Authors: Kate Rockland
“I dunno. I was looking around on the ground for pinecones for one of my sculptures and when I looked up, I saw the most beautiful sight; it was you, and you were on the
television
! This family had the show on, and the mom was feeding her baby at the kitchen table, not even watching
Oprah,
even though she had it on, which don’t you kind of hate it when people turn on the TV but don’t watch it, just, like, for background noise? It’s such a waste of electricity.”
“Um … Aggie? Can you kind of get to the point? Because I have work to do.”
“Oh! Right. So anyway, I gathered up about twelve pinecones in my canvas bag and then just stood there and watched you. It was kind of hard to hear through the glass…”
“I can imagine,” Shoshana said sarcastically, but Aggie didn’t pick up on it.
“But toward the end that Alexis person started shouting nice and loud and then I could hear just fine. The mom didn’t even see me, but I had an excuse all cooked up in case they did, that I was looking for my earring in the bushes. And by the way, Alexis was totally demonic! Her aura is totally
off
. You looked beautiful up there. Oh! And you sounded really smart when you were talking about your blog and facts about big women’s health. I was impressed.”
“You could see her aura through the TV, now, could you?”
“Of course I could,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s a sickly green color, a very worrisome shade of moss. Pea soup. It means her chi is waaaaaaay messed up. Anyway, enough about her. I was so proud that I knew you, and you looked so beautiful and knowledgeable up there onstage!”
Shoshana was touched. Aggie’s head was always so up in the clouds. Up until now, she wasn’t sure Aggie actually knew about what she did for a living. “Thanks, Aggie,” she said, hugging her.
Shoshana quickly pulled away, retching. “Ugh! What’s that smell?”
“Must be the herbs, then,” Aggie said defensively.
“It smells like dead monkey!”
“Well, then, I’ll be sure not to offer you any,” Aggie sniffed, turning her tiny elfin back to Shoshana. Aggie seemed impervious to cold, never wore a jacket, and had on a thin white cotton dress that had a big circle cut out in the back, through which her two shoulder blades pressed together like moth wings. You could see her tiny pink nipples through the front of the dress.
“I’m sorry, Aggie, you know I love you,” Shoshana said, planting a kiss on her friend’s cheek. Aggie, never one to hold a grudge, beamed at Shoshana before continuing to stir her pot.
Shoshana grabbed two slices of whole-wheat bread, a jar of peanut butter, and an orange. She threw it all on a plate and headed upstairs to her bedroom and shut the door. She loved living with four women, but sometimes she had to hide.
Climbing into her bed, she could hear the shouts of a teacher outside, leading a line of children across the street. “Hold hands with your buddy! Walk between the white lines!”
Shoshana walked over to her window to wipe condensation off the glass and felt the cold wet on her palm. Tiny light flakes of snow danced down from the sky, only to disappear once they hit pavement. Mothers walked side by side, pushing strollers like a brigade. There’s a joke in Hoboken that you never see a child out of a stroller. And that there is a baby boom here, with a three-child limit: once the third baby pops out you grow tired of living sardinelike in a two-bedroom for three thousand a month; it’s time to venture forth to that foreign land we call the suburbs. Families move a few exits down the Turnpike and expand to Montclair, Jersey City, Madison, and Summit. Shoshana planned on sticking it out in Hoboken for as long as she possibly could. Should she get married, children would have to simply live stacked one on top of the other. She would not move to the burbs no matter what.
She heard a car door slam and two small, hunched old ladies clutching triangle-shaped plastic purses emerged from their car and peered up at a tall sign in front of their car. “Can we park here?” Shoshana heard one of them ask a passerby, her wrinkled face creased further in confusion. The man crossed his arms and read the sign slowly.
“Can I park here?” is a refrain heard everywhere in Mile Square City. On the right side of every street is a white sign with green lettering. That means you can stick your car there for four hours. If you should miraculously find an empty spot on the
left
side, well, that is a different story. The left side has a
green
sign with
white
lettering, and you need a resident sticker on your car that you give up your firstborn child to attain. On top of this, you must also be aware that there is street cleaning every day from nine to eleven. And if you can follow all that, the streets where the cleaning takes place switch daily. All this makes for a very pedestrian-friendly city, but confusing parking situations. Hobokenites constantly look for assurance from strangers walking by that they are reading the sign system correctly, and they’re not about to have the parking police come by with their little handheld computers that spit fifty-dollar tickets out like sticks of gum. If you are in line at the dry cleaner’s, the bakery, or the library, it is not uncommon to get a debilitating neck strain from craning your head toward the window, carefully keeping tabs on your double-parked car.
But you wouldn’t have your flashers on, oh, no, sir, not if you’re a local. Flashers signal weakness; a bleeding deer leaving a trail through the woods. Only a novice puts on the flashers in Hoboken, and that’s who gets saddled with the dreaded white ticket slipped beneath the windshield wiper. If you’re from Hoboken, you simply double-park for as long as you want. Double-parking, sans flashers, is a way of life here.
Shoshana left the window and helped Sinatra hop up on the bed. She plumped up her many pillows, forming a chair of sorts she could lean against. She moved a larger-sized one to her lap, so her computer’s heat (when it was thinking, it emitted a hot blast) wouldn’t scald her. She called her Web site manager, who lived in Park Slope and updated her blog daily, implemented advertisements, and kept things running smoothly. They spoke briefly, and agreed to touch base the following week to talk about a redesign of the entire blog. She peeled her orange and bit into one half-moon section, feeling the sugary burst of juice on her tongue.
She logged on to
Fat and Fabulous
and began reading the morning’s message boards. A lot of positive feedback was still streaming in from the
Oprah
show as well as several sympathetic e-mails. Her favorite was from Erin of Austin, Texas:
Dear Shoshana,
I never knew your father passed away, I totally understand why you’d want to keep that private and I just wanted to offer you my condolences. At first I was surprised that you kept something a secret, since you usually tell your readers every detail of your private life.
Fat and Fabulous
has done amazing things for my self-esteem. I am a librarian at an all-girls prep school and I weigh 300 pounds. I feel like your blog helps me open discussions between the high-school-age girls at my school so they can love their bodies just the way they are. Anyway, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me in my life and wanted to reach out and say how sorry I am about your father’s passing.
Her phone rang. Shoshana sighed. She wished she were one of those dedicated writers who could shut off her phone so as not to be disturbed. She’d once read an interview with a novelist who would cuff her leg to her desk chair in order to force herself to work. Sometimes Shoshana thought writers made up things to sound interesting. I mean, how did that woman
pee
for goodness’ sake?
She heard her mother’s voice and was immediately enveloped in a warm calm.
“Hi, Mom,” she said.
“Honey, did you know they’re showing another repeat of the
Oprah
show today?”
Her throat tightened. “Oh. I didn’t know that, no.”
“Well, do you want to drive here and we’ll watch it together? Your sister is home, she got that lovely new assistant to watch the store and she doesn’t have anyone to draw pictures on today.”
Shoshana smiled. Her mother always called tattooing “drawing pictures.” She didn’t seem to grasp the concept of the needle penetrating skin.
“I can’t, Mom, I just woke up and I have to do some work on the blog. I literally haven’t done anything yet today, and I have to check in with all my writers and see when the heck they’re going to turn in their work.”
“Your sister and I will be watching the show again. Emily wants to see if she can spot herself in the audience, of course.”
She was half listening to her mother, and half drifting into her wave of thought. Shoshana felt something shift within her. The
Oprah
experience still bothered her.
“Are you proud of me, Mom?” she asked quietly. She stuck a pink fingernail on the down arrow and scrolled through several more posts on her message board. There were a lot of women very angry with Alexis Allbright. One had superimposed red devil horns and a tail onto a picture of her, taken from an appearance she’d made on
The View
last year.
“Well, I
was
proud of you until I saw this kid on
Ellen
who is a five-year-old piano prodigy who they say is better now than Beethoven in his prime.”
“Mom!”
Pam laughed. “Of course I’m proud of you, what kind of question is that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been kind of bummed out since
Oprah
. Alexis had way more health facts to throw at me than I did. I feel like I came off kind of silly.”
“Shoshana, if you think for one second I give … well, I give an
owl’s behind
about what Alexis Allbright says or thinks, you’ve got another thing coming.”
Shoshana had to smile at the expression. Pam wasn’t much of a curser.
“Dear, no one cares about boring statistics but doctors. Your posts are funny and smart and witty. You make people feel good about themselves again, and that is a skill. Your father and I have always been proud of you, and if he were here today he’d give you a big hug. Now, promise me you’ll come over later after you do some work. Emily is shouting that she’ll make spinach lasagna for dinner, your favorite. And you know she’s not always willing to eat your vegetarian stuff. It sometimes has an odd … taste. You can bring Sinatra. I’ve bought him a new chew toy.”
Her mother called Sinatra her hairy grandson and doted on him. He could do no wrong in her eyes, even when he dug up her azaleas and peed all over the backyard, leaving little white circles where the grass withered and finally died.
“Okay, okay. I’ll drive home after I do some work. Love you, Mom.”
“Love you, too. And keep your chin up!” There was a click as her mother hung up her old white phone, which had hung in their kitchen as long as Shoshana could remember. Its ring was cranky, a hammer hitting a bell. Her parents had bought it at a flea market when they were dating, and Pam refused to get rid of it.
Shoshana read through more message boards, made a few notes for tomorrow’s column, and closed her laptop. She heard Karen and her long, volleyball-champ legs walking down the stairs on her way to law school and the creaking sounds of the metal gate swinging behind her as she left for the train. Andrea’s light snoring came through the wall next door. Well, good. She worked a lot of nights and Shoshana knew she was tired. Plus, she had to get her beauty rest before her big date. She hoped this guy was a good one; some of Andrea’s past beaus were doing hard time in the clink.
It was one o’clock and time to call Nancy.
“Is this Fancy Nancy?” she asked, when her friend picked up the phone.
“In the flesh,” she said, in her low growl of a voice. She had a thick Jersey accent that sounded just like Kathleen Turner in
Serial Mom
.
“Ready for our walk? It’s pretty cold out, but I feel like I need to do something healthy after the few glasses of wine I had last night. I think my insides are made out of grapes now.”
“Meet you at Dunkin’s?”
“Word.”
They disconnected. Shoshana put on her pink XXL sweatsuit, brushed her long hair into a high ponytail, slipped on shoes, and set out, dragging a protesting Sinatra along with her. He was a high-maintenance dog and didn’t like being out in any weather below fifty degrees, but Shoshana knew he’d like it once the cold air hit his tongue. She dressed him in an army fatigue jacket with a fur-trim hood.
As she passed an old-style Italian club (one of several still scattered throughout this mile-square town) she caught a flash of soccer on a television bolted into the wood-panel wall, an overwhelming smell of cigar smoke (the no-smoking-inside ban had come and gone here, like a fad), and glimpsed old men clustered around the entrance. They patted their breast pockets for their next cigar, spoke in rapid Italian (oh, what were they
saying
she wanted to know), and slapped one another on the back, telling stories. They wore tweed jackets, skinny gray ties with bright red designs on them, high-waisted pants with cuffs on the bottoms, and suspenders Shoshana imagined she could have walked past the club any decade of the last century and the men would look exactly as they did now. There were never any women in sight.
She had a library book to return, so she walked down Fourth. The snow had let up and there was a light dusting on the ground. The sun peeked through clouds, casting the town in a grayish yellow light. Kids were having a snowball fight in Church Square Park and Shoshana scooted out of the way of an incoming missile. Because of the snow the colors were crisp: the bricks on the top of Our Lady of Grace Church shone bright red against its surroundings.
On the Waterfront
was filmed here, and the church looked even more beautiful in color than in the black-and-white film. She pictured Brando sauntering in, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.