Limelight: A Novel - Softcover

Amy Poeppel is the author of Limelight and Small Admissions, which was first performed as a reading at the Actors Studio. Amy has worked as a stage actress and teacher and now lives with her husband and three sons in New York City and Frankfurt, Germany.

Limelight one

OUR FIRST MORNING IN NEW York City, before anyone else in the family had shown signs of life, I was up, surveying the situation. In bare feet and pajamas, mug of coffee in hand, I stood in the open doorway of our new apartment, wondering if you even use a doormat in a carpeted hallway. When I heard a creak down the hall, I ducked back inside before a man heading out with a pug under one arm and a newspaper under the other could spot me in my sleepwear.

The left side of the small living room, opposite the north-facing windows that overlooked a beige brick building, was a wall of boxes. I found one that was especially well labeled (“**OPEN FIRST**”) and began unpacking towels, stuffed animals, lamps, school supplies, and toilet paper so we would have the essentials right from the start. Before going to bed the night before, I had unpacked the coffee maker, mugs, and cereal bowls. I had a hammer and nails handy so that I could hang pictures, along with a baggie of magnets to clutter up the refrigerator. The Jawbone speaker was on the kitchen counter, ready to play pop music to get my kids in a chipper mood for their first day as New Yorkers. Above all, I wanted everyone to feel at home, in spite of the upheaval. One needs a doormat, for example. Or so I thought. Standing in the living room that morning, with the doormat still rolled up, I had a suspicion that the universe was scoffing at me and my futile attempts to settle in. But I didn’t let that dampen my mood; I was finally getting the chance to live in Manhattan.

As soon as I heard voices coming from the kids’ rooms, I went old-school and turned on the Beastie Boys’ “Body Movin’.” But before we could get some action from the back section, the doorman called up with a noise complaint. The new refrigerator was wood-paneled and nonmagnetic, a barren expanse, and the box I’d carefully labeled “FRAGILE! WINEGLASSES!” made a sound like a package of Legos when I went to open it. Our furniture seemed confused and uneasy to be sitting thirteen stories in the air. I couldn’t shake the worry that it was all too heavy and eventually the floors would give way, sending couches, beds, book boxes, and the upright piano through the ceilings until finally all of our possessions landed in the lobby. Our cat, Jasper, was hiding in a closet behind our GE Spacemaker stacked washer/dryer, my children were cranky and nervous about starting school the next week, and my husband was stressed about his new job.

I took a deep breath and continued unpacking.



We had been living in New York for less than two weeks when we had our first, full-blown crisis. I didn’t know how to handle it and almost called my mother for advice, but I stopped myself; she was still mad at me for moving away. I called Sara instead, my one and only friend in the city. As someone who had lived in New York for years, she was, in my mind, an expert.

“Is this bad?” I asked her.

“Honestly, I wasn’t listening.”

I closed the door to my bedroom and spoke clearly. “The principal says Jack offered a girl in his class a dollar to see her vagina.”

“Ooooh.”

“I know.”

“That seems like a low offer to me.”

“Not for a third grader.”

“He obviously hasn’t adjusted to Manhattan prices. Did he have a dollar?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Why?”

“It speaks to intent. Maybe he was asking hypothetically.”

“But I’m asking—is this really bad? It’s only his first week at this school, so can they kick him out? And does this point to something seriously wrong with him? Like is my son a sexual deviant?”

“He’s four.”

“He’s eight.”

“Whatever,” she said.

“No—that’s why the school is so mad. He’s old enough to know better. Do you think he hates women?”

“To the contrary,” Sara said. “So did she?”

“What?”

“Unveil the vag?”

“No! And she’s very upset. Jack has to write an apology.”

“You’re blowing this way out of proportion.”

“It’s not me. The teacher asked him to write a letter. And she used the word ‘troubling.’ Like the act was a predictor of something worse to come. Like when young kids torture animals, it’s considered ‘troubling.’?”

“Asking for pussy and lighting a cat on fire are not the same thing,” Sara said bluntly. “He was probably testing limits. Or thinking entrepreneurially, like ‘How can I turn a single dollar to my advantage in this shit economy?’ That’s not troubling. That’s enterprising.”

What I found most troubling, infuriating, actually, was that the girl’s mother didn’t call me directly. Or tell me to my face. I had seen her each day at pickup since school started, surrounded by her many friends, and we’d been added to the school directory already. She could have talked to me so we could smooth things over privately. But instead she went over my head and ratted Jack out.

“A written apology—”

“Why should he apologize?” Sara asked. “No money changed hands, so technically it’s not even solicitation. It’ll blow over. A week from now you’ll be laughing about this. Did you start work yet?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “What if he grows up to be a regular customer at a strip club? Where all the dancers know him by name.”

“Allison—”

“You’re busy, I know. Sorry.”

“No, but my boss just came in, and I can’t wait to tell her about this.”

“No! Don’t . . . ,” I begged, but I could hear her saying, “Hey, so my friend’s male chauvinist piglet tried to pay for a peek of snatch . . . ,” as she hung up.

That’s the problem with Sara, other than being inappropriate and never available. She has no clue about discretion. Or about children. But she lives here, which makes her the only local friend I have. I need her.

I went back to the living room, past dozens of half-unpacked boxes, wondering how many people Brittney’s mother had already told. Had she destroyed our reputation before we’d ever had a chance to build one? Jack would have to throw himself at everyone’s mercy and hope for forgiveness. I wanted to shield him from further embarrassment, given what he would face at school the next day. As a teacher, I knew the staff would convene around the school secretary’s desk and have a laugh at Jack’s expense. And the only people who gossip more than teachers are elementary school children.

If this sort of misstep had happened back in Dallas, I would have met the moms for margaritas, and they would have made me feel better. Oh, Allison, we love Jack, bless his heart. I would have called up the girl’s mother to talk; Bygones, she would have reassured me. We were known there. No moms knew me here.

I considered calling Lilly who was supposed to be my local mom friend. In college she had repeatedly made the case that New York City was the best—no, the only place on earth to live and had always urged me to move there. And then she’d promptly abandoned the place the moment I decided to take her advice. I put my phone back down; I was still, perhaps unreasonably, smarting from our last phone call in the summer.

“It took only twenty years,” I had joked, “but I’m finally moving to New York!”

I waited for her exclamations of joy but heard nothing.

“Lilly? Bad connection?”

“Just bad timing, sweetie. We’re moving to Montclair. Like, we’re literally moving as we speak. I’ve got boxes all over the place.”

“What?” Lilly leaving New York? Impossible. “Very funny.”

“It was time,” she said flatly and yelled instructions to the moving men who were in her apartment.

“Why? Time for what?” I asked. Lilly had been selling me on New York since the day we’d met. She was the one who had taught me that if I knew the inner workings of Manhattan, I could see a Broadway play for only ten dollars. She was the one who proved to me that the subway was indeed the fastest way to get around the city and that runway models, such as the dozens she worked with at her mother’s agency, had acne in real life. “But you always said you could never imagine living anywhere else. That you loved the smell of concrete. That you were allergic to every other place on the—”

“I’ll still see you all the time,” she said. “I can hop on the train from New Jersey whenever I like. You, me, and Sara; we’ll grab drinks anytime. But I’ve had it with the noise, the schools, just the whole . . . I don’t know . . . scene. Montclair is amazing. You’ve got to come visit.”

Her desertion, at the moment I was arriving, felt like a personal betrayal, and I didn’t feel like calling her to commiserate over Jack’s school incident. She would probably just tell me to move to Montclair.



I checked the time; Charlotte would be heading home from cross-country practice at Van Cortlandt Park within the hour, and Michael would be getting out of the meeting he was holding with the entire staff at his firm. Meanwhile, Jack was in his room with the door closed, and my homesick fourteen-year-old was in hers. For some reason our new living room didn’t seem to function as a family room, so the kids often retreated to their corners, and it was quieter than I was used to. I admit, I was homesick, too.

Since Jack and Megan were doing homework, I settled in to do mine: I continued the hunt for the many people we would need in our lives: a dentist, a veterinarian, a piano teacher, and a pediatrician. A math tutor, a hairdresser, a dry cleaner, and a handyman.

Dallas had been such a mellow, comfortable place to live. The streets are broad, the winters are mild, the air-conditioning has oomph, and parking is plentiful. But truth be told, I had grown a bit restless there.

Moving to Texas had been easy. I was welcomed. Literally. Instantly. On our first day in the Dallas house, a decade ago, as I unpacked my doormat and took it outside to the front steps, my neighbor Natalie walked up with her tanned, blond, preteen daughter and a heaping plate of homemade snickerdoodles. The recipe, calling for two pounds of butter, was taped to the Saran Wrap. “In case you want to give it a try,” Natalie said.

We liked each other right off the bat. She became one of my walking friends, meeting me in our driveway twice a week at six thirty in the morning with her gooey-eyed cocker spaniel.

Over the years that our families lived side by side, Natalie’s daughter Carrie, a fan of football, fast cars, and country music, grew up to be a partier, so Natalie confiscated booze whenever she or the cleaning lady found any half-empty bottles under her canopy bed. “You in need of some cheap rum?” Natalie would ask me. “I found a handle in the backseat of Carrie’s car.” Carrie got a coveted spot on the cheerleading squad once she got to high school and wore her short flouncy skirt to school every Friday; Megan’s eyes would lock on those bouncy pom-poms and never blink, pupils turning into little cartoon hearts.

Charlotte, on the other hand, grew up to become decidedly antiparty and anticheerleader.

“What does it say about our society,” she ranted one night at my mom’s house for dinner, “when males get accolades for knocking each other down for sport and giving each other concussions with subsequent long-term brain damage, while the women dress up as sex symbols and chant inane rhymes in order to support some brutish, caveman rituals? Disgusting.”

“I like her,” Megan said.

“Popularity shouldn’t be based on sex appeal,” Charlotte said.

“She’s popular because she’s always sweet and nice to everyone. Unlike some people I know.”

“I’d say that you’re both one hundred percent right,” my mother interjected, playing her role of keeper of the sibling peace.

When I told Natalie that the firm had made Michael an offer for a major promotion as long as he agreed to move to the East Coast office, she got teary and said, “Oh, how awful!” She caught herself and suddenly hugged me, saying, “What I mean is, awful for me. But hey! New York City! How exciting!”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “I think it would be great.”

“I mean, I would never want to live in New York, not ever in a million years, but how thrilling for you!” She looked away for a moment, imagining perhaps feminist demonstrations and political marches, and said, “Come to think of it, I can picture Charlotte fitting right in there.”

My mother reacted to my news in a way that was far easier to interpret. “Have a nice life,” she said when I told her. Neither one of us took that comment seriously, but I was starting to wonder how long she planned to punish me.

“You’ve got so many close friends here, so many people who love you and Michael and the kids. I don’t see why you would want to throw that away,” she had said.

I wasn’t willing to admit to anyone that so far I wasn’t feeling the love in New York. I was starting to get the feeling that no one cared how I was doing. New Yorkers have a way of looking at you as if to say, “Let’s just see how long you last.” I was up for that challenge. Fine, I’ll show you, I thought.

Michael had initially been on the fence about moving to New York, even after I was all in. As soon as I’d landed a teaching job, I couldn’t be dissuaded by anyone. I got a perfect long-term sub position: I would be replacing an English teacher who’d abruptly decided to get married and was taking a one-year leave of absence to move to Boston with her husband-to-be. It was the perfect combination of serendipity and connections: a teacher friend of a friend had recommended me, and I took the job right away, knowing it might very well lead to a long-term position.

The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that an adventure and change would be good for all of us, while Michael continued to worry about uprooting the kids. We went out for dinner one night to make our decision, one way or the other.

“We’d be crazy to turn this opportunity down,” I said.

“Three kids and no backyard?”

“Who needs a backyard when we have Central Park, and our kids will never drink and drive.”

“I read that sixteen thousand pedestrians get hit by a car every month in New York. That’s more than five hundred a day.”

“Michael.”

“What?”

“You’ve been offered your dream job. It’s an honor; it’s what you’ve worked for your whole life.”

“But if it’s bad for the kids—”

“It’ll be great for the kids. When I was visiting New York in college, I remember looking at all the faces on the subway and thinking, ‘This is real life.’ Dallas isn’t real life.”

“It’s real to me,” Michael said, looking around the restaurant. He waved at someone across the room. I turned to see who it was and waved to the couple as well; I’d taught both of their children.

“But New York would be so much . . . realer. I have such a good feeling about it, like this is exactly what we need.”

“What do we need that we don’t already have? I’d miss the guys. Where am I going to play golf?”

“Lawyers in New York play golf somewhere.”

“What about Dorothy? Do you really expect your mom to move again because of us? We’ve all got a good thing going here. Why not stay put?” he asked.

I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I think it had to do with my urge to stir the pot, to keep things interesting, to stop aging. “Adventure,” I said, picking up my gla...