Summer and the City Read Free Page B

called.”
    “Thanks.”
    “And remember, all long-distance calls are collect.” She lumbers out like a mummy. If she can barely walk in that rubber suit, how can she possibly run in it?
    I’ve only known Peggy for twenty-four hours, but already, we don’t get along. You could call it hate at first sight.
    When I arrived yesterday morning, disheveled and slightly disoriented, her first comment was: “Glad you decided to show up. I was about to give your room to someone else.”
    I looked at Peggy, whom I suspected had once been attractive but was now like a flower gone to seed, and half wished she had given the room away.
    “I’ve got a waiting list a mile long,” she continued. “You kids from out of town have no idea— no idea —how impossible it is to find a decent place in New York.”
    Then she sat me down on the green love seat and apprised me of “the rules”:
    No visitors, especially males.
    No overnight guests, especially males, even if she is away for the weekend.
    No consumption of her food.
    No telephone calls over five minutes—she needs the phone line free in case she gets a call about an audition.
    No coming home past midnight—we might wake her up and she needs every minute of sleep.
    And most of all, no cooking. She doesn’t want to have to clean up our mess.
    Jeez. Even a gerbil has more freedom than I do.
    I wait until I hear the front door bang behind her, then knock hard on the plywood wall next to my bed. “Ding-dong, the witch is dead,” I call out.
    L’il Waters, a tiny butterfly of a girl, slips through the plywood door that connects our cells. “Someone found my bag!” I exclaim.
    “Oh, honey, that’s wonderful. Like one of those magical New York coincidences.” She hops onto the end of the cot, nearly tipping it over. Nothing in this apartment is real, including the partitions, doors, and beds. Our “rooms” are built into part of the living room, forming two tiny six-by-ten spaces with just enough room for a camp bed, a small folding table and chair, a tiny dresser with two drawers, and a reading light. The apartment is located right off Second Avenue, so I’ve taken to calling L’il and me The Prisoners of Second Avenue after the Neil Simon movie.
    “But what about Peggy? I heard her yelling at you. I told you not to use the phone in your room.” L’il sighs.
    “I thought she was asleep.”
    L’il shakes her head. She’s in my program at The New School, but arrived a week earlier to get acclimated, which also means she got the slightly better room. She has to walk through my space to get to hers, so I have even less privacy than she does. “Peggy always gets up early to go jogging. She says she has to lose twenty pounds—”
    “In that rubber suit?” I ask, astounded.
    “She says it sweats the fat out.”
    I look at L’il in appreciation. She’s two years older than I am, but looks about five years younger. With her birdlike stature, she’s one of those girls who will probably look like she’s twelve for most of her life. But L’il is not to be underestimated.
    When we first met yesterday, I joked about how “L’il” would look on the cover of a book, but she only shrugged and said, “My writing name is E. R. Waters. For Elizabeth Reynolds Waters. It helps to get published if people don’t know you’re a girl.” Then she showed me two poems she’d had published in The New Yorker.
    I nearly fell over.
    Then I told her how I’d met Kenton James and Bernard Singer. I knew meeting famous writers wasn’t the same as being published yourself, but I figured it was better than nothing. I even showed her the paper where Bernard Singer had written his phone number.
    “You have to call him,” she said.
    “I don’t know.” I didn’t want to make too big a deal of it.
    Thinking of Bernard made me all jellyish until Peggy came in and told us to be quiet.
    Now I give L’il a wicked smile. “Peggy,” I say. “She really goes to auditions in that