The Bag Lady Papers by Alexandra Penney Page B

furthering my career as an artist, but he did something that was more crucial for me at the time. Mr. Liberman offered to pay me a thousand dollars a monthas a “roving editor” for Vogue . My responsibilities were light: a meeting once a month where I would present ideas that other editors could produce, and one written article with any shoots necessary to illustrate it. It was a perfect job!
    A guaranteed twelve thousand dollars a year was good money but not nearly what I needed to make ends meet. I scoured the Help Wanted section of The New York Times every morning on the subway coming back from my son’s school. I was limited to jobs that allowed me to pick him up in the afternoons. And somewhere and somehow I had to find the time to finish my master’s thesis at Hunter and paint.
    I found a listing for teaching English to aspiring models. I researched the borough of Queens, where I’d never stepped foot, and figured out a way to trek by subway to the outer reaches, for an interview at a shopping mall. The “school” was two small ramshackle rooms situated on top of an outlet store. The classroom consisted of twelve brown metal folding chairs and two overhead fluorescent light fixtures. I landed the job at fifteen bucks an hour for two hour-and-a-half sessions per week.
    Another stroke of good luck from the Help Wanted ads found me two subway stops away teaching journalism at a junior college. Sixteen bucks an hour for the same two days a week.
    The roving editor routine plus the two Queens jobs broke me down. I was thrilled to have the work, but soon I felt that I was counting out my life, not in coffee spoons but in endless subway loops. The time spent belowground added up to far more than the time I spent in class.
    After a semester of this grind, luck again came my way. A friend told me that Bloomingdale’s needed a copywriter. They liked my credentials and hired me for two full days a week, and I could still leave early enough to pick up my son at school.
    Around the same time, The New York Times posted a listing for a journalism teacher at the Fashion Institute of Technology. After four interviews I acquired a new title, Professor Penney. I told my Queens colleagues that I had found work in the city for the next semester, and the aspiring models air-kissed me good-bye. I was switching employers at a dizzying rate, but I finally began to feel some financial stability and that, at last, my life was definitely on the right track.

CHAPTER 10
The Kindness of Friends and Strangers
    MF + 5 WEEKS
    S ince the MF, I wake up every morning at 4:46 by the red lights of the digital clock. Anxiety twists through my veins. I imagine that if I curl into the tightest ball maybe I can crush it away. But it’s no good, of course. To short-circuit the demons, I snap out of bed, pull open the curtains, gaze out onto a magnificent platinum moon in the luminous gray-blue sky.
    The world appears to be exactly the same as it was BMF. Some skyscrapers are already alight with worker bees booting up their computers—or maybe they’ve been there all night on overtime hours to make ends meet. Suspendered, bespoke, pin-striped-suited, John Lobb–custom-shod bankruptcy lawyers are making big bucks in this economy so they, too, are probably arriving before dawn to strategizetheir day. More windows are illuminated by early-rise type-A moguls frantically counting the millions they are losing in the meltdown. At first glance, the scene may look as it always has for the last ten years, but inside those offices, everything may actually be very different.
    I pad into the kitchen with its gleaming granite counters and its maple and glass cupboards loaded with beautiful china that I’ve collected over the years. My mother, although withholding in many ways, gave me trays and plates and bowls made of sterling silver from the time I was a young girl. She was certain, I’m sure, that I would lead a life