Girls in White Dresses - JENNIFER CLOSE [2]
Isabella and Mary signed the lease and moved into the apartment, which had gray walls that were supposed to be white and a crack in the ceiling that ran from the front door all the way to the back windows. When Isabella stood in the bathroom, she could hear the upstairs neighbors brushing their teeth and talking about their day. They were from somewhere in the South, and their accents made everything more amusing. Isabella often found herself sitting on the side of the tub, her own toothbrush in hand, task forgotten, listening to one of the girls talk about a date she’d been on. Sometimes the neighbors smoked cigarettes in their bathroom, and the smoke traveled down the vent, seeping into Isabella’s bathroom and making the air hazy.
They hung mirrors on the walls to make the apartment seem bigger, and put up bright yellow curtains to distract from the grayness. They put up a fake wall to make Mary’s bedroom, a slim rectangle that held her bed and desk and not much else. The wall was thin and Isabella could hear when Mary sneezed or turned a page. Mary was always shut up in her room working, which drove Isabella crazy.
“What are you doing?” she’d ask through the wall.
“Studying,” Mary always replied.
“Again?” Isabella would ask. Mary would sigh.
“Yep. Again.”
After the first month, Mary started to go to the library more. “I’m too easily distracted,” she told Isabella. It was quieter in the apartment with Mary gone so much, but Isabella never really felt lonely. And if she did, she’d go to the bathroom and listen to her neighbors chat, breathing in their smoke and laughing along with them as they said things like “Y’all knew he was a bump on a log” and “Back that train up!”
Isabella got a job as an assistant, working for two high-level executives at a mailing-list company. She wasn’t sure what they did exactly, but she did know that they called her their “executive assistant” and that her main job every morning was to get Bill a corn muffin with raspberry jelly and to get Sharon a chocolate chip muffin. Bill asked for his muffin, and Sharon did not. This was part of the game. Each morning, when Isabella placed the muffin on Sharon’s desk, she said, “Oh, I shouldn’t!” but she still ate it. “I was just getting Bill’s muffin and I thought maybe you’d want one?” Isabella would say in response. As long as she did this, they seemed happy.
Isabella’s days and weeks fell into a routine, but she always felt like there was something else she should be doing, something better that was waiting for her. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons, she and Mary went to the park across the street and ate hot dogs in the sun. Mary always brought her textbooks with her, and took notes and read. Isabella just stared at people.
“This is the first fall that I haven’t gone to school,” Isabella said to her once.
“Mmm-hmmm,” Mary said. She turned a page and uncapped a highlighter.
“Maybe that’s why I feel so weird all the time,” Isabella said.
“Maybe,” Mary said. She filled the whole page with yellow smudges and Isabella was jealous of her. She didn’t want to go to law school, but Mary had purpose and assignments and for that Isabella envied her. All Isabella had was two bosses who just wanted muffins. And sometimes jelly.
Their friends from college, Kristi and Abby, lived in the same building as they did. Kristi was the one who’d recommended it to them. “You have to live in a doorman building,” she’d said to Isabella, as though it was something everyone already knew. “It’s not safe otherwise.” Sometimes Isabella went out with them, but they exhausted her. Kristi and Abby always wanted to get dressed up and go out for sushi or go to a party where you had to have your name on a list to get in. They both worked in PR and all they talked about was events and RSVPs, which Kristi pronounced “Risvips” for some reason. “I can get you on the list,” Kristi would often say to Isabella.