“I’m so sorry, Casey,” Mary Ellen said, her pale cheeks wet.
“I know,” Casey said.
They walked out of the shop together. Mary Ellen lit a cigarette on the street, and Casey couldn’t refrain from asking her for one, too, even though she had never before smoked in Mary Ellen’s presence, following some Korean notion to not smoke in front of your elders. Mary Ellen handed her the pack, and Casey lit hers. The first drag was euphoric; the miasma in her head parted instantly, and Casey felt a kind of clarity she’d been missing for quite some time.
They hugged each other good-bye. Mary Ellen watched Casey walk uptown, then turned and went back to the library. At her empty space at the long wooden table in the Great Reading Room, Mary Ellen remembered that she’d forgotten to eat, and when she fumbled through her skirt pocket, she realized that Casey still had her packet of smokes. She gathered her papers for ED’s biography that she’d been working on for eight years. Another day would hardly matter. She was a biographer who did not understand her own children’s lives. Life was just guesswork even if you were an eyewitness. Mary Ellen searched for her cigarettes again, then planned to buy some on her way to Penn Station. She put her bare arms through the straps of her knapsack and left the library.
8 COST
IT WAS THE FINAL WEEK OF JULY, but still cool enough in the morning for Casey to wear her brown suit with Ella’s brown pumps. Casey rationalized to herself that she was amortizing the cost of the suit with each use—avoiding altogether the issue of the credit card minimum payment she couldn’t make. She was also calculating the odds of running into Jay. Four thousand employees worked at the Kearn Davis building on Fiftieth and Park. Jay and Ted worked on six at investment banking, and Casey would be interviewing on two with sales and trading.
From the lobby phone, she called Ted. His assistant told her that Ted wanted her to come up to six. In a huff, she marched into the empty elevator. Well, at least she was alone to hear the rumble in her stomach.
Casey was ravenous. That morning, Ella rushed off before finishing her breakfast, so Casey had eaten the discarded half of the toasted bagel with some butter. But eating that bit of bread had only made her hungrier. In the five weeks since she’d left her parents’ house, Casey had lost eleven pounds according to Ella’s bathroom scale. Her suit skirt spun around her waist, and for first time in her life, she was not happy about losing weight—it felt like a human rights violation to be this hungry all the time. And now that she couldn’t afford to buy cigarettes （she’d already smoked two of Mary Ellen’s packet and was rationing out the remainder for emergencies）， her hunger was unbearable. The less she smoked, the more she wanted to eat, and food had never tasted better.
Every day, she went to the Mid-Manhattan Library to conduct her job search, and she couldn’t stop thinking about bread, spaghetti, and hamburgers. Each night before Ella got home, she cooked one of her three-for-a-dollar ramen noodles bought from Odd-Job （occasionally filching an egg from Ella’s refrigerator） with as much water as possible. The salty broth kept her going for a couple of hours. Sleeping when hungry was difficult. Once in a while, she broke her resolve not to take from Ella’s larder and ate anyway. One night, she consumed a whole jar of Bonne Maman strawberry jam with a teaspoon. When Ella ordered Chinese food, Casey never asked for anything, but she ate the free egg roll or hot-and-sour soup and fried noodles in the waxed paper bag that Ella never touched. When Ella prepared dinner for Ted, Casey pretended to have other engagements. But having nowhere else to go, since meeting anyone in the city required cash and carfare—even hooking up with a college friend for a beer and pizza meant fifty bucks—Casey walked to the Metropolitan Museum, where you paid what you wanted, on the nights it closed late or lingered in bookstores that were still open, and when it was time for bed, she walked back to Ella’s.
The sharp chime of the elevator pierced the hush of the sixth floor. Right away, Casey recognized the thick blue carpets and the dark wooden trim on the window jambs and door frames. The rest of the company was styled as a marble temple of finance. But investment banking on six resembled a private English men’s club—mahogany paneling, silver-leaf-framed black-and-white photographs of New York’s first skyscrapers, and buttoned leather wing chairs. The pert receptionist directed her toward Ted’s office—only shouting distance from the larger shared office where Jay worked as a junior analyst with nineteen other Ivy grads chained to their rolltop desks.