They also cuffed the gray-haired guy, but he had his eyes locked on mine. He looked pissed, for sure, but something new was there. A kind of astonishment. A stunned disbelief.
And, for the first time, the whole world could see me.
Callback
by Sarah Pemberton Strong
Audubon Arts District
I didn’t become a plumber because I like lying on my back in crawl spaces while fiberglass insulation and mouse turds fall on my face. I didn’t become a plumber because I like getting sprayed with black drain water, either. I became a plumber for the money, and because I like certainty. Plumbing’s not an ambiguous job — the pipe either leaks or it doesn’t, the toilet is clogged or it isn’t. Money and certainty and the satisfaction of a job well done.
I had to keep reminding myself of these reasons as I turned onto Audubon Street. I was on my way to a new customer’s house, and it was going to be hard to make a good first impression given that I was still covered in fiberglass and dirt and smelling of eau de drain. Once upon a time, being a woman plumber had seemed both transgressive and sexy: think girl driving a truck, think big pipe wrenches, think buff upper arms. But after spending half the morning lying under Lamar and Francine Bowman’s rotted pipes, I felt about as transgressive and sexy as a bucket of dirty water. I smelled like a sewer and I had a bad case of the creeps from accidentally grabbing a dead mouse when I reached for my wrench. I’d been wearing rubber gloves, but still. And to make matters worse, the Bowmans were broke, so when I wrote out the bill I charged them only half of what I usually do.
“Isn’t that illegal?” Charlotte asked me once when I confessed I gave discounts to poor people. “And besides, how can you tell who’s poor, anyway? Some people are millionaire skinflints — while they’re alive everyone thinks they’re paupers and it’s only after they’re dead that—”
“I can tell,” I interrupted. Charlotte has probably never even driven through the Bowmans’ neighborhood, not even with the windows rolled up and the doors locked. “Besides,” I said, “it’s gotta be less illegal than redlining.”
Charlotte hates it when I talk like this. Part of my appeal to her is that when she’s with me she feels like she’s slumming, and if I start going all analytical on her it messes with this. To shut me up that time, she poured me a drink. It was Charlotte who taught me to appreciate extremely good whiskey, which is a problem in that she’s no longer my girlfriend and I’m too much of a cheapskate to buy it myself. I also have a rule about drinking alone — I don’t. But as I sped away from the Bowmans’ that day, it occurred to me for about half a second that I might stop by Charlotte’s condo and ask her to let me take a shower. A shower and a splash of her famous Scotch to take away the feeling of having picked up a dead mouse. She lived right in Audubon Court and I knew she’d be there. Charlotte works from home, doing some kind of stock trading from her bedroom. She lies on her bed and looks up at this enormous projection of her laptop screen on the bedroom ceiling and talks on the phone and makes about a zillion dollars an hour. You can tell Charlotte is rich just from the way she talks to people, even if you only happen to overhear her ordering coffee in a Dunkin’ Donuts. Except Charlotte would never go into Dunkin’ Donuts. She only drinks Willoughby’s.
The idea of using her shower was pure fantasy, though. In the first place, I was too filthy — she wouldn’t have let me into her bathroom, which has white fluffy everything — and in the second place, there wasn’t time. I have a thing about being late — I’m not. Ever. It’s OCD, I know, but it’s also one of the reasons I don’t have to advertise. I looked longingly up at Charlotte’s window as I drove through the Lincoln Tunnel, which is what we call the illegal cut-through on Lincoln with the private footbridge arching across it, and I kept going. I’d rather be dirty than late. I turned the corner and parked, then appraised myself in the rearview mirror. Dirty hair, stained hoodie. Spattered jeans, cracked steel-toed boots. I ran my fingers through my fiberglassy hair. I look good in my work clothes, actually, if you like women who look like scruffy teenage boys, but I didn’t smell so hot. I did a hasty cleanup, scrubbing my face and hands with a few baby wipes. Then, hoping I smelled more like baby fragrance than old drains, I went to the door.
Most of the big houses in this neighborhood have been converted into law offices or therapy practices, but not this one, a gorgeous three-story brownstone. And judging from the single nameplate, the Lancasters had the whole place to themselves. The door knocker was a big brass affair that probably weighed as much as my tool bag, and I heard it echo through what must have been a cavernously large hall inside. There was a long wait, during which I banged the knocker again.
The woman who finally answered had a bath towel wrapped around her head. She was wearing a leopard-print dress that looked painted on, though her face put her somewhere in her fifties. She was holding a mascara wand in one hand and her expression said that although she was annoyed at being called to the door in the middle of getting dressed, she was too well bred to say anything about it.
Rich. Very. You can tell, I thought again. Then I said, “Mrs. Lancaster? I’m the plumber. Nicky Biglietti.”
If she was surprised to see a female plumber, she didn’t show it. She invited me in and I followed her through the enormous entrance doors and down the hall. The brownstone’s ceilings were a good twelve feet high, and the walls were covered with big, imposing oil paintings in fancy gold frames. Beneath them, lots of antique furniture that looked like the real deal was strewn about.
I followed Mrs. Lancaster up a curving flight of stairs. The way she carried herself reminded me of Charlotte — she took up space like she knew the space liked her taking it. You could practically see the air molecules stepping aside to make room for her. It’s a money thing, I think. I followed her through the master bedroom, past an enormous boat of a bed that might have been teak, and finally reached the bathroom door.
“We had a plumber in here just a month ago,” she said, stepping aside, “and now the sink’s clogged again. She looked at me and smiled. “I couldn’t be shedding that much hair, could I?”
I glanced at the towel on her head. “I don’t know,” I replied, “I haven’t seen your hair.”
She reached up and pulled the towel off. Dark gold locks, still damp, fell down around her face and rested on her shoulders. I thought for a second about touching a curl. Her hair was thick and wavy and smelled somehow of damp grass.
“Well?” She caught my gaze and held it. I wasn’t expecting that, and I looked away.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just the plumber.”
She turned away too then, and her stockinged feet padded out of the room. A moment later I heard the sound of a blow-dryer.
The clog in the drain was hair all right, but something else too. When I pulled my snake out, a thin line of gold was tangled around the end of it, a necklace impossibly knotted up among a tangle of drain-colored hair that might have once been her shade of blond. There was a pendant strung on the chain, a gold heart with one small, clear stone set in it. It looked like the kind of necklace a teenage girl would wear, not a woman in her fifties, but on the other hand, Mrs. Lancaster was doing the leopard-print dress pretty well, not to mention the eye contact. I rinsed off the tangle of hair and chain, and when I did, little flickers of rainbow fire shot out from the jewel in the pendant.