Revenge of the Cootie Girls (24 page)

“It's okay. Take care of yourself, Robin.”

“You too.”

I hung up. He sounded so sweet, and his family sounded sweet. But now he was just a faraway voice on a phone, someone I didn't really know. I closed my eyes and saw his iconic face, which had remained so firmly and vividly fixed in my mind all these years, falling backwards into space, receding into a dot, and disappearing.

The same thing then happened with Julie's face. Different Julies at different ages flashed through my head, like a slide show in reverse chronological order—in the community-college quad putting up posters for pep rallies and dances, in her prom dress, slow-dancing with Doug Gribetz, in Minneapolis when we were fourteen and went down to the big city by ourselves for the first time together, in her Girl Scout uniform before we quit Girl Scouts, standing on a pier, laughing, in a bathing suit that matched mine. I saw her grow backwards from a beautiful young woman to a gangly adolescent to a cootie girl with braces and dorky cat's-eye glasses, and then to a dot, a spark really, and then nothing. I pulled a photo out of my recovered purse and looked at it, but it was like looking at a stranger.

I looked at my reflection again. I felt like the cab driver with the curse, whose face was changing into someone else's, or like one of those Oliver Sacks people who suffer brain damage in the part of the brain that recognizes faces, and afterwards don't recognize any face, not even their own.

That's when the voice sounded in my head again, only this time it was very specific.

You have to go to Two Joes
, it said, sudden but quiet.

20

T
WO
J
OES WAS A CLASSIC
New York coffee shop, not to be confused with the ubiquitous tony coffee bars that have mushroomed across the land. Two Joes had a half-dozen six-seater booths and a lunch counter. The humble doughnuts were kept elegantly under glass on plates atop metal stems, and in every booth one of those miniature jukeboxes perched on the wall above the square steel napkin-dispenser on the table. The waiters had potbellies barely held in by big white aprons and used their own corny code. Like, if you ordered a ham on rye, toasted, they'd ask for a “Ham on whiskey, down.” Over the years, they'd used the same plain white china, unadorned except for a single rust-colored stripe just below the rim. You had to bring your own beer and wine; they weren't licensed to sell it. The last time I was there, there wasn't a fern, pastel, or faux Art Deco accent in sight. Through many changing restaurant fashions, Two Joes had remained true to its roots.

“And why is this important?” Claire asked. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her and Tamayo exchanging indulgent, meaningful looks. Kathy had gone home.

“It's the very first place I went in Manhattan. Seeing it will help. I know it will.”

It was raining that night, the evening we landed at JFK. Julie and I had taken the JFK express from the airport, but we made a mistake and got off at 34th Street instead of Rockefeller Center. There were no cabs available, but we were young, healthy women, so we began the Long March uptown, dragging our suitcases behind us. After about three blocks, the torrential rain was too much for us, so we ducked into Two Joes to wait out the storm.

One of the things I loved about Two Joes was that the first time I was there I had a moment of déjà vu. As my super, Phil, says, “You never really feel at home in a place until you experience déjà vu there,” and I knew exactly what he meant. That's the thrill I was looking for tonight. That old déjà vu.

I remember the guy behind the counter, Joe, singing a song he made up about me and Julie, interrupting himself to curse at the delivery guy: “Harry, where the fuck you been you're an hour late goddammit we got orders waitin'.”

Joe, he cursed at Harry not with anger, but in a matter-of-fact sort of way. Better a sturdy Anglo-Saxon word that has stood the test of time than a punch in the face, I almost always say—or, for that matter, than a stiletto to the heart.

“You're giving these girls from Minnesota a bad impression of New York,” Joe said. Harry gave an exaggerated salute and then bowed to us.

And all of it—the potbellied guy singing, the dim lights, the doughnuts under glass, the rain-streaked window, Harry the delivery guy—I'd seen it all before, exactly like this. Déjà vu. At that moment, I heard this unbidden voice say: Home.

Though the rain didn't let up all night, a cabbie came into the coffee shop, and Joe told him about our predicament. He dropped us off at the hotel on his way home. Wouldn't take our money. I remember he was Irish, he had four-leaf-clover kitsch all over his car, and everyone called him Peppermint Paddy because his name was Patrick and he gave all his passengers a miniature York peppermint patty when they paid their fare.

It had been years since I'd been to Two Joes. The closer I got to the Two Joes corner, the more my heart beat. By the time we got to Sixth Avenue, I was craning my neck out the cab window, looking ahead for the Two Joes sign.

When we were ten feet away, I realized I had made a terrible mistake. At that point, I couldn't really see the sign yet, but I could see an unfamiliar light coming from the storefront. Two Joes had a dimmish, warm glow. Up ahead was a bright fluorescent glow. For a moment, I wanted to turn around and bolt. I had to force myself to go towards the disturbing, unfamiliar brightness and face the truth.

Two Joes was gone.

In its place was a generic, ultramodern pizza place. The old Coke sign had been replaced by a gleaming, backlit sign in red, white, and green, the colors of the Italian flag, under which were the words “Open 24 Hours” in neon. Everything was gone—the booths, the lunch counter, the little jukeboxes, the potbellied waiters. Inside 37th Street Pizza (brilliant name), two young guys were standing idly behind the counter while one young man in very baggy pants ate a slice and glowered at the floor. It was so boring.

I turned and walked away a few feet, and abruptly I started bawling. Loudly, and I couldn't stop. I had no tissues on me, and my nose was running. I could barely see anything through the milky glaze of tears as I ran into a deli, plopped a dollar down, and asked through sobs for some tissues. The stunned guy behind the counter, who was just a flesh-colored blob with dark hair to me, gave me a whole box of tissues. With Claire and Tamayo following me and saying things I couldn't hear over the sound of my own bawling, I tore out of the store, pulling tissues out of the big box and blowing my nose as I stumbled down the street.

I plopped myself down on a curb in front of the pizza place.

Two Joes was one of the last personal landmarks left from my first trip to New York. Over the years, I'd lost a lot of them—the old Abbey Victoria Hotel was torn down, Jimmy Ryan's jazz joint on 52nd Street had closed, the Malabar Disco was a strip joint now, the Brass Rail was gone—and now Two Joes. And there were only about a half-dozen old-style Checker Cabs still trawling the streets for fares. All of a sudden, I missed them terribly.

Two Joes, the one place that could always be relied on to bring on that delicious feeling of déjà vu … gone, because the city needed one more mediocre pizzeria, I thought.

How unfamiliar the city looked to me now. I couldn't remember anything. I felt like one of Homer's lotus-eaters in the
Odyssey
, who ate sweet lotus fruit on a strange island and forgot about the past, forgot about home, just wanted to stay and eat sweet lotus fruit with the natives.

Somehow, Claire's voice broke through. “Robin, can you talk about it?”

It took me a moment to spit it out.

“My whole life here was built on an illusion. My best friend wasn't my best friend. I wasn't squired around by a rich, sophisticated man and his friends, I didn't dazzle fashionable people who, won over by my natural charm, gave me free stuff. I was squired around by a gangster, who on at least one occasion
bought
me a date with a male prostitute, and whose mere appearance in a designer showroom caused people to fearfully dish out free stuff.

“And the Saudi prince and the Finnish mogul Julie and I danced with, they were probably just a couple of guys from Queens trying to impress us.

“Frankie the Fish did a turn as a procurer. Just like the white-slavers my Aunt Maureen warned me about before I came to New York. God, is she going to enjoy this.”

Tamayo was laughing.

“It's even better that you were squired around by gangsters,” Tamayo said. “Rich guys are a dime a dozen in this town. But gangsters—that's an adventure.”

Then I started laughing and crying, alternately.

“And we are all free women on a great adventure,” I said, quoting one of Tamayo's favorite expressions.

“Oh, I've revised that,” she said. “I'm a struggling demigoddess on a great adventure. Ha! Tell me again how you tried to beat that Perrugia sister with her own granny.”

Just then, a cab pulled up and the driver hopped out and ran past us into the all-night pizzeria, where he slapped two bucks on the counter, asked for something, then ran into the bathroom for patrons only. A few minutes later he came out, much becalmed, and almost walked out without his pizza, which was not his priority. But then the guy behind the counter called out to him, “Hey, man, your slice.” Another pizza guy took it, steaming hot, out of the oven and slapped it onto a plate. The cabbie seemed happily surprised to remember the slice, and picked it up from the counter, walking out as content as I've seen a man in quite a while. He'd had a good pee, and he was eating a nice hot slice of pizza.

Tamayo, Claire, and I all looked at each other. We laughed.

“Even though Two Joes is gone,” Claire said, “what it represents is still here.”

“What?”

“You didn't fall in love with the city because of those rich mobsters. Maybe they helped it along. But it was that déjà vu you had here that first night. If you hadn't met those guys, hadn't got all that free stuff, it wouldn't have mattered. You would have ended up here anyway. I know it.”

“You belong here. In New York, you can be as weird as you are, and it hardly matters,” Tamayo said.

“Funny that we all had cooties as kids,” Claire said.

“Hilarious,” I said.

“Geeks and nerds are cool now, you know? Even models have been rebelling. Did you see the last Prada show? No makeup, models slouching, walking gracelessly with stringy hair. It's like revenge of the cootie girls. Geek chic is in. It's the new model of beauty, trying not to look conventionally beautiful.”

“If only the models would rebel a little more and put on some weight,” I said.

The sun was up. Claire said, “Let's go to Ol' Devil Moon for a Southern breakfast. Mmmm. Grits. And you meat-eating thugs can have eggs and biscuits with pork-chop gravy. It's in your neighborhood, Robin.”

“Claire, I love you. I love my girlfriends. But I've had enough sisterhood for a while. You know what I need right now?”

“A man.”

“Yeah. There's something about men, you know? I can't put my finger on it. Whenever I try to name it, I can think of a bunch of women with the same quality.”

“It's called a penis, Robin,” Tamayo said.

“Besides that. There's something a good man has, some mysterious thing.…”

“Yeah, she needs a man,” Claire said to Tamayo.

“But which man?” Tamayo said.

Oh, shit.

Tamayo said, “Well, we'll go downtown with you.”

“You want to go to Madison Avenue with me later?” Claire asked Tamayo. “Those Tommy Mathis paintings I bought Monday? They're framed and ready for pickup today.”

“Okay. We could get Susan Brave's shower present today too. Robin, you want to go in on a present for Susan's bridal shower?”

“What are you guys getting for her?”

“It's great. Well, you'll probably find something wrong with it.…”

Claire broke in. “One of those mechanical toilet seats. You push a button and it goes up, and then it automatically goes down when the toilet is flushed. So Susan and her husband won't ever have to worry about him leaving the seat up.”

“Mechanical toilet seat. Uh-oh,” I said.

“What's the problem with a mechanical toilet seat?” Tamayo asked.

“An ugly accident waiting to happen.”

“How so?”

“A mechanical malfunction, a short circuit, and the toilet seat could go berserk. Some poor sod taking a crap could find himself hammered into the wall like a pancake,” I explained.

“You know, I never did get that, why women complain about the toilet seat being up,” Tamayo said. “After you've fallen into the bowl once, you learn not to do it the next time. You turn on the light in the bathroom, you check to make sure the seat is down, and before you leave, you put it up out of consideration for the man in your life. Or men, as the case may be. But I thought it was a funny gift. It was either that or the six-pack of Hungarian singing condoms.”

“Jeez, I was thinking of giving her a gift certificate for a facial, or maybe some Tupperware.”

“Tupperware, Robin?”

“That's what we always did back home. China and fancy stuff for the wedding, practical stuff at the shower.”

“Tupperware is great,” Tamayo said.

“It really is,” Claire agreed.

“But Susan won't want Tupperware. The
old
Susan maybe, but the new Susan would much rather get the Hungarian singing condoms.”

The old Susan was a nebbishy doormat to Dr. Solange Stevenson. The new Susan was a happy, confident producer at ABC, about to marry a cute doctor. Though assertiveness training and therapy helped, what really turned her around was Prozac. Made ya think.

“So what do the condoms sing?” I asked.

“Huh? Oh, there are three instrumentals, ‘William Tell' Overture, Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy,' something else, and then a couple of pop songs with vocals—I can't remember what they are,” Tamayo said. “The way it works is, there's a microchip at the base of the condom, which is coated with heat-sensitive stuff. When the body heat rises, the condom sings. You can't see a safety problem with those, can you?”