by Melissa Bank
When it was time for him to go, I walked out with him. We stood by his car. I wanted to make a joke so that everything would be okay between us. I considered saying, “Thank you for opening your home to me,” but it seemed like a joke at Robert’s expense, and maybe bitter.
Instead, Jack spoke. He took both my hands in his and said, “I’m for you, and you’re for me.” This was something my uncle had said to me when I was little, and I hadn’t heard it since and understood it only now.
Jack hugged me good-bye. He had a way of hugging that could pull you all the way in, and make you feel safer and more loved than you ever thought possible.
Then he got in his little car and was gone.
3.
MYGRANDMOTHER’SAPARTMENT looked out on the Harlem River, which is no Hudson; our cut of the Harlem wasn’t mighty or mythic, not blue or green or gray, but varying shades of brown that evoked no metaphor save human waste.
The apartment had two rooms and could feel spacious if you were the only one in it, which I never was except when my grandmother went downstairs for the mail or out to Gristedes for groceries.
She was on a perpetual diet and didn’t eat dinner with me. Mostly she stood nearby, at the ready to refill my water glass or serve the seconds I never asked for.
I couldn’t. Everything she made had been sautéed or boiled or baked too long. I could eat the salad—iceberg lettuce, mealy tomatoes, and carrot pennies smothered in lo-cal dressing—but the chicken was a dried-up dishrag and the baked potato a shiny sack of mush.
She kept calling me “Sophilla,” her pet name for me, and the sound of it made me feel like a sack of mush myself.
She asked how Robert was, but it was Naomi she wanted to talk about. “She’s a nice girl, Naomi,” my grandmother said, her tone implying there was something more important that Naomi wasn’t. “You can’t blame her for wanting to get married.”
I said, “I don’t think Naomi’s so interested in getting married,” though I didn’t know.
My grandmother turned her head to the side.
“Really,” I said. “She’s pretty busy with school.”
She sat down with me and sighed. She sighed again and then said, “It’s hard after college, Sophilla?”
I thought she was talking about finding a job, starting a new life, joining what we recent college graduates called “The Real World,” and I agreed: It was hard.
“Not that it isn’t hard in college,” she said. “The boys want the younger girls.”
I said, “Um.”
“It gets harder, Sophie,” she said, squinting at me, as though seeing despair and loneliness in my future. “Harder and harder.”
“You know what?” I said. “I should practice my typing.”
She told me that I’d practiced all day, and I had. But I cleared the dishes and wiped off the green place mat we’d agreed I’d use underneath the typewriter to protect the finish of her dining-room table. She wouldn’t let me do the dishes.
Once I was sitting in front of the typewriter, she said, “I’m just trying to tell you how life is, Sophilla.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Thank you.”
She said, “Maybe Jack or Robby could introduce you to someone.”
I made my face say, Hm, and began to type.
. . . . .
I planned to call Josh once my grandmother went to bed, but she stayed where she was on the sofa, knitting an unwearable sweater of Orlon.
Josh was a maniac about sleep and I had to call him before eleven. At 10:55, I went into the bedroom and dialed. I only had time to say, “Hi,” before she came in.
“Excuse me,” she said and went to her closet.
Josh said, “How’s it going?”
I said, “I’m here at my grandmother’s,” in a voice meant to convey both the hardship of this and her presence in the room.
He said, “How is she?”
. . . . .
Without comedians, mimes, or puppies to distract me, I broke through to thirty-two words the next day. I made a few calls and set up appointments. At dinner I was exultant. I ate the strings of what must once have aspired to be pot roast, and I was considering a second helping when my grandmother said, “You have to let people know you’re looking, Sophilla.”
Thinking she meant for a job, I was about to say, I have, but then I realized she was talking about men again. I said no to seconds and cleared the table, though she fought me on this and blocked the sink so I couldn’t wash the dishes.
I was about to start an exercise on numbers, my nemesis, when she said, “Jack doesn’t have any friends you could meet?”
Even as I said the words, “I did meet somebody,” I regretted them and began typing up a storm of nonsense.
“Oh!” she said, pulling up a chair. “What’s his name?”
“Josh,” I said.
“Josh what, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Rudman.”
“Jewish?” she said.
I said, “He is Jewish,” though her pleasure in it rankled me. “I have to type.”
“Excuse me,” she said. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”
She returned an exercise later. “What does Josh do, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“He’s a poet,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“He writes poetry.” I said, “He’s really good,” though I hadn’t understood any of the poems he’d read to me.
She said, “This is his living?”
I told her that he programmed computers for a research group at Columbia Presbyterian.
“The hospital?” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
She thought for a second. “Maybe he’ll decide to go to medical school.”
“He already went and didn’t like it.”
He’d said, “I realized I was too creative to be a doctor,” which had bothered me; Robert was going to be a doctor. Remembering how I’d felt, I frowned.
To make me feel better my grandmother said, “He could change his mind.”
“I don’t think so.”
She said, “You could talk to him.”
I said, “I’m having dinner with him tomorrow,” even though we hadn’t made plans.
A little later, I went into the bedroom to call him. I told him that I would be in Manhattan for interviews the next day.
My grandmother walked into the bedroom and, seeing that I was on the phone, said, “Excuse me,” and left.
She closed the door, but not all the way, and it occurred to me that she was standing on the other side.
I lowered my voice. “Maybe we could have dinner.”
“I can’t tomorrow,” he said, and he named the ex-girlfriend he’d made plans with. One of his principles was that he maintained contact, as he called it, with his ex-girlfriends; another was that he did not cancel plans.
The phone sat on a stack of paperbacks, the entirety of my grandmother’s library, and I chose this moment to read the titles. My eyes were on Love’s Urgent Flame when Josh said, “What about Thursday?”—three nights away.
I had to force myself to return to the typewriter, and was almost grateful for my grandmother’s interruption—“You know, Sophilla . . .”
I looked up.
“Grandpa wasn’t interested in me at first,” she said. “He had a lot of girls.”
I’d heard this story maybe 250,000 times before. As she spoke, I mentally mouthed the details: My grandfather, whom for the purpose of the story she called Abie, was friendly with her brother and would come over to play cards Friday nights.
“When Abie walked in, I walked out,” she said. “He thought I had a date. I was a very popular girl. I took myself to the movies,” she said.
I said, “I think I understand what you’re trying to say.” I flipped to a new exercise.
“You’ve got to be a little smart, Sophie,” she said.
“Got it,” I said.
She was qui
et after that, and when I glanced over at her, she looked worried.
At the end of the evening, I took a timed test. I’d typed thirty-six. I got into bed, thinking, You typed thirty-six words per minute. I closed my eyes, thinking, Thirty-six, thirty-six, thirty-six.
I was almost asleep when my grandmother said, “Sophie?”
“Yes?”
She said, “Maybe you should let Josh call you once in a while.”
. . . . .
I couldn’t wear my interview suit, as seersucker said “summer” as clearly as did corn on the cob and flip-flops; I was grateful for the dress Cynthia had given me, though in the mirror it looked more uneven than cut on the bias. I put on my trench coat. Remembering the blisters from my first interview, I placed my pumps in the cardboard accordion file with my envelope of résumés and wore sneakers.
My grandmother said, “You look like a little doll,” which was not exactly the look I was striving for. Still, it was one of her highest compliments, along with, You’re a modern girl in every way.
I tried to tell her that I wasn’t having dinner with Josh until Thursday, but it seemed like proof that I should be faking dates and letting him call me.
All I could manage was, “I won’t be too late.”
. . . . .
I stood outside waiting for the express bus to Manhattan, and even in the morning sun I was cold. I had three interviews—on Fifty-third and Lexington, Sixteenth and Union Square West, and Sixth Avenue and Forty-eighth. Before and after each appointment, I changed my shoes on the sidewalk. I’d face the building and try not to notice people noticing me.
I thought the last interview of the day, with a Rogers alum, might be easier than the rest because he’d at least have heard of our alma mater, but Clay White seemed bored and annoyed from the start. All through the interview, he was occupied with a paper clip he was unbending into uselessness. After a half hour, holding the straightened paper clip he’d achieved between his thumb and index finger, he said, “Tell me again what you’ve been doing since graduation.”
I said that I’d been learning how to type, and I tried to make this sound hilarious. I’d just begun to tell him about the patron saint of lost job-seekers when his phone rang.
I thought this interruption might be one of those serendipitous opportunities to discontinue a failing anecdote, but after he hung up he said, “You were saying?”
I told him that I’d heard her, “Can you type?” as, Are you willing? and delivered what I hoped would be an acceptable end of the story, if not the punch line: “Then she gave me the test.”
“How’d you do?”
The effect of his question was to turn my anecdote back into a real experience: Once again, I saw the pencil counting up the words I’d typed and subtracting the errors I’d made; I knew that I hadn’t done well but I was hoping, which struck me now as the basic emotion of my entire life.
I told Clay that I’d typed nine words a minute.
He said, “Call me when you get to forty.”
I almost said that I was up to thirty-six now, but I liked not saying it better. Not saying it made me feel I would do fine without the help of Clay White.
Then I was outside on the sidewalk, changing from my pumps into sneakers.
. . . . .
I turned off Sixth Avenue onto Forty-seventh Street and found myself in the diamond district as it was closing: Necklaces were removed from velvet necks and rings from velvet fingers; metal curtains and iron gates were pulled shut and locked. The people rushing by me looked cold and seemed more desperate to get away from where they were than eager to get to wherever they were going. I was cold myself, and my feet hurt from their brief imprisonment in pumps. My accordion file was weighed down with the publishers’ catalogs I’d amassed. I’d been given at least one at the close of each interview, like a consolation prize—I can’t give you a job, but here is a catalog. Oh, thank you for this catalog.
I’d already flipped through the catalogs, but I didn’t know what to look for. What was I supposed to do with them? Throwing them out seemed like giving up.
Walking down Fifth Avenue, I couldn’t work up any excitement about being in New York. It was hard to feel that anything was possible in a dress and sneakers. In a dress and sneakers, I was just me, pretending to be on a date while my boyfriend was having dinner with an ex-girlfriend. In a dress and sneakers, I was just me, killing time before going back to my grandmother’s.
It began to rain, and I ducked into a phone booth. I told myself I was not going to call home, but I pictured it: My father would have pulled up the driveway a few minutes earlier, and now I knew he was standing in the kitchen having two fingers of gin with ice and hors d’oeuvres my mother had prepared for him, and they would be talking about the day. The kitchen would be warm, and there would be the smell of a well-cooked dinner almost finished.
My mother was the one who answered, and she accepted the charges. She must have heard the despair in my, “Hi”; she said, “I’ll put your father on.”
“Mom?” I asked her to send me a coat, and she said, “Of course.”
I told my father everything, and I felt better just having him on the other end. He was quiet. My father listened more closely than anyone, so he didn’t have to make the sounds of listening; he didn’t say, “Uh-huh,” or make comments, or ask questions.
When I finished, he told me what I already knew: Soon I would find a job and get an apartment of my own.
In the background, I heard my mother ask him to tell me that another overdue notice had come for 20th-Century Typewriting, but he said, “Why don’t you come home this weekend?” He made his voice light, like it might just be a good idea.
I thought how nice it would be to go home, but then it occurred to me how hard it might be to leave again.
“Think about it,” he said. “We’re here.”
. . . . .
I typed furiously. I typed as though my life depended on it. I typed like a madwoman. Even with all of my errors to subtract, that afternoon I counted up forty-five words per minute.
I called the saint with my typing news, and she congratulated me and promised to keep me in mind. I called everyone I’d put off calling; I set up appointments with anyone who would see me.
Before dinner, I was lifting the typewriter off the table when my grandmother said that maybe I would have some news for her soon. I assumed that she meant about a job, and I said, “I hope so.”
It was her smile that made me ask what she’d meant. “Maybe you’ll get engaged,” she said.
“Grandma,” I said, and I turned full around to look at her. “I’m not ready to get married yet.”
She said, “Why, if I may ask?”
“I’m just, you know, twenty-two.”
She turned her head to the side.
I didn’t know what to say. “I’m just starting my career.”
She said, “Let me ask you a question.”
“Okay.”
“You like this Josh.”
“Yes,” I said.
“So?”
“So . . . ?” I said.
“You don’t want to marry him?”
“Not now.”
She nodded. “Let me ask you a question,” she said again. “If a twenty-two-year-old girl met a nice Jewish guy who made a good living, she would be crazy not to marry him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What was the question?”
“Does he want to marry you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I tried to make my tone say, I don’t care, but just then I did.
. . . . .
I had three personnel interviews and aced each typing test, which filled me with pride.
In the late afternoon, I had an appointment with one of the editors from Jack’s list. She said, “How’s Jack?” like she didn’t care, so I knew she did.
Her name was Honey Zipkin, and I thought of my grandmother saying, You look like a little doll, because Honey really did loo
k like one. She was very pretty, but she had a bigger head than you’d expect on her little frame, plus long blond hair.
It wasn’t until close to the end of the interview that she told me she needed an assistant. She gave me a manuscript, pages in a box, to critique over the weekend.
I had an hour before I had to meet Josh, and I walked up Park Avenue. Catching sight of Grand Central, and the big clock and the statue on the roof, I got this huge feeling: This is your life, Sophie Applebaum.
Soon I would be working as an editorial assistant in a major publishing house. I would be leaving the dull brown Bronx for sparkling, silvery Manhattan. I would be moving into my own apartment.
And, I thought, I am about to have dinner with the man I love.
Outside Szech West, I changed from sneakers into pumps.
Josh sat at a corner table, studying a page of the yellow legal pad he wrote poems on. He stood up and gave me a kiss that was more suited to a cheek than lips; his embrace seemed to be holding me off instead of pulling me in.
I reminded myself that this was Josh: He was reserved; I couldn’t take his personality personally.
He picked up his menu and, handing me mine, said, “I need food.” He seemed to think of being hungry or tired as an early stage of illness.
After we’d ordered, he reached for my hand and held it. “How’s your grandmother?”
“Hard,” I said.
He nodded, which was how he told me to go on.
“I don’t know.” I said, “She’s always talking to me about getting married,” and I looked at his face to see if there was anything on it for me to know.
“You should ask her about her life,” he said. “Where she came from. That’s what I talk to Bubbe about.”
Up until that moment, I’d been at the earliest stage of love, when you feel it will turn you into the person you want to be. Now, his gentle voice and sage advice took me to a later stage: I felt I needed to pretend to be a better person than I was so he’d keep loving me. This was hard because it made me hate him.
I couldn’t look into his eyes, so I looked down at his hand. I’d never said anything about the turquoise ring he wore; usually, I tried not to notice it. “Where’d you get the ring?” I asked.