Read Online Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions by Bacon Press Books - Free Book Online Page B

kids.
    “That’s what we have secretaries for,
Lauren.”
    “Do any of your gals ever get out of the
typing pool?”
    “That’s where we get our private
secretaries,” he said.
    Between interviews, I hung out in the Grand
Central Station waiting room, scanning the classifieds for job
leads. I grew familiar with all the women with shopping bags, the
ones who waited for trains that weren’t coming and talked to
imaginary friends. Unclaimed women with no visible means of
support. Like me, except I was younger and better dressed. I went
to the movies on my lunch money, and saw every movie on 42nd Street
that wasn’t x-rated. In The Arrangement Kirk Douglas languished in
anguish, while Faye Dunaway blasted him for not living up to his
potential. Poor Kirk, with his swimming pool and his waterfront
mansion, who’d never write the Great American Novel because he’d
been such a successful ad man. Most of the audience thought this a
hoot,
    “How did your day go, sweetheart,” my father
said when we met in Grand Central to take the train home.
    “Okay,” I said, unable to meet his eyes.
    .
    Copy trainee wanted. English Major preferred.
Advancement opportunity for bright self-starter . . .
    After Christmas I answered an ad in the New
York Times and landed an entry level job with Chatsworth Osborn, a
small agency specializing in real estate and mail order
advertising. My first press release was the letter I wrote to the
Alumnae Quarterly. Like any good press release it did not lie, but
simply stressed the aspects most likely to impress a casual
reader.
    83 Bleeker Street
    New York, NY
    February 10, 1970
    Dear Muffy,
    Lauren Ginsburg is alive and well and living
in Greenwich Village. My apartment is right around the corner from
The Fantasticks and the Little Red Schoolhouse. Working on Madison
Avenue and living in the Village is everything I dreamed it would
be . . .
    .
    The apartment in the Village was four tiny
rooms on the sixth floor of an old six-floor walk-up tenement
building. For $65 a month and my share of utilities I moved into a
closet size bedroom with a view of the air shaft. Zebra striped
contact paper covered the wall facing my bed. The yellow and green
daisy stuff was in the kitchen.
    I’d never met anyone like Eva, the roommate
who came with the apartment. She fit none of the available
categories. She was a philosophy major from Oklahoma State with a
Fredericks of Hollywood wardrobe; a logical positivist with bad
taste. Everything in her closet was either jungle print or black.
It all fit tight and smelled of stale perfume. She sold magazine
subscriptions by telephone, which she thought was a fabulous job.
She loved everything about New York except New Yorkers, who were,
in her words, jaded and provincial. After dinner Eva and I often
played chess. She could talk and play at the same time, which gave
her a decided advantage over me.
    “I just hate it when I call those mean little
Westchester County towns,” she complained one night.
    I defended the folkways of New York
suburbanites.
    “You always have to answer a ringing phone no
matter what else you’re doing, and it’s a real pain when someone
interrupts your dinner to sell you something.”
    “But people don’t have to be so unfriendly
about it. And no one ever smiles at you on the street,” she
said.
    “There’s eight million people in the Naked
City. If I smiled at all of them my teeth would fall out. Plus lots
of them are crazy and you don’t want to make eye contact.”
    “That’s what I mean by jaded,” she said, and
swiped my remaining bishop.
    Provincial was wearing white cotton
underpants instead of black nylon panties. The very word “panties”
made me cringe, and still does. I hated the way nylon felt next to
my skin. Cold and insinuating, like the men I met in the East Side
singles bars Eva took me to, who put their hands on my thighs and
talked about their careers.
    “You can’t go back to the freshman mixer,”
Eva said.