Twelve Rooms with a View (23 page)

“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.

After about twenty minutes of lying in bed and paging through peaceful and lovely picture books, I was quite frankly drifting off when Katherine whispered, “There’s the ghost.”

Because I was only half awake, I thought she was talking about the story we were reading. I shook my head slightly to clear the fog and considered the picture we were looking at, confused. The story had to do with a talking teddy bear who was left in a large department store by mistake, then had a series of charming misadventures before the little girl who owned him came back and found him. “What ghost, there’s no ghost,” I said.

“Listen,
listen,”
Katherine said, worried. She put her small hand up in the air, like the ghost was in the room with us and might flee if I kept talking. We had turned off the overhead light and were reading by the bedside lamp, so the room was dark. I put my arm around her and looked up to listen, meaning to take just a moment before telling her there were no ghosts in her room, only night and shadows.

And then I heard the ghost. I tensed up a little, so Katherine knew she was right. “See?” she said.

She was right. There was a kind of whisper in the walls. It was a female ghost, and she was upset, talking fast in a different language in her other world, which seemed to be sort of adjacent to this one, or maybe in a slightly skewed dimension. It sounded truly spooky, like a river of dead words with nowhere to go, trapped in the air all around us, some past catastrophe frozen between places where things moved. It
was definitely a ghost. Katherine looked at me with solemn confidence. She knew that I knew she was right.

“That’s not a ghost,” I said. “Come on, that’s just some person who lives in the building.”

“Then why is she on our floor? We are the only people who live on this floor, and that’s not us.”

“It’s somebody on some other floor.”

“Shhhhhh,” she said. “She’s crying.” Sure enough, the ghost had stopped her mournful complaints and now was sobbing, long pain-wracked moans that clung to the insides of the walls.

“That is not a ghost,” I repeated. I sat up to go look for it and caught sight of Jennifer in the doorway.

“You hear the ghost?” she whispered. She glided into the room and joined us on the bed.

“That’s not a ghost!” I said, with so little confidence that they both looked at me triumphantly.

“Shhhhhh,” whispered Katherine. “If you talk too loud, it goes away.”

“I’m not going to be loud,” I said, whispering as well. “I’m just going to go listen.” I left them on the bed and got down on my hands and knees so I could crawl silently through the wool pile of the carpet and get to the wall without the ghost knowing I was closing in on her. She was talking again, a fast, anxious complaint, like she knew she was trapped forever and simply couldn’t make peace with it. Katherine sat up on the bed, clearly worried that something was going to happen to me. She leaned into Jennifer, who put her arm around the kid in a gesture of such careless affection it wounded me to the core.

“Come back, come back,” Katherine whispered, waving her hands at me like I was doing something way too dangerous and had to be ushered back to the one safe spot in the room—the bed—or the ghost would get me. I didn’t answer right away, I just put my ear up against the wall. The murmuring river of grief got louder; there was no question that the ghost was inside the wall. “Oh,” Katherine said, really worried. “Come back!”