People Who Knew Me Read online

  He finally looked up at me. “We’re a team now, right?”

  I nodded apprehensively, forcing a smile.

  “What’s a ‘real job’?” I asked.

  “Salary, health insurance—all that responsible stuff,” he said. Neither of us knew anything about being responsible. We were imposters.

  “All right,” I said. “Then who goes first?”

  I was sure he would say I could go to school, live my dream, while he worked. He always let me have my way.

  He didn’t say that, though. He said, “Flip a coin?”

  I laughed, he didn’t. “Can you think of another way to decide? Neither of us will be happy putting off school. We both know that.”

  He was right. I couldn’t think of any other way to decide, nothing “fair,” at least. Any other way would lead to a fight, and Drew and I, as a couple, did everything possible to avoid fights. He grew up in a house where problems were actively ignored; for years, his mom told him that his father might come back. I grew up overhearing shouting matches between my mother and her boyfriends-of-the-moment. Both of us were terrified of conflict.

  He took a quarter out of his pocket and I wondered for a split second if he’d put it there, knowing it would come to this.

  “Call it?” he said.

  The coin started flipping through the air and I acquiesced: “Tails,” I said.

  It landed on heads.

  I thought he would see my disappointment, say, Best of three? But he just put the quarter back in his pocket.

  * * *

  Jade was the woman at Mathers and James who made the bizarre decision to hire me for the junior editor position. She was a tall, thin blond woman in her forties who held the title of creative director. She painted each nail a different color. If you saw her on the street, you wouldn’t guess her to be the director of anything.

  The interview was short. I did my best to appear somewhat disinterested, as I had in the other interviews I’d landed. I didn’t really want a job. Jade said she had a good feeling about me, though, and proclaimed herself to be someone who went with her gut. She did all of the talking—yammering on and on about the opportunities for advancement within the agency. Then she complimented me on my sea-green earrings and said I’d hear back in a few days. Which I did. They offered me a salary of thirty thousand, a small fortune in my eyes. Drew hugged me when I told him, then ran downstairs to the liquor store below us and bought an eight-dollar bottle of red wine.

  * * *

  The punk-rock receptionist brought Jade out to greet me.

  “So good to see you again, sweetie,” Jade said, hugging me like we were old friends. She smelled like lavender.

  I followed her to a tiny, empty cubicle. She waved her hands in front of it dramatically and said, “This will be your personal office.”

  There was just enough space for a small desk—with a computer and phone—and a chair. I set down my purse.

  “Marni, sweetie, meet your new neighbor,” she said, peering over the wall into the cubicle next to mine.

  The face of a young woman—about my age, maybe a couple years older—peered back. She was wearing thick-rimmed glasses that appeared to be more for style than prescription.

  “Hey,” she said, and sat again.

  “Marni’s a junior writer here. You will be proofreading some of her stuff,” Jade explained. “See how she’s decorated her cubicle?”

  Pages of magazines and photos had been tacked to the walls. Next to her computer, a goldfish swam in a small bowl with blue pebbles. A Post-it on the bowl read Bob.

  “Feel free to decorate your cube, too,” Jade said. “We encourage people to express themselves creatively here, right, Marni?”

  “Truth,” Marni said from over the wall.

  Jade looked at her watch and said she had to “scurry” to a meeting. As soon as she was out of sight, Marni came around the corner and sat on my desk.

  “Jade is such a fucking weirdo,” she said, loud enough for me to look around to see who may have heard. Marni waved me off. “Don’t worry, everyone here thinks that.”

  “I figured she must be crazy because she hired me,” I said.

  “She probably thinks you have a good aura,” Marni said. “That’s what she said about me, anyway. And it’s total bullshit because my aura sucks.”

  I laughed.

  “I’ll give you and your aura the benefit of the doubt, though,” she said. “You have to be better than the last guy. He talked to himself.”

  “Did he get fired?” I asked. “For talking to himself?”

  “No, he quit. I think he wanted to pursue comic book writing or something.”

  I liked Marni.

  “Have you worked here long?” I asked.

  “Couple years. Started here right out of college. I was gonna go to grad school, but that would have been a grand waste of money.”

  “Funny you say that. I was supposed to start an English program at Brooklyn College. Today, actually.”

  “You made a good decision coming here instead.”

  “I want to go someday, in a couple years, maybe. Right now I’m working while my husband goes to school.”

  She stepped back, analyzing me up and down, blatantly.

  “Forgive me for saying so,” she said, hand on her hip with attitude, “but you look far too young to have a husband.”

  “I probably am,” I said with a nervous laugh. “College sweethearts. We’re about to celebrate our first anniversary.”

  “I guess that’s cute, as long as you sowed your oats or whatever.”

  I didn’t confirm or deny the sowing of oats. I barely knew her.

  “Just be careful,” she said. She stood and smoothed out a wrinkle in her magenta pencil skirt.

  “Careful?”

  She sat again.

  “Things get weird when the woman is the breadwinner.”

  She could see I wanted her to explain. She exhaled.

  “My ex couldn’t handle it when I got promoted to copywriter—fifty grand a year if you twist Jade’s arm a little,” she said. My eyes got big. “It was like I cut off his dick.”

  I flinched at the word “dick.” She must have sensed my discomfort, because she stood again and waved at the air, swatting away her theory like it was an annoying fruit fly.

  “Actually, don’t listen to me. What do I know? I just date a bunch of losers.”

  Her chair creaked as she sat. “I’ll tell you about them—my losers—over drinks after work if you want.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I waited until lunch break to go outside and call Drew to tell him I’d be home late. I didn’t want Marni to hear me, to see me as a wife who needed to check in with her husband. I spent the afternoon reviewing ad copy, correcting typos, suggesting rewordings, and wondering if I’d ever want to go back to school if I was making fifty grand a year.

  SEVEN

  Marni and I were friends immediately, the best of friends after only a few weeks. So when she left Mathers and James a year later, lured by a 30 percent increase at another ad agency, we promised each other we’d continue to meet up for after-work drinks. As happens, we kept our promises weekly at first, then monthly, then sporadically.

  She called me one Friday to say she’d been promoted to senior copywriter, so we had to celebrate. “Meet me at the Dive,” she ordered. Marni always had a beat on the best new bars. And in New York City, there’s always a “best new bar.”

  This one, true to its name, was grungy, even a little dirty. There was a jukebox in the corner, a flickering Budweiser sign, and a sawdust-covered concrete floor, just like at the bar in Jersey my mom used to frequent; she’d get whiskey and I’d get a Sprite. At first glance, it was the type of place where men broke each other’s noses on a nightly basis. But when you looked closer, most of the people in the place were white-collar Manhattanites, slumming it for a night with stiff drinks and Bruce Springsteen through the speakers. Even so, it was a decent alternative
to the usual pretentiousness of SoHo.

  I sat at the bar, between two guys with ties tucked into their button-down shirts. Marni was late, as expected. I ordered a vodka tonic. I’d come into my own, alcohol-wise, ditching the cheap beers and wine coolers of college days and graduating to liquor—on the rocks. It would take a couple difficult years for me to fully appreciate anything straight up.

  I’d developed a habit of sitting with my hands under my thighs in bars. It hid my wedding ring and gave me an opportunity to see just how desirable I still was. Marni knew of this game of mine. We played it frequently during our happy hour outings. I kept a collection of business cards and phone numbers scribbled on bar napkins in a desk drawer at the office. Marni said it was weird, that I was longing for the single years I never had. I told her I was just having fun. Maybe I was a little bored. Drew was so occupied with school and I was working long hours at the office. Still, it’s not like I ever called any of the guys. And when Marni left Mathers and James, I threw away all the numbers, which makes me think I kept them around to impress her more than anything.

  “Boo!” a voice said, so close that I felt warm breath on the back of my neck.

  I turned to see Marni in an outlandish faux-fur coat—dyed purple—that went down to her shins. I knew it was faux because Marni had become a staunch vegan, which was somewhat revolutionary in 1997.

  “Where in the world did you get that coat?” I asked, touching it.

  “I’m doing well, thanks for asking,” she said, pulling up a stool and squeezing in next to me, forcing one of the tie-tucked guys to move over. He scoffed, out of Marni’s view, which was lucky, because she would have told him to move to the Midwest if he didn’t like rudeness.

  “Sorry, how are you? Blah, blah, blah,” I said.

  “Great. And I got this also-great coat at a thrift store near my new apartment. It’s so freaking hot outside, but I had to show you.” She took it off, elbowing the scoffer next to her in the process.

  “New apartment? Geez, how long has it been since we caught up?”

  “Last time I saw you, it was snowing outside, if that says anything.”

  “That’s unacceptable.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  She flagged down the bartender aggressively. Marni was born and raised in New York—the Bronx, to be specific. She was forthright and firm, with little understanding of boundaries or personal space.

  “So. New apartment?” I asked her.

  “Oh, right. I moved to Queens. Little studio on Shore Front. It takes me, like, ten hours to get anywhere, but I like it,” she said. “You guys still in Brooklyn?”

  “Same place,” I said. When we chose our tiny apartment, I thought we’d be there a year, max. Somehow the months just passed and we just stayed.

  “Em, it’s time to move on up in the world and out of that shithole.”

  “Yeah,” I said, folding the corners of my napkin distractedly. “So, congrats on the new position. How is it?”

  She got her first drink—some kind of dark beer that I thought only men drank—and closed her eyes as she took her first sip.

  “Stressful,” she said. “Did I tell you they put me on the Durex account?”

  “Condoms?”

  She rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. “I mean, what am I going to write about condoms? I brought up the idea of just publishing photos of herpes as a campaign, and that didn’t go over well.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Do they still have you writing about paper towels?”

  I nodded. That had become my primary gig at Mathers and James. I’d worked my way up from a proofreading peon to a copywriter. I used the word “absorbent” more times on a daily basis than any one person should. The highlight of the year was when the brand came out with a perforated paper towel “for smaller messes.”

  “I don’t even know why we’re talking about work. That’s boring. Tell me about you and your hubby.” She said “hubby” with a tinge of disdain. Marni never wanted to get married, and had trouble hiding her skepticism of the institution. Once, she compared a husband to a mole: “You sort of just learn to live with it because getting it removed is a big hassle.”

  “Are you popping out kids soon?” she asked. She hated the idea of children even more than the idea of a husband. “I would strongly advise against it. I can give you free condoms.”

  “We don’t need those,” I said, “because we hardly ever have sex.”

  With Marni, I knew this declaration of accidental celibacy would be shocking. I wanted it to be shocking. I wanted someone to commiserate with me. Before Marni, I never really talked to friends about sex. She had no off-limits topics, a fact that intimidated me at first. I considered her crude, mostly because I was a prude and prone to embarrassment—blushing cheeks and all. But then I got used to her, came to appreciate her frankness. Every woman needs a Marni, someone who says “pussy” and uses “fuck” as an adjective, verb, and noun. She told me she’d use it as an adverb, too, but she wasn’t one hundred percent sure what an adverb was, despite making a living as a writer.

  “Unless one of you had some kind of genital injury, this is not okay,” she said, speaking a little too loudly for my liking.

  “We’ve been busy,” I said.

  “You’re freaking twenty-five years old. You can only use the ‘busy’ excuse when you’re thirty-five or older and have two maniac kids.”

  “It’s true, though. I’m billing ten-hour days at the agency. Drew’s finishing up cooking school…”

  “Is he still in school?” she said.

  “He just has one summer class left and he’s done.”

  “Finally,” she said. “But that’s beside the point. Let’s go back to the lack of sex. Is it really that exhausting for him to sauté crap all day?”

  It was a thought I’d had myself, on the nights I managed to get home by seven and wanted him with all my twenty-five-year-old gusto. His usual refrain: “I’m beat.”

  “It’s not just school. He’s talking with his friend—this guy, Domingo—about opening a taco shop,” I said, repeating the rationalizations I told myself. “It’s stressful for him.”

  “Domingo? First of all, what kind of name is that? And second of all, tacos are never, ever stressful. For anyone.”

  “It’ll be a gourmet taco shop.”

  “Oh, gourmet. Well, that’s stressful,” she said sarcastically.

  “It’s a big deal—going into a food business. They fail all the time.”

  “So do marriages.”

  “Oh, Marni, don’t be such a cynic.”

  “I’m a realistic, Em. A realist.”

  She drained the rest of her beer and let the bartender know—with hand signals alone—that she wanted another one. I wasn’t even halfway done with my vodka tonic. I guided my skinny cocktail straw around and around my glass with the tip of my index finger.

  “Anyway,” she said with a disapproving sigh, “what about you? What’s next, then?”

  “Next?”

  “Yeah—what’s the plan? I can get you in at my agency, if you want. Could be a pay increase.”

  “I don’t know, I’m pretty happy as I am,” I said. “Especially with Drew doing this taco shop. I don’t want to shake up things too much.”

  A guy walked by and hit Marni in the side with his elbow. She glared at him, following him with her eyes all the way across the bar until he went into the restroom. She muttered, “Asshole,” under her breath and turned her attention back to me.

  “You know what you are?” she said. Whatever it was couldn’t be good, judging by her tone. “Complacent.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Is that so bad?”

  “Jesus, you’re complacent about being complacent.”

  “Mar, my life is different from yours,” I said, remembering why I let months pass between these meet-ups of ours. “I can’t be free and crazy like you.”

  “I resent the ‘crazy,’” she said.


  We turned our attention to our drinks.

  Then: “Do you ever think about going back to school?”

  “I think I’m past that,” I said.

  And I was. It didn’t make sense anymore. I was making good money at the agency. It made me nervous to leave, to put pressure on Drew and his tacos.

  Marni looked off, above the top row of bottles at the bar, into a distance I didn’t know.

  “Don’t you ever wonder about all the different paths we could take in life? Like, what if I had married Phil?” Phil was one of Marni’s many guys who had come and gone. “Or what if you hadn’t married Drew?”

  “You could make yourself nuts considering all those what-ifs,” I said.

  “I’m already nuts, according to you.”

  “Then you could make me nuts.”

  I pulled a twenty out of my purse and set it on the bar.

  “I’ve driven you away already?” she asked, as I stood.

  “I have to go. We’re having our moms over for dinner tonight.”

  Marni laughed a laugh reserved for comedy clubs.

  “You don’t even like your mother.”

  “It was Drew’s idea,” I said.

  “You really are two old married farts.”

  * * *

  I never minded the commute from Manhattan to Brooklyn. It gave me time to make my daily to-do lists and prepare for the transition from home to work (or vice versa). That’s what it felt like—two different worlds, home and work, Manhattan and Brooklyn. Drew offered to meet me for lunch sometimes, in the city. I said I was too busy, I had a client meeting, I was on a deadline. The truth was the hours between eight and six were my own. Creating taglines, preparing for campaign pitches, brainstorming with the art team. Drew didn’t know any details of this and I preferred it that way. He saw me leave in the morning—in my pencil skirts and heels—and he saw me come home, tired. We didn’t talk about the in-between. When it was just the two of us, we talked about just that—the two of us.

  That night, like every weeknight, I caught the R train at Prince Street, got off at Fourteenth/Union Square, and took the L train the rest of the way. My stop was DeKalb. Home was just a short half-mile walk from there, at the corner of Irving and Menahan. Marni could say what she wanted, but I liked our little place. The subway station was close enough to walk to, even in the dead of winter. We had a favorite bakery down the street where the owners knew us by name. Drew was eyeing a storefront for lease on Knickerbocker, just a short walk away. He didn’t want a long commute since he’d already be working long hours—at the beginning, at least. His priority was me, he said.