The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

Debra gripped the edges of her shawl. She said, “I’m going to make them laugh.”

  “Who?”

  “My panel audience. One of them will raise their hand and ask ‘What’s the craziest question a prisoner ever sent you for the reference-by-mail program?’ and I’ll babble about the Dungeons & Dragons group in Delaware. They keep writing in, asking for more and more complex D&D rules.”

  Martin snorted.

  “See,” Debra said, “that’s exactly the problem. I’ll bring it up because I’ll be too nervous to tell that person in the audience that it’s kind of messed up to ask what’s the craziest question I ever got. And then everyone will laugh at the idea of prisoners playing Dungeons & Dragons, and I’ll laugh, too, because I have no spine and I’ll want the audience to like me, and after, I’ll just feel like a jerk. Just this fat white lady on a panel for mindful outreach, going ha ha ha at the incarcerated populations she’s supposed to be helping. I know that’s what’s going to happen.”

  “Maybe just don’t bring up the Dungeons & Dragons group?”

  “You don’t get it. I won’t be able to think clearly. You don’t know what it’s like to be speaking in front of a group of strangers.”

  “You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to be listened to like that, Deb.” He pressed the call button by the elevator. “You’ll be late.”

  “Martin.”

  The meters swerved. A maid was running a vacuum cleaner. A babysitter was microwaving her coffee, which had gotten cold on her commute. Martin said, “I didn’t destroy the nest.”

  “What?”

  “I couldn’t. I came out here to mop instead.”

  “Babe? They’re just birds. They’ll rebuild.”

  “I know. I know. It’s only that this nest—”

  “You’d rather preserve their home and compromise ours. Makes sense to me.”

  “You’re being overdramatic.”

  “It’s only that 2D’s pretty vocal on the board,” Debra said. “But I guess you know how far to push things.”

  “Have fun,” Martin said. “Enjoy the banquet.” He added, as neutrally as possible, “Try not to work too hard.”

  “Yeah,” Debra said, with the same look Ruby had given him when he’d returned downstairs from kicking out the intruder. “I’ll give you a call later on.” And she gazed out in the direction of the courtyard.

  “Fine,” Martin said. “I’ll take care of the nest. I’ll do it right now. I promise.”

  “You do what you can today,” she said. “Try to get out of the building a little, okay? Breathe some fresh city air.” The elevator doors opened and she stepped inside, the wheels on her suitcase wobbling, squeaking, and the doors closed, and she rose up.

  6 ALL OF THE ANTELOPE

  Ruby sat on the toilet.

  The apartment was empty and her stomach ached. She bent forward so that her nose nearly touched her knees. She pushed. If she could just shit, she’d feel okay. Her phone buzzed. A text from Caroline. Good morns and good luck today with interview rubyyyyyy.

  She pushed.

  The Clogged Toilet. That could be the title of a diorama, too.

  Near the end of their relationship, John had told her she was being self-centered with her diorama ideas. “You won’t actually ever have a museum dedicated to your life,” he said, looking through her sketchbook of plans. “It doesn’t make sense, like, holistically.”

  “But it wouldn’t be a literal museum,” Ruby said. “It would be an imagined space that viewers could interact with somehow. There would be an element of participation.”

  “An element of participation,” John said. “For someone who didn’t go to art school, you sure have picked up a lot of bad habits.”

  She pushed. John had gotten surprisingly good with the zingers after Ruby had said some critical things about his own work. “You spend more time hosting these crazy galas for the rich volunteers than helping the kids,” she told him. “Is what you do really about the students who need help, or about making the volunteers feel like virtuous people?”

  He would sigh, seem to agree with her, say something about the complex systemic issues perpetuated by complex systemic evils and how yes, despite his best intentions, he was probably a cog in that machine, but at least he was a self-aware cog, right, trying to do good, ha ha? Then a few hours later, he would drop some equally critical bomb on her diorama visions. She knew deep down he wanted to understand her whole obsession, and it was her fault that she had never really been able to explain to him that imagining dioramas was, for her, like meditation was for her father. Her father liked to say that everything was constant change, but when she’d seen him meditate a kind of immobilization stole over his face, a tranquil stillness.

  Caroline texted again. lemme know how it goes and if you see Nate (my connect there) say hi for me.

  Caroline’s connect. Why was that word so annoying? Ruby pushed harder.

  The Clogged Toilet. The diorama would show two girls (Caroline, Ruby) who were lost. No, who were just pretending to be lost, pretending that they’d run so far from the imaginary Nazi guards, they now couldn’t find their way out of the imaginary woods. Of course the viewer would not be able to see the imaginary woods. They would only see a roomful of dolls. When she constructed this diorama, it would be important for Ruby to make the girls look animated—to differentiate them from the dolls—despite their artificiality, their stillness. Their sweat must look like real sweat, and not the sheen of plaster. Their eyelashes must not look like loose thread and fringe. Their bodies must not look soft and posable, but should seem full of tough muscle, full of breakable bones.

  Caroline’s childhood room would take up two-thirds of the diorama. Then there would be a divider, meant to represent the wall between Caroline’s room and the guest bathroom. The remaining third of The Clogged Toilet diorama would show Ruby’s father fixing the toilet in this bathroom. (In real life, the toilet had broken, and Caroline’s father had called Ruby’s father upstairs in the middle of the girls’ playdate.) The bathroom would be full of little colorful soaps, rendered in the background of the diorama, in two dimensions. Rendered in three dimensions: The toilet. The tool kit. The plunger.

  Both of the girls would be pretending not only that they were Holocaust-orphans-sisters-survivors running from Nazis, but also that they weren’t aware Ruby’s father was making repairs so close by. And this second game of pretend would be deeper, more frightening, not really a game at all. How to convey, in a single diorama, multiple levels of pretend?

  Ruby stood up, sweating. Nothing in the toilet bowl. Just an ache inside her gut. She flushed anyway. In her room, she buttoned up a light blue blouse and pulled on her old rayon/nylon/spandex knit skirt, what she thought of as her professional skirt. It looked not great. She texted Caroline back and told her she was worried about her interview outfit. Caroline responded immediately. I’ll just come right down, Rubes. I can help with outfit.

  * * *

  —

  Ruby was in middle school when Caroline and her parents moved out of 6A and into the new penthouse apartment on the roof. “My mom’s more excited about not sharing a bathroom sink with my dad than she is about the view,” Caroline told Ruby. During the housewarming party in the penthouse, Caroline’s grandmother Dora had called out Ruby’s name when she walked in. Dora was a skinny old woman with dark eyes that looked lacquered with protective solemnity, just like Caroline’s. Dora took Ruby’s wrist in her right hand and Caroline’s wrist in her left hand and said, “Yes, yes, Ruby, I remember you. From when you were tiny. So tiny, Ruby. Listen. You only get so many friends from youth. Okay, girls?” Dora had turned to Caroline. “Hold on to each other and you hold on to your childhood!”

  Caroline was obedient to her grandmother’s wishes. She kept tabs on Ruby not only through high school, but also in college, calling her once a month. Usuall
y Caroline would call on the first day of her period when she said she needed a distraction from her painful cramps. Ruby’s period almost always started a day or two after Caroline’s menstruation-centric call. “That means you’re syncing your period to hers,” Ruby’s freshman-year roommate said once, “which means Caroline’s the alpha female in the friendship.” Ruby’s roommate was always stoned, and Ruby decided not to share her observation with Caroline. Anyway, during their phone calls Caroline never acted alpha, but would dissect the disparaging things her professors said about her work or talk about a boy she liked who didn’t like her. Near the end of their call, she would often speak sweetly about how much Ruby meant to her. Sometimes after Caroline complained about cramps, she would say, “We knew each other before we knew what menstruation was, even conceptually. Do you think about that ever? We knew each other for our whole childhood.”

  Here was one real obstacle presented by habitat dioramas: They were actually very specific but needed to represent the universal. You saw an antelope behind the glass and even though you were looking at one antelope that had had its one particular antelope life, now, in the educational space of the museum, that individual life came to represent All of the Antelope. And sometimes Ruby felt as if Ruby didn’t represent Ruby to Caroline, but All of Childhood. And vice versa, probably, right? Because what did Ruby actually know about grown-up Caroline today?

  She knew: That Caroline had painful cramps for approximately two and a half days every month. That Caroline threw parties at her dad’s apartment anytime he was out of town. That these parties were actually pretty mild, just people talking and drinking and wandering around on the roof. That Caroline always wore great dresses to these parties. That Caroline now had short hair and a sideways smile. That when people asked Caroline what she did for a living she flashed a bright smile and said, “I make sporks,” which always made people laugh, but almost never in a mean way. That after saying “I make sporks” and disarming her audience with what sounded like pure satire, Caroline would then speak very eloquently about the way people dismissed “disposables” in society and about the decadence of most art in the epoch of the Anthropocene and about whales killed by plastic garbage in their stomachs and, really, how disposable were the disposables, how expendable was any of it, and she felt lucky, just very lucky, to be part of the conversation, to be able to devote herself full-time to her art.

  What else did Ruby know? That Caroline did not actually make very much money from those sporks but that Caroline, being Caroline, did not have to work another job, and so could claim art-making as her principal employment. That Caroline’s grandfather did things with stocks. That Caroline’s uncle did things with stocks, too. That Caroline’s mother had let Caroline’s father have the penthouse because she had wanted to get out of what she took to calling “that toxic city” and now lived in a huge house in the Hudson Valley. That Caroline believed her mother was a drama queen. That Caroline was friends with several semi-famous actresses who would one day be truly famous, Caroline believed. That her friends were all great wits, Caroline said, and she said it to be witty, since who called anybody a wit these days?

  Nobody but Caroline.

  Ruby knew this.

  Ruby also knew, from conversations participated in or overheard at Caroline’s parties, that Caroline believed in the power of positive thinking, that Caroline had once said her dream was to become a social-justice-artist-warrior-princess, that maybe Caroline had said that in an ironic way, that Caroline could be ironic and earnest at the same time, somehow, that Caroline had a sometimes-boyfriend, who sometimes lived in London and sometimes in Italy, that Caroline liked trees and occasionally did volunteer work planting baby trees near ancient parking lots, that Caroline believed in the power of education, that Caroline thought Ruby, also, should cut her hair very, very short and just see what happened next, that Caroline had a trust fund but that John (after a bad day at work when his organization’s funding got slashed) told Ruby not to act like the trust fund was somehow Caroline’s fault, not to go all “Occupy batshit, please, because Caroline’s dad has donated in big ways to Hover Up,” that John told Ruby that Caroline was a resource Ruby should make use of, that before trees Caroline once volunteered her time at animal shelters helping them find their “forever homes,” but gave up because the animals made her just a little bit too sad. “It’s their eyes,” Caroline said. “You can tell they’ve seen more than any Labradoodle should.”

  What else did Ruby know? She knew that last year Caroline had gotten the beauty mark on her cheek removed—she said her mother worried it might be cancerous—but Ruby could make out a tiny ruffle of the skin where the mark had once been. She knew that most people would not even notice that ruffle. She knew that it was important, during the resentment game, for her to never breathe a hint of resentment toward Caroline because such a hint would cause not only a full-on weeping session on Caroline’s part, but also, probably, hours of conversation in which they would have to unpack and describe and compare their own various privileges, which would seem like a healing process, but which would actually leave Ruby feeling worse, she was pretty sure, though she wasn’t entirely sure why.

  Of course, at times she’d found Caroline insufferable or dense. But she could never picture just walking away from a friendship that had been such a constant part of her childhood. Half the old stores in the neighborhood where she’d grown up were gone. Losing Caroline’s friendship would be like gutting something in her own internal landscape. Maybe that was why, since moving back into her parents’ apartment and into a neighborhood that already seemed a little unfamiliar, she had felt an almost frenzied need to spend time with Caroline. Or maybe she felt that need because, right now, Caroline was the only person she didn’t feel embarrassed around, perhaps because they’d known each other so long, perhaps because Caroline didn’t seem to have a sense of how much debt Ruby was in. Ruby had other friends, of course, but since her return home, those friends seemed less distinct, had become simply the non-Carolines—and Ruby would not speak to them when they called. She left the non-Carolines’ texts unanswered, ignored the strings of you okay?? The baristas she’d worked with for years at Mellow Macchiato, Tamar, who sang opera under her breath when a customer was rude, and Jane, who always wore a Sailor Moon T-shirt beneath her apron. Olivia with whom she’d survived the terrors of high school math. She even ignored Nadia, whose dad was also a super, in a building a few streets away, and with whom Ruby had hung out a lot in middle school, despite the way Nadia liked to brag about how her dad once had been an engineer. In high school, Nadia began spending all her time with a small insular group of other Romanian immigrants. It had been hard for Ruby to break into that group, not being or speaking Romanian, and the two had fallen out of touch until a few years ago when Nadia and Ruby had reconnected online, just before Nadia moved to Alaska to count vanishing caribou for a nature conservancy.

  How is it being back with The Folks, Nadia had asked yesterday, but Ruby had ignored her text, both because she couldn’t think up a response, and because Nadia right now was like the background painting in a diorama, a flattened-out figure far away, from some other part of Ruby’s life. Ruby could not speak to her caribou-saving friend. There were no sound waves in the second dimension and Nadia, right now, was two-dimensional to Ruby.

  So why was Caroline still so vivid to her?

  Well, Caroline was right upstairs for starters.

  No, no, Caroline was downstairs—the doorbell rang. Caroline had arrived to help Ruby with her outfit.

  * * *

  —

  When Ruby saw Caroline in her father’s building now that they were adults, it sometimes felt a little like attending a séance, like they were raising up the long gone, witnessing a somber congregation of the spirits of their former selves. The spirits shook hands, did their little ceremonial spirit bows, while the living human receptacles acted casual, pretending not to see the gh
ost girls at all. Caroline was wearing leggings and a belted saffron-colored dress with on-seam pockets. “That’s a beautiful outfit,” Ruby said as she led Caroline to her room. Caroline laughed and told Ruby it wasn’t an outfit, just a dress, and Ruby looked down at her own skirt, which Caroline had not yet commented on. “Did you get some sleep last night?” she asked Caroline. “After we talked?”

  “Some,” Caroline said. “I was definitely way less panicked by the time we hung up.”

  Yesterday Caroline had been to see her grandmother Dora, who had not recognized her, had thought Caroline was Dora’s own long-dead sister. This had happened before, but it was the first time her grandmother had not realized, eventually, who Caroline was. Caroline had called Ruby in tears. “It’s like I’ve lost someone who’s technically still here, and feeling like I’ve lost her when she’s still breathing makes me feel guilty and bereft.”

  So Ruby had talked for a while, trying to distract her from feeling sad. She had spoken in dry tones first about her breakup with John and then about the way her father clearly was disappointed in her. She had done impersonations of both men, mimicking their attempts to exude male authority and still seem like sensitive, reasonable guys. She kept her own panic about her return home out of the conversation. She had simply tried to make Caroline laugh.

  Now, as Caroline stood in Ruby’s room and surveyed Ruby’s interview outfit (or maybe just her interview clothes), Ruby wondered if she’d make Caroline laugh unintentionally. Caroline simply squatted down and touched the fraying hem of Ruby’s skirt, inspected the bunchy elastic waistband. At last she said, “Do you have anything else to wear?”

  “Not really.”

  “I might have something that would fit?”

  “Your clothes don’t fit me. You know that. They never have.”

  “You’re superskinny. Don’t get into a body-shaming zone.”