September 2023 Web Feature by Andy Spisak
Andy Spisak was born in New Jersey and earned degrees at Boston University and Tufts University. After working for several years in public policy and economics, he has begun a new career in writing. His short stories have been published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, October Hill Magazine, and Scarlett Leaf Review. He and his family live in Virginia.
Miriam’s Daughter by Andy Spisak
A young woman clutching a leather portfolio broke my concentration with the click-clack of her approaching steps. She wore Escada jeans and a sea green silk blouse, much nicer than the tired, cut-rate attire usually seen on campus. “You should try to look more vulnerable,” she said.
Now I did feel vulnerable. I had settled onto the floor and found my focal point—a Norah Jones concert poster taped to the cinder block wall. I’d been silently rehearsing my audition song for the school’s production of The Last Five Years. Why was a journalism major trying out for the lead in a musical about an unraveling marriage? Sure, I’d played Seymour in my high school’s production of Little Shop of Horrors. Maybe there I could have landed the role of Jamie, Cathy’s unfaithful husband. But that was in a Jersey factory town, and this was New York. There was real talent here.
“This is the only way I can concentrate,” I said.
She tapped a beat on the floor with her right foot. Her shoes were expensive too. “Well, Jamie might be a jerk, but Cathy wouldn’t have fallen for him if he weren’t a little insecure.”
“What song are you doing?” I asked.
“’Climbing Uphill.’ What about you?”
“I’m doing ’Nobody Needs to Know.’”
A production assistant poked her head out the auditorium door. “Number 127!”
“That’s me,” she said, with a toss of her long brown hair. She turned and headed toward the auditorium. “Good luck with ‘Nobody.’”
“Hey, 127, what’s your name?”
“Amy, on my way to becoming Cathy.”
“I’m Matt. Good luck…Cathy.”
My friend Jimmie Wilcox invited me to a party the Saturday after the audition. As I threaded my way through the guests in his apartment, I saw Amy talking to a man with shoulder-length hair with the consistency of corn silks. I caught her eye, and she excused herself from the stringy-haired guy.
“Amy, congratulations on getting the part,” I said as she approached me.
“Thanks. I’m sorry you didn’t. I could see you playing my faithless schmuck of a husband.”
I laughed. “It was a long shot. My roommate knew I did musicals in high school and dared me to try out.”
Across the room, a tall blond woman engaged Jimmie and a couple of other guys in an animated conversation. She climbed onto a chair with her back to us and thrust her arms in a dramatic gesture toward Jimmie and his enthralled mates. Amy winced. “That’s my roommate. I’m her excuse for an early exit if things get boring.”
“Is that her Evita routine?” I asked.
The roommate leaped off the chair and twirled in a ballet parody. The faux pirouette caused her to bump into a folding table, which Jimmie had set up as the bar.
“It’s not even eleven. The bottles usually don’t start crashing until after two,” I said.
Amy sipped her wine and frowned. “I hope I don’t have to do clean-up tonight. Would you believe she’s an anthropology major?”
“Yes, yes I would.”
I took Amy’s arm and we moved to a corner of the room away from the commotion. “You must be a hell of a singer to get that part. Are you in the theater program?”
“I am, but I’m taking a bunch of finance classes too.”
“Theater and finance. Do you want to be a producer?”
Amy smiled and shook her head. “It’s for my parents. They said I could take theater but wanted me to have a ‘real’ major. They’re paying, so…,” she said with a shrug. “What about you?”
“Journalism. I’m a photographer. I want to travel and shoot. The more off-beat the better.”
Amy leaned closer to me. “Hey, there’s a theater group in Brooklyn doing the show next week. Why don’t you come with me? Maybe I’ll pick up something so I won’t embarrass myself.” She lowered her head as she spoke, her self-doubt an unexpected contrast to her bravado at the tryout.
“That’s not the person I saw march into the audition,” I said.
“I’m sure others wanted it more…or were more deserving. My vocal coach pushed me to try out. I surprised myself.”
“Yeah, my vocal coach banged on my dorm wall and told me to keep it down.”
Amy laughed and tossed her hair. “So, are you coming? We already know the songs.”
On the evening of the show, I walked to Amy’s building on Mercer Street. I was buzzed in and knocked on the door of her second-floor apartment. Her roommate answered.
“Oh, hi…Evita,” I said.
“Evita?”
“At the party—when you were performing for Jimmie and his friends.”
She grimaced. “Ah, Amy said you were like that. It’s Julie,” she said as she waved me in.
A large painting hung from the wall opposite the doorway. Its ochre starbursts and fractal patterns in varying shades of green dominated the small room.
“Beautiful composition; it’s mesmerizing,” I said.
“I taught at a village school in Western Australia last year. It’s a farewell gift from my students,” Julie said. “It tells a story of Aboriginal identity and culture. I’m going back there this summer.”
Amy came out of her bedroom. She wore a gray satin blouse, a black skirt, and a pair of amethyst dangle earrings. “You’re the first guy who ever showed up on time,” she said.
“Hmm, I could leave and kill some time in the bodega next door.”
“I wouldn’t. The last time I went there, the owner’s Doberman tried to bite me.”
We took the B train to DeKalb Avenue. On our way to the theater, we passed a brightly-lit diner with a red neon sign boasting “Best Cheesecake in New York” in the window. Amy said we should stop in after the show.
We turned off Willoughby onto a dark street with little activity, except for a kabob take-out and a laundromat. A police car and an EMS vehicle sped past us, their sirens amplified by the narrow street. The theater resided in a repurposed warehouse. A worn purple banner with a gold Elizabethan font “BOC ~ Brooklyn Onstage Company” hung from a pole protruding from a cracked brick façade.
We walked down a narrow hallway lit by bare sixty-watt light bulbs and proceeded single-file upstairs to the theater. Amy stumbled over a lighting cable as we squeezed down a row to our seats. I grabbed her arm as she was about to fall into the lap of a woman who was tending to a needlepoint project she saw fit to bring to the show. Our shaky entrance foreshadowed the performance, which convinced Amy that the school’s effort would surpass the night’s uneven production. “It wasn’t so much off-Broadway as ‘off’ Broadway,” she said as she shook her head.
After the show, we set out for the diner for our snacks. As we neared Willoughby, two guys in their teens approached. The taller one muttered an aside to his buddy, who walked up to us and asked if we had any money. I caught the glint of the knife the tall guy pulled from his jacket pocket. It felt like that moment you slip on the ice and realize you are falling, but there’s nothing you can do about it. Without a word, I grabbed my wallet and handed over forty-two dollars. Amy fumbled through her purse and took out some bills. The kid with the knife yanked them out of her hand, and the pair ran off.
Amy’s eyes darted from one side of the street to the other. She tried to speak but her words dissolved before leaving her mouth. I grasped her hand, and we ran down the stairs to the subway. Amy wrapped her arm around my waist and pulled close to me as we waited for our train back to Manhattan. Drops of water from a leaky pipe pinged as they struck the track bed and formed a gray and rusty puddle, the same colors as the knife. I replayed what had happened. It ran through me like an electric current.
Amy’s hand shook, an after tremor of the night’s trauma, as she struggled to fit the key into her apartment lock. She groped for the light switch and hurried to the kitchen. She took two glasses from the drying rack and filled them with ice. She reached into a cabinet for a bottle of vodka and poured two drinks.
Amy took a good pull on her drink and handed me the other. “I don’t think cheers are in order,” she said. “Back there, I was scared; now I’m pissed.”
I reached behind her and stroked the back of her neck. “Yeah, me too. You’re home now, safe.”
“My mother wouldn’t think so,” she said with an ironic laugh. “She wanted me to go to Cornell, where the biggest danger is frostbite.” Amy took another sip of vodka. “Julie’s staying with a friend tonight. I don’t want to be alone here.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
We put down our drinks and walked to Amy’s bedroom.
Amy offered me her apartment for the summer. Her father, Dr. Nathan Wolinsky, had secured an internship for her in the CFO’s office of the medical center in New Jersey, where he served as the chief cardiologist. Julie was returning to Australia to teach in the Aboriginal school.
A professor had saved my summer by offering me a job taking photos for a book he was writing on off-beat sites in New York. The previous summer, I worked in a steel mill, where for each eight-hour shift I stood with a pair of bolt cutters and clipped off the unfinished tips of steel coils as they passed by on conveyor hooks. The work was hot and miserable, but the job paid well, and I needed the cash to cover my school expenses.
After my last exam, I loaded my stuff from the dorm into a taxi and headed to Amy’s place. She bounded out of the building to help me carry the cartons up to the apartment. After we had set the last box on the floor, Amy took a couple of beers from the refrigerator and handed one to me.
Amy stared at the cartons cluttering the floor. “At least I won’t have to deal with this when I head back to Jersey. I will have to put up with my mother, though. At least she’s happy I’m doing something ‘practical’ this summer,” she said.
Her mother, Miriam Wolinsky, served as president of the Northern New Jersey Arts Council. She believed talent alone did not ensure success. A wry smile or a knack for taking the emotional temperature of an audience often separated those who perform at Lincoln Center from those consigned to the lounges along Route 46. Miriam indulged her daughter but bathed her in reality.
“Your only job is to keep my plant alive,” Amy said, pointing to the bushy five-foot ficus wedged in a corner. Amy walked to the tree and poked a finger into the soil. “If it’s dry, give it some water, but don’t drown it. There’s a watering can on the kitchen counter.”
“I’m not good at keeping things alive,” I said. “When I was a kid, I had goldfish, a turtle, and a hamster. They all died. My mother wouldn’t let me get near anything bigger.”
“They die for everyone,” Amy said, as she dragged her soil-specked finger over the edge of the pot. “Anyway, you’re twenty now.” She walked to the kitchen to rinse off the dirt and returned with a bottle of water from the fridge. She stood in front of the window fan and pressed the bottle to the side of her face. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said.
I rummaged through one of the boxes to find my camera. “Let’s take the tram to Roosevelt Island. I can shoot the hospital ruin.”
“Hospital ruin?”
“They built a hospital to treat smallpox patients in the nineteenth century. It was a beautiful neo-Gothic building, but it fell into disrepair after it closed. Hey, nothing like a photo shoot of creepy ruins to brighten an afternoon.”
“Great. Should I put on some black lipstick? Find a black cat to pose with?” Amy said.
“It’s Gothic, not goth.”
“All right, but we have to go to Abruzzi’s for dinner.”
“That place way up in the Bronx?
“That’s the price.”
I slung the camera strap over my shoulder, and we headed out.
Every Friday that summer, I took the Jersey Transit train to Metropark. Amy would drive from the medical center to meet me, and we’d head to her family’s summer place on Long Beach Island. Most weekends there were noisy and crowded, filled with Amy’s relatives and friends of her parents. But the Wolinskys had reserved the weekend after July Fourth for the family only and, after Amy lobbied her mother, me.
Amy’s sister, Kit, was flying in from Boston, where she attended Harvard Medical. Miriam hated the ride to the airport on the crowded Parkway. As the rest of us prepared to leave, she opened a bottle of St. Emilion and gestured toward me. “Why don’t you stay? The view from the deck is much better than that horrid Parkway.” She spoke in the tone she would use addressing her Arts Council, less an invitation than a command.
“That’s a good idea,” Amy said. “Once Kit and I get started, you wouldn’t get a word in anyway.”
I kissed Amy as she and her father left for Newark. Miriam poured two glasses of the Bordeaux and handed one to me. She opened the glass pivot door, and we walked onto the deck.
“How are you enjoying Amy’s apartment?” she asked.
“Well, it beats spending the summer in New Brunswick.”
“I’m sure. Tell me, Matthew.” (Miriam never called me Matt.) “What are your plans after college?”
Miriam was accustomed to a Tudor on five acres in Morris County and a summer house on the beach. She expected no less for her children and, like most mothers, wanted some assurance that her potential son-in-law had a future—or at least a plan.
“I’m going into journalism, photojournalism,” I said. “I’m shooting sites around New York this summer for a book my professor is writing.”
“You want to take pictures?” she asked, as she batted away a swarm of midges.
“It’s more than that.” I pointed to a pair of elderly men, who chatted while surf fishing near an outcrop of rocks. “What do you see there?” I asked.
Miriam squinted and looked perplexed. “A couple of old men fishing,” she said.
“Yes, but the fishing isn’t important. It’s the conversation, the expression on their faces. It’s about the years they’ve known each other, their friendship.”
“Ah, it’s like Amy’s music, an amusing sideline, but how far can you go with it?” Miriam squinted at the water and took a sip of wine. “Has Amy told you about London?”
Amy had said nothing about London. Her family traveled a lot; I assumed it was another holiday. “No,” I said, “are you planning a vacation?”
“Nathan operated on a Goldman Sachs partner last year, emergency surgery, saved his life. A week ago, he called Nathan and offered Amy an internship in their London office.” Miriam turned to me and took off her sunglasses in a “so there” gesture. She glanced at her watch. “Oh, I’d better get the dinner started.” Her aim achieved, she turned and walked brusquely from the deck to the kitchen.
Amy and Kit swept into the house on a wave of laughter. Kit ran into the kitchen and threw her arms around her mother. Amy took her beach hat and planted it on my head. “I see you survived. Did you and mom finish off the wine?” she asked.
I took Amy’s hand, and we retreated to a spot outside of Miriam’s earshot. “Not quite, but we had an interesting talk. Tell me about London,” I said.
Amy shot an “oh fuck” look toward the kitchen. She drew close to kiss me. “Later, not now.”
Over the summer, Amy and I had fallen into a routine of taking an after-dinner walk to escape the boisterous beach house. We finished dinner after ten and excused ourselves as Miriam quizzed Kit about her residency choices.
Amy and I used the light from our phones to avoid the sea turtle nests and shell shards. We walked to a secluded spot past the last house on that stretch of beach and rested on the cool sand. Amy closed her eyes and placed her hand on my chest.
“Why didn’t you say anything about London?” I asked.
Amy turned toward me. “I only found out a couple of days ago. My mother got excited when my dad told her. She likes to make plans; it makes her feel important,” she said.
“She made it clear I’m not part of her plans. She seemed pleased I’d be out of the picture.”
“It’s not that. She has expectations. When she and my father started, they didn’t have much. She worked while he was in med school. After he finished, she went back for her degree.” Amy lifted her hand in a sweeping motion. “It wasn’t always like this. She wants to make it easier for me and Kit.”
Amy took off her windbreaker and placed it under her. She reached down to remove her shorts and pulled me on top of her. We joked about Miriam’s reaction if the beach patrol interrupted us and escorted us back to the house. Her mother would glom on to our indiscretion as evidence of my aimless, shameless character.
After we had finished, we lay side-by-side for several minutes until Amy broke the awkward silence. She turned to me and jabbed a finger into the sand to trace an arc from her to me. “When you think about it,” she said, “someone will be that intern. Why not me? It’s an opportunity.”
“What about your music?”
“The music’s fun, but it has to end sometime.”
I clutched Amy’s hand. “You are Miriam’s daughter.”
Amy laughed and leaned over to kiss me. “Hey, if I wanted to leave you, I wouldn’t need London as an excuse.” She swiped strands of hair away from her eyes. “And before you know it, it’ll be summer again.”
The sea breeze had picked up. Amy slipped into her jacket, and I pulled her close to me in the chill.
The Wolinskys hosted a party on Labor Day weekend. Many of the relatives and friends who had frequented the house throughout the summer were there, along with Kit, enjoying her last free weekend before beginning a rotation at Mass General. After Nathan toasted the gathering, Miriam added a coda with her expectations. “And to my beautiful daughters—Kit, who will soon realize her dream of becoming a doctor, and Amy, who will take on her new adventure and shine.”
The glasses clinked. The balloons popped. Amy flinched. “I won’t miss this,” she said.
The next day, I carried Amy’s luggage from the Mercer Street apartment to an Uber waiting to take us to JFK for her flight to London. We settled in for the monotonous ride to the airport. As we drove through Queens, Amy’s hands grew more animated as she talked about her life in London.
“Theo will be at the airport to help me settle in.”
“Theo?”
“He’s my Goldman contact. He said he’d meet me at Heathrow and drive me to my apartment. I guess they don’t want their interns schlepping luggage from the airport.”
By the time we reached the Van Wyck, she was in full bloom. “Did I tell you I might get to travel? Theo said he’d put me on one of the teams for their clients in Paris or Milan. I’d be there mostly to take notes and listen, but still.”
The driver blew his horn at a car trying to cut him off. The blast interrupted Amy’s London chatter, and she turned to me with a serious look. “Remember, Julie will be back from Australia on Sunday.”
“You’re sure she’s OK with sharing the apartment?”
“Yeah, she’s supposed to keep an eye on you,” Amy said with a playful jab to my arm.
“Ah, and who will be keeping an eye on you?”
Amy’s eyes widened. “Why would you say that?”
“Theo this, Theo that,” I said.
“Oh…I guess I was going on.” Amy rested her hands on her lap. “You could come over. There are plenty of weird places to photograph in London. Talk to your professor.”
“Hmm, I don’t think he has that in mind,” I said. It was easy for Amy. She had choices.
We kissed goodbye before Amy entered security. After clearing the checkpoint, she turned to me and waved. She slalomed between the other travelers before disappearing down the corridor. The flight to London would take seven hours, but in her mind, she was already there.
The day after Julie returned from Australia, a delivery worker buzzed the apartment to let her know he was dropping off a large carton in the lobby.
“It’s the totem!” Julie said.
I walked down with her, and we lugged the bulky container up the stairs to the apartment. We set it down in the middle of the room. Julie retrieved a serrated knife from a kitchen drawer. She inserted the tip of the blade to break the seal and was careful not to cut too deep. She opened the flap and removed several wads of crumpled paper protecting the wood carving. The sculpture stood a bit over five feet. Two arms carved from wood curved up from the base; the hands converged to support a bird.
“It’s a warndurla, an Australian magpie. One of the students carved it from eucalyptus. It’s his totem, his spirit animal,” Julie said. She surveyed the room to find a suitable location for the imposing sculpture. “Ah, I know just the place.”
She walked to the ficus and dragged the pot away from the wall. We picked up the sculpture and set it down in the corner. The afternoon sunlight caught the totem and gave it an eerie glow.
Julie pointed to the bushy plant, crowding us in the middle of the room. “Well, we don’t have space for this.”
She grabbed the lip of the hefty pot, and I picked up the opposite side. We dragged it down the stairs, through the lobby, and onto the street. We set it to rest on the curb to await its pick-up on trash day.
“Amy’ll be pissed for getting rid of her plant,” she said. “I’ll take the rap.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t think she’ll be coming back here,” I said.
As we turned to go back to the apartment, a gust of wind blew the ficus over. I pulled it up and wedged it against a light pole. I shrugged my shoulders and Julie responded with an approving smile.
Back in the apartment, I picked up my camera gear. The professor liked the photos I took over the summer and extended my stipend for another semester. I planned to photograph some of the old men playing bocce in Pelham Bay Park. Sometimes the simplest subjects are the most exquisite. I passed by Julie’s room on my way out to let her know I was leaving. She was sitting on the floor and unpacking a box, the contents of which were strewn around her.
“I’ll probably be asleep when you get back. I’m still jet-lagged,” she said.
I nodded and set out for the Bronx. It was that sad time of the year when summer prepares to surrender. If the subway connections worked out, I’d have an hour of sunlight to take my shots. But I didn’t have a minute to waste.
El Portal Literary Journal 