The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  Ruby did not tell Caroline any of this after she put in the code that let them into the motor room. This was Ruby’s kingdom, and she was the one who controlled what Caroline did and did not know about its courtiers and nobles, its magnificent machines. All she told Caroline was, “Wait, just wait.”

  When the door clicked open, nobody came running after them. Lily, on the couch, was still counting to five hundred, or else she had fallen asleep. The girls stepped inside. The door clicked closed. Caroline gasped. She turned around, her mouth moving as though trying to form words about all she saw: the baffling machines, the spinning cables, the sense of mysterious movement.

  “My dad knows all the names for all these machines,” Ruby said. “Isn’t that amazing?”

  Caroline said, “Let’s pretend this was where they gassed them.”

  “Huh?”

  Caroline began to chant. “We are orphans, they have locked us up. We are orphans, they have locked us up.”

  “But we’re already playing hide-and-seek,” Ruby said. “You can’t play two games at once.”

  “At my school,” Caroline said, “anything’s allowed as long as you’re following your real passion.”

  “Your real passion?”

  “Yes,” Caroline said. “There are no rules except for ‘Use your words.’ Anybody at my school can play two games at once, easy.”

  Ruby blushed. She felt like a baby. She had shown Caroline the motor room, shown her the secrets of the basement, the secrets of Ruby’s home, she had resourcefully remembered the code, and still Caroline was commanding their games. “They won’t be able to keep us here for long,” Caroline said. “The Americans are coming. They’ve hidden a key inside one of these machines to free us. We just have to find it.”

  Then Caroline reached out toward the barrel machine. She paused, looked back at Ruby. Asking, with her eyes, Is this safe?

  And Ruby said, in an attempt to mimic her father’s sarcasm, “You should definitely touch those cables.”

  But Caroline was deep in the Holocaust-orphans-sisters-survivors game and their Holocaust-orphans-sisters-survivors games were always powerfully earnest. She took Ruby at her word. She reached out to touch the cables.

  Ruby screamed. A whole zoo of animals roared their roars in her voice. There were baby llamas in Ruby’s voice, and howler monkeys, and angry mama bears, and full-grown lions, and wolves, wolves, wolves. She leaped forward, between Caroline and the machine, and grabbed her, and Caroline howled and hit Ruby on the side of her head, and then the cables started to spin, they started to go round and round and round, and Ruby started to pee.

  The pee was so hot that she thought for a second a gash had opened up in her right inner thigh. Everything inside her was panicked, burning.

  But she had stopped her. Ruby had stopped Caroline from hurting herself. She had been a good friend.

  Not that it mattered much. Caroline shrieked: “You tried to kill me!” She rushed to the door, attempted to open it, couldn’t. “You’re trying to kill me!” she hollered at the door. Which was when Ruby realized the door had automatically locked behind them. They were trapped.

  Soon both girls were sitting on the cold concrete floor, their faces wet with sweat and tears. Caroline wanted to know why Ruby had told her to reach for those ropes if they were dangerous. Ruby explained that she’d been trying to be sarcastic. Caroline told Ruby she hated her, she hated her so, so much, and she wasn’t being sarcastic, either.

  “You even peed your pants, you stupid baby,” Caroline said when Ruby was silent. “Ruby Ru-pee. Do you even know what a rupee is? Do you even know you’re a stupid baby and you even peed your pants? You’re a kiddo. That’s what you are. Kiddo. Do you know that’s what you are?”

  Ruby started to cry again, and she told Caroline yes, she knew. When Ruby’s sobs got louder, Caroline’s face softened. She said, “I’m sorry I yelled. I’m sorry you peed your pants, Ruby.”

  “I didn’t pee them that much.”

  “Yes, you did. Do you want mine? We could swap.”

  Ruby shook her head. Caroline’s pants would be too small for Ruby, which was a shame, because Caroline’s pants flared out at the ankles in a way that made Ruby think of fancy ball gowns. Ruby hiccuped, looked up at Caroline again, looked hard at her beauty mark until the beauty mark seemed like a piece of snot that Ruby could, if she reached for it, wipe away.

  “Maybe we should sing ‘I Am the Cute One’?” Caroline said. “Maybe that would make us feel better.”

  Caroline had a cassette of songs by the Olsen twins, who were just a little older than Ruby and Caroline. Sometimes Caroline would play the tape and she and Ruby would sing together, each pretending to be one of the Olsens, two only children turned twins.

  “I don’t feel like singing,” Ruby said.

  “Do you know the Olsens aren’t identical twins?” Caroline said. “They’re fraternal. That means they each came from their own egg. Even though they look the same.”

  “I know that,” Ruby said. “You told me before.”

  “Do you think the Olsen twins are true friends?” Caroline said. “Or false friends?”

  “What?”

  “My grandmother told me she survived the war because she didn’t have false friends like most people.”

  “Oh,” Ruby said.

  “She said she had some real true friends.” Caroline looked seriously at Ruby. “I’m sorry I called you stupid.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “We are real true friends.”

  “Yes,” Ruby said.

  “And that is how we will survive.”

  “Yes,” Ruby said, not entirely sure if they were playing Holocaust-orphans-sisters-survivors again, or if this was Caroline being Caroline. The barrel machine was again whirring away. Somebody was operating the freight elevator. Her father, probably. Maybe that meant he had finished fixing the leak. Or maybe Lily had realized they were missing. She must have alerted Ruby’s father and now he was in the freight elevator, searching for them.

  Only still nobody came.

  “What are the dolls doing now, do you think?” Caroline asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ruby said.

  “Here’s what I think the dolls are doing. First of all, I think Jasmina’s off saving the world. Maybe she’s stopping Holocaust the Sequel.”

  Wrong. Ruby knew all about dolls. When you weren’t in the room with them, when you weren’t imagining hard on their behalf, they couldn’t save you or anybody else. She said, “What’s Holocaust the Sequel?”

  “It’s what comes after the Holocaust, kiddo,” Caroline said.

  “Did your grandmother tell you there would be a sequel?”

  “No. I asked her about the Holocaust the other day for a school project. She told me the true-friend thing and then she told me she didn’t remember much else. But she remembers everything! She’s written books, she goes all over the country talking about what she remembers. Why does she lie to me and say she doesn’t remember, if she loves me as much as she says?”

  “Maybe she’s lying about that, too,” Ruby said, her pants piss-wet and rank.

  * * *

  —

  Outside the motor room, Ruby learned later, everyone had become the seeker—not only Lily and Ruby’s father, but also a contractor assessing damage to a tenant’s ceiling, also some nannies pulled from the laundry room. They were all looking for the girls. Ruby’s father (who would be the most blamed for the incident) was the one who heard their voices, singing rounds of “I Am the Cute One” as loudly as they could.

  * * *

  —

  Shortly after the elevator-motor-room incident, Lily took Ruby to the Museum of Natural History. When they stood before the diorama of hunting dogs on the Serengeti Plain, she cleared her throat. Diorama displays had their origins in what were
called cabinets of curiosities, she said, or sometimes cabinets of wonder. “Cabinets meant rooms back then,” Lily added. The wealthy would go on hunting explorations. Then they needed a place to show off their kill. Exotic animals were originally killed in great numbers and displayed as trophies not for the public, but for other rich people. Now, sometimes, people painted beautiful landscapes into the background instead of just putting the animal up on the wall, and everyone was allowed to look at and learn from the posed dead. Some of the animals in this hall had been killed to convince humans that the landscape where these animals lived should be preserved and protected.

  “Are you too young to comprehend the tension?” Lily asked. “The tension between an educational effort and a trophy? Do you understand?”

  Ruby said she understood. But really she was thinking: How did Lily know all this history? She was very smart, Ruby decided. She was brilliant, maybe even more brilliant than Caroline’s traumatized grandmother who gave lectures around the country. Hearing Lily go on in this way, Ruby felt like the voice-over actress inside Lily had truly begun to emerge. She was selling something. But what? The dioramas were not for sale, Ruby was pretty sure.

  They stood in front of the Serengeti Plain a little longer, in silence. Ruby scrutinized the smallest of the hunting dogs. She said, “My dad wanted to look at the dinosaur.”

  “Huh?”

  “When we were supposed to come here that day with Caroline.” Ruby pulled her braid until her scalp prickled. “He’s mad at me for sneaking into the motor room. He told me he was disappointed in me.”

  “The reality is it’s one matter for just you to get into trouble,” Lily said, reaching down and gently extricating Ruby’s braid from her fist. “But when you drag Caroline into trouble, too . . . Do you know your dad almost lost his job because of what happened?”

  Ruby did not know that. Her father had told her Caroline’s mother had called and been “upset.” But he had hidden from her that he almost lost his job. It no longer felt thrilling, the prospect of sleeping in the park, now that she knew how close it had come to happening. A true disgrace. She heard these words in Caroline’s lark-voice, as if Caroline were right behind her. But nobody was there.

  “The thing to know about you and Caroline,” Lily said, “is you’re not in the same class.”

  It was true. They went to different schools.

  “I’m not saying you can’t be friends with Caroline at all.” She rocked back on her heels and her ankles creaked. “But there are certain things . . . Your dad says I shouldn’t go on about this stuff because it might alienate you.” Lily eyed the diorama like she wanted to reach through the glass divider there. “And he said it’s not like we’re eating coal. Well, I know that. I’m not saying we’re eating coal. What I’m saying is nobody wants to voice this. Ruby. Do you recognize that nobody wants to voice this? The middle class in the city is on the verge of vanishing. Your pal Caroline’s father came into my apartment the other day pretending to want to chat about our lives over tea, but no no no, he was measuring the doorways with his eyes. They’re waiting for me to kick the bucket so they can buy my apartment and combine it with 6A.” Lily lifted Ruby’s braid up so that it hovered like an exclamation point over her head. “They want to build not just a penthouse but a two-story dream palace, with a fancy staircase.”

  Ruby had heard Lily talk about this before, but she’d grown accustomed to half tuning out her rants about the rich. She had never really listened until now. A dream palace. She imagined Caroline descending the staircase in a shiny dress with puffed sleeves, holding an expensive historically significant doll from a time period Ruby had probably never known existed.

  “I’m not afraid of them, is the thing,” Lily said. “The key is not to be scared of the economically powerful, at least not if you’re close enough to be smelled. People are animals. They smell fear and it starts a chain of reactions. It’s a whole loopy soiree in the limbic system. But you control your fear, you control your dominance.”

  Ruby crossed her arms over her chest and looked at the floor.

  “God, your father would say this is inappropriate.” Lily dropped Ruby’s braid. It fell down between her shoulder blades. “I’m not supposed to say any of this. Forget it, okay? Let’s get out of here. You done looking at these dead things? You all good, sweetie?”

  Ruby wanted to cry, but tears would allow Lily to smell her sadness. “I’m all good,” she said.

  She tried to be all good on the walk back to her building. She was supposed to forget what Lily had just told her, so she attempted to think of something else. She repeated in her mind, again and again, Cabinet of curiosities. Cabinet of curiosities. Cabinet of curiosities. It was a wonderful phrase.

  Back in 5A, while Lily was in the bathroom, Ruby wandered over to a pile of library books. One of the books was on dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. Behind the Glass: A Chronicle of Habitat Dioramas. Lily had taken a book out before their trip, Ruby realized, so she could seem smart when she took Ruby to the museum. Lily had wanted to show off to Ruby!

  A new and nearly unbearable love swelled in Ruby. It was not as if her heart had grown to the size of the heart of a giant whale, but more like a giant whale had burst inside her heart. It hurt so much. It felt so good. She was all good.

  Ruby grabbed her backpack and placed the library book inside of it. When it was time to go to the basement again, she snuck the book out. Lily would have to pay for the book, and Ruby felt badly about that, but it would have felt worse to think about the strangers of the New York Public Library system smearing, without thought, the pages of an object that had brought the giant whale into Ruby’s heart, that had made her feel full to bursting with love. She showed the book to nobody. Not her mother, who would lecture Ruby if she found out she’d stolen a library book. Not her father, who would shout at Ruby if he found out she’d robbed a tenant. She didn’t even show the book to Caroline, whose justice-seeking dolls would never forgive Ruby. She kept it for herself, memorized its facts, and looked through it often, not just that year, but all through middle school, through high school, even sometimes in college. When she moved into an apartment, the one she shared with six other people, she took the book with her, and when she moved in with John, she took the book to John’s place—their place now, he said—and showed it to him.

  “I stole this when I was a kid,” she told kind, strong-jawed John, who had made it his life’s mission to ensure equal opportunities in the educational sphere, and who sometimes took Ruby’s hand and declared that, despite all her debt, she represented the beginning of what he thought would be a success story that bravely defied systemic pressure. (“I hope you write that into our wedding vows,” Ruby joked once, and John started to cough.) When she showed John the book, she was not wearing a shirt. She held the book up to her chest.

  John smiled. He suffered from rosacea, which gave him a ruddy Bill Clinton–ish complexion, making his smiles seem so over-the-top genuine they began to feel political. Still, that wasn’t his fault, so Ruby smiled back. John took the book and looked at the due date inside it. Then he reached for her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. “You’ve had this thing so long,” he said. “It’s basically yours.”

  “It’s not embarrassing that I still have it? Or, like, shameful?”

  “Do you think it’s shameful?”

  “Well. I stole it from a rent-controlled tenant who took it out from the library. How is that not shameful?”

  “You were a little girl,” John said. “I think it’s cute.”

  Ruby decided that one of two things happened to the shames adults carried from childhood: These shames became very cute, or they became very ugly.

  “Did you steal much else when you were a kid?” John asked.

  “No,” she said. “I caused trouble in other ways.” And then she told him about getting locked in the elevator-motor room w
ith Caroline. She was smiling the whole time she told the story. Like that shame had become adorable. Like she was very far away from that basement and would never go back. She did not tell John that after that day in the elevator-motor room, Caroline was not allowed to have playdates in the basement again. They always met in 6A instead, under the eye of Caroline’s mother or father or a certified babysitter. She did not tell John about how her father almost lost his job. She did not tell him that she had peed her pants. She lied. She said Caroline had been the one who’d peed.

  “Seriously?” John laughed. “Caroline is so self-possessed. It’s hard to imagine her peeing at all, like, ever, even into a toilet.”

  “Oh,” Ruby said, “she peed. She definitely peed.”

  John poked her in the ribs. “You sound happy about it. You don’t have a secret lady–hate boner for Caroline, do you?”

  “Of course not!” She pushed his hand away. “I love Caroline. Anyway, I’ve never had a hate boner.”

  “They can feel good,” John said. “But they’re destructive. I always tell my kids at Hover Up, during our breakout sessions? I tell them you shouldn’t waste energy on even a little anger.”

  * * *

  —

  And here Ruby was, back in the basement apartment, wasting all her energy on anger toward her father, who sat once again on a meditation bench, breathing in and out with such regularity, it was hard to believe he wasn’t deliberately trying to infuriate her. She tried to take a deep breath herself. She knew in some way her father was aggravated that she was living at home again after the brouhaha about college, those high school teachers announcing to him at graduation that they were so proud of Ruby and all she’d go on to do. She had never told her father that at times college had been enormously isolating. She didn’t want to sound like she was complaining, certainly not to her parents, who worked real and demanding jobs. And she didn’t want to make it seem like she hadn’t also loved college. Most days, even when she felt alone, she also felt thrilled to be there, bopping around campus with the sense that the world was fuller than she’d realized. Her art history professors lectured with a warmth and an eloquence and an intelligence that in itself felt like an art object.