The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  Ruby had not heard of Watergate.

  “Well,” Caroline said, “Jasmina fixed it. She fixes all the things in the world that are a true disgrace.”

  A true disgrace. Caroline said those words just like she had said Watergate, as if they were the name of a special, powerful doll Ruby would never have met without Caroline as her conduit. Ruby’s dolls did not pee, did not talk, did not come with their own career trajectories or historical backstories. Ruby must have unconsciously adopted a tragic air of deprivation, because later on during their playdate, Caroline had adjusted her lace collar again, and said, “I’m sorry I told you that your dad was mean for kicking people out.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I know he can’t help it.”

  “It’s his job,” Ruby said.

  Then Caroline had given Ruby one of her American Girl dolls, the Colonial Williamsburg–era redhead. “You can watch Felicity until our next playdate, if you want.”

  Ruby was always leaving 6A with borrowed stuff. Caroline’s parents would give her educational books on animals and ecosystems and history and famous artists, then ask her if she felt properly stimulated in school, if she was being presented with educational opportunities. But now she had something better than an educational opportunity. She had one of Caroline’s fanciest dolls.

  Back in the basement apartment, Ruby had gone to her father and, clutching Felicity to her chest, said, “It’s very mean, what you’re doing. Homeless people have no place to go.”

  He laughed in her face. Her father had never laughed at her like that before, had always laughed with her. She’d been so stunned, she’d let go of the doll, which hit the ground with a smack. Ruby picked the doll back up, turned her around and around, looking for signs of damage. The doll was fine. But Ruby’s limbs tingled. Had it actually been thrilling, for a second, thinking she had harmed Caroline’s doll? No, that made no sense. Caroline was her kind, generous friend. And this doll was a total plastic innocent.

  Her father said, “You shouldn’t be borrowing stuff from tenants, anyway. If you damage their dolls, who do you think gets in big trouble?”

  “You,” Ruby said.

  “That’s right.”

  Ruby looked down into Felicity’s glassy eyes. If her father were fired, they would lose their apartment. Ruby, her father, and her mother would wander the streets of the Upper West Side together, sleeping in Central Park by the ducks, huddling together by a campfire near Bow Bridge, waking up every day in some outdoor place filled with all the natural light the basement apartment didn’t receive. They’d wear rags like the orphans in Annie (which she’d just watched with Lily, who had lectured the whole time about how the ridiculously rich Daddy Warbucks was the real villain even if he adopted children, because hadn’t his own wealth generated the systems that created and forgot orphans in the first place; did Ruby understand?). Rag-wearing Ruby would pass Caroline in Strawberry Fields, and Caroline would look away, deeply ashamed. Ruby would be the girl who was at last poor enough to be truly noble and sympathetic and orphan-like, instead of a regular girl with a home and nice enough parents. If she smashed this doll somehow, if she dropped her from a great height, or burned her beautiful doll hair—then the role Ruby played in Caroline’s life might change.

  But of course she didn’t do any of that. She took good care of Felicity, read to her every night, and returned her to Caroline unharmed.

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks after Caroline accused Ruby’s father of being very mean, something bad happened to Ruby and Caroline when nobody was watching. The girls had just graduated from second grade and were not supposed to be alone. Ruby’s father was meant to babysit them during their playdate. But there had been a waste-pipe leak in 2D, damaging 1D’s ceiling. Something in one of the apartment units was always breaking, everything always on the verge of flood or fire. Back then Ruby saw her father as a kind of magician, preventing the building from succumbing to a range of biblical afflictions: infernos, deluges, pestilence. He was the one to call the firemen, the plumbers, the bedbug guy. He was responsible for saving them all from disaster. On top of that, their apartment was rent-free! Ruby was proud of this fact—she felt like they were getting away with something, especially knowing Caroline’s parents had paid a lot of money to buy their apartment. Ruby and Caroline never discussed this difference.

  If the leak had not occurred, the girls would never have been alone in the building to begin with. They would have been at the Museum of Natural History, one of Ruby’s favorite places in the world, especially during summer vacation when the air-conditioning was a welcome relief. While Caroline’s parents and Ruby’s mother all had to work that day, Ruby’s father’s week had been slower than usual, the calls to his answering machine almost nonexistent, as many residents were away on vacation. He had promised to take her and Caroline to see the largest-ever scientific reconstruction of a dinosaur. “The paleontologists looked at all these bone fragments,” he’d said to Ruby the night before. Even though they were eating dinner, he still wore a baseball hat streaked with plaster, which he liked to call “the guts of good real estate.” His beard was dark then, his back still very straight. “They looked at all these tiny bone pieces. And they guessed at where the muscles might be.”

  Ruby had gazed at her plate. Her mother was taking night classes, and dinner without her always meant boneless fish sticks, corn, and rice. With the right amount of salt, it tasted okay.

  “You know what a paleontologist is, Ruby? A paleontologist is like a plumber of the prehistoric. A paleontologist is trying to figure out how the insides of something huge and ancient are meant to flow together. When we go see that dinosaur tomorrow, it’ll be like seeing the oldest pipes in the oldest building in the world.”

  But the next day, just as they all were about to leave the building to head to the museum, there was a panicked call from 1D. Ruby’s father called Ruby’s mother and told her about the leak, but she was at work and couldn’t get away. So he called Lily in 5A, to see if she might babysit Ruby and Caroline while he managed the issue.

  Lily often watched Ruby for free, taking her to the playground, to the park, to the Met. “It’s good for me to have a reason to get out,” she said. Other times Ruby hung out in 5A, an apartment even more fun than Caroline’s because not only did it have a cat slinking around, it was also full of all the best non-doll stuff: art supplies from Lily’s “I’ll be an artist” phase, gems from Lily’s “I believe in the power of healing crystals” phase, videocassettes from Lily’s “I’ll write a neo-Marxist critique of Hollywood” phase. It was like a mini-museum dedicated to Lily’s shifting obsessions. Plus, any time Ruby was there, Lily gave her a bowl of ice cream and provided her with drawing pencils.

  While Ruby drew, Lily talked. Sometimes she read from one of her many in-progress manuscripts, but often she simply reminisced. She went on about her history with voice acting (“What I hated in the end was how the work made it seem like I was totally void of a body”), and her cat (“An undiagnosed manic-depressive”), and her parents (“Drunken louts, not in a nice way, why do you think I decided not to have kids, because god, what if I became my parents, Rubes?”), and the art that she loved, especially the paintings of Alice Neel (“They’re realistic, but distorted, Ruby, and nobody else will ever so perfectly capture the beauty and vulnerability of belly rolls”). Sometimes she railed against those in the building she called “Big Money Folks,” people she said were just waiting for an excuse to kick her out of her rent-controlled apartment, and other times she talked to Ruby about how she was happy to watch her while her mother worked at the library because libraries were the last true public spaces in a democracy gone to the wolves. Occasionally, while Lily ranted, Ruby would look up at her from her sketch pad and try to draw her. Lily was the most beautiful old person Ruby had ever seen. She had a large, soft body, blue eyes made huge behind her glass
es, long pale earlobes that resembled blanched Swedish Fish, and hair dyed a dark brown. She smelled like litter-box deodorizer, tangy sweat, and citrus—along her windowsills were gnarled orange peels curling into the fetal position. She claimed the peels kept away cockroaches. In her drawings of Lily, Ruby always made sure she was surrounded by orange peels that looked like smiling mouths.

  Everything would have been fine that day if Ruby and Caroline had been able to go to Lily’s apartment while Martin dealt with the leak. But Caroline was allergic to cats (“Not to cats, technically,” she liked to say, “but to the protein pests in their dander”). And so Lily lumbered downstairs to babysit Ruby and Caroline in the basement. She smiled at Ruby, frowned at Caroline, and immediately reclined on the couch and turned on the TV once Ruby’s father left. “Long night,” she said to the TV. “Hardly slept. Back pain. What a comfy couch.”

  “It’s got cows on it,” Ruby said, in case Lily hadn’t noticed.

  “These kinds of rustic prints were popular postwar,” Lily said. “Mass-produced couches referencing the artisanal. Everyone wanted to pretend they could just go back to the happy days on the farm. Utter delusion.”

  “If the farm was so happy, why do the cows look so sad?”

  “It’s a good question, my Ruby. If you didn’t love ice cream so much, I’d tell you.”

  “Can you take us to the museum?” Caroline asked.

  “I told your dad we’d stay here. Let’s watch TV.”

  “Don’t babysitters usually have activities?” Caroline said.

  “Not this one,” Lily said.

  “Come on.” Ruby took Caroline’s hand and led her to her room. Her stomach hurt a little. Usually their playdates occurred in Caroline’s apartment, with all its light and toys, and the fantastic off-white leather swivel club chair they used for interrogation scenes during Holocaust-orphans-sisters-survivors. But Ruby’s room had just a bed, a small chair, a gaggle of worn-out bears and dolls. Caroline picked up a baby doll with its eyes stuck wide open in an expression of pure terror.

  “That’s Joan,” Ruby said quickly. “She’s a journalist.”

  Which was a lie. The doll was named Cindy Baby and she’d never had a job in her life. Caroline put Cindy Baby down again and sighed, but very quietly, like she wanted Ruby to believe she was nobly repressing the weighty oomph of her disappointment.

  “I’m sorry we’re not looking up at the big whale right now,” Ruby said.

  “Do you know the biggest heart in the known universe is the blue whale’s?”

  Do you know do you know do you know. Caroline was always starting sentences this way, as if she was not content just to own and share spectacular dolls, but must own and share, too, the spectacular and strange facts of the universe. The protein pests in cat dander, the big hearts of whales, which Olsen twin had been born first, the name of the most recent glacier to glide across and cover Central Park twelve thousand years ago. She knew all these things.

  The steam pipe in Ruby’s bedroom gurgled and hissed. Ruby would have liked nothing more in that moment than to kick Caroline out, the way her father had kicked out homeless people. Leave, she wanted to tell Caroline, or I’ll call the police.

  She said instead, “We could draw.”

  “I just came from art class.”

  “Maybe we could play hide-and-seek?”

  “How? The room’s so tiny.”

  She was right. Ruby’s room was too small for hide-and-seek. And yet she never wanted to trade her room for Caroline’s. Because while Ruby’s room was small, in some ways the whole basement felt like hers. The laundry room, the boiler room, the storage room. All a part of her father’s kingdom, something to which Caroline had no claim.

  That gave her the idea: There were other places in the basement they could go. They did not need to stay in this tiny space. “Follow me,” Ruby said.

  Lily was still on the couch, her knuckles white from clutching the remote. When she saw Ruby and Caroline emerge, she pointed at a girl on TV advertising pills to make a person less sad. The girl stood in a meadow filled with wildflowers. “Are you searching for a sense of purpose?” the girl asked.

  “Do you hear the gurgle in that voice?” Lily said. “Goddamn, like her larynx is giving birth to llama babies. How do they let these people’s voices on TV?” Although Lily’s voice now sounded a little croaky, she often told Ruby that during her time as a voice-over actress, her voice flowed like honey and her larynx was lauded for its flexible ligaments. She had been especially skilled at declaring, in a bubbly but sassy-girl voice, one detergent’s superiority over the other when it came to making stains, grime, and unseemly streaks vanish just like that.

  “It is very difficult to get on television,” Caroline said, looking at the sincere TV girl. “She’s probably trying very hard, Lily.”

  “It’s not about trying, kiddo,” Lily said. “It’s about sounding.”

  “I’m not a kiddo,” Caroline said. “I’m a kid.”

  “I think that lady on TV sounds awful,” Ruby said. Then she told Lily that she and Caroline wanted to play a game of hide-and-seek in the laundry room, which was just down the hall from the apartment.

  “Your dad lets you do that?” Lily asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay, okay.” Lily waved her hand. “It’s like the way kids in suburbs play in the yard, I guess. You basement kids play in the laundry room.”

  “Exactly,” Ruby said. “It’s like the suburbs but for basements.”

  “Just don’t stay out there too long.” Lily reached into her pocket for a tissue and blew her nose hard. Then she kissed Ruby on the top of the head. She did not kiss Caroline on the top of the head. “I want to be the hider,” Caroline said quietly. Her face had become a hardened shell, like one of her dolls.

  “I want to be the hider, too,” Ruby said.

  “You’re always the hider, Ruby. You never seek.”

  “Lily,” Ruby said, “could you be the seeker?”

  “I want to watch TV, sweetie.”

  “Please?”

  “Okay, okay, yes, yeah, sure, I’ll count to, what is it, ten?”

  “Five hundred,” Ruby said.

  Lily looked doubtful, but she closed her eyes. “One,” she said. “Two. Three.” Her breathing got a little more regular. Ruby put her finger over her lips, grabbed Caroline’s hand. On the way out of the apartment, she shut the door as quietly as she could.

  Then she took Caroline past the laundry room, past the garbage room, to the door of the elevator-motor room—the ultimate hiding spot. Caroline shoved it with her shoulder. It was locked. “It’s okay,” Ruby whispered. “I have the best memory ever.”

  “No, you don’t,” Caroline said.

  “Yes, I do. And I know the code. Eight-eight-eight.”

  Ruby’s father had shown her this room a few weeks before when she had asked him how the elevators worked. There were two elevators in the building: the main passenger elevator, mahogany-paneled and brass-buttoned, and the freight elevator, which was only for Ruby’s father and maintenance people. The freight elevator had bars instead of walls. Its single bulb cast its light on peeling plaster in the elevator shaft. There were still abandoned dumbwaiter shafts that had traveled alongside kitchens, near where the maids’ rooms were, and for a long time in the building, food had been ferried up and down that way. “Before either one of us was alive,” her father had said, and Ruby tried to grasp the magnificent oldness of her own home.

  In the motor room, her father showed her the big generators that turned the alternating current into direct current. It was a place of pendulation, of sudden rotations, of machines that seemed like gear-brained bodies. “There are invisible forces all around us,” said her father. “Currents, magnets, ions, waves in the air.” He waved his arms in the air like a bird trying to take off. Ruby’s he
ad rushed with the sound of her blood. These wheels turned and lifted people to their homes, or lowered them back to the city streets, where they might go to the playground or learn about dinosaurs in a museum or find groceries. It was some sort of an enchantment.

  There were two big machines, one of which had a wheel on it, long steel cables going around and around. That big machine was for the passenger elevator, Ruby’s father told her. The other elevator machine in the room, for the freight elevator, was a smaller barrel machine that had been in the motor room since 1911. “It’s illegal to install something like this now,” her father said. There were even more ropes around the barrel machine. “Always reminded me of something on a whaling ship.”

  Ruby thought about the blue whale hanging from the ceiling at the Museum of Natural History, imagined its innards as this motor room, its giant heart a primordial turbine.

  “The barrel machine is dangerous, dangerous, dangerous,” her father went on. “You get near that one, you get even a little bit near, you could lose your arm. The wheel starts spinning when you don’t expect it to spin. Boom. George in the building next door, he knew a guy who lost his arm. You know what that means you should do, Ruby?”

  “What?”

  Her father had smiled and said, in a voice rich with sarcasm, “You should definitely touch those cables.”

  Wow. Wow. Wow. Her own father had not only brought her to this previously unseen space, but had used sarcasm, trusting her to hear the nuances. Ruby felt taller, wiser, ancient. She had laughed. And of course she had not touched the cables.