Twelve Rooms with a View

by Theresa Rebeck

  “Barbie—Barbie—oh, for heaven’s sake, sweetie. Barbie!” She turned to me. “I’ll be right back.” And she scooted off with the baby, down one of those endless hallways, leaving me and Katherine staring at each other.

  “Do you want to see my toys?” Katherine asked.

  “Sure,” I said, following her down another hallway to a room so far back in the building I would have gotten lost if I had to try and find it by myself. There was a comfortable daybed covered with a pink-and-yellow bedspread, and on the wall behind it was an enormous quilt cross-stitched with little pictures for the different letters of the alphabet. The walls were yellow and the rug had a big rainbow on it. Itty-bitty wooden and plastic people were clumped in small groupings everywhere, like they were having discreet parties in every corner of the room. Some were standing around toy plastic playground sets or, in one corner, beside a little wooden castle.

  “Wow,” I said, flopping on the daybed casually so I could sneak a glance out the window. It looked out on an alley I had never seen before, which convinced me that there was another room in my own apartment that I had not yet found. “Is this your room? It’s so cute.”

  “This is my bed, and these are my animals,” Katherine said, pulling about seventy stuffed animals out from behind the sweet little trundle bed that sat tidily in the opposite corner. “This is Blackie. This is Lulu. This is Betty.”

  I climbed down to the floor to get a closer look at the dogs and cats and rabbits and bears and ponies and ducks and sheep and llamas pouring out from behind the bed. We were deep into some game that had to do with animals living in the forest when one of the teenagers finally found us. It was not Louise, the one I had met at the door, but a slightly younger one who seemed even more unhappy about wearing that hideous school uniform. Her hair drooped all over her head as if she couldn’t be bothered with it, which was a shame, because it was that great dark blond color with streaks of red that only teenagers get to have, and only for a little while. She had pretty gray eyes, but they were narrowed together under suspicious eyebrows. The kid definitely needed a makeover.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she asked, a tad hostile, from the doorway.

  “You said the f word, you owe me a dollar,” Katherine announced without looking up.

  “Fuck fuck fuck. Fuck,” the hostile teen replied.

  “Jennifer!” Katherine gasped, truly appalled by this outrageous breach of decorum.

  “It’s better for you, now I owe you a five,” Jennifer announced as she picked the kid up and kissed her, then set her back down in the middle of her animals with a move that was both careless and careful at the same time. “Are you the person who moved into 8A?” she asked, flopping on the daybed.

  “Yeah, my name is Tina,” I started.

  “I know your name,” she announced, utterly bored. At least she was acting bored, but I know plenty about teenage girls, having been one, and I was well aware that she was completely desperate for information about me and the empty apartment beneath our feet.

  I was only too happy to share. “My mom died, so, yeah, I just moved in. Downstairs. I guess I’m right downstairs.” I started to smile, decided that was too much, so I turned back to the game. Katherine was in the thick of it, waving a spotted pony in my face. “No, no, go away!” she yelled.

  “I’m gonna get her,” I announced, picking up the unicorn and pretending to eat it. She started laughing, completely beside herself with glee.

  “Yeah, but you’re not like staying there,” Jennifer informed me. “Like I heard they were kicking you out.”

  “Who told you that?” I asked.

  “Everybody.” She shrugged.

  “Everybody who?” I pressed.

  “Just people.” I knew I’d get nothing more out of her until she felt like talking.

  “We’ll see, I guess.” I shrugged. “Do you want to see it?”

  “See it?” she asked, not quite getting me. “You mean the apartment?”

  “Yeah, you want to come down and see it?”

  Such a stroke of blind good luck had never occurred to her. But she was far too well versed in the etiquette of cool to acknowledge any excitement. “Are you allowed to let people in?” she asked, choosing to completely dismiss my invitation rather than express any interest in it.

  “I have the key,” I pointed out. “My stuff is there. They haven’t kicked me out yet.”

  “But isn’t it just like this place?” She suddenly and cleverly decided to feign indifference, pretending to be bored with the possibility of seeing the mystery apartment downstairs. “It’s the same layout and everything—it’s the same apartment, right?”

  “Are you kidding? Your place is totally normal, you should come see my place, it’s pretty weird. Like they were selling off all the furniture, so there’s nothing in there but light fixtures and moss and some clocks and those crazy mirrors from like the nineteenth century? All sorts of cracked stuff.”

  “Moss?” said Jennifer, disbelieving this. “I mean, like, are you kidding? What is it, like mold?”

  “No, it’s really moss, the guy who has the greenhouse up on the roof needed a place to put his moss.”

  “You know that guy?”

  “Len? Yeah, he was a friend of my mom’s; he’s great. Have you ever seen his greenhouse?”

  “No,” she said, an edge of sullen jealousy creeping into her tone.

  “It’s amazing. If you want, I’ll take you up there.” I knew this all sounded so unbelievable that she was tempted to believe it. “Anyway, you have to at least come by and see the moss, he’s got twenty different kinds in my kitchen. One of the kitchens.”

  “You have two kitchens? ’Cause we only have one.”

  “Yeah, it’s different down there. The layout is completely different. Like this room, the one we’re in right now? It’s not there.”

  “Well, where is it?”

  “I don’t know, maybe it’s part of the Westmoreland apartment. Do you know her, Delia Westmoreland?”

  “Do you know her?”

  “Not really.”

  “She wants that apartment, she’s been trying to buy it for like fifteen years,” Jennifer stated. “She’s going to try and get you kicked out. She’s hell on wheels.”

  When Jennifer wasn’t pretending to be bored with the universe, she had a curious beam going, like there was a spectacularly intelligent person in there who was perfectly capable of utterly devious behavior.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I announced, feeling far less sure of this than I sounded. “You want to come down?”

  “I’m not allowed.”

  “Come on, it’s only one floor,” I persisted. The idea of having an idle teenager to show off my cool apartment to was suddenly very enticing.

  “Seriously, I’m not allowed,” she said. And the devious person went away again.

  Jennifer was telling the truth. When Mrs. White showed up two minutes later, she shooed Jennifer back to her room and described the facts of life as they were lived in 9A.

  “Their father is very strict,” Mrs. White explained, as she politely ushered me back through the many hallways to the front of the apartment. Their place was easier to navigate than mine, but it was a bit of a maze nonetheless. “Raising six girls in Manhattan, you can imagine how that would be necessary. The things that go on in the private schools, you don’t want to know about.”

  “Drugs, boys, blow jobs?” I asked, kind of all concerned and quiet. She shot me a look, none too pleased with my slightly too careless display of insider information.

  “Of course, you would know about this,” she observed, smiling a little too tightly.

  “Oh, I just know what I’ve read, it’s all over the Web,” I countered fast. “Isn’t it? I went to Catholic school in Jersey. All girls, only nuns. We didn’t even have priests. Well, and thank god for that! I mean, what the priests turned out to be up to, a kid would be safer in prison.”

  “You went to Catholic school
?” This seemed of some interest to her, so I was glad I had made it up.

  “Saint Ignatius, over in Jersey City. They finally closed it a couple years ago, which is too bad, I got a great education there.” To my own ear I sounded like a pretty desperate liar, but she was dealing with a writhing baby and wasn’t paying full attention. “Your girls are in Catholic school, right?”

  “Saint Peter in Chains, up on Ninety-eighth,” she said.

  “Saint Peter in Chains!” I smiled, like I knew it well. “I love their uniforms, they look so cute.”

  “Well, it certainly makes life simpler. With six girls you can imagine what kind of chaos we would have to deal with in the clothes department if we didn’t have the uniforms,” she agreed. “And my husband wants them to learn a broader system of values.”

  Eyeing Mrs. White’s gorgeous pink outfit, I felt a sincere moment of sympathy for those teenage girls learning a broader system of values. I mean, their mother was running all over New York City in designer suits, and they had to throw on the same ugly pleated skirts every morning before heading uptown to hang out with a bunch of nuns. It seemed like a pretty nasty fate, especially considering that they lived in Manhattan, where I would have thought that nobody, and I mean nobody, went to Catholic school to learn values.

  “Well, I know I loved my uniform, maybe not every day of high school, but afterward, definitely,” I said. “I come from a family of girls too. Not as many, there were only three of us, but obviously we were in something of the same boat in terms of the clothes, I mean. My mother was always up to her eyeballs in laundry.” I was definitely starting to sound like a suck-up. Mrs. White, mother of teenage girls, recognized the sound, and her already chilly attitude became logarithmically less friendly.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said, opening the front door. Behind her I could see Katherine watching from the hallway. Off in the distance teenage voices were suddenly raised in heat—Jennifer and Louise sniping over shoes or hair clips or who was hogging the phone—and then a third voice chimed in, topping them both. I thought for a second about the two girls whose names I didn’t know yet and hadn’t even laid eyes on. Mrs. White turned for a second, impatient.

  “Girls, no yelling! Gail! Louise! NO YELLING IN THE HOUSE!” she yelled. And then she looked back at me, clearly waiting for me to just go.

  “I have two sisters,” I repeated.

  “Yes. So you said.”

  “I’m the youngest. We didn’t live in a very big house, so we were really on top of each other all the time. And we would argue about everything. Sometimes I think of the stupid things we argued about and wonder how my mother didn’t go stark raving mad just listening to us. Did you ever meet my mother? She lived downstairs. She died just a week and a half ago. It feels like a long time already, but it was just a week and a half. I mean, it was a shock to everybody, we had no idea she was even, well, I guess that’s how heart attacks work, nobody sees them coming. And maybe it was good for her, to go that way, just fast like that. If you’re going to die, that would be the way, right? I just worry. I’m staying down there and I’m seeing all her stuff, and I’m telling you, she—did you know Bill? Because we didn’t—anyway, I just hadn’t seen her in such a long time. I think maybe she was lonely. It’s nice to meet you. It’s nice to meet your girls. I’m happy to be here.”

  Don’t ask me what I was trying to do, because I didn’t even know. I just didn’t want her to think I was whatever she thought I was. Katherine was still watching me from behind her mother. I gave her a little wave, low, so she knew I could see her. She waved back. The voices of the girls at the other end of the apartment rose again, unyielding in their fury. For a moment a few words shook themselves free of the sound and made the argument comprehensible: shampoo. They were mad at each other over shampoo.

  “GIRLS, HONESTLY YOU DO NOT WANT ME TO COME BACK THERE!” Mrs. White hollered. “I’M NOT KIDDING. DO YOU WANT ME TO TELL YOUR FATHER ABOUT THIS?” Silence bloomed instantly around the question. She turned back to me, newly determined. “Well,” she said. “Thank you for coming by.” She raised her hand, but with the palm up, so it was more like an offering and less like she was pointing at the door, which was in fact what she was doing.

  “I would be happy to babysit sometime, if you need anybody,” I said.

  “We’ll give you a call,” she said, politely shutting the door in my face.

  Okay, so that didn’t go exactly the way I wanted, but since I hadn’t put a ton of thought into the plan, I decided not to take it personally. Besides, I had made definite inroads with two of the kids, and I had left the dangling possibility of cheap local babysitting in the back of Mrs. White’s busy brain. Even though she had been less than enthusiastic, I decided it might be worthwhile to capitalize on my introduction to her, so I hopped into the elevator and went down to the lobby, where Frank was leaning on his podium, head in hands, talking quietly in Spanish to someone on the phone who was clearly bugging the shit out of him. He didn’t raise his voice at all, but the speed of the conversation kept increasing until Frank was careening through sentences and thoughts so fast I expected him to crash and burn any second. But he didn’t. He just looked up, saw me standing there, and switched into English.

  “I got to go,” he said, and hung up.

  “Hay una problema?” I asked, in friendly lame Spanish.

  “Dos problemas. Dos hermanos, dos problemas, not as big as the problem with mi padre, but what can I do for you, Tina? I heard you were moving out soon.”

  “Ohhhh, not yet,” I said. “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “Well, who you think?” he said, starting to sort mail. He was a lot less friendly than he had been before, but having just come down from Mrs. White, who was downright rude, I didn’t take it personally. I saw how right Len was, that I had a lot of work to do if I wanted to try and stay here.

  “Yeah, I heard that Doug wants me out, but I think Pete’s okay with it, isn’t he?” I asked. “Did you talk to Pete?”

  “No, I talked to Doug, he said you were moving out,” Frank repeated.

  “No, not yet. Listen, Mrs. White asked me if I could babysit for her sometime, so I said okay, but I didn’t remember the number of my cell phone because I just got it? So is there something I can write it on, and you can maybe give it to her with her mail?”

  “You’re going to babysit for the Whites?” He looked up at me, surprised, and I could see that his eyes were kind of red and sad around the edges. Then he looked away again fast, and I thought, oh hell, he’s not mad at me, he’s upset, that phone call really upset him. He took a second to press his eyes as if he had a headache, but really so that the tips of his fingers could catch the tears before they actually existed. Then he started sorting the mail with extremely fierce attention, so I knew I’d better say something fast or it would be impossible for us both to keep pretending that nothing was amiss.

  “Yeah, I went up and said hello because my mom always talked about how much she liked Mrs. White, and we talked about me babysitting, but I didn’t have my phone, so I went back to the apartment and got it and then I was going to run back up with the number, but they were in the middle of homework and stuff when I left, and I thought it would be easier to leave it for her with you, and you should have it anyway,” I said, acting all casual and sticking my fingers in the back pockets of my jeans, pretending I was looking for something there. “And of course I’m so retarded I don’t even have a pen. Do you have a pen? Do you have anything I can write on?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know, here, here’s a pen,” he said, handing me one of those skinny ballpoints that nobody buys, but businesses get in truckloads and give out to people they don’t care about. He went back to sorting the mail, then stopped and said, “There’s paper too, hang on, I got a notebook here under the mail.” And he lifted up the whole pile, which was quite an awkward maneuver, and I saw a spiral notebook, which I slid out before he could drop something. The whole move was so complicate
d that by the time we were on the other side of it we were both in the clear, and I was writing down my cell phone number and he was putting it in with Mrs. White’s mail, as if that was all that was going on anyway.

  So we were busy when Vince Masterson showed up.

  There is almost no point in describing Vince Masterson. When you first meet him, he seems to look like nothing; his features are so regular that he doesn’t look like anybody in particular. He’s about thirty, you think, and he just looks normal. Then he starts to talk, and you realize that his eyes are a perfect light blue and his nose is long and beautiful and he’s tall and jaw-droppingly gorgeous. And then he keeps talking and you realize that he’s actually kind of an asshole and he doesn’t really know as much as he thinks he knows and he’s not that handsome after all. And then he keeps on talking and you think wow what a gorgeous guy, maybe I’m wrong, maybe he does know all this stuff, and I’m the one who’s stupid. And then he talks some more and you think, what an asshole. And then you think he’s handsome again, but maybe not really. It’s like that.

  So this was the first time I’d laid eyes on Vince. He announced his arrival pleasantly enough. “Hey, Frank, how’s it going?” he called from the doorway. Frank and I both turned, and I thought, oh, it’s just some guy who knows Frank, stopping by to say hello.

  “Hey, Vince,” said Frank, holding up his hand in a polite, friendly wave.

  “Anything in there for me?” asked Vince, and he sauntered over, stuck his hands in his pockets, and leaned over the podium to watch what Frank was doing. I was standing right in his way, so his arm kind of brushed my shoulder and I took half a step back. He’s tall; I’m short, and when he stood that close that fast, it became immediately clear that I would fit perfectly under his arm. He smiled down at me, and I was thinking, holy shit, this guy is gorgeous.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said, and I swear to god, I turned all red. Seriously, that’s how great-looking Vince sometimes is: you just go all red.