the catch was blown so it took two slams with the side of her fist to make it stay shut.
“Espece de merde,” she muttered. “Ma che cazzo fai.”
I leaned against the edge of the reception desk. “So get Tracy to make the Granta Bitches let us use theirs.”
“She’s stuck in Geoffrey’s office with Betty, going over edits for the Fall Bulletin.”
“O joy, O rapture.”
Betty was the ex-wife of Julian, the owner, and had retained enough post-divorce cred to march down from the Review and slap us around whenever she felt like it. On bad days that was pretty much hourly.
A door crashed open against Sheetrock, down the short hallway toward Editorial.
I could hear Betty doing her usual screech-ranting-banshee number: all “congenital idiocy” and “how- dare-you-fuck-with-me-like-this,” and blah blah psycho-bipolar-hosebeast blah.
Pague and I flinched at the noise of a sudden crack-splash explosion: Crockery v. Wall.
“Fucking Betty,” said my sister. “She made me bring her that coffee. In my mug from home.”
“Bitch throws like a champ, though. Especially considering she’s missing an arm.”
“Don’t be evil,” said Pagan.
“Compared to Betty?”
“You want to be like her when you grow up?”
She narrowed her eyes at me, hands on her hips. No one can shame me like Pagan. Especially when she’s right.
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“Go tell the Granta Bitches I need to make copies. I don’t want to extend Betty’s psychotic break du jour.”
I checked my watch. “Can’t. Late for the cemetery.”
“Chickenshit.”
“What if I interrupt some Granta-Bitch Kill-Toddlers-for-Satan fest?” I asked. “They’ll go for my throat like a pack of Dobermans.”
She rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe I’m related to you.”
“Them’s the breaks. Gotta run.”
5
I’d never thought of Jamaica as an actual place.
It had always been more transition than geography. Three stops out of Penn Station and you alighted briefly at this celestial concrete expanse carpeted all Jackson Pollock with discarded Kool butts and soda-can tabs and matte-black ovals of chewing gum—a stretch of nowhere to be raced across when exchanging your sleek city train for the big-shouldered cars of the Oyster Bay Line.
I had nothing against Queens, per se, it was just that if you were raised in the milieu I had been, you were reminded of the borough beneath this platform maybe once a year, if that often.
It might happen on your way to the airport, or when a member of your party dismissively remarked upon the “bridge-and-tunnel crowd” still pressed up hopeful against the velvet ropes while a nightclub’s bouncer ushered all of you inside that particular season’s haute meat-market Nirvana (and please understand that such inclusion had always made me feel slightly ashamed and unworthy—whether I’d been granted entrée to Studio or Regine’s aged fifteen, Area or Pyramid at twenty—since I can’t dance for shit and besides which never had the price of so much as a draft domestic beer in my pocket, even if I was on somebody’s guest list and didn’t have to pay the cover).
With all of the above in mind on this particular September afternoon, I ventured down Jamaica Station’s cast-iron staircases to street level for the very first time.
I consulted my rough sketch of map every few blocks, walking on through a crowded terra incognita of bodegas and boombox stores, newsstands and fruit vendors, feeling very much like the only white chick for miles.
The day had grown hot: air rank with diesel fumes and curry, melting asphalt and the chicken-soup funk of humanity, not to mention the occasional sweet-sour belt of Dumpster leakage wafting out from restaurant alleyways.
I trudged onward, the sidewalk crowds thinning, the stores fewer and farther between, until I finally turned into a cratered dead-end block in the shadow of some elevated subway tracks. A wall of vines ran down one side of this lane, the occasional snatch of ornate rusted fence peeking out from beneath the leaves.
I spotted a gate sagging open next to a small Romanesque building of golden stone. Its low roof-pitch was more suggestive of synagogue than chapel, and its rose windows were shattered.
I looked across maybe a quarter-acre of cleared lawn inside the gate. There were crooked gravestones poking forth from the hacked weed stubble and a dozen brush-filled black garbage bags lined up at the head of a trail leading into the lot’s still-riotous green interior.
I followed the narrow path into a jungle of nettles and vines, towering three times my height in some places.
“Cate?” I called. “It’s Madeline….”
I heard soft laughter ahead.
“Cate?”
I found her around the first bend of trail through the brush, with a