The Fixer Upper

by Judith Arnold

  Back in Vermont, the kitchen of their house had been sixteen by twenty feet, big enough that he could get an aerobic workout fixing dinner as he jogged from sink to stove to table. The kitchen in this cozy Upper West Side apartment was too small to contain a table. Or a refrigerator with side-by-side doors and an external water dispenser. Or a double-basin sink. Or a window.

  Deborah would have hated this kitchen. But Ned liked it well enough, if only because it wasn’t in Vermont.

  “So,” he said, swinging the oven door shut and turning to face Eric, who had planted himself in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining nook. “What are you really trying to tell me about Mrs. Karpinsky? You don’t like her?”

  Eric shrugged his bony shoulders. “I don’t like the way she smells,” he said.

  At some point in the not-too-distant future, Eric would be a teenager and Ned would no longer be able to decipher his cryptic grunts and snorts. But he was still on the safe side of adolescence, and Ned could read him reasonably well. Eric had a wonderfully open face, parts of which were currently hidden behind a mop of wheat-colored hair that cried out for a trim. Despite its shagginess, however, Ned could see the glint of mischief in Eric’s blue eyes, the slight skew of his mouth, the way his chin shifted as he gnawed on the inside of his cheek. Ned could also see that the jeans Eric had on, bought just a month ago, were looking a little short at the ankles. He mentally added trips to the barber and Filene’s Basement to the weekend schedule.

  “Oatmeal smells good,” he pointed out when no explanation of Eric’s problems with Mrs. Karpinsky was forthcoming. “What’s really bothering you about her?”

  Eric tucked one foot behind the other and kicked his toe against his heel. “Okay, it’s just that I don’t need a babysitter. I could come home from school and—”

  “No.” Ned cut him off quietly but firmly. Maybe he was overprotective, but damn, this was New York City, and he wasn’t going to let his son become a latchkey statistic, stuck alone in an apartment with all the locks bolted until Ned got home from work. Maybe in another couple of years, but not now. Eric was too young.

  “Okay, so I thought, like, if there was someplace I could go after school. You know, like a program or something.”

  “I researched after-school programs. All the programs in this neighborhood had waiting lists a mile long.”

  “Well, see…” Eric reversed feet and kicked his other heel. “The Hudson School has an after-school program for kids. I read about it on the Web. After class you can stay as late as five o’clock and do all kinds of things, like art or go to the gym and shoot hoops or play indoor soccer, or you can do homework or extra-credit stuff. They’ve got a computer lab, too. I could learn Java. Or even Linux.”

  “If you went to the Hudson School,” Ned reminded him, leaning left a few inches so he could reach into the refrigerator for lettuce and tomatoes. “Which you don’t.”

  “I applied, though, so if I got in—”

  “You what?” Ned twisted around so fast a tomato went flying from his hand. Fortunately, it landed in the sink instead of smashing on the floor.

  “I applied to the Hudson School.”

  One thing Ned admired about his son was that he never retreated. If he did something, he owned up to it, not in a tiny, apologetic voice but at full volume and with his chin raised. Ned had always taught him that if you were going to do something, you might as well be proud of it—and if you weren’t going to be proud of it, you were better off not doing it.

  Evidently, Eric was proud of having applied to the Hudson School. He’d mentioned the place to Ned once, about a week ago, casually remarking that it was only a few blocks away and that he could probably get a good education there. Ned had pointed out that private schools in Manhattan generally carried tuition fees resembling the gross national product of certain third-world nations. Eric had raised the idea of scholarships and Ned had said scholarships were great, and then the conversation had shifted to whether Eric was obligated to root for the Yankees now that he lived in New York.

  They weren’t poor. Ned had gotten a good price for their house in Woodstock and his business—enough money to enable him to buy a four-room walk-up in a brownstone on West 73rd off Riverside Drive. The place had needed some work, but Ned was an expert at renovations. He’d refinished the hardwood floors, constructed a wall between the living room and the L-shaped extension that was supposed to be a dining area, and converted the newly created room into a den with built-ins and a window seat from which a half inch of the Hudson River was visible, and he’d built a loft bed for Eric so he’d have more floor space in his bedroom. Not a major overhaul, but Ned had turned the place from a dowdy flat into a bright, livable home.

  So other than the monthly fees and taxes, housing was paid for, and his income covered expenses and the occasional luxury. But private-school tuition? Ned would have to win the lottery, and he’d rather spend his disposable income on visits to the Hayden Planetarium or skiing trips with Eric than on tickets for Mega-Millions.

  Eric must have read Ned’s mind. “I asked for financial aid,” he said. “I think I misspelled financial, though. I probably should have looked it up.” He stopped kicking his heel. “So they probably won’t accept me, anyway.”

  “Because you misspelled financial?” Ned took a deep breath. At times like these, he really resented Deborah for having gone and died on him. Call him sexist, but women knew how to get through these conversations better than men did. They knew how to zero in on a kid’s insecurities and doubts, how to cut through the crap and figure out what was really going on. Ned could cook chicken, he could handle clothes shopping and haircuts, he could bandage a scrape and make funny British voices while reading Harry Potter aloud—and he could do things Deborah would never have done, like camping with Eric or teaching him how to throw a curve. But these discussions in which Ned sensed he and Eric were talking about something they weren’t actually talking about…

  He busied himself rinsing the salad ingredients while he scrambled for the right thing to say. Eric had applied to a private school. Without telling Ned. Because he didn’t want a babysitter, especially one who smelled like oatmeal. Add it up, Donovan, he ordered himself. Do the math. Figure it out.

  “Was there an application fee?” he asked.

  “Um, yeah.”

  He considerately didn’t turn to face Eric. That “um” warned him that Eric was squirming, and no kid liked to squirm in front of a witness. “And you paid for this application fee how?”

  “Well, I applied online,” Eric explained. “They have this online form, so I just filled it out and sent it in.”

  “And paid for it how?”

  “With your Visa.”

  “I see.” Ned washed the hell out of the lettuce and waited for Eric to say what he knew he had to say.

  “I’m sorry. I shoulda asked.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was only forty dollars.”

  “Only forty dollars?” Forty dollars wasn’t too awful, but if Eric was feeling guilty, Ned would just as soon ratchet up his guilt to an uncomfortable level.

  “I got the account number from a bill. You keep them in that drawer, you know which one? In the desk.”

  “Of course I know which drawer I keep the bills in.” Ned didn’t want to snap at Eric, but damn. If the kid could give Ned’s credit card number to some posh private school via the Web, he could just as easily give it to an online vendor. He could buy hundreds of CDs—he’d recently discovered hip-hop, much to Ned’s dismay—or silly T-shirts or pasta makers or—Jesus!—porn. He was only ten years old, but his voice was beginning to sink from soprano to alto, and the hair on his spindly legs, while still pale, was beginning to thicken. With Ned’s credit card, Eric could rack up hundreds of dollars on the Internet visiting sites that showed breast-enlarged women having sex with farm animals.

  That was why Eric needed Mrs. Karpinsky babysitting him. She might be sixty-seven, but she knew a thi
ng or two about the Internet. She’d taken a course at the local branch library, she’d told Ned when he hired her. “I got a set of Victorian napkin rings to die for on eBay, sterling silver, the real McCoy,” she’d boasted. “If I told you how much I paid for them, you’d want to kill yourself.” She tended toward morbid imagery, but at least she was computer-savvy.

  Ned tore the lettuce onto two plates. He tried to reduce the violence of his motions, but when you were pissed, it was better to rip into a head of lettuce than the head of your son. By the time his temper had cooled off, he’d heaped each plate with enough lettuce to feed a visiting army, but at least he could trust himself not to throttle Eric. “You are never, ever to use my credit card without asking me,” he said in a tight voice. “Now put these plates on the table.”

  “You forgot the tomato,” Eric pointed out, his expression not nearly as contrite as Ned would have liked.

  “Fine.” Ned slapped the plates onto the counter and hacked the shit out of the tomato. He divided the mangled chunks between the two plates and handed them to Eric.

  He waited until the chicken was done and he and Eric were seated, facing each other in the dining nook he’d created at one end of the living room, before revisiting the subject. The credit card use was one thing. The Hudson School was another. “Look, Eric,” he said. “We agreed on the move to New York. You said you wanted to live here.”

  “I do,” Eric said.

  “And now you’re hitting me with this school thing.”

  “I don’t like my school,” Eric said bluntly. “It’s too noisy.”

  “Like you’re the quietest kid in the world.”

  “If I think it’s too noisy, you can imagine,” Eric said.

  Damn him for coming up with such a smart response. “I can’t afford the Hudson School. Do you know what private schools cost?”

  “That’s why I asked for financial aid.”

  Hell. The school’s cost wasn’t the worst of it. Eric had already figured out how to get around that obstacle: type in Ned’s Visa account number and click on Send.

  The problem, the issue that bit into Ned’s gut with greater force than he could ever bite into his chicken, was that Eric was apparently unhappy. With school, with Mrs. Karpinsky, with everything. With this new life, which Ned had been so certain was just what they both needed. “You want to go back to Vermont?” he asked, bracing himself so he wouldn’t cringe if his son said yes.

  “Nah,” Eric said, to Ned’s enormous relief. “New York’s cool.”

  “So it’s just school that’s bugging you?”

  “The school is okay. I mean, I could survive. I told you about Gilbert, right? This kid in my class. He’s like always pushing kids and stuff. He calls me Monty because I’m from Vermont. I mean, that’s really stupid.”

  “Definitely stupid,” Ned agreed.

  “Anyway, this other kid, Leo, he and Gilbert got in trouble today because they were using all the rubber cement to make a ball, and Ms. Martinez said they were wasting it, and they kept doing it, so she made them leave the room. And Gilbert kept shoving Leo the whole time. I don’t know why Leo didn’t shove him back. I would have.”

  “So…” Ned scrambled to get the conversation back to where he wanted it. “So there are obnoxious kids in your class—”

  “And not enough rubber cement.”

  “So that’s why you want to go to the Hudson School?”

  “And the after-school stuff they have there. And…” Eric jabbed the tines of his fork into a chunk of potato, then pulled them out, then jabbed again, as if he believed the potato might still be alive. “It’s just, the kids all look so happy when they leave the Hudson School. I see them sometimes when I’m walking home with Mrs. Karpinsky. The ones who don’t do the after-school program are leaving right when we walk past. The school’s in this row of brownstones on I think it’s 78th Street, between West End and Broadway. And they look, I don’t know, like they really had a good time while they were there.”

  If anyone was experiencing a guilt glut now, it was Ned. His son wanted to have a good time in school. What kind of father was he if he wouldn’t move heaven and earth to send Eric to a school where he could be happy?

  He was the kind of father who didn’t have twenty-five thousand dollars a year to spare for tuition.

  “Okay,” he said, letting out a long breath. “You submitted this application. You asked for financial aid. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens, right?”

  Eric’s face brightened. Ned hadn’t said, No, you can never go to the Hudson School. He hadn’t said, You will do chores of my choosing at three bucks an hour until you’ve repaid me the forty dollars you charged on my Visa card. All he’d said was, We’ll see. The two most wishy-washy words a father could ever utter. And Eric’s smile was wide enough to split his face.

  Two

  If Reva didn’t love Kim, she would hate her. Kim was just so totally perfect. She had that whole Japanese-American tough-but-dainty thing going for her. Her hair was so black the highlights were blue, and it was naturally straight, not like Reva’s, which she had to press the waves out of with her straightening iron. Kim was petite and wore size-two jeans, size freaking two, and she was incredibly smart, and she played the piano really well, even though she said she hated it and wanted to quit. Her older brother, who played the violin, was a freshman at Juilliard and her older sister, who attended the Hudson upper school, took cello lessons at Juilliard, and Kim’s parents were already saying they expected Kim to take piano lessons at Juilliard once she started ninth grade. Kim insisted that would never happen because she hated hated hated the piano, but she never said so to her parents. She just complained to Reva.

  The thing was, Kim was really a great person, so Reva had to forgive her for being perfect. Also, Reva had a few things on Kim. For instance, she could invent the best excuses to spend Friday afternoon at Central Park, checking out Darryl J. Kim never came up with good excuses for anything. It was always up to Reva to devise their cover stories. Kim said this was because Reva had a much better imagination, and Reva didn’t argue. She liked having at least one thing better than Kim, and an imagination was a pretty cool thing to have.

  Collecting leaves for a school project. Kim considered Reva some kind of genius for thinking that story up.

  “We’ve got to remember to bring home some leaves, though,” Reva reminded her as they jogged into the park at the West 77th Street entrance. She figured they could collect leaves on the way to the Band Shell, which was where Darryl J would probably be. That was where he was last weekend, when she and Kim had seen him and fallen in love.

  Reva wondered what the “J” stood for. She wondered where he would go once it started getting really cold. She wondered whether he had a girlfriend. At thirteen, she was too young for him, but maybe he’d wait for her. Like, he could date other girls now, as long as he was willing to dump them all when Reva turned fifteen. Okay, sixteen.

  Kim picked up a maple leaf that was lying on a bench. “How’s this?”

  “It’s torn. This is supposed to be for a school project, remember?”

  Tossing the leaf to the ground, Kim shrugged. “What kind of project? My parents will ask. You know them.”

  “Botany,” Reva said. Eighth-grade science was mostly about the scientific method and lab technique and how to keep a proper notebook. It was pretty boring except for when they actually did something. Like, they were currently studying the properties of magnets. Writing out the labs in a notebook was about as exciting as getting a tooth drilled, especially all those details about what the metal nail weighed and how far it was from the magnet when it reacted to the magnet’s attraction. But actually doing stuff with the magnets was fun. If Reva decided to become a scientist when she grew up—not likely, but stranger things had been known to happen—she would have an assistant do all the measurements and write everything in her lab notebook for her.

  Magnetism was physics. Leaves were bot
any, which was biology, which meant she and Kim were doing absolutely nothing like it in their science class. The last time Reva had to collect leaves for school, it was for an art project in second grade, when the class made autumn place mats by sealing colored leaves between rectangular layers of transparent contact paper. Reva’s place mats had come out ugly, but her mother had used them every day until Thanksgiving. She was that kind of mom.

  “Ashleigh Goldstein is so weird,” Kim said, picking up a couple of aspen leaves and handing one to Reva. “Wasn’t that weird, what she did in gym today?”

  “You mean, refusing to play field hockey because it’s too militaristic?”

  “What’s militaristic about field hockey?” Kim asked as Reva scooped a couple of oak leaves off the path. “You just run back and forth with a stick.”

  “I thought Ashleigh’s protest was cool,” Reva argued. “I mean, yeah, she’s weird, the way she wears that ankh necklace and the black nail polish and everything. It’s like, she can’t decide if she’s Goth or hippie.”

  “I bet she just didn’t feel like playing hockey so she made that up, about it being militaristic,” Kim said. “That’s just so her.”

  “She wants fewer team sports and more stuff like modern dance and yoga. I think it’s because she sucks at sports.”

  “I heard Ashleigh tell Monica Ditmer in the bathroom yesterday that her mother had breast reduction surgery.”

  “Really?” Reva could not imagine why anyone would want to reduce the size of her breasts. At the moment, she measured 32A. Her dream in life was to make it to B. Her real dream was to have cleavage, but she was pretty sure you had to be at least a C for that, and she didn’t dare to hope for too much. Her mother wasn’t that chesty, and she’d said these things tended to be hereditary, so Reva was probably doomed. The idea of having boobs so big you wanted to shrink them was just too bizarre.

  Darryl J undoubtedly liked big boobs. All guys did. If they didn’t, a dozen magazines, a zillion Web sites and thousands of plastic surgeons would go out of business.