Getting Ready

Elena brushes her hair out of her eyes.

“Yes, ma’am, whatever you say.”

“Good. I’ll have my limo driver pick you up.”

Riding home after work, Elena stares at the cardstock in her hand, curious about the happening yet also anxious. Thanks in no small part to her position outside her boss’s office, she’s been privy to all sorts of gossip, work related and otherwise, and every week there seems to be some literary event or happening in the neighborhood. She’s aware of a few people who had attended one or two, and not once has anyone described the goings on as being anything but pedestrian. They remind her of an intellectual panel—calm, sedate, and entirely boring.

Yet the gleam in Ms. Lewis’s eye suggested more than she let on.

Sandwiched between a heavy-set older woman and a rank homeless man, Elena massages her forehead, trying to ignore the stench and sweat that permeated the subway. She turns the thought over in her mind, trying to figure out what made this party different than any other. Could the author in question be someone famous, a person of power perhaps? Maybe they’re a Costa award-winner or a public intellectual?

How would she know?

Exiting the popular and much crowded E train, she sprints up the massive steps toward the surface and hails a cab, tipping the driver extra to drop her off a few blocks over the newly gentrified borough of Jamaica, Queens. While the formerly blighted and racially diverse iconoclast of shopping malls and nail salons has lost much of its seedy milieu, traces of its troubled past could still been seen in the handfuls of ****-crazed homeless and hard-faced men and women who call it home. No wonder Elena’s bronze-faced driver grips the steering wheel tightly. Yet for all its ups and downs, it’s also her home too, for the time being.

She nods toward him and flashes a smile, letting him know that everything’s fine, that it’s okay for him to drop her off there. She waves toward him as she walks the several feet or so toward the nondescript brick building that is her apartment. Elena ducks inside and trudges up the several flights of stairs toward her small room at the top. She collapses on her bed, exhausted and reeking of the city’s musk.

She dozes off, imagining herself at a fancy soiree, surrounded by the brightest literary minds of New York, everyone, living or dead. Brooklyn, naturally, is heavily represented. She swills her glass of merlot and tosses her head back, laughing uproariously at a quick barb by John Cheever or staring into the eyes of Jack Kerouac as he waxes poetically about the bohemian lifestyle…

Her fantasy is shattered by a knock at the door.

“Seth?” The elderly woman’s voice is squeaky yet soft. “Honey, are you there?”

Elena sighs and walks toward the door, feeling self-conscious in no small part due to the notable stains under her armpits. She opens the door, smiling graciously at her caramel-colored neighbor.

“Lucille? It’s me Elena. Your neighbor next door?”

Lucille stares at her blankly.

“Where’s my baby? What happened to my baby?”

Elena glances at the floor.

“Your baby’s long gone.”

“What are you talking about? I saw here in your room last night! You must’ve talked to her for at least an hour!”

“I’m telling you, she’s not her—“

Lucille pokes her head in.

“You done stole my Seth, haven’t you? Snatched her up and taken her away…”

“Where’s your husband? Have you taken your pills today?”

“I don’t have no husband! What are you talkin’ about?”

Elena takes her neighbor’s hand in hers and escorts her to her apartment, waving at the barrel-chested man reclining in the Laz-E-Boy chair. She shakes her head ruefully as she returns to her room, not having the heart to remind Lucille of her daughter’s **** twenty years before. She recalls the night Lucille’s husband took her aside after one of his wife’s episodes, his voice hoarse with sorrow.

During a midnight confession poured out over glasses of scotch, he’d recounted the agonizing details of his daughter’s wasting away in a hospital bed, ridden with sores, able to breathe only through the assistance of a respirator. The disease didn’t have a name back then, but her parents were sure it was connected with Sethlunya’s aid work in Africa—helping the poor, the parentless, and the disenfranchised. They told the doctors, the specialists, anyone who they thought would listen only to be scoffed at by the “educated” of the medical elite.

Twenty years later they’d be proven right after a fashion—by a lone epidemiologist working in the bush of the Central African Republic. It’d long been speculated that the illness was somehow transmitted from ape to human, and slowly those suspicions were being confirmed, study by study, autopsy by autopsy. By then Lucille had grown increasingly senile and remembered less and less—yet she still retained the memory of her young daughter, her almond eyes glowing with idealism and innocence.

Elena pushes the thought away as she jumps into the shower. She scrubs the grime and dirt of the day off her legs, torso, and legs as the steam envelops her, breathing it in heavily. Water trickles down her back as the pulsating water droplets soak her. Her chest heaves as she sighs, mentally checking out for this portion of the evening.

The next six hours are spent sitting at the kitchen table, waiting. She tosses the business card over in her hand, examining it as if viewing it for the first time. She picks at the folds of her pajamas, wedged in her ass crack. It makes her feel as though she’s a fourteen year old boy at a shopping mall. At least there’s nobody around to capture the moment on film.

As the moment approaches, she slips into something more appropriate. Reaching into her closet, she pulls out a sleek black dress with spaghetti straps, tossing it on her bed as she switches out of her sports bra into a seamless underwire number that’s less conspicuous. She slips into the dress, briefly feeling self-conscious for wearing her cotton panties in lieu of silk lingerie.

The trills of a car horn pierce the night. She quickly throws on a pair of knee-high boots and a beige trench coat, hurriedly checking her reflection in the mirror in case her lipstick a shade or two below passing muster—this is an official function, after all.

“Miss Bancroft, there’s someone waiting for you downstairs.” A neighbor knocks.

“Thank you for reminding me.”

As she runs down the steps, she brushes the hair out of her face in an effort to look presentable. First impressions…

Her jaw almost drops at the sight of the curvaceous blonde at the landing, dressed similarly to her except for a black trench coat.

“Who are you?”

“Good evening, Ms. Bancroft. Your boss told me all about you.”