Slaves of New York Read Online Free PDF Page B

many lives: gilt ceilings, molding in a pattern of vines and leaves, covered with many layers of paint, an intricate puzzle-parquet floor, like a Parcheesi board, cracked and dented in places, the wood still beautiful. The apartment was two stories high, with a spiral staircase in the dining room that led upstairs to a small balcony with a sleeping area. There was a second bedroom in front, off the living room, which had an ornate marble fireplace. The bathroom was elaborate, with a claw-footed tub and a pedestal sink. The place came with its own backyard, fenced in, though bare of plant life. How calm and happy I felt here! It was a place to sit morosely by the open fire in a velvet dress, entertaining an assortment of people I would surely meet. I would plant a willow and peach tree in the backyard, get a cat. "I'd never be able to afford this," I said. "I bet it's twenty-five hundred a month."
    "You could get a roommate," my mother said. "Maybe it's not so much." My mother, on her stiff stilts of legs, never allowed her face to express much emotion, but I could tell she liked it.
    We spoke to the woman in the antique store. She said the rent was $600 a month, and had scarcely finished the sentence before my mother wrote out a check as a deposit. The woman said she would call the landlady—she didn't see that there would be any problem. I took the train home with my mother; the whole trip we discussed the apartment. She said that maybe the landlady would reduce the first month's rent so that I could get metal security gates installed over the back windows. At $600 a month, however, it was hard to complain.
    When we got home the landlady called: she hadn't spoken to the woman in the antique store when I saw the apartment, but it had been rented only a few minutes before we looked at the place.
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    "Goddammit," I said to my mother. "That was my apartment. It felt like my apartment." The flavor of lemons and chalk filled my mouth, the taste of disappointment. This loss was an indication that my whole life was out of sync. Nell was also disappointed. There was nothing she could say or do, but she did show me an article in Fate magazine which suggested that possibly I had lived in the apartment in another incarnation but was not meant to now.
    Luckily I had something to fall back on; Yale had accepted me the previous spring, and though I had told them I wasn't going to come, now that I changed my mind they said I could still attend, but without the scholarship.
    Though I had enjoyed living in my own apartment in New Haven, I didn't mind being back at home with my mother. She lived in Southampton, on a back suburban street, far from the large mansions that lined the waterfront. The tiny house had been built in the 1930s, before the Hamptons became so popular and expensive. Some summers, my mother went away on a trip and rented out the house for $5,000 a month; this summer she had a job as librarian at the Southampton library.
    In her house we were constantly tripping over each other, but we didn't get on each other's nerves: we called each other, as a joke, "Letitia" and "Hermione." Though we had never seen the movie Grey Gardens —about a mother and daughter, related to Jackie Onassis, who never went out of the house and grew old and eccentric together—this was what we imagined we were like. We lived on quick-cooking Ramen noodles, spinach, and snow peas; tuna fish, direct from the can, frozen corn fritters heated in the oven; or baked potatoes topped with Cheddar cheese.
    In the afternoons I rode my bike to the beach and walked up the mile stretch and back, scuffing my feet through the foam at the edge of the sand and waves. I spent a lot of time thinking: What makes me the way I am? Okay, I figured, I was a combination of genetic and environmental accidents. On the other hand, surely my personality wasn't entirely beyond my control. It disturbed me that I seemed to be totally uninter-
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    ested in men: when I went out