Which is when I tried to buy a can of lemonade. It seemed like a sane enough idea, as I had been walking and thinking for quite a while and was feeling rather thirsty. Unfortunately, I was so thoroughly peeved with Lucy when I left the apartment that I had been more concerned with making an exit than with grabbing my backpack. All I had on me were my house keys and a dollar twenty-five in my back pocket, and the Arab guy in the falafel cart wouldn’t spot me the quarter.
In fact he was dismissive. “One fifty. You need one dollar and fifty, young lady,” he explained, which I was perfectly willing to accept, if he hadn’t so quickly and needlessly worked himself into a lather over it. “What is the matter with you?” he asked before I had a chance to scrounge the three quarters, four dimes, and two nickels out of my pocket. “Can you step aside, please? If you are not going to purchase something, step aside!”
“Cool your jets,” I muttered. This sent him even further over the edge.
“You have no money! Step aside! Step aside, please! You have no money!”
“Could you just relax for a second,” I said. “I have it. For fuck’s sake.”
“Why are you using obscenity?” the guy howled suddenly. “STEP ASIDE,” he raged. I couldn’t move. I was in trouble, serious psychological trouble. After my awful night and day, I had nothing left. I was actually contemplating leaping onto his little cart and hurling cans of soda at him when some girl came up behind me.
“I’ll buy her a lemonade,” she said.
“It’s fine,” I said, trying not to sound as insane as I felt. “I didn’t want his stupid fucking lemonade.”
“This crazy woman is cursing me! I do not have to serve people who speak to me with this language!”
“Yeah, I’m sure you’ve never heard that word before,” said the girl. “Relax.” She reached past my shoulder and handed the guy a five. “Make it two,” she said. I turned to snap at her and stopped. It was Jennifer White, my sullen teenage neighbor from 9A.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “You’re welcome.” She handed me my can of lemonade and turned back to reach for her change.
“Here, here is your change, now please go!” growled the way-too-uptight Arab. “There are customers who are waiting!” Jennifer ignored him, holding her lemonade under her arm while she slowly took the two dollars off the Plexiglas stand and carefully folded them into a tiny pink change purse. “Please!” he howled, but he sounded now like he was begging. Still ignoring him, she dropped the change purse into the side pocket of an enormous backpack and finally stepped aside.
“I AM SO SORRY, HOW CAN I HELP YOU!” the guy shouted at the next man in line, with a kind of friendly fury.
Jennifer looked at me, unruffled. “Are you heading home?” she asked.
“I guess so,” I said. “Thanks.” She popped the lid of her lemonade and took a long slow sip, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. The leaves were glowing above us. We sipped our lemonades silently, as if that were a solution to something, then turned toward the path. Jennifer walked so slowly we were barely moving at all.
In the golden light of late afternoon, Jennifer White looked like a young goddess. A slight breeze moved carelessly through her hair, and her cheeks had the slightest lift of color in them. She was wearing that dopey school uniform, but the boring white blouse was open a bit too wide at the neck, and the plaid skirt looked witty, somehow, like an outfit in a hip-hop video. Heroic-looking young men in shorts and running shoes kept glancing back at us in fleet, happy admiration.
“This lemonade is pretty good,” I said.
“It’s all right,” she agreed.
“I don’t want to go home either,” I told her.
She didn’t respond, as that would have amounted to admitting something. I decided to just keep talking. “My sister is a fucking nightmare,” I said. “Sooner or later, she’ll leave, but I can’t go home until she does.”
“What’s so bad about her?” asked Jennifer.
“All she thinks about is money.”
“That’s all anybody thinks about.”
“Yeah, I know, but trust me, Lucy is off the deep end. I think inheriting this apartment has driven her insane.”
“I heard you didn’t inherit it,” Jennifer volunteered. She didn’t exactly sound like she was fishing, but I knew she was.
“My mom was married to Bill and he left it to her, so they say we inherited it. It sounds legal to me, but what do I know.” This came out sounding snottier than I meant it to, since I realized that Jennifer might be able to shed some light on a few things. “Anyway, that’s what they’re going to figure out, if we did inherit it. Nobody knows yet.”
“They think they do.”
“They who?”
“Everyone.”
“Everyone who?”
“They’re having meetings about it, you know. You are so totally not supposed to be there. It’s driving them nuts.”
“Them who?”
“The building,” she said.
I knew what she meant, but it was unnerving to hear it stated so definitively by a teenage girl.
“The building doesn’t get to decide, does it?”
Jennifer shot me a bored look, like she didn’t believe that a person as old as me could be so stupid.
“What?” I said, trying to laugh. “It’s not up to them.”
“They think it’s up to them,” she said. “They didn’t like your mom.”
This last bit, offered up with no prodding or prying on my part, landed like an atom bomb on my heart. For a second I hated that bored kid in her snotty pleated skirt and her shitty little white blouse and her perfect blond hair, but before I could come up with a cutting remark to avenge this completely obscure and meaningless slight on the mother I had barely spoken to in the last years of her life, Jennifer flushed, ashamed of herself. “Not me,” she apologized. “I liked her. I mean, she was always nice to me. But she was like a cleaning lady. That’s what they’re hung up on. And Mr. Drinan was kind of weird. And they’re all obsessed with that apartment, everybody knows it’s the best one in the building, and they’re all so hung up, it’s so, whatever. I’m just telling you. That’s what the problem is.”
She felt so bad about telling me the truth that I didn’t know what to say.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I appreciate the information.”
“Yeah, okay,” she said. Neither of us said anything for a little while, and then, as slowly as we were walking, we were there. We looked up at the Edgewood looming above us, elegant, enormous, the building.
“I love those lions,” I said.
“They look like guard dogs to me,” she replied, tossing her empty can of lemonade into the cast-iron trash can on the street corner. She looked over at me and made one of those half smiles, like you expect people to know how unhappy you really are. It was the most human expression I’d seen cross her face.
“Look,” I said. “Do you have to go in?”
“They’re probably flipping out already,” she said, and the half smile evaporated. She just looked sad.
So that’s how I got into that apartment again. I took Jennifer up to the Whites’ apartment and rang the doorbell and started talking. “Hey, Mrs. White,” I said, all friendly and helpful. She was, as usual, wearing an absolutely glorious suit. “I hope you haven’t been too worried about Jennifer. She’s been with me.”
“We have been worried!” Mrs. White said. Her entire ensemble was the most extraordinary shade of sea green. She must have had the shoes dyed to match the suit; there could be no other way to get the color so exact. “I was just about to send for the police!” she announced, checking herself out in the mirror.
“Oh, I am so sorry, we should have called, but she was really upset,” I said humbly.
“Jennifer is not allowed to go off and have activities after school, certainly not with people she barely knows! Your father will be beside himself, Jennifer. You know the rules
!”
“Would you relax, Mom?” Jennifer started. I reached over and squeezed her hand, her new best friend.
“No no, don’t get angry, of course your mom was worried, she didn’t know what we were doing!” I explained. I looked at Mrs. White and smiled. “I was helping her with her math!” This was completely improvised on my part, and Jennifer looked at me with real surprise. “We bumped into each other in the lobby—I mean, literally, it was ridiculous and completely my fault, because I was just not looking where I was going—and her homework went everywhere, and when I was helping her get it back together she told me she didn’t have a clue how to make it through today’s problem sets. And there were so many! Let me reassure you, those nuns are doing their job up there at Saint Peter in Chains, she’s getting a workout in the math department. It is almost laughable how much homework she’s got. Anyway, she was a little upset, so I told her—well, I’m actually, you know, I’m pretty good at math.” Improbably, this part was true. “And I felt bad that she seemed so overwhelmed, so we went to my place just to look at a couple of the most difficult problems, and we seriously lost track of time. And when I realized how long we had been working, I was appalled, and I thought about calling, but obviously it made more sense to bring her home. I’m really, really sorry.” Jennifer was staring at me now. It is possible that I was laying it all on a bit thick, but I could tell that Mrs. White was not particularly interested in facts, so the more I gave her, the less likely she would be to examine them too closely. And as usual, seven things were going on at once in that apartment. Kids were screaming off in the distance, a washing machine was chugging along, and then something in the kitchen fell with a crash. Under the circumstances, Mrs. White couldn’t waste a ton of time worrying about me.
“Oh, well, thank you,” she finally said, picking up a small child and kicking a pile of coats and scarves into the closet off the foyer. “That really was kind of you, I just wish—Anna, where are you going? I have to meet Bob any minute, is dinner ready for the girls?”
“Is Wednesday,” Anna, the Polish cleaning lady, announced, as if that were an answer. She was putting on her coat.
“Wednesday?” said Mrs. White. “No no, it’s not Wednesday. Or, I mean, it is Wednesday, but we talked about this, this is the Wednesday you’re staying. Barbie, please!”
“I’ll take her,” I said, and as I untangled the wriggling child from her arms, Mrs. White tried to explain to Anna that she had agreed to stay until midnight, because she and Mr. White had made arrangements months before to attend an auction this evening benefiting the Museum of Modern Art. His firm had bought a whole table at great expense, and there would be some extremely important Korean clients at that table, and they would not understand if his wife failed to make an appearance. Anna the cleaning lady seemed to feel bad, but it wasn’t clear that she even understood Mrs. White’s explanation. She kept saying, “Sorry, so sorry,” while Mrs. White kept telling her why she couldn’t leave. After a little while, Anna just walked out the door, leaving me and Barbie and Jennifer as witnesses to Mrs. White’s problem and her beautiful suit.
Mrs. White looked over at me. She really had no options, so I knew better than to push it. I kissed Barbie on the cheek and started to hand her back. “Here’s your mommy,” I said. “Don’t mess up her pretty suit.”
“You couldn’t—I’m sorry, but you did say you might be interested in babysitting sometime. You wouldn’t be available right now, would you?”
“Right now?” I said. “Gee.”
Once we got rid of Mrs. White, things really started to cook. The first hour or so was a bit of a mess, because six sets of coats and shoes had to be hung up and put away, the baby needed a new diaper, and dinner had not even been started. Katherine decided that because she had seen me first, no one else had any claim on my attention whatsoever. She followed me around, silently worshipful but with big confused tears in her eyes, while I dealt with all sorts of nonsense instead of going back to her room to play stuffed animals with her. The other two girls, whom I had not met before, didn’t want to eat anything, and they argued incessantly over total bullshit. There were three cooked casseroles from a fancy gourmet store in the refrigerator, but nobody was interested in them. Louise, the oldest daughter, made herself a shake with flaxseed and wheatgrass and ignored me. Jennifer sat in a corner of the kitchen and picked at a salad.
“Is that all you’re going to eat?” I asked.
“Are you my mother?” she asked back.
“No, I’m the person who wants to know if that’s all you’re going to eat,” I told her.
She smiled to herself like she thought that was amusing in a minor way, then she looked at the ceiling. “Yeah, this is all I’m going to eat.”
All of this eating and not eating was going on around the kitchen table, which was apparently a real treat for everyone, whether they were eating or not.
“We’re not allowed to eat in the kitchen,” said one of the middle kids, whose name I couldn’t remember.
“Your mom didn’t tell me that,” I told her.
“I’m telling you. We eat in the dining room.”
“I want to eat in the kitchen, it’s easier,” I said.
“You don’t get to decide,” she informed me.
“Sure I do; I’m in charge.”
“You’re not old enough to be in charge,” she insisted.
“Don’t you think it’s boring to eat in the dining room all the time?” I asked.
“It’s the way we do things,” she told me.
“It is boring,” Jennifer announced from her corner. “This is better.”
“How old are you, anyway?” asked Louise, the eldest, who had been helping me feed Katherine and the baby with a sort of effortless ease.
“I’m thirty-two.”
This made everyone stare. The two monstrous middle kids, Jennifer, Louise, Katherine, even the baby, seemed startled to hear that I was so old. I was startled myself.
“You’re in your thirties?” said one of the monsters.
“You don’t look that old,” said the other one.
“It’s just because I’m short,” I told her. “If you stretched me out a little, I would look older.”
“You would look taller maybe,” Jennifer corrected me. The two monsters thought this was a riot and started giggling hilariously, burying their heads in each other like little animals. That made Katherine start laughing too. Then Louise started laughing, just because everyone else was. The baby looked bewildered. For a second, Jennifer’s mood lifted, and she actually smiled, like she really liked having gotten the whole room to laugh, even inadvertently.
“Thirty-two, that’s bizarre. That’s like old,” said Louise.
“Yeah, I’m pretty near death,” I admitted. This made the monsters laugh even harder, and things were pleasant for about ten minutes, until I told them that they would not be allowed to have chocolate ice cream and watch television unless they ate their dinner and finished their homework. They started whining and yelling again, and then Jennifer sighed and told them to fuck off, which pretty much put an end to all the fun. The monsters went back to their room, where they argued with each other over nothing for another hour or so. The baby fell asleep in her high chair, then woke up screaming while I wiped her off, and Katherine started crying because no one was paying attention to her. The kitchen looked like a disaster because I didn’t have time to clean up before Louise announced that Katherine and the baby really needed to have baths and be in bed before eight, and she couldn’t help me because she had so much homework to do.
For a moment I wondered how much people got paid for this, because I had not nailed Mrs. White down on the details of the babysitting plan before she fled the apartment in her hot little sea green suit. But I really had no time to think about that missed opportunity. I gave the baby a bath and then Katherine, who then proceeded to prance around the apartment naked and screaming while I tried to put the baby to sleep. Louise said
I shouldn’t have let her fall asleep in her high chair even for a minute because now she would not go down for hours. The two monsters suddenly came out into the hallway, declaring that they were hungry for dinner but didn’t want the cold food that was congealing on plates in the kitchen; they wanted the leftover Chinese carry-out they had had earlier in the week with some different babysitter who, they insisted, had shoved it all in the back of the refrigerator. Louise told them that Anna had tossed the leftover Chinese food when she came in that morning, which started another unfortunate round of whining. I wanted to smack Louise, who really seemed to be constantly full of bad news, but then she sighed and told me to go read to Katherine, that she would put Bee to bed. I didn’t know what she was talking about until she reached for the baby, whom she called Bee instead of Barbie, and that made me like her, even more than the offer of help. Then Jennifer appeared out of nowhere and said, “I’ll feed them,” propelling the two hungry monsters toward the kitchen.
That left me to lead the naked Katherine back to her little yellow room, find her some pajamas, and look through a pile of books with her. This was extremely pleasant after all the chaos. Katherine carefully and quietly picked up one book after another and considered which ones she wanted read. The books all had brilliantly colored pictures of talking animals and princesses and elves and happy families with small but significant problems, all of which got worked out by everybody being kind to each other. Seriously, the pictures in these books were so pretty and the people in the stories so decent and sensible that you wondered how we all ended up being such assholes in real life.
Twelve Rooms with a View Page 18
