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I freeze in the doorway until the picture is taken. Giggling, the girls move on, unaware I’m also in the photo. Then again, there’s a chance they might not even notice me at all. It’s easy to feel invisible on this patch of busy Manhattan sidewalk. In addition to the Bartholomew tourists, I see dog walkers, nannies pushing strollers, harried New Yorkers doing the sidewalk slalom around them.
I join them all at the corner two blocks away from the Bartholomew, waiting for the light to change. The streetlamp there bears a taped flier that’s come loose at one edge, the paper flapping like a windblown flag. I get glimpses of a woman with pale skin, almond-shaped eyes, and a mane of curly brown hair. Above her photo, in siren-red letters, is one dreadfully familiar word.
MISSING
Memories lurch out of nowhere, leaping on top of me until the sidewalk turns to quicksand beneath my feet.
All I can think about are those first fraught days after Jane vanished.
She was also on a flier, her yearbook photo placed under the word MISSING, which was colored a similarly urgent red. For a fewweeks, that picture was everywhere in our tiny town. Hundreds of identical Janes. None of them the real thing.
I turn away, afraid that if I look again it’ll be Jane’s face I see on the flier.
I’m relieved when the light changes a second later, sending the dog walkers, nannies, and weary New Yorkers into motion across the street. I follow, my footsteps quick, putting as much distance between me and the flier as possible.
8
I now have only two hundred and five dollars to my name.
Grocery stores in Manhattan aren’t cheap. Especially in this neighborhood. It doesn’t matter that I bought the least-expensive things I could find. Dry pasta and generic red sauce. Off-brand cereal. An economy-size box of frozen pizzas. My only splurge was the handful of fresh fruits and vegetables I bought to keep me from being completely malnourished. It’s mind-boggling to me how a few oranges can cost the same as five pounds of boxed spaghetti.
I leave the store with more than a week’s worth of meals carried in two sagging paper bags. They’re an unwieldy pair, which shift with every step I take. They’re heavy, too, a fact I blame on the frozen pizza. I hold the bags high so they can lean against my shoulders for additional support. Even then, I barely make it through the uncaring throng of New Yorkers hurrying past me in all directions. But when I reach the Bartholomew, there’s Charlie, who sees me coming and holds the door wide open. He ushers me inside with a dramatic sweep of his arms that makes me feel a bit like royalty.
“Thanks, Charlie,” I say through the narrow gap between bags.
“Let me carry those for you, Miss Larsen.”
I’m so eager to be relieved of my load that I almost let him. But then I think about what’s inside these bulky bags. All those store-brand boxes with their rip-off names and apathetically designedlogos. I’d rather Charlie not see them and have the opportunity to judge me or, worse, pity me.
Not that he would.
No decent person would.
Yet the shame and fear are still there.
I’d like to say it’s a quirk of my currently dire financial situation, but it’s not. This fear stretches back to grade school, when I invited a new friend named Katie to spend the night. Her family was wealthier than my parents. They had a whole house. My family lived in half of one that had been sliced down the middle into two symmetrical units, a fact made glaringly obvious by our neighbor’s habit of keeping her Christmas decorations up all year round.
Katie didn’t seem bothered by that half of house bedecked in silvery garland and twinkling lights. Nor did she mind the smallness of my room or the budget-conscious mac and cheese we had for dinner. But then morning arrived and my mother placed a box of cereal on the counter. Fruit O’s, not Froot Loops.
“I can’t eat that,” Katie said.
“They’re Froot Loops,” my mother said.
Katie eyed the box with undisguised scorn. “FakeFroot Loops. I only eat the real kind.”
She ended up skipping breakfast, which meant I did, too, much to my mother’s aggravation. I refused to eat them the next morning as well, even though Katie was long gone.
“I want real Froot Loops,” I announced.
This brought a sigh from my mother. “It’s the exact same thing. Just with a different name.”
“I want the real thing,” I said. “Not the poor-people version.”
My mother started to cry, right there at the kitchen table. It wasn’t subtle crying, either. This was shoulder-heaving, red-faced weeping that left me terrified and confused as I ran to my room. The next morning, I woke to find a box of Froot Loops placed next to an empty bowl. From then on, my mother never bought the generic brand of anything.
Years later, during my parents’ funerals, I thought about Katie and those Fruit O’s and how much money my name-brand obsession cost over time. Thousands of dollars, probably. And as I watched my mother’s casket lowered into the ground, the main thought running through my head was how much I regretted being such a little shit about something as innocuous as cereal.
Innocuous or not, here I am, hurrying past Charlie into the lobby. “I’ve got them. But I won’t say no to being helped with the elevator.”