Twelve Rooms with a View (25 page)

Which would have been fine—I was planning on letting them in, for Chrissake—but Lucy got herself so worked up over my arrogance that she decided she’d better come over early and yell at me some more. So she showed up in the middle of the day, well before I was expecting to have to let anybody in. And she couldn’t get in, because I had locked it from the inside with my slide bolt and the two chain guards.

Honestly, I had not predicted that Lucy would get so offended by my defiance that she would just arrive, which was why I was all the way
in the back of the apartment, crawling around in the secret room, looking through boxes with a flashlight and trying to determine which one to go through next. I had already gone through six boxes that day, and I had not yet thought about packing it all up and hiding it away again, so flatware and shoes and fifty-year-old Halloween costumes were strewn all over the laundry room. I had just found the first box of photo albums when my cell phone, which I kept clipped to my belt loop, started to buzz. I looked down, saw that it was Lucy, and decided not to answer. After about three minutes it buzzed again, and I ignored it again, figuring I had already gotten one shitty message from her and that was plenty. I mean, why listen to her snipe at me on the phone when I could just wait and get it in person? So I was truly immersed in my studies when the phone buzzed a third time. I decided to finally answer it.

“Yes,
what
, Lucy?” I said, annoyed as hell.

“I am out in the hall, let me in,” she demanded.

“Wait, you’re what?”

“I’m in the hall at the front door and I can’t get in. I told you to take those extra locks off the door, we don’t need them. I’m not going to talk to you about this while I’m standing out in the hallway. Just let me in. Right now.” She was calm but furious.

“You said you were coming at six,” I said.

“I don’t have to get your permission to come over, Tina!” she said. “And I am not kidding around! You have to come and let me in immediately!”

Lucy is so good at bossing people around that sometimes I actually do whatever she’s told me to do before I’ve even decided to do it. So I had squeezed through the doorway of the secret room and out into the laundry area before I paused to consider what would happen if I let her in. I kicked aside a pile of sweaters I had unearthed, which were now strewn all over the floor. One of them, a rather small olive green pullover, had a lot of charming cables all over it, and one of the rows of cable was all screwed up—it went one way and then the other, and then it twisted around and kind of collapsed into a knot, and then it came out the other side and held steady for the rest of its journey up the sleeve.
Right then I realized that the sweater was handmade and that the mother of those two boys had knitted it, that she was a knitter.

“Tina, where are you?” Lucy snapped, because I hadn’t said anything while I considered the hapless cable on the sleeve of the little sweater on the floor.

“You have to come back,” I said.

“Open the door, Tina,” Lucy said, surprised.

“Come back at six, I’ll let you in then,” I said. And then I hung up.

Lucy is nothing if not persistent, and she did not go away. She called me back three more times, and then she stood out there and pounded on the door for ten minutes, trying the locks in between calls, pulling furiously at the doorknob and yelling, “Tina! TINA. TINA.” I cautiously made my way to the front of the apartment so I could listen to the commotion for a little while, and it really did continue for longer than you would have thought possible, even given the fact that it was Lucy. Then I heard Mrs. Westmoreland come out and say something curt to her. Lucy said something sharp back. A door slammed, and I heard more pounding, and a little while later I heard the elevator ding and heard a soft rumbly voice that sounded somewhat confused and vaguely like Frank. And then Mrs. Westmoreland, who had apparently called Frank and told him to get up there, said something that sounded wounded and angry and filled with righteous indignation, and she and Lucy started to argue. Then there was more patient rumbling from Frank, and the next thing I heard was the ding of the elevator and then the slamming of the door across the hall, and then silence.

So I went back and picked up the sweaters, which I had strewn about with a ridiculous degree of disregard, and I folded them up, making two piles. I kept the little green sweater out, because it seemed kind of friendly and real to me now. When I held it up to my nose and sniffed it, I thought it smelled a little bit like fall air, but that may have been because there was no heat in that storage area, so everything was imbued with a sort of timeless chill. I looked around at all the sweaters and shoes and Halloween costumes, and I thought about all the other things stored in that room. And then I spent the rest of the day picking
up everything I had excavated and putting it back into the room behind the laundry. I shoved the broom closet back in front of the door, and for good measure I pushed one of those half-empty boxes full of expensive wine in front of it and tried to make it look exactly as it had before my discovery.

When Lucy arrived for the second time that afternoon, she was predictably in a state. “This is completely unacceptable,” she snarled, pushing right by me as soon as I opened the door. “You are
forbidden
to deny us entrance, Tina!”

“I’m not denying you entrance, I’m letting you in,” I pointed out calmly. “Hi, Alison. Hi, Daniel.”

Alison smiled at me with a vague air of apologetic goodwill. I could tell she’d already gotten an earful from Lucy, who really was ridiculously worked up about how horrible I was being.

“This afternoon was humiliating. Do you know I was asked to leave the building?”

“Oh for crying out loud,” I sighed. “Would you stop yelling at me? What is the big damn deal? I’m not your apartment
slave
. I was doing something and I didn’t want to see you right then! I didn’t say you couldn’t come in
ever.”

“This is coming off. Now,” Lucy asserted, ignoring me and turning her attention back to my private set of locks. “Daniel, can you take care of this?”

“Well … I
can,”
said Daniel, with a tone of such rational reluctance that we all turned and stared at him. He shoved his hands into his pockets, looking thoughtful, and squeezed up his face into a sort of regret-filled grimace. He’s actually a fairly nice-looking guy, even though his hair is thinning and prematurely gray, and he has a fondness for corduroy jackets. So he looked like an excessively reasonable father figure who was about to step in and make the girls behave.

“You
can
?” Lucy repeated. “Then I suggest you do so.”

“You know, Lucy … I think Tina might be right,” Daniel suggested. “She’s a bit at risk here. I personally can see why she’d want to have some degree of control over people coming and going. Besides, she’s entitled to a bit of privacy, isn’t she?”

“This apartment belongs to all of us!”

“It doesn’t belong to us quite yet, actually,” he pointed out.

“That’s what I said,” I started. He held up his hand, endlessly patient.

“Maybe we should take this away from the door,” he suggested, waving everyone farther into the apartment, where the patently nosy Mrs. Westmoreland couldn’t overhear absolutely every evil thing we might dream up to say to each other. It was pretty slick; in one fell swoop he looked saner and Lucy looked more out of control and nuts. The implication was not lost on her. But rather than snapping back, as was her clear instinct, she did as she was told.

“Of course,” she said, tersely diplomatic. “Thank you. You are absolutely right.”

“I just think we do have to be careful,” Daniel continued, walking calmly to the far end of the great room. “You were asked to leave the building? That’s bad, that’s the sort of thing people talk about.”

“That’s my point. She should never have put me in that position,” Lucy asserted.

“I didn’t, I told you I was busy,” I volunteered.

“Doing
what?”
Lucy hissed.

“It’s not relevant, what she was doing,” Daniel told her. I was thrilled to be on the winning side of this, but I’m not so stupid that I didn’t get what he was up to. The power plays were flying thick and fast. “It’s clearly important that we maintain a presence here,” he continued, sounding like the most sensible guy on earth. “So far I think Tina’s doing a good job. You told me she’s already made some friends in the building, she knows people on the co-op board, she’s gotten some jobs babysitting?”

“For the Whites, yes. Mrs. White is on the board too,” I said. Daniel’s hand went up again, keeping me from drowning them all in helpful, sloppy details.

“So Tina is in fact doing what we need her to do,” he noted methodically. “And you want to kick her out?”

“Kick me out?” I said, suddenly not feeling so cheerfully helpful. “Did she tell you that? She wants to kick me out?
”

“No one’s kicking you out, Tina, that’s what Daniel is
saying,”
Alison reassured me, a little too nicely.

“You guys talked about kicking me out because I wouldn’t let Lucy just barge in on me in the middle of the day?” I said, getting all worked up as fast as I could. “That is
ridiculous.”

“It is ridiculous and it’s not happening,” Daniel repeated, but he wasn’t talking to me, he was talking to Lucy. Lucy looked him square in the face, unflinching, even though she knew she had overreached and lost.

“Well, then, maybe I’ll just move in,” she said. And with that she headed down the hallway, pulling out her CrackBerry and moving her thumbs over it. I looked at Daniel, reeling from whiplash and worried that maybe I had won the battle and lost the war. He shook his head and raised his shoulders in a slightly edgy dismissive shrug.

“Let it go, she doesn’t mean it,” he said. He was right. By the time we caught up with her, she was phoning an order for sandwiches to some deli, without asking any of us what we wanted. I got stuck with salami on rye, which I have a feeling she did on purpose. But for the next two hours the conversation stayed on boring lawyer issues, and everyone behaved themselves and I was nearly rid of them by eight, when Alison started cheerfully clearing the paper plates off the coffee table. She took the trash into the kitchen while Lucy droned on about our court date and the deposition schedules and how Mr. Long was going to testify on Mom’s behalf even though the opposition’s attorney had tried to have him barred from the proceedings because of a conflict of interest, but our attorney had pulled some unbelievably clever move and successfully quashed their motions. Seriously, it was so devious and boring I thought my head was going to explode, when Alison breezed back into the room and held up the little green sweater.

“What’s this?” she asked, cheerfully curious.

I froze. I don’t know why, because usually I am a much more fluid liar. “Oh,” I said, feeling my face turn red. Lucy looked at me, her antennae at full alert.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a sweater, a children’s sweater,” Alison told her. “I found it in the kitchen, on the counter.”

Why I had left that thing on the counter is anybody’s guess. It was the only thing I hadn’t put away, but why on earth did I leave it out in plain sight? I wracked my brain trying to figure out what I had been thinking, while Alison was holding it up and admiring it, running her fingers down one of the cables and smiling. She wants to have kids so badly that even holding a piece of kids’ clothing can make her shyly hopeful.

“It looks like it’s handmade,” she observed. “Isn’t it sweet?”

“Adorable,” said Lucy, taking the sweater from Alison and looking at it, then looking up at me. “Where did it come from, Tina?”

“I found it,” I said. My brain was full of oatmeal and molasses. The secret I was keeping from them was so large it was making me catastrophically stupid.

“I’ve been over every inch of this apartment, and all the closets are empty,” Lucy observed, not buying it. “Where was it?”

“Oh, not here, I didn’t find it here,” I said, recovering finally. “I took a walk over to Amsterdam and there was a stoop sale.”

“You bought it at a stoop sale? Why?” asked Lucy.

“For the little girl upstairs.” What a relief, my brain was starting to function again. The lies were coming thick and fast. “It was only a dollar and I thought it might be a nice way to just, you know, build on the relationship.”

“Very smart,” Daniel said, nodding to himself. Lucy handed it back to Alison, who folded it up and set it softly on the arm of the couch. And then, ten minutes later, she mentioned that she was tired, and she and Daniel headed for the door.

Lucy did not follow immediately. She wasn’t going to punish me any more for locking her out, but she knew it would look weak to leave when Alison decided it was time to go, and she was tired of looking weak. So she lingered on the couch, checking her e-mails yet again. I, however, jumped up and said, “I’ll walk you to the door!” Which had the advantage of looking proprietary and affording me a moment alone with Alison while Daniel went over to the elevator.

“Hey, Alison,” I whispered, yanking her back into the apartment for a split second. “Can I ask you something?”

She looked at me, surprised and immediately worried by my conspiratorial tone. When we were teenagers, I had tried once or twice to get her to side with me against Lucy, and it never ended well. Her default position in times of family conflict was a sort of worried neutrality.

“It’s really late, Tina,” Alison said, edging toward the door. “I have to be at work early tomorrow.”

“Do you know how Mom met Bill?” I asked.

She blinked, startled, then glanced at the floor. When she looked up, she made a little face, like she felt sorry for me.

“She was his housekeeper, is that what you mean?” Alison said.

“You knew that she was his cleaning lady?”

“For heaven’s sake. You know they don’t call it that anymore.”

“What would you call it?”

“I don’t know. What did you call it while you were out there at the Delaware Water Gap—you were a ‘caretaker’ or something. A lot of people do it, it’s a good way to make money without paying taxes.”