Dead is the New Black Read Online Free PDF

4.

    Laura’s mother never let the fact that she couldn’t cook keep her from charming her daughters home. The meals were hot and salty, and occasionally solid, but little else. The functioning Whirlpool washer/dryer combo, an aging tin box stuffed in a precious closet of her tiny Hell’s Kitchen two-bedroom, was what brought Laura and her sister Ruby back to the apartment weekly.
    Laura remembered the worst shame of her adolescence—the clothesline hung in the hallway, dripping on the decades-old paint that the landlord, Moshe, would not renew, and that Mom scraped, replastered, primed, and painted herself in an effort to stay under the radar and, thus, keep the place rent-controlled. The “wonderful euro wet/dry box,” which cleaned and dried clothes in a swoop, as well as her “dishwashing wheeled thingy,” were illegal in the building because Moshe paid the water bill, and therefore, they could get her evicted. Laura suspected the water-hogging appliances served the dual purpose of drawing her and her sister back to the apartment periodically, as well as letting Mom flirt with eviction, like having an affair so your husband would leave you.
    That’s what Ruby had likened it to on her last visit to the euro wet/dry box. Everything went back to men. Ruby could be as interesting as a lump of dried gum. Laura wondered if it was that flatness that attracted good fortune to her sister who, at ten months older, was as close to a twin as you could get without actually being one, and who was as far away from Laura as possible in just about every other respect.
    For instance, right out of high school, Ruby had found an illicit rent-controlled two bedroom in SoHo that required little more than a paint job and three-digit rent checks made out to the legal lessee in Parsippany, New Jersey. Laura had ended up with two roommates and a loft bed hung over a doorway in a Lower East Side studio. Ruby had offered her second bedroom to her sister like alms, and Laura had counteroffered that Ruby should kiss her flat white ass, to which Ruby’s best and final response was a set of puckered pink lips sucking the air between them.
    Laura could not deny the satisfaction she felt upon hearing that, a scant three years into her lifetime rent-controlled tenure, Ruby had been forced out when the landlord, on a random walkthrough, had busted her taking out the garbage like she actually lived there.
    By then, Laura had bitten the bullet and left Manhattan for the somewhat slightly cheaper rental market of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and was in a position to offer Ruby a spot on her couch. But Mom countered that Ruby had spoken with the landlord, spilled the Parsippany address, and negotiated herself a good price on a vacancy he had on Sullivan Street. “And seriously, Laura,” Mom asked, “what would Ruby do in Brooklyn for Christ’s sake? Date coosheens and eat gabbagole and mootzadel ?”
    “And me, Ma? Why is it okay for me to be boroughed?”
    Mom shrugged in a way that let Laura know there was a natural order of things, and that only those that understood it could love two very different daughters the same. But Laura wasn’t hearing it. She was feeling petulant and cranky. Her neighborhood hadn’t seen a cugine since the early ‘80s. It was wall-to-wall butter-skinned art students who had a seemingly endless trove of accessories and the knowledge of how to wear them. Even the lady behind the counter at the Korean market wore bracelets and earrings that didn’t match, but went perfectly together. Gabbagole , her ass.
    Laura, a native Manhattanite, lasted a full year in Brooklyn before she found a way-too-expensive apartment on East Broadway. It was a haul to the train, and the rent made ramen noodles her main nutritional source, but she had never habituated to crossing water every day just to go to work.
    A month after Laura’s move, Ruby had called Mom to complain about the lady upstairs, whose two little yippy dogs had peed on