Hanging by a Thread

Starr’s bottom lip starts to tremble. “It’s not funny.”

I hug her harder, trying to tamp down the chuckles. Underneath that so-cool-I-rule exterior is a very sensitive little girl. “I know it’s not, honey. And I’m not laughing at you. But honestly—where did you hear that?”

“Jason. He says it all the time. He says some other stuff, too, but he told me I can’t say those words, ’cause you’d burn his butt.”

I crack up all over again.

Of course, the next time I see Jason, he is so dead.

“Ohmigod! Ellie Levine!”

Ten days have passed. I’m standing in a crush of bodies at a new deli close to work—I’d given my old one the heave-ho the day I saw a cockroach the size of the Hindenburg taking a stroll through the potato salad—when I hear the voice. I crane my neck, but even in four-inch heels all I see are chests and arms.

“Ellie! It’s me! Mari!”

My mouth drops open. Ohmigod, is right. Mariposa Estevez, my best friend from college. We fall into each other’s arms—much to the annoyance of the hundred or so people in our immediate vicinity—as I wonder how I managed to lose touch with somebody I thought would always be close.

Of course, then I remember. Daniel. Who happened at a time in my life when I hadn’t yet figured out there’s a difference between installing a man as the center of my universe and letting everybody else spin right out of my orbit.

“Girl,” Mari says with a huge smile. “You are looking good!”

She is nothing if not kind.

The tall, thin product of a French mother and a black Cuban father, the woman in front of me, the woman fully aware that every straight man in the place is gawking at her, the woman radiating some out-of-this-world perfume she probably didn’t rub on her wrists from a magazine strip, is unbelievably gorgeous. Skin a perfect golden milky color, huge dark gold eyes, God-given below-the-shoulder ringlets, full lips shimmering in some right-this-minute burgundy that would make me look like my great-aunt Esther three weeks after her funeral. She is wearing a coat that, swear to God, looks like it’s made out of rags, thigh high black leather boots with five inch spike heels that scream dominatrix (but classy), a striped miniskirt and a tiny, olive-green cashmere sweater that on anyone else would look like moldy cheese.

“So are you!” I say, thinking, Why is it so hard to hate nice people?

“Numbah fawty-three!” booms from behind the counter.

I check my number. Seventy-five.

“I can’t believe we lost track of each other!” she says, beaming. “How are you doing? What are you doing?”

“Seventh Avenue,” I hedge. “You?”

Mari rattles off a major designer name. As in, not just first tier, but on the right hand of God. “But I’m thinking of moving on. It’s all about keeping your options open, you know? Listen, I’m running like three years behind here—” she grins “—but we have got to get together for drinks…shit, hold on…”

She pivots to the man behind her and says at the top of her voice, “You got some kinda affliction that makes you grab women’s butts or what? And don’t even think about giving me some sorry-assed story about how crowded it is in here. You don’t see me with my hand on your balls, do you?” Then, muttering “Jerk,” she turns back to me, fishing for something in her pocketbook. Gucci. This year’s. The girl is doing well. “Are you uptown or down?”

“Oh, um, actually…neither. But here’s my cell…” I pretend to rummage through my purse. “Damn. I must’ve left my card case at work.”

“Not a problem.” She pulls out a second card, scribbles my cell number on it. “I’ve gotta couple evenings free next week. Will that work for you?”

“Uh, sure.”

“I’ll call you, I swear!” she says, slithering through the crowd, undoubtedly leaving a plethora of hard-ons in her wake.

“Sixty-fowah?” I hear. “Sixty-five? Yo, sixty-five?”

My bag rings. My arms squeezed so close to my ribs I’m about to suffocate in my cleavage, I somehow get my phone from my purse, while number sixty-six—presumably—and one of the guys behind the counter are having a major set-to about exactly how fresh the tuna salad is. Guy sounds like nothing’s gonna do it for him short of the fish swimming up the Hudson that morning, then taking a taxi over from the 42nd Street pier.

“Hey,” comes the faint, pitiful voice through the phone after I say hello. “It’s me.”

I now understand what they mean by “her heart leaped into her throat.”

“Tina?” I press the phone harder to my ear, stuffing my index finger in the other one. “I can’t hear you very well—where are you?”

“Home,” I barely hear as “Seventy-five!” booms right in front of me. Jesus. How’d it get to be my number so fast? I wave my hand; a round-faced, white-shirted man beckons to me with a gruff, “Okay, sweetheart, what’ll it be?”

“Hang on,” I say into the phone, then: “Liverwurst on whole wheat, mayo on the side, lettuce, pickle.” Back into the phone: “We’ve got a crappy connection, I can’t hear you—”

“We just ran outta whole wheat, you wan’ white, rye or pumpernickel?”

It’s not even noon, for God’s sake, how can they be out of whole wheat already? “Rye. No seeds—”

“Oh, God, Ellie—I’m so sorry…”

“About…what?”

“I couldn’t go through with it.” By now, she’s sobbing. “I just got too scared.”

My stomach drops. “What are you talking about?”

“What do you think?” I can hear her now, boy. Hell, half the people on either side of me can hear her now. “I got rid of the baby! I went by myself, and just…did it.”

“Here ya go, sweetheart,” the deli man says, handing me a white bag emblazoned with hieroglyphics over the glass case. “Pay at the register. Number eighty-t’ree!”

Ten people surge in front of me, shoving me into the minuscule air pocket left in their wake. I tell Tina to hang on a sec as I peer inside the bag, noting a suspiciously dark image through the butcher paper and nothing that even remotely resembles a container of mayo. Which means either there isn’t any or it’s slathered on the bread thicker than Anna Nicole’s makeup.

Just a mite too preoccupied to assert my usual snarky self, however, I elbow my way through the hordes and over to the register, grabbing a Dasani, a bag of chips and a Hershey’s bar to round out my meal. Juggling the bag, my purse, my now-extracted wallet and the phone, which is too damn small to wedge between my shoulder and my ear, I finally say, “You went alone?”

“Yeah, it was okay, I took a taxi home after.”

The dark-haired hottie on the register gives me a total that could feed a family of six in his country of origin for a week; I swipe my Visa and say, quietly, “You okay?”

The silence on the other end slices right through to my soul. “You’re not mad?”

Frankly, I don’t what I am. And God knows, I don’t know what to say. I do know, however, that she didn’t call just to give me the news.

I sign the slip and say, “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

I told Gretta, our new bookkeeper—Angelique did indeed throw in the towel, the end of last week—I had a family emergency and to tell Nikky to call me on my cell if she needed to get in touch with me. So far, she hasn’t. Which actually might break the tension as Tina and I sit here on her king-size bed in her aqua-and-peach pseudo-Southwest style bedroom, watching Ricki Lake and sharing my mayonnaise-drenched liverwurst on pumpernickel. I gave her my whole chocolate bar, though. I think she needs it more than I do.

More than anything, I want to ask her what she’s planning to tell Luke. Who stopped by last night to show me the itty-bitty pair of athletic shoes he found. The day before that, a toy elephant nearly as large as a real one. Well, a baby one, anyway.

The people at the clinic told Tina since she had it done so early, she should be basically okay by this evening, just to take it easy for a day or so.

But there’s “okay” and then there’s “okay.” I’ve finally sorted out my feelings at least enough to know that I’m feeling sick about the whole thing, but I can’t tell what’s going on inside Tina’s head. Which, as I said, is totally unlike her, since at any given moment her emotions hover a good foot outside her body. Rather than really talking, she’s instead providing running commentary about the bozos on today’s show. Something about fat girls who slimmed down and then slept with men who hadn’t given them the time of day when they were heavy. Without bothering to reveal their true identities, of course.