Apartment 1986

by Lisa Papademetriou

  I smooth my fingers over the hole. It isn’t the kind of thing that can be sewn, or glued. “We’ll tell Mom you need a new one,” I say. And then I stop and give him a hug, right there on Park Avenue. We’re only a block from our house now. “When we get home, I’ll make you some chocolate milk. It’ll be okay.” I know he can make it himself, but it’s a nice feeling when someone takes care of you, instead.

  “I love you,” Desmond whispers into my shirt, and I remember suddenly how small a third grader who is supposed to be a second grader really is. I always think of Des as a full-size person, but—like Simon Yee—he isn’t. I hug him tight. “I love you, too.”

  So we head home and, uggggh, the minute we get there my mom calls out, “Please go wash your hands!” and I remember that I am mad at her and at my dad, too. But there’s nothing to do about it now. I have to eat dinner.

  Desmond and I go and wash up using some of Mom’s artisanal lavender-sage soap, and when we get to the table, Mom has put some weird kale-and-lentil thing on it, but also a loaf of homemade bread-maker bread, so it’s not a total loss.

  I love that bread maker. If we ever have a fire, the first thing I am going to grab is the bread maker, that is how good the bread is. And we eat a lot of it ever since my mom became obsessed with kale. Dad just looks at the kale and sighs and I must be predictable because I can see his future clearly and it contains a bacon-egg-and-cheese-on-a-bagel from the deli across the street. Usually, I would ask him to get one for me, too, but I will not do that today because I am still fighting off being mad, which is taking all of my energy. Keep it positive!

  “How was your day, sweetheart?” Mom asks Desmond. He gives me this worried look, like he doesn’t want me to say anything about Simon and the lunch bag, so I slather a thick layer of butter onto my bread and pretend that this task is taking all of my concentration.

  “It was okay,” Desmond says.

  “Rose and Thorn?” my mom asks. This is a “game” we are supposed to play every night. My mother believes in these kinds of games because she has taken a lot of psychology classes and she believes that it is important to foster communication in a family, which is a good idea except when you have something you actually want to talk about and instead have to play this game. Anyway, for Rose and Thorn, we talk about the best thing that happened to us (rose) and the worst (thorn) and it occurs to me that I must be very careful and remember not to let anyone know anything about my day at the Met, and I have a not so very good memory, so I panic and blurt out, “Grandma Hildy has a boyfriend!” even though it is not my turn.

  “What?” My dad looks shocked and repeats, “What?” His eyes blink like crazy behind his thick lenses, and his unibrow waggles up and down like a squiggly black caterpillar while Desmond shouts, “Yay!” and claps his hands and my mom just laughs and says, “Oh, Callie, don’t be silly.”

  My dad takes off his glasses and starts to polish them on his shirt. “What makes you think so?” he asks. He doesn’t look at me when he asks this, which makes me happy because now I can tell that he is uncomfortable about his mother maybe potentially having a boyfriend. So I say, “She was talking about spending a lot of time in Mr. Johnson’s apartment,” and then my mother and father exchange uh-oh looks and it’s all I can do to keep myself from saying Ha. Ha.

  “I’m sure Callie is mistaken,” my mom says to my dad, and then turns to me to add, “Besides, it was your brother’s turn to speak.”

  “Sophie S. taught me how to finger-knit, and there wasn’t any thorn, I had a great day,” Desmond says, pushing lentils around on his plate.

  “Except that Simon Yee ripped a hole in your lunch bag,” I remind him, and then Desmond shakes his head at me, and I suddenly remember that I am not supposed to say anything about that, because of Desmond’s earlier look. Sometimes my mouth works faster than my actual thoughts.

  “Why did he do that?” my mother wants to know.

  “Because he says that Sparkle Pie is stupid.” Desmond stabs a lentil.

  “I hope you taught him a lesson,” Dad puts in. He piles some lentils and kale onto a slice of bread and takes a big bite, and a lentil falls off the bread and into the thick hair on my dad’s arm, which is kind of disgusting.

  “What kind of lesson?” Desmond asks.

  “Desmond isn’t going to fight anyone, Dad,” I say.

  “Nothing good comes from fighting,” my mother agrees. “Desmond, you must offer him compassion. You must visualize yourself as Simon’s friend. I’ll get you another Sparkle Pie lunch bag tomorrow.”

  “You can’t just get him another Sparkle Pie lunch bag,” Dad says.

  “Why not?” Mom demands. “I think we can afford that much, at least. For now.” Mom spears a kale leaf on one tine of her fork and nibbles it, because that is the way she eats now.

  Dad turns red, and I’m thinking ooooooooo because that was kind of a low blow, and that comment just sort of sits there for a moment, like it’s munching popcorn and staring at all of us and wondering what is going to happen next.

  “If you buy our son another Sparkle Pie lunch bag,” my dad says slowly, “Simon will just rip a hole in that one. I’m not made of Sparkle Pie lunch bags, Helen. Desmond needs to teach that kid a lesson.”

  So I’m all like, “Can’t Desmond just, like, take a brown bag?” which I think is a pretty smart solution but Desmond says, “I’ll just take the old one. The hole is no big deal.”

  “Then you’re going to have to teach Simon a lesson,” Dad says.

  “Why?” Des wants to know.

  “Because Simon will just keep teasing you,” I say. “Take a brown bag. Then he’ll pick on someone else!”

  “Why don’t you get a different kind of lunch bag?” Mom suggests. “Spider-Man?”

  “Spider-Man!” My dad agrees, as if this is a brilliant idea. “That’s the perfect thing for a boy your age. Do they still have Spider-Man, Helen? Is he still around?” Which goes to show that my dad has not participated in the world in about twenty years because he has been working too hard.

  “I hate Spider-Man,” Desmond says. “He’s creepy and you can’t see his face.”

  Dad frowns and my mother suggests, “What about Iron Man? Or the Incredible Hulk?”

  “He’s just the regular Hulk now, Mom,” I tell her, and she purses her lips and takes a long sip of water.

  “I don’t want that stuff,” Desmond tells them.

  “I know you love Sparkle Pie,” I cut in, “but you don’t want to get teased, do you?” It is very important to fit in, in my opinion, because school is survival of the fittest, so if you don’t fit, you don’t survive.

  Before I went to Haverton, Anna told me, “Callie, if they know you don’t belong, they’ll eat you alive,” and if I am going to get eaten, I at least want to be dead. And I want the same for my brother, so I tell him, “If you take a brown bag, you’ll fit in.”

  Desmond looks at me for a long time, his mouth in a little O of surprise, like I’ve slapped him, maybe, or stabbed him in the back. “I don’t want to fit in,” he finally says and he stands up from the table and walks away. Fifteen seconds later, I hear his bedroom door slam.

  “Why do I even bother trying to make a nice healthy dinner?” Mom demands. “I should just stick to making soap!” She throws down her napkin and storms off into the kitchen for a glass of wine.

  Dad pushes away his plate of lentil-kale stuff and stares at it a moment. Then he looks around the room, blinking at the expensive imported wallpaper. He shakes his head. “Maybe he was right,” he says really quietly. Almost like he’s talking to himself.

  “Right about what?” I ask.

  Dad just looks at me. I think maybe he is going to ask me a question, but he doesn’t. My dad’s not a big talker, really. It’s like they say: silent waters run deep. Finally, he sighs and says, “Do you want to get a bacon-egg-and-cheese with me?”

  “Sure,” I say, because even though I am still a little mad at him, I think a ba
gel will help me stay positive. Also, I can’t stand the thought of my dad going out to get his bagel all by himself, so I guess I’m not as mad as I thought.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In which a character makes an unexpected reappearance, and our heroine is like whaa??

  THE NEXT MORNING, I wake up because “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” is playing faintly beneath my pillow. When I pull out my phone, it is, like, one thousand degrees hot, and I wonder if it is maybe going to blow up or burst into flames before I can shut off the alarm. Min has sent me at least fifty texts, which is really only about twenty-five texts because half of Min’s texts are just corrections of previous texts, like:

  wheer r yo????? re you sich?

  *sick

  do you need soul????

  *soup????

  must plan frdy durng 19-min-breal!

  *Friday

  *during

  *10

  *break

  Min says she does not like to use autocorrect, because that only makes it worse, but that is very hard for me to imagine, and I have a great imagination. I text her back, Coming today, and then get dressed followed by the usual: toast, kiss to Desmond, and out the door.

  As I walk up Madison Avenue, my feet feel like I’m wearing shoes made out of bowling balls. I keep thinking about Desmond, and fitting in, and people eating me alive—which is supergross and not at all positive if you really let your mind go there. I wish I could talk to Anna, but when I try calling again, nobody picks up. I decide to leave another voice mail even though she never returned my phone call from the day before.

  “Hey, Anna! It’s Callie. I’m just on my way to school, you know, and I know you’re a morning person, so I thought I’d try to catch you. . . . Well, anyway. Bye!”

  When I click off, I have this yuck feeling in my stomach, and then I remember it’s because I still do not have two hundred and fifty dollars for that concert ticket.

  So I decide that I absolutely cannot handle school today, either. I believe it is important to protect one’s mental health, so I take Althea Orris’s advice and “manifest the outer reality of my inner desires,” and that is how I end up at the Guggenheim Museum, which is also educational, but in a different way from the Met.

  First of all, the Guggenheim looks like a giant white upside-down soft-serve ice cream and the inside is a ramp that goes around and around and around to the top. So that is educational right there, because it teaches you that people can like all kinds of ugly buildings. Second of all, most of the art at the Guggenheim does not look like art. Most of it looks like stuff Desmond could have done when he was three—like colorful scribbles on canvas or maybe a hairbrush dangling in front of a video projector—which is how you know it is very, very deep. In fact, when Desmond was three, he spent three months putting tape on the wall of our bedroom. Every day, he would add more tape, until it stuck out from the wall by a good foot in curlicues and ribbons. I was only eight, but even then, I knew my brother was artistic. One day, I know that I will see a twenty-foot-layer-of-tape ball at the Guggenheim, and I will say, “My brother thought of that when he was three.”

  So, okay, I get into the ticket line and am looking in my bag and in a very shocking turn of events I cannot find my wallet. I know that it must be in there somewhere and I am wondering if maybe it has an extradense core that somehow sucks it to the bottom of my bag, like these stars we learned about in science, when a voice behind me says, “Maybe you should consider a smaller bag.”

  And when I look up, there is Grouchy Boy.

  He actually looks amused, and adds, “It looks like you could use a new one, anyway.”

  “It’s vintage.”

  “Not everything old is vintage.”

  Great, now I am having a conversation with, like, someone who wants to critique my personal style while wearing a pair of sunglasses clipped onto the front of his shirt. Well, I’m sorry, but this kid is not Tim Gunn. “It belonged to my uncle.”

  “I guess he didn’t want it anymore.”

  “I don’t think he needs it. He’s dead,” I say, and when Grouchy Boy winces, I almost add, ha! but I do not because I am trying to be dignified.

  “I’m sorry.” He looks really stricken, and now I feel guilty because I didn’t mean to make him feel that awful.

  “It’s . . . it’s okay. He died before I was born. But I like his bag.” My dad found it when we were moving, and he said I could have it. We don’t have a lot of stuff from my uncle, so I thought, why not?

  “Look—” the boy starts, like he wants to say something, but then he stops, like he isn’t sure what. “I’m Cassius.”

  “I’m Callie. And—I’m sorry about yesterday. I didn’t think you stole my wallet.” Well, I kind of did, but I didn’t want to get into that all over again.

  “It’s cool. I just—” He rolls his eyes and looks up toward the ceiling, way high above us. “Sometimes people make assumptions. When you’re black,” he adds finally.

  “You’re black?” I ask, and Cassius lets out this annoyed little laugh.

  “So you’re one of those people who ‘don’t see color’?” he says, making quotation marks with his fingers.

  “I totally see color!” I say because I think for a moment that he thinks I am color-blind as in that I can’t see green, but he says, “Oh, you’re color-blind, but you still assumed that the black guy stole your wallet. And you assumed I couldn’t afford to pay the entrance fee.”

  I feel like I’m on a roller coaster that just dropped before I had a chance to scream. Is this guy calling me racist?

  Wait—the rollercoaster drops again—am I? Because I did kind of think maybe he took my wallet.

  But that was because he was behind me, right?

  Yes!

  I think.

  But I seriously had no idea he was black. I look at him carefully. I guess I can see it. He has big, dark eyes and black curly hair. His skin is the color of sand. “You could be anything.”

  “So I talk a certain way, and I’m in a museum, therefore you assumed I was white.”

  What? I’m sorry. Like he knows all about me and my brain and how it works or does not work?

  “So—wait. First you thought I was a racist because I thought you were black. Now I’m a racist because I thought you were white?” Now I’m getting mad. “For your information, I thought you were Puerto Rican!”

  Now he’s a little unsure. “Are you Puerto Rican?”

  I actually get asked this a lot. “No, I’m Greek.”

  “Oh.” He looks confused.

  Now I think that maybe he is worrying that maybe I think he is racist because he asked if I was Puerto Rican and now neither one of us is sure if we are racist or not, and maybe we are both a little afraid that maybe we are, but we don’t want to think that because that’s disgusting.

  Cassius’s eyes flick away for a moment. “What are you here to see?” he finally asks, and I nearly melt with relief. I guess he wants to change the subject as badly as I do.

  “Uh . . . Mondrian,” I lie. He’s the only artist I can remember that’s part of the permanent collection at the Guggenheim, and I don’t have a clue what the special exhibitions are. Grandma Hildy and I have been here a few times, but nowhere close to the number we have been to the Met.

  “I’m here for the Thannhauser collection.” Cassius shoves his fists into his pockets.

  “For school?”

  “Sort of.” He shrugs. “I wanted to look at Mountains at Saint-Rémy.”

  “Isn’t that van Gogh?”

  His eyebrows bounce up for just a split second. “You know a lot about art.”

  That kind of makes me laugh a little, because Ms. Blount—my history teacher—does not agree. “What, girls can’t know about art?”

  His black eyes go round. “No—I’m not saying that—” he starts, and then he sees that I am kidding and we both laugh.

  “Listen, I’m really sorry,” Cassius says, and he sounds supersincere. “I can
be kind of . . . harsh.”

  “I get it,” I say. Anna’s the same way, to tell you the truth.

  Then he surprises me. “Do you want to come with me to see some Impressionists? Then I’ll join you for Mondrian.”

  And of course I say, “Great,” because I think it might just be great, although it’s kind of hard to know until you do something.

  So we both head to the booth, and it turns out that we both have membership cards, so we get our stickers and head right up to see the Impressionists. I’ve never spent much time looking at the Impressionists in the Guggenheim, because it seems kind of weird to look at something old-fashioned at this crazy museum. But they have this one Picasso that I really like called Woman with Yellow Hair, and as I’m looking at it, I say, “You know, this kind of reminds me of Lichtenstein. Because of the colors,” and Cassius stands there with me and we both stare at it and stare at it, and finally he takes out his smartphone and starts whispering into it, and I hear him say Lichtenstein, so I know I have made a good point, and not a complete ass out of myself.

  Then we go over to the van Gogh, and Cassius does a lot of staring and whispering into his phone, which is surprisingly okay with me. Most people look at a painting for, like, five seconds, and then move on to the next one. But these paintings took, like, months and years to make. The van Gogh is really something to look at, too, because the brushstrokes are so swirly and the colors are so vibrant and I like to think about how he was so incredibly passionate that he cut off his ear and sent it to some lady he liked as a present. True story; my grandma told me.

  Once we have moved through the collection, Cassius says, “Okay! Let’s go do some work on your project now,” and so I say, “Great,” because I really like the idea of having a project and right then and there I decide that I do have a project and it is to look at Mondrian.

  So I really look at Mondrian’s art. I look and look at Chrysanthemum, which is a drawing of a flower that is so beautiful that it looks like it has a smell even though it is in black and white, and even though mums don’t really smell. And then at Still Life with Gingerpot I, which is a little more abstract, but with lots of bold colors, and then Still Life with Gingerpot II, which is even more abstract and in softer colors. And then I look at Tableau No. 2/Composition No. VII, which he painted in 1913. It’s gold and gray and shell tones, and lots of uneven rectangles. And then Tableau II, in 1922, is a big white square painted very precisely, with smaller rectangles around it and a few points of primary colors that remind me of the Google logo. Going from painting to painting makes it easy to see how Mondrian’s mind was working over the years—how he went from that beautiful, complicated flower to just a white square. He just stripped everything down to a basic shape and I think that Piet Mondrian probably had an apartment with, like, nothing in it. Cleanest closet ever, I bet.