“Everybody saw it coming before I did,” said Molly.
And she knew she was right about not fitting in; her by-day-by-night story would turn anybody out that way.
Molly worked in the glittering gift shop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she made believe she was a princess. Then she’d come home to her lower east side one-window-looking-nowhere room on the first floor at the YMCA. Back to nothing each evening, when, around ten, the drunk roomer above her peed out his window, down across hers. He had to do this because a crazy man was hallucinating on the seat of toilet in the tiny locked bathroom and kept everyone else from using it.
They all knew.
“Retail sales is going to drive me up the wall,” she said to herself, over and over, as she failed to go to sleep.
Sleeplessness led to her firing. She returned to the Y. She ascended stairs past her floor to the floor above her. She walked down the hall to the room directly above her.
She put her ear to the door.
It seemed all was quiet inside and that gave her courage to knock loudly.
When the door opened she was surprised to see two men, not one, in the room.
That explained a lot.
“I need to go to the hospital,” she said. “Would you keep an eye on my room for me?”
Without waiting for a reply she turned and returned to her room. She bundled her belongings in a pillow case, took one more look at her window, and left and closed the door behind her.
Beth Israel Medical Center was right around the corner and the emergency room was semi-quiet. Soon Molly was meeting in a room with a social worker who asked a lot of questions and then with a nurse who said not much at all and then with a doctor who examined her.
“Ms. Molly,” said the doctor, “Did you know you are pregnant?”
Molly laughed louder than she had in the last five years.
“That’s impossible!” she screamed. “I haven’t had ‘relations’ for at least seven years!” she cried. Then she looked at the doctor and said, “I just need a place to live.”
“Well you can’t stay here,” he said.
Molly trudged back to the Y with her bundle and unlocked her room where she found “the two men.” They had kept an eye on her room for her by breaking in to it.
As usual they had been drinking and quarreling.
“Can you please take me to Bellevue?” she asked.
“Are you nuts? You can take yourself,” said the gruffer man.
“No I can’t. I’m pregnant.”
So the three dragged themselves, and her bundle, to Bellevue. The two men didn’t wave to Molly as they watched her go through the sliding ER glass door.
The next day, on the psych. ward, Molly began to find that she liked the food and the therapy groups there. She also saw a fellow patient who she thought looked somewhat familiar. When he introduced himself to her she remembered him from the gift shop.
Jim said he was and an entrepreneur.
During the week Molly saw him using the phone a lot. She spied on one of his calls and found out that he was calling women and getting them jobs working for him. On his last day there he gave Molly his telephone number and he promised to give her a job when she got out.
On the day she was discharged Molly called the number.
“I’ll come and get you,” said Jim.
Molly waited for 90 minutes outside the hospital with her bundle until Jim finally arrived in the back seat of a taxi. He opened the rear door for her. He noticed something quite different about her.
She looked almost pretty.
Molly saw his stare and said, “They got me using make up and I cut and bleached my hair.”
“There’s something else about you,” he said.
“They told me I really wasn’t pregnant,” she said.
“So are you ready to get to work?” he asked.
She nodded.
“I’ve got the perfect retail job for you,” he said, like an entrepreneur.
Another gift shop?
“The job is at a gift shop,” he said.
“Thank you, Jim. You know I don’t even know your last name.”
Before Jim could answer, the cabbie shouted, “Here you are.”
It had been a very short ride.
“And, I got a room for you,” Jim said.
She was back at Y.