Authors: Anna Quindlen
I’ve always got one of the buttons on my bulletin board, although people are always stealing it and I have to go back to Tequila for a replacement. It’s next to my list of phone numbers: city agencies, hospital emergency rooms, shelters, the precinct. I’ve also got a pile of regulations held in place with one pushpin: eligibility for public housing, rules for visits by biological parents to children in foster care, all the things you’re not supposed to do if you’re on parole. In a corner there’s a basket filled with ratty toys, since lots of the women I have to talk to come in dragging tired, sometimes hungry children. There are granola bars in a jar on my desk. I’ve got everything at my fingertips, which means that my office looks like one of those apartments occupied by an old person who won’t throw anything out.
So I felt a combination of shock and shame, seeing Evan amid my junk when I got to the office. He was turning a page on the circular sent out by the precinct with the new rules for complainants in domestic violence cases, a fingertip away from making a move that would send all the papers on my desk crashing to the floor. “Ev, don’t,” I said as he put the one he’d been reading back.
For many years Evan was the closest thing I had to a dependable man in my life. If there was a mouse in my kitchen, I barricaded myself in the bedroom until Evan arrived with a trap and a rind of Jarlsberg. If I needed a mirror hung, I would ask for his help, although he was not much better with a hammer than I was. He bought me a locket when I graduated from high school and perfume on my birthdays and cashmere at Christmas. He is a good listener, a quality rare in the circles in which he travels. I know that he is shy, although most people do not; Meghan’s aura of sociability has rubbed off on him. I suppose he was a hybrid, the brother-father I’d never had.
My sister and I are orphans. People like that. I know it sounds harsh, but I could see it even when I was young, the round-eyed looks, the lowered voices. Everyone around us went limp at the sound of the word. I see it at work now, too. It’s so much easier for us to find a placement for three siblings if the parents are gone for good, dad shanked in Attica, mom frozen to death in an abandoned building after an alcoholic blackout. That’s a real case; those kids are living in a split-level house on a half-acre lot in Jersey now, although the littlest one still hoards food under his bed from the years when he was starving. I helped place them myself. Their mom was one of our clients, and on a good day she was a pleasant churchgoing woman with scars all around her eyes. On her bad days she was, in the words of her middle kid, the devil.
Meghan and I weren’t orphans the way those kids were orphans, but no matter what facts surround the word, it still has a certain punch to it, a Dickensian shorthand that means lost, sad, needy. There’s one photo of us that I think of as the orphan photo. It was taken at Easter; our parents had died in December, on their way home from a holiday party in their black Lincoln. In the picture we’re wearing the kinds of clothes working people think the upper-class wears on special occasions. And we’re dressed identically, turned into twins by tragedy. Navy coats with small rounded collars and pearl buttons, white straw hats, white gloves, and patent leather shoes. Elastic under our chins to keep the hats on. There are two versions of the picture. In one we are both looking at the camera, Meghan, tiny and almost translucent, as though she’s a vision halfway through a disappearing act, and me dopey, mouth a little open, square and short, going through a chubbette phase. The second picture was probably taken accidentally, my aunt’s finger coming down on the button of her old Brownie a moment later. We are still in place, but Meghan is staring off to the side and I am hitching up the socks that have crept down into the heels of my shoes. My nephew, Leo, has these two pictures in one of those hinged stand-up frames on his bureau for reasons best known to him.
Meghan tends to conflate her childhood with my own. Four years is not much of a distance now that she is forty-seven and I am forty-three, but in childhood, four years is the difference between toddler and girl, middle school and high school, innocence and sex. Sometimes Meghan will say, “Do you remember when Mother wore that horrible lavender bouclé suit?” or “Do you remember when Father brought home the beagle puppy and then decided we weren’t dog people?” But I don’t. I have hazy memories of the big foyer and the little telephone alcove tucked behind a door beneath the stairs, of Mother’s dressing room with enormous roses on the wallpaper and a chair with cracked green leather in Father’s study. But sometimes I’m not sure if I’m remembering right or if those are scenes from some movie that imprinted itself inside me, a facsimile of our lost life. Sometimes Meghan will sniff the air like a pointer dog at a cocktail party or in a department store, and I know that she has scented someone wearing our mother’s perfume. The smell means nothing to me, not that one or cherry pipe tobacco or wet oilcloth or any of the other vaguely Englishy things with which our parents apparently tried to disguise themselves.
Meghan had a big chunk of childhood in that world, in our old house, among those people. And then it was over as though an enormous blade had sliced through the front walk. On the other side were our aunt and uncle, who moved fifty miles southeast so the two of us could stay in the same town. They’d probably decided it would be best to uproot us as little as possible, but the smaller, shabbier place on the down side of Main Street and the palpable sympathy of virtually the entire town combined to suggest that this was a mistake. They should have taken us away instead of raising us in the long shadow of before. I didn’t feel it much, but Meghan did. She spent eight years waiting to leave. After her first year at Smith, she never lived there again.
She didn’t really know Evan until college, despite the oft-evoked dunking. He went to the local boys’ school. It was the brother school of the one we attended, but there wasn’t much mixing until the students were older, and by then he’d graduated and moved on to Amherst. It was an old story; he went to a college party, she went to a college party, they were both surprised to see each other out of context. She was shaken by Smith, by the glut of smart girls who, like her, dreamed of being successful writers. He was bored by Amherst, which had begun to feel like a slightly more grown-up version of high school. They went to see a French art film projected on a blank wall of the Smith museum, and both thought it was pretentious and silly. There are stupider reasons for marriage, I suppose. And perhaps part of Meghan’s reason was that Evan was a last vestige of that past life, when we had parents, a sunporch, a patina of privilege.
I just loved the guy. The day they married was one of the happiest days of my life.
“Ev,” I cried, “what are you doing here? How did you get here? Do you want coffee? We have really horrible coffee.”
“There’s a recommendation,” Evan said.
“Sit. The leather chair is comfortable.” It was. One of the board members had redecorated her den, and we’d gotten all the old furniture. Why should a woman who has just lost her apartment in a fire and lost her kids because she lost her apartment have to sit in a straight chair?
“I can’t believe you found this place,” I said.
“The driver couldn’t believe this was where I wanted to go. He kept saying, ‘Mr. Grater, you got the wrong address there.’ ”
“Black car?”
“What else?”
“Yeah. The driver’s either from the neighborhood or grew up in the neighborhood, or one just like it. Bet he locked the car the minute you got out.”
The black car could be the official icon of New York, or at least the New York Evan and Meghan call home. It’s usually a Lincoln Town Car, apparently not unlike the car in which our parents died. New Yorkers with pretensions but middle-class means take one for airport trips or special occasions, an anniversary at the River Café or a black-tie event at the Waldorf. Up-and-comers get them to drive around with clients, or the company picks up the tab when they take one home late at night, when a prospectus or a brief has slopped over into the early morning hours. If you walk down Park Avenue in the Fifties at midnight, you’ll see black cars bumper to bumper double-parked from the old Pan Am Building to Fifty-seventh Street, with the logos of some of the Fortune 500 richest companies on small signs in the windows.
Then there are people like Meghan and Evan, who have black cars all the time. The most enduring memories of their work life will be sitting in the back of a spotless Town Car, reading the
Times
and trying to drink coffee from a sip cup without getting stains on their suits when the driver hits a pothole. A car picks Evan up every morning, returns if lunch is in midtown, takes him to the restaurant or the hotel for dinner or (rarely) to the apartment for an evening in. Elsewhere in the country teenagers are taking photographs of the limo that picks them up for the prom, but in New York there are children who take one to school every morning. A lot of them. In fact, Meghan chose Leo’s school in part because it had the fewest black cars double-parked in front on the morning they went for their family interview.
Before Leo went away to boarding school, a black car would take him to Randalls Island for soccer and softball games. From the Triborough Bridge during the early rush, you can see a strange sight in the spring and fall: fields full of the bright blues and greens and yellows of school sports uniforms, with a phalanx of black cars on the verge, the spectators in dark suits moving back and forth from field to car as they watch, cheer, cry encouragement, then hasten to the backseat when a cell phone chirps. Once I was at one of Leo’s games and a dad emerged from the back of a black car with a big grin and high-fived Evan. “I just made seventeen million dollars between innings,” he said.
“Way to go,” Evan said.
There had been no black car outside when I came in, slogging up the hill from the 149th Street subway station in a bitter wind that carried bits of greasy paper and some strange carbonized city dust with it. I would have noticed. I would have assumed it was Meghan, straight from the studio. She and Evan had once gotten into each other’s black cars by mistake when he had an early morning flight. They had talked about it at dinner parties for months after.
“Luis drove me,” said Evan. “He’s a good guy. He’s the guy who drove us to and from the Waldorf the other night. He’s just never driven me to the Bronx.”
“Yeah, but he knew the neighborhood, right? I’ll tell you where he is right now.” I was moving toward the door, which required only half a step since my office is the size of what they call the maid’s room in a big New York apartment, which is big enough for a twin bed, a cheesy dresser, and the maid. “He’s around the corner getting a Cubano sandwich and a good cup of coffee, the kind you can stand your spoon up in. It’s what I have for lunch at least once a week.” I closed the door and sat in my desk chair. “And that’s the end of the chitchat. What the hell is going on?”
“What?”
“You. Here.”
“You know.”
“I know the world of morning TV as we know it has blown sky-high, and that Meghan gave the most insincere apology I’ve seen since she told that guy who came to dinner at your house who kept calling her Maggie that she was sorry about the coffee spill. But I figured I’d talk to her about that, not you. No offense. If she ever calls me.”
He searched my face, then slumped and looked at his hands. “So you haven’t talked to her?”
“Not since Sunday. Saturday we ran. Saturday we all went to that deal at the Waldorf. Sunday she called me while she was prepping for Monday. Monday I had to go to court with one of our women who might lose her kids, so I missed the show. Monday night I find out all about it at a dinner at Kate and Sam’s, walk in cold and discover that my very own sister is the toast of New York, emphasis on
toast.
I couldn’t call her line because of the telephone switch-off at nine. I called your line and got no one. I called her office line and left a message. Several messages by now, I guess. And this morning I watched her give the finger to the network and the FCC. Tequila,” I hollered—we didn’t have an intercom because the place was so small we didn’t need one—“did my sister call yet?”
“No, ma’am,” called Tequila, who didn’t like being hollered at.
“So I figure she’s probably sitting and fuming, and when she cools down she will call and I will yell at her about not calling sooner. Sounds like a plan, right?”
Evan took a deep breath and did something unnecessary with the knot of his tie. “So you haven’t talked to Meghan since Sunday afternoon.”
“Honey, you’re scaring me. What’s the matter? What’s really going on here? This isn’t about some stupid television screwup.” I touched his bent shoulder. “She’s sick.”
“No. God, no.”
“You’re sick?”
He shook his head. His lanky body was so accordioned in the chair that the point of his pink tie was touching the floor. He was going to be covered with dirt by the time he got back into that black car.
“Jesus, Leo?”
“He’s fine. He’s living for a few days on some family farm in the middle of the Spanish countryside. I talked to him briefly yesterday. I didn’t want to stay on long. He sounded busy, but good, really good, you know how he is. Just…happy. When that kid’s happy, he’s really happy. I didn’t tell him about the Greenstreet interview. I was thinking it might upset him, being so far away, and I didn’t want to do that. And afterwards I thought he’d just laugh. He’d just say, ‘That’s my mom,’ the way he always does.”
“He’s always had her number. Boy, I miss him. Did Meghan get a chance to talk to him?”
He looked up at me. “Meghan’s not at the apartment. She’s staying at Harriet’s place. Harriet is in Africa, I think. There are photographers and TV camera guys all over both entrances of our building.”
“Well, that’s okay. Give me Harriet’s number. I’ll call her there.”
“I don’t have the number there. I’m not living there. I’m living at that new Four Seasons downtown.”
I’m slow. I’ve always been slow. Meghan says that when our aunt told us our parents were dead, I went into the kitchen and rummaged through the cabinets and finally came out with a box of Cheerios. “Like, what do you mean, dead?” I said. “Like, dead dead?” Probably at the time they thought it was shock. But the truth is that I’m a little slow on the uptake.