Chapter Three
Annie
New York City, 1978
It was never a good sign when Annie’s mother played the Rolling Stones on the dusty turntable in their basement apartment. While the dulcet tenor of Jackson Browne or the harmonies of Styx signified that Joyce was more or less content, Mick Jagger yowling about being shattered meant Joyce was as well.
Annie heard the music blasting as she closed the front door of the brownstone firmly behind her. She’d been cleaning their landlady’s apartment—which consisted of the three floors above their own—the entire afternoon, and her back ached as she maneuvered down the steep steps that led to the sidewalk. Thank goodness Mrs. Hollingsworth was up in her bedroom on the second floor recovering from a twisted knee, or she’d have been stomping around her parlor in a fury at the bass droning through her parquet floor. Annie did a quick U-turn, closed the small metal gate behind her, and turned the stiff doorknob that led to the basement apartment’s front door, tucked directly beneath the steps she’d just descended.
When she and Joyce first moved in, six-year-old Annie had imagined their hideaway as a fairy’s cave, a place where they could be safe. At nineteen, she recognized that they lived in a hovel of sorts, with rats scurrying outside the barred windows late at night and the damp smell of mold seeping through the brick walls in the spring. Joyce still insisted on calling it a “garden flat” when speaking to others, even though the garden out back consisted of a series of uneven bluestone squares edged with desolate tufts of ragweed.
On top of her job waitressing at a diner on Lexington Avenue, a few days a week Annie scoured Mrs. Hollingsworth’s apartment in exchange for discounted rent. Her duties included scrubbing Mrs. Hollingsworth’s toilets and dusting the floor moldings of every room, dragging a cloth along the top edge like some hunchbacked servant girl. Right now, all she wanted was to make herself some macaroni and cheese and curl up on the couch with the latest issue of Vogue . But her respite wasn’t coming any time soon. She walked over to the record player and carefully lifted the needle before turning it off. Blouses were piled up on the one armchair, and several skirts were draped over the couch.
Joyce flew out of the bedroom in a silk slip, eyes wide. “Where have you been?”
Even in an agitated state, her mother was a beautiful woman. At thirty-nine, she was often mistaken for being in her late twenties, and it was no surprise that her face, with its with baby-smooth skin and upturned nose, had at one time been celebrated by top fashion photographers.
“I was cleaning.”
“Brad’s due in an hour and nothing fits. Nothing. We’re supposed to be going to Mortimer’s and then Régine’s for dancing, and I can’t look like some frumpy nun. You have to help me.”
“Not all nuns are frumpy. Julie Andrews wasn’t.”
“She was a novitiate, not a nun. And she didn’t last very long.”
Annie pointed to a brushed-silk dress in a grayish silver. “What about that one? It’ll look great on the dance floor.”
“The color is boring. I can’t look old. I simply can’t.”
Annie sighed. “How about if I play around with it? Maybe lift the hem a few inches?” She’d seen a similar design in last month’s Bazaar , with dolman sleeves. Annie’s love for fashion had begun when she’d gotten a set of paper dolls for Christmas one year. She’d created dresses, coats, and hats for each one in bright colors and then gotten sucked into the glossy pages of Mademoiselle , working her way up to the serious, grown-up styles of Bazaar and Vogue . Clothes protected; clothes were armor. Clothes were a distraction when things got difficult.
“Could you? And maybe lower the neckline as well?”
Annie grabbed the dress and headed to the bedroom, where her sewing machine sat in a corner. On the bed was a Macy’s bag.
Annie’s stomach dropped. “What did you buy?”
Joyce ran into the room and clutched it to her chest like it was a crying baby. “I needed makeup.”
“The medicine cabinet is practically exploding with makeup. We won’t have rent if you keep on buying things you don’t need.”
“It’s an investment in our future. Once Brad and I are married, we’ll never have to worry about this again. And don’t tell me what to do. I’m the mother here.”
“Then act like one.”
She’d pushed it too far. Joyce’s eyes welled up, and she plopped on the bed, letting the bag fall onto the floor. “Fine. Take it all back. I thought, after the week I’ve had, that I deserved a little treat. A pick-me-up.”
A few days earlier, Joyce had announced that her agency had dumped her. Not that she worked much at all anymore, only catalog ads for JCPenney and Sears. But now Joyce was too old even for that type of job, and Annie knew her mother was gutted. The only bright spot was this burgeoning relationship with Brad. Annie had seen her mother cycle through a number of Brad types after her father died when she was five, precipitating the move to the garden flat. But Joyce’s eyes lit up whenever she mentioned Brad’s name, which was often. They’d met at the local watering hole on Lexington a few weeks ago, Joyce brimming with excitement after he’d bought her a daiquiri and they’d talked for hours.
“Maybe you’d be better off without me.” Joyce eyed the bedside table that sat between their twin beds. Annie knew a bottle of sleeping pills lay in the top drawer. It wasn’t an idle threat.
Annie sat beside her. “Go put on your face while I play with your outfit.”
Joyce hugged her close, smelling like Ana?s Ana?s. Annie breathed in deeply. She loved her mother, even when she was a mess. Joyce needed Annie to maneuver in the world, and most of the time it was lovely to be needed.
Forty-five minutes later, Joyce had a new outfit that she twirled around in with delight. Annie began cleaning up the scattered clothes. Her fingers were sore, her eyes hurt, and her stomach growled.
“No, there’s no time,” said Joyce. “Just stick them under the bed or something.”
“Then they’ll need to be ironed.” A task that would surely fall to Annie.
“No, it’s time.”
A silence fell between them.
“But it was starting to rain when I walked in,” said Annie.
“Then you should take an umbrella. Annie. Please.”
Annie eyed the darkness outside the windows and sighed. Her mother needed this to work out so badly, and Annie most definitely didn’t want to be blamed if—or when—it went wrong. There was no point in putting up a fuss.
The fact was that Joyce wasn’t ready for Brad to meet Annie. And it wasn’t just that Brad didn’t know Joyce had a nineteen-year-old daughter. It was a matter of aesthetics.
Whenever Joyce was forced to introduce Annie as her daughter, Annie steeled herself for the expected look of confusion. The person would stare at Annie a beat too long, taking in her round face and lackluster light brown hair, then look over at Joyce, with her blonde updo and perfect bow lips. Their gaze would travel back to Annie, noting the way she towered over her mother, her shoulders and arms muscular from carrying trays of food at the diner and scrubbing floors, before taking in Joyce’s cinched, twenty-three-inch waist.
“How nice,” they’d say as Annie slowly faded into the background.
Joyce loved to compare their hands, her lacquered nails and long fingers a stark contrast to Annie’s substantial grip and ragged cuticles. “You have your father’s build,” she would say. “He was a big guy, but so graceful on the dance floor.”
Annie didn’t remember much about her father, but she’d been so young when he died. She still remembered the smell of his aftershave and the feel of his rough cheek on her own, as well as the fact that he’d take her to the Met Museum on Saturdays while Joyce slept in, where she’d scamper around the Egyptian Art collection, pointing out the blue hippo, which was her favorite object. Before they left to return home, he’d pick her up so she could get a good look at the Cerulean Queen, which was his favorite.
Joyce marched to the coatrack near the front door and grabbed Annie’s red coat and an umbrella. “It won’t be that long. Brad and I will be on our way in no time. Two loops around the block and the place is all yours. Hey, maybe before long, we’ll be living in luxury. Brad’s in sales, you know.”
Whatever that meant.
Annie didn’t have much choice. She put on her coat and headed out into the cold November air.
Annie wandered the familiar streets of the Upper East Side in a hungry, exhausted daze. She wanted more than anything to settle in for the night with her macaroni and cheese and a long, hot bath, which would take the chill from her bones. She passed her old high school, which looked uglier than ever in the gloom of the evening, the Brutalist architecture slightly improved by colorful graffiti. Five years ago, she’d been a freshman, eager to move on from the impenetrable cliques of middle school. Nothing much had changed for her, though.
That year her geography teacher, Mr. Williams, asked the class to write an essay about where they would travel if they each had $1,000. The boy sitting next to her immediately chose Rome, for the Colosseum and the pizza, while it took Annie a while to wrap her head around the very idea of making such a huge decision, especially one that didn’t involve her mother. She finally settled on Paris, for the fashion. She worked hard on her essay and got an A.
Annie brought it home to show Joyce, but her mother had been harshly rejected during a bathing suit go-see that day and was in no mood to read it. When Annie gently suggested they each get part-time jobs to lessen their dependency on the income from the modeling gigs, Joyce surprised her by considering the idea. Joyce looked through the classifieds and, right then and there, called to answer an ad for a receptionist position in a midtown law firm. The very next day, she went to the interview and, to Annie’s delight, was offered the job. Meanwhile, Mrs. Hollingsworth had just inquired about Annie taking over for her maid, and Annie had accepted, hoping to do her part.
As Mrs. H’s cleaner, Annie was paid $170 a week, along with a discount on rent. To Annie’s surprise, Mrs. H added that, every week, she’d put ten dollars into a cookie jar that sat on the kitchen counter. “That money is yours, not your mother’s,” said Mrs. H. “Do you understand? I suggest you forget it exists entirely.”
Annie had nodded, embarrassed that Mrs. H was aware of the upside-down mother-daughter dynamic in the basement apartment.
When Annie came home from school the first day of her mother’s new job, excited to have the place all to herself for once, Joyce was lying on the living room couch in a bathrobe, a cool compress over her forehead. The work had been too much, too demanding. Joyce couldn’t possibly answer all those phones, and, after mixing up the senior partners’ calls one too many times, she had been summarily let go.
“Great, you can take the cleaning job, then,” Annie said.
Joyce weakly lifted up one arm without removing the compress from her eyes. “It would damage my hands, darling.”
Annie let loose a stream of complaints about Joyce’s maternal deficiencies before storming off. When she finally cooled down enough to return home, her mother was sleeping heavily in her bed, and when Annie leaned over to check on her, still angry, she discovered an empty bottle of pills on the quilt. Annie called for an ambulance and, sick with worry, rode in it to the hospital, where Joyce had her stomach pumped. After, Joyce insisted to the doctor and to Annie that it had all been a silly mix-up; she’d completely forgotten how many she’d taken because Annie’s harsh words had “burned into my soul.” She promised to be a better mother and begged Annie’s forgiveness, and the doctor, thoroughly disarmed by her allure and charm, had discharged her. The shock of that awful night had stayed with Annie long after. Her mother was delicate, and it was Annie’s job to protect her from the world.
After Annie graduated from high school, while many of the other students were heading to college, she picked up the waitressing job. It didn’t seem fair that others had the freedom to dream of the future while Annie was stuck in the present, hoping the check for the phone bill didn’t bounce and making sure to tell Joyce how beautiful she looked before she left for a go-see.
Annie checked her watch. She’d given her mother plenty of time to head off on her date with Brad. She reached their building and opened the door to the basement apartment, feeling the blast of heat that the overactive radiators emitted during the cooler months. However, as she set her keys down on the tiny table beside the coatrack, she heard a peal of laughter from the bedroom. Joyce and Brad were still here.
Annie picked up her keys and backed out the door, closing it behind her. She considered heading to the diner where she worked and ordering a hamburger and fries, but then she remembered the shopping bag filled with makeup. They couldn’t afford any more unnecessary expenses, even with her employee discount.
At least the rain had stopped. She sat on the steps to Mrs. H’s front door, tucking her raincoat under her. Neighbors passed wordlessly by, matronly women with little dogs out for their evening walk, men with briefcases returning from a work dinner.
“What are you doing out here, for goodness’ sake?”
The voice came from over Annie’s right shoulder. She twisted around to find Mrs. H peering out of one of her parlor windows, a silk scarf loosely covering the large pink rollers in her hair. She looked like one of those marionettes with huge heads and skinny bodies Annie had seen in a puppet show as a child.
Annie rose to her feet. “Shouldn’t you be upstairs? What about your knee?”
Mrs. H waved a pale hand in the air. “I had the nurse help me downstairs before she left. I’m sick and tired of staring at the same four walls. Are you locked out of the apartment?”
She considered lying and saying yes, but Mrs. H had an extra key. “My mom has someone over.”
“I see.” The woman’s lips pursed. “Come inside. You look like a drowned rat.”
Annie let herself in. Mrs. H was already halfway down the front hallway, leaning heavily on her cane as she made her way to the kitchen at the back of the brownstone. Annie knew every inch of the apartment by now, from the coffin corners on the stairway to the parlor adorned with European etchings and porcelain vases, and couldn’t help but notice a stark difference between the public areas and the ones where visitors didn’t venture, like the kitchen. There, a small sink stood next to a chipped countertop, a line of drunkenly crooked cabinets just above it. In one corner was a linoleum table covered by a stained tablecloth. Mrs. H often declared she was one of the “faded rich,” ladies who had lunched in style at the Russian Tea Room twenty years ago but were now trapped in their decaying, depreciating townhouses in a dangerous city.
Annie’s gaze was drawn to a large pot of spaghetti on the stovetop that Mrs. H’s cook had made.
“You want some pasta?” asked Mrs. H as she settled into one of the kitchen chairs. “Help yourself.”
Annie took a bowl from the cabinet and ladled a knot of spaghetti into it. She didn’t care that it was cold; anything would do at this point. She joined Mrs. H at the table, aware that they’d never been in such close proximity before. Mr. H had died a decade or so ago, although Mrs. H still constantly invoked the first-person plural when speaking of him, saying “We loved that restaurant until it closed,” or “We prefer the silverware polished weekly.” It was sad but also sort of sweet.
“So tell me, who’s the latest swain?”
Annie hadn’t realized how close an eye Mrs. H kept on their comings and goings. Lately, the men Joyce dated didn’t tend to stick around very long, which only made her clingier with the next one, accelerating the downward spiral. Instead of getting wiser with age, her mother was becoming more desperate, regressing into a lovelorn teen.
Annie jumped to her mother’s defense. “She’s very serious with Brad. He’s in sales.”
“What kind of sales?”
“Yachts.”
Annie had no idea what the man sold, nor did Joyce, probably, but it was the first thing that came to mind.
Mrs. H let out a small, disappointed sigh. “Tell me, girl, what are you going to do with your life?”
Annie was unprepared for the change in subject. “I’m not sure.”
“What do you want to do?”
For so long, Annie’s goal had been the same as her mother’s: help Joyce find a man so that they could live the life they deserved, with a nice apartment in one of the new white-brick high-rises and vacations to Florida. When Annie turned twelve, she’d taken over managing their money by necessity, but living on the edge financially had kept her focus on the here and now—mainly whether or not they could afford next month’s rent. She was too tired to imagine a life beyond the one she currently lived.
Before Annie could come up with an answer that might satisfy Mrs. H and allow her to eat more than two forkfuls of pasta, the phone hanging on the wall just above Mrs. Hollingsworth’s head let out a shrill ring. Mrs. H lifted the receiver and twirled the cord around her finger. “Hollingsworth residence.”
Annie got in another two bites before Mrs. H hung up. “I need you to run an errand for me.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Go upstairs into my closet and take out the feather boa that’s hanging in there. Somewhere on the right side, I think.”
Reluctantly, Annie did as she was told. It was almost worse to have had a few bites of food than none at all. Her stomach craved to be filled. Mrs. H’s closet bloomed with gowns and dresses from another era, ones that the widow probably would never wear again. While the designs were out of date, some of the fabrics would be perfect turned into tunics or skirts. Annie took down the feather boa, which had been dyed a strange pea green color, and sneezed.
Back downstairs, Mrs. H placed the boa into a shopping bag. “Now take it to the Met Museum.”
Annie must have heard her wrong. Or maybe Mrs. H was losing her marbles.
“I’m sorry, you want me to take this to the Met. Now?”
“Yes. They’re waiting. Go in the side entrance on 84th Street. Tell them it’s for Diana, and make sure she gets it and knows who sent it.” She pronounced the name in a fancy way, Dee-AH-nah .
“Diana who?”
“For goodness’ sake, enough with the questions. Go on, and I’ll have the spaghetti heated up for you by the time you get back. I even have some ice cream for dessert.”
“What flavor?”
“Strawberry.”
Annie’s favorite.