The young policeman standing on the stoop as we trailed outside was probably wondering why so many women were living together in the same house, without any men. He held the door open and, once Verena was out, asked, “Is that it?”
We were cordoned at the end of the block with the rest of the neighbors. The clusters of red and blue police lights made our genteel street look like a disco, but we shuffled along slowly, barely awake. On Sixth Avenue, Verena claimed two benches. There were eight of us: Verena, me, Sana, Rubí, and four women who were staying as guests. We looked like we had fled a slumber party. There wasn’t much traffic at three a.m., but the cars that did pass slowed down to stare at us.
Sana yawned and set her head on my shoulder, resting her arm across my back. “Are you wearing a bra?” she asked.
“I put it on before coming outside.”
“In the face of possible death by explosion, you put on a bra?” Rubí said.
“That’s not proper bomb threat etiquette,” Verena said.
“Ha ha.” I let them tease me. No one bothered to tell me what was happening and I assumed someone wanted to blow up Verena—an old disgruntled Baptist, perhaps, or someone else she’d angered with her rants against the diet industry. As I sat on a bench in the black hours of night, it made sense. But then a man in pajamas and leather slippers walked toward us. The pajamas were patterned with tiny cowboys lassoing tiny steers. He stepped over a passed-out homeless man, whom I hadn’t noticed. “We’ve got to do something about this,” the man said. “Do you like being woken up in the middle of the night?”
Verena looked up at the man. “I’m not going to help you throw out the Jews,” she said. She was marmoreal under the streetlight, in her white gown, with her light hair.
“This has nothing to do with the fact that they’re Jews,” the man said. “Don’t say it that way.”
“If they weren’t Jews, terrorists wouldn’t be terrorizing them,” Verena replied.
The man waved his hand at her in disgust. “We’re going to act with or without you,” he said. “Don’t forget—if they go down, you go down.”
As the man stalked away, Verena explained that the Jews in question were our next-door neighbors, the Bessie Cantor Foundation for Peace and Understanding, a nonprofit organization that occupied the townhouse next to Calliope House, which was in fact attached to it. If they go down, you go down. For years the foundation had been the target of frequent bomb threats by unknown terrorists, who claimed that Bessie Cantor was a front for the Mossad. The businesses and residential neighbors wanted to evict the foundation from the block for all the trouble the bomb threats caused, for the evacuations and police presence and potential for mass casualties. Verena refused to take part in the growing campaign. “First the Jews, then us,” she said.
The man in the cowboy pajamas approached another group of neighbors, and it was clear they were talking about us. They stared and pointed at us, the women on the benches, as if on an island.
We were the outcasts.
At dawn, we were allowed back into the house. The other women returned to their beds, hoping to sleep for an hour or two, but I went directly to the kitchen. Since leaving the underground apartment and moving upstairs, I had spent most of my time in the red kitchen. Verena maintained a well-stocked pantry and in a frenzied few days I had worked my way through it, cooking and eating under the shadow of Eulayla Baptist’s fat jeans. I couldn’t remember when I’d spent such a happy, carefree time. I loved to bake most of all, making cakes and breads and fruit pies from scratch. Baking was restorative. I was soothed by the jeweled berries, the yellow of an egg yolk punctured with my fork, and I liked the texture, too, placing my hands in the soft flour, cutting into the white flesh of a bright green apple and feeling its juices on my fingers. After being underground, I now found an apple to be wholesome and pure.
I shared what I made with the other women but always kept enough back for myself. I could eat half a dozen cupcakes at once, followed by great gulps of cold milk. I could eat a peach pie in the afternoon with a pot of coffee and a can of whipped cream. No matter how much I ate, I didn’t feel full. In the past, after I binged, I’d rein myself in. I’d been doing that for years—diet-binge, diet-binge, the old two-step—but this was different. I never felt full, no matter how much I ate. It was as if the hunger from a decade of dieting was stored up inside me and the chains that had been wrapped around it were beginning to break.