a spy

Jobs I had in New York in the nineties

I took a bus from Park Slope to Cobble Hill; both were Brooklyn neighborhoods with brownstones and boutiques, but Cobble Hill seemed statelier somehow. I was an artist who wasn’t making art, and I thought working at an art supply store might spark my life force, which had been waning, so when I saw the ad, I scheduled an interview.

I don’t remember how the knowledge was disseminated, but in New York in the nineties, it was well known which crime families ruled over which neighborhoods. I sat on the bus and thought to myself that I was traveling into Genovese territory, then wondered if the Genovese crime family was related at all to the chain of drugstores of the same name. New York was a complex series of such questions and connections.

I got off the bus on a tranquil, lovely street. This section of Cobble Hill did not have the same energetic bustle I was accustomed to in Park Slope and wasn’t quite as grimy. I walked past a pub with outdoor seating and made a mental note to ask Kevin if we could have dinner there, at a wooden table, beneath an umbrella.

My interview was with the co-owners of the store, two sisters, Flora and Phoebe, who commuted every day from Amityville, Long Island. Because they made this commute, they told me, they held no grace for employees who called out of work. There was no excuse, they said, for an employee not to come in, especially one who lived in Brooklyn.

After I got the job, I asked Janine, the woman who ran the frame shop in the back of the store, if the sisters lived near the Amityville Horror house. She told me never to mention it. It was a sore point with them, she explained in a low whisper. It made them angry that visitors came to Long Island and clogged up their town just to drive past the murder house and tell ghost stories.

I did not want to make the sisters angry.

They had personalities that filled the room, wild hair, colorful fingernails, and rhinestoned reading glasses they wore on chains around their necks. They yelled a lot, and I was both frightened and fascinated by them, so I was grateful for the insider tips Janine offered me:

Never mention The Amityville Horror.

Do not attempt to wrap a gift—only the sisters can do the gift wrapping.

Never mention menstrual cramps because the sisters do not believe such an ailment exists and feel it is degrading to women to suggest that it does.

I was trained to operate the cash register. Still, the sisters mostly worked behind the counter, and I worked on the floor, restocking shelves and helping customers find what they were looking for—colored pencil sets, poster board for school projects, and artful gifts. A young boy from the neighborhood worked a couple of hours in the afternoon after school. He moved in silence next to me, straightening shelves. When he overheard me hesitate to answer a customer’s question, he would whisper the answer to me, because he knew the store inside and out, just like Janine.

Most days, near the end of my shift, the sisters would send me across the street to get iced coffee—one for me, one for each of them, and one for Janine. It was a great pressure release to walk out of the shop into the sunlight and wait in line in the bakery for a few minutes, so I always tried to make the coffee errand last as long as possible.

One day, when they sent me on the coffee run, the sisters pointed out a stationery store down on the next block. We stood in the front window of the art supply store, and they squinted in the direction of it. “Have you ever gone in there?” they asked.

I said that I had not.

“Walk past,” Flora said, “glance in and see what kind of business they’re doing.”

She handed me the coffee money, and I did what she requested: I crossed the street, walked past the stationery store, and then walked back up the street to the bakery.

“Well?” Phoebe asked when I returned with the coffee and the change.

“Not much going on,” I said. “Maybe one customer.”

The next day, the sisters told me they wanted me to go inside the stationery store. “We used to be in that location,” Flora said. “We think that since we moved over here, they haven’t been telling our customers where we are.”

“We think,” Phoebe said, “when our people go in and ask where the art supply store moved to, they’re saying they don’t know.”

The three of us were standing in the front window, the sisters eyeing the stationery store as if placing a curse on it.

“Why would they do that?”

“We don’t know,” Flora said.

“Go in,” Phoebe said, “and ask if they know where the art supply store is.”

“Be our spy,” Flora said.

I didn’t want to be a part of this covert operation. I knew that if I came back and told the sisters that their suspicions were correct, they would fly down to the stationery store themselves to confront the owners, and I would be revealed as a spy, a Mata Hari of Cobble Hill. How could I show my face in the bakery or the cute pub with the umbrella tables after that?

“Just do it,” Phoebe said. “They don’t know who you are.”

“Here,” Flora said, handing me the coffee money.

I walked across the street toward the stationery store, feeling the sisters’ eyes on me. I thought I would go in, look around, and leave, but the paranoia was infectious, and I wondered if maybe this was a double-spy situation. What if they were in cahoots with the stationery store owner and would ask her later if I had done what I was told? I suspected that if I lied to them, they would know, as if they were supernatural in their abilities to discern my loyalty.

I walked into the stationery store, and the bell on the door chimed.

“Hello,” the woman behind the counter said.

“Hello,” I said.

“Can I help you with anything?”

“Did there used to be an art supply store here?” I asked.

I could tell from her sharp little intake of breath and the tone of her voice that I was not the first spy the sisters had sent on this mission. “Yes,” she said, “they moved across the street, up on the corner.”

I fled to the bakery.

“Well?” Flora wanted to know.

“She told me where you moved to,” I said.

“Really?” Phoebe said.

“Really.”

“Humph.”

“I don’t believe it,” Flora said. “I know they’re sabotaging us.”

“They’re definitely sabotaging us.”

Long after my stint at the art supply store was over, I thought about Phoebe and Flora. I imagined their house on Long Island as similar in style to the Amityville Horror house, with its half-moon windows.

I thought of them waking up early in the morning, coming out on a winter’s day to scrape the ice from the windshield of their car, and setting out on the drive to Cobble Hill that would never take less than an hour but would often take longer.

Surely they had been approached about purchasing a parking space, not from the city, but from a man in dark suit pants and a Ban-Lon shirt. I didn’t speculate as to whether or not they paid him, but if they did, there would be no crime in it. It was simply the way things worked in Brooklyn.

I thought of them unlocking and rolling up the metal safety gate that protected the store, switching on the lights, and getting to work selling art supplies and wrapping boxes with a precision that wasted not one shred of paper or ribbon but created an elegant gift with razor-sharp edges that anyone would be proud to give.