“What does she do, your mother?” asked Tom Satville.
“She’s on a bunch of committees. Hadassah. The temple sisterhood. That kind of thing. She throws parties. Fund-raisers.” She smiled. “And she shops. That’s mainly what she does.”
“And she reads,” corrected Lil. “She’s read everything. She reads like, ten books a week.”
Sadie smiled apologetically at Tom Satville. “I think it’s more like one or two.”
“She reads a lot,” confirmed Tal.
“But she reads everything,” Lil went on. “Books about string theory. William Gaddis. Donna Tartt. Mystery novels. Crazy stuff. John Grisham.”
“She loves John Grisham,” Sadie agreed. “And British mysteries. Cozies. Elizabeth George. Who’s not actually British.”
“And every magazine,” continued Lil.
“Every magazine?” asked Tom Satville.
“A lot of magazines,” Sadie conceded with a shrug. “She has a lot of time on her hands.”
“Like what?” asked Tom Satville.
“Harper’s, The Economist, The Nation, The New Republic,” Sadie told him, ticking the names off on her fingers. “The American Prospect, The Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones, The Utne Reader, The Atlantic, though she won’t read their fiction. She hates short stories. Um. A bunch of Jewish magazines, like Hadassah and The Jewish Week. Commentary. Though she doesn’t agree at all with their politics. And she’s always complaining that they’re boring.”
“So she’s kind of a public intellectual?” Satville asked, sending Tal into a spasm of silent laughter.
“Um, not really,” Sadie told him. “She’s more of a completionist. She also reads Ladies’ Home Journal and Better Homes and Gardens and all that. She clips recipes for me.”
“There are more, Sades,” Lil insisted.
“Really?” asked Sadie. She was hungry and if she and Tal were going to go their separate ways this evening, if she wouldn’t see him until the following night, then she’d rather get their parting over with. “I suppose Time,” she added. “And sometimes Newsweek. And, of course, the Times magazine. And she’s probably the only person who reads those local neighborhood magazines. Quest. East Side Spirit or whatever it’s called. And New York. She actually loves New York.”
“The New Yorker?” suggested Tom Satville.
“No. Not anymore. She canceled her subscription.”
“Really?” Tom Satville appeared shocked. “That seems odd.”
“She says it became just like People after Tina Brown took over. She’s really down on the rise of celebrity culture.”
“She should talk to Ed Slikowski!” cried Lil, so loudly that Sadie worried that Ed could hear her. “That’s his thing, too.” The four of them turned to look at Ed, who was still at the front of the loft, cornered by Caitlin Green-Gold. To his left, Sadie spotted Beth walking through the front door, trailed by Dave.
“Hey.” Sadie turned to Tal. “Where are they going?”
“Let’s go see,” he said, taking her hand. “We’ll be back,” he called to Lil and Tom Satville.
It’s time to leave, Sadie thought. She was bored and tired and hungry. Bean, Sadie thought, I’ll get Beth and we can go to Bean. The room, now, was filled with strangers—friends, perhaps, of the band? After several wrong turns, Sadie and Tal arrived at the front of the loft, its door propped open by a cement brick, where Dave and Beth sat on the front step. Dave jumped up as soon as he saw them. “You wanna head?” he asked Tal.
“Sure, if you’re ready,” said Tal, squeezing Sadie’s hand.
“Have fun,” she told them. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” Tal nodded and kissed her quickly on the cheek, his gaze already off down the street.
For a moment, she and Beth watched them walk away, Dave lighting a cigarette, their lanky frames oddly similar when lit by the yellow glow of Bushwick’s old streetlights.
“What do you say we go get some dinner?” Sadie asked Beth.
“That sounds great,” she said. “Let me just run to the bathroom, okay?”
Sadie nodded. “I’ll go find Lil and say good-bye.”
Inside, the girls fought their way through the crowd, which seemed to grow thicker and wilder by the minute. Midway through, Sadie realized that she’d lost Beth, and that Lil was nowhere in sight. Left alone in the middle of the large room, Sadie surveyed the company. An unusually large number of guests wore glasses. Is our entire generation going blind? she wondered, irritated. What a lazy metaphor. She, at least, seemed to be. For weeks, she’d been plagued with headaches, like a needle inserted into the back of her head. She’d mentioned it to Tal on Wednesday and he’d suggested she get her eyes checked. “That’s how I knew I needed glasses,” he’d said. He wore contacts now. “Oh, no, I don’t think that’s it,” she’d said. “I have perfect vision.” But the very next day, after work, they’d gone to a French movie on Court Street—she’d insisted on doing something to celebrate—and spent the whole two hours scrambling to read the strangely fuzzy subtitles. Glasses, she thought, bleh. She knew that is was “cool” now to wear glasses—so cool that (could it be?) perhaps some of the glasses that surrounded her were props—but she somehow couldn’t rid herself of her mother’s Eisenhower-era admonition against them. For women, of course. For men, they posed no threat to desirability. This was Number 367—or perhaps 54—of Rose Peregrine’s Rules for the Upkeep of the Modern Female, which began with the obvious (sweaters should only be cashmere; fur coats, mink or sable), delved into the practical (tweezers should always be slant-edged), before devolving into extreme esoterica. Sadie, unlike Lil, had a limited appetite for down-to-the-stitches descriptions of calfskin wallets with brass clasps and leather linings (“Anything else just falls apart”), or the appropriate colors—black, brown, bone, or, on occasion, navy blue (provided one owned corresponding shoes)—and styles for handbags, which had to have a strap of at least an inch in width and should never extend below one’s waist; legs must never be shaved, only waxed (“it just grows back thicker!”); hair must never be colored at home (“you’ll ruin it!”), only at “the hairdresser’s”; skirts that ended above the knee and patent-leather shoes were suitable only for prepubescent girls (“you don’t want to look like a streetwalker!”); and faces should only—only!—be cleansed with cold cream.
The older she grew, the more Sadie found herself unconsciously following Rose’s strictures, even as she became increasingly frustrated with Rose’s adherence to them, particularly those that veered away from the areas of women’s ablutions. Rose would not, for example, eat with her coat on, or while walking down the street, or at any sort of bar, or at a cafeteria-style establishment, or, God forbid, from a tray. She had no tolerance for plastic cutlery and refused to drink water from a bottle, much less to buy water in a bottle (“We’re not in Mexico!”), but believed flocked paper luncheon napkins to be a wonderful modern contrivance. Her views on what constituted “food” did not include the cuisines of Thailand, India, Japan, Malaysia, Spain, the islands of the Caribbean (which she also refused to visit, saying this region had “no culture”), or the nations of Latin America, excepting Argentina, which was “European, actually” and “has a very large Jewish population, you know.” Her mother, she thought lately, was becoming a character.