by Jill Ciment
“And?”
“And you fumigate.”
“Who do I contact?”
“I’d phone my insurance company and find out what your mold coverage is. If you’re covered, your agent will suggest a fumigator.” His expression remained officious, but Vida noticed the spark of recognition in his eyes. His face suddenly changed from stoic commander to charmed admirer as he struggled to hold back the grin.
“Who else should I be calling?” she asked.
“I’d call my lawyer,” he said, unable to contain the grin any longer.
Before she could reach for her cell phone, Edith strode toward her. When Vida first bought the building, she had tried to buy out all the tenants, made them generous offers, more than the realtor had recommended. Only Edith had said no and never made a counter offer. Maybe she could buy her out now?
“I left five urgent messages and you never called me back. I warned you last week that a foul odor was coming from the laundry room,” Edith began, barely able to control her rage. “Now we have a catastrophe on our hands. I found a mushroom growing under my bed. All the furniture will need to be thrown out and burned. And what about my mother’s archive? Can you promise me that the fungicide won’t destroy the letters? When can we expect to go home?”
“I wish I knew. No one’s telling me anything either,” Vida said.
Edith didn’t believe her. In her summer dress and sandals, Vida must have charmed an answer or two out of the fire chief. He practically had to wrestle his eyes off her before returning to duty. “What are we supposed to do in the meantime? Where are we supposed to live?”
“I don’t know what to say. I’m out on the street myself.”
A sedan navigated around the emergency vehicles and pulled up to the curb. Wheeling her suitcase behind her, Vida got in. When did she have time to call a car service? Edith wondered. She watched Vida settle in the rear seat, subsiding into the cool interior. Before the tinted window rose, Edith called, “I expect to hear from you this afternoon, or you’ll hear from my lawyer.”
She looked around for Kat, but Kat wasn’t where she was supposed to be, guarding their luggage and purses as Edith had asked. Kat was waving good-bye to the newly released prisoner.
“You know her?”
“Ashley? I thought she was Vida’s maid. We met in the garden. She said hello and introduced herself. What kind of a burglar introduces herself?”
Gripping the hot iron banister, Edith eased herself down on Gladys’s stoop, which was thick with cat hair. The noon sun smoldered directly overhead. The air felt unusually still, as if the morning had run out of breath. Her anger rapidly evaporated into despair. She remembered what she’d forgotten to pack in her haste—her heart medication. And she hadn’t washed her hands since she’d touched the infested shoe box.
Kat joined her on the steps. The humidity had varnished Kat’s permanent suntan resin yellow. Her blond wisps lay sweat-plastered to her scalp, dead cornstalks rain-beaten on the ground. She hadn’t had time to put on her makeup, and her eyes looked naked and vulnerable.
“Where are we supposed to go?” Edith said out loud to herself.
Kat gently guided Edith’s chin until they faced each other. Looking directly into Kat’s eyes was both greatly comforting and oddly disquieting to Edith. They were born with matching pale blue irises down to the coronas of forest green around the pupils, but over time, Kat’s dark nimbuses had widened, leaving an impression that her stare vectored just beyond this world. She smiled reassuringly at Edith with her zealous teeth.
“Edie, we’re going to be fine. We’ll treat ourselves to a nice hotel,” she said, as if their eviction was cause for celebration and she was picking up the tab.
The policewoman came over and took off her painter’s mask. Edith was surprised to see that a policewoman wore lipstick. “Do you ladies have someone to call? Anyplace to stay tonight?”
Edith could have phoned one of her old friends from work, but Maggie had just moved in with her daughter and Janice lived in a small one-bedroom. Janice might have been able to squeeze in one, but two?
“Any family?” asked the policewoman.
Neither twin had married or had children.
“No,” Edith said.
“Do you need public assistance? Would you like to speak to a caseworker from the Department of Aging?”
“The Department of Aging? We’ll get a hotel, thank you very much,” said Kat.
Edith couldn’t conceal her exasperation. Kat was more indignant about being labeled “aging” than she was about their being temporarily homeless.
Kat knew that Edith thought she was in denial about growing old, but the blond hair and the suntan weren’t feeble attempts to mask the truth; they were medals. Had she let herself age like Edith, without a struggle, her body wouldn’t reflect her being. She would no more be herself with white hair than if she sported a barrister’s wig. Her carriage and stride were still nimble and lithe. She had never stopped believing that she was on the brink of hurling herself into something significant.
Edith found them a room at the Metropolitan, a two-star neighborhood hotel with a twelve-lane view of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The room was barely large enough to hold two single beds, a suitcase rack, and a coffeemaker. Kat showered first, then sprawled naked on her sheets, her shampooed hair damp and turbaned in a towel. From her pillow facing the curtained window, the expressway appeared to converge at her bare feet.
Pallid and blotchy, Edith sat on the opposite bed, still wearing her sweaty, sticky street clothes. Strands of white hair clung to her gleaming brow as if chalked on. The low late-afternoon sun sliced through the curtains and blanched her to the bones, turned her dress to ectoplasm and her hair to transient smoke, leaving only the essence of her bearing, an austere armature.
Kat was terribly worried about Edith. The blotches meant that Edith’s blood pressure had spiked again.
“She should have called by now,” Edith said.
“Who?”
“Vida. I’m going over there to see if Frank knows anything and then stop by the pharmacy. I left my heart medicine on the nightstand.”
“Edie, you’re going to give yourself a stroke. Take a shower, cool off, and lie down. I’ll go.”
Their block, normally a human anthill on a summer evening, was eerily deserted. The steam-bath heat was keeping everyone indoors. The only reminder that Kat saw of today’s four-alarm response was a cat’s cradle of yellow police tape tying off their stoop and a Health Department vacate order stapled to the doorjamb at eye level.
Frank emerged from Gladys’s basement hauling out two overstuffed transparent recycling bags, cat food tins rattling within like maracas. At sixty-four, he still had the jacked arms of a pugilist. Kat was both relieved and comforted to see him attending to everyday chores. They’d known each other for more than forty years. Before Frank was a super, he’d been a welterweight boxer in contention for a title bout when a blow had left him blind in one eye. During her itinerant Deadhead days, whenever Kat visited her mother and Edith, she and Frank smoked a joint and had athletic sex in the basement, until she realized that he was falling in love with her. She ended the affair before she hurt him. At twenty-one, her life was on the ascent. She was writing free verse and learning the guitar. The Dead’s drummer had asked her to dance onstage. She was sailing somewhere remarkable, and Frank was anchored to this neighborhood, still reeling from his injury. That blow had crushed his ambition as much as his sight.
“Hey, Kat!” he shouted from the curb. “You and Edie land somewhere safe?”
“Edie got us a room at the Metropolitan.”
“I hear it’s a nice hotel. Did you know it used to be a Howard Johnson?”
“I don’t think they changed the wallpaper.”
“Oh, Kat, you should have seen your place an hour ago. It was crawling with guys in bubble suits.”
“Did they fumigate?”
“The guy I talked to said they we
re just taking samples. You tell Edie I’ll keep an eye on her place.”
“You’re a champ, Frank.”
He returned to Gladys’s basement for another load.
Ignoring the vacate order, Kat ducked under the police tape and opened their front door, surprised to find it unlocked. She headed straight to Edith’s bedroom to get the heart pills. She didn’t switch on the lights in case a squad car drove by. She didn’t need to. The phosphorescent bloom under Edith’s bed gave off enough wattage. She saw the prescription bottle on the nightstand, but she didn’t dare move toward it. What looked like iridescent slime was seeping out from under the bed skirt. Muffling her mouth with both hands, she suppressed a scream. Edie had slept in that bed only last night.
She heard footsteps overhead. Vida? Had she snuck back inside too?
Kat marched upstairs and pounded on the door. “Open up, Vida, I know you’re there. Edith has been waiting for your call all afternoon.” She hammered until the door swung wide.
Sporting a freshly laundered Ziberax T-shirt, Ashley stared at Kat as if she’d knocked on the wrong door, or had come to proselytize.
“Who let you in?” Kat asked.
“Who let you in?” Ashley retorted, the accent syrupy with both old-world irony and new-world sarcasm.
“Where’s Vida?”
Ashley shrugged. “I keep place to myself tonight. You call police?”
“You’re spending the night? You’re not worried about getting sick?”
“No big deal. In Russia, mushrooms grow out people’s ears.”
“The police told us they were poisonous.”
“So don’t eat. I fix myself vodka. You want? Vida has Stolichnaya in freezer.”
Kat knew she shouldn’t, but how could she refuse a stiff drink after what she’d seen downstairs? Besides, she was so curious to see how Vida had refurbished the place. She and Edith had grown up in this building, and Kat remembered their second- and third-floor neighbors—the old Polish lady who used to give them candies to pray for her and Mr. Hernandez, who made Kat and Edith twirl around until he could see their underwear before letting them pass by him on the stoop. Even without lights, Kat saw that all traces of their cluttered lives had been eradicated. The upstairs was now one open space, lined with closets, chic, but impersonal. It dawned on Kat: the second floor was meant to be the master suite as soon as the parlor floor became available: Vida was waiting for Edith to move—or die.
“I come to America to be house sitter, but Vida make me slave,” Ashley told Kat, pouring them each a fist-sized shot. “When I refuse to be donkey, she lock me in closet with mushroom.”
“Did you tell this to the police?”
“Who believe Russian nobody?”
They sat in the dark kitchen, on stools. Kat intended to have just one, but the fright made her thirsty, and Ashley generously replenished her glass. “You actress like Vida?”
“I’ve been told more than once that I look like Lauren Bacall, but no, I’m not an actress,” Kat said, knowing she should put down her glass and leave. “I’m an author.”
“Have I read book by you?”
“You a huge reader?”
Ashley shrugged noncommittally. “I finish New Earth, Wake Up Life’s Purpose. Maybe next I read you. What book about?”
“It’s a collection of my mother’s advice columns. She was very famous in her time. She broke all taboos. Have you heard of the G-spot?”
“Yeah, sure thing, G-spot in Russia.”
“My mother gave her readers directions for finding it.”
“You going to be millionaire!”
“You think so?”
“I know so. You have Russian translator yet? You sell big in Russia.”
It was nearly ten p.m. before Kat returned to their hotel room. Edith was sitting up in bed, typing on her BlackBerry.
“Where have you been?” Edith asked.
“Frank said the exterminators took specimens.”
“You needed two hours to find that out? Did you go to the pharmacy to get my pills?”
“Oh, shit.”
“I’m not supposed to skip a dose.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot.”
“Is that alcohol I smell?”
“I went inside.”
Edith’s displeasure softened into slackened awe, just as it had when they were teens and Kat crept through their bedroom window after an all-night date. “What was it like?”
“Oh, Edie, the rug under your bed was glowing. I needed that drink.”
After the leathery blonde with the alarmingly big teeth left, Ashley finished the bottle of Stolichnaya, then proceeded to Vida’s closet—not the dark cell in which she’d hidden, but the palatial one in the master bedroom. In the week that Ashley had stowed away in Vida’s guest room, she’d had more than enough time alone in the apartment to know which of Vida’s dresses were a size too big and which looked sexy on her smaller frame.
Dumping out the meager contents of her red suitcase, she began filling it with Vida’s dresses, but not before inspecting the closet for mushrooms. She knew what happened to those aged Russians with mushrooms growing out of their ears: they coughed up black blood and died.
She had grown up with eight siblings in a Soviet-era apartment complex outside Omsk. Girls like her got called insignificuntskis. One of two futures awaited her: married with babies, or unmarried with babies. Ashley hated babies. Her mother and father were speechless when she announced that she’d signed up with a nanny agency. The “Au Pair in America” brochure had promised that “the time of your life starts here, you will experience American culture, improve your English, gain self-confidence, make new friends, and have fun. Au pair means on par, which is exactly what you will be—an equal member of your host family.”
She was eighteen. She’d never been on an airplane before. As a going-away present, her parents gave her a cardboard suitcase that she painted red. Her host family, a divorced theater agent and a goatish male toddler, treated her anything but on par. The divorcée, a hysterical hen with only one chick, constantly pecked at Ashley for the slightest infractions, while the toddler, Zachary, would butt her with his thick skull whenever she tried to pick him up. The hard bones felt like budding horns were about to sprout.
In the three weeks she’d slept in a tiny maid’s room off the hen’s kitchen, she gained no self-confidence, made no new friends, and had no fun, though her English did improve. The hen ran her agency from the basement suite of her Village brownstone. Ashley didn’t get to meet any of her boss’s famous clients, though she sometimes heard affected theatrical laughter through the air vents. Photographs of the agency’s stable adorned the stairwell leading up from the street—actors in profile, laughing, posing solemnly, kissing passionately, a fat man wearing a judge’s robes, the actress from the Ziberax commercial garbed as a queen. The first time Ashley watched the commercial on the hen’s television, she hadn’t been able to guess what was being sold. She’d been too distracted by the actress, who appeared to have it all—beauty and money and minions—yet still pouted. Only later did Ashley realize that the queen in the photograph and the spoiled lady in the commercial were one and the same.
During her short employment, as soon as the hen would leave for one of her lengthy lunches, Ashley would abandon Zachary shrieking in his crib and go downstairs to snoop around the office and leaf through the Rolodex and booking datebook. That’s how Ashley learned where Vida lived and when she was supposed to be out of town doing a play.
On Ashley’s last morning of employment, before the hysterical Americunt threw her out on the street, she finished copying down all the names and addresses in the Rolodex and datebook, though how that information would serve her was still a mystery. Blotched with fury, the hen had dragged her across the living room, sat her in front of the television, inserted a DVD, and played a movie starring Ashley, the American name Anna Alevtina Sokolov had picked out for herself—Ashley muting the shrieking baby monitor;
Ashley giving Zachary a tiny chip of Ambien to help him nap; Ashley going downstairs to root around the hen’s office.
She’d been given five minutes to pack and get out. She hauled her red suitcase to Vida’s address. According to the datebook, Vida was supposed to be out of town for the next two weeks. Ashley had been trying to figure out how to break in when the leathery blonde had mistaken her for Vida’s maid and unlocked the garden door for her.
Ashley selected one last outfit from Vida’s closet and laid it carefully atop the hillock of finery already piled in her red suitcase. She had to wonder how she had let herself be caught twice in a row by security cameras, though she was certain no one was watching her tonight. What kind of country was this where private citizens hide cameras in toys and pencil sharpeners? Even in Putin’s Russia, people didn’t do that.
Her favorite place in Vida’s apartment wasn’t the living room, or the cedar-paneled steam room, or the master bedroom with the memory-foam mattress and the forty-seven-inch flat-screen television. Ashley preferred a harder bed. No, her favorite room was the office: smoky glass desk, leather chair, the walls displaying Vida’s accomplishments—framed awards and a photo array of her various roles. The pictures weren’t particularly flattering. The photographs hadn’t been chosen out of petty vanity, but from regal self-possession, and Ashley intended to learn those poses, even if she had to fake it. She’d always been a sloucher, but not anymore.
Her plan was to try the next available apartment in the hen’s datebook, an actor away in London for the month. Her only other option was to phone her parents collect and ask them to call all the relatives to see if anyone could loan her money to get home. Who would loan her money? No one in the family spoke to her except her uncle, and he didn’t have two rubles to rub together. Ashley had cased the actor’s apartment after the police had let her go, a glass tower on the East River only ten blocks away. She’d introduced herself to the doorman, a big-eared boy built like a draft horse, and told him that she was the actor’s house sitter and would be moving in tomorrow. She planned to spend one last night at Vida’s and sleep in the master bedroom, not in the guest closet with the mushrooms.
