I couldn’t remember a time before Korean groceries dotted every available corner in New York City with canned goods, salad bars, precut fruit, extensive selections of energy drinks, and fresh flowers twelve months of the year. No doubt there are names on leases and health department certificates, but to most people they are just the Koreans on Twenty-eighth or the Koreans on Seventeenth, et cetera. I headed for the Koreans on Eighth Avenue about three blocks from Lucy’s. The outside flower stand was shielded by heavy plastic sheets to protect the merchandise, and I brushed aside the cold, clear panels to get to the front door. I sensed someone behind me, so I held the flaps open for an extra second but, seeing no one, I let them go. Inside the small market, I stocked up on provisions for the weekend.
When I’d arrived, Lucy’s nearly empty kitchen had reminded me she was a single woman who generally ate out and probably hadn’t stocked her pantry since a world-class Mardi Gras party thrown two years earlier attended by members of the Preservation Hall Band and half the New Orleans Saints bench. She still had foil packets of Pat O’Brien’s Hurricane mix on the refrigerator door. Inexplicably, she also had ten or twelve envelopes of Orville Redenbacher’s. I wasn’t a good enough cook to turn sweet pink powder and popcorn into a meal, so I’d been replenishing at the Koreans one or two bags at a time.
After less than a block, the plastic I Love NY bag handles were stretched thin and cutting off the circulation in my fingers. I walked carefully, hoping the bags wouldn’t break and I wouldn’t have wasted forty dollars on chickpea and tuna salads the pigeons would be feasting on the next morning. I regrouped and changed hands while waiting for the traffic light to change.
Once again, I felt someone walking just a little too close behind me. There wasn’t much traffic; a Lincoln Town Car idled on the other side of the street. That was good. I wasn’t alone. In the same way flight attendants and fire drill captains always know their exit strategies, women who occasionally have to walk in New York at night develop a survival strategy. It was second nature.
We knew when to cross the street to avoid an unsavory character. We knew not to recite our telephone or credit card numbers out loud in a crowded bar, not to flash cash at an ATM, and not to leave half a drink on a table and then come back and drink it. These are in the collective New York memories, the way farm kids automatically know cow stuff and children in seaside towns know about the tides. At least we do most of the time.
In addition to two salads, which wouldn’t make very effective weapons, I was packing heat—four twelve-ounce cans of diet Red Bull that could put a sizeable dent in someone’s Adam’s apple if he messed with me. I’d taken a self-defense class once, and it was one of the few things I remembered. Go for the vulnerable spots—throat, groin, shins, eyes. I doubt the manufacturers had that in mind when they introduced the new, larger cans, but it was reassuring as I walked the rest of the way home.
Thirteen
Lucy’s building was a five-story limestone next door to a church that housed a soup kitchen in its basement. Two mornings in a row I’d seen men lined up as early as six A.M.
There were a few steps down to the vestibule, where the mailboxes were, and then a locked glass front door that led to the lobby and to the apartments upstairs. Lucy lived on the fifth floor, in two studio apartments bought and combined a few years back when prices were down and she’d gotten a bonus for doing a highly rated story on the unscrupulous owners of a Long Island puppy mill. I had talked her out of adopting the three Havanese she fell in love with and now I regretted it; they’d have been good company in her absence.
My fingers were numb from the heavy bags, so I took a quick break on the third floor to switch hands and get the circulation back. That’s when I heard someone jiggling the doorknob on the inside door, downstairs. I stopped to listen. There was a frustrated push against the door, all the glass panes shaking, then the sound of a person ringing all the doorbells in an attempt to get someone, anyone, to let him in. No one took the bait. I hurried up to the next landing, banging the bag that held the cans against my right shin. One of the vulnerable parts. Ouch, that would leave a mark.
On four, I caught a glimpse of a woman through the one-inch opening between her door and the chain that held it closed. She eyed me suspiciously.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Lucy’s friend.” Then I remembered where I was. In large cities people didn’t always know their neighbors’ names. Maybe it wasn’t a geographical thing, just the times. You could have eight thousand Facebook friends but not know the name of the person living right on top of you. And as much as Lucy traveled, it was no surprise that her downstairs neighbor barely recognized her name.
“Lucy Cavanaugh, the woman on five. I’m apartment sitting while she’s away. I’m here for the flower show.” That struck a chord. The woman undid the chain and opened the door a bit more to take a closer look. She had a few decades on me, with straight blunt-cut hair, flecked with gray, that said, I’m too serious to color my hair or have it styled.
She wore a black sweatshirt and sweatpants and held a long metal rod that could have inflicted serious damage. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought she was an aging ninja warrior with an iron pugil stick, but I recognized the bar as part of an old-fashioned door lock, the kind where one end slips into a hole in the floor and the other into a bolt on the door. Only the oldest apartments in New York still had them.
A white Persian cat slipped out of her apartment and crept around her bare ankles to see what was going on.
“Get back inside, Tommy.” She nudged the cat with her bare toes, but he didn’t budge. “Technically this is three and your friend is on four. They don’t count the first floor in this building for some reason. Absentee Italian owners, some European thing. Did you ring my bell?”
“No, ma’am.” I dangled Lucy’s keys so she could see I wasn’t the culprit. As long as she held that iron bar I wasn’t taking any chances. The cat hissed.
“Beautiful cat.” I hoped complimenting her cat would disarm her, literally and figuratively.
“Beautiful but deaf as a post. That’s why I named him Tommy. Can’t hear a thing. But I heard something. Probably the menu deliverymen. When I first moved here it was Jehovah’s Witnesses who left stacks of literature in the hallway. No one wants to feed the soul anymore. Now it’s all about the food. I shred the menus and use them in the litter boxes.”
A second cat ran into the hallway and sniffed the plastic bags I’d placed on the steps while the woman and I spoke.
“That’s Moochie. He thinks he owns the building. Always running around, looking for food. You’d think he was a stray. Come on, Mooch.”
I bent down to play with the cat, then looked up to see if it was okay. The woman nodded. Rules of engagement: if you love my pet, you’re probably all right.
She eyed the bags. “Supermarket on Ninth delivers. They’re cheaper than the Koreans, too. Even with the delivery charges.”
I thanked her for the tip, said good-bye to Moochie, and finished my way up the stairs to the sound of multiple door locks being thrown. With the bags hoisted on one hip like a baby I unlocked Lucy’s door, then reenacted the same ritual the woman below me had—chain, bolt, bolt. I piled the groceries and my backpack on the aluminum kitchen set and collapsed on Lucy’s sofa.