Authors: Ellie Midwood
- Rustam was talking about some bar where waitresses wear bikinis as a uniform… - I knew that Julie would go nuts as soon as she would hear it, so I was just mostly thinking aloud.
- Don’t even go there! I’m not even considering this as an option! I’ll better go back to Russia and stay there, but I’m not serving nobody wearing bikinis!
Of course she went ballistic.
- Julie, going back to Russia is not an option too! This way we are just going to give up on our dream, on what we always wanted to accomplish, and you are just going to give up on that?
- I don’t want to leave New York either, but we don’t have any more money! We have no choice!
The only thought of going back to Moscow started to give me depression I always had there. Shitty government that doesn’t care about its people, corruption, complete disorder in all spheres of life… And what am I going to be there? A university professor with a two hundred dollars salary? I’d better off be back selling fur coats just like I used to while still being a student. At least I was making good money and was an official model for that store. And then the fall will come and I’ll be taking antidepressants for six months, trying to put myself into the state of a zombie, who walks, talks and does things, but whose brain is dead, or in my case, drugged out so it doesn’t feel the everyday pain from waking up and seeing the same scenario behind the window, the same life day by day, grey, empty, with no reason to be lived.
- I’m not going back there, - at that point I realized for the first time that despite the gravity of any situation there will be no turning back. – We’ll have to ask our parents for money, just for the next month, just to pay the rent and tuition, for a couple more weeks, until the club is open. Then we’ll give it all back to them.
_______________
Little did I know that Dr. Weinstein was never going to open the club with Ari and took his money leaving him out just like us. With no documents and no work permission, we soon found ourselves in a tiny dirty room in Bensonhurst, rented to us by a Chinese man with a teenage son, both barely speaking English. Our neighbors from across the hall were so nice that they gave us a mattress to sleep on and let us use their bathroom since we didn’t have our own. At that point I realized that we really hit the rock bottom and the option of borrowing more money from our parents didn’t seem good either. They didn’t have anything more to give since my mom already borrowed money from my Godmother to help me out. I had one last option I could try and since I had nothing to lose, I decided to call my father.
My father. The source of my insecurities and all the roaches in my head. The man who was supposed to protect me but who broke me instead. Father is the first daughter’s love they say, but in my case it turned out to be the biggest disappointment of my life. The man who would hurt me more every time after I would forgive him. No, there was no physical abuse towards me or my mother, but he would hurt us with his actions way worse than that. He promised and he never did. He was absent when he was needed the most. He didn’t care when I was in trouble. He wouldn’t celebrate with me when I accomplished something. He liked it the best when he wasn’t bothered and when he was just left alone in his apartment, the further from me the better. All my life I was trying so hard to make him proud, to make him love me, but he would never acknowledge any of my achievements. Neither my high school diploma or my bachelor’s degree, nor my driver’s license or my new job. He simply didn’t care. I was trying so hard to keep faith that he loves me, but he’s just so busy working that he doesn’t have time for me…until I finally gave up on him sometime in the last course of my university and admitted the bitter fact that he simply didn’t love me. And after twenty years of my unconditional and hopeless daughter’s love, I stopped loving him too. I crossed him out of my life and decided to move on, hoping that one day I will meet the man who will make me feel loved like I deserve it. And to that man I will give all my heart and soul.
Standing by the payphone somewhere in the New Utrecht area in Bensonhurst, I felt quite uneasy. Julie was by my side, trying to support me, but I already felt that familiar twisting in the stomach that appeared every time I was thinking of my father. I already knew that he wouldn’t help me and I didn’t want to humiliate myself begging for his money, even though he had more than enough to help me out, but I just knew that he wouldn’t even want to bother. I took a deep breath and dialed his number.
- Hi, Dad, - it was weird to hear his voice after not talking to him for so long. He knew that I was going to America for good and he never came to my little family “goodbye” party we had before I left. I wasn’t surprised.
- Dad, I need your help here. Julie and I have some financial problems, we live in a real shithole with some Chinese people, we sleep on a mattress on the floor and can only afford food from the dollar menu from McDonalds. We have no money to pay for our school and they can cancel our visas and send us back to Russia.
- Did you speak to your mother? Why doesn’t she do anything?
I’m starting to feel the anger growing inside. It’s so him, always trying to get out of solving a problem by accusing the others and telling stories about his own nonexistent troubles.
- Dad, she already paid for my whole trip here, for the plane tickets, for my rent, for my school and food. She already borrowed the money from my Godmother to help us with the rent and school for this month, but we have to pay for the next month soon and if we don’t, we’ll have to sleep in the street. We’ll be homeless. We don’t ask for much, several hundred dollars would really help right now…we are trying to find a job and as soon as we do I’ll pay it all back to you, I promise.
- Honey, I would love to help you, but I just finished the renovation in the apartment and I also had to buy a new computer for work, so it just sucked all the money out of me.
I expected him to say something like that.
- Ok, dad. Could you borrow it from somebody or take a bank loan? It’s a really bad situation right now and I just want you to understand the whole gravity of it. I’m alone in the completely different country and I can become homeless soon. I’m not talking about food, we almost don’t eat anything at this point.
- I’m sorry, honey, I can’t take any bank loans, first of all I don’t want them to have all my information and second, they are giving such crazy fees. Why won’t your mother take a bank loan?
- She already did to send me here and pay for my school. Never mind, dad, don’t bother. And don’t worry, I won’t call you anymore. Goodbye.
I hung up and the familiar feeling of disappointment filled me up again. But it felt good at the same time. I finally said my last goodbye to him and knowing that he will never hurt me again was liberating. The last hope that someone will come to my rescue just vanished, replaced by the bitter-sweet, almost physical sensation of freedom spreading throughout my whole body. I felt cold on a hot June day; that was it, I was on my own now. And it was time to do something.
Julie was hungry and we went to some cheap Mexican pizzeria nearby. She got a dollar pizza slice, I didn’t get anything. I got used to not eating since my teenage eating disorder years, so hunger doesn’t really bother me. I even like being hungry, I like how a little bit suicidal it is. But unlike then, back in Russia, it felt different this time. I knew that I just had to suffer through it and when Ari comes back from Russia where he went trying to set up some business contacts, everything will settle down.
While Julie is eating, I’m thinking of possible ways to get money.
- Rustam had a friend named Martin, right? – I ask Julie.
- Yes, I think so. Why?
- He was saying something about Martin’s new business he was going to open.
- Yes, I remember something like that. But what do we have to do with that?
- Maybe he needs a secretary, or a cleaning lady, you never know. Let’s just call him.
We got really lucky. Rustam’s friend Martin was opening a little law firm specializing in foreclosures and mortgage settlements. And lucky for us, he needed assistants who would be calling up potential customers, telling them about our services and inviting them to the office to handle them over to the lawyers who would deal with their situations. And we would get a percentage from each case, plus a salary every week. I started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel after all.
Chapter 4
A month later a lot of things changed. Aunt Anna and Ari took us to live in their guest house in Staten Island after Ari came back from his trip and saw the room where we lived. Now we were working five days a week and still tried to attend school at the same time. It was hard, but at least we were getting our salary at the end of every week and that was enough for now.
Every day we were getting up at 6.30 am, taking a train to the ferry, taking another train to school in Manhattan, skip the last class, catch another train, go to work to Brooklyn, take a train to the ferry, take a train to our station from where Ari would pick us up and drive us home. Then Julie would stay at the guest house and we would have dinner at Ari’s house, walk Tonya in the park and have sex before aunt Anna came home. On weekends I would sleep over at Ari’s room and I couldn’t be happier waking up with the boy I was in love with, in a king size bed instead of a mattress on the floor in the tiny, dirty room in Bensonhurst.
While being happily in love with Ari, my friendship with Julie however started to get shaky. I’ve never lived with a roommate before Julie and never after, and therefore I never knew that it’s quite difficult to compromise and share the space with the other person.
When I was getting ready to leave Russia, I remember having this conversation with my mom about living together with Julie. I was very optimistic about it, after all we’ve been friends for so many years, I stayed overnight at her apartment so many times and she was the most wonderful hostess ever. We liked pretty much the same food, we shared the same views on the apartment design, we both loved shopping, working out and “Sex and the City”. So I remember telling my mom that Julie will make the most perfect roommate ever! But maybe it was me in some situations, maybe it was her, maybe we just couldn’t work it out as friends living together, but our “roommateship” was coming to an end, and not a happy one.
It all started with small conflicts: I want to use a frying pen and it’s dirty in the sink after Julie didn’t wash it since yesterday. First of all, I’m the biggest neat freak that you will possibly meet. I can’t stand dirty dishes with grease and oil just sinking there, it makes me sick, that’s why I always wash dishes right after I eat. Julie didn’t mind just leaving them there for a day or two, just because she didn’t feel like washing them at the moment. Second of all, it doesn’t matter to me whether I rent an apartment or I own it, since I’m living there for a certain period of time I consider it mine, so I treat it like mine. When we just moved in my aunt’s guest house, I washed it all single handily, using Windex and Bounty only, I washed every single surface in the house, including the bathroom. Meanwhile Julie would take her make up off and leave the perfectly clean sink all messed up, one more thing that was driving me nuts! I actually can’t even recall a single time when she would help me with the cleaning or laundry. Cooking somehow became my responsibility too, of course if I didn’t want to eat Julie’s macaroni and cheese after we would come back from work. And while I was doing my best trying to make a cute little nest for us to live, she would watch TV, listen to Jennifer Lopez and get annoyed by the intimidating presence of Tonya, who like any other animal would feel her fear and try to bite Julie at any chance she had. I would lie if I say that it wasn’t amusing me.
My aunt though rewarded all my nest-making efforts by inviting me over more and more often to have family dinners together and pretty soon I was spending more time in my aunt’s house helping her with cleaning, walking Tonya and cooking, than in the guest house. One of the reasons was Julie’s constant whining about how she hates Staten Island, how long it takes to get to school and come back from work, how far the stores are (even though aunt Anna would take us shopping every time she went to the supermarket) and how she’s afraid of sleeping alone. On weekends, while I was tanning by the pool, she would go to Manhattan in one hundred degrees heat and just walk around the city all day. I didn’t mind; at that point the further we stayed from each other, the better it was.
_______________
Our life together came to an end one hot August night, along with our new career. It turned out that not all Americans are such sweethearts as we imagined before and for me it was quite a discovery that people here will fuck you too, just like in any other country. With the smile on the face, but they certainly will.
Our new boss Martin decided to get rid of some of his employees, including me, Julie, our co-worker Stan and another older lady whose name I don’t even remember. More than that, Martin decided to get rid of us without paying and since we had no work contracts or any rights in this country at all, there was nothing we could really do, except for feeling pissed and hoping that karma will get him someday.
Later on Stan, who we became good friends with while working, explained to me why Martin did what he did. It turned out that the little law firm he was running was doing not such legal things and that’s how Martin and his lawyers were making pretty good money. It all started with us, the “phone people”, who were calling potential clients (every day Martin’s lawyers were bringing us lists of the names and phone numbers, and I still have no idea where they were getting this information from) and explaining them what our law firm was doing. It’s funny, I still remember our little speech we were supposed to give to every client: “We are looking for mistakes in your mortgage agreements, for example when the banks illegally set your fees higher than it’s set by the government, and then we just take them to the court and basically we sue banks for you”. Sounds really stupid, but it worked perfectly well for people with major problems, like those whose houses were already marked for “foreclosure”. And these poor people would come to Martin and his lawyers, hoping that the firm will somehow help them save their houses, but what Martin would do is tell them that in their case there is no hope and then offer them a certain sum of money, explaining that it’s still much more than they would get if their house would be sold by the bank (which of course wasn’t true), and that’s how he would get dirt-cheap houses and then sell them for a tripled price.