Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602)

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Fast & Sloppy

Liar's Gap

Dial 9 to Get Out

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright © 2013 by Kathy Ebel

 

All rights reserved

 

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

 

www.hmhbooks.com

 

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Ebel, Kathy.

Claudia Silver to the rescue : a novel / Kathy Ebel.

p. cm.

ISBN
978-0-547-98557-2

1. Young women—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 2. Self-realization in women—Fiction. I. Title.

PS
3605.
B
445
C
57 2013

813'.6—dc23

2012039062

 

e
ISBN
978-0-547-98560-2
v1.0613

 

 

 

 

Dedicated with deepest gratitude to

Jessica Vitkus,

my first first reader,

who told me so

1

C
LAUDIA SILVER
, the production assistant, ordered lunch for the ladies of Georgica Films every day. The all-female staff ate family-style, around a large oak table that their employer, executive producer Ricky Green, had purchased at considerable expense for just this purpose. While the daily lunch order at the little production company was perhaps her chief duty, Claudia had other key responsibilities, including the speedy typing of contact sheets for different production jobs on the Selectric in the corner. She handed the documents to her bosses Faye, Tamara, or Kim to review, and invariably trudged back to the typewriter, taunted by the crop of typos that only minutes before were nowhere to be seen and now required immediate correction.

Claudia ran errands and picked up giant brown-paper-wrapped bunches of flowers from the wholesaler on Twenty-Seventh Street. Ricky, who'd gotten into the business of producing television commercials because he wanted to wear jeans to work and considered restaurants and a place in Idaho important, arranged the flowers himself in various Depression-era pottery vases from his sprawling collection. Claudia FedExed gift certificates from day spas and salons to clients whose birthdays had almost been forgotten. She called the messenger service for pickups and drop-offs around town. She greeted, with a wink, the various rangy, ripe, dreadlocked, tattooed, gold-toothed, knit-capped dude-bros whose cycling cleats clattered on the parquet and whose Public Enemy pounded through their Walkman headphones as they waited for a signature, while her bosses tensed, silently calculating the degree of sexual threat the messengers posed.

Claudia carefully observed and pitied the ladies of Georgica Films. She was determined to perform her daily tasks with an ever-so-slight yet palpable indifference, which, when paired with her charisma, would keep her pointedly on the fringe of the operation and protect her from ever turning out like them.

Her idiosyncratic work ethic had earned Claudia the nickname Fast & Sloppy.

Every day at Georgica Films there were fights, usually over the phone. They typically began with first-date nervousness, rocketed into cocky aggression punctuated with gales of ballsy laughter, and ended with a pounding of the receiver into its cradle, followed by loud analysis, frustrated tears, and a cigarette on the fire escape. Faye, Tamara, and Kim screamed at production managers and casting directors on the phone: hours later they would call back and laugh it off, comrades once again. This style of conflict resolution was a new one for Claudia.

In the home of Claudia's mother, Edith Mendelssohn, fireworks had always been followed, swiftly, by cataclysmic ice ages. Only once, when she was eleven, on a long, cranky car trip, Claudia told Edith that she hated her:

“I HATE YOU.”

Hearing the hot syllables leap from her throat had been satisfying. She'd heard other children rage at their parents similarly with negligible consequences, and telling her mother she hated her made young Claudia feel, briefly, normal. But she soon regretted it. Edith didn't react suddenly. Her hand didn't fly into the backseat to box an ear. She kept driving, under a remarkable silence that Claudia soon realized Edith planned to keep up. As it turned out, Edith neither spoke to nor looked at her child for three straight days. Finally, when Claudia couldn't take it anymore, she dropped to her knees and begged for forgiveness at her mother's lap. This method was successful. Edith accepted her child's apology, recognized her once again, and life resumed.

Ten years later, Claudia was a senior in college, sitting on the floor of her dorm room on Manhattan's far Upper West Side, on the phone with Edith. In one week, Claudia would graduate and set out to seek God knows what. She was afraid. Over the last month, she'd visited several of her favorite professors at their office hours to ask what
they
thought, but none of them had a particular plan of action in mind for her. Recognizing that she was utterly unprepared to depart the snug little campus, Claudia was tempted to demand a refund from the bursar, despite the fact that her education had been financed largely on credit.

Claudia had called her mother to discuss the upcoming summer. Graduation ceremonies would be held in a few days, and Claudia's various friends would be going home to catered graduation parties held in leafy backyards, professional internships killing time before graduate school, or bright new backpacks that would soon be hauled off on wine-dark European tours. Claudia had the weekend waitressing job in SoHo she'd held on to since her senior year in high school. Plus a hangover.

“I'm afraid I'm unable to offer you accommodation at this time,” Edith explained. Edith, who spoke more languages than she owned bras and trusted poetry more than people, might have been known for her slim but stunning volumes of sestinas in multiple translations, had circumstances far beyond her control not required her to become a business-school librarian at Baruch College. She spoke in calligraphy.

“Accommodation?”
Claudia echoed, disbelievingly. “Are you my mother, or Howard Johnson's?”

Claudia's best friend, Bronwyn Tate, had just come downstairs from her own nearby single to visit. Theirs was the druggy dorm, now in a wistful state of dismantling as its residents prepared to scatter. Good-quality museum posters had been stuffed, ignominiously, in trash cans, as a general scorn for the Impressionists was required as an exit visa, and futon frames, broken by one too many threesomes, were piled on 114th Street to dry their particleboard bones in the hot May sun. Bronwyn joined Claudia on the floor, pulling the shredded cuffs of her faded Nantucket Reds up over her bony knees and folding her long legs Indian-style.

“Quarters have become close,” Edith continued, “and I'm afraid I just don't have the space.”

“And would those close quarters by any chance go by the name of Robbie Burns?” Claudia accused, as she and Bronwyn exchanged a look. Bronwyn communicated her focus and sympathy by tucking a long, loose strand of blond hair behind her ear.

Edith's gentleman friend was Robbie Burns, although Claudia knew he was neither. Edith had become involved with Robbie a decade before, when she'd still been married to her second husband, Mr. Goldberg, the father of her younger child, Claudia's half sister, Phoebe, who was eight years Claudia's junior. Neither Claudia's father, a hotshot émigré professor with a penchant for psilocybin mushrooms and primal scream therapy, nor Phoebe's father, a Jewish playboy with a sixth-grade education and a velour wardrobe, had remained in the picture. But each girl resembled her own father as well as the brunt of Edith's humiliation, embodying separate failed chapters of her fragmented life. Edith had kept her maiden name.

The family was shaped like a triangle.

Edith and Robbie Burns had met at Baruch. She'd been thirsty and flagging, en route to a Hillel Club event, a lecture on Malamud and Roth presented by a darling widower of the English department who would have been a suitable mate for Edith, if only he'd been fifteen years her junior, tall, ponytailed, spottily educated, occasionally incarcerated, wearing a canvas coverall provided by the beverage distribution company that had disregarded considerable doubts upon hiring him, and stocking the soda machine, like Robbie was. Robbie handed her a cold one, on the house, with a saucy comment that made Edith feel wanted, dangerous, and armed. She'd divorced Goldberg a few years later, and kept Robbie as her poison: he was the Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie of paramours, and like bodega pastry was best consumed in the dark. Edith's solution to managing the shame of Robbie's presence, alongside motherhood and her respectable profession, was to pretend to Claudia that he didn't exist.

Edith, erudite and accomplished in certain realms, was very, very bad at her chosen ruse, dropping endless extravagant clues over the ensuing years for Claudia to pick up. Edith was either whispering to Robbie in the bathroom, the long cord of the kitchen phone dragged across the dinner table, or she was visiting Robbie, first in rehab, then in prison, then in rehab, and bringing Phoebe along, who would later report to Claudia exactly where they'd been. Or she was pulling the car into every available rest stop between the city and the beach to “call a friend” on the pay phone, while the sisters waited in the hot, old Karmann Ghia and made up spoof lyrics to movie theme songs. Skipping over introductions or explanation, Edith finally moved Robbie into her home with her two daughters the dreadful summer before Claudia had left for college. Claudia didn't know whether to act surprised or not. But she knew from precedent that she wasn't supposed to act
angry.
Which made Claudia exponentially ripshit, enough for all of them.

“I'm not sure where it is written that a grown woman continues to live with her mother,” Edith was saying.

I'm not a grown woman,
Claudia was tempted to counter.

“When people graduate from college, they go home,” Claudia argued instead. “They at least have it as an
option.
I'm not saying forever. Or even for the whole summer. But literally. You know, I come home for a week or two, regroup, and then I'm outta there.” Bronwyn had reached out to give Claudia's knee a caring squeeze with her long fingers.

“I'm afraid,” Edith countered, firmly, “that you'll need to revise that agenda.”

“You realize that what you're saying is that your fucking junkie boyfriend is more important to you than I am,” Claudia croaked. It wasn't even that Claudia was so eager to return. Or that she thought of Edith's domicile as
home,
particularly. It was simply the
injustice
of it all.

“What I realize is that you're very angry right now.”

“Do you wonder at all where I'm going to sleep once the dorms close?” Claudia asked her mother. Bronwyn had now dipped her head to rest her cheek on Claudia's shoulder. She smelled familiarly of Chanel and cigarettes.

“I think you might inquire with the housing office,” Edith suggested. “You may be able to secure suitable campus housing for the summer, and perhaps beyond.”

“You're saying I am not welcome in your home.”

“There comes a time,” Edith declared, “for a young person to be, simply, on her own. Do you think
I
ever went home, quote unquote? By the time I was your age, my childhood home was a mass graveyard, and we had lost everything. And not just tea services and dowry linens, I assure you.”

Edith's Hitler card, Claudia knew, was her mother's prerogative and impossible to trump. She promised herself she would not cry until she had hung up the phone, which would be soon. “We should have talked about this,” she said, plaintive. “Before it was too late.”

“No one put a gun to your head and forced you to ignore your own next steps until the eleventh hour, as they did us.”

“Oh my God!” Claudia cried, hot tears of rage making her break her promise. “You know what? You are a terrible fucking mother.”

“And you, my dear,” Edith replied, “aren't so hot as a daughter.”

Claudia hung up the phone, shifted into Bronwyn's bony embrace, and wept.

“It's okay,” said Bronwyn. At that very moment, forty blocks downtown, Bronwyn's own mother, Annie Tate, was sitting at her kitchen table, affixing Dinah Washington stamps to the invitations for Bronwyn's graduation party, which would be held at the Boathouse.

“No, it's not,” Claudia sobbed.

Bronwyn sighed. “I know,” she admitted. “Your mom is . . . who she is. But you're going to be okay.”