“We also buy you lunch every day,” Phoebe said.
“The lunch is awesome!” Isabel chimed in, spreading some pint-sized leather gloves that retailed for $155 out in the display case next to a broken vintage camera (price upon request).
“I’m in,” I said. For reasons I will never understand but did not question, Phoebe handed me twenty-five dollars for the interview itself.
And with that, Peach and the Babke became the most poorly staffed store in the history of the world.
The days at Peach and the Babke followed a certain rhythm. With only one window up front, it was hard to get a sense of time passing, and so life became a sedentary, if pleasant, mass of risotto and tiny overalls. But I will reconstruct it for you as best as I can:
10:10 Roll in the door with a coffee in your hand. If you’re feeling nice, you also bring one for Phoebe. “Sorry I’m late,” you say before flinging your coat on the floor.
10:40 Head into the back room to start casually folding some pima-cotton baby leggings ($55 to $65) and roll-neck fisherman sweaters ($175).
10:50 Get distracted telling Joana a story about a homeless guy you saw wearing a salad spinner as a hat.
11:10 First customer rings the bell. They are either freezing and looking to browse before their next appointment or obscenely rich and about to purchase five thousand dollars’ worth of gifts for their nieces. You and Joana try to do the best wrapping job you can and to calculate the tax properly, but there is a good chance you charged them an extra five hundred dollars.
11:15 Start talking about lunch. How badly you want or don’t want it. How good it will be when it finally hits your lips or, alternately, how little mind you even pay to food these days.
11:25 Call next door for the specials.
12:00 Isabel arrives. She is on a schedule called Princess Hours. When you ask if you can also work Princess Hours, Phoebe says, “No, they’re for princesses.”
12:30 Sit down for an elaborate three-course meal. Let Phoebe try your couscous, since it’s the least you can do. Split a baguette with Isabel if you can have half her butternut squash soup. Eat a pot of fresh ricotta to finish it off.
1:00 Joana leaves for therapy.
1:30 The UPS guy comes and unloads boxes of rag dolls made of vintage curtains ($320). You ask him how his son is doing. He says he’s in jail.
2:00 Isabel leaves for therapy.
2:30 Meg Ryan comes in wearing a large hat, buys nothing.
3:00 Phoebe asks you to rub her head for a while. She lies on the rug in the back and moans with pleasure. A customer rings the doorbell. She says to ignore it, and when her massage is done she sends you around the corner for cappuccino and brownies.
4:00 You leave for therapy, collecting your hundred dollars.
6:00 This is the time work was actually supposed to end, but you are already home, half asleep, waiting for Jeff Ruiz to finish his landscaping job and meet you on the roof of his building to drink beer and feel each other up. Only once in nine months does Phoebe admonish you for your poor work ethic, and she feels so guilty about it that at lunch she goes across the street and buys you a scented candle.
Phoebe ran the store with her mother, Linda, though Linda spent most of her time in Pennsylvania or, if she was in the city, upstairs in the apartment she kept, smoking and eating popcorn from a big metal bowl. As thoughtful and conflicted as Phoebe was, her mother was so wild her hair stood on end. Phoebe handled the practicalities of the business, while Linda conceived designs so fantastical that rather than sketch them she would just wave ribbons and scraps in the air, outlining a sweater or a tutu. Phoebe and Linda’s fights had a tendency to turn rabid and ranged from small-business issues to the very fiber of their characters.
“All my friends were getting abortions!” she screamed. Linda often spoke of her former life in San Francisco, prechildren, a utopia of knitwear designers and early Western practitioners of yoga who supported and inspired one another. The money was good, and the sex was even better.
As they fought, Isabel and I (or Joana and I, as it was rare we all worked at once) would look at each other nervously, shrug, then proceed to try on all the dresses we carried in a child’s size 8, whose hemlines hit right below our crotches (aka just right). Another common distraction was to cover our heads in rabbit-fur barrettes ($16) or strap each other up with ribbons like some ersatz Helmut Newton photograph.