Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York Read online

  No, they weren’t waiting for Sheila. As a matter of fact, they did their best to avoid her. In the reception area—dirty beige walls, dirty beige floor, dirty beige chairs—were eight “Sheilas” and about five young “Mannys” all with the New York Times’ classified section under their arms, ads circled in pencil. All the girls in black sheaths. All the boys in blue cord jackets. The whole group carrying trench coats, and where was Doris Day? How come she came to New York, got off the train, some man spilled coffee on her, made her head of his advertising company, lent her his handkerchief when she cried and then married her? Is there such a big difference between Sheila Levine and Doris Day? Yes. Doris Day goes to funerals to see people buried, and Sheila Levine goes to funerals to get buried.

  The receptionist at the For College Graduates Only agency gave everybody a card to fill out. Ruthie, I should have been a mommy. If I had been a mommy, I wouldn’t have had to fill out that card.

  “Sheila, darling, if you had gone into teaching, then you wouldn’t have had to fill out that card.” Tap-tap-tap all you want on my casket, Mother. I can’t hear you now.

  With a ball-point pen, leaning on my patent leather pocketbook: Social Security—133-30-6165. Name—Sheila Lynn Levine. Last job held—none. Reason for leaving last job (should I leave it blank? If I didn’t have a last job, I couldn’t have a reason for leaving it). I squeezed in, “I never worked.” Then crossed that out (card looked messy). Should I ask for another? Would the receptionist think I was stupid? How do people who work in employment agencies get their jobs? Ever think about that? Turn the card over. Skills. Should I put that I type a little? If I do, then maybe they’ll send me to a job that requires some typing, and I don’t want to type. I want to go buy paintings in helicopters. Skills—none. (Card looking terrific. Boy, would I like to hire this Sheila Levine. Never worked. Can’t do anything. Makes messes.) Question—What type of work are you looking for? Aha! I am looking for “anything creative.” Last question. Education. Aha! College Graduate, you dumb asses.

  I sat and waited for my turn to be interviewed, staring at the walls, avoiding eye contact with anyone, hoping none of the other girls landed the job of the year before it was my turn. There was a man interviewer and a woman interviewer. I hoped and prayed for the man. I don’t relate to woman. Never did. The only D I ever got in college was from a woman teacher to whom I didn’t relate. Next? My turn. It was the woman. Come on, Sheila, relate; don’t get another D. The woman motioned for me to follow her to her office. Not actually an office—one of those make-believe offices. A partitioned cubicle. She gestured for me to sit, and I sat.

  “I’m Sheila Levine. I read your ad in the classified section,” taking out paper, making a mess of paper all over this lady’s desk. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at my card. I bet that card really wowed her. “Ah, yes. Here it is. Brght. gal, coll. grad. good py. For College Grads Only Agency, 555-7826, 44 West 45 … you see, it’s right here.” She didn’t look up. The bitch wouldn’t look up and face me.

  Miss Burke was the name of this charming woman. Miss Burke, whom do you think you were fooling? Your name used to be Burkowitz, and when you graduated from college, your parents offered you a nose job or a fur coat and you took the nose job, didn’t you, Miss Burke? We all know that’s what you did. Do you know, Miss Burke, how many people said, “That’s a nose job if I’ve ever seen one,” behind your back? Silly Miss Burke, you should have worn the nose of your heritage proudly, like Barbra Streisand and Sheila Levine.

  Miss Burke made me sit in her cubicle, small, sloppy, with nebbish ashtrays, unfunny signs on the wall, like PLAN AHEAD, a big poster of Mona Lisa winking. She probably had a pencil holder in the shape of a penis in her top drawer. She made me sit there for about ten minutes without looking at me. Maybe I had her old nose. Finally she spoke. The speaking gave her away for the Burkowitz she really was. With her dress from Henri Bendel and her ten rings from Saks, her voice still said East Flatbush. Miss Burke, let me give you a piece of advice—hock the rings and take speech lessons.

  “Do you type?”

  “Actually I don’t really want a job where I have to type. I want to do something creative. I’m here to answer your ad in the paper—the one where they were looking for a bright gal. That’s me, a bright gal. Ha-ha-ha.” To this day, I wish I could take back those ha-ha-ha’s.

  “May I see that paper, miss?”

  “Certainly. Certainly. See, here’s the ad. Bright gal. Ha-ha-ha.”

  She took the paper from me and in her alligator pumps, which I’m sure she wouldn’t have worn had she known the alligator was becoming extinct, walked out of the room. Walking lessons she also had. I’m telling you, Miss Burke, get rid of the voice, you could land an Onassis.

  She was back in a flash. Didn’t even give me a chance to read anything upside down on her desk.

  “I’m sorry, that job has been taken.”

  “Was it a good job?” Big mouth had to know.

  “What’s the difference? It’s been taken.”

  “I was just curious. I mean, it’s nice to know that somebody got a nice job. I mean, it’s nice to know that there are nice jobs available. I mean. …”

  “Do you type?”

  “I type a little, but I don’t want a job where I have to type. I want to do some creative type of work. I wouldn’t even consider a job that required typing.”

  “How many words a minute?”

  “Twenty-nine, but I don’t want. …”

  “Not too good. Shorthand?”

  I should have said, “No, Miss Burke, and I feel this interview has come to an end. You and your people obviously don’t understand what I’m looking for. Good day, Miss Burke. Next time get your voice fixed.”

  I said, “No,” with my eyes on my chipped nail polish.

  “Well, let’s see if we have anything.”

  She started riffling through the cards on her desk, removing a paperweight of somebody sitting on the toilet. Charming. Absolutely charming. The phone rang. She picked it up immediately.

  “Hello, Burke here.”

  She got out a new three-by-five card, on which she wrote down information with a pen that had an eight ball on the end of it.

  “Yes, your name … the name of the firm … job requirements … typing? … Shorthand? … Preference to age, color, religion?”

  Miss Burke, I hope you’re not still doing that. Do you read the papers? You’re not allowed to do that anymore. You wouldn’t want to have to go to jail and eat bread and water and give up your charge accounts, would you?

  “How much does the job pay? … You’re kidding. I don’t know if I can get anybody to work for such coolie wages.”

  She hung up the phone, turned to me with the new three-by-five card in her hand, and said without shame, “A job just came in you might be right for.”

  “Do you have to type?”

  “Yes, your typing isn’t good enough, but we’ll lie a little. You go to 418 West Thirty-ninth, room 1411, ask for a Mr. Mann [Mankowitz?]. Call me after the interview. The fee is one week’s salary, due the day employment starts.”

  She handed me the address on a slip of paper, and I walked out of the office in a daze, right through another crop of young hopefuls with their classified sections. God damn it, Doris Day never typed.

  I never went to see Mr. Mann. For four weeks I went to twenty-three other employment agencies, where I met twenty-three Miss Burkes. To all of you, I would like to say a few words. Why not? … I’m a dying woman with a curse on my lips for you. So you didn’t listen to me then. Would it kill you to listen to me now?

  I hope each and every one of you ends up in hell. You should each have a little room like the boutique on the third floor of Saks, only they should be out of your size in everything. Your breasts should sag, and your hair should lose its shape. In front of each of you should be a typewriter. You should have permanent laryngitis and have to type instead of talk. You should get nothing until you t
ype sixty words a minute, use a dictaphone and take shorthand—speedwriting doesn’t count. The people who bring you your food will be college graduates in their black dresses and blue cord jackets. You will be forced to look at them, smile and say thank you. I wish you bad breath and space shoes. And one more thing—all your noses will grow back.

  After four weeks of searching, I spent a week eating, and then I got a job. Not through an employment agency or the New York Times. I got my job through Rose Lehman’s sister.

  If a Jewish kid is an actor, he doesn’t get an agent. He gets a job acting through Rose Lehman’s sister or Abe’s brother-in-law, who works in the same building as Fred Siegal, who is David Merrick’s lawyer’s barber. If a Jewish kid graduates from law school, he gets his job through Herman Marsh, who is in the garment business but has a brother who works on Wall Street and retains a lawyer from one of the top firms.

  If a Jewish boy wants to be a hairdresser, there’s a lot of crying at first, but have no fear, ladies and gentlemen. The first day on the job he will have a huge clientele. The Jewish boy’s mother and aunts and friends will come from near and far just to have their hair teased by Goldie’s boy or Harriet’s nephew. They will set up so many regular appointments that he will soon own his own shop and not have to work for Italians and stop being a disgrace to his poor Mama and Papa, who saved for his college education and had to send all that money to the Bu-T Beauty School.

  So I got my job through Rose Lehman’s sister. She was friendly with a man called Danny Hirshfield, who lived next door to a man called Herman Nash, whose brother-in-law, Frank Holland, was in the children’s record business. Rose Lehman’s sister heard, right through her ears on the phone, that Frank Holland was expanding, owing to a Christmas hit he had where a lot of squirrels sang, and was taking on more help. Rose’s sister swore to me that I wouldn’t have to type, and the job started on my birthday, August 12 (I’m a Leo, but not your typical Leo), and I figured starting work on my birthday was some sort of omen and I couldn’t stand the thought of facing another Miss Burke lady and if I didn’t find a job soon, I would go crazy hearing about how wonderful teaching was for a girl. So I took the job even though it didn’t have a chance of being written up in Glamour—WOMEN WHO ARE DOING THINGS—Here’s fat Sheila Levine, just about to take coffee and a cheese danish to her boss, Frank Holland, whose real name is Frank Hyman, but he changed it when he left shoulder pads—he was the shoulder pad king—and went into the children’s record business. It is widely known that Frank Holland-Hyman wouldn’t have coffee and a danish if it wasn’t brought by Sheila’s own hands. The picture would show me in a tight black dress, wrinkles across the stomach, runs in the stockings, having a pretty big cheese danish myself.

  The job wasn’t great, but I was satisfied. My mother, however, was thrilled. Thrilled that I got a job in “show biz.” I could hear her bragging to her friends on the phone. “Yeah, Sheila got a great job. She’s involved with a record company. Why shouldn’t she have such a good job? She majored in show business.”

  Bernice Arnold, had her fling with the business. Somebody once told her she oughta be in pictures and he gave her his card. So it turned out he was a theatrical agent. My mother never went to see him because she was engaged to be married. To this day, she tells people she gave up show business for my father. Come on!

  I would like to take this opportunity to thank Rose Lehman’s sister, Fran, for getting me the job. Thank you, Fran, thank you for saving me from the struggle. I wish I could have put up a thousand posters in the subways of New York—I Got My Job Through Rose Lehman’s Sister.

  My roommate, Linda, and I decided way back in Syracuse that if we weren’t married by the time we graduated, we probably would at least be engaged, and we would live together in Manhattan. Why not? Didn’t Doris Day always have a precious, little two-bedroom apartment, all yellow and light blue and cuddly? Nothing pretentious—just a modest fifteen-hundred-a-month apartment in a gorgeous brownstone that poor Doris paid for with her unemployment check. The sheets and matching pajamas alone must have cost a fortune. Four years of college apiece, and Sheila Levine and Linda Minsk didn’t know that Hollywood had been deceiving them all these years. We thought that if we were good girls and looked hard enough, Doris Day, when she was carried off into blissful matrimony, would sublet her place to us.

  By August Linda had a job, too. She majored in art, which, like drama, prepared one for nothing. That was the trend. There was a whole crop of college girls prepared for nothing. Upon graduating, Linda put down her charcoal and mat knife for the last time and became a welfare worker for the New York Department of Welfare. She didn’t get her job through Jewish connections; she just went there and applied. However, once she was in the department, her next-door neighbor’s brother-in-law’s friend’s son did pull strings and got Linda into a good district. Mrs. Minsk didn’t mind that her daughter worked for the Welfare Department so long as she didn’t have to hand out welfare checks in a poor neighborhood.

  Linda did try—a welfare worker with a heart. During her first three months with the department, she gave twenty-two families linoleum, arranged for end tables for another six and sent a young mother and her nine illegitimate children on a vacation to Florida. They never came back, which delighted Linda’s supervisor so much that he took her for coffee at Chock Full o’Nuts and tried to grab her knees under the counter.

  I planned to meet Linda under the arch in Washington Square Park. I left for Manhattan to find an apartment and start my life on a Friday morning. My mother hid behind her Sanka. My father hid behind the New York Times. I had done them wrong.

  All the way in on the train, I kept thinking of the gay old times I was going to have in the big city. Had I but known then what I know now, I would have turned back and not looked for an apartment. I would have stayed in Franklin Square until I went loony enough to be locked up in an attic.

  “No, no, children, don’t go up there. Crazy Aunt Sheila is up there.”

  “Why is she crazy, Mama?”

  “She’s crazy because she didn’t get married. Nobody thought she was pretty enough or nice enough to want to marry her, so she went crazy. That’s all. No, no. Don’t go up there, honey.”

  Yes siree! Had I known the facts … the actual facts … I never would have gone. Some call New York a jungle. It’s not. It’s a big jockstrap. It supports the men. Just look at the figures.

  In New York City there are one million single girls who wear a size nine, have straight hair, and have never had a pimple. Not one of these girls is a virgin. They are all willing to go to bed with men in their studio apartments. They all read Cosmo’s articles on how to get married (“How to Get Married if You’re Over Thirty”). They all go, keep going to parties for single people, Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, election eve, any other eve they can think of. Some lie about their age. A few even lie and say they’ve been divorced, because if you’ve been divorced, your chances of getting married are better. True. If you’ve been divorced, it means somebody once loved you enough to want you always.

  New York has one million girls who have charge accounts at Bloomingdale’s and Saks, who buy their own jewelry. Girls who go to Tiffany’s and buy themselves bracelets and rings. Yeah, and in case you think you’re real special, you should know that these girls also went to college, have read Faustus and know Zola. And they’re all gourmet cooks. Every one of them can make quiche and paella. They all use the same goddamned recipe.

  And oh, how political they are. They’re liberal, these girls. They march in the cold and join parties and wear buttons. They go to meetings because they believe in good causes? No, they go because they might meet a man who believes in good causes.

  What, are we crazy? Are we all crazy? Don’t we realize we’re a business, we single girls are? There are magazines for us, special departments in stores for us. Every building that goes up in Manhattan has more than fifty percent efficiency apartments. Apartments? Nah—they’re cells, wi
thout bedrooms, for the one million girls who have very little use for them.

  All these girls, these hundreds of thousands of girls, follow the same pattern. They come to the Village first, sharing apartments with three, four, five girls, all looking for men, for husbands. They move to the Upper East Side with one roommate into smaller, more expensive apartments. They don’t decorate. All their money is spent on clothes, for they are looking, searching, screaming for men. They end up alone. In small apartments, midtown, less expensive but still safe, buying skin creams and taking an interest in their pension plans. They buy some nice wineglasses, recover the old couch, and buy a cat. They have pots on their kitchen walls and plants on their living-room tables. And they never stop looking.

  It would be wrong to say that none of them get married. Some do, god damn it! … Some do. Some marry the boy back home that they wouldn’t even consider marrying when they left for Manhattan. A few meet a man at a party through a friend in the building. A very few … believe me, a very few. Fun City. Ha! New York is a struggle to survive, to be noticed, to be wanted, to be married. Reprints of these views can be obtained through Manny Levine, who will be happy to Xerox them for anyone interested.

  I spotted Linda immediately under the arch at Washington Square Park. She was not hard to spot. Linda Minsk is five eleven in her stocking feet. On some people five eleven is fine. On Linda, the inches were not graceful. She was, at this point in her life, big, not statuesque. And she was awkward. Like just standing there, she made Washington Square Arch look peculiar. You know what people said about Linda? They said she had a very pretty face. And she did. Olive skin, big hazel eyes and a nose that didn’t get in her way.

  On this fine Friday, Linda wore her hair, dark and straight, teased on top of her head. Her lips were white, for she had applied coat after coat of the white lipstick which was so fashionable then. Her dress was a madras shirtwaist that looked too skimpy and hadn’t had a chance to bleed. Her shoes, size eleven … red with baby heels. She carried a burlap sack for a pocketbook. As I remember it, Linda dressed like many girls who had recently graduated and had just started to work. She had changed positions but not wardrobes. It happened to the best of us. She was standing there and reading a copy of Mad magazine. No, Linda was not hard to spot.