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 rubber suit? Can you imagine the smell?”
L’il grins. “She belongs to a gym. Lucille Roberts. She says she takes a shower there before. That’s why she’s always so crazy. She’s sweating and showering all over town.”
This cracks us up, and we fall onto my bed in giggles.
The red-haired girl is right: I have no problem finding her.
Indeed, she’s impossible to miss, planted on the sidewalk in front of Saks, holding a huge sign that reads, DOWN WITH PORNOGRAPHY on one side, and PORNOGRAPHY EXPLOITS WOMEN on the other. Behind her is a small table covered with graphic images from porno magazines. “Women, wake up! Say no to pornography!” she shouts.
She waves me over with her placard. “Do you want to sign a petition against pornography?”
I’m about to explain who I am, when a stranger cuts me off.
“Oh, puhleeze,” the woman mutters, stepping around us. “You’d think some people would have better things to do than worrying about other people’s sex lives.”
“Hey,” the red-haired girl shouts. “I heard that, you know? And I don’t exactly appreciate it.”
The woman spins around. “And?”
“What do you know about my sex life?” she demands. Her hair is cut short like a boy’s and, as promised, dyed a bright tomato red. She’s wearing construction boots and overalls, and underneath, a ragged purple T-shirt.
“Honey, it’s pretty clear you don’t have one,” the woman responds with a smirk.
“Is that so? Maybe I don’t have as much sex as you do, but you’re a victim of the system. You’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy.”
“Sex sells,” the woman says.
“At the expense of women.”
“That’s ridiculous. Have you ever considered the fact that some women actually like sex?”