When the Messenger Is Hot Read Free Page A

my voice. I think she’s sort of got it, but what do I know? It’s not like I ever studied myself. But you think you know how you seem to people, and you really don’t. I think of myself as unremarkable in a lot of ways; I don’t have a New York accent, and I don’t think I have any overly weird habits like not letting my food touch on the plate or being especially neat or sloppy, although I am sometimes afflicted by a tiny bit of obsessive-compulsive disorder when it comes to locking my door; I usually have to unlock it and lock it again to make sure it’s locked, and I tend to check it a bunch of times before I go to bed, too, which obsession has not gone past Apple, but so anyway she manages to find interest in the way I shuffle my slippered feet and in my fairly rigid schedule of having frozen donut holes and 1 percent milk in bed when Seinfeld comes on at 7:30 (Leo joins at the foot of the bed with a Milk-Bone), which I notice because she shuffles her slippered feet over to my bed with her own donut holes and milk (and Milk-Bone) before I have a chance to get there first. I do end up letting her chip in when she asks to use my shampoo and conditioner and pretty much all of my products. It may be equally as fascinating to me that she thinks using my shampoo has some relevance to the Wendy experience as it probably is to her that I use generic shampoo. Anyway, she goes as far as getting her hair cut like mine (by my haircutter) even though her hair is poker straight and mine takes forty-five minutes to blow out and still needs to be slept on for a night if I don’t want to look like an extra on Dynasty . She wants to know where I got my purple camouflage pants and all my little beaded cardigans (which I’m sort of known for) and has never heard of eBay, so I sit her down at the computer and take some bit of time to explain to her how the Internet works, and when we finally get into eBay, although she’s completely willing to out-and/or overbid for any item by a ridiculous amount, she doesn’t want to wait for the auctions to end, so we venture out to get her some sweaters, which I wouldn’t have minded so much if she weren’t a size two. Those cardigans tend to be on the small side (I don’t know if women were smaller in the fifties or what), and she ends up with a spectacular midnight blue one I could never have gotten one arm into, but I try to keep my resentment to myself; she was just born that way.
    Naturally, I don’t ever drive around New York City, but Apple has a car and knows from the book that I lived in L.A. for a while (after a fight with my then-boyfriend I got on a plane in an alcoholic blackout, and even though I sobered up about a week later I wasn’t in any big rush to get back to New York) and that driving was this huge deal (and I’m not even going to discuss the whole matter of buying a used car in L.A., which is a trauma I just don’t have the time to get into), suddenly having to drive everywhere, driving a mile even just to get milk (and then it’s some giant Ralph’s where the milk is of course in the back and you have to walk three city blocks through the store to get it so that the total milk-errand time is never less than forty-five minutes), but also having to drive 37.4 miles to and from work every day, not to mention the many thousands of dollars spent on auto repair totaling more than the actual cost of my car. I lived in L.A. for four years and never got comfortable driving. And so Apple asks me to take her for a ride in her Expedition, which to me is the equivalent of driving the Broadway bus, and we go on a short, rectangular route (all right turns) up Riverside Drive to 107th Street, back down West End Avenue, and home, which is going to have to be enough for her to observe my driving weirdnesses, which apparently it is, because she finds it noteworthy that I keep both hands on the wheel at all times (at “ten