Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (20 page)

Because her beauty incited a following, despite her cloak of mellow and her deliberate pace, Phoebe couldn't quite melt into the pot. The offerings she'd received to date at Bedford included: knishes, with and without onions and mustard, black and white cookies, notes, lots of them, shoved into her locker, live goldfish in plastic bags she'd felt too worried about to bring home to Edith's and released instead into Prospect Park Lake, feathered roach clips, chapbooks, and the smooth company of various cocoa-butter-scented varsity soccer players on the walk to the Flatbush Junction subway.

Pretty much every morning, Phoebe was the last one to walk in when the bell rang for first period. Not
late,
necessarily, but
last.
Her hanging back was what did it. Phoebe didn't like crowds, particularly the Bedford bazaar, all those operators hawking their personalities. Her stamina waned the instant her name was called for attendance, at which point her thoughts would turn to getting the fuck out of there.

When she'd lived at Edith's, Phoebe was often the first awake. She'd sleep in most of her clothes, finish dressing in the harsh glare of the clamp-on lights affixed to the overhead pipes, splash her face and brush her teeth at the utility sink next to the old washing machine, and emerge, squinting, from the basement doorway. She'd already be turning the corner past Hector's Hardware, headed for a hot chocolate at Castillo de Jagua, while Robbie greeted the day upstairs, coughing his brains out like a tubercular rooster.

This morning, Phoebe awoke on Claudia's futon sofa, having slept on the diagonal to maximize the cramped space. She could tell that Bronwyn had left for work and Claudia had left for wherever the hell she had been going for the last couple of weeks. Having never had a bed built for lounging, Phoebe swung herself quickly to a seated position. She scrubbed at her face, wondering if any cigarettes were lying around, and discovered, one after the other, the notes left by her roommates.

Bronwyn's note, cleverly safety-pinned to her pillow, had simply presented the address and time of today's open casting call for the new face of
Moxy.

Noon.

That would give her twenty unrealistic minutes to get from Flatbush to SoHo, if she cut out of school directly after her meeting with Claudia and Ms. Krinsky at 11:10, as Claudia had annoyingly arranged. Truthfully, Phoebe had been
psyched
for that D-plus on her
Huckleberry Finn
paper. She felt like Ms. Krinsky had done her a
solid.
She didn't see why she needed to show up for a bullshit parade in the first place. But the idea that Claudia could save her had once meant so much, and Phoebe was letting go of it slowly, saying a quiet and lengthy good-bye instead of hurling it on the fire, Edith-style.

The note from Claudia had been written hours earlier, and stuck to the fridge by a magnet featuring a photo of some gay guy in war paint and a pirate blouse. Phoebe glanced at the clock on Bronwyn's microwave oven. She peed, didn't flush, and wandered into Claudia's bedroom to paw through her pile of clothes and see if there was anything she could borrow from her sister's carefully staged closet. Claudia had always told Phoebe to help herself, but her jeans were too big and too short, and a lot of her clothes that
could
work—Claudia's brightly colored vintage polyester shirts and acrylic sweaters, her shiny jackets and junk jewelry—looked like they'd been jacked from somebody's old Jewish grandmother or a backup dancer.

Now, the collar of her peacoat turned up, her hands jammed in the pockets, the chain-link fence of the faculty parking lot bouncing her stance as she leaned against it, and her headphones secure (
Who's the black sheep, what's the black sheep? Don't know who I am, or when I'm coming so you sleep
), Phoebe waited for the surge up the wide front steps that indicated the bell had rung, and scanned the crowd intently for her target.

Afros, ponchos, Mohawks, cornrows . . .
BAM!

Raising the volume on her Walkman
,
she loped across Bedford Avenue, her sights set on Ramona Parker.

Ramona and her soft-spoken gaggle were arriving in an affable pod, JanSport backpacks pulling heavily on their shoulders. Ramona didn't do the whole relaxer thing, but the angle of her skinny braids suggested the blunt, slightly asymmetrical bobs that the white girls in her group wore, dipped lower on one side. They were nice girls, Ramona's Bedford friends, and with their dogged scholarship, orderly creativity, and unassuming flair, just a tad interchangeable.

“Hey.” Phoebe appeared at Ramona's side, towering over her.

Ramona smiled, a little sadly. Back when Ramona and Phoebe commuted endlessly between each other's houses, it would have been a grin. But when Ramona told Mrs. Parker how creeped out Robbie Burns made her, and how bad she felt that Phoebe had to live with him, Mrs. Parker's reaction wasn't what she'd expected. Ramona had wanted her mother to have a solution for Phoebe's problems. She'd wanted her mother to get
involved.
Instead, Mrs. Parker had flatly declared it would be over her dead body that Ramona would ever go over there again, and Ramona told Phoebe, and Phoebe told Edith, and Edith stormed the Parkers' front stoop, and Mrs. Parker served her point of view all up in Edith's face.

Ever since then, the adjacent houses had occupied different time zones.

And then they'd both ended up at Bedford. Ramona because she'd scored high on the citywide test and aced her interview, Phoebe because Edith served on several prominent City University committees.

Ramona and Phoebe had once been the same age in the same place.

“Hey, Feebs,” Ramona said.

“Can I talk to you for a sec?” Phoebe asked.

“Yeah, sure.” Ramona gave the nod to her AP posse. Aware of the wistful chemistry that clearly connected the two old friends, they drifted away.

Phoebe hesitated. “How's it going?”

Ramona could have offered a litany. She had applications for college, summer programs, and scholarships, with a weekend job at Connecticut Muffin to help pay for them. This afternoon she had her veterinary internship at the Tribeca Animal Hospital, plus there was the tutoring, and the new jewelry-making technique her mom was teaching her. “Pretty good,” she said.

“Cool,” Phoebe said. “So, it's like . . . back in November, you and Darleen. You guys made it possible for me and Claudia to, you know, get back together. I kind of think I never said thank you.”

Ramona's expression was kind. “That was a messed-up situation,” she admitted. Then: “You're welcome.”

“But now I . . . I'm trying to get a job, you know? And my mom, she's got to sign my working papers. But, you know, the whole Robbie thing.” Briefly, Phoebe glanced away. “He says the only way she'll sign is if I move back.”

Ramona's arms shot out. Her hands, in their fingerless Guatemalan gloves, grabbed Phoebe at the elbows. “You
can't,
” she said, grave.

“Yeah,” Phoebe agreed. “I know.” The first-period bell rang, and Ramona squirmed. She had never been late to class, or anywhere else, for that matter, and certainly never
last.

“So I was wondering. If maybe you think your mom might, um, you know. Sign them for me. Or, like, go with me to the place and talk to the guy.”

A security guard appeared and, one by one, shut Bedford's heavy front doors.

Oh man,
Ramona thought, not unkindly. She remembered her mess with Claudia, just a couple of months ago. How Claudia had reared up before her eyes, practically in flames, accusing her of stealing her own bag. Mrs. Parker's words from back then came back to her now.
Bullies are people who hurt.

“I'm not sure,” Ramona answered, truthfully. “I think you can definitely ask her.”

“Do you think she would even
talk
to me?” Phoebe wanted to know.

“Talk to you? Why, sure, Feebs. Why
wouldn't
she?”

Phoebe shrugged. It was a standout memory, and they'd each been occupying their respective stoops when the shit went down. Edith had lobbed outraged rhetoric:
How dare you judge me.
And Mrs. Parker had smacked it back:
Oh, I'm not judging you.
Because you are none of my business, and I'm glad for that.
But my daughter is my business, Ms. Mendelssohn, and I have given her firm instructions to stay the hell out of your house, and I'm gonna trust that you'll respect my wishes. Now get on inside, Ramona, and do your damn algebra.

Ramona, her head bowed, had trudged past a frozen Edith to make a beeline for her math homework, and Phoebe had watched her go. When the Parkers' door shut, Edith, her cheeks marked with their familiar, high splotches of color, had looked across the stoop to her daughter.
“Unfuckingbelievable,”
she'd said. Her voice was hurt, her shrug dismissive.

“It's like the commutative property,” Phoebe now said to Ramona. “Your mom doesn't like my mom, so she doesn't like me.”

“Transitive,” Ramona corrected, inching away from Phoebe. “A is to B as B is to C.” Bedford High School was Ramona Parker's seaworthy vessel, it was pulling away from shore, and no way she was going to miss it. Soon, another whirlwind day at Bedford would be full-steam ahead. There were four minutes to get to class. “It can't hurt to ask, right?” said Ramona.

Yes, it can,
Phoebe thought, watching Ramona make a run for it.

 

Arriving at Hudson Plaza, Claudia fought her way against the buffeting tide of hell-bent morning commuters. Many floors up, she arrived at the padded inner lobby of Golden Fenwick Tate Stein and Lowe. The unwitting receptionist, who'd just shoved her white Reeboks into a Conway shopping bag, was currently ducked below her desk in a low struggle with a pair of navy pumps. Claudia slid past.

There was the temptation to behave in an unseemly manner. To storm Paul's office in a fury of wifely hysteria, pulling off her new black gloves as she strode, demanding an immediate solution to the outrageous inconvenience of Annie Tate. But on the heels of the disastrous surprise at the Powell, it was more important than ever for Claudia to attempt pleasantness at all times, with minty-fresh breath and plenty of concealer.

It was first thing in the morning at New York City's premier factory of corporate justice and wealth management, yet Paul's floor retained an air of fatigued activity from last night's closing. Claudia knew Paul might already be en route to Jane Street, and prayed to find him in his shirtsleeves, slipping documents into an accordion file, or whatever it was that attorneys did. Crossing through the bullpen, Claudia saw associates and paralegals of the real estate group clustered giddily around the remnants of a midnight delivery from Szechuan Delight. Here was Carter Kemp, rep tie flung over his shoulder, putting his thumb in an insulated bag to pull out an egg roll that had gone soggy. Claudia continued down the hall to Paul's corner suite.

The family snapshots and Catholic-school portraits on the secretary's otherwise empty desk followed Claudia with their eyes. She pushed forward, knowing she should slow down, square her posture, fasten her gut, but found herself growing unfortunately teary as she tumbled in to find Paul at his thirtieth-story window, running a cordless electric razor over his jaw as he stared north at the city. He could see his house from here.

“Paul.” She couldn't tell whether her heart was stopping or starting. He turned. The way he looked at her, while continuing to shave, made Claudia realize she hadn't looked at herself. “Hi,” she said.

Paul clicked off his razor. “What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood,” she replied, falteringly. She took a step closer.

“What's wrong?” Paul went about his business, coolly returning his razor to its case and the case to his desk, in direct opposition to the heartfelt choreography Claudia had imagined. He seemed to smell the personal crisis leaching from Claudia, and intuit that it had something very bad to do with him.

“Annie knows,” Claudia blurted.

Now Paul hesitated. Claudia wondered if she should use the pause to tell Paul she loved him. “How do you know?” he asked, finally. He had sunk into his tufted leather desk chair.

“I ran into her,” Claudia replied. “At our place.”

Paul pivoted his chair to face the window, and looked down at the bare trees of the park. He stretched out his long legs and propped his feet on the baseboard, crossing them at the ankles. His socks were a bright, devilish violet. “I told you we always needed to talk before meeting there,” he said.

“I wish you'd told me we were trespassing,” Claudia retorted.

Paul leaned his head back in his chair. He had a terrific head of hair, one that would never thin. “You didn't know that?” he said, softly. “Come on, Claudia.” In a sudden motion, he hunched forward with a new tautness, as though he'd spotted Annie thirty stories below.

“What are you going to tell her?” Claudia asked.

“The truth, I suppose.”

“That we love each other?”

“Claudia.” Paul rose from his chair. It took him only two paces to stand closely before her. To place one hand on her shoulder and the other beneath her chin, gently. She felt the urge to reach for him boldly, as a lover would, but felt the clammy void that had doused his fire. His mild touch was apologetic. Distracted by the Metro section when he was supposed to have been keeping an eye on her, he'd allowed her to tumble from the monkey bars, and while she'd gotten the wind knocked out, the playground was rubberized, and after all, she was someone else's child. “You need to go,” he said.

“
That's
what I need to do?” Claudia repeated, incredulous.
“Go?”

“Annie's probably on her way up here as we speak.”

“So shouldn't we all sit down together and discuss this, like adults?”