Summer and the City Read online

  “Could you turn that thing off?” Maggie shouts at Miranda. “It’s hurting my ears.”

  “Sorry,” I say, to both Maggie and Miranda, as I scurry across the room to lower the volume on the stereo.

  “What’s her problem?” Miranda asks. She sounds put out, which I know she doesn’t intend. She’s just a bit soused.

  “Ryan ran out of the coffee shop while she was in the bathroom.”

  “Ah,” Miranda says with a smile.

  “Mags?” I ask, making a cautious approach. “There’s nothing Miranda likes more than guy troubles. Mostly because she hates all men.” I hope this introduction will make Maggie and Miranda appreciate each other. After all, guy troubles, along with clothing and body parts, are a major source of bonding among women.

  But Maggie isn’t having it. “Why didn’t you tell me he was a dick?” she demands.

  This isn’t fair. “I thought I did. You knew he was engaged.”

  “You’re dating a guy who’s engaged?” Miranda asks, not liking the sound of this.

  “He isn’t really engaged. He says he’s engaged. She made him get engaged so she could string him along.” Maggie takes another swig of vodka. “That’s what I think, anyway.”

  “It’s a good thing he left,” I say. “Now at least you know his true nature.”

  “Here, here,” Miranda adds.

  “Hey. Miranda just got a new boyfriend,” I tell Maggie.

  “Lucky you.” Maggie scowls, unimpressed.

  “Maggie has two boyfriends,” I say to Miranda, as if this is something to be admired.

  “That’s something I’ve never understood. How do you handle it? I mean, they’re always saying you should date two or three guys at once, but I’ve never seen the point,” Miranda says.

  “It’s fun,” Maggie retorts.

  “But it goes both ways, right?” Miranda counters. “We hate guys who date more than one woman at a time. I’ve always believed that what’s unacceptable in one sex should, by definition, be unacceptable in the other.”

  “Excuse me.” Maggie sounds a warning note. “I hope you’re not calling me a slut.”

  “Of course not!” I jump in. “Miranda’s only talking about feminism.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have any problem with women having sex with as many men as they want,” Maggie says pointedly. “To me, that’s feminism.”

  “You can do anything you want, sweetie,” I reassure her. “No one’s judging you.”

  “All I’m saying is that men and women are the same. They should be held to the same standards,” Miranda insists.

  “I totally disagree. Men and women are completely different,” Maggie replies obstinately.

  “I kind of hate when people say men and women are different,” I interject. “It sounds like an excuse. Like when people say, ‘Boys will be boys.’ It makes me want to scream.”

  “It makes me want to sock someone,” Miranda agrees.

  Maggie stands up. “All I can say is that you two deserve each other.” And while Miranda and I look at her in bewilderment, Maggie runs into the bathroom and slams the door.

  “Was it something I said?” Miranda asks.

  “It’s not you. It’s me. She’s mad at me. About something. Even though I should be mad at her.”

  I knock on the bathroom door. “Mags? Are you okay? We were just having a conversation. We weren’t saying anything bad about you.”

  “I’m taking a shower,” she shouts.

  Miranda gathers her things. “I’d better go.”

  “Okay,” I demur, dreading being left alone with Maggie. Once she gets angry, she can carry a grudge for days.

  “Marty’s coming over anyway. After he finishes studying.” She waves and hurries down the stairs.

  Lucky her.

  The shower is still going full blast. I straighten up my desk, hoping the worst is not to come.

  Eventually Maggie comes out of the bathroom toweling her hair. She begins picking up her things, stuffing clothing into her duffel bag.

  “You’re not leaving, are you?”

  “I think I should,” she grumbles.

  “C’mon, sweetie. I’m sorry. Miranda is just very adamant about her views. She doesn’t have anything against you. She doesn’t even know you.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Since you’re not seeing Ryan, maybe we could go to a movie?” I ask hopefully.

  “There’s nothing I want to see.” She looks around. “Where’s the phone?”

  It’s under the chair. I grab it and hand it over reluctantly. “Listen, Mags,” I say, trying not to be confrontational. “If you don’t mind, could you not call South Carolina? I have to pay for the long distance calls, and I don’t have that much money.”

  “Is that all you’re about now? Money?”

  “No—”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m calling the bus.”

  “You don’t have to go,” I say, desperate to make up. I don’t want her visit to end in a fight.

  Maggie ignores me, looking at her watch as she nods into the receiver. “Thanks.” She hangs up. “There’s a bus that leaves for Philadelphia in forty-five minutes. Do you think I can make it?”

  “Yes. But, Maggie—” I break off. I really don’t know what to say.

  “You’ve changed, Carrie,” she says, zipping up her bag with a snap.

  “I still don’t know why you’re so angry. Whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry.”

  “You’re a different person. I don’t know who you are anymore.” She punctuates this with a shake of her head.

  I sigh. This confrontation has likely been brewing since the moment Maggie turned up at the apartment and declared it a slum. “The only thing that’s different about me is that I’m in New York.”

  “I know. You haven’t stopped reminding me of the fact for two days.”

  “I do live here—”

  “You know what?” She picks up her bag. “Everyone here is crazy. Your roommate Samantha is crazy. Bernard is a creep, and your friend Miranda is a freak. And Ryan is an asshole.” She pauses while I cringe, imagining what’s coming next. “And now you’re just like them. You’re crazy too.”

  I’m stunned. “Thanks a lot.”

  “You’re welcome.” She starts for the door. “And don’t worry about taking me to the bus station. I can get there myself.”

  “Fine.” I shrug.

  She exits the apartment, banging the door behind her. For a moment, I’m too shaken to move. How dare she attack me? And why is it always about her? The whole time she was here, she barely had the decency to ask me how I was doing. She could have tried to understand my situation instead of criticizing everything about it.

  I take a deep breath. I yank open the door and run after her. “Maggie!”

  She’s already outside, standing on the curb, her arm raised to hail a taxi. I hurry toward her as a taxi pulls up and she opens the door.

  “Maggie!”

  She spins around, her hand on the handle. “What?”

  “Come on. Don’t leave this way. I’m sorry.”

  Her face has turned to stone. “Good.” She crawls into the backseat and shuts the door.

  My body sags as I watch the taxi weave into traffic. I tilt my head back, letting the rain’s drizzle soothe my hurt feelings. “Why?” I ask aloud.

  I stomp back into the building. Damn Ryan. He is an asshole. If he hadn’t stood Maggie up, we wouldn’t have had this fight. We’d still be friends. Sure, I’d be a little pissed off with her for sleeping with Ryan, but I would have ignored it. For the sake of our friendship.

  Why can’t she extend the same courtesy to me?

  I bang around in the apartment a while, all churned up about Maggie’s disastrous visit. I hesitate, then pick up the phone and call Walt.

  While it rings, I remember how I’ve neglected Walt all summer and how he’s probably pissed at me too. I shudder, thinking about what a bad friend I’ve been. I’
m not even sure Walt is still living at home. When his mother picks up, I say, “It’s Carrie,” in the sweetest voice possible. “Is Walt there?”

  “Hello, Carrie,” Walt’s mother says. “Are you still in New York?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I’m sure Walt will be very happy to hear from you,” she adds, sticking another knife into the wound. “Walt!” she calls out. “It’s Carrie.”

  I hear Walt coming into the kitchen. I picture the red Formica table crowded with chairs. The dog’s bowl slopped over with water. The toaster oven where Walt’s mother keeps the sugar so ants won’t get it. And, no doubt, the look of confusion on Walt’s face. Wondering why I’ve decided to call him now, when I’ve forgotten him for weeks.

  “Hello?” he asks.

  “Walt!” I exclaim.

  “Is this the Carrie Bradshaw?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What a surprise. I thought you were dead.”

  “Oh, Walt.” I giggle nervously, knowing I deserve a hard time.

  Walt seems ready to forgive, because the next thing he asks is, “Well, qué pasa? How’s Nuevo?”

  “Bueno. Muy bueno,” I reply. “How are you?” I lower my voice. “Are you still seeing Randy?”

  “Mais oui!” he exclaims. “In fact, my father has decided to look the other way. Thanks to Randy’s interest in football.”

  “That’s great. You’re having a real relationship.”

  “It appears so, yes. Much to my surprise.”

  “You’re lucky, Walt.”

  “What about you? Anyone special?” he asks, putting a sarcastic spin on “special.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been seeing this guy. But he’s older. Maggie met him,” I say, getting to my underlying reason for the call. “She hated him.”

  Walt laughs. “I’m not surprised. Maggie hates everyone these days.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she has no idea what to do with her life. And she can’t stand anyone who does.”

  Thirty minutes later, I’ve told Walt the whole story about Maggie’s visit, which he finds immensely entertaining. “Why don’t you come to visit me?” I ask, feeling better. “You and Randy. You could sleep in the bed.”

  “A bed’s too good for Randy,” Walt says jokingly. “He can sleep on the floor. In fact, he can sleep anywhere. If you take him to a store, he’ll fall asleep standing up.”

  I smile. “Seriously, though.”

  “When are you coming home?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know about your father, of course,” he says smoothly.

  “No.”

  “Oops.”

  “Why?” I ask. “What’s going on?”

  “Hasn’t anyone told you? Your father has a girlfriend.”

  I clutch the phone in disbelief. But it makes sense. No wonder he’s been acting so strange lately.

  “I’m sorry. I figured you knew,” Walt continues. “I only know because my mother told me. She’s going to be the new librarian at the high school. She’s like twenty-five or something.”

  “My father is dating a twenty-five-year-old?” I shriek.

  “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Damn right,” I say, furious. “I guess I’ll be coming home this weekend after all.”

  “Great,” Walt says. “We could use some excitement around here.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “This will never do,” Samantha says, shaking her head.

  “It’s luggage.” I, too, glare at the offending suitcase. It’s ugly, but still, the sight of that suitcase makes me insanely jealous. I’m going back to boring old Castlebury while Samantha is headed for Los Angeles.

  Los Angeles! It’s a very big deal and she only found out yesterday. She’s going to shoot a commercial and stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which is where all the movie stars hang out. She bought enormous sunglasses and a big straw hat and a Norma Kamali bathing suit that you wear with a white T-shirt underneath. In honor of the occasion, I tried to find a palm tree at the party store, but all they had were some green paper leafy things that I’ve wrapped around my head.

  There are clothes and shoes everywhere. Samantha’s enormous green plastic Samsonite suitcase lies open on the living room floor.

  “It’s not luggage, it’s baggage,” she complains.

  “Who’s going to notice?”

  “Everyone. We’re flying first-class. There’ll be porters. And bellhops. What are the bellhops going to think when they discover Samantha Jones travels with Samsonite?”

  I love it when Samantha does that funny thing and talks about herself in the third person. I tried it once myself, but there was no way I could pull it off. “Do you honestly think the bellhops are going to be more interested in Samsonite than Samantha Jones?”

  “That’s just it. They’ll expect my luggage to be glamorous as well.”

  “I bet that jerky Harry Mills carries American Tourister. Hey,” I say, swinging my legs off the back of the couch. “Did you ever think that someday you’d be traveling with a man you hardly knew? It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? What if your suitcase opens by accident and he sees your Skivvies?”

  “I’m not worried about my lingerie. I’m worried about my image. I never thought I’d have this life when I bought that.” She frowns at the suitcase.

  “What did you think?” I hardly know anything about Samantha’s past, besides the fact that she comes from New Jersey and seems to hate her mother. She never mentions her father, so these tidbits about her early life are always fascinating.

  “Only about getting away. Far, far away.”

  “But New Jersey’s just across the river.”

  “Physically, yes. Metaphorically, no. And New York wasn’t my first stop.”

  “It wasn’t?” Now I’m really intrigued. I can’t imagine Samantha living anywhere but New York.

  “I traveled all around the world when I was eighteen.”

  I nearly fall off the couch. “How?”

  She smiles. “I was a groupie. To a very famous rock ’n’ roll guy. I was at a concert and he picked me out of the crowd. He asked me to travel with him and I was stupid enough to think I was his girlfriend. Then I found out he had a wife stashed away in the English countryside. That suitcase has been all around the world.”

  I wonder if Samantha’s hatred of her luggage is actually due to a bad association with the past. “And then what happened?”

  She shrugs, picking out lingerie from the pile and folding the pieces into little squares. “He dumped me. In Moscow. His wife suddenly decided to join him. He woke up that afternoon and said, ‘Darling, I’m afraid it’s over. You’re binned.’”

  “Just like that?”

  “He was English,” she says, laying the squares into the bottom of the suitcase. “That’s what Englishmen do. When it’s over, it’s over. No phone calls, no letters, and especially no crying.”

  “Did you? Cry?” I can’t picture it.

  “What do you think? I was all alone in Moscow with nothing but this stupid suitcase. And a plane ticket to New York. I was jumping up and down for joy.”

  I can’t tell if she’s kidding or not.

  “In other words, it’s your runaway suitcase,” I point out. “And now that you don’t need to run anymore, you need something better. Something permanent.”

  “Hmmm,” she says cryptically.

  “What’s it like?” I ask. “When you pass a record store and see the rock ’n’ roll guy’s face on a poster? Does it make you feel weird to think you spent all that time with him?”

  “I’m grateful.” She grabs a shoe and looks around for its partner. “Sometimes I think if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have made it to New York at all.”

  “Didn’t you always want to come here?”

  She shrugs. “I was a wild child. I didn’t know what I wanted. I only knew I didn’t want to end up a waitress and pregnant at nineteen. Like Shirley.�
��

  “Oh.”

  “My mother,” she clarifies.

  I’m not surprised. There’s an underlying pulse of determination in Samantha that has to come from somewhere.

  “You’re lucky.” She finds the matching shoe and pushes it into the corner of the suitcase. “At least you have parents who will pay for college.”

  “Yeah,” I say vaguely. Despite her confessions about her past, I’m not ready to tell her about my own. “But I thought you went to college.”

  “Oh, Sparrow.” She sighs. “I took a couple of night courses when I arrived in New York. I got a job through a temp agency. The first place they sent me was Slovey, Dinall. I was a secretary. They didn’t even call them ‘assistants’ back then. Anyway, it’s boring.”

  Not to me. But the fact that she’s come so far from nothing puts my own struggles to shame. “It must have been hard.”

  “It was.” She presses down on the top of the suitcase. There’s practically her whole closet in there, so naturally, it won’t shut. I kneel on the cover as she clicks the locks into place.

  The phone rings as we’re dragging the suitcase to the door. Samantha ignores the insistent ringing, so I make a move to grab it. “Don’t answer,” she warns. But I’ve already picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Is Samantha still there?”

  Samantha frantically shakes her head. “Charlie?” I ask.

  “Yeah.” He doesn’t sound terribly friendly. I wonder if he found out it was me doing the cooking after all.

  I hold out the receiver. Samantha rolls her eyes as she takes it. “Hello, darling. I’m about to walk out the door.” There’s an edge of annoyance in her tone.

  “Yes, I know,” she continues. “But I can’t make it.” She pauses and lowers her voice. “I told you. I have to go. I don’t have a choice,” she adds, sounding resigned. “Well, life’s inconvenient, Charlie.” And she hangs up the phone.

  She briefly closes her eyes, inhales, and forces a smile. “Men.”

  “Charlie?” I ask, perplexed. “I thought you guys were so happy.”

  “Too happy. When I told him I suddenly had to go to LA, he freaked out. Said he’d made plans for us to have dinner with his mother tonight. Which he somehow neglected to tell me. As if I don’t have a life of my own.”