59

A New Beginning

Rae came to see me one evening, cursing the whole world. She spoke about her sorry life. She lost her job because she spent too much time going out with Davis. Her head wasn’t in her work. She couldn’t follow the instructions they gave her precisely, so they replaced her. And Davis? Now that she can give him all of her time, he’s nowhere to be found. He’s taken up with someone else: Katya. Only now has Rae found out that they knew each other before; they’d gone out with each other for a while in the past and now they’ve taken a room together, to live together according to the laws of free love. Maybe they’ll even get married someday.

She’d been to see B. but left him indignantly. He and his wife moved from their old rooms to a pretty apartment on the West Side. They had a maid living with them, and guess who else, Rae told me, is their boarder?

My heart plummeted, pounded against my chest like a frightened bird, and nearly stopped altogether. Feeling Rae’s familiar penetrating glare as she stared at me with her furrowed brow, I was afraid to guess, but she soon supplied the answer I was expecting.

“A.! A. moved in with them! Yes, that’s how it is! Can you believe it? But there’s no need to gossip about them. What we need to worry about is keeping ourselves out of all the malicious gossip. There are those, believe me, who are blind to their trespasses but strict about ours.”

Rae gave this moral about society as a bitter warning, and asked my advice about how to tear herself away from all of them once and for all, because she’d had it up to here with all of it. She needs to get away, she doesn’t want to see any of them ever again!

“The best thing would be to leave,” I said.

“Yes, leave,” nodded Rae, sadly, “only to show up alone in a strange city . . .”

I thought to myself, “Why shouldn’t I leave here too? What would I miss? Would I be at all sorry to leave behind all the A.’s, B.’s, C.’s, D.’s, E.’s, and F.’s? They’d meet other girls soon enough. And what of my love for A.? I can take that with me!”

When I told Rae that I’d go with her she grabbed me by both hands and almost cried with joy that she wouldn’t need to leave by herself. She would not be alone! She was already imagining how good things will be for us in the other—not strange now but new—city. We’ll live there together like sisters. We’ll make new friends. We will start a new life and it will be so much better than our life is here.

“Who even cares if it’s worse, as long as it’s different,” I said, and she liked that very much.

“Yes, even if it’s worse, it’ll be different. Let’s not get our hopes up, imagining too much happiness for ourselves, because we don’t want to be disappointed. Whatever happens to us we won’t be here anymore, so that’s already better. The heart aches less from a distance.”

We’ve decided not to tell anyone where we’re going. The only thing we’ll tell them is this: we are leaving them. We won’t be here in New York any longer. We’ve had enough. And there: who even cares if it’s worse, as long as it’s different!