Heidi, née Milena

Heidi was annoyed.  Gillian, her broker, had shoved this young couple off on her; and here she was showing them houses in Hartsdale.  This was a waste of her time.  They should just live in Yonkers and give her a break.  There was no commission here that she could see.  First off, the wife wanted Tudor and he wanted ranch like his parents had in Des Moines, Iowa.  What were they doing here anyway?  Why not go back to Iowa where everything was affordable?  With the way they bickered about every little item in every single house, nine so far, maybe they should put their money toward a divorce lawyer instead.

Being a real estate agent hadn’t turned out to be the dream Heidi envisioned. All of a sudden, with the rise in interest rates, everything was dead.  Houses that sold before they were listed now stayed on the market forever.  Prices were dropping at twenty thousand a pop.  True, so many properties had been overpriced, but still, she was working harder for less and frankly she was not a happy camper.  All her ecstatic dreams had faded into drudgery.

So far she had sold two condos and one house on the limits of Scarsdale for the high seven hundreds. A real fixer-upper.  She was simply not making a living in real estate.  Nor was she finding anyone to make a living for her.  Had she lost her allure?  It’s not as if she hadn’t read John Updike.  She knew adultery was rampant.  But so far, Jerry Franklin had been the only taker and Jerry was dead.  If only he hadn’t invested all that money in Allgate with Will Stanton, master deceiver.  Heidi remembered Stanton from the country club—and his wife Elinor, who snubbed her.  Probably a friend of Bernice’s.  And now look at them.  But look at her and what they had done to her.

There were whispers that the Stantons might put their house on the market.  It seems they were being regularly egged.  They had installed security lights and cameras. Now their neighbors were complaining that the lights went on at all hours and illuminated the entire street, despite their massive front lawns.

Heidi did have some sympathy for the Stantons.  She remembered one year their house in Erie being egged by a group of girls, due to her brother breaking up with one of them.  Those eggs were hard to scrape off.

Erie.  You can’t go home again.  See Thomas Wolfe.  Okay, true, she had belonged to a book club in Lexington, Kentucky.  She couldn’t just sit around waiting for Harold.  Yes, always Harold, never Harry.  Though he thought nothing of calling her Bunny.  Why Bunny?  Well, did it matter?  Those were the good years.  All that cruising they did and the foreign countries he took her to.  And then, the heart attack.  It wasn’t even during sex.  He just swam his twenty pool laps, got out, wrapped a towel around himself, then fell back into the water.  Dead.  So unfair!

Heart attacks.  Were they in fashion with men?  Look at Jerry.  Despite the whispers, bondage was all his idea.  She was to be his dominatrix.  Black mask and all.  At least no whip. All she really had to do was tell him he was a bad boy as she tied him to the bed.  He didn’t even need her to get it off.  Tying him up was enough.  Stupid, stupid man.

What no one understood was that she had tried to persuade him not to marry her, that things were fine just as they were.  He was part of her sales territory, and she saw him often enough, at least in her estimation.  Her job, dropping in to see doctors, pushing prescription drugs, allowed her to have a quickie whenever she felt like it.  There was no place she had to be, as long as she kept selling.

But then one of her drugs went generic.  There went half her sales.  And maybe her job?  So Jerry became her fallback position.  Who knew it was going to end too soon and cause such a mess in so many lives?

So now in a way she began to take after her mother.  On her down times, which were way too often in this real estate business, she entered contests and answered weird surveys on the off chance she would win something big that would get her out of this financial slough of despair.  Her mother won a casserole set once.  They had all been so delighted, opening the package.  “All for nothing,” her mother said with a gleam in her eye.

Sometimes Heidi missed the closeness of her family.  Not that she could ever return to that persona, Milena Wojcik.  Her family didn’t approve or even understand her name change.  Where was her Polish pride and who did she think she was?  Well, she wasn’t Milena from Erie anymore.  They should have realized that when she sent all those postcards from overseas.  But she kept the connection, sending baby gifts and communion gifts.  With her siblings’ growing families, this was not cheap.

She had visited once, after Harold died and before she moved to Poughkeepsie.  It had not gone well with her parents.  Her mother looked askance at her streaked hair and the way she dressed. “Too good for Kohl’s, are you?”  Oh, lordy.  She hadn’t been back to Erie since.

Life is so complicated, but she wouldn’t be smothered by her upbringing or her current lamentable condition.  There was no way to go except forward.