God Given Gifts

Perle Besserman

Fay’s fifteen minutes of fame had come and gone on a Saturday, with the sun slicing one sharp ray through the lettering on the Polish butcher’s window across the street from her Yorkville tenement apartment. She was twenty-one, in the second year of her dance education scholarship at Barnard–where she’d earned a reputation for being “eccentric” because once, during a snowstorm, she’d come to school on skis. Basically, she was a loner, known only sketchily to her few New York acquaintances as an army brat from Texas whose father, a career army doctor, was starting to have his own doubts about Iraq. Her mother–a fiercely devout Catholic working as a receptionist at the Marriott, on whose stationery she typed her letters disapproving of Fay’s politics, her living in New York and “shacking up with every Jewish Tom, Dick, and Harry”–was not a subject for discussion at all.
…..Mrs. Engelhardt, the janitor’s wife, was leaning out of the ground floor window of her apartment on the day Fay was discovered. Fay greeted her before stepping inside and climbing the corroded staircase leading to her own apartment on the top floor. On the second landing, she stopped to catch her breath. Then she started climbing again, past the corner apartment shared by two Cuban exiles perpetually arguing in elegant Castilian Spanish, up to the third floor, where the sun knifed through a cracked glass skylight. She reached her door. Her heart was still pounding with the thrill of what had happened on the Lexington Avenue bus stopping for a red light in front of the parking lot that had once been the School for the Deaf. A woman in a pale yellow silk suit with brown braids arranged on top of her head like a Polish peasant dancer had approached her and asked if she’d done any modeling.
…..“No,why?” Fay said.
…..“I just thought you might. You have the height, the facial structure, the body…”
…..They were just passing Bloomingdale’s. Fay’s stop was eight blocks away. “I’m a dance major at Barnard,” she said, the nape of her neck prickling with anticipation.
…..“Have you ever done TV?”
…..“No, I haven’t,” Fay said.
…..“You’d be perfect for commercials. You strike me as the travel ad or soft drink type.”
…..“I’ve never modeled,” Fay said.
…..“You’d probably photograph smashingly with those green eyes and those cheekbones,” the woman said.
…..“My grandmother was part Cherokee.”
…..The woman didn’t seem to hear her. “Here’s my card,” she said. “I get off next. The name’s Leorna Mann, I’m with Sherman, Hopewell and Brand–you’ve heard of us, I’m sure.”
…..Fay had not.
…..“The number is there on the card. Call me.”
…..The bus pulled up to the next stop. The driver opened the doors and the woman with the braids folded into the Lexington Avenue crowd. Fay missed her stop and walked the twenty blocks home in a daze. Digging into her saddlebag-sized purse for her keys, she came upon a small hand mirror and appraised her looks through Leorna Mann’s eyes: abundant black hair caught up in a dancer’s knot, green eyes, high-bridged nose, and one-quarter Cherokee cheekbones–what her mother had called her “God-given gifts”, adding that she was not to misuse them and making her feel tainted in God’s eyes.

Leorna Mann’s office at Sherman, Hopewell and Brand was carpeted in real Bessarabian. Knowledgeable about décor she could never hope to afford, Fay noticed it the minute she walked through the door. Looking more imposing than she had on the bus, Leorna Mann wore a black dress and black high-heeled pumps; her hair was still braided. When Fay saw her get up from behind her desk and come forward with her hand outstretched, she was reminded of Erika, the sister-in-law of her latest Jewish lover, whose name was neither Tom, Dick, nor Harry, but Ira. Erika and Leorna had the same taut skin, lean arms and year-round tan that came from playing hard tennis in the Hamptons on a regular basis. Erika was German. Mann was a German name, too. Fay tried not to be intimidated. She remembered pretending for Ira’s sake that she was really enjoying herself immensely listening to Ira’s brother Charles tell her the time she’d spent a weekend at the family’s house in Amagansett that Sonia Heine, the ice skating star, had owned the place next door. “She was a Nazi sympathizer, you know,” he said, pouring drinks as Erika shook her head and pouted. “It’s a matter of local fact.” In the discussion that followed, Fay had compared Dick Cheney to a Nazi and Charles, a balding cardiologist and right-wing Republican, had called her anti-American and ignored her for the rest of the weekend.
…..Fay pictured Leorna Mann dragging exhausted Nazi frogmen from the water and leading them up the wooden steps to the weathered house with the glass wall facing the dunes. The spies were blond, with sand-colored moustaches, and they drank brandy from snifters painted with kingfishers.
…..“I really am glad you came,” Leorna Mann said. “I was afraid you might think I was putting you on. But then I wouldn’t have given you my card, would I?”
…..Fay noticed the outlines of a full slip under Leorna Mann’s smart black dress. A woman who wore a full slip had to come from out of town; she was probably an import from the Midwest who had carefully cultivated her British-inflected accent. Fay, also an import, wore neither bra nor slip under her tie-dyed skirt and white peasant blouse. Nor was she wearing stockings with her sandals.
…..Leorna Mann introduced Fay to “the staff,” four crew cut preppies with pencils behind their ears. The preppies mumbled “Hello” in unison and looked down at their yellow memo pads. Fay tiptoed behind Leorna Mann into a room marked “Quiet”, where a director and camera crew were preparing to shoot a cheese cake. Sprouting earphones, the professorial-looking director waved his hand, the cameras whirred, and an actor in a loud red blazer purred into an offstage microphone about the myriad uses of cream cheese.  Leorna Mann led her out of the studio into a corridor, stopping in front of a chrome cylinder that turned out to be an elevator which scooped them both inside. At the fiftieth floor, the elevator opened and disgorged them into a glass-enclosed room dominated by a fig tree. A thirtyish man with a red face and patrician features, his vest flaunting a shameless display of Phi Beta Kappa key, was standing behind a desk. “Miss Hopkins?”
…..“Watkins.”
…..“Yes, Watkins…nice to meet you.” He did not offer her his hand. “You don’t mind if I call you Fay, do you, dear?”
…..Fay nodded, though she did mind that the Phi Beta Kappa key man had called her “dear.”
…..Leorna Mann said, “This is Dave Wilkie, Mr. Sherman’s assistant. He’ll tell you everything you need to know. I’ll be in my office. When you’re ready, just ring yourself back down to twenty and the receptionist will show you where to go. We’ll have lunch, hmm?” Leaving behind the scent of sandalwood, she stepped into the elevator and was swept out of sight.
…..Dave Wilkie emerged from behind his desk then and asked Fay to turn around so he could have a look at her ass. Without loosing so much as one of the barbs that had earned her some notoriety at Barnard for “having a mouth,” she walked calmly toward the elevator, pushed the button and entered it. When she reached the lobby, she fled from the building onto Madison Avenue and puked against a fire hydrant.
…..Arriving at the yoga center on West Seventy-Second Street, where she taught four classes a week, she fell sobbing into the arms of Sonya, a Parthenon-thighed fellow instructor who calmed her with deep breathing exercises. When Fay had sufficiently recovered, she went to the locker room to prepare for her master class. As she was changing in her cubicle, she heard a woman whose voice she recognized as belonging to a student of hers named Phyllis say, “Sure she’s pregnant.”
…..“Eets a veecious rumor,” said another of her students, a Frenchwoman they called “Pixie”.
…..Phyllis, who was double-jointed and could sit in full lotus posture, but whom Fay didn’t like, because she was coarse and giggled during the meditation period, spoke again. “And it’s not even his, either. They’re divorced…they have been for ages. Why do you think she’s wearing all those loose smocks these days, huh? Why do you think she’s losing her waist…too many belly breathing exercises?”
…..“When I was pregnant, my waist was the first part of me to go,” called a third woman from one of the toilet stalls.
…..Fay stood in the changing cubicle staring at her unpainted toenails and listening to the women bad mouth the nice couple from California who owned the yoga center.
…..“I heard something about their being divorced a long time, too. They keep the partnership going for the business.”
…..“Yeah . . . She’s got a lover ten years younger, the fella with the motorcycle that shows up every Thursday,” Phyllis said.
…..“Do you zink zat’s why Fay is taking over so many of her classes?”
…..“They say when you’re pregnant you’re not supposed to do the inverted postures.”
…..Fay waited for her students to leave the locker room before coming out of the cubicle. She washed her face with cold water and brushed her hair, tying it back into a severe bun. A long black strand curled around the spigot. She stared at it for a minute or two. Then, putting on her serene yoga teacher smile, she entered Studio A and greeted the women, who were seated in a circle on the floor waiting for her.
…..She made two bad mistakes in class that day, but her students pretended not to notice, not even when she almost lost her balance while demonstrating the Locust. She’d been thinking of interrupting the class to tell them how Dave Wilkie had asked to look at her ass; of chastising them for spreading ugly rumors about the owners of the yoga school, maybe saying something about yoga being not only a set of physical exercises but a spiritual practice. She was still thinking about delivering a little lecture on “cultivating compassion” while her students were standing on their heads, maybe after the relaxation period that closed the hour, but then Phyllis, the coarse redhead, executed a perfect Full Lotus while standing on her head and Fay decided to dismiss the class without saying anything at all. She was there to teach hatha yoga, not preach at them. If she antagonized her students–especially the redhead, who wore a four-carat, marquise-shaped diamond ring to class and enjoyed platinum card status for having brought six new members to the Yoga Center from Great Neck–they might complain about her to the management; and she didn’t want to lose her job, because she needed the extra cash for her bi-weekly visits to the chiropractor. Luckily, she’d kept her mouth shut. She had a penchant for saying just what was on her mind at the wrong times. Should have blasted Dave Wilkie with some choice words, or complained about him to Leorna Mann; a professional woman like that was surely a bit of a feminist, would have lent her a sympathetic ear. No, better not to have mentioned it to Leorna Mann. Sonya was okay. Funny, it was easier to talk to Sonya, who was a lesbian, than to the yoga students, who were straight and aligned themselves with men like Dave Wilkie. Women like Doreen, her mother, who was always ready to condemn one of her own kind for taking offense at being propositioned because she wasn’t wearing a bra, saying she was asking for it by sticking her tits in her boss’s face. What did she expect from men, pigs, they were. God help me, Fay thought, I’m on the verge of becoming a moral tyrant–judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one…just like my mother.
…..She clapped her hands. “Okay, ladies,” she said, “that’s it for today.”

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→VOLUME 13