woman said, “Take your time.”
I managed to say that I was looking for a job as an editorial assistant, and the woman, apparently a saint, asked if I could come into the office that afternoon.
I put on my seersucker suit and panty hose and pumps, which blistered my feet after only a few blocks.
The personnel saint was even nicer in person. She nodded at my résumé and smiled even when she told me that she’d never heard of the college I’d graduated from.
I told her not to worry: No one had heard of Rogers. “My brother calls it Hammerstein,” I said.
“Fine,” she said. “Can you type?”
I heard this as, Are you willing? and I said, “Absolutely.”
Then she gave me the test.
After calculating my score, she said, “I’m sorry,” and explained that I needed at least forty-five words per minute to be considered for any entry-level position in publishing.
I said, “How did I do?”
“Nine,” she said.
. . . . .
That night, instead of seeing Josh, I typed. I was restless, though, and kept going into the kitchen for a diet Coke or another coffee. Each time, Naomi appeared. She’d get herself a glass of water or look in the refrigerator, but I knew she was just in there to make sure I used the right dishes and silverware. I smiled at her: But you don’t know which I use when you’re not around, do you?
. . . . .
Josh liked to stay in New York on weekends. He liked how the city emptied out, and you could go to museums or eat in restaurants that were usually crowded. I understood that, but my parents had a house on the New Jersey shore, and I wanted to go there sometimes. I wanted to swim in the ocean.
I said this to Josh one Friday night in August, when the humidity made me feel desperate and shrill.
Josh said, “We’ve already been there twice.” He said, as he had before, that he wanted us to have new experiences together.
We began to have one right then, when he suggested we go to Coney Island to visit his Russian grandmother, Bubbe, who, on our first meeting, asked why I hadn’t come to see her sooner.
I kept my voice even. “We’ve already been there,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”
Irrelevantly, I added that I hadn’t seen my own grandmother even once.
Josh said, “Didn’t I just meet her?”
He’d met my mother’s mother, Steeny, at the shore. “I’m talking about my father’s mother, Grandma Mamie,” I said. “She lives in the Bronx.”
“Well,” he said, as though we had a wonderful solution right in front of us, “let’s visit her.”
I said that the last thing I wanted do on a summer day was see anybody’s grandmother. “Don’t you understand?” I felt like I must not be speaking clearly, and I tried to find the right words. “I need to get out,” I said, and even to myself I sounded like a child throwing a tantrum over something like a drop of coleslaw touching my hamburger.
“You want to take a walk?” he said.
I shook my head. My frustration was escalating, a headache coming on.
He said, “Why don’t you stand by the fan?”
Josh became eerily calm; he was the eye of the storm, and I became its mouth. Finally, I took my ranting self out of there and walked up Broadway to Robert’s.
When I got there, I couldn’t find my keys. I buzzed the intercom and waited; I buzzed again. When I stood back and looked up, I saw a light on in Naomi’s bedroom—or rather, candles lit, and I remembered that it was the Sabbath.
I called from one of the pissoir phones. The answering machine picked up, and Leah’s recorded “shalom” calmed me down. After the beep, I said, “It’s Sophie,” and, “I’m locked out.”
I waited, and the voice-activated machine hung up on me.
I was pretty sure the library closed at ten o’clock on Friday nights. It was 10:10 now. I figured that Robert would come home soon. I sat on the stoop and waited.
But then a terrible thought occurred to me: What if Robert was upstairs? I couldn’t picture him refusing to let me in, no matter what Naomi said. But she ruled the kitchen, and the front door was just down the hall.
Finally, a delivery man was buzzed into the building, and I followed him inside. Upstairs I knocked on the door, and a few minutes later Naomi answered in her bathrobe. She said, “I was asleep,” which came out as a statement of fact, but if it listed anywhere it was closer to reprimand than apology.
I got into bed and lay there, listening for Robert. A few minutes later he unlocked the front door. He went down the hallway to Naomi’s room without turning on a single light.
. . . . .
When I woke up, Robert and Naomi had already gone, probably to her synagogue.
There were two messages from Josh on the answering machine.
The first—“It’s Josh . . . I have Sophie’s keys”—was so cold and matter-of-fact it made me feel we’d already broken up. The second—“Please call me”—was so sad and intimate he might have been whispering in my ear.
He was sorry; I was sorry; we were sorry. We spent all Saturday making up in his apartment.
. . . . .
On Sunday, Robert said, “I’m sorry about Friday night.”
I said, “It’s not your fault.”
Without mentioning Naomi, he defended her: He explained what couldn’t be done on the Sabbath and why.
I waited until he’d finished. Then I said, “Are you Orthodox now, Robert?”
He shook his head but told me he liked observing the Sabbath—“It’s nice and quiet”—and reminded me that he’d always liked going to synagogue. “What’s not to like?” he said. “It’s a roomful of Jews.”
Later, Naomi knocked on my door, and when I turned around, I realized that she was standing just as I had when I’d gone to her room to apologize.
She said, “Sorry about the buzzer.”
. . . . .
She went off to the library, and Robert and I had dinner with his roommates. Leah was leaving for Tel Aviv in just a few weeks, and Seth said that they had to start looking for another roommate now. “What about you, Soph?” Seth said. “Don’t you need an apartment?”
Leah’s eyes widened, and I realized that Naomi had talked to her about me.
Robert had stopped eating. He was looking down at his plate, and when he looked up at me, his face was helpless. On it, I could see that a yes to me would mean a no to Naomi. I didn’t want him to feel that it was Girlfriend vs. Sister, but I knew he would no matter what.
I made my face say, It’s okay.
I told the table that I needed to find a job before I rented an apartment.
. . . . .
I could see that Robert was relieved when I told him that I was going to stay with Jack for a while.
It was awkward when I moved out. I stood with Naomi and Robert by the door for a few minutes, saying good-bye. Josh had carried my stuff downstairs, where Jack was waiting for me in his convertible. I had all my clothes on hangers draped over my arm when Robert tried to hug me.