City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert Read Free Book Online Page B

to check on me as I was hanging up my dresses in the wardrobe.
    “You’re comfortable here?” she asked, looking around at Billy’s immaculate apartment.
    “I like it so much here. It’s lovely.”
    “Yes. Billy would accept nothing less.”
    “May I ask you something, Peg?”
    “Certainly.”

    “What about the fire?”
    “Which fire, kiddo?”
    “Olive said there was a small fire at the theater today. I wondered if everything is all right.”
    “Oh, that! It was just some old sets that accidentally got ignited behind the building. I have friends in the fire department, so we were fine. Boy, was that today ? By golly, I’d forgotten about it already.” Peg rubbed her eyes. “Oh, well, kiddo. You willsoon enough find out that life at the Lily Playhouse is nothing but a series of small fires. Now off to sleep or Olive will have you detained by the authorities.”
    So off to sleep I went—the first time I would ever sleep in New York City, and the first (but decidedly not the last) time I would ever sleep in a man’s bed.
    I do not recall who cleaned up the dinner mess.
    It was probably Olive.

FOUR
    Within two weeks of moving to New York City, my life had changed completely. These changes included, but were not limited to, the loss of my virginity—which is an awfully amusing story that I shall tell you shortly, Angela, if you’ll just be patient with me for a moment longer.
    Because for now, I just want to say that the Lily Playhouse was unlike any world I’d ever inhabited. It was aliving animation of glamour and grit and mayhem and fun — a world full of adults behaving like children, in other words. Gone was all the order and regimentation that my family and my schools had tried to drill into me thus far. Nobody at the Lily (with the exception of the long-suffering Olive) even attempted to keep the normal rhythms of respectable life. Drinking and reveling were the norm. Mealswere held at sporadic hours. People slept until noon. Nobody started work at a particular time of day—nor did they ever exactly stop working, for that matter. Plans changed by the moment, guests came and went with neither formal introductions nor organized farewells, and the designation of duties was always unclear.
    I swiftly learned, to my head-spinning astonishment, that no figure of authoritywas going to be monitoring my comings and goings anymore. I had nobody to report to and nothing was expected of me. If I wanted to help out with costumes, I could, but I was given no formal job. There was no curfew, no head count in the beds at night. There was no house warden; there was no mother.
    I was free .
    Allegedly, of course, Aunt Peg was responsible for me. She was my actual family member,and had been entrusted with my care in loco parentis . But she wasn’t overprotective, to say the least. In fact, Aunt Peg was the first freethinker I’d ever met. She was of the mind that people should make their own decisions about their own lives, if you can imagine such a preposterous thing!
    Peg’s world ran on chaos, and yet somehow it worked. Despite all the disorder, she managed to put ontwo shows a day at the Lily—an early show (which started at five, and attracted women and children) and a late show (which started at eight, and was a bit racier, for an older and more male audience). There were matinees on Sunday and Wednesday, too. On Saturdays at noon, there was always a magic show for free, for the local children. Olive was usually able to rent out the space for neighborhood usageduring the daytime, though I don’t think there was danger of anybody getting rich off dry swimming lessons.
    Our audience was drawn from the neighborhood itself, and back then, it really was a neighborhood—mostly Irish and Italians, with a scattering of Catholic Eastern Europeans, and a good number of Jewish families. The four-story tenements surrounding the Lily were crammed full of recent immigrants—andby “crammed,” I mean dozens of souls