“But you ate alone, didn’t you?”
It was true. After the girl had spattered Lee with spaghetti sauce, she’d spent dinner at a table by herself, pretending to read a book she’d found on the shelf. She couldn’t figure out how to fit herself in with any of the other tables. It was just like high school, before Edie.
“Why not sit with the other kids? Nobody here bites.”
“I was just reading,” she said.
He handed her the tea, and she leaned back against the wall. The warm cup felt good in her hands.
“Nothing wrong with that. But the others are all curious about you. And you have a lot to offer.”
Lee didn’t know what she had to offer, but she liked the way he half smiled at her when she scrunched her face up.
“Will you do that for me?”
“What?”
“Make an effort.”
“Okay.” She didn’t know what more to add. She could see him about to leave, and her head swam with something to say that might keep him a bit longer. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
She liked that when he looked at her, he didn’t look away. But she still couldn’t think of a thing to say. “What’s upstairs?” she blurted out.
“You tried to go up there this morning, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t mean to. I was just . . .”
“Do you understand desire, Lee?”
“What do you mean?”
“You are too young, I think, to understand yet the nature of desire. You know what it is to want, perhaps even to yearn, but true desire is something else entirely.”
“I guess.”
“You don’t understand what I’m talking about, but you will. We are a community, we exist like an undercurrent beneath society. But to exist in concert with society, we need a currency that society values.”
She could feel his eyes on her, and she kept hers on his shoes. She no longer knew what to do with her hands, so it felt good to hold the warm cup.
“You still don’t understand, but you will. Society has cast you out. Determined that it has no use for you. How does that make you feel?”
Lee didn’t think about it like that. It was her mother who had cast her out. Her mother and Steve who had no use for her. Society didn’t even know she existed.
As if inside her mind again, the man said, “Even your family has rejected you. I am sorry to be so blunt. But I need you to know that you are not alone. Each of us here has felt rejected in some way—by family, by society, by our supposed community or friends. But now you are here, and you have found another place, another way. You have found another family.”
She felt her emotions rising from somewhere in her chest like an undertow wanting to pull her down. Lee took the spoon from the cup and bit down on it, focusing on the hard bite of the metal. But she could feel herself losing the battle by degrees. The man took the spoon from her mouth and put it back in her cup, then took the cup from her hands. When he sat back down beside her and put his arm around her, Lee was sobbing. He said nothing, only held her as she pressed herself into his chest. He was so thin she could feel his ribcage beneath his suit jacket, and his heart felt right there in her ear. It beat slowly, pumping a steady river of calm that slowed her sobs until they and his heartbeat were synched.
“The Crystal Castle is like a mansion with many rooms, but you have to earn the right to enter some of those rooms, and you earn that right through trust. When you’ve earned trust, you earn keys.” He pulled a strand of her hair loose from behind her ear. “All in good time. Now, can I trust you not to go back up there until I tell you it’s time?”
Lee nodded into his chest.
“I need to hear you say it.”
“Yes,” she said, sitting back up. “You can trust me.”
“Good.” He kissed her tenderly on the head. “I told you you’d fit right in.” He got up. “We don’t pull punches here. But you will see we take care of our own.” He seemed about to leave, then paused, and Lee followed his gaze to the mattress. He bent down close, then pulled back the thin sheet. Beneath it was a large brown stain. “I’m sorry about that. It’s improper. We’ll get you another mattress. Until then . . .” He offered her his hand and helped her up, then tore the sheet off and flipped the mattress. He got down on his knees and carefully remade the bed for her, tucking the sheet tightly underneath. He went back to his room and returned with a square of tissue paper tied with string, which he laid on the end of the bed. “I heard about what happened in the eating commons earlier. I hope this helps.”
When he left, Lee untied the package and opened it. She held up a folded dress. It was old-fashioned, a simple gray cotton drop-waist dress with white cloth-covered buttons running up the front, all the way up the neck. It felt ancient.
Lee put the dress down and lay back on the newly made bed, still feeling his lips against her head. She felt stupid and briefly dirty—the man was twice her age—but whatever she was feeling wasn’t sexual; it was something else. He saw her. When she was with him, she knew she was the only thing in his world at that moment, and she liked that. Lee shifted and faced the wall and tried to will herself to sleep. She rolled onto her stomach, then her back. Something was digging into her spine, a spring in the mattress. Lee shifted again but couldn’t find a position around it. She got up and removed the sheet—even the stain was better than this thing in her back—when she noticed the rectangular outline beneath the mattress fabric. She felt around it, felt the spring of a spiral notebook, and pushed it along until she was able to squeeze it out through a tear in the side of the mattress.
The notebook was about the size of her hand, and when she opened it, a small card-stock club flier fell out onto the bed. Lee recognized the style; it was the same as the one given to her and Edie in the café. On this one was a mechanical insectlike figure below a cloud with three square cutouts in it. Within the cutouts was an announcement of an event put on by the Société Anonyme, along with a date some weeks past. At the bottom it read ADMIT ONE, with a Web address and a six-digit code. As with the other flier, there was no street address, but someone had scrawled one on the back.
The first half of the book was filled with sketches and cartoon figures. Some of the kids from her school, graffiti bombers, had kept books like this. The same mouse head as the ones from the wall kept popping up again and again, with more frequency as she turned the pages. Then, about halfway through, it became a diary. The entries were undated, but they were clearly demarcated by day—seventeen of them.
The girl—there was no name but Lee could tell that much—had started out much like her, homeless and drifting, before she’d been invited to a party at some place called the Silo. She’d met a boy at a prearranged spot, and he had taken her there with several others, to a place well outside the city. The girl had written down the name of the road in case she ever wanted to come back, but once there she’d met Ester, who’d brought her back to the Crystal Castle. The first entries brimmed with feverish excitement and spoke of all the new friends she was making—she was clearly more outgoing than Lee, and Lee hated to see that the girl had felt the same giddy anticipation at the visits from the Station Master. Except she called him Josef, and Lee felt an unexpected pang of envy that the girl had earned his name.
Lee tried to picture the girl, lying awake as she herself did, waiting for Ester or the Station Master to give her their attentions. She wondered what this girl’s life had been before she was here. She’d run away from home, probably, with nowhere else to go. Had she been lonely before she came here? Where was she now?
About a week in, the entries became so scattered and self-referential they were hard to follow. She wrote of wanting to please Josef enough to earn his trust, of fearing something upstairs but wanting to see it so badly she dreamed about it at night. The last entry was a single line:
He came today. It’s time. I close my eyes and see it.
• • •
The next day Lee went out again to ask strangers for money. She didn’t want to return to the same corner, because she didn’t want to see the professor again. Lee liked the idea of him imagining her on a bus back to Ohio. So she chose a spot near the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where tourists stood in line to take pictures mimicking the victory pose of a life-sized bronze of Rocky Balboa. The spot was full of competition, and Lee watched others—both older and younger than she—approach strangers and ask for handouts as easily as asking for the time. By midafternoon she gave up. She still had forty dollars, which she could stretch to two days’ worth of supposed panhandling before she’d be forced to come up with something.
Lee wandered the streets downtown, winding a tortuous path back to the Crystal Castle. It was nearly five when she got there, late enough to call it a day. Lois was on her corner, wearing the orange smock from the JDC. “Spare some dough?” she said as Lee passed.
Lee stopped, waiting for Lois to look up, to see her, and finally to recognize her. “Where you get that dress?” Lois said, her eyes trained on Lee’s legs.
Lee looked down at herself, running a hand down the starched cotton.
“They bring you upstairs yet?” Lois said.
Lee sat down beside her. Lois was as mean as spit, but Lee still wanted to help her. “Why don’t you come in with me? It’s a pretty good deal—place to sleep, shower, two meals a day . . .”
“So you doing Ester’s job now?”
“What?”
“Recruiting?”
“No, I—”
“Forget it. I got no use for them. Anyway, you’ll see upstairs soon enough.”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“He’s watching us right now, you know,” she said, not looking at the Station Master’s window. “Probably.”
Lee said nothing.
“He talk to you about trust yet?” Lois asked.
Lee didn’t answer, but she knew her expression told Lois he had.
“Well, that sure was quick. Shouldn’t be surprised, though, pretty girl like you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“First he’ll tell you you need to earn his trust. Then he’ll tell you his name. Then he’s gonna tell you it’s time. Then you’ll see what’s upstairs. I never talked to anyone after they went upstairs. Never saw them again.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“What’s it matter to me you believe me?”
Lee got up. She knew Lois was only trying to scare her; she was just mean that way. Lee didn’t care; for some reason she wanted to help her anyway. But she also knew you couldn’t help someone who didn’t want to be helped. “Okay,” she said. “Suit yourself.”
• • •
That night at dinner Lee made a point of sitting at a table with four other kids, one of them the girl who had spilled spaghetti on her. She was a black girl with tight bleached cornrows and sharp, pretty eyes. She pointed at Lee’s chest with a fork and said, “How you like my dress?”
Lee looked down, embarrassed. She didn’t know what to say.
“You know how long I been looking for that? You stole that from my room.”
Another girl whispered something to the boy next to her and giggled.
The black girl stuck her fork into a piece of Lee’s chicken and popped it into her mouth. “I want it back.”
Lee looked down at the dress again, then around the room. It was just like what had gone down in the detention center with her shoes, but there was no Maria here to defend her. She stood, deflated. “Whatever. You want it? I’ll go change and bring it back down.”
“Uh-uh,” the girl said. “Right here.”
“Come on. I’m not even wearing a bra.”
“Not my fault you’re flatter than Nebraska.”
Then the room went silent, as though a window had slammed shut, blocking all the noise out. Lee could feel the attention of the kids behind her shift, and she turned to see the Station Master, standing in line with a plate in his hands, waiting for food as the rest of them did. He was talking casually to a few kids in line, and Lee wished she could hear what he was saying. He noticed her and nodded. But then he turned back around, and she no longer had even that little piece of him.
He took his plate upstairs, and the room went back into motion as though the window had been opened again. The girl was staring hard at Lee, and Lee began to unbutton the dress, but the girl reached out and touched her arm.
“Hey, man, I’m just fucking with you,” she said. “Of course that ain’t my dress. And I like flat titties—my mom had nice big ones and you should see them now, like two socks holding grapefruits.” She laughed.
“You’re such a bitch, Ramona,” said the boy.
By the end of the meal, Lee felt that they’d accepted her. Ester came down once and smiled at Lee sitting there at the table, and seeing that gap between her teeth made Lee feel good.
• • •
The Station Master came to her room again that night. He sat beside Lee on her bed and asked her how she was settling in. Lee felt an urge to answer in a way that pleased him, but she didn’t know how. It was easier to know what to say to Ester, whose face couldn’t help but display her emotions. This man was unreadable.
“I saw you sitting with the others today. See, nobody bites.”
“Just making an effort.”
He smiled. “Can I ask you something?” The man waited for her to meet his eyes before going on. “What did Lois say to you? Earlier today, on the corner?”
Lee knew she couldn’t tell the man what Lois had said. “She’s all alone. Why don’t you take her in, too?”
“Lois is welcome to come in again any time she wants. She has an open invitation. She knows that.”
“Again?”
“She was with us once, for a short time. But some kids are just . . . feral. They’ve been out on the streets too long, and they—they start to believe things, even to see things, that aren’t there. They feel better out in the open. She’s not in here with us, but we still look out for her. Once you’re family, you’re always family.” He took Lee’s hand and gently removed it from the lock of hair she’d been pulling, then took the hair and pulled it behind her ear. “Did she say something to you?”
The man leaned back and shifted behind Lee, taking Lee’s hair, and began braiding it. Lee felt the skin of her neck prick with electricity.
She stared at the dark corner of the room. “Not really.” He pushed her head around until he could meet her eyes, and Lee, without being able to stop herself, said, “Only that she had no use for you.” Why had she said that? She hated herself.
The man went back to braiding Lee’s hair into two ropes, which he wrapped around the top of her head, pinning them there. It was an act that might have been creepy from a different man, but from him it seemed mannered and old-fashioned. “Soon enough you won’t be saying ‘you,’” he said. “You’ll be saying ‘us.’ But until then, I’d suggest staying clear of Lois. Like any feral animal, she’s unpredictable, even dangerous. Do you understand?”
Lee knew he was wrong about this, but she nodded anyway.
He stood, took a long look at her. “When I first saw you, I thought it a coincidence.”
“What coincidence?”
“But there is meaning, even destiny, in coincidence. Remember when we first met, I told you that you came here for a reason?”
“Yes.”
“I’m quite sure you don’t know what that reason is. Am I right?”
Lee said nothing.
“Well, I do know what that reason is. I don’t think you’re ready for it yet, but you will be. In time. Can you trust me until that time?”
Lee
nodded.
“Thank you. Good night, Lee.”
“Good night. Sir,” she said.
“You should call me Josef.”
When the Station Master was gone, Lee went down the hall to the bathroom. She buttoned the dress and stood back to inspect herself in the mirror. She didn’t recognize the girl staring back at her. The chaotic tangle of her hair was made serene, even elegant. This girl was pretty and refined. Lee had felt a thrill run through her when he told her his name, as though he’d given her the key to a secret garden.
• • •
That night Lee dreamed that she was sharing her room with a girl, the same girl who had written the diary. Her hair was braided in the same fashion as Lee’s, and she kept talking Josef this and Josef that. Lee felt herself grow annoyed when the girl put on Lee’s new dress and kept flattening it down with her greasy fingers. Lee woke to footsteps down the hall, and the dream girl remained in the room with her, naked now, for several terrifying seconds before slowly disappearing into the air. Lee felt the dress on her and realized she’d fallen asleep in it.
Someone was knocking on the Station Master’s door, lightly at first, then loudly. She heard the door open, heard the Station Master say, “What is it?” But after that only whispers. Lee pretended to be asleep as she watched the Station Master, looking pale and spindly in boxer shorts and a white undershirt, follow a boy down the hall.
Lee lay in the dark, letting the dream fade. She heard sounds upstairs, then raised voices that hushed quickly. The diary came back to her, and she pulled it out to read again: He came today. It’s time. I close my eyes and see it. Upstairs. What had happened to her?
Lee stuffed the diary behind the radiator, then got out of bed. The hallway was empty. She stood against the Station Master’s door and listened, then reached for the knob and turned, as slowly as if she were defusing a bomb. The door cracked open. She told herself to go back; she’d promised him he could trust her. But it was as though some machine had been set in motion and she was powerless to stop it. She edged into the room, closing the door behind her.
When she’d been here before, the Station Master had drawn all her attention; now that he was gone, the room carried a fuzzy residue of his presence. She could feel him, beneath the smell of old cigarettes and garlic, in everything he’d touched. The whole room seemed to hum with him. There was an old armoire in the corner beside the door, and a painting hanging above a dresser, a frenzied explosion of color and movement that made her a little dizzy to look at. Lee kept telling herself to leave, once even saying it out loud, but before she knew it, she had opened the armoire. Five suits hung inside. Each was dark, thick wool, old and slightly moth-eaten. Lee noticed an insignia on the sleeve of one of them, and she pulled it out. It was more of a uniform than a suit, even heavier than the others, a blue so dark it was nearly black, rumpled and ancient-looking. A matching cap, with the same insignia, rested on the shelf above. She thought of the uniform on the young man who’d paid the Station Master a visit that night. It was different but seemed of the same era. Lee let the suit swing back into the armoire.
The Readymade Thief Page 7