1
Amanda
Amanda Cox closed the door to the apartment she shared with her mother, ignoring the mess that was slowly creeping towards the front door.
‘Tomorrow,’ she promised the apartment and headed downstairs and onto the New York street and to the coffee stand where a flat white and a bagel were waiting for her.
‘Thanks, Arnold,’ she said to the man who ran the coffee stand. Arnold had left her bagels by her mailbox when her mother, Wendy, was sick.
‘You good, Manda?’ he asked, busy making coffee for the waiting patrons.
‘Great,’ she said as she left the exact money on the counter and picked up her standing order.
‘You lie like a rug, lady,’ he said, and she gave him a half-smile then headed to the subway.
Arnold had been at the coffee stand ever since she could remember. He was a constant in her life, always on the corner, making bagels and coffee and chatting with the locals in Astoria, Queens.
The neighbourhood had changed over the years, but Arnold hadn’t and neither had the other mainstays of Wendy and Amanda’s life. They had the same rent-controlled apartment, the same bodega, passed the same faces until some of the old stores went, replaced with Starbucks and Whole Foods. A dog grooming shop replaced the bookstore and, to Amanda’s horror, a yoga studio replaced the art supply and studio store where she had worked through college, while still living at home.
For twenty-six years Amanda had been in Astoria, watching the world shift and turn while her little pocket of the planet stayed largely the same with her mom, and Arnold and the coffee and the bagels.
Until the pocket was emptied and Wendy fell over in the street one day, writhing in pain. The next day, the scans showed a brain tumour.
Incurable but they could treat it to prolong her life, they said.
Wendy had said no treatment and Amanda was so furious at her mother’s selfishness that she hadn’t spoken to her for three days until her best friend Lainie reminded her that she might as well consider her mom dead already if she was going to treat her like that when she was dying.
Only Lainie could put it in a way that was an emotional slap to wake her up from her pain.
And it was pain. Every moment of her mother’s death was painful, but it was also so beautiful being able to express the love without any conditions attached. The privilege of being with someone as they died was not lost on her. When Lainie asked her if there was anything about death that she wasn’t prepared for, after all was said and done, Amanda had pondered. Lainie always asked thoughtful questions.
It was all so unusual, she had replied after she had sugared her coffee and they sat in the park watching the well-groomed dogs play with coloured balls and chew-proof rubber bones.
‘The laughter,’ she had answered finally.
Lainie had looked at her, confused. ‘What about death is funny?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t really explain it. It’s not funny so much as it’s life without any edits. It’s all raw footage. The body makes peculiar noises when it’s shutting down, which we would scream laughing at, or you say stuff that you think you shouldn’t but it’s perfect at the moment. You’re honest about stuff, like Mom and I talking about our mutual hatred of folk music and Gerard Butler movies. I can’t explain it, but there was laughter, and love, so much love.’
Now, sitting on the train to work, Amanda would have handed over her coffee and bagel to anyone who could have made her laugh again at that moment, or anyone who would call her boss and tell him she wouldn’t be in today, but she knew she couldn’t take another day off from work. She was already in the red for sick days, and there had recently been another hire at the talent agency to book the models and the photographers for shoots.
If she could, she would resign tomorrow, but that wasn’t possible. In her perfect world, she would spend the day drawing and working on the illustrations for the children’s book her mom had written but never published. That was her only regret on her death bed, she had told Amanda.
‘I should have done more of what made me happy, like writing. I didn’t trust my voice until I was older. I should have known I knew what I was doing sooner, or at least tried.’
Amanda had tried to tell her it was fine; she had raised Amanda as a single mom, who had moved to New York from England when she was twenty to become an important writer. Then she became pregnant with Amanda and gave up on her dream; instead, she worked as a court stenographer for twenty-five years, giving them stability and food on the table but at the cost of quashing her dreams so Amanda could have hers.
But was the dream of being an artist a reality? she thought as she left the subway and walked the three blocks to work. She hated her job, but it wasn’t like her door was being knocked down with offers for her drawings. She had seen so many agents to try and get one of them to take her on. All she needed was one important commission and then she could leverage off that. But the response was always the same.
Your style is too old-fashioned.
We already have a Beatrix Potter style of illustrator.
No one cares about flowers anymore.
She didn’t think her work looked like Beatrix Potter’s; it was inspired by her style but not the same. Just characters living in New York, doing New York things but as animals.
There were the ferrets who ran the local bodega. And the warthog traffic cop. The elegant frogs who dined at Gramercy Tavern wearing pearls and gloves and heels, and the tiny little puppies all in school uniforms, tumbling through the fancy iron gates for their posh school.
