Hanging by a Thread

God, the place is—or at least, will be—gorgeous. Honeyed wooden floors blurrily reflect the brick-and-marble fireplace at one end; through the pair of virtually transparent floor-to-ceiling windows, I can see a small terrace. “Hello?” I call out, my voice echoing tentatively inside the large, bare living room.

A pair of toddlers streak out of what I guess is the bedroom, startling me. The one girl, long-legged with curly dark hair, chases a smaller blonde, their laughter shrill and infectious in the still, empty room.

“Hillary! Melissa!” Dragging a metal tape measure behind her, a tall, bony, very pregnant woman in a stretchy black jumpsuit suddenly appears, her expression slightly harried underneath an explosion of dark curls. “Sorry,” she mutters with an apologetic smile, then tries to glare at the two little girls. “Hey, you two. Cool it.”

Naturally, they just laugh all the harder and take off again, their sneakered feet beating a syncopated rhythm against the bare floorboards as they race each other up and down, up and down, the length of the room. The woman rolls her eyes, then smiles in a whatcha-gonna-do? grin. “Baby-sitter crisis, sorry.” She extends her hand. “I’m Ginger Petrocelli. You must be Marilyn?”

“No, Ellie. Levine. Her mother’s assistant. Marilyn couldn’t make it.”

Ginger’s brows lift slightly, then she grins. “God, that is a great hat,” she says, eyeing my red wool cloche. “Where’d you get it?”

“It was my grandmother’s,” I say, once again scanning the living room. “Is this place a knockout or what?”

The woman laughs. “That’s one word for it.” Over in the far corner, the little girls collapse on the floor in a fit of giggles. “At least they’re not trying to kill each other,” Ginger mumbles under her breath, then nods toward the folder clutched to my chest. “Is that for me?”

“What? Oh, yeah.” I hand it to her. “I tried to organize it a bit on the way over, but I’m not sure how much good I did.”

Halfheartedly shushing the children, Ginger starts flipping through the torn-out magazine pages. A plain gold band gleams on her left hand. And from out of nowhere, I feel this…prick of envy.

This is very weird, especially since I don’t tend to think much about my marital status, much less obsess about it. Maybe because I already have a kid, I don’t know. Not that I haven’t gone out occasionally since Starr’s birth. Fix-ups happen. But honestly, it got to be more trouble than it was worth. You dress up, you go out, you’re on your best behavior. So what do you really learn about the other person, other than whether or not he’s got good table manners? Then there’s the whole will-or-won’t-he-call-me-or should-I-call-him? trauma, which usually is more about your own ego than whether or not you really want to see him again—

“Well, if nothing else,” Ginger says beside me, scrutinizing one of the clippings, “she’s got good taste.”

“That would be her mother. I don’t think Marilyn has any taste—”

We’re interrupted by the tiny brunette who looks just like Ginger, all done up in mauve Baby Gap.

“Gotta go potty.”

“I thought you just went.”

“Gotta go ’gain.”

“Sounds familiar,” I say, following them back through the equally large, airy bedroom to the bathroom. Yeow—Nikky wasn’t kidding about the wallpaper in here. Sunflowers. The size of garbage can lids. On a lime-green background.

“You have kids?” I hear from the bathroom.

“One.” I look away, but now reverse-image sunflowers are seared onto my retinas. “A five-year-old girl. With the smallest bladder in the metropolitan area.”

Ginger emerges, the little girl shooting past her and back out to the living room, where the giggling starts up again. “I doubt that. Right now, that honor goes to me.”

I like this woman, I realize. Her neuroses seem to lie within the normal range. For New York, at least. Since that’s a rare thing in my life, I’m reluctant to leave just yet.

“When’s your baby due?”

“In six weeks. Might as well be six years.”

“Are the girls fraternal twins?”

“They’re not even related,” she says, smiling. “The dark-haired one’s actually my half sister. My mother’s testimony to yes, you can get pregnant after you think you’ve gone through menopause. And little blondie’s my husband’s.” Her voice softens when she says this, except then she mutters “Shit” under her breath and glances at her watch. “I’ve got another appointment on the upper East Side in twenty minutes. Girls, get your coats and let’s get cracking! God, I hope I even can get a taxi at this hour!”

We all troop down the stairs, the girls jumping from step to step. I tell her about billing Nikky’s business, she nods and digs a card out of her purse.

“I don’t really need—”

“You never know,” Ginger says with a shrug. “And when you’re just starting out on your own, believe me, you give business cards to everybody.”

I glance at the spiffy logo on the card as we all thread through the door and down the steps. GPW Designs, it says, with an address in Brooklyn.

“What’s the W for?” We hang a right and head toward Sixth Avenue; Ginger laughs.

“Wojowodski. My husband’s name.” Hanging on to one kid with each hand, she tosses me a grin. “What can I say, I’ve got bad name karma.”

“Is he worth it?”

“Most days, yeah.”

I get that funny feeling in the pit of my stomach again, decide to change the subject. “So—you’re in business for yourself?…Oh, here, let me do that,” I offer when I realize Ginger’s going to try to hail a taxi while hanging on to her briefcase and two wiggly little girls.

“Thanks.” She moves them all back nearer the curb as I step out into the street. “I just hung out my shingle a few months ago.”

“How do you like it?” I say over my shoulder as cab after cab whizzes by. “Being on your own?”

Her silence makes me turn. She seems to be considering how to answer my question, as a sudden breeze whips her curls into a froth around her face.

“It’s scary as all get-out,” she says at last. “Knowing I could lose my shirt. That I now have to pay for my own health insurance. It’s a real shock after working for big firms. Taking the safe road. Oh, God…bless you,” she says as a taxi pulls up in front of me and she herds her charges toward it. After she gets them in, she turns to me, our gazes level since I’m now standing on the curb. Her brown eyes are huge and unnervingly imploring, as if she’s been sent to warn me of something. And I can tell she’s as perplexed about why she’s answering my question as I am about why I asked it to begin with.

“But you know what?” she says. “I’ve never been happier. And I knew the longer I waited, the harder it would be to take the plunge.”

“Mom-mee!” the blonde calls out. “I’m cold!”

With a smile and a “Thanks again,” she gets in, slams shut the door, and they go shooting off up Sixth Avenue.

Huh.

I turn south to walk the few blocks to Washington Square and the subway, yanking my cell from my purse. I call home, tell Leo I’ll be there in about forty-five minutes, then punch in Tina’s number. Of course, I get her machine, since she works until six, at a lumber supplier in Long Island City. I toss the phone back into my purse and find my mind wandering, back to that dress. The one with the dropped waist, in the showroom. How to change it to make it work for, I don’t know, somebody like me.

With the exception of my sister, the women in my family, on both sides, tend to be short and bosomy. My hunch is that Starr will follow in this genetic tradition, even though she’s got spaghetti strand appendages now. So did I at her age. Imagine my shock when I awoke one morning to find these bizarre protuberances jutting out from my chest.

At twelve, I was already a D-cup. They should make it a rule, when you get breasts that early, that you have to put them away for later. Like the pearl necklace my great-grandmother gave me for my sixth birthday that I wasn’t allowed to wear until I was deemed mature enough to handle the responsibility.

I’m okay with them now, though. My breasts, I mean. The necklace, sad to say, vanished in the back seat crevice of Donny Volcek’s father’s Taurus on prom night. The good news, though, is that a Taurus’s interior is definitely roomier than it appears from the outside.

As I was saying. I came to terms with my short, bosomy self some time ago. That’s not to say I don’t have body issues from time to time. Like whenever I go bra shopping. Or try to find a pair of jeans that even remotely go where my curves do. You know what I’m talking about, right?

Men don’t have these problems. All a guy has to do is yank on a T-shirt or a sweatshirt or something and he’s done. No wires to pinch, no straps to slip, no overflow ooching over the sides or between the zipper that refuses to close unless you lie flat on your back and give up breathing. Okay, so men have the tie thing to deal with, but please. How many men wear ties these days? At least on a full-time basis. When you’re a D-cup, you damn sight wear a bra every single day or by the time you’re sixty you have to kick your ta-tas out of your way when you walk. This is not something a man has to face.

Not too often, anyway.

I fall in with the herd resolutely filing down the stairs to the subway entrance, wishing I had something to anesthetize me for the long subway ride.

Wishing that adorable little apartment were mine.

What is it with me tonight? First my reaction to Ginger’s wedding ring, now the apartment. I am not—normally—a covetous person, wanting things that belong to someone else. Especially things I couldn’t afford in my wildest dreams.

I swipe my Metrocard and meld into the pack on the platform, while way, way back in my brain, something blips, very faintly, very quickly. Hardly enough to register, really. But it was there, I can’t deny it, like not being able to deny that, yes, that was a rat skittering across your path:

Resentment. That if I hadn’t had Starr, maybe things would be different.

As I said, the feeling is fleeting, like the shudder from seeing that rat. But that it surfaces at all gnaws at me. Just like that rat.

And now that I’ve beaten that metaphor to death…

A gush of heavy, stale air and an increasingly loud series of mechanical groans and whines heralds the train’s arrival. Doors open, bodies get off, bodies get on, doors close. I find a seat, amazingly enough, settling in and forcing myself to think about all the things I have to be grateful for. One of my mother’s tricks, whenever either one of us was tempted to feel sorry for ourselves.

We used it a lot, there at the end.

But there were days when thoughts of losing her crowded my brain to the point where trying to find something positive about my life seemed as insurmountable as my being able to come up with a cure in time to save her.

“So start small,” she’d whisper in the North Carolina accent nearly twenty years in Queens hadn’t been able to budge, her smile strained against skin so fragile-looking I was half afraid it would tear.

“I got an A on my math test,” I’d say. Or, “Nancy DiMunzio wasn’t at school today.” Or, “My zit’s all gone.” Or, depending on whether or not this was one of her good days, “Jennifer and I actually got through breakfast without biting each other’s heads off.”

If she had the energy, she’d chuckle, then add something of her own to the list. That she’d had me was always part of it, a thought that tightens my throat even fifteen years later. In any case, we’d go back and forth, and before I knew it I’d filled a whole loose-leaf page.

So tonight, I shut my eyes, shutting out the whispers of discontent, and start small. I’ve got a seat on the train, I think.

The man next to me doesn’t smell like a distillery.

My daughter makes me laugh.

I’m not having my period.

I open my eyes and fish a tiny sketchbook out of my purse, flipping through a few ideas I had for altering some of my grandmother’s dresses. I jot down what I’ve already listed, then add to it. By the time I get home, I’ve got more than fifty items. Crazy.

Leo’s in the kitchen, basting a chicken. The house smells like Heaven. I mentally add this to my list.

“Where’s Starr?”

“Gomezes’. You got a phone call.”

My stomach jumps, which doesn’t stop me from trying to pinch off a piece of chicken skin. “Who from?”

“Heather Abruzzo, I wrote it down. Didn’t you used to hang out with some girl named Abruzzo?”

“Heather’s older sister. Joanne.”

“Joanne, now I remember. Cut that out!” He smacks at my hand, but the prize is already mine. “It’s not done yet.”

“What’d she want?” I say around the sizzling hot, succulent piece of garlic-and-pepper seasoned chicken skin.

“Something about her wedding dress. I think maybe she wants you to make it?”

Uh-boy.

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