by Lee Conell
When she’d returned to the States, Caroline had immediately set to work on a triptych of marble sculptures resembling paper plates. Ruby did not feel threatened by news of this series, which sounded to her like something that had been done before. But Caroline had managed to make Paper Plate with Pizza Grease, Paper Plate with Leftover Pink Frosting, and Paper Plate with Pigeon Shit look singular and gorgeous. Paper Plate with Pigeon Shit was Ruby’s favorite. The hue of paint Caroline had found for the pigeon shit was breathtaking: the perfect purply milkiness.
She’d sculpted a marble Styrofoam cup that looked vividly pocked and a pair of marble maxi pads with wings (the folds resembling the robes of the Pietà, according to one art blog). Most recently Caroline had learned that her marble Spork series was going to have a small sidebar in an interior design magazine. “It’s a little weird because obviously the works are supposed to critique mass consumerism,” Caroline had said to Ruby. “They’re not supposed to be interior design sort of pieces. But I guess I’m not at the place where I can complain. Exposure’s exposure.”
Ruby had tried to be happy. Caroline had worked hard, had been spending day and night in her studio. But it was difficult not to feel like it was unfair that Caroline was profiting off an artistic take on trash when Ruby was the one who had grown up right next to all that garbage. Shouldn’t she be the one inspired by it, clever about it, making statements? Ever since she graduated college Ruby seemed unable to make or state anything, could barely articulate her urge to make or state. Now, of course, John wanted to inspire her, to be a kind of muse by asking her to traipse through the garbage room with him. And that was sweet, wasn’t it? She tried not to think the darker thought, that John was encouraging her murky artistic ambitions not because he cared about what she would make, but because such ambitions would make her more like Caroline. Which would in turn make her less like someone who had grown up next to the garbage room. She would not think that, no, because that thought wasn’t fair to John. He was just trying to help her feel self-actualized in some way.
So she clapped her hands like a self-actualized camp counselor, trying to rally herself. “Okay,” she said, and rolled out of bed, pulled on her jeans. “Why not take advantage of the basement amenities?”
She yanked John’s hand toward her and led him through the apartment, unlocked the many locks, shepherded him into the hallway, tried to bring back that feeling she’d had in her vision earlier—a powerful whirring.
And here, now, the garbage room. Bulky black garbage bags among piles of cans and newspapers and purses with broken zippers. A giant air filter had been placed beside some broken folding chairs. In the corner of the room, just to the right of the paper recycling, sat a pile of nice cutting boards, sustainably harvested walnut, or something. On top of the cutting boards sat a teddy bear and a jean jacket.
“Jackpot.” John went for the pile of cutting boards.
“No. Don’t.”
“What’s wrong?”
“That’s Rafael’s pile.”
“Rafael?”
“The porter. He helps my dad put out the garbage cans sometimes and he always gets first dibs on the trash. When people throw out paintings, if he likes them, he’ll hang them up in the alley.”
“Gosh,” John said. “Even the porter has a curatorial side hustle.”
“I’m just saying he’ll probably take those cutting boards back to New Jersey tomorrow, along with the teddy bear for his daughter.”
“So even though he’s left the cutting boards here, they’re his?”
“He gets first dibs. But all the other stuff outside of Rafael’s pile is fair game.”
“Okay. Fine. I will abide by the cryptic rules set forth by my beautiful tour guide to the basement.”
The tour guide to the basement. Well, sort of. While she could show him these rooms, she could not show him what made this building run.
She could not tell him about the nannies from Ecuador and the Philippines who kept the kids they watched away from the glass recycling and broken bottles with serrated edges. She could not bring him into face-to-face contact with the plumber who had prostate cancer, or the pump mechanic from New Jersey who had just divorced his wife and lost the kids but kept the motorcycle. She could not introduce him to the elevator mechanics her father called in, the Russian guys who had trained on Soviet missile-guidance systems. Or Rafael, even, with his new baby and his parents and sisters far away, Rafael who Ruby had caught weeping over the garbage once and who hadn’t looked her in the eye since.
These were the people who populated the basement in the daylight. Helping John know them, understand them, would be beyond her abilities to guide and beyond his desires as a guest. John and Ruby were simply touristing around the garbage room right now. Prismatic slicks of who-knows-what liquid on the floor. Eight pairs of compression socks in the bin meant for wet garbage. John began to dig up the socks, which luckily were completely dry, wedged between tied-up trash bags. He tossed two pairs to Ruby. After a few more minutes, he looked into another bin for wet garbage and found, at the very top, an unopened bottle of wine. “Unbelievable,” he said, “right? But you know we have to drink this wine.”
Ruby said, “I’ll go get a bottle opener.”
She went back into the apartment. The year before, as a birthday gift, she had bought her father a chrome-plated bottle opener in the shape of a sparrow, knowing that he was newly into bird-watching. Now she held the bird in her palm and looked into the dents of its eyes before bringing it to the garbage room. John opened the wine and took a deep gulp. He passed the bottle to Ruby and she swigged.
John gestured to Rafael’s cutting boards again. “He doesn’t really need five of these. Right?” He lifted up a cutting board. “I could give it to one of the Hover Up kids. Wendell’s writing his essay on his dream to become a chef.” John held the cutting board up a little higher.
“Take it,” Ruby said, giving in. “Go ahead.”
They returned to the apartment, drank the rest of the wine, and had much better sex.
* * *
—
John left around eight in the morning for work. Since Ruby’s shift at Mellow Macchiato wasn’t until three, she overslept until almost noon. Finally she got out of bed, got dressed, placed the used condoms in a CVS bag, and stepped out into the living room.
Her shoulders jumped.
There was her mother, peering at her over a newspaper. Her parents had returned from their trip and had tried not to wake her. Her father, who sat in front of the TV, didn’t look her way. But he said, staring at the weather radar map on the screen, “Will you go upstairs with me, Ruby?”
Had they found out John stayed the night? Ruby’s mother turned her gaze back to her newspaper too quickly.
“Am I in trouble for something?” Ruby asked.
“Let’s go upstairs.”
Ruby and her father took the elevator to the first floor, walked down the lobby hallway, stepped out under the awning. The sun was up and bright and hurt her head. She’d had far too much wine. She was still, she realized, holding the CVS bag.
Her father pointed to a patch of sidewalk. “See that?”
“What?”
“That spot. On the sidewalk where I’m pointing?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s where I put the recycling when I haul it up from the basement. When it’s recycling day and I come up with the bags, no matter how late at night it is, Ruby, somebody is always waiting. Sometimes it’s this white guy in his thirties. Sometimes it’s these crews of women, mostly Hispanic, with empty baby strollers. They pile the strollers full of glass and plastic bottles and tie plastic bags to the strollers and fill those bags with glass and plastic bottles, too. Sometimes they have shopping carts, but the strollers are easier to maneuver. The women see me and go, ‘Hello mister.’ If it’s the white guy in his thirties
who makes it to that spot there first, he always tries to get me to talk to him, as a fellow white guy. He always goes, ‘Oh, having a good day, buddy?’ Meanwhile I’m sweating all over from hauling up the glass and the paper from the basement. If too many of the stroller women are here, or if the women and the white guy are both here, they get in fights over who gets a claim over what. Everybody wants the plastic, because it’s cheap and light and nobody wants to carry the glass bottles back.” Finally her father looked at her. “The point,” he said, “is if you’re going to dig through the recycling, Ruby, if you’re going to dig through the plastic and paper and glass, you should wait up here, around that spot. You should wait your turn. Okay? That’s how it’s done in this city.”
She said nothing.
He took her hand—the one not holding the CVS bag—and placed the sparrow bottle opener in her palm. “You left this in the garbage room.” He began to walk back to the building. “Return that cutting board to Rafael, too, will you?” he called over his shoulder. “It was a present for his wife’s sister. She’s visiting all the way from Texas.”
He walked through the entrance doors into the foyer. Ruby didn’t follow. She didn’t move at all. The spot on the pavement looked like all the other spots. Her head pounded. She walked to a garbage can at the end of the street and threw out the CVS bag and the sparrow bottle opener and called in sick to work and got on the subway and almost vomited about five times before she reached the apartment she shared with her slew of roommates. Back in her non–elevator box bed, she called John and said, “I almost hurled on the subway. The train was delayed and delayed. And when I got back to the apartment, Jordana had clogged the toilet.” Then she began to sob. She did not mention that her father had noticed the missing cutting board. She didn’t want John to associate his visit to her childhood home with guilt. Still, maybe he sensed she was shielding him from something. Or maybe he still felt sheepish about the way he’d said repurposed. He murmured to Ruby that she was wonderful and he was sorry about the roommates and the tampons and then John said, “You should just move in with me.”
* * *
—
She had hauled her belongings—just a few boxes—into John’s apartment, which was huge and full of light. He received help with rent from his parents every month. “I’m personally fine living in a less nice neighborhood with less space,” he told Ruby, “but my mom sent me nonstop articles about bedbugs and robberies and insisted she’d have a heart attack if I didn’t accept their help.” He had helped her unpack, lifting each one of her shirts and dresses and spinning the garment around like he was dancing with an invisible Ruby.
They had settled into a routine. Takeout for dinner, a movie. Turn-taking with loading and unloading the dishwasher. Nights, she’d hold him when he panicked about some kid from Hover Up he couldn’t help. He’d breathe into her hair and say, “You always smell like coffee.”
Then the fights, slow at first, about dishes and then about smelling like coffee, how she was too old and too educated to always smell like coffee, and why wasn’t she applying for other non–coffee shop things, new options? John, when he said the words new options, often pushed his hair back on his head, revealing a flush at the top of his forehead. Then Lily was dead, and when Ruby shook, he stroked her back, and the next day she told him he treated her like she was one of his kids from work, the high schoolers he was supposed to guide to college, and he said Ruby needed a guide, clearly, and she could learn a thing or two from the ambitious students he mentored, the students who came from way more difficult backgrounds than she had, by the way, and turned into real success stories.
“They don’t turn into stories,” Ruby said. “They’re people. They’ll just keep on being people.”
They’d had an especially bad fight right after the coffee shop closed down, when Ruby told John she planned to apply to other, more stable coffee shops, as well as a few waitressing gigs. She didn’t necessarily dream about working in these places, but she didn’t hate the work, and it would allow her to start earning money again—otherwise she’d be dependent on John’s grocery money on top of a place to stay. But John had said, “You have a college degree. You’re selling yourself short.” The problem was not the words or the sentiment, exactly, so much as the tone. He still spoke to Ruby the way she’d heard him speak to his Hover Up students, as though she were a teenager and his belief in her abilities was part of his job description. “We probably should break up,” she told John, and began to cry. John did not look as surprised as she would have guessed. In fact, he looked a little bit relieved. He told her he’d need her to move out very soon in that case. He said, “No matter what, Ruby, I will always believe in you,” and handed her a tissue. She dropped it on the floor, hoping it would plummet fast, but it only drifted, very slowly, and John, misunderstanding, handed her another.
* * *
—
Now, Ruby gathered up tissues in the foyer of her father’s building.
Was this why her father meditated, working so hard to stay in the moment? Did it keep snot-streaked objects from becoming mystical portals to other times? She glanced up at her father, waiting for him to sense what she’d done, to accuse her of letting the woman into the building today. But he was distracted, it seemed, lost in his own head. After a minute, he took the tissues from her hands and said, “You shouldn’t be picking those up. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t mind.”
“You go back to the basement. I’ll take care of the tissues and I’ll take care of the pigeons like 2D asked. You go get ready for the interview.”
* * *
—
When Ruby returned to the apartment to change into her interview outfit, it was a little after eight. She went into her parents’ bedroom first to see if her mother had any last-minute interview advice, and found her removing a black dress for the conference banquet from the closet. Ruby imagined her mother zipping the dress into a garment bag and riding to Port Authority on the subway with the dress over her lap like a tired child. “I can’t believe you’re going to be gone all weekend, Mom,” she said.
“You’ve turned sweet again,” her mother said. “I figured you’d be mad at me about the whole intruder thing.”
“I still think you guys were cruel. But it’s over now. And if you’re gone, who’s going to make sure Dad and I don’t kill each other?”
“Don’t hassle your father too much, okay? His back is hurting him and he hasn’t been sleeping well.”
“Do you have to go right now?” Ruby took her mother’s hand. “I can’t tell which interview outfit makes me look wholesomely sane. Or sanely wholesome.”
“Astute.” Her mother kissed her on the cheek. “The look you’re going for is astute. But I can’t help today. You should have asked me last night. I’m already late.”
Then her mother folded up her dress. No garment bag at all, it turned out. She placed the dress directly into a rolling suitcase, right over a few balled-up pairs of socks. Somehow this made Ruby’s heart hurt. “I just wish you weren’t going,” Ruby said, and then focused on the rug’s blobby amoeba shapes, embarrassed by the childishness of her words. Ruby’s mother really had helped keep the peace between Ruby and her father this last week. Ruby acted out less when her mother was around. Even as a teenager, she hadn’t fought with her much. “Probably that’s because she got home late so often when you were a kid,” Caroline had said to Ruby a few days ago under the blue whale when they’d gone to the Museum of Natural History together to help Ruby prep for her interview. “My mother and I fought about everything and she was always around. Always.” Caroline shrugged. “But probably you felt like you had to be really well-behaved when your mother was around so she didn’t leave you again.”
“She didn’t leave me,” Ruby said. “It’s not like she abandoned us. She took night classes for her college degree for a few years. And then night classes for her li
brary science degree for another few years. She only took one or two classes a semester so it wasn’t like she was gone that often. She was always back in time to read to me before bed.”
“You don’t have to sound so defensive,” Caroline said.
“I’m not defensive,” Ruby said, gazing up at the blue whale’s fiberglass belly. Years back, museum staff had renovated the whale to make it more accurate—the old 1960s model had been based on photographs of a dead female blue whale found in South America. The new twenty-first-century museum whale had more accurate blowholes, less bulgy eyes, and, Ruby had read, a belly button. But she’d never been able to spot the belly button in the hall’s dim light. Ruby was looking hard at the whale’s navel when Caroline said, “It doesn’t make you a bad anti-feminist person if you wish your mom had been around more. Aren’t you a little resentful?”