ONE
Snowflakes pirouette down over a waking Manhattan as I emerge from the subway. Christmas is almost upon us and rushing New Yorkers scurry past me at a frantic pace. Immediately I zig-zag on the salted sidewalk in a bid to avoid them. You’d think after living in this city for twenty years I’d be used to the pace, but it still overwhelms me. Oh listen, I’ve read all the confidence building self-help books and listened to every life-affirming podcast in a bid to shake off my – what’s been called –timidpersonality because the publishing business is brutal. ‘Breathe.’ I inhale deeply. With my wild red curls tumbling down my back, I lift my chin up high. My eyes rest on the towering silver skyscraper that hosts the offices ofUltimate Locations Wedding Magazine.
‘You got this.’ Although my nerves are jangling like a rattling tambourine, I make a fist pump to rev myself up, clutching my wedding venue lookbook tightly to my chest. I’ve put my heart and soul into this lookbook in the hope it will impress Amanda Crosse, my boss, enough to promote me to feature writer today.
‘Help the Salvation Army?’ A small woman dressed in an elf costume startles me as she shakes a clattering bucket with white writing in a red shield. I rummage in my pocket and drop some loose coins in. Then, staring up at my building again, I refocus.Not only do I crave more creative writing fulfilment than my proofreading job offers but I also have to find a new place to live in the next few weeks. If I don’t get this promotion and raise, I’ll have to go back to living with my mother. While I know I’m very lucky to have that option, a recent development in my mother’s life makes it a non-starter as far as I’m concerned. The pressure of choosing to be single and solo living is getting trickier in this financially inflating city. My eyes dart between the cars as I wait for a gap in the commuter traffic on the sidewalk.
‘This is going to go well,’ I tell myself taking a positive step forward then back as a weaving jogger speeds up. I’m still filled with insecurities when it comes to my job in publishing because I didn’t go to college – Dorothy, my divorced mom, couldn’t afford it, so I’ve worked my way up in the publishing world.
Because I love to write and I love to write about love.
A little ironic, I know, considering I myself have sworn off love for life! But for as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be that kind of writer, not specifically a magazine writer, just someone who writes about love. Maybe it’s because my parents had such a disastrous marriage. As a young girl, I devoured books and spent all my free time writing short stories for competitions, winning my fair share. I would have given anything to go to college to study journalism, but it wasn’t a possibility. My first actual job was helping Mom and setting tables in the early hours at Sweet Dough, the small bakery my mother worked at, baking the most incredible pastries. It was in that little bakery I would conjure up all sorts of love stories. It was also where I picked up a copy ofUltimate Locations Wedding Magazine(that a customer left behind) while biting into a warm chocolate brownie and spotted the advertisement for an internship at the magazine.My eyes had almost popped out of their sockets. The brownie fell off my fork. The small black and white square box containing the ad glowed like a beaconof hope. Not even bothering to remove my cupcake-splattered apron, I’d literally run across town where I waited outside the building, Googling Amanda Crosse. Pushing myself well and truly out of my comfort zone, I was practically hyperventilating. When Amanda left the building I’d wobbled alongside her from the revolving door to her waiting car, trembling with nerves, and blurted at her how much the internship would mean to me, and how much I loved to write about love. Over her shoulder, Amanda had asked my name. Maggie Grace, I’d answered after far too long a pause, almost forgetting who I was in the excitement. Then, she’d told me to email some writing samples to her. Easy, I had a desktop folder full of them. But I had to fight damn hard for the position due to the huge competition and I got it.
Just one year later I’d impressed Amanda so much she hired me as a runner before I later moved to an assistant role and then to proofreader five years ago. But writing is my dream and these last few years I’ve watched in dismay as juniors with less experience and louder personalities thundered past me for a promotion to feature writer in their towering stilettos of ambitious steel, while I cowered in the background, passed over. This morning, I am determined to speak up. To push myself forward like I did as that brave, hopeful intern. At thirty-three, I’ve served my apprenticeship and I deserve my place in that writers’ room. Besides, after all these years working here, I’m pretty damn good at spotting a unique wedding venue! Stepping back onto the sidewalk I’m momentarily distracted, reciting the promotion pitch I’ve practised endlessly in my head, when a thunderous warning call erupts from close behind me.
‘Will ya watch out!’ a man’s strong voice hollers in a thick accent.
‘W-what the heck—?’ I yelp as my head whirls round, my long green wool coattails flying as the man narrowly avoids collidingwith me. I leap back off the kerb, barely missing an electric scooter that swerves around me. I almost lose my footing in my ankle boots. Cars honk, couriers on bicycles dodge and shout at me, but I steady myself just in time, absolutely mortified at the attention I’m drawing to myself.
‘You okay, sweetie?’ a woman in a knee-length quilted coat asks and I nod quickly. With burning cheeks, I look around to see the running man. He almost knocked me off my feet and didn’t even stop to see if I was okay! The gall of him! His back is turned. He’s tall, very broad, wearing a faded black leather jacket, denim jeans, white sneakers and a bright burnt orange woollen hat pulled down over his head.
Who the hell is he? Just as I press call to tell my mom my news, a red cardinal bird sweeps down inches above my head and lands on the snow-covered top of the newspaper vending machine. When I turn back, the man is already pacing through the lobby of my building, his arms swinging purposefully, rhythmically matching the pace of his determined walk. A man on a mission it seems.
‘What a jerk. Like slow down. Where’s the fire?’ But of course, instead of yelling this after him, I just mumble to myself under my breath, a childhood coping mechanism I have taken into adulthood. My eyes return to the bird. I drink in the stark beauty of its blood-red plumage against the dazzling white of the snowflakes. It’s like staring at a wondrous winter painting.
‘Well hello there, beauty,’ I whisper, my eyes locking with the bird’s beady black ones. ‘I hope there’s truth in seeing you? That my fortunes will turn up rosy within twelve days?’
‘Helllloooo? What fire? What fortunes? What’s going on?’ a faint voice calls out from my earbud.
‘Huh? Oh, crap! Mom!’ I grapple for the loose white wire tangled in my unruly curls, pull it free and insert the other earbud quicky. ‘I’m sorry!’ I apologise for leaving my momhanging as I catch my breath.
‘It’s seven in the morning and all I hear is some kind of chaos – you okay, honey?’ Her muffled concerns echo from her Art Deco bungalow in Scarsdale.
‘I’m fine, Mom, some obnoxious man almost knocked me over. No manners, so rude.’ Cupping my hands, I blow into them for heat. Will I ever stand up for myself? What will it feel like when I do? I hold my five-foot-six frame up tall. I’m going to give it to the next person that makes me feel this way! If I don’t, I may as well throw all my self-help books in the trash can!
‘Sweet Lord, I thought your room in the brownstone had gone up in flames. All those candles Mrs Schwartz lights, I wouldn’t have been remotely surprised. I’ve cinnamon biscuits for her by the way. Is the For Sale sign up yet?’ Mom shouts as she always does, as though the further away I am, the louder she has to talk.
‘I’m fine.’ I turn to face the wind, grasp my mop of red curls in one hand as the breeze plays havoc with my hair. ‘The For Sale sign goes up on Christmas Eve.’ The thought of that sign going up makes me desperately sad. I’ve loved living with Mrs Schwartz. She is a formidably strong woman.
‘You can always move back in with me. I’ve been using your room to host bridge night, but it’s still yours.’ Mom has repeated this a hundred times since I told her I have to find a new place to live.
‘I’ll be fine. I have a few places to see near the office.’ I lie to put her at ease. Today, I have something else to tell her, but before I can tell her she hurls into a diatribe about Alice, her neighbour, and her varicose vein operation that I’ve already heard about more than once this week. But lately there has been a recent development, an unforeseen turn of events that I can hardly believe: my mother is a changed woman. She’s a lot more upbeat. There’s a definite glint in her eye, a coy smile that appears out of nowhere when she’s busy whisking or kneadingin the kitchen and doesn’t think I’m looking. The reason makes me smile – my mother has fallen in love! After all these years of rubbishing romance, she has fallen for George Mitchelson, the owner of Sweet Spoon Bakery where she supplies her baked goods. Mom is yet to confess this to me, but I know she’s on the verge, searching for the right moment. Despite my love for my mother – and I really do love her – there is no sugar-coating the fact that she parented me in a blaze of romantic negativity. For as long as I can remember, my mother has been utterly dismissive and scornful of love and marriage, and it rubbed off on me. It’s true she had a very unhappy marriage and as the relationship crumbled, my dad, Jim, cheated on her, and in her own words, made matters ‘grottier’ by marrying the woman he had an affair with.
In 1990, my dad Jim Grace, a sailor ten years her senior, had walked into Pastry Heaven, the New York bakery then twenty-five-year-old Dorothy worked in. He was on his first day of shore leave and took one look at Mom and proclaimed fate had brought them together. An unplanned pregnancy and a quick marriage followed. It’s also fair to say that the reason I now relate to my mother’s discontent with men is because I too have had my heart broken. Most notably by Cooper Dwight, my boyfriend of two years. I dated Cooper from the age of twenty-eight to thirty until he came home from the restaurant he worked in one night and told me he had fallen in love with Tanya, the sommelier, that fate had brought them together and that he loved her in a way he had never loved me. It was beyond hurtful. I had been too shocked, shamed, too sick, too humiliated to react. As always, timid to a fault, I just packed my bags and my mom picked me up sobbing outside the liquor store on the corner of his apartment block. It’s safe to say that after Dad’s affair, my mom’s scornful outlook on love and Cooper’s nasty treatment of me, I, too, have sworn off relationships forlife. Never again will a man hurt me. There are two things I’m sure of. One: I do not believe in fate; and two: I am never, ever letting myself fall in love again. This heart of mine is sealed off.
TWO
I’m claustrophobic. The sidewalk is becoming busier, noisier, louder. I sidestep the weaving commuters and dart back behind the newspaper vending machine for some much-needed space. I love male company, don’t get me wrong, I’m just not willing to get my heart broken again. So, I’m not in the market for a romantic relationship. I’ve more sense! Mom is still jabbering in my ear about Alice’s bloody veins (pardon the pun!). Shivering, I eye the mechanical reindeers with blazing noses pulling sleighs behind the window next door to my building. People are huddled in oversized winter jackets against the harsh December conditions. Red-cheeked dog owners walk their pets before breakfast, the canines wearing reflective Christmas coats and booties as they bark and bounce.
‘Don’t you hate how Christmas injects blind panic into the already frantic pace of Manhattan?’ I try to interrupt my mom. Although I truly love this city, it’s never quite felt like home to me.
But nowhere ever has.
My story is rather unusual. I was born three weeks early, out at sea, and sometimes think I’m more like a dolphin than a New Yorker as a result. I’m timid, intelligent, agile and happy in my own company, exactly like my marine buddies. But I would liketo be more assertive. And I am working on myself. That mound of self-help books on my bedside locker will attest to it. I want to stand up for myself. I want to be tougher. A go-getter like my co-worker Eliza, who was deservedly promoted to feature writer three years ago. More self-confident like Jill, my best friend, who is a hugely successful influencer. These are women I aspire to be like. What I’d really love is for women to look up to me one day like I look up to them. Speaking of Jill, I miss her dreadfully and worry so much about her. It may appear that she’s living the dream online, but real life is kicking her hard right now. Her pain is breaking my heart.
‘I do hate it. As you know, honey, after fourteen years with your cheating father and all that time at sea and moving bases, I crave stillness and tranquillity,’ she laments.
‘Mom, when are you going to let it go and move on?’ My tone is light, but my question is leading as my breath comes out in wisps, clouding around me like an evaporating fog. For a change, Mom is slow to answer.
