Oh My God, what a tauntingly-desperate night, what a screwed up life. I had to go to the showroom for a meeting with the new rep for the less expensive line, the Lizbet Collection and then I had to go and see Bob at Trinity Leather and I asked Richard for some money to get Lizbet from Hebrew School and he said you use YOUR money. He was just crazy to get this rep to take the line. When he said “Jonathan Adler” out loud I thought Richard would kiss him-all that money dancing in his head. In front of this dude he just says use your money for a Cab! Like I’m some sort of landed gentry. Like I have money. Like I’m like other women who can buy panty hose at a real store and if all my friends weren’t designers I’d never have anything to wear. They all give me clothes pretty much for free and then when I give someone a lousy RTV belt from some Neiman’s outlet store he could kill me. He is so mind numbingly crazy-he thinks I’m rich. That I get $261 bucks and ALL THIS MONEY HE GIVES ME. I live so lavishly. I buy what? I pay for cabs and Tylenol and Celexa and Klonopin and Tylenol PM so I can MAYBE sleep…everyone pays for me if I go out to dinner or a movie-It’s humiliating. A one-woman Unicef. Sally Struthers should be toting me around some garbage dump in Buenos Aires.

So I just left and kissed the rep and walked a couple of blocks to Hermes Leather to see the new collection of brush-off calf and then Bob Katz and I went on the bus but my Metro card was out and I knew I didn’t have any change or God Forbid PAPER MONEY so Thank God Bob swiped his again for me. He has no idea that. I have nothing inside my $8,000 bag-nothing-make-up I’m ashamed for people to see-the lipsticks that you have to use a pencil to dig it out the lipstick worn down so low-the Tampax with the paper falling off, shmutzy from my bag. Tampax I’ll use even if it has eye shadow and lint and whatever else ‘cause he won’t let me get extra Tampax. Why, I live like a Czarinna? I’m so frivolous. So, I make it to the Synagogue and I kibbutz with Myrna (the grandmother of Lizbet’s friend) and I think there is probably 40 dollars in my account so I’ll go to the bank on the corner after we get the girls. But God it is butt-kicking cold. So cold and dark now. Early and sad.

Or Carey lives next door at 86th and Madison and I’ll get scratch from her. She knows what he is like. She understands. And then we are out in the cold and it is below thirty, the temperature just plummeted and I call Carey and no one answers so I go over to her Building with Lizbet and Joseph, the doorman, says they are all out and I love Joseph and I know he’ll give me 5 dollars but I still think I have money in the bank. Surely, I have money in the bank. And we go in there-into that little bank vestibule and I try to get money off the debit card and there isn’t any so I call Richard and he says to use my card-the card that goes with the checking account where I deposit my 300 a month from Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles and I scream, there is no card, no debit card I have told you that a million times. There are only checks. He hangs up on me and Lizbet is tired and she lies down like some beer-gutted piss-soaked homeless person on that nasty linoleum. I call Gloria and she says she doesn’t have any money. I can’t believe it. She always has cash…where would she even put her cash, she’s illegal and doesn’t even have a bank account but she is cheap and hates to loan, though I always pay her back. ALWAYS. And I got her a raise and I give her money on the side and birthday cakes and stayed with her in the emergency room when her blood pressure and diabetes and cholesterol all soar until she is convinced she’s dying. I stay for 8 hours. 10. What a perfect Christian-The kind that never loans, never thinks about anyone else. Watches constant evangelic television and reads her dog-eared bible and HOLIER THAN THOUS you into an early grave, OF COURSE GLORIA WILL NOT LOAN MONEY. Or clean windows or clean under beds or any of the other heinous chores that she LETS ME DO!

So Lizbet and I just sit there and I’m crying and she is comforting me and saying “It’s ok mommy its ok mommy its ok mommy” and her phone rings and it is her father saying “Lizbet, go home. Gloria has left money downstairs with the doorman.” So we go home and he had $500 in cash in his dresser so when I find out he’s been out having DRINKS with his sister I go APESHIT CRAZY. “How can you leave your kid lying in a bank lobby? She couldn’t make it 20 blacks in a light coat in freezing weather? What is your problem?” And woozy with drink he say’s ”You have money, you f**king thief” and I am hysterical and I collapse on the ground and I call my Mother and just weep and weep and weep and I can barely talk and she says she has had it! She will call his MOTHER! So, I hang up and Mother calls back and says that his Mother says that I am “high-strung” and this will pass. And he is screaming at me about Momma calling his Mother and he won’t leave me alone and Lizbet is crying and I am on the floor and then I call the police. And when they come they are so sweet and I am crying and crying and telling them to make him stop and they see he is drunk but he hasn’t hit me or anything but they listen and they tell him to calm down, to stop talking to me, sleep in another room. They leave and I cry for hours. Hours. I find some valium and I take a bunch with my nightly klonopin and I go to sleep and where is he…in my bed.

As Newark loomed gritty in the distance against the interminable smokestacks and industrial ruin, I tried desperately to excavate my wallet from a hard-livin’ Hermes bag. As my friend Martha would always say, “Greenpeace should be picketing for the salvation of that bag,” with its $6,400 price tag and general state of devastation. War-torn Bosnia was indeed a far prettier site. I needed money to pay the driver. It is somewhere. Somewhere.

Starting to panic as the car horns honked behind me, I turned that f**ker inside out: old Tampax—wrappers peeled back, the stubby ends grimy (I was saving those for later); loose Tylenol PM (my latest addiction); topless tubes of lipstick (I’ll only toss it when I’ve scooped out the last of it with my fingernail like the old days when Richard was doing coke); and various types of grit and tobacco, littered the once beautiful lining. My sweaty legs were beginning to slide down the hot vinyl seat. Damn! Where was that money? I caught the drivers eyes in the wrap-around mirror. I swear I can hear his thoughts:” Rich bitches making off without paying the tab. Perhaps an old hooker? “

After digging for what feels like an eternity, I have only managed to find my card—the green one that was masquerading as a credit card—one of those late night loser ads I’d responded to: "Clean up your credit," "Car repossession a problem?" The colorful hologram glinted back at me, and I wondered if I had $50 left on it. As I close my eyes and remove it from its tiny pocket my prayers were answered. There were the $20s, 4 of them tucked surgically behind the card. I hastily handed the cash to the driver as I slithered out onto the curb. Despite my financial situation, I tipped the young Israeli driver a good 30 percent. I’m always over tipping, according to Richard—always trying to make people like me. I’d been a waitress, and I knew life from the other side: the meager change the Richards of the world left. I remember working retail and flashing a forced smile to the ladies who threw down the clothes as they tried them on, stepping over the piles as they walked out the door empty handed. My daughter Lizbet lacks such empathy.

Daddy’s little girl is so spoiled she once walked into Bernaudaud, and when the sales lady asked her to be careful amidst the acre of fine crystal, she brattily retorted, “If I break it, I can pay for it,” stomping her shiny new patent leather Mary Janes from Jacadi. I’d seen this one before, the same dramatic hissy fit would surface at Sofia's every time they tried to give her a children's menu.

Despite her warped sense of entitlement, I manage to look at the bright side. I was just happy Lizbet wouldn’t be lying flat on her stomach in college like my brother Jerry and I were—rifling under the Coke machine for dropped change, stealing books when the scholarship money ran out. I remember with pain how all my friends tucked money inside my bag when they thought I wasn’t looking, my guy friends, Rib and Bill and Jim-Bob suspiciously asking me to bring the beer and then overpaying me, claiming they never had change.

I am wiped out. Richard has left again for an entire week and I don’t even have the energy to be excited. The nanny is not back from her Pentecostal Weekend where surely the topic of Christian Charity has not been high on her list. How did I ever trust this woman? Her affidavit sworn out against me long before Richard even mentioned Mediation. The long days in the hospital when her blood pressure soared. The family in Jamaica that needed money wired. All my kindness wasted on her and now she is mad that I am taking back the fur coat I LOANED her and which she has destroyed in two years and I want it back. She can’ betray me and sit and watch me like a Gulag warden in some desperate soviet state and report everything I say and do to Richard and expect me to FORGIVE HER. So, anyway I am up and Lizbet is in the kitchen and I am making her scrambled eggs and I have to get out that speck of red or she will freak out-that little bit of baby chick that somehow stayed. And she is hunting around the papers on the table and reads aloud my note to Richard. “Please do as the JUDGE has ordered a leave us the $250 weekly allowance for household expenses” She struggles with the words before I can grab it away. Turning she asks me “where is the money?” and my heart sinks and I rifle through all the bills and homework and crap on the table and there is NO MONEY. I told him on Saturday that my $261 weekly salary that was deposited on Thursday was gone. We had to have that money. What was he thinking? That I was lying? I had turned in an expense report to him showing that it was gone. All those years of accounting for paper towels and Lizbet's colored markers and Maxipads? I had left the expense report. Why did he do this? Leave us with nothing? I could call Sanjeev but it would do no good. The judge would say he had left it-my word against his-Lizbet not a reliable witness. I went to the kitchen and there was food-basics, pastas and sauce and fish for Lizbet and hotdogs and baloney the nanny liked to serve her despite my repeated entreaties for nutritious meals-serving her up corn once straight from the can-unwarmed. We could eat and there was Kool Aid and instant tea and coffee and milk and creamer for me.

HE IS SICK! Only Food.
And Lizbet is worried now.
“Mommy how are we going to get to school?”
“We will take the bus.”
“But we will be late.”
“No we won’t let’s leave now. Eat up!”
“But Mommy I have the book fair!”
“OK we will find some money.”
“Ask Deenie…ask Hilary…ask somebody.”
“No, I have asked enough of people. We will be fine-it will be an adventure.”
“I don’t like your adventures.”

And then I spotted it-the tin can from Hebrew School from the Synagogue. And I grabbed it. Prizing open the lid.

“Mommy NOOOOOOOOO that is for the Poor Jews.”
And I smiled at her and said, “Lets pretend we are poor Jews.”
She laughed, “Mommy you aren’t even a Jew. But we can say you are.”

Another Poor Jew. With Thirty-eight dollars and seventy five cents in coins. We would make it. I dumped it all in an orange crocodile makeup bag and zipped it up.

`He’s following me around saying “you friggin bitch, you are stealing money from the family. You friggin, friggin bitch.” Gloria, that miserable nanny cum Gestapo warden told him about my checking account. Momma told me to open that account-I’ve never had my own checking account. He controls all the money…the company… everything. The nanny, Gloria, gets almost $400 a week off the books and I get a whopping $261 bucks and then when Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles started paying me $300 a month, Momma made me open an account right downstairs at the HSBC bank and it’s only 300 a month for a 500 word column and a TV Show. Every month I fly down there to work in the factory and the column just builds our PR in Atlanta-billing me as Atlanta’s Design Diva is a good thing and now that I’m doing the Fox Good Day Atlanta Show at least it gets my airplane ticket paid for. But he wants me to give him that check. He is furious. He could kill!

I told him all I did was buy towels and sheets and buy those two dressers for our bedroom and I painted them myself with the handyman who wouldn’t even take 20 dollars because they all know about Richard and how he treats me. God damn it! I’ve gotten every apartment photographed, using a clogged-up and electrically unsound glue gun and paint. Metropolitan Homes, HG, Harpers Bazaar, and House Beautiful and then Wendy Goodman at New York Magazine photographed Lizbet’s room with Lizbet and her dog, Star Baby and I did the whole thing in 24 hours with my intern for Wendy Goodman, the editor, who had a deadline crisis. Just barely made it down to So Good Ribbons and got about 5 miles of 10 cent a yard grosgrain petal pink ribbon and then I got Sculpture House to send me over a gross of plaster medallions and we stayed up all nite and did the ribbon over the entire room in a trellis pattern with the medallions painted gold at every place where the ribbons crossed. And Momma had made Lizbet the wildest bedding from fabric Deenie GAVE me from Cowtan and Tout and Brunschwig & Fils and I painted the backs of some old Merrill Weinstein Ads that ran in W-I flipped them over and painted the backs ‘cause he’d never give me money for actual CANVAS. And paint? I have to use that rock hard bit left in those dried out tubes of acrylic from Lizbet’s paint set and mix it all with House paint that got left over. These ads used to be framed and in the showroom and I painted the backs with these whimsical, cartoony handbags and the room was so cute. The story was on Lizbet and The Katie Ford/Andre Balacz kids and Muriel Brandolini’s kid and I have a sneaking suspicion the other Mothers didn’t wear pantyhose with a hole in them that they glued to the to of their thigh so it wouldn’t ride down? Did they have the Elmer’s glue that is my best-kept secret? Would anybody who read about me in Southern Accents believe this is how I really live? The lady with the store and the factory and the $10,000 tables and he makes me wear bras that have the razor-thin wire poking me in the breast. Nasty red gashes. He doesn’t see a problem with that. Wants a receipt for tampax. Makes me leave an expense report every Monday-all the cab fares and Children’s Tylenol and maxi-pads. Lizbet and I looked so happy in those magazines all those magazines and our new Lizbet Collection of Juvenile Furniture and all he cares about is me working my ass off.

The handymen in the building come up for coffee and sit with me and the painter who did our showroom, Ricardo, saw me one day frantically rifling through my bag and he gave me 100 bucks and said he wouldn’t take it back. Do they all know that I am in trouble? Ron is still living with us and it’s been 6 months since he was supposed to be here for “a couple of weeks” and Richard is getting tired of Lizbet being in the bed with us. Last week I couldn’t stop her from going to a sleepover and he came out into the living room and said “I’d like to see you in the bedroom”. Blowjobs, blowjobs, after me all the time though he never even looks me in the eye. How long can I keep Ron here? Keep Lizbet in the bed with us? Avoid him? I work from home now because the showroom is too small he says for both of us. Maybe he has girlfriends. God he is so delusional, he said he could get Cindy Crawford if he wanted to. Does his family know he smoked for 30 years, did drugs, went to hookers? The perfect Jewish son. He is still mad that I wouldn’t go to work for St James Furniture, his great plan to have them buy the company so Merrill Weinstein could make all of their accessories. And then we get out there to the friggin horned toenail of the planet in Irvine California ALL on our dime and Richard makes them lousy FREE alligator boxrs as GIFTS and then Mr. James looks at him and says so cruelly, “why are you here? No one is interested in you or your company we only want her!”

And he wanted me to do it. Live 3,000 miles away from my baby at least a week a month and design all of the accessories and the homes classifications-area rugs, lighting, china, soft furnishings, flat wear, etc and all while wearing nude pantyhose. No, he wants that $150,000 and he’ll never forgive me for refusing. How dare I? All my crap makes him furious, The Gordon Elliott shoot, The Today Show, my books and articles on Interior Design, why can’t I earn money? Will I be believed? I can’t pay him back all the money I’ve been writing for about two years now and that money is gone. Gone on a coat for Lizbet gone on China from the Auction. All our plates chipped and cracked and we can never have anyone over. And he is after me …what can I do. He is punishing me. I hurt. I hurt. I hurt. Can’t Lizbet feel his hate…it is everywhere. You bitch, you bitch you stole the family money…And I keep begging him to let me have some time off to have the bladder surgery I need and he won’t. Not convenient. So, the bladder just pops out of me, through the vaginal wall and there is an ACTUAL FLESH BUBBLE and I joke about it with my girlfriends when I pick something up heavy (which he always lets me carry the truly heavy stuff) and I joke “oops my friend is out” and I say “my bladder will be accompanying us to the Theatre in its very own little red wagon…” Everyone just howls. He’s drinking now so if I stay out here in the living room maybe he’ll fall asleep. That’s the best I can hope for ….sleep.

F**k Judge Frager and her bullying and her screaming and her enraged teenage spoiled brat “I’ve got all the power” crap. Her condescension and her taunting. I hate her so much. Her “you’d better not call the police again or I’ll throw you out of the house. The police would have arrested him if he had committed a crime”. But she knows that he showed the police an expired restraining order the first LOVELY one he dropped on me. The restraining order that said we would both go to jail for talking about the divorce in front of Lizbet and I’m so damn scared that I don’t realize that the restraining order has expired about a million years ago. A restraining order that his fancy dickhead lawyers got when I THREW HIM OUT OF MY BED. Destruction of property? I laid his clothes in the hall going to the Nanny’s room-not in a public hall. But the judge won’t listen to my lawyer. Wants us out of her court. So the police are here to help me cause he slammed a door into my head with his won MOTHER listening on his cell phone and Lizbet heard and she is freaking out and I can’t get Ravi on the phone.

Weinstein, natch, gets through to his Lawyer because WHEN YOU PAY YOUR 1000 THOUSAND DOLLAR BILL THE COCKSUCKERS ANSWER IF THE’RE AT A FRIGGIN GRAVESIDE SERVICE FOR PRESIDENT REGAN. My lawyer is NO WHERE to be found! The police said Lizbet would have to go home with someone or to Child Protective Services and I couldn’t think of whom to call. Only Carey and she was out! And of course Lizbet is scared. The two policewomen get me off by myself and the little butch one is such a iece of work-menacing and grim-taunting me- as my life unravels with, “ Hey, work it out. What’s wrong with you people? Why don’t you move out?” And when I say I have no money and nowhere to go she says, “Go home to your Ma for chrissake”. So I try and shut her up with the news flash that I DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY. NO SAVINGS. NO WAY TO EVEN GET TO MY MOTHERS HOUSE. And she just snorts at me and walks over to the policeman. And the big one comes over and was like “he hit cha? No? So what’s your problem…you got a nice apartment, if you fight just work it OUT? I had a nasty divorce and I ain’t rich.“

As if I am? I patiently explain I have nothing but she juts her jaw at the fireplace mantle and the oil paintings and sculptures and says, “OK, so sell some shit.” Oil paintings I painted? Who’d want them? Sculptures bought for ten bucks in Haiti that the Nanny has broken till I’ve crazy-glued the so-called sculptures about three times with slivers missing all over the place and I’ve covered the seam with grey eye-liner. Yea! The Whitney is just waiting to get this ART for their permanent collection. It could be its own wing.

Only the policeman listens to me and I can tell he’s seen it before, the Upper eastside apartment, the suave husband, oozing charm…the crackpot wife only maybe she wasn’t so crazy…maybe, just maybe she was TORTURED every single day by this proper-looking, Ultimate-Respect-For-The-Law type and the women cops just keep glaring at me and tossing off mean barbs, So, when they see that restraining order they practically WHOOP for JOY. And I mean I am not some woman being beaten by a Meth Head husband while the starving infant screams TRAINSPOTTING-ly in a filthy corner. Who does this bitch think she is? How dare I live in a clean house, with a Nanny and an Oriental rug and still have the audacity to have a husband who abuses me. Momma is always telling me he is an abuser. She asked me these 12 questions from Cosmo or something on “Spotting the Emotional Abuser”, and I said yes to only 9 and she replied you only needed 4. FOUR. So. No I’m not having a straight razor aimed at my larynx. No, he is not raping my child but he is torturing me inexorably, unstintingly, indelible. His art? Bruise-less. Perfect.

Lizbet did not want to go with anyone so I send the paramedics away-I don’t want Lizbet freaking out. I had that kind of childhood. Shotguns and liquor and pills. I swore NEVER. Of course I can’t reach my lawyer so what do I do? They are never around when you owe them but Richard gets his lawyer who brilliantly suggests waiving around an old restraining order because God KNOWS they’ll never read it and he lies and says he is the custodial parent, And My Mother calls his and he won’t tell the truth. And GOODAMN HER SHE KNOWS IT, JUDGE FRAGER KNOWS IT and IT IS POWER. To me and the countless other women who have come before her she either screams “GET A JOB’ or “YOU HAVE MONEY” and does she have kids…I know this is awful…I want to hurt her, hurt her, hurt them make them suffer like she has made me suffer, I WANT HER IN PAIN AND THE GOD I SO DESPERATELY LOVE HEARS ME AND IM’S SURE LOATHS ME AND MY EVIL THOUGHT. BUT THEY ARE ONLY THOUGHTS BECAUSE I CAN’T HURT HER. I WOULD. I WOULD KILL HER.

Smug in her courtroom, preening like an ancient hawk-billed bird for the assembled –her audience-her court jesters-her little small hell of a world. Her “who pays for all you airfares, who pays for all your hotel rooms, who are your backers and what are they paying you. What do you make from all these TV shows? “. And “I don’t think she is telling me the truth about the money. She has money. I don’t believe a word about this money.” THIS. Despite my testimony that The Magazine pays me $300 a month (the 300 a month Richard taunted me about for a year-the $300 I was “stealing from the family”), that I stay with friends, family, drive my brother’s car. Despite the tax returns and all the bank account statements and credit card records. FOR FOUR YEARS. And he has a tax return saying he makes $57,000 a year and pays a live-in nanny ILLEGALLY almost $20,000 a year and $24,000 in tuition and $60,000 in rent. I’M THE ONE WHO IS LYING ABOUT MONEY. I WANT HER TO GO TO REAL ESTATE SCHOOL AND START A BUSINESS IN 14 WEEKS AND WRITE MONTHLY COULMNS AND DO TV SHOWS AND LIVE ON CHANGE AND NEVER EAT BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO MONEY OR YOU WANT YOUR KID TO HAVE COCOA WITH HER FRIENDS AT THREE GUYS AND THEN SUBMIT TIME AND TIME AND TIME AGAIN THE SAME BILLS FOR FOOD AND TRANSPORTATION AND ALL THE OTHER KIDS STUFF THAT SHE ORDERED HIM TO PAY FOR HIS FRIGGIN KIDAND HE DOESN’T. AND THEN SHE CAN WALK AROUND LIKE ME WITH A CROWN MISSING FROM HER TOOTH AND NO MONEY TO PAY FOR IT SO THEN I NEED A ROOT CANAL AND HE WILL NOT PAY. AND NEED BLADDER SURGERY BUT CAN’T DO THAT AND SO WHEN YOU CRY AND CRY AND CRY YOUR BLADDER ACTUALLY MAKES A SKIN BUBBLE AND POPS OUT-LIKE A PING PONG BALL BETWEEN YOUR LEGS. SCREW HER-LET HER GET A JOB AS A PARALEGAL IN SOME SNOTTY LAWYERS OFFICE AND START OVER AT AGE 7,800 OR WHATEVER AGE SHE IS THE EVIL CRONE. AND SCREW HER AGAIN- LET HER RIDE THE SUBWAY AND HAVE THIN, FRIGGIN PENNIES AND DIMES BETWEEN HER AND THE FRIGGIN ABYSS AND LET HER WORK HER ASS OFF TO KEEP HER KID AND LIVE IN THE SAME HOUSE AS HER ABUSER. AND HE KEEPS AT IT. TAUNTING. MERCILESS AND CRUEL.

IS THERE A DIVINE WILL? ARE THESE TESTS I AM FAILING?

My husband is an emotional abuser who will not get help. Why? Because he is perfect. His mother told him so. He is handsome, well dressed and has the Southern manners that so often substitute for actual values. I married him because I was 20 when I met him, and he was the only man in Alabama in Gucci loafers with movie-star looks that made him seem unattainable. He called himself “an excellent conversationalist,” which I later learned was his only multi-syllabic word. I was an idiot. I was a virgin before him (just the way he liked it) and Catholic, so that was it. I was hanging on for dear life.

What made me even more attractive was that I had a father who also put me down…setting the stage for future relationships with assholes. Dear old Daddy nicknamed me Beau Coup when I was 3. The name seemed to sum up his basic feelings about me. For him it was the perfect nickname —too much: too much talk, too much energy, too much noise, too much girl. The straight A’s, awards, my two jobs, scholarships and the “I love you Daddy” mantra would never get me a compliment or a pat on the back or anything resembling a relationship.

Daddy didn’t even have the heart to at least let me down easy. Just an “I love you, but I don’t like you,” followed with: “You’re just not my kind of woman.” Well, of course. How could I be? I wasn’t blonde, or tiny, or giggly or anything that could be described as female. I was locked into a cycle of trying to please someone who disparaged, while at the same time, on the lookout my next abusive relationship. Lucky me, I found it in Richard.

Then, in a moment of pure genius, I started a business with him. Yes, if you are completely miserable in your personal life, by all means, ruin your professional life, too. So we opened Weinstein, Merrill with a pathetically small collection of five chairs and a side table. Somehow, we got lucky. We got very lucky! No one was doing our “look” and ABC bought and Bloomingdales bought and the press were interested in the “preppy pair” from Alabama selling $1,000 python-covered tables that were far fresher than the dingy old Karl Springer tables from the 1960s that showed up at Tepper.

I love his family. I’ve had most of the cousins and nieces and nephews living with me over the years and I’ve done resumes and made phone calls and set up interviews and I am so close to his Mother that she tells everyone I am not a daughter-in-law, I’m a daughter and then she is so sweet she is so, so, so incredibly sweet she tells them all how I took care of her when she had Breast Cancer, In her beautiful, patrician, high…high…high Southern accent all mellifluous and charming “ Why my children just almost died when I had cancer and they were so worried they all came straight to my hospital room and stayed with me the whole time but when I was to go home there was no one but me and Grandpa in a wheelchair and Marcia just came. You know she never gets up before noon but she got up every day and she drained my shunts and kept records of everything and took care of Marv and gave me sponge baths and hand washed my panties.” So, loving toward me and forgiving of all my hyperness, my crazy outfits and my drama. Should I call her? Can she help me? Should I tell her the truth about him? His past? They never knew he chain smoked until he was 42, did drugs, whored so much that he had the worst reputation in Birmingham. A warning from my girlfriend Grace to “stay away from that cockhound.” Didn’t even know what that meant. His sisters angels. The older one, Gail, a famous editor at Southern Accents who supported her family after her husband died. Never complained. Worked like a stevedore and got her three kids through the best colleges she could find. Scraping by BARELY and giving those children every advantage-would eat lunch out of a paper bag for months to get a Spanish tutor for the youngest, the least academic. The most out-going-a piece of work -who could bring a room of adults to fits of hilarity-a tiny Shecky Green. I always told this sister, Candy that if she had only been born in New York she would have married Benjamin Netanyahu and she would laugh-Brooke I am happy in Alabama you just don’t realize it-I belong here-No she didn’t in her Andrew Gn coats, thrift store floor-length white fox fur and Python Go Go boots and her great uncompromising beauty. Like her Momma said “pretty inside and pretty outside-inside lasts forever.” Should I call Gail? She will only side with Richard-The baby.

So this is it. I am hysterical. My lawyer WILL NOT go to court on Monday and I’m scared witless. This settlement agreement is 5,000 pages long and it is horrible. Bobo is inconsolable. He worked for Richard too so he was screwed royally himself when he left the company but this blind-sided him. 24 years and a kid and a company and nothing. I knew this was coming. It’s like everything with Richard a zero-sum game, a fight to the death. I lose everything, everything. Everything except Lizbet, thank God I get joint custody but how I’m going to pay for her in Manhattan has me terrified, I need another Valium. Bobo needs to get me some more Valium. Something to deaden this fear. This I want to throw up, I’ve smoked till I could puke and I have swilled so much coffee that I am trembling like a crepe paper. My lawyer is not amused that I owe him so much money…he is so clearly overwrought, undone by the weight of everything, the sick wife, the two small kids that he actually emailed me last week that since I owe him so much money I am getting “bare bones “ treatment. He says he “can’t afford to go to court” since my $15,000 retainer ran out oh, so long ago. His behavior has been disintegrating from sarcasm to outright verbal abuse and emails that singe. He is himself in worse shape than me-desperate-angry. I can’t help him and he can’t help me. Anyway, I’m way too scared to go to court because Judge Frager will stick-it-to-me me even worse. That’s my fear. How can I lose a business that makes millions –or at least enough to have paid FOR years, the apartment rent, 70 thousand, a nanny, 22 thou and Lizbet’s tuition of 27 and a showroom on Fifth and the factory in Atlanta and the store in Atlanta. All on an income -for IRS viewing pleasure- of $57,000. So, I get 27 thousand over THREE lousy years for MY company that sells $22,000 dollar Desks and $10,000 lamps-God there are 30 lamps in the store and showroom and I get 27 thousand dollar pay out for a company I built-I designed everything-I worked 16 hour days- I killed myself. And 2,500 a month for 18 lousy months and 1000 a month for child support and no health insurance. HELP ME! What am I going to do? My part of her tuition is 10 thousand Ten un-imaginable-unbelievable thousand. Where am I going to live? A studio costs more than I’m getting and that was MY business. All the stories in Met Homes and New York Magazine and Elle Decor all of it all about the business and me. The designer. So what? He has it all now, all the designs and logos and patterns, and contractors. Everything is HIS. Or I can risk this pittance and scream at Sanjeev and go to court and get nothing. Frager never gave a shit that Richard refused to obey her orders to pay support-she laughed when Sanjeev showed her the emergency room bill for Lizbet that he made me pay and the sewing class bill and the food bills and he WOULD not pay. Judge Frager just sat there like some pockmarked medusa and screamed, “I know Mr. Weinstein is a wonderful father”. End of story. Goddarn it! All those unpaid bills-all the records, all the receipts and she just ignored them. A wave of her hand. Banished. The perfect Father. So, do I take this deal? I have no choice. None. Too scared. A lawyer who tries to represent me although I owe him 37,000. All of which that he sees no way of me earning. He is such a patient and kind man with a sick wife.-a dying wife. How can my misery keep spawning misery? Am I taking everyone down with me? He got so mad at court last time that he told me to get a job selling handbags at ABC Carpet and Home. At ABC? Where they SELL Merrill Weinstein. Yea, support hose and Stride Rites sandals and I’m golden. Look likes a SHOE feels like a SNEAKER…what do I do? Settle for this crap? Lay down and die.

A divorced mom needs a job. I’m tired of fighting with Richard about who owns our fashion business, so I’ve decided to become a real estate broker. It seems like everyone in New York is buying and selling apartments, and making obscene amounts of money. I want a piece of the action. But first I have to go to Real Estate School on godforsaken 35th Street. It is pouring rain, buckets, kegs, water towers of rain and by the time I get to school I am soaking wet. The walls are drab yellow-green, the color of institutional suffering.

The class consists of a ragtag ensemble a class of over 120 students: the young and earnest, the poor and desperate, middle managers trying to move out of property management. Mostly immigrants, all exhausted, all ill used and eaten by this city. Poor students who barely speak English. We are jammed into a tiny room, spilling out into the hall. The heat is stifling, a steam is pouring off our damp bodies. My wet legs twitch like the limbs of somebody in a crack panic. It makes the young Asian kid sitting next to me so nervous that he moves closer to the woman on his other side. She’s got tattoos galore, no bra, and a visible thong rising up above her jeans. A hooker, looking to sell something besides her ass? She seems nicer than me. Maybe she is.

The teacher drones on, reading lifelessly from the textbook. He goes on and on and on about environmental issues and how far wells need to be dug from a septic tank. A septic tank in New York City? My mind is racing, wondering how will I get any money from my miserable husband, how I will get an apartment, how will I get a new life? The teacher hastens through the textbook. Now we are onto Real Estate Math: percentages, amortization, depreciation. I’m locked in a nightmare of equations. “Take the cost of the house,” the teacher says, “assume a twenty year mortgage and an interest rate of six percent. Now give me the monthly payment.” The pencil shakes in my hand. I sneak out to buy a three-dollar calculator. I get back to class and offer to share the crappy calculator with my classmate, who is from Guyana and has even less money than I do. He figures out his cell phone has a calculator, so he is OK.

All of the students are desperate, desperate to support themselves and their children. They can’t give in—they have to be brave for their children. We get a break, and stream in a million-legged mass for the elevator. Out into the rain for cigarettes and coffee. We are desperate for cigarettes. I look in my purse. There’s only one dollar in cash. I have to get to an ATM. For once, I’m not nervous, because I checked my balance two days ago and had about $250. Now it says I’m overdrawn by $70. Goddarn it this cannot be happening. I get a Diet Coke with my last paper money and go to the phone booth to sidestep the rain that has already soaked through the soles of my Manolo Blahnik suede boots. Eight years ago they were fabulous but now there are holes in the soles, and the water comes in. There’s a squelching sensation at every step. The water has soaked my jeans up to the knees. It is New York Cold: concrete and metallic, merciless. From the phone booth I call the Customer Assistance line for my debit card. They explain that the charges just came through from the hotel in Jamaica where I took Lizbet for Christmas.

Our trip was free, because I was doing design work for the hotel. Lizbet’s father was under court order to pay ALL of her expenses. He gave her 60 one-dollar bills so she’d think it was a lot. But it wasn’t enough of course. I used the debit card to pay for her hair braiding and her tennis lesson and her Hobycat ride. So now I have no money.

F**k. I have to meet a design customer at Tepper Galleries. How am I going to make it over there and back during our lunch break? I don’t have money for a cab—just change for a subway ride home. Annabelle is invited to a play with one of her girlfriends. I left a message for her father to send her with money for dinner. Her girlfriend’s mom wants to take them to Serafina. I can’t afford to go with them. I’ll say I’ve already eaten. I‘ve been saying that for years. Even when I was married my husband never let me have any cash.

An endless pelting rain is coming down, a monsoon worthy of Phnom Penh. I check my cell phone. My client left a message: she is on her way to Tepper and will meet me there. Damn, if I’d gotten her call I could have asked her to pick me up. But we have to turn off our cell phones in Real Estate Hell. Calling back, I get my client’s voicemail and leave a message saying I can’t find a cab. A lie to cover my stinking wet self. I have to keep my shit together and get to Tepper NOW. I run eastward through the rain. Aunt Hazel’s old mink coat is giving off a dank animal smell. The fur is matted together, and water is streaming off the cuffs. The hem is loose again, water pouring from the loose threads as if they were little siphons. The big safety pin on the right side is showing. I make it to Tepper, and do my hair up, pinning it with a Bic pen. The auction is still going on, but my client is gone. A call. “So sorry,” she says, they had stayed a few minutes but her friends wanted to go…very cool place…very sorry we missed each other.”

I am responsible. Sort of. Dropped Lizbet off with a girlfriend. Was the mother eyeing me. Wondering why I was always dropping off this girl. Abandoning her? Showed up at Tepper again to met potential clients. But they wanted nothing to do with the auction. Too down and dirty. I pointed in the crowd to all the dealers sitting in the front row-every shop on 11th or 60th-Antique Alleys ready to throw up their hands and keep them UP UP UP. A battle to the death and then after it was all over-everyone was the best of friends until bidding and then it was war-a sport-fun for us amateurs. But my clients want out-away from the conviviality, the joshing, te back-of-the-auction deals. The old guys standing there negotiating with one another over a missed lot-“I’ll take that Sevres piece for a client and give yu 20%.” Deal done. No the clients wanted Sothebys or Christies-the paddles and glamour. Had the great contacts. Back in Kenny’s office I bummed a Diet Coke and kibitzed with the girls-the young ones there that just lift you up (a fraternity-a sorority- a family) Talked with Kenny about doing a store in New York, I think I was coherent. I talked business. Product classifications and sourcing and vendors and workrooms and margins and rents and open-to-buys and all that stuff that I REALLY DO KNOW. Time for class so I jogged back as the wind and rain eased up, just that eased. Stop? Never. Not that-a blessing. No food and so hungry in class that I can’t even comprehend though God Knows I haven’t read any of it, the Construction Class stuff all about mansard roofs and sewage and plats and gabled roofs and pitch and help me! Help! Can’t call Momma again because she’d break down and cry after yesterday and I don’t want Billy knowing, worrying. After class I’m running again to the subway to get Lizbet-this Metro card is out after this last swipe through the turnstile so I have to make it home and I don’t know shit about the subway so I ask two cute girls how to get to Lexington and 68th as we stand jostling on the uptown Westside train-I think I should get off at Times Square and one tells me that there was a fire and I should go up to 125th Street and down on the Lexington Local, 4, 5, or 6.

A teenage boy, African-American with an Afro full of water droplets nods his head and I don’t understand-the girls are right or wrong. He smiles so sweetly. So we girls talk and then we get seats as the crowd spills out of the filthy subway car. A homeless man, handsome, young Hispanic, like an Abercrombie model but stoned and slept-in-looking clothes and a tie strung low on his skinny hips asks us all for money “It’s my fault. I’m homeless. I screwed up a couple of times and I’m gonna try and keep straight. Can any of ya’ll spare any money.” And I scramble in my expensive-looking bag, in my fur, matted but a fur and fancy jewelry and fancy watch in with these children, lower-middle class children, raised on subways and McDonalds and Yankees caps. And the African-American boy gives him money-paper money from a soiled, sad plastic wallet. A wallet held with a rubber band. Right then I want to cry. I want to give him a Merrill Weinstein wallet in alligator a thousand dollar wallet would not be worthy of his greatness. Others give and I scramble in my bag-receipts falling out, bedraggled Tampax with torn paper and swatches and make-up in a Ziploc bag. The handsome one stops me-his big hand gentle-a zigzag design razor-cut into one eyebrow, “It’s OK. Lady, don’t worry about it. Thank you! Eyes on my eyes. Soft. Understanding. Communion. And then as he steps to the next car we scream to a stop.

The lights flicker and dim and then as they go out one of the young girl’s voices rises in panic. And the boy with the halo calms her, calms all of us. The conductor announces “ We have a problem in the next station. Somebody is on the tracks. We are waiting.” And the car goes black. And it turns hot and noisy as people speculate that this is terrorism. Only the angel’s voice rises in utter calm “this is not terrorism, someone has thrown themselves on the track.” “It’s a suicide.” “Don’t worry.” And we don’t. We are calm, pacified. And then the conductor says’ OK folks there is a body on the track and we are going to have to wait for the police to uhm get here and the ambulance and well we will get going as soon as we can.”

Out of there and into the station and there is no Lex Line. Nothing. An exit sign. A message on my phone that Lizbet has gone to Planet Hollywood-her father is dropping her off. So, there it is! No ride to Planet Hollywood. Must get back to the apartment and must find enough change to Planet Hollywood. Out into the rain again I spin around and see one of those giant, centipede-like double long buses and I jump on. “Help me, can you PLEASE tell me how to get down to Lexington and 68th or anywhere near there.” Sweet driver, a silvered haired Irishman and he says don’t worry about the fare-if you paid at the subway-it’s a transfer. I never knew all these codes, these rules that move people through this city-poor people for whom $2 is money. And he says “this bus will get you there but we have to get a new driver at 100th Street” and we all laugh and say that we’ll miss him-100 plus seats and just four of us. In from the rain. And I have seven messages on my cell phone. Lizbet is on her way to Planet Hollywood. The other child’s Mother leaves word that they we have to be at the theatre early-someone gave us the tickets but we have to go to the box office. Another message. Lizbet is coming with Richard but for Gods sake hurry so the other Mother doesn’t have to eat with “Mr. Charm”. He is really hated. Something in that, these women I barely know, who admire me, seek me out, want to be with me-their unrelenting rooting on of me and they do not know about the hell before or the hell now. But they see something in me. Is it kindness? Is it a smile? An unflagging joy in their daughters. My formerly happy house, the “sleep-over house” The “Chocolate chip cookie house” “the house of the legendary scavenger hunts”. I am not the woman on the Today Show bantering with Matt Lauer. I am broke and scared and frightened and wanting not to ride this bus but get out and stand in front of it. Let it mow we down and end this despair, this exhaustion and this fear.

Another message. Is Lizbet bringing money? Another message. Am I eating? Another message. Where am I? I call and say that someone died in the subway but don’t worry I am en route and I’ve already eaten so just order away. I jump off the bus and dash through more rain and now I am cold and desperate and crying. Into the house and I rifle through his drawers hoping I can get enough change to get ME there by subway and both of us home by Bus. My fingernails, worried by my teeth into flaking splintering nubs can’t grab the coins so I scoop them up in a piece of paper and drop them in my bag-piles of coins, scads and scads of coins. I can’t tell if there are mostly pennies, my eyes try to spot the quarters. Count. I shower and throw on a dirty Dolce and Gabbana raincoat that is filthy but hey it’s raining so of course it is dirty. PERFECT.

I get back on the subway and as usual I make a mistake with my stops and I am seven blocks from 42nd Street and I run-now mercifully in flat suede boots. Wet but flat. At Times Square I stop a couple of the cleaning guys with a garbage can and ask them “Where is Planet Hollywood.” In their orange jumpers they look like inmates. They don’t know. I call 411. They say it is on Broadway between 44th and 43rd and then I’m there and it ISN’T. Where is it? I spin and find a cop and he says to go to 45th and caddy cornered- there it is and I am in and it is so big, stories and elevators and stairs and crowds of people with children and men with walkie-talkies and I ask where would a party of four go? Where would they be? They waited in line and I know they are already eating. THEY’VE LEFT MORE MESSAGES while I was on the subway. A rough bouncer-ish guy says to go to the 3rd floor-take the elevator and all these strollers go on with me and it is hot and steaming again like the subway and then I am out on the floor and it is the size of a Southeastern Conferencee football field. The Sugar Bowl! With partitions and walls and small rooms and vast central eating ZONES. End Zones-cam I end it all here? That would be nice on this dee polyester plush, hospitality rigs in this warmth, just to lie down and rest. But I am yelling,” Lizbet, Lizbet, Lizbet!!!! “I am screaming and running until a waitress stops me and offers to help. “I can’t find my child ““Help me find my child” I dial the other Mother’s number and I can hear her and I am asking her where they are? On 3? On 2? Where are they?” And now I am crying and I cannot hear the Mother…and the waitress brings the manager and I sit down on the carpet in the middle of the room and cry until he finds the Mother and she holds me.

As I try to flag down a cab outside Diane’s building in Harlem, I realize that I’m just two steps away from joining the line that has formed outside the soup kitchen next door. The irony doesn’t go unnoticed, but I’m just too busy today to feel sorry for myself.

Loaded down with paint cans, brushes and painter’s tape, I am desperate to meet the two painters I picked up at Janovic Plaza. They don’t have cell phones, and if I don’t hurry they will disappear. Cash the only thing keeping them waiting, and the store must be painted today. Ah, but this is Harlem. And, although I can’t prove it, I’m pretty sure all the cabbies here share the same car. The one with the 14 air fresheners hanging from the two foot rear view mirror.

When I see my beaten-down reflection in the storefront windows I’m reminded of my mother. When my father was institutionalized and lost his company, my mother was there to pick up the pieces. A former model and alleged gold digger, Momma gave sewing lessons at the local Hancock Fabrics to pay for our Catholic school tuition.

Even though she made her own clothes, she never lost her model chic—black cashmere shift topped with a long, severely cut fox collar coat (the pelt she found at a yard sale), shiny, black over-the-knee boots weaving through the strip mall parking lot on her way to class—I close my eyes, and there she is.

Much to the chagrin of her boss, Momma was too swept up in teaching to give a damn about selling the sewing machines that would boost his tiny kingdom into the Hancock sales competition stratus-sphere. He had his eye on the prize: a plump holiday ham. The second she entered, the complaining began: too much noise, too many students. His toupee slipped slightly askew from his sweaty skull as he screamed at her to sell machines, not bobbins and scissors and cheap Butterick patterns. His name was Mr. Duvone—a stage name, I imagined as a child, an attempt to sound regal in his snug, sherbet-hued leisure suit. Her eyes shimmered as she tried to hold back the tears.

Now, in my own shit storm, I prayed I could be just like her.

Gigi, my friend Whit’s mother, was also a sight to behold. When her husband left, this Audrey Hepburn look-a-like and pillar of the local garden club took a job at the Sears furniture department to pay the bills. I remember her chiseled profile as she drove her broken down Fiat to visit clients across the lake in the scorching New Orleans summers—without air conditioning. Being the classy Southern lady she was, she never left home without her pantyhose, which were no doubt bonded with sweat to her legs before she could even back out of the driveway.

Mothers desperate and anxious with tuition payments, health insurance, children who needed new tennis shoes and books, and bill collectors lurking in the shadows—I had become one. I hope Lizbet knew I wouldn’t fail.

My heart is in my throat, the gypsy cab will only take money, green backs, not my scarred and war-torn Debit Card but there are no taxis up here in Harlem almost duct tape and bondo holding together just barely and I have about 11 bags of clothes and crap I have been storing them up here-the hefty bags reeking of moth balls and old clothes. Several tearing ominously. I have two war torn suitcases that I keep meaning to throw away. I have my eyes on some luggage at T K Maxx-funny I used to have lizard suitcases and embossed suede hanging bags. These last two bags are Hartmans from a garage sale-Jojo trolling for treasure and these wheels have never worked wheels sets opposed to each other locked in mortal combat. Worse than actually carting bags the old fashioned way and the last one is impossibly heavy and as I hoist it into the back seat it drags a bit on the 4 toned gray paint and bondo and the driver mutters.

In the city and trying to renovate a store with my new partner an old friend that needs a name. I almost laugh out loud. Is mine a NAME?

So, with a crew of 3 we are redoing the floors and painting and poor sweet Billy was on top of the ladder yesterday swat pouring off him and two other guys Pierre and Marlon, Haitians we knew and loved-Haitians that could get the job done-an Billy is holding the other end of a petite valence that weighed about 500 lbs-it spans the store and serves to hide the fabric wands, the wings that the fabric hangs from. Wings as if the fabric was angels but Billy almost buckling as they crammed the wood up and up and up into the blackness of the ceiling and Lizbet and Stephanie almost hysterical when the whole thing lurched forward shattering the glass of a deco chandelier and Billy seemed ready to cry and I don’t know am I helping him-making him take two truckloads to the warehouse whittling away at his inventory, his treasures. And then Rick, the manager, came back in the store manager and was furious an indignation of the unconsulted and threw a punch at the bathroom wall and was out in a hailstorm of F You's and drama and we were all suddenly tired. All this macho drama, this roughness is so different for Lizbet than the trips to London for Decorex and Paris for Maison and Objet-our lives as hardscrabble and gritty as the real world of this furniture- antiques beaten by life not scrubbed fresh and gleaming like a Weinstein Merrill settee. This is our new life. And I saw that Lizbet's school shirt a uniform shirt was dingy from me hand washing it in the sink and thought of last month when we were at Marney’s and her grand Park Avenue apartment and the two live-in maids and how they had taken all our panties and shirts and hung them up to dry and I told them asking Lizbet to translate that “all our stuff can go in the dryer.” I don’t have nice clothes, nice things anymore. The only nice thing I have is Lizbet-hidden behind a cupboard with my hand over her mouth for silence about these atrocities, the life I was making her live furtive, lying and scared.

I stroll through Central Park looking upon the innocent young mothers sporting $2,000 British prams, trailed by a Caribbean nanny pushing a silver-spooned tot swaddled in the choicest cashmere. I want to shake their carb-starved figures right out of their Manolos, and scream some hard-earned wisdom into their Botox-frozen faces. “Where is your pre-nup? A post-nup, at least? Did you quit your job? Oh God, you’re not actually working for the jerk, are you?”

Surprise—most marriages end in divorce. The ’60s-era picture of divorce that gave women virtually everything, including alimony, has gone the way of the home perm. Women just assume they will end up with the children, the house, the cars and enough cash to keep their plastic surgeon from ever missing a yacht payment. Surely, their years of blowjobs and homemaking count for something? Don’t count on it.

Today’s system is weighted so heavily in favor of the spouse with money, with power and, for the most part, with the Y chromosome. No surprise—I lacked all of the above.

Everyday someone invariable asks me about my divorce. I can only say that it must be because I live between New York and Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala. (except those days when I am on self-imposed suicide-watch and wisely stay at home).

Why did I get screwed? What forces were at work in the cosmos to land me in such a horrible state (read: no apartment, no company, and no health insurance)? Go ahead. Fill in the blanks.

I often hear, “Did you have a horrible lawyer?” Yes and no. My lawyer was a sweetheart in the beginning when it looked like I would be awarded legal fees but as the 15,000 in cash raised by my posse of girlfriends I was quickly run through and it became obvious that I was destitute my poor sole-practitioner could afford my case about as well as I could while Richard wracked up a staggering quarter million dollar bill. If I would dare to leave him then he would gladly pay to destroy me Shiva-like. Mine was sad tale all to common for women like me who do not have access to money and power. A tale I was tired of living and even more tired of living.

What horrible thing could I have possibly done to lose a company I built with my husband for 24 years? It was our company, and while his father was fond of introducing me as “Richard’s designer,” I wrote every business plan, managed major sales, hired employees, researched and developed all product lines, went to all the European shows and handled all of the press—which landed me and our products into the national spotlight in the pages of Elle DÈcor, W, Metropolitan Home, House & Garden, InStyle and on and on. I was the business. Everyone knew it, and now it belongs to him. All of it.

Most people usually breathe a sigh of relief that this is only happening to someone else…somewhere far, far away and surely urban. Most people reach an “ah ha!” moment, nod their heads with relief and say, “oh, this is just a New York thing.” No. Unfortunately it’s not a New York thing. I’ve heard war stories that make Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger look like Mike and Carol Brady. This is strange unchartered territory and now women married twenty, thirty years are harangued from the bench by an irate Judge to “get a job” as husbands dissipate assets like Nazi’s plundering the Louvre-we are Lewis and Clark without a compass, without a canoe, without a prayer.

I just saw Jill Stuart’s kid, Chloe, and she was is shock. She just stammered “Oh My God, Marcia” trailing off like a littler kid. Jesus and me all 210 sweating, wife-beating tee-shirt wearing pounds of him with his oiled dread locks in the front seat of the U-Haul. Me driving. PRETTY. And I laughed and said I was in the middle of the ultimate Ghetto move. Which in no way does justice to the horror of this move. Beyond Ghetto. Thank God, Milyn is here and helping me cause I may yet die. I couldn’t afford real movers and I had 5 days to move according to the Divorce decree so I packed with Milyn for two days and did an incredibly shitty job. Just utter chaos. And then we went on the third day over to Janovic Plaza, where the out-of-work painters stand waiting for day jobs and we got 4 guys. 2 are doing the move with me while 2 are painting the new place with Milyn and they are fighting and bitching pretty much non-stop. All toked up on weed and whatever else. The Mexicans fairly good guys or so I thought until the Hippie, Iza tells me “Yo, Mommy, Alexandro has it too good, you dig him and that shit, so he has it made with this rich white lady!” And I cannot believe what I am hearing. Is this my life? I am being singled out to be a Sugar Momma for a Mexican “stud”. But the ones that get to paint lord it over the others. Like they are yard trash. So, the next day we switch and they are so paralytically slow a slow that says “paid by the day”. 150 bucks so time stands still in a Stephen Hawking-ish nightmare and I am screaming at them and firing the little freaky one that jumped on Milyn’s bed and asked her if she wore a bra. So the “movers” are late as usual and trying desperately to stretch this Hell Move into a fourth day. The old dude, screams out in agony that his arms have BOTH cramped, a scientific marvel to which I suggest we should alert the Discovery channel. And he says he can’t unload any more today and my boyfriend Jesus says we need to keep the U haul for another night and they have NO idea where the trolley is or the ten blankets and Danny at U-Haul has me on speed dial. He needs this truck and we’ve been keeping it on the street with a padlock that we got at Home Depot on Third Avenue, but it is loaded with shit every night and it is not safe. And Danny wants it back. So after he gets his money the old Dude peels off to a Yes Concert-as if he’d completed a tour of Lourdes such is the healing power of cash. And Jesus just stands there cursing and swearing and saying we have to have another day. But they have painted (I hired 4 fired 2 hired 2 more so of the six) 5 rooms and moved 4 loads and that sucks. So, I scream to the doorman at the new place “100 bucks to help me get this shit off the truck” and he and Milyn and I just throw stuff off pell mell onto 72nd street. Sweat pouring off us. And we are done. I am two hours late and begging Danny to wait for me and they find the frigging trolley and put it in the back and I take off for U-Haul. And the trolley flies against the back steel wall behind my seat and I almost cream this taxi.

So, we unpack the boxes. One box a metaphor for the whole Ghetto Move with an oil painting and random panties and a tube of toothpaste in a box that the “movers” triple duct-taped to Brinks-style security. It all sucks. My life sucks. Where will I put Lizbet there is so much furniture and equipment and computers and amps in her tiny room that I swear I feel like a roadie for Ted Nugent. Iza will be back tomorrow and finish the kitchen and then we’ll wait on the living room and foyer. So, we moved and painted and got air-conditioners and washer/dryer and hung all the paintings and put the beds together and unloaded all the boxes in 7 days. HEAVEN.

The aging Lincoln Town Car kisses the pavement down the avenue on its way to take my daughter to a lunch date with Oonagh. I carefully peel back the giant swatch of threadbare duct tape that is holding down the trunk lid just long enough to toss Lizbet’s bag inside. Ah, the luxury of a Harlem gypsy cab.

Lizbet quickly takes a look around before ducking inside––making sure her dad is nowhere in sight. A glimpse of me putting her into a cab would signal to Richard that I am in fact out of my apartment. I have been subletting my place since my surgery. The surgery was a great excuse at first – I had to be tended at first but that lame excuse has worn off after three months-Right now, subletting my pathetically small studio is the only way to pay the bills. Richard has yet to catch on to my Bedouin-style parenting. If he had, he would have filed for sole custody by now

Lizbet is scared of her father finding out, so I will be dropping her suitcase off at her father’s house before racing off to meet her and Oonagh at the restaurant. Once restaurant bound, panic begins to set in. My stomach is lurching. My palms are sweating. I wish I were dead. I cannot go inside. I cannot go on. I cannot go on. I cannot make it through this.

I cannot make it through an entire meal. As I arrive, Lizbet texts me not to say anything in front of Oonagh that might give away the fact that we’re sleeping on a friend’s air mattresses in Harlem­­­­­–– so we are officially still on 75th Street and definitely NOT in Harlem, or at Carey’s or Susie’s or whoever will take us and has an air mattress. We are still at my comfortable 75th Street apartment. Comfortable if you are a cat. I will be taking her suitcase to her Dad’s apartment-our old apartment-a cavernous apartment in an elegant pre-war building and I can’t help but think that my life on the run is better than our cramped studio. She can’t have any of her friends over because it is too small but the closest friends come anyway and say, “I love your apartment Brooke-its so pretty.” Shameless and maladroit liars. I love them! I have been rereading Anne Frank’s Diary and I feel like Lizbet is my Anne Frank, something furtive that I must scamper and hide, nuzzling her like something small and precious tucked into the smallest darkest corner … away from other eyes that would covet her. This is our new life. Six long months of frantic lies and deceit—how much longer I can keep

They are absolutely screaming. Screaming in that way that only thirteen year old girls can scream. Shrill, high-pitched, still-little-girl screams. We are 5 of us crammed in a room, clothes strewn everywhere-my OCD held in check by their joy. They are blowing out their hair damp still from swimming. The early night air smelling of singed hair and Juicy Couture perfume. There is Juniors Department at Bloomingdales’s worth of clothing. Juicy, Tory Burch, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Seven for All Mankind Jeans and bathing suits from everywhere, Their favorites-5 matching tie-dyed suits. Itsy bitsy teeny weenie tie-dyed bikinis. And in homage to the summer that is yet to come, everyone of the girl sports a couple of braided strands of hair. Only Esme was sporting a full Rasta Halo of corn rows. The air damp and think from their showers and ungents-little bud-breasted girls some already wit boyfriends. Boys that wear Gucci loafers, attend Le Rosey camp and try to cop feels. City boys.

Lizbet is refusing to shower. Claiming she was clean. I don’t care if she smells like hell- I am so in love with her.

On the road I am driving fast, faster to amuse them, Their shrieks piercing the bite. Black on black nite heavy with humidity. They are one their phones calling their friends who are already down at the Beach Bar B Q telling them they are en route. We are of course, the 5 of us, over an hour late and belying their age they are desperate to get there for the Crab Races, their Mark Jacobs, Le Sport Sac and Chanel bags crammed with Jamaican money. They feel rich with the volume of the bills. At the cottage, our old favorite Cottage # 1, they tried on and disposed of a mountain of clothes, ripping tank tops on and off, trying on endless shoes and sandals-Lizbet opting for Tory Burch heels that will sink to their soles in that moist sand at the Bar B Q,. She may stand on her tippy toes like I did at her age at parties with my 45 first cousins at the lake and me in strappy heels after the monotony of my Catholic School uniform. They are so loud that all of the gentle and mysterious swamp sounds are drowned out- the cicadas and the birds chattering with the coming of night and water rats scampering off the road and down into the dank alluvial creek. Stephanie and Sophie are here with us and they are enjoying a month-long peace after a long year of endless power struggles. The four popular girls. And I am back in Jamaica and it is not a bus mans holiday. After 10 years of begging to redesign this hotel I said, NO.’ I’d rather pay and I am loving it. The girls. Their music, a hip-hop stream, serenading us as we drive in the golf cart- sure that someone will be aggravated by our sheer volume. So, I speed up with the music-me singing along with them. “ Its gettin’ hot in here so take off all your clothes. I am getting’ so hot I could take my clothes off.” And I could. Take off this little eyelet mini-dress and run sandal-less in the sand. And then Stephanie leans over and says. “Brooke I love your hair, you look even prettier than in New York Magazine.” Maybe it is true. Prettier.