The Party Upstairs
Page 28
It would be a kind of meditation, a kind of art, a kind of naturalism, a kind of scientific record.
As she paced through the Hall of North American Mammals that night, she thought about how the nanny had smiled at her exiting the building where Ruby had grown up, how she had held open the door. Then Ruby shook the moment loose and began to plan a diorama to capture the day in the elevator-motor room with Caroline. This diorama she’d call Behind Elevators. On the other side of the display glass would stand three-dimensional remodelings of two girls, surrounded by cables and wheels. Ruby would indicate the griminess of the motor room with three-dimensional mice and water bugs, even though they had seen no mice or water bugs that day. The two girls would stand in the middle of the space. The taller, slightly pudgy girl on the right would have pissed all over her pants. How to indicate the urine? In the book on dioramas she’d taken from Lily, there was a line about an artist adding a streak of motor oil to make it look like a salmon had been dragged to shore by an otter. Would motor oil work for urine?
More important: The skinny girl on the left, the re-creation of Caroline, would have scrunched her nose up. The re-creation of Ruby would be looking to the side, ashamed. The re-creation of Ruby would not be a cute little girl at all. She would look young, yes, and feral. But in no way cute.
In the middle ground she’d place the elevator machine and many ropes going round and round. A motor generator that turned the alternative current into direct current. The two-dimensional background would be nothing but gray paint. No fake horizon. Just the sense of an indestructible wall.
As far as those diorama girls knew, they would be trapped together in the elevator room forever. They would starve listening to the sounds of the machinery that allowed the elevators to rise and fall and rise again. The display would have a lost-in-the-woods watching-out-for-the-witch atmosphere, coded with the wild, weird morality of fairy tales. A space of powerful whirring created by machines the girls couldn’t name because they hadn’t yet been taught.
Ruby took a deep breath.
She might not be a thief. She might not be an artist. Definitely, though, she was a guard. And what artifacts was she protecting?
Her shoulders jumped. An unexpected sound. A slow drip-drip. Perhaps the storm had started in earnest? And now there was a leak somewhere in her hall. She must find the water and report it, get word out before serious damage occurred, before a display got mucked up, before a piece of ceiling crumbled down on her own head—or, worse, on the head of some unsuspecting future visitor who had traveled great distances, come to the museum from a faraway state, seeking only a sense of wonder.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Scott Moyers, my editor, for your wisdom, steadiness, and for really seeing and believing in this book. I’m so grateful to you, to Mia Council, and to everyone at Penguin Press. To my agent, Sarah Burnes, for her big-heartedness and fierce intelligence. To the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Alumni Micro-Grant program, and to Vanderbilt University for funding and support.
I owe so much to many people at SUNY New Paltz, Sewanee: the University of the South, and Vanderbilt University. Special thanks to Lorraine López, for creating a space where I could start to write this even though I was a little terrified. To Marysa LaRowe, Kevin Wilson, Lorrie Moore, Nancy Reisman, Tony Earley, Justin Quarry, Rachel Teukolsky, Claire Jimenez, Cara Dees, Anna Silverstein, Simon Han, Sara Renberg, and Emily Jacobson. Thank you all for your humor, your encouragement, and for being there for me at various stages of flailing during the writing process. It’s meant more than you know.
To Hedy in remembrance.
To Garrett Warren—well, obviously.
Most of all, to my mother and father.
About the Author
Lee Conell is the author of the story collection Subcortical, which was awarded The Story Prize's Spotlight Award. Her short fiction has received the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award and appears in the Oxford American, Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of creative writing fellowships from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference.
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