Love Saves the Day

10



Laura





THE WOMAN ON THE SUBWAY WAS MIDDLE-AGED AND FORMIDABLE. Short but sturdily built, she had caramel-colored hair and red fingernails so long they arced gently half an inch from the tips of her fingers. She spoke emphatically to the man standing in front of her. Also middle-aged, tall and slender, his head seemed too large for his frame. It bent slightly toward the woman, like a flower beginning to droop on its stem. “La gente cambia,” the woman said, aiming one red nail in the direction of his face. “La gente cambia.” And then, in heavily accented English, “You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all.” The man didn’t do much in the way of response aside from nodding his head dolefully from time to time. Whether because this conversation pertained to him in particular (could they be splitting up, this middle-aged couple in this very public subway car?), or in silent acknowledgment of the fickle mystery of the human heart, was impossible for Laura, seated half the car’s length away from them, to discern.

The two of them clung to the steel bar above their heads, the occasional lurches of the train throwing them slightly off-balance but otherwise not disrupting their conversation. All around Laura, seated and standing, people shivered in the too-chilled air-conditioning as they tapped on BlackBerrys (which Laura knew she should be doing, but wasn’t) or fiddled with iPods, or stared blankly into the middle distance. The train stopped, and a hot whoosh of fetid air from the station entered the open doors along with a black-haired man dressed in a waiter’s uniform. It was a muggy July day, and faint yellow circles had begun to form at the armpits of his white jacket. He wheeled a linen-draped cart covered with plastic-wrapped platters of fruits and pastries, pasta salads and sandwiches. Somebody catering an after-hours meeting, Laura thought. Somebody who still has a budget to do things like that. The people who had to move to accommodate the cart looked at the waiter in minor annoyance, and he returned their looks with a vaguely apologetic expression on his sweat-slick face that said, Sorry, but I gotta work, too. Then everybody went back to what they had been doing, the middle-aged woman continuing to harangue the middle-aged man even as one corner of the cart dug into the flesh of her hip.

The woman was right, Laura acknowledged. People did change. Or maybe it was just that, over time, you started to notice different things. She’d been thinking about how dramatically Josh had changed these past few weeks, since he’d become involved in the cause of saving Alphaville Studios along with the apartment building on Avenue A. Except, Laura conceded, with the uneasiness of someone who’s deliberately shut her eyes to an unpleasant truth she now has to face, the real change had been happening slowly over the past few months. Once she’d thought Josh exempt, somehow, from the vicissitudes that threatened people like her, whose lives weren’t as charmed as his own. Now she realized what she should have seen in a hundred different ways, in small gestures and offhand remarks. Josh was frustrated. The “changed” Josh she’d seen during the last few weeks was merely the confident, energetic, pleasantly busy Josh she’d first met just under a year and a half ago.

She’d been certain his interest in the building would fade after a few days. Instead, Josh had committed himself full-time to the project, making endless phone calls, creating a blog and Facebook pages, sending out a steady stream of emails. He’d pressed his niece and nephew into service, bringing them to the apartment once a week to clip together press releases and informational one-sheets that would be packaged and mailed to reporters, music journalists, city council members, congressmen, anybody who might choose to get involved. Even Prudence had gotten caught up in the frenetic activity, making sudden wild leaps onto the small folding table Josh had set up in his overcrowded home office (he’d had to move a few boxes of his own into their spare bedroom to accommodate it), scattering orderly stacks of papers in all directions. “Look, Prudence is helping!” Robert would shriek, and he and Abbie would collapse into uncontrollable laughing fits—especially when Prudence would accidentally get a mailing label stuck to the bottom of one paw and walk around shaking her paw furiously, assuming an air of injured dignity and refusing to let anybody close enough to pull the sticker off for her.

“It’s one of those Mitchell-Lama buildings,” Josh had told Laura a few days after he’d first gone there with the children. “You know, those middle-income apartment buildings they started putting up in the fifties.”

Laura did know. She and Sarah had moved into a Mitchell-Lama complex farther uptown back in the ’90s, when they’d left the Lower East Side.

“Anyway, now the building owner is trying to opt out of the program so he can sell to a developer who’ll reset the rents to ‘market rate.’ Which would basically quadruple or even quintuple what the tenants are paying. A lot of them are elderly and on fixed incomes, or war veterans. There’s a cop who lives in the building, and the new rent would be twice what he takes home in a month!”

Laura was only half listening. Of all the buildings in Manhattan, she wondered, why did Josh have to pick this building to worry about? She remembered Sarah, on the day they’d gone to Alphaville Studios, adjusting a set of headphones to fit over Laura’s ears and saying, This way we can hear ourselves while we record, so we’ll know what we sound like. Laura had asked, But won’t we know what we sound like just by listening to ourselves? And Sarah had explained that the way you sounded to yourself and the way you sounded to other people were two very different things.

“The building’s property value has been assessed at seven-point-five million,” Josh had continued, “and the tenants’ association has raised ten million from city subsidies and a handful of private donations. They want to buy the building themselves so they can keep the rents where they are. But the landlord has an offer of fifteen million from a developer, and he’s holding out.”

Laura had tried to quell the beginnings of panic as she listened to him talk. “It’s a terrible thing,” she’d said. “But this is just what happens in this city, Josh. There’s not even any point in fighting it. One way or another, the developers always win.”

“And the music studio!” Josh exclaimed, as if she hadn’t spoken. “Do you know how many great artists rehearsed and recorded there? Evil Sugar, Dizzy Gillespie, Tom Waits, the Ramones, Richard Hell. And the space is still in use! This isn’t just gentrification, this is decapitalization of the arts in New York.” He was pacing the room in his excitement. “Clarence Clemons, Nile Rodgers, Dylan, all the sessions guys who backed up the big-name performers on their albums and played in clubs all over town. The list is endless!”

It was an uncanny thing, Laura thought, to hear the exact same words her dead mother might have used coming from her husband’s mouth.

“But, Josh,” she’d tried again. “This is a lost cause. Surely, you can see that. You and I, we are not a lost cause. We need someplace to live, too, and we can’t live here forever on my salary alone. The last of your severance is coming up in two months.”

“Laura,” Josh had replied, and his frustration was evident in the way he said her name. “I’ve worn my fingers down to nubs making phone calls and sending out résumés. And at this point, nobody’s making any major hiring decisions until after Labor Day, anyway. At least this way I could possibly make some new contacts, or maybe it’ll lead to something else.” Josh had paused to give Prudence, who’d taken up diligent residence in front of the couch, a dollop of tuna salad from his half-eaten sandwich. “It beats the hell out of sitting around here doing nothing.”

“Maybe you could try writing again,” Laura had suggested. “Isn’t that what you did when you first moved to New York? You know people at so many different magazines …”

“Oh please, Laura. I couldn’t make it as a writer back when people were actually hiring writers. It won’t happen for me now when everybody’s scaling back.” He’d taken her hand and said, “Look, I don’t want you to think I’m trying to put the whole burden on you. I swear I’m going to find something else. And I know it’ll be tight, but we can manage on your salary and what’s left of our savings until then. What’s that expression? Safe as houses? Isn’t your job at the firm safe as houses?”

“Yeah,” Laura said. “Safe as houses.”


White-shoe firms like Laura’s had traditionally never engaged in major layoffs the way other companies did. In part this was a point of pride—of maintaining public confidence and public appearances—and in part it was a practical matter. Large cases were apt to spring up on short notice, and then you’d want partners and associates whose skills you knew you could rely on. Sometimes a firm would grow so large and unwieldy that it would collapse under its own weight, sucking everyone into its vortex like a black hole. Typically, though, jobs like Laura’s—even during recessions and downturns—had been safe.

But now uneasy whispers and rumors were afloat, tales of large corporate firms like Laura’s that were actually laying associates off. Laura wasn’t sure precisely when the early-morning phone calls from recruiters had stopped coming in; she only knew that one morning, when the phones were unusually quiet, she’d realized with a start that it had been some time since anybody had called to “feel her out” about her willingness to move elsewhere. At Neuman Daines, the new class of first-year associates, who in the past had always started their employment the September following their law school graduations, had seen their start dates deferred until the following spring. A handful of associates who fell onto the lower end of the billable-hours-per-month scale had been told, in the most civilized way possible, that it would be best for all concerned if they were employed elsewhere within, say, the next two months. Perry had never exactly been a jovial person, but Laura had detected an undercurrent of strain lately in their interactions. She didn’t know whether it had to with her personally, or with the firm’s larger financial outlook, but whatever its source, it was disturbing.

Nothing had been the same since Josh’s company had gone through its own round of layoffs. As soon as Laura had seen the severance agreement in Josh’s hand, she’d known what had happened. A “Chinese wall” had been erected around her at the firm. She had been deliberately excluded from anything related to Josh’s company, the paperwork the firm was preparing for it, and everything else associated with it. It was foolish, Laura knew, to take such a thing personally. Had she gone to Perry and confronted him with it, if she’d said something like, How could you not tell me? she knew exactly what Perry’s response would be. You knew what you were getting into when you started dating a client, he would say. You knew there might be complications. Probably he would have thrown in some pithy quote from the Talmud about choices and consequences for good measure. And of course he would be right. The only thing to be gained by bringing it up would be to appear naïve and overly emotional. Just another woman in business who couldn’t separate the personal from the professional.

Still, the thing hurt. Laura would look at her co-workers, particularly the other fifth-years, and wonder who had known what and when. How long before Laura had they known that her home life was about to turn upside down? What had they said about her when her name was mentioned? Growing up, Laura had always had a keen sense of being different—tall and white in an elementary school where few children were either. She had spent most of her adult life trying to fit in, and since marrying Josh she’d nearly convinced herself that this was something she no longer gave much thought to. Yet, as it turned out, it had taken very little for that feeling to come rushing back, to make her wonder if every hushed conversation that ended abruptly when she entered a room had been about her, the oddity, the one who wasn’t quite the same as the others, the associate foolish enough to marry a client—something no other Neuman Daines associate had done in the entire hundred-year history of the firm.

Laura remembered a little joke of her mother’s, something like, You’re not paranoid if they really are all against you. Laura didn’t want to be paranoid, but she couldn’t help noticing that where she’d typically racked up anywhere from 200 to 240 billable hours a month, in the past two months she’d barely broken 160. While technically this wouldn’t affect her salary, her bonuses this year would undoubtedly be smaller than in previous years—and bonuses accounted for nearly half of what she earned.

It wasn’t that Laura had slacked off or was unwilling to take on the work. Work wasn’t being sent her way. It could be that there wasn’t as much work to go around as there had been in flusher times. She suspected that some of the other associates might be “hoarding” work, although it was nothing she could set out to discover and prove without making herself appear even more paranoid than she already felt. Maybe Perry wasn’t looking out for her the way he used to. Maybe Perry was somebody else’s rabbi these days, although she couldn’t be so far out of the loop as to be unaware of something like that, if it had truly occurred.

Unless, she would think grimly, she was.


Laura had fallen into the habit of staying up late thinking about these things, telling Josh she was staying up to go over work papers the way she always had, but actually turning everything over in her mind. Frequently she found herself encouraging Prudence to join her for company, placing a morsel of tuna or cheese, or some other much-loved treat, on the couch until Prudence was lured into settling down next to her. Once the cat had fallen asleep, Laura would gently comb the tips of her fingernails through the fur of Prudence’s back, which was what had first suggested the cat brush she’d spontaneously stopped for on the way home from work today. Only a few months ago (had it really only been a few months?), Sarah must have stroked Prudence in much the same way Laura did now. Laura would look at her long fingers—fingers that, under different circumstances, might have moved with ease across a turntable or a musical instrument or a typewriter—and think, I have my mother’s hands.

As a child, on hot July days like this one, with school out and her mother busy at the store, Laura had spent a great deal of time in one of the ladder-backed chairs in the Mandelbaums’ kitchen with Honey in her lap. Mrs. Mandelbaum would chop a frozen banana into a bowl, sprinkle a teaspoon of sugar over it, then mix it with sour cream taken from what she insisted on calling, to Laura’s amusement, “the icebox.” Honey would lick the sugared cream from Laura’s fingers with her raspy tongue while Mrs. Mandelbaum prepared dinner and Mr. Mandelbaum rested in his overstuffed living room chair only a few feet away, listening to the big-band albums that Sarah scavenged from her store to bring back for him.

Once, listening to an album by the Count Basie Orchestra, Mr. Mandelbaum had closed his eyes and said, “Ah, this takes me back.” Calling into the kitchen, “Ida, do you remember this one?”

“Of course I do,” Mrs. Mandelbaum had answered. She thwacked a chicken breast cleanly in half with a cleaver. “Norm Zuckerman and I danced to this at the Roseland Ballroom in 1937.”

Mr. Mandelbaum grumbled something under his breath that sounded like Norm Zuckerman followed by a bad word in Yiddish. But Mrs. Mandelbaum had been unperturbed, her deft hands massaging spices into the chicken as she smiled and told Laura, “Mister Bigshot in there might not have thought much of me at first, but plenty of boys had eyes for me in those days. Believe you me.”

“No wonder,” Mr. Mandelbaum snorted. “You had the shortest skirts and longest legs on the whole Lower East Side.”

“Stop it, Max! You’re filling her head with nonsense.” Mrs. Mandelbaum slid the chicken into the oven and ran her hands under the faucet. “I’ll put the leftovers in the icebox and bring them up later when your mother comes home,” she told Laura. “Nothing beats cold chicken at the end of a hot day.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “Don’t listen to what he says. My mother used to measure my skirts with a ruler before I went out. If they were shorter than two inches below my knee, I had to go back upstairs and change.”

“Ah, but those were some knees.” Mr. Mandelbaum smiled from his chair. “They still are, you know. Nobody has knees like my wife’s.” Mrs. Mandelbaum had pretended not to hear him, but a pleasant blush spread across her wrinkled cheeks.

Laura, rubbing her knuckles gently behind Honey’s ear, had considered this, unable to imagine what it would be like to have such a strict mother. Sarah had never been especially prone to discipline, had never once raised her hand to Laura or enforced punishments of any kind. “Do you have any pictures of what your dresses looked like back then?”

“Do we have any pictures?” Mr. Mandelbaum’s voice was always powerful. Sometimes Laura could hear him from the hallway in front of her own apartment, all the way downstairs. But even Honey opened her eyes wider at how loud his voice sounded now. “Ida, bring out the photo albums.”

Mrs. Mandelbaum had gone to the linen closet in the front hall, pulling out several thick albums. She’d spread them out on the linoleum kitchen table, and Mr. Mandelbaum came in to join them. Laura marveled at the tiny hats and long beads women had worn back then as Mr. and Mrs. Mandelbaum told stories about this relative and that friend. Finally, Honey had crept from Laura’s lap onto the table and sat smack in the middle of an open photo album, rubbing her head against Mr. Mandelbaum’s cheek and swishing her tail across Laura’s hand. “Honey, in her infinite wisdom, is here to remind us that all good things must come to an end,” Mr. Mandelbaum declared. Then Mrs. Mandelbaum had put the albums back in the linen closet and begun preparations for a strudel with Laura’s help (“A girl is never too young to learn how to cook,” she always said), and Mr. Mandelbaum returned to the living room where he continued to listen to Count Basie until dinner was ready.

Later, after they’d eaten, Laura would fall asleep in the bed that had once belonged to their son, Honey clasped in her arms and purring contentedly. It was from Honey that Laura had learned the trick of sleepily half closing her eyes in a series of slow blinks in order to make a cat fall asleep. At some point Sarah would close the record store and come to carry her downstairs to her own bed, although Laura would be too deeply asleep to remember this part. She’d always slept well with Honey snoring softly beside her.

If she squinted now, sitting on the couch with Prudence, she could almost imagine that it was Honey sleeping next to her once again. The two of them looked somewhat alike, both slim brown tabbies (although Prudence seemed to be getting plumper lately—or was Laura imagining things?) with black tiger stripes. Prudence even had a hint of the same tiny black patch on the white fur of her lower jaw that Mrs. Mandelbaum had referred to as “Honey’s beauty mark.”

Of course, Prudence and Honey were very different creatures. Honey hadn’t been nearly as comical as Prudence, with her funny little airs of self-importance and the peremptory way she was apt to demand food (a thing Honey had never done). And Prudence was far more aloof than Honey had ever been, Honey who was so gentle and who had turned huge, green, adoring eyes upon you the second you reached down to stroke her head. Sweet as a piece of honey cake, Mr. Mandelbaum had always said. Laura remembered now, with a sudden shock at having ever forgotten, that Mr. Mandelbaum had also sung the “Daisy Bell” song to Honey—except, of course, he’d sung, Ho-ney, Ho-ney, give me your answer do …

Honey and Mr. Mandelbaum and everything else she’d loved had been lost to exactly the same inexorable forces Josh was now trying to combat. Mr. Mandelbaum himself had talked about friends forced from their tenements in the West Sixties back in 1959, when the buildings were leveled to clear space for Lincoln Center. It was the inevitable life cycle of a large city. A few tenderhearted people would wring their hands and write piteous op-ed pieces for the local newspapers, and some poor sap would be trotted out before the cameras to share his tale of woe for the evening news. But in the end, the buildings came down, the rents went up, and sooner or later everybody forgot. Cities had no memories. Only people did, and even people would forget eventually.

And this was the thing, of all possible things, that Josh had chosen to fixate on. This was where Josh was putting all his time and energy instead of focusing on what he should have been focused on—himself and Laura and the future the two of them would have together. Laura wanted her life to move in one direction: forward. And here Josh was, dragging her back into the past.


All of it had become so jumbled in her mind that by the time she’d knocked on Perry’s office door that morning, she wasn’t sure if she was there for Josh, on a pretext to talk to Perry at length about something, or to assuage her own conscience when it came to the dim view she’d taken of Josh’s efforts. Probably, she told herself, it was some combination of both.

From her customary seat across from Perry’s desk, Laura could see the framed photograph of Perry with his wife and two daughters taken at the older one’s Bat Mitzvah two years earlier. Laura had attended alone and been seated with the handful of other people Perry had invited from the firm. She had been the only third-year associate. Next year, she would attend the younger girl’s Bat Mitzvah with Josh. If I’m invited …

“What can you tell me about Mitchell-Lama statutes and regulations?” she’d asked Perry, after pleasantries had been exchanged.

Perry’s bushy eyebrows rose. “Are you working on an opinion letter for a client?”

Laura hated lying, knew she wasn’t any good at it. “Something like that,” she hedged, and felt her cheeks grow warm.

Perry nodded, then leaned back in his leather chair. “Well …” The tips of his fingers steepled across his stomach in the professorial air many of the younger associates found irritating, although Laura had always secretly loved it. “Mitchell-Lama is a type of subsidized housing program that was proposed by state senator MacNeil Mitchell and assemblyman Alfred Lama, and signed into law in 1955 as the Limited-Profit Housing Companies Act. There was a large working-class population in New York who needed places to live. Manhattan was pretty crowded back then”—Perry’s brief smile contained a hint of irony—“and there was a shortage of affordable housing for people who were teachers, for example, or transit workers, or store clerks. City and government officials all the way up the line wanted to find some way to make affordable housing available to these people. The thinking was that it wasn’t in the City’s best interests to have a population of only the very rich and the very poor. They wanted a stable middle class who were invested in their neighborhoods in order to generate additional tax revenues, bring crime rates down, et cetera.”

“Sounds logical,” said Laura.

“It was logical,” Perry replied. “The problem was that developers would say, I’m not going to build a building and then have the rent frozen afterward with rent control. Why should I invest money in a losing proposition? So Mitchell-Lama was created as a solution. The basis was that the city would put up ninety-five percent of the money to erect the buildings. Somebody from the private sector would come up with the additional five percent of the project cost at a ridiculously low interest rate on a thirty-five to fifty-year mortgage, and that would include the cost of the property, building a tenable building on it, and so forth. In exchange for this great deal the City was giving them, the developers would calculate rent by figuring out how much the building would need for maintenance, how much for debt service, and then they would build in a limited annual return for the investors. I forget the exact number, but something like seven percent. There would be some profit for the developers, but that profit would be limited so rents for the tenants could remain affordable. The developers knew this going in—it was why they got such favorable terms in the first place. It was a win for everybody at the time.”

“At the time,” Laura interjected when Perry paused to sip from his coffee mug. “But not anymore?”

“As you know, things change.” (Was the look he gave her then meaningful? Or was he merely looking at her? For the life of her, Laura couldn’t decide.) “There haven’t been many new Mitchell-Lama properties built in the past fifteen years or so. A lot of the buildings that already existed, especially the ones that went up in the earlier days of the program, have long since paid off their mortgages. Property values and market-rate rents have skyrocketed. So now there’s a wave of owners and development corporations that want to opt out of the program and flip the buildings, or at least raise the rents substantially. It’s not quite as simple as all that, of course. You have to get permission from the DHCR before you can privatize.” At Laura’s quizzical look, he clarified, “The Division of Housing and Community Renewal. Typically, though, that’s just a formality. There’s a mandatory process by which the building’s tenants have to be notified of a potential privatization and given a chance to protest the opt-out, and to submit any problems with building maintenance and repair that would need to be addressed before the building could be sold. Then there are several different agencies that regulate Mitchell-Lama housing. Not all buildings are regulated by the same agencies, and some buildings are regulated by multiple agencies that have conflicting regulations. Wading through all the bureaucracy can represent hundreds of billable hours and tens of thousands of dollars to a developer’s law firm. There are a number of court cases and proposed amendments to the original statutes working their way through the system right now, any one of which could change the game significantly. We’ve been keeping an eye on them for some of our clients.”

“Usually, though, the owners are able to sell the buildings.” Laura phrased this as a statement, not a question.

“Almost always, in the end,” Perry replied, nodding. “There was one situation back in 2007 with a Mitchell-Lama building up in the Bronx, where the tenants organized and were able to bring enough political pressure to bear that the DHCR ended up denying the request to opt out. That was the only time I’ve seen it happen, though, in the twenty-five years or so since the buildings started privatizing.”

“Thanks, Perry.” Laura prepared to rise and leave his office.

“I’m assuming this client you’re preparing the opinion letter for is interested in privatizing the property?” Laura nodded, feeling the color rise in her cheeks for a second time. Perry gestured her back down in her chair. “You should know that sometimes, if the tenants’ organization is very well organized, and if they can generate enough negative publicity for the building’s owner, and if they have an attorney who’s an ace—someone who can ferret out every problem in the building, every contradiction in the statutes, and who can bury the owners and developers in paperwork and make the whole process even more painful and expensive—assuming a scenario where the tenants’ association has the intellectual and financial resources to mount a large-scale resistance like that, then it might be in the owner’s best interests to find a way to compromise with them. People don’t always like to see their neighborhoods change too quickly, and they’ll fight hard to keep it from happening. As the Talmud says, Customs are more powerful than laws.”

Laura thanked Perry again and rose. She had been hoping for something—a word, a gesture—that would let her know things between Perry and her were what they’d always been. She’d gotten nothing from this conversation to confirm that wish, but then nothing to contradict it, either. Her hand was on the doorknob when Perry said musingly, “Yes … there’d be a lot of potential billable hours for an attorney on either side in something like this.” The look he leveled at Laura was inscrutable. For a fleeting moment, it reminded her of Prudence.

Perry had a way of knowing things that nobody had ever told him. Laura wondered if this last statement was meant to urge her on to wring more hours out of this possibly lucrative client she’d hinted at, or if some instinct had whispered that her motivations for asking weren’t what she’d led him to believe. Perhaps he was warning her against letting her priorities drift in unprofitable directions.

Not that Laura needed to be reminded where her priorities lay. At least the tenants have a process, she thought. At least they have a chance.

A chance was more than she and Sarah had ever had.


Laura had spent the past sixteen years of her life worrying about money. The day she and Sarah had been thrown out of their apartment—along with Mr. Mandelbaum and her best friend Maria Elena and everybody else who’d lived there—she’d heard people say how something like this would never have been done to people with money, how it wouldn’t have happened if they’d all lived on Park Avenue instead of Stanton Street.

In high school, she’d gone one day with a friend to visit the friend’s father, who was a partner in a large law firm much like the one Laura worked for now. Laura would never forget the first time she’d been inside one of those huge, prosperous Midtown skyscrapers. There had been an atrium in the lobby with trees over twenty feet tall, and Laura had been astounded. That there could be trees that big growing indoors! A building so enormous, so obviously wealthy, so confident in its own permanence that it could afford the time and money to plant trees within its walls and wait for them to grow—surely the people who worked in such a building could go to and from their offices every day in complete confidence that they would still have homes when they returned to them in the evening. And from that day, Laura had wanted nothing more than to be one of the chosen, happy few who could take such permanence for granted. She imagined opening her eyes one fine morning without even a flicker of memory of what it had felt like to worry about the things that might happen to her if she didn’t have enough money.

Laura’s philosophy of life was simple. It was that money, money safely in the bank, money enough to pay all your bills, was the most important thing in the world. It was better and more important than youth or fame or having fun or being pretty or anything other than (Laura would grudgingly concede) one’s health. Maybe it wasn’t more important than love, but even love would crumble in the face of true poverty. When poverty comes in the door, love flies out the window, Laura had heard Perry say once, quoting his grandmother. And Laura, remembering the catastrophic days after she and Sarah had lost their home, had known he was right.

Then again, there were the Mandelbaums, who’d always struggled over money, especially after failing eyesight had forced Mr. Mandelbaum to retire from driving his cab. We’ll get by, Mrs. Mandelbaum would say. Remember, we’re supposed to thank God for our misfortunes as much as our good fortune. And Mr. Mandelbaum would reply, Ida, if I stopped to thank God every time I had problems, I wouldn’t have time to scratch my own head. But there would be affectionate good humor mingled with the exasperation in his voice.

People who worried about accumulating a lot of expensive “stuff,” or who felt a need to be “fulfilled” by what they did for a living, were people who had gotten used to luxuries that Laura had never been able to afford. Stuff was nice and feeling fulfilled was probably even nicer, but money was more important than either. Without money you ended up the way Mr. Mandelbaum had. Without money you would rot in the streets or in one of those wretched SROs and nobody would care. Laura had no desire to live extravagantly. By living on less than half her take-home, she’d managed to finish paying off her student loans the month before she and Josh were married. Now all she asked was not to have to worry about having enough money to live decently and pay her bills on time.

But these days all she did was worry about money. She’d pace around her office with the door closed, during all of that “extra” time that had once been given over to accumulating billable hours, calculating what she was likely to earn this year with her smaller bonuses, trying to think up a budget that would allow her and Josh to meet their current expenses and leave something to carry over into next year in case Josh still couldn’t find a job.

At a certain point, Laura had acknowledged that worrying about these things as much as she did could only be counterproductive and distract her from her work. But even that made her worry more rather than less, until she began to wonder if worrying about worrying was some kind of diagnosable mental disorder.

She thought about her mother, who’d also tended toward obsessive thoughts, although Sarah’s obsessions had been of a pleasanter kind. Sarah had sometimes spent whole days listening to a single song—like “Baba Jinde” by Babatunde Olatunji, or Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent” on a twelve-inch album—if she was in the right kind of mood. When she was small, Laura had marveled at the intensity and focus something like this required. Now, as an adult, she understood.


The apartment was silent when Laura let herself in after her sweaty slog home from the subway, empty except for Prudence, who was curled up asleep in a box that had once held a ream of paper and was now waiting by the front door for someone (Me, Laura thought, a touch resentfully) to carry it to the trash room. Josh was out somewhere, perhaps at some meeting of the tenants’ association in the Avenue A building, or at one of the networking events he attended with less frequency as the months went by and they failed to yield any job leads. Possibly he’d even told her about it that morning and she’d forgotten. It wouldn’t surprise her at all, considering how snarled her mind was these days.

She went upstairs to her bedroom to remove her watch and earrings and place them in the wooden jewelry box Josh had surprised her with in the early days of their courtship. She’d admired it in an antiques store they’d ducked into during one of their walks. It had reminded her of Mrs. Mandelbaum’s jewelry box, which had rested on her bedroom dresser amid framed photos of Mr. and Mrs. Mandelbaum’s wedding, their honeymoon in Miami Beach, the two of them with their son, Joseph, as a towheaded toddler in a Thanksgiving Pilgrim’s costume and later as a laughing young man dressed for his high school prom, and pictures of Mr. Mandelbaum in his World War II fighter pilot’s uniform. The box itself had been filled with pieces in the art nouveau style that Mr. Mandelbaum had bought for Mrs. Mandelbaum over the years, none of it terribly expensive yet all of it beautiful to Laura’s young eyes.

One afternoon, when Laura was ten, Mrs. Mandelbaum had pressed a heavy brooch of silver and onyx into her hand. Laura had tried to give it back, thinking it would be bad manners to accept such a gift, but Mrs. Mandelbaum had said, Max and I love you as if you were our own granddaughter. This is so you’ll always have something to remember us by. Then she’d fixed the brooch onto Laura’s dress and combed her hair before the murky glass of the old mirror in their bedroom. See how pretty it looks on you? The two of them had walked hand in hand back into the living room where Mr. Mandelbaum waited with cake and tea things, Honey lying behind him on the back of the couch with one small paw resting on his shoulder. Hoo-ha! he’d said. I had no idea two elegant ladies were joining me for tea. Laura had blushed with shy pleasure at his praise. The brooch was long gone but Laura hadn’t needed it to remember the Mandelbaums, not even all these years later. Not even though she had failed them, in the end.

Of all the childhood places she had loved, the Mandelbaums’ apartment had been second only to her own bedroom downstairs from them. She’d loved its sheer lace curtains that Mrs. Mandelbaum had sewn when Laura was still too young to remember such things, and the lovely watercolor wallpaper in deep blues and creams and purples that Sarah had picked out—pretty but not cloying. Perfect for a young girl’s room. Laura had been far less tidy in those days than she was now. She’d let dolls and books and clothing accumulate in large heaps until, finally, Sarah would be provoked into one of her rare displays of impatience. If you don’t clean this room soon, I’ll … But Laura had liked to let the mess build until even she couldn’t stand it anymore, because then she would have the intense joy of cleaning it up. Once she had everything perfectly arranged, the amber of late-afternoon sunlight slanting in through the delicate white curtains (it was important to time the cleaning so that it never started so early or so late as to miss this time of day), she’d walk around touching things and think, How lucky I am! I’m the girl who gets to live here.

On her way back downstairs, Laura passed the room she and Josh had intended for a nursery, now filled with Sarah’s boxes. Prudence, for reasons Laura couldn’t quite figure out aside from a general Well that’s cats for you, had recently developed the habit of throwing things from the boxes onto the floor. Last night, Prudence had unearthed part of the collection of funny little musical instruments—a harmonica, a Jew’s harp, a miniature drum on a stick with tiny wooden knobs attached to it by strings that would hit the drum if you spun the stick around—that Sarah had kept behind the counter of her record store for Laura’s amusement.

The harmonica had been Laura’s favorite, although she’d never really learned to play it. Sarah, discerning as her ear was, had smiled and never once winced whenever Laura had banged around the store blowing chaotic, discordant “music” through it. Laura had blown a few notes experimentally through the harmonica yesterday while Prudence observed her with grave attention. The noise had startled Prudence away at first, although moments later she’d returned to raise one paw up to it, as if to feel the air Laura blew through its holes or to push the noise back into the instrument.

Today Prudence had somehow uncovered Sarah’s old address book, the one Laura had told herself she’d never find among all Sarah’s odds and ends after Sarah had died and the question of how to contact Anise, currently touring in Asia, came up. She’d settled for sending a letter through Anise’s management agency. In truth, Laura had no desire to talk to Anise. It was Anise who’d first lured Sarah into her Lower East Side existence. And it was Anise who’d abandoned Sarah (and Laura) when that life fell apart.

Lately, though, looking through Sarah’s old things with Prudence, Laura had found herself recalling earlier days, when Sarah’s owning a record store and living with her in an old tenement had seemed like its own kind of charmed life. Even knowing that Prudence didn’t really understand her, speaking aloud about Sarah while Prudence regarded her solemnly had given those memories a substance they hadn’t had in years.

Prudence had followed Laura up the stairs and now sat in the spare bedroom next to Sarah’s address book, waiting for Laura to put it back in a box so the game of throwing things out could begin again. But Laura’s newfound discovery of happy memories was a fragile thing, and thinking about Anise threatened to ruin it. “Not now,” Laura said, on her way past the room and back downstairs. Prudence continued to wait with an air of martyred patience that made Laura smile despite herself. “Come on,” she said in a softer tone. “Don’t you want your dinner?”

Prudence seemed to consider this for a few seconds. Then she stood and, after arching her back in a luxurious stretch (so as not to appear too eager, Laura supposed), she trotted into the hallway in front of Laura. The merry tinkling of the tag on her red collar grew fainter as she rounded the corner toward the staircase.


Josh had sounded apologetic a few weeks ago, when he’d moved some of his own things from his office to join Sarah’s boxes in their spare room. “I can’t even think anymore with all that clutter,” he’d said. “And we can always move this stuff into storage if …”

He hadn’t finished the sentence, and Laura hadn’t finished it for him. The last time he’d brought up trying to get pregnant again, Josh had told Laura that the history of the world was people having babies under less-than-perfect circumstances. As if Laura didn’t know this—as if that wasn’t how Sarah had gotten pregnant with her in the first place. But what was she saying? Laura wondered. That she and Sarah would both have been better off if she’d never been born?

When Laura was a little girl, she’d thought that the saddest thing in the world was a child without a mother. There was a girl in her class whose mother had died of AIDS, and Laura would lie in her bed at night and cry for this girl who she wasn’t even really friends with, this poor girl who would now have to live the rest of her life without a mother. Sarah’s shadow would appear in the trapezoid of light from the hallway that fell onto the floor of Laura’s bedroom, and then Sarah herself would be sitting on Laura’s bed, holding her and saying, Shhh … it’s all right, baby, it’s all right … you’ll never lose me … I’m not going anywhere. Laura would bury her face in her mother’s neck and breathe in the flowery smell of her hair, hair so much prettier than that of any of the other mothers she knew, clinging to her kind, beautiful, loving mother who would never never ever let anything bad happen to either one of them. Only after this ritual of assurance could she fall asleep.

She’d never considered what it would feel like to be a mother without a child. She’d never thought about how many different ways there were to lose a person. She had resented Sarah for so long for not giving up the music and the life she’d loved so she could have given Laura a more secure childhood. And then she’d resented herself for having wanted Sarah to give up what she’d loved, for being angry she hadn’t given it up earlier, even after Laura had seen the happy light in Sarah’s eyes fade, year by year, as she trudged to and from that dreary desk where she’d typed endless documents for other people who had more important things to do.

And now that Laura was old enough to have children of her own, she was afraid of all the things she couldn’t even begin to foresee that might take her and her child away from each other. She was afraid of not having enough money to keep her own child safe, and afraid of the price that would be exacted (because everything had to be paid for in the end) in exchange for the money and the safety that money provided.

She looked at Sarah’s picture sometimes, the framed photo they’d taken from her apartment, and wondered how Sarah had felt when she’d first learned she was pregnant. Had she been happy? Had she foreseen a long future of laughter and sunny days together with her husband and the child they were going to have? Would she have done things differently if she’d known everything that would happen?

But Sarah’s perpetually smiling face gave no answers. She’d clearly been happy at the moment the photo was taken, her eyebrows arched and her eyes holding a hint of laughter for whoever had held the camera. That was all Laura could tell.


Prudence greeted Laura at the foot of the stairs. Her tail twitched three times and then stood straight up, and Laura thought that she’d never seen a cat with a tail as expressive as Prudence’s. It could swish from side to side in annoyance, and puff up when she was scared of something, or puff just at the base and vibrate like a rattlesnake when she felt full of love (as Laura had seen it do in Sarah’s presence), or curl at the very tip when Prudence was feeling happy and complacent. This straight-up posture, combined with the series of urgent meows, meant, Give me my dinner now! Laura obliged her, carefully cleaning the bits of food that had spilled from the can off the otherwise spotless kitchen counter. Josh must have eaten his lunch out today.

Spending so much more time among Sarah’s things lately—among the music and picture frames and knickknacks—had made it almost painfully clear to Laura how empty her own home seemed by comparison with her mother’s. She had been reluctant to become too attached to the apartment and the things in it—not to this apartment and these things specifically, but to the idea of apartments and things in general. Looking at the sheer volume of everything Sarah had accumulated over the years, she’d marveled at the courage (for it had been a miracle of courage in its own way, hadn’t it?) it must have taken for Sarah to unearth and display old treasures, and even add new ones.

Perhaps it would make her feel more rooted if she and Josh were to finally unpack all their wedding gifts and do something with this apartment they’d spent weeks hunting for together (“Someplace with room to grow,” Josh had said, eyes sparkling). Maybe, if they filled bookcases with well-worn paperbacks and the glossy hardcovers about music that Josh dearly loved, and decorated bare walls with paintings and prints, maybe after all that they could rest to admire their work and think, How lucky we are to get to live here!

Except that now there was no telling how much longer they’d get to live here. Laura knew that if they did end up having to move, it wouldn’t be like that other time. This time they would be able to pack everything neatly into labeled boxes that would follow them to wherever their new home would be. Still, she had hoped never again to be forced to leave a home, and she raged inwardly against the cruelty of a world that could never allow you to consider anything in “forever” terms, no matter how much of yourself you were willing to sacrifice for the sake of permanence.

The apartment was stuffy, as it tended to get during the summer when nobody was home to turn on the central air. On sweltering summer nights like the one now overtaking the failing daylight, she and Sarah had sometimes slept outside on the fire escape, listening to the car alarms and music and laughter and angry shouts that drifted up from the street. It had been a glorious day when they’d finally been able to afford a small, secondhand air-conditioning unit, even though they’d had to wedge it into place with old magazines to make it fit the roughly cut hole in the wall.

Laura moved into the living room to unlock the clasp that would allow her to push open the top half of one of the tall windows and let fresh air in. She could see people in other apartment buildings watching television, many of them unknowingly watching the same show in different apartments on different floors. All the way down on the street was a cluster of teenagers dribbling a basketball up the block, and Laura remembered the boys who’d made basketball hoops out of milk crates in the neighborhood she’d grown up in, sloppily duct-taping them to lampposts and telephone poles. Across the way the amber-and-white pigeons rested peacefully, settling in for the evening. Their numbers had grown of late, and Laura wondered when the mating season was for pigeons, if perhaps their little group had swelled to (she carefully counted) upwards of thirty because they’d had chicks she hadn’t seen, even though she looked at them every day.

As she watched, the black door that led to the roof where the pigeons slept opened. The head of a broom appeared, followed by a dark-haired man in a white T-shirt. The man began yelling something and waving his broom at the pigeons. The startled birds took flight in circles that grew in breadth and number as more pigeons from the roof joined their widening arcs of panic.

Laura didn’t know what came over her. There was a part of her mind that watched with a kind of bewildered detachment, even as she pushed her head through the open window and screamed, “Leave them alone!” The man must have heard her, even if he couldn’t tell what she was saying, because he looked directly at her (the crazy lady in the apartment across the way) as he kept shouting and flailing his broom. Laura waved her fists in the air and continued to scream, “Leave them alone! Leave them alone!” Over and over she shrieked, “Leave them alone!” until her throat was raw and the man grew tired of his work and disappeared again through the black door. The circles the pigeons made in the air began to tighten and shrink until, finally, a few brave souls were the first to alight. Soon all the pigeons had settled back onto the rooftop, as if nothing had happened to disturb their rest.

Laura pulled her head back through the window and closed it. She discovered small, red half-moons where her fingernails had dug into the flesh of her palms. Her hands were shaking, and she ran them through her hair and took a few deep breaths to steady herself. Prudence was sitting on her haunches in front of Laura, eyeing her steadfastly.

“What are you looking at?” she demanded hoarsely of Prudence, thinking that now she really must be losing her mind. “My mother never yelled in front of you?”

To Laura’s surprise, Prudence purred and bumped her head affectionately against Laura’s ankles. Then she turned and curled the tip of her tail around the bottom of Laura’s leg.