her throat was exposed. At least when they turned the corner, in sight of Sy’s pushcart, the wind abated.
‘Hello, ladies,’ Sy called out over the heads of the other customers on line for their morning caffeine and carbohydrate fix.
‘Hey, Sy!’ Tina replied. ‘Wanna go to Puerto Rico with me?’
‘Nah,’ Sy said. ‘I’d rather stand here in the cold, freezing my nuts off and doling out coffee to rich, cheap bastards.’
The rich cheap bastards on line were too busy reading the Journal headlines or talking on their cell phones to react, but Claire smiled.
‘Yeah. You got the life,’ Tina agreed. When she and Claire got to the front of the line Sy, without needing to be told, put their regular orders into two little bags. He handed them over to the girls with a flourish.
‘Tell ya what,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask my wife’s permission. But screw Puerto Rico. If she says yes we’re going to Aruba.’
‘If she says yes, I’ll buy Aruba,’ Tina wisecracked. ‘Then I’ll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.’
‘Been there, done that. That’s why I’m pushing this cart,’ Sy said. He turned to Claire. ‘But maybe a cutie like you could sell me the Williamsburg.’ He winked.
Tina was rooting around in her gigantic purse. She looked up. ‘Geez, I barely have enough money for Danish and coffee. Hey, Claire, can you lend me a twenty till Friday?’
Sy, still looking at Claire, shook his head. ‘Same shit, ‘nother day,’ he smiled.
Claire nodded, opened her backpack and handed the bill to Tina. ‘Thanks,’ Tina said, and handed the twenty to Sy. ‘My treat.’
Claire smiled. That was so Tina. Always there with her hand out but always willing to share. She’d give you the blouse off her back – but she’d probably already borrowed your money to buy the blouse. Claire was the kind of person who always had money saved to lend to Tina – who was the kind of person who always needed to borrow some. Claire wasn’t old or experienced enough to know the whole world was divided into those two kinds of people, one never happy with the other. She just smiled at her friend as Tina handed Claire the bag of black coffee and a buttered bagel. As they walked from the cart, though, Claire did idly wonder why she was more comfortable lending than borrowing. It certainly wasn’t her mother’s influence. Her mother owed money not only to Claire but also to most of Tottenville. But neither did Claire remember her late father being open-handed with money. Perhaps she didn’t take after either one of them. Despite genetics she had always seemed completely unlike her parents or her brother Fred.
‘My brothers and Anthony went out last night and got hammered,’ Tina said. ‘Boy, were they hung this morning. They said they missed Fred. How is he?’
The truth was Claire had no idea how her brother was. He had joined the Army and had been shipped off to Germany. Claire had written to him dutifully for the first six or eight months after he left but he had rarely responded and when he did it was only with a brief postcard (no picture). As her letters became more and more difficult to write, Claire had admitted to herself that she and Fred never had much in common. So her letters had petered out. That didn’t mean that her guilt did. Aside from Fred and her mom she had no relatives she associated with. There was an aunt on her father’s side, but Claire had been told that the Bilsops had disowned her forever.
Tina, on the contrary, lived amidst scores of complex ongoing relationships: cousins, second cousins, their wives or husbands, godmothers, goddaughters, and dozens of courtesy aunts and uncles where no blood relationship existed at all. Sometimes Claire was turned off by Tina and her boisterous clan, but now and then she was envious of their closeness and even their feuds. You had to care about somebody to bother to fight with them. Now Fred was away, she only had her mother and Jerry, her mom’s repulsive boyfriend.
‘I guess Fred’s okay,’ Claire told Tina. ‘My mother got a card from Dusseldorf.’
‘Dusseldorf? Who’s he?’
Claire just shrugged. She’d decided long ago that educating Tina was not her job.
They arrived at the enormous glass doors to their office building with the usual couple of minutes to get upstairs. The lobby was crowded and the elevator was, as usual, jammed. The ride in the elevator was Claire’s least favorite part of the day. She had told herself over and over that it was only ninety seconds but she still dreaded it. In the summer people’s sweaty bodies were oppressive and in the winter the smell of wet wool was equally unpleasant. But it probably wasn’t the smell as much as the crush. All those strangers’ bodies rubbing. At that very moment Claire felt the breasts and belly of a large woman pushing against her back while in front, inches from her, she faced the wall of a man’s black coat, almost touching it with her nose. Her coffee had to be cradled directly against the tall man’s back. She was waiting for the day when the bag broke.
She was always relieved when the doors opened on the thirty-eighth floor and she could make her way out of what she thought of as ‘the aluminum sauna’. But her relief was almost immediately replaced by dismay as she remembered her next challenge: Once she had said goodbye to Tina she would have to scuttle down the rows of secretarial desks lined up outside the windowed offices which were ranged around the edge of the floor. Then she would have to turn and make her way down the windowless hallway that led to an even deeper corridor. It, in turn, would bring her to the interior room she shared with half a dozen other ‘analysts’, lorded over by Joan, a woman who proved that a little authority could make one a petty tyrant. Another day, another ninety-two dollars take-home Claire thought.
As they filed out of the elevator Claire hunched her shoulders in her habitual way but Tina, beside her, was jaunty, queen of the floor. How could she be so cheery? Maybe it was because Tina worked for Michael Wainwright, otherwise known as ‘Mr Wonderful’. Claire repressed a sigh at the thought of him. All the girls in the office talked about him. He was thirty-one, single, gorgeous, successful, and deeply in love … with himself. He had a hot- and cold-running stream of women, all of them financial executives in size six Prada suits. That wasn’t mentioning the shoes they wore, which cost more than Claire earned in a week. Michael dated them serially, replacing an investment banker with a broker with a fund manager. Secretaries like Tina and analysts like Claire were not his style. Many of them hated him, many admired him, but Claire was the only one who was in love with him. Of course, she wasn’t stupid enough to betray that information to any of her coworkers, not even Tina.
Michael Wainwright had spoken to Claire exactly four times in the eighteen months she’d worked at Crayden Smithers. The first time he’d asked, ‘Would you make five copies of this right away, please?’ The second time he’d said, ‘I need these numbers crunched by this evening.’ The third time – Claire’s favorite – was when she’d delivered a report to his office and he’d said, ‘Thanks. Nice dress.’ The last time was a little over two weeks ago when he had brushed against her on his way out to lunch and said, ‘Oh, sorry.’
They got to Tina’s desk. Claire glanced at the office behind her but couldn’t see Michael Wainwright. ‘I’m meetin’ Anthony tonight,’ Tina said. ‘We’re goin’ to the bridal registry at Macy’s. You wanna go?’
Claire doubted that even Anthony wanted to go. Was the choice that or garroting (something Tina’s uncle might know about)? She just shook her head. ‘No. I want to get home. I have a book to finish.’
Tina shrugged. ‘You and the books.’
Claire shrugged back and refrained from saying ‘You and QVC.’ Then she began the unpleasant route which made her disappear down the corridor like Alice down the rabbit hole.
‘He ain’t gonna get away with it. Someone should tell him ta get ovah himself,’ Michelle D’annunzio said.