Trying to Float

by Nicolaia Rips

  Jade’s apartment was decorated with wood paneling, marble floors, leopard skins, and rabbit pelts. Everything was comfortable. Very comfortable. Although her apartment had a balcony and faced the Empire State Building, her shades were always drawn. The apartment was lit with chandeliers, lamps covered in patterned silk shades, and candles. On the shelves was Jade’s collection of stuffed quail, raccoons, foxes, and other woodland treasures. Bounding through this was an Egyptian sphinx and miniature greyhound.

  My Barbie doll had a small waist; Jade’s was smaller. My Barbie had full breasts; Jade’s were fuller. Jade’s eyes and hair and skin were shinier than Barbie’s. So why would I play with dolls when I had Jade?

  Unlike Barbie, Jade had a brain. She was smart and witty, and I spent as much time in her apartment as my parents and Jade would allow. Upon my arrival, she would always offer a glass of champagne.

  I reminded her every time, “I’m a kid. I don’t drink anything but milk, juice, and water.”

  “Too bad. It’s French, from a small vineyard.”

  Sitting on her red velvet couch, she would bring the glass to her lips, the bubbles never reaching her mouth. Jade did not drink.

  It is said her name was not really Jade, but Stacey. That she arrived at the Chelsea Hotel in the middle of the night during a blizzard, a runaway from Florida. It is said she walked from Port Authority to the hotel wearing only a T-shirt, tattered shorts, and flip-flops. That Stanley Bard said she could stay for a few nights, which extended to months, then years. And that in those years she transformed herself from a little girl to a goddess—her home, from a dark, single room without a toilet, to a suite.

  It was not to last.

  After a year, I noticed that Jade’s spotless apartment was coming undone. She was no longer vacuuming every day, and clothing, which was once stored on cushioned hangers, was piling up around the apartment.

  “Jade, do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “Of course not, dear.”

  “Well, things are a little messy and you seem . . . worried.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Not exactly . . .”

  “Please.”

  “You have a smell.”

  Normally, Jade had the most beautiful odor, the result of the perfumes that filled her bathroom shelves. She and I had such fun going through those perfumes: rose, lilac, blueberry, and musk.

  “What sort of smell?”

  “The smell, well . . . ”

  “Shalimar?”

  I hesitated. “Dog.”

  Jade sighed. And then explained.

  “One day, Nicolaia, you will meet someone and despite how comfortable you are or even happy you are, you won’t want to do anything but be with that person.”

  “When that happens I’ll smell like dog?”

  Jade continued and told me—and I suspect it was only part of the story—that she had a job which paid her a lot of money, and caused her to work late. She was happy with that job, and it allowed her to buy fancy things and to live in a nice apartment in the hotel.

  But one day she met someone. Someone she liked.

  “He is studying and doesn’t have a lot of money. If I want to be with him, I need to find another job, and the only one I could come up with was betting. I learned from my father when I was a kid, and it’s the one way I can make enough to support the two of us.”

  She retreated to a pile of newspapers in the corner, returning with a copy of the Greyhound Review, which, according to Jade, was essential to her new life.

  For the next hour, she taught me how to handicap “the hounds.” Interesting, but not exactly something that was going to help me with elementary school.

  What she didn’t tell me was that she was moving out of the Chelsea Hotel.

  —

  With Jade gone, I had no babysitter.

  On those evenings when my parents went out, there was a scramble to track down one of the various girls who had looked after me in the past. My parents could never quite remember their names, and if a name was recalled, the number was on a scrap of paper that was lost in a drawer or pocket or inside a book. Often, my parents would give up and haul me along to wherever they were going.

  A solution arrived one afternoon when we met a young lady and her mother in the lobby of the Chelsea. They lived in the hotel, and the girl, Dahlia, worked as an au pair. I liked her, and she volunteered her services as a babysitter.

  The first few times that Dahlia took care of me, she stayed in our apartment. After playing with me for a while, she would excuse herself, go into my parents’ bedroom, and fall asleep. With time, she would take me downstairs to where she and her family lived, so she could sleep in her own bed. If she had other babysitting jobs, she would take me along.

  Dahlia’s apartment was filled with things her mother had picked up at the flea market and neighborhood antique shops. On the walls were sculptures and paintings by artists in the hotel. Dahlia and her mother had lived there a long time, and the apartment was very crowded.

  I should mention that there was always a man lying in a bed just off the living room. That man was Artie, whom I knew from his exchange with Stanley in the lobby. Artie was Dahlia’s father.

  On the first day I went to their apartment, Artie was in his pajamas, bathrobe, and sunglasses. On his stomach was a camera with a long lens—a scene that was repeated on each of my visits.

  At the end of Artie’s bed was a television. Completely still, a hunter in his blind, Artie waited until he saw what he was looking for on the screen and then snapped a shot. Every few hours, he would get out of bed, put on his clothes, and leave the apartment. When he came back, he would return to his perch.

  Not once, as he passed through the living room, did he acknowledge me or the fact that we had met before.

  —

  I became close with Dahlia’s mother, Colleen. She often returned home with her arms full of flowers, which she would arrange while we talked.

  But most exciting was the fact that they, unlike my parents, had animals: a dog, two cats, and a hamster. It was the hamster, Hammie, I liked the most. Once or twice a day I would run downstairs to play with Hammie.

  With time, Dahlia began to babysit other kids at the hotel. Two or three years my junior, these kids already had big groups of friends and rarely wanted to spend time with me. I was fine just hanging out with Dahlia’s mother instead. There were times, however, when neither Dahlia nor her mom was around, and it would only be Artie and me.

  Artie spent each day dormant in bed. Every so often this would be interrupted by a phone call or a visit from someone who wanted to ask him questions. Artie seemed to know about a lot of things.

  Artie didn’t talk much, and when he did, it wasn’t about himself. So it was a long time before I learned that the big canvases on the walls of the hotel, the ones with pictures of FBI agents, men dressed as girls, politicians and actors, were photographs that Artie had taken from the television.

  But these were not my favorite of Artie’s creations: at the very top of the hotel, suspended from the roof of the tenth floor, were large discs of clear, thin plastic. Infused into those circles were portraits that Artie had taken with his camera. The circles were three or four feet wide, hung from invisible wires, and were lit by multicolored spotlights. When Artie turned on the lights, the photographs would create shadows on the walls—shadows of the people in the portraits. As the discs rotated on their wires, the shadows would mix. Dwight Eisenhower’s face merged into Salvador Dalí’s and Muhammad Ali’s. For a few minutes, Dwight Dalí Ali was in the hotel.

  Though it is true that Artie and I rarely spoke, he understood me. On those rare times when he left the apartment, often wearing a leather jacket and pajamas, he would, as he returned to his bed, toss me a pack of black licorice or a chocolate bar.

  THE THEATERr />
  I HAD IMAGINED that by the end of elementary school, my career in musical theater would have been much further along than it was. The problem was clear: Pippi had conspired to give her children the roles (such as the Pea in The Princess and the Pea or Thomas in Thomas the Tank Engine) that would otherwise have gone to those who, owing to their talent and years of hard work, deserved it—meaning me.

  I was complaining to my mother about this when she reminded me of the musicals staged by our local synagogue—the year before, I had played Nancy in Oliver, one of their productions. That year, they were doing Fiddler on the Roof, Mom’s favorite. On Passover, my mother and her family gathered before the television to watch Fiddler. During the songs, they would get up to sing and dance around the room, pretending they were leaving the shtetl.

  The next day, I walked with Mom to the synagogue. The director of the musicals, Schmuel, was good enough to meet with us. When Schmuel was not casting, directing, and acting in musicals, he taught Hebrew and made sure there were enough brownies after the bar mitzvahs.

  “Of course,” he assured me, “you’ll be in Fiddler. You were my Nancy last year. Besides the main parts—Golde, Tevye, and their three daughters—there are three more daughters, so you will definitely get something.”

  “Six daughters?” I responded. “I only remember three.”

  “The others got left out of the movie, but I’m bringing them back.”

  “And which one would I be?”

  “Well there’s Tzeitel, Hodel, Chava . . . ” Schmuel gazed up at the ceiling and stroked his beard. “And . . . well . . . Prancer, Dancer, and Blixen,” he finished quickly. “Maybe you’ll be Blixen.”

  —

  With my acting career back on track, I could not have been happier. Returning to the hotel that afternoon, I decided to share my good mood with my friends the Crafties. But they were having a very serious discussion, and when I tried to butt in, I was told to come back in a few minutes. They were, Uber-Crafty explained, trying to work out the details of how to murder someone on the second floor. This was of minor concern to me.

  With the Crafties preoccupied, I rolled my good mood across the lobby to the office of Mr. Stanley Bard.

  “Mr. Bard. I am sorry to bother you . . .”

  “No bother at all. You were born here, grew up here, you are like a daughter to me. A beloved resident of the Chelsea. Your father, on the other hand . . . ”

  “I have some news,” I blurted.

  Stanley, who was always on the edge of agitation, began to shake.

  “Does it have to do with the Crafties? I heard they’re going to murder someone.”

  “They are,” I assured him.

  “Me?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Who, then?”

  “The guy with a lot of muscles.”

  “The one with the platform shoes?” Mr. Bard guessed.

  “No, the big bald guy.”

  Mr. Bard was now stoic.

  “No one should murder anyone in this hotel without talking to me first. Remind your friends out there that I’m still the owner of this hotel and someone who cares about all the tenants, even if they are behind on their rent and not one of them is paying what similar hotels, like the Plaza or Carlyle, get for their rooms.

  “Did you know the green satin ceiling and green shag carpet in your apartment was put there by Angie Bowie to complement her pale skin, red hair, and green eyes? What a beauty she was. Between you and me, there was a certain way she looked at me . . .”

  “My mom told me ours is the apartment above that one.”

  “And Marilyn Monroe lived with Arthur Miller just down the hall from you.”

  “I thought they were on the tenth floor? Anyway, I have some good news.”

  “They moved around. And now all I have are deadbeats—they complain all the time about the mice. Do you see any mice? I’ve never seen one. Lies!”

  “Mr. Bard, I have good news about my career.”

  “Did I tell you that Jackie Kennedy used to visit?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “In this office . . . and other places, Jerry’s home, but I shouldn’t say.”

  “Mr. Jerry at the front desk?”

  “Is there any other? Yes! Jerry Weinstein, my best friend, that conniving S.O.B.—boy, those were the days! Who knows what he has taken from the register?”

  Stacks of yellowing papers surrounded him.

  “Nicolaia, you said you had something to tell me?”

  “Very good news, Mr. Bard. Do you know Blixen?’

  “Of course! My grandmother’s were the thinnest in the neighborhood.”

  “Two thin, Jewish grandmothers? Unusual.”

  “No, not my grandmothers. The blintzes! They were the thinnest crêpes in the neighborhood; she used to cook them on the back of the pan, a little cottage cheese and cherry jam . . . ”

  “Mr. Bard, I am talking about Tevye’s daughter Blixen.”

  “Blixen, the reindeer?! Who’s playing Tevye?”

  “Maybe Schmuel—he was my husband, Bill Sikes, in Oliver. He reminds me of you.”

  “People have always said I would make a great Tevye. I think Jerry said it. Years ago when we were . . . Wait a minute, where is that good for nothing Jerry?”

  He stared off to the side, driving recklessly into his memory.

  I stepped quietly out of his office. As I closed the door, I looked back at Mr. Bard—the Tevye of the Chelsea Hotel, an eccentric yet lovable bundle of anxiety.

  In the end, the Hebrew School cast a boy named Saul to play Tevye. He had a high voice and long blond hair. I was chosen as Golde, his wife, which meant that for the first time in any production of Fiddler, Tevye had less facial hair than the woman he married. Golde was a good role; she had many songs and wasn’t killed by pogroms. My cousin Tillie was Blixen.

  REBECCA

  WHEN OUR TEACHER, Rebecca, young and attractive, walked into our fifth-grade class, there was only one thought in the room: “Fancy.” Black dress, pumps, fine stockings—all stylish and expensive in that obviously not-obvious way that refined people have.

  Here was someone who appreciated the gravity of the superficial (her haircut and nails alone took a day at the salon). She would have no interest in homework or lectures.

  It took only a couple days to realize how wrong we were.

  When two boys were caught talking during one of her lectures, she told them to stop or they would have “to sit in the hallway.” When they continued, Rebecca, dragging two chairs behind her, led them outside.

  The next day the chairs remained in the hallway.

  And the next, and the next, until it became apparent that when Rebecca had told them that they would have to sit in the hallway, she meant that they would be spending the rest of the year there.

  When their parents complained, pointing out that they were “good boys,” Rebecca gestured toward the other classrooms in the hall.

  “Surely,” Rebecca replied, “such good boys will be welcome in someone else’s class. But not here.”

  End of discussion.

  Rebecca’s no-talking-in-class rule was the first of many.

  After I received a failing grade on an art project (a portrait of my grandmother), my baffled mother studied the difference between it and my earlier “A” drawings. With some inspection it became clear to my mother that Rebecca wanted all drawings to have their backgrounds completely filled in. Having detected a speck or two of white from the paper below the drawing of my grandmother, Rebecca scrawled a red “F” across Grandma’s face.

  “There is no right way to express yourself,” my mother comforted me. “But you also need to learn to give teachers what they want—especially Rebecca.”

  Compared to the punishing way that kids often treated each
other, Rebecca’s insistence that we fill in the white spaces behind Grandma’s head seemed a light sentence.

  As kids were expelled and others, weakening under the weight of Rebecca’s rules, switched teachers or schools, the number of kids in her class shrank. None of this seemed to bother Rebecca.

  For those of us who held out, though miserable, we sensed that we were learning in a way that we never had before. And that was because Rebecca didn’t care if we liked her. For her, there was only one thought: getting the most important ideas of literature, science, and current events into our undeveloped brains as deeply and quickly as possible.

  Every day, she was there in the classroom, waiting solemnly, dressed head-to-toe in black, ready to cut out bad ideas and replace them with healthy material, a fashionable surgeon.

  In addition to the assignments required by the school, Rebecca insisted that each of us complete a long writing project. We could do almost anything, but it had to focus on a single subject.

  As we wrote, she would offer comments, making sure that by the time the project was complete, it was as close to perfect as our little minds could get it. As a gift, she had all of our writings printed and bound, with an engraved cover.

  Rebecca was not the most popular teacher in the school. Other teachers, burdened by the kids they had to take in from Rebecca’s class, disliked Rebecca; administrators, sensing her disapproval, avoided her. And Rebecca, aware of this, ignored everyone.

  If there was one person who was as friendless as I was at school, it was Rebecca.

  Fifth grade brought new responsibilities, one of which was the privilege of spending lunch outside the school grounds. This seemingly innocuous activity was the most exciting part of the day, a foray into the real world. We had forty-five minutes to pick up food from a nearby deli and return to class. The only limitations were that we could not go beyond a three-block radius and we couldn’t go out without someone else—a “buddy.”

  On the first day, I wandered over to two girls who were getting ready to leave for lunch.