The one girl, long-legged with curly dark hair, chases a smaller blonde, their laughter shrill and infectious in the still, empty room.
“Hillary! Melissa!” Dragging a metal tape measure behind her, a tall, bony, very pregnant woman in a stretchy black jumpsuit suddenly appears, her expression slightly harried underneath an explosion of dark curls. “Sorry,” she mutters with an apologetic smile, then tries to glare at the two little girls. “Hey, you two. Cool it.”
Naturally, they just laugh all the harder and take off again, their sneakered feet beating a syncopated rhythm against the bare floorboards as they race each other up and down, up and down, the length of the room. The woman rolls her eyes, then smiles in a whatcha-gonna-do? grin. “Baby-sitter crisis, sorry.” She extends her hand. “I’m Ginger Petrocelli. You must be Marilyn?”
“No, Ellie. Levine. Her mother’s assistant. Marilyn couldn’t make it.”
Ginger’s brows lift slightly, then she grins. “God, that is a great hat,” she says, eyeing my red wool cloche. “Where’d you get it?”
“It was my grandmother’s,” I say, once again scanning the living room. “Is this place a knockout or what?”
The woman laughs. “That’s one word for it.” Over in the far corner, the little girls collapse on the floor in a fit of giggles. “At least they’re not trying to kill each other,” Ginger mumbles under her breath, then nods toward the folder clutched to my chest. “Is that for me?”
“What? Oh, yeah.” I hand it to her. “I tried to organize it a bit on the way over, but I’m not sure how much good I did.”
Halfheartedly shushing the children, Ginger starts flipping through the torn-out magazine pages. A plain gold band gleams on her left hand. And from out of nowhere, I feel this…prick of envy.
This is very weird, especially since I don’t tend to think much about my marital status, much less obsess about it. Maybe because I already have a kid, I don’t know. Not that I haven’t gone out occasionally since Starr’s birth. Fix-ups happen. But honestly, it got to be more trouble than it was worth. You dress up, you go out, you’re on your best behavior. So what do you really learn about the other person, other than whether or not he’s got good table manners? Then there’s the whole will-or-won’t-he-call-me-or should-I-call-him? trauma, which usually is more about your own ego than whether or not you really want to see him again—
“Well, if nothing else,” Ginger says beside me, scrutinizing one of the clippings, “she’s got good taste.”
“That would be her mother. I don’t think Marilyn has any taste—”
We’re interrupted by the tiny brunette who looks just like Ginger, all done up in mauve Baby Gap.
“Gotta go potty.”
“I thought you just went.”
“Gotta go ’gain.”
“Sounds familiar,” I say, following them back through the equally large, airy bedroom to the bathroom. Yeow—Nikky wasn’t kidding about the wallpaper in here. Sunflowers. The size of garbage can lids. On a lime-green background.
“You have kids?” I hear from the bathroom.
“One.” I look away, but now reverse-image sunflowers are seared onto my retinas. “A five-year-old girl. With the smallest bladder in the metropolitan area.”
Ginger emerges, the little girl shooting past her and back out to the living room, where the giggling starts up again. “I doubt that. Right now, that honor goes to me.”
I like this woman, I realize. Her neuroses seem to lie within the normal range. For New York, at least. Since that’s a rare thing in my life, I’m reluctant to leave just yet.
“When’s your baby due?”
“In six weeks. Might as well be six years.”
“Are the girls fraternal twins?”
“They’re not even related,” she says, smiling. “The dark-haired one’s actually my half sister. My mother’s testimony to yes, you can get pregnant after you think you’ve gone through menopause. And little blondie’s my husband’s.” Her voice softens when she says this, except then she mutters “Shit” under her breath and glances at her watch. “I’ve got another appointment on the upper East Side in twenty minutes. Girls, get your coats and let’s get cracking! God, I hope I even can get a taxi at this hour!”
We all troop down the stairs, the girls jumping from step to step. I tell her about billing Nikky’s business, she nods and digs a card out of her purse.
“I don’t really need—”
“You never know,” Ginger says with a shrug. “And when you’re just starting out on your own, believe me, you give business cards to everybody.”
I glance at the spiffy logo on the card as we all thread through the door and down the steps. GPW Designs, it says, with an address in Brooklyn.
“What’s the W for?” We hang a right and head toward Sixth Avenue; Ginger laughs.
“Wojowodski. My husband’s name.” Hanging on to one kid with each hand, she tosses me a grin. “What can I say, I’ve got bad name karma.”
“Is he worth it?”
“Most days, yeah.”
I get that funny feeling in the pit of my stomach again, decide to change the subject. “So—you’re in business for yourself?…Oh, here, let me do that,” I offer when I realize Ginger’s going to try to hail a taxi while hanging on to her briefcase and two wiggly little girls.
“Thanks.” She moves them all back nearer the curb as I step out into the street. “I just hung out my shingle a few months ago.”
“How do you like it?” I say over my shoulder as cab after cab whizzes by. “Being on your own?”
Her silence makes me turn. She seems to be considering how to answer my question, as a sudden breeze whips her curls into a froth around her face.
“It’s scary as all get-out,” she says at last. “Knowing I could lose my shirt. That I now have to pay for my own health insurance. It’s a real shock after working for big firms. Taking the safe road. Oh, God…bless you,” she says as a taxi pulls up in front of me and she herds her charges toward it. After she gets them in, she turns to me, our gazes level since I’m now standing on the curb. Her brown eyes are huge and unnervingly imploring, as if she’s been sent to warn me of something. And I can tell she’s as perplexed about why she’s answering my question as I am about why I asked it to begin with.
“But you know what?” she says. “I’ve never been happier. And I knew the longer I waited, the harder it would be to take the plunge.”
“Mom-mee!” the blonde calls out. “I’m cold!”
With a smile and a “Thanks again,” she gets in, slams shut the door, and they go shooting off up Sixth Avenue.
Huh.
I
