No Ordinary Matter

Chapter One Veronica sat in the back of the Hungarian Pastry Shop waiting for her older sister, Lillian. She surveyed the compact room, while contemplating a dash outside for a smoke. The cafe's clientele were mostly regulars who came laden with dog-eared, beverage-stained reading materials and stayed for hours sharing a table with fellow bohemian throwbacks while consuming innumerable cups of coffee. A laptop was as rare a sight in the Hungarian Pastry Shop as was a pencil in Silicon Valley. In keeping with the times, however, the patrons had been forced to give up smoking, at least while inside the cafe. When Veronica was a student, smoking Lucky Strikes or Gitanes with your coffee was de rigueur. Now smoking was permitted only at the tables on the sidewalk out front, which lay in the formidable shadow of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.As she waited for Lillian, Veronica sipped a cup of Viennese coffee and ate a hamantasch, a triangular pastry with poppy-seed, prune, and walnut filling. For nearly fourteen years, since Veronica was a freshman at Barnard and Lillian had just started in the M.D./Ph.D. program in neuroscience at Columbia, the two sisters had met more or less consistently the first Monday of every month at 9:00 A.M. in the dusky but warm and sweet-smelling hangout.Veronica, a half-pack-a-day smoker, hated being told she couldn't smoke, because it reminded her that she shouldn't smoke, which made her defensive and angry, a state of being she found very uncomfortable. But perhaps it was better under the pastry-shop rules that she wasn't allowed to smoke on these Monday mornings with her sister, since she was then spared Lillian's medically detailed descriptions of the long and painful death that awaited her if she continued to smoke. Veronica, however, wasn't in the habit of thinking quite that far into the future and, besides, she just loved to smoke -- she loved the taste, the smell, the way she looked with a cigarette in her hand, and most of all she loved feeling, even if just for the duration of the cigarette, defiant. What exactly she was defying -- death, her sister, the surgeon general -- she wasn't at all sure.Veronica wished desperately for a cigarette to go with her coffee as she strained her eyes in the dim light shed by the bluebell-shaped wall lamp just above her table. She was reading over the script she had written for an episode of Ordinary Matters. Later that morning, the draft was due to be delivered to a head writer for his review, which would lead to inevitable rewrites before final approval by the associate producer, Jane Lust. Not once, in the five years Veronica had been a sub-writer for Ordinary Matters, had the head writer flat out accepted what she'd turned in. Veronica believed the head writers returned each and every script for rewrites, regardless of its merit, to ensure that none of the sub-writers got big ideas about moving up. They needn't have worried about Veronica. She had no desire whatsoever to become a head writer. Such a promotion would mean more money, benefits, and perks, but it also would mean joining the office corps, which would seriously curtail the pursuit of her greater ambition to write musicals. When Veronica was hired, Jane Lust had told her that if she had any sense she wouldn't take the job, that writers shouldn't write as a sideline, that she would end her days as a soap-opera writer. She said that statistically Veronica would have a greater chance of breaking into a writing career if she were an actor on the show, that the names of sub-writers who ever went on to write anything, much less get published or produced, could be easily scribbled on the inside cover of a pack of matches.Veronica closed the script and pushed it away. Soap operas, she decided, were even more implausible than musicals. Her eyes were wandering over this month's art exhibit on the pastry shop's walls --McPhee, Jenny is the author of 'No Ordinary Matter', published 2004 under ISBN 9780743260725 and ISBN 0743260724.