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hassle, you might even want to sell it,” Debbie said as they looked for a parking lot.
    Joyce said she couldn’t imagine doing that; the car was a high school graduation gift from her parents, bought second-hand but lovingly maintained.
    “That’s what I said, too,” Debbie smiled with the air of a city native. “Wait until you need money.”
    They found a parking lot near 40th Street and Broadway that charged $21.50 per day; enough, Joyce pointed out, to get a complete oil change at home.
    She was dismayed to hear that she was expected to leave her keys. “We got to move’em. We need the keys,” the attendant said.
    “If I leave you the keys, what’s to stop you from driving off in my car?” Joyce asked.
    The attendant, a thin young man in dirty jeans, grinned and shrugged at her question. He held up the receipt, with “No bailment created” printed on it. Then, seeing the look on Joyce’s face, he told her: “Relax. It’s a VW. No one wants those.”
    The girls watched as the attendant drove Joyce’s car with the door partly open all the way to the back of the lot. The cars were parked in several long rows, one in front of the other with only inches between bumpers and grills.
    With a series of deft maneuvers he wedged the car into the last spot in a row, between the stone wall of the adjoining building and a 1998 Acura Legend nearly the same color as Joyce’s car.
    “Come on,” Debbie said. “We don’t want to be here when the owner of that car wants to leave.”
    They walked a few blocks to Nathan’s for lunch, moving with their yellow plastic trays past nearly every kind of fast food imaginable.
    “I promised my mother I’d eat well,” Joyce laughed, putting the end of a foot-long hot dog in her mouth.
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    “It’s a lot cheaper to eat at home, but I thought you’d like a welcome to the city lunch,” Debbie said. “If you can cook we’ll eat really well. I’ve been buying up all the makings and having salads.”
    Joyce agreed to cook and Debbie agreed to do the dishes.
    Joyce figured up her weekly expenses on a yellow napkin, with Debbie providing estimates of what things cost. “There are a lot of free things to do. You just have to know where to find them,”
    she said.
    From their discussion Joyce realized that Debbie had used up both of the “meals out” in her weekly budget to take her to lunch at Nathan’s. She resolved to take Debbie somewhere nice for a dinner.
    Joyce swallowed a Depakote tablet with the last of her soda, and over the rim of her cup she saw Debbie’s eyes widen.
    “Medicine. Prescription,” she said quickly. “I have to take it three times a day, but I’m fine.”
    There was an awkward pause, and then Joyce asked her roommate, “So, you seeing anybody?”
    “Well… There’s Ron.” Debbie rolled her eyes. “He showed me the ropes when I first got here, and he feels it gives him squatter’s rights. So far, no one’s challenged him.”
    “I know how that is,” Joyce said. “I broke up with my boyfriend just before I left. It wasn’t going anywhere. He’s looking for a PTA wife.”
    Debbie had been in New York three months, and worked in a video store and a vintage clothing store to make ends meet. She told Joyce she went on her “rounds” every morning, going to every open call she could find. But so far she hadn’t been given a second look.
    “The only acting work I’ve done at all was in a student film at N.Y.U. They shot it in New Jersey,” Debbie said. “These guys 34
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    were big fans of “Cinefantastique’ and “Fangoria.’ You know, real devotees of special-effects gore.”
    “Sounds awful,” Joyce said.
    “Well, it had a sense of humor to it. It was about a Tory judge during the Revolutionary War who was taken prisoner in his own house by the rebels. When the British came to rescue him, it was dark, and they accidentally bayoneted the old judge.”
    “Terrific,” Joyce said wryly.
    “That was