The Fixer Upper

by Judith Arnold

  “Yeah, well, Mrs. Karpinsky knows how to use a computer. If she stumbled upon this, she’d be insulted.”

  “She probably wouldn’t even get it,” Eric argued, but he shrugged again. “I can trash it when I’m done. I’m just experimenting.”

  “So you said.” Ned straightened up. “Did you finish your homework?”

  “Hours ago.”

  “I’m going to catch some TV and read the paper. I want that Web site gone before you shower.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said, tuning Ned out with a click of the mouse.

  Ned abandoned the den for the living room. He opened the cabinet doors that hid his TV, grabbed the remote and settled on the couch. He wasn’t really interested in any shows; the World Series would start next week, but no playoff games were on tonight. It didn’t matter. He wanted the noise, a babble of voices to serenade him while he read about turmoil in other parts of the world. They made his own turmoil seem petty.

  He’d go to Libby’s apartment on Wednesday. He’d do her fireplace and see what happened. If nothing worked out…Well, he had a lot of socks and some sturdy walls.

  Sixteen

  Life sucked sometimes, Reva thought as she unwrapped her Muenster-and-sliced-tomato sandwich. In fact, life sucked a lot of the time. Here she was, grounded for the rest of her life—and her Sunday afternoon with her father convinced her he was in total agreement with her mother regarding the punishment, so she couldn’t even play her parents off against each other. Even worse, she had no idea where Darryl J was. And Luke Rodelle, who was an asshole anyway because he was obsessed with hubcaps and hadn’t paid for her pizza, was schmoozing at the diva table when she’d entered the cafeteria a few minutes ago. She saw him leaning over Larissa LeMoyne, talking intimately to her, tossing his head every now and then to get his hair out of his eyes. Larissa was wearing a sheer white fitted blouse with a black tank top under it. All her friends were wearing the same thing. Seeing Luke surrounded by so many sheer white fitted blouses with black tank tops under them had curdled Reva’s already sour mood.

  After he was done talking to Larissa, Luke wound up sitting with Micah Schlutt at the other end of the dining room from where Reva settled. She shouldn’t have told Katie Staver she’d serve on the dance committee, because now that she’d made the commitment she was stuck having to work with Luke. And Micah, the little turd.

  Across the table from her, Kim pulled the cardboard lid off a disposable foil tub filled with tempura. Reva could see the big pieces were shrimp. The smaller pieces were probably vegetables, although who could tell with all that batter clinging to them? The shrimp held her attention, though. She’d kill for shrimp.

  Not that she’d kill Kim, of course. Kim was her best friend, and now that Reva was majorly grounded, Kim could serve as her lifeline to the world. While Reva was imprisoned in her apartment, Kim could use her cell phone to call her and report in. “It’s sunny out,” she’d say. “I’m at a hot-pretzel stand, and I’m going to buy a pretzel and eat it in your honor, since you can’t be here to eat it yourself.”

  God, if Kim did that, Reva might just have to kill her after all. Reva would rather have a hot pretzel than a Muenster-cheese sandwich. She’d rather have tempura than a hot pretzel. She’d rather have anything than the life she was living right now.

  Well, she wouldn’t rather have whatever weird vegetarian thing Ashleigh had packed into her insulated bag. Ashleigh dropped into the chair next to Kim’s, her long gray skirt fluttering around her legs and her hair so black it looked as though she’d spilled ink on it. “Hey,” she said much too cheerfully. “I hear Luke Rodelle likes you.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Reva snapped.

  “Mia Nussbaum told me. She was at my dad’s office yesterday getting a new retainer. This is her third replacement. She threw the last one down the compactor chute by mistake. The one before that got run over by a bus. Anyway…” Ashleigh busied herself peeling the silver foil off a spinach wrap with weedy green stuff spilling out of it. “My dad’s office is on the first floor of our building, so I stopped in before going upstairs, and I saw Mia, and she told me Luke likes you.”

  “I don’t think so,” Reva muttered.

  “Reva’s in a bad mood,” Kim warned Ashleigh.

  “I am not,” Reva argued, then sighed.

  Ashleigh appeared genuinely sorry. “How come?”

  “She’s grounded,” Kim said.

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know,” Reva answered, softening. Having sympathetic friends eased her resentment. “Probably till I finish college, at least.”

  “What did you get grounded for?” Ashleigh asked, gathering the sprouts her sandwich was shedding and stuffing them back into the wrap.

  “It’s a long story,” Reva said, even though it wasn’t that long. She just didn’t want to have to go through it. “I didn’t check in with my mother every five minutes when I was searching for Darryl J this weekend.”

  “He’s disappeared,” Kim added.

  Ashleigh frowned. “No, he hasn’t. He’s playing in the subway.”

  Reva could barely keep from leaping out of her chair. She was so excited to hear Darryl J was still in Manhattan that remaining seated seemed physically impossible. She jiggled both feet and bounced her knees to burn off the excess energy. “Where was he? Which station?”

  “Seventy-second and Broadway,” Ashleigh said.

  “How’d you find him?”

  “It was really bizarre.” Ashleigh settled into her seat and grinned, obviously thrilled to have a really bizarre story to tell. “I was walking home through the park yesterday—” Ashleigh lived on the East Side “—and I detoured down to the Band Shell to see if he was there. He wasn’t, but that mime was.”

  Oh, yuck. The mime. Reva scowled.

  “So I figured, what the heck, and I asked him if he knew where Darryl J was.”

  “You asked a mime?” Kim gaped at her.

  “Well, he’s a human being. I figured, what the heck.”

  “What did he say?” Reva asked.

  “He didn’t say anything. He’s a mime.”

  Reva decided Ashleigh was enjoying this story a little too much. Her impatience grew and she jiggled her feet harder.

  “He was doing this whole routine, pretending to sew his fingers together,” Ashleigh continued. “But there was hardly anyone watching him, so I interrupted him and asked if he knew where Darryl J was. He’s, like, blinking. His face is so white. He has no skill when it comes to makeup.”

  Neither did Ashleigh, but Reva was too polite to mention that.

  “So he points to where Darryl J used to stand, and mimed strumming a guitar. And I’m nodding and telling him, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s the guy. Do you know where he is?’ And the mime starts doing this thing like he’s walking downstairs. He gets shorter and shorter, like he’s about to disappear into the ground. It was really cool. And I’m thinking, Darryl J has gone to hell.”

  “Why would he go to hell?” Kim asked. “He seems like a nice guy. Plus he’s so cute.”

  “Well,” Ashleigh said, drawing the story out, “I asked the mime, ‘What, you’re saying he’s underground?’ And the mime shakes his head and sticks one hand in the air and starts trembling and rocking. He looked exactly like someone riding a subway train. He was really good. If I’d had any money on me, I would have given him some, just for that subway routine. Well, I did have some money, but I need it to buy my kid sister a new Minnie Mouse watch, because she ruined hers because I told her it was waterproof and she was dumb enough to believe me, so she wore it in the bathtub and this was somehow my fault.”

  “So Darryl J’s in a subway?” Reva pressed. Damn. She and Luke and the Stavers had guessed right on Saturday—but they hadn’t found him.

  Ashleigh nodded. “So I asked the mime which line, which station, and he falls to his knees and spreads his arms out…” She put down her icky green sandwich and dropped to her knees, arms extended l
ike one of the Marx Brothers at the end of Duck Soup. When Reva and her mother had watched that movie on the VCR, her mother had explained that the Marx Brothers were spoofing minstrel singers. Reva wasn’t exactly sure what a minstrel singer was.

  “I didn’t get what he was doing,” Ashleigh continued. “Not a clue.” She stood up, dusted off her skirt and flopped back into her chair. “So then he pretends he’s holding a microphone, and he’s mouthing some song—I don’t know what it was, but I tried to read his lips and I think he was singing that schmaltzy song from Cats. You know which one I mean?”

  “‘Memory,’” Kim guessed.

  “That’s it.” Ashleigh nodded energetically. “All I’m thinking is Cats. And then I got it. Broadway. So I said, ‘Is Darryl J on the Broadway IRT?’ and the mime hugged me.”

  “Gross!” Reva and Kim shouted in unison.

  “Yeah.” Ashleigh laughed. “It was gross, but at that point I was on a roll. So I asked if he was playing on the subway, and the mime did the shaking, swaying thing again, then tapped on this imaginary subway door and then stepped through it and did the imaginary guitar-strumming thing. So I guessed Darryl J was playing in a subway station, and the mime hugged me again. That made me feel better about not giving him any money. I mean, he was getting paid in hugs.”

  “Gross,” Kim muttered again, although she seemed full of admiration for Ashleigh.

  Reva admired Ashleigh, too. She couldn’t believe she and Luke and the Stavers had wasted Saturday checking out the IND stations instead of the IRT. They’d been on the right track—but on the wrong tracks. Damn, damn, damn.

  “So I asked which Broadway station,” Ashleigh continued, “and he starts pawing the ground with his foot like one of those circus horses that can supposedly do arithmetic? After a while, I just guessed 72nd Street, and he did this stupid little dance.”

  “So Darryl J is playing in the subway station at Broadway and 72nd?” Damn! That was so close! Her own neighborhood! “Do you think he’d be there now?”

  “Reva.” Kim sounded sterner than Reva’s own mother. “You’re already in trouble. You’re not going to cut school to find him.”

  “But after school—”

  “You’re grounded, remember?”

  Leave it to Kim to be obedient. Reva didn’t want to get in worse trouble than she was already in…but if Darryl J was in the 72nd Street station, that was just a few blocks away. Chorus wasn’t rehearsing today, and the dance committee wasn’t meeting, thank God. Reva’s mother would be working late because she had all those applications to deal with. Reva could leave school, check out the station to see if Darryl J was there and be home before her mother ever found out.

  “Okay, I’m grounded,” she said with a shrug. Like what more could her mother do to her if she found out Reva had taken a minor detour to the subway kiosk at 72nd on her way home from school? Add another year to her life sentence?

  Her mother wouldn’t have to find out. Kim wouldn’t have to find out, if she couldn’t stand the pressure of participating in Reva’s brief jailbreak. All Reva meant to do was check on Darryl J, find out where he was going to be when, and then go home. No big deal.

  He might not be there today, anyway. And shit, she’d have to buy a fare card just to see him, unless he was playing in the entry, outside the gates. She hoped he was, because the odds of her earning any more babysitting money watching the fireplace guy’s kid play Sim games on the computer were pretty low, not only because she was grounded but because her mother hadn’t said a word about the fireplace guy for days.

  Darryl J was worth the fare, of course. And if Reva wasn’t allowed to go out ever again, she wouldn’t have much opportunity to spend her money on anything else. So she’d pay to find Darryl J.

  He’d just better be there.

  Eleven o’clock. Libby stared at her fireplace, a farewell visit with the thing. Tomorrow Ned would do whatever he was going to do to it—chip it and strip it, work a miracle, fix it up. She wanted to be excited, but she felt like drek.

  Reva hadn’t gone straight home from school today. Libby knew because she’d phoned home at 4:00 p.m. and Reva hadn’t answered. Libby hadn’t bothered to leave a message on the answering machine. What would she say? “Reva, you’re breaking my heart!” But she’d asked about it over dinner—a meal she’d had to choke down, she was so upset—and Reva had said, with only the slightest hesitation, that she’d taken a nap when she’d gotten home from school. She must have slept right through the phone’s ringing.

  Reva was a teenager. The sensory nerves in her body were wired to vibrate wildly at the sound of a ringing telephone. No way could an eighth-grade girl sleep through that sound.

  “You should have left a message, Mom,” Reva had had the audacity to scold her. “I would have called you when I woke up.”

  Her daughter was lying to her. Libby had realized it then, when Reva had issued her phony defense at dinner, and she understood it now, in the silence of her dimly lit apartment in the minutes before she went to bed. Reva was slipping right through her fingers. Libby recalled her own mother’s warnings when she’d been a teenager: “Someday you’ll experience what I’m feeling right now. May God give you a daughter who causes you pain the way you’re causing me pain.”

  Of course, Libby hadn’t had to do much to cause her mother pain. She often achieved that tragic feat simply by dressing in what her mother considered unflattering clothing, or refusing to wear lipstick on a date. She hadn’t misbehaved the way Reva did, sneaking around and lying about it. Then again, her mother probably thought that going on a date without lipstick was more shameful than what Reva had been doing.

  Damn. Libby didn’t even know what Reva was doing.

  She was a terrible mother, that much was certain. Her own mother had been a stay-at-home mom—busy with her volunteer work when she wasn’t whining about how this or that organization was refusing to pay her for her efforts. Libby recalled a few conversations with her mother during which she tried to explain the concept of volunteerism, which was that a person wasn’t supposed to get paid, and those discussions had usually concluded with her mother moaning, “You should only have a teenage daughter someday who does to you what you’re doing to me!”

  But Libby hadn’t sneaked around. And when she’d misrepresented her activities to her mother, her lies had been awfully benign: saying she’d been at Jenny’s house when she’d actually been at Laurie’s house, or saying she’d bought a piece of fruit to snack on when she and her friends had in fact gone to the Cone Zone for ice cream.

  She’d been in the suburbs, for God’s sake. How much trouble could a suburban teenage girl get into? Bethesda wasn’t Manhattan.

  She stared glumly at her fireplace and pondered the likelihood that her choices of late represented one huge mistake after another. The hugest of all had been signing all those papers at the bank in order to buy this apartment. Buying it meant that not only would she never be able to retire, but she’d have to be reincarnated so she could finish paying off the mortgage and Harry’s loan in her next lifetime. She would never be able to come home at three o’clock to keep an eye on Reva, and Reva would run wild through the city, looking for some scummy street musician who was probably strung out on drugs. If he was any sort of decent musician, he’d be taking classes at Juilliard during the day and practicing his scales at home at night.

  And Ned…another huge mistake. She couldn’t even guess what was going on between them; she just knew that whatever it was, it was wrong, especially since his son hoped to get into the Hudson School.

  She was a failure. She didn’t deserve a revitalized fireplace, and she certainly didn’t deserve getting one free. She couldn’t afford to be indebted to Ned, given how indebted she was to Harry and the bank. Every flake of paint Ned removed from the mantel would represent one more bit of evidence that she was a disaster. And she couldn’t kiss him ever again, because lousy mothers up to their eyeballs in debt weren’t entitled to such pleasu
res.

  If she tried to explain, he wouldn’t understand. He didn’t seem to possess the gene for guilt. Not only wasn’t he Jewish, but he was from Vermont. Did they even know what guilt was in Vermont?

  She could phone him and tell him not to come tomorrow. Right, at 11:00 p.m. He’d appreciate that.

  Okay. She’d call him tomorrow, as soon as she got home from work—except that as soon as she got home from work she’d have to interrogate Reva. And if Reva lied to her again…She couldn’t bear to consider that possibility.

  She turned off the lamp, said goodbye to her fireplace with its layers of thick white paint and trudged to her bedroom, certain she wouldn’t sleep.

  She wound up not calling him. The one time she’d tried to phone him on the job, a few days ago, he’d never bothered to call her back. That was then, this was now, but she didn’t want to open herself up to getting not called back again. The woman who’d taken her message last time would recognize her voice. She’d think, This is the ditz who keeps calling Ned.

  Libby didn’t call him after work, either. The admissions committee included two teachers and generally didn’t meet until after their teaching hours, which meant they didn’t convene until three-fifteen. The first ten minutes of their allotted time was consumed by filling their mugs with coffee and arguing whether three-fifteen was too late in the day to ingest caffeine. Once they’d finished stirring and sipping and bickering, they would review the applicant pool so far, the numbers of openings and the tenor of the kindergarten class they hoped to assemble for next year. That discussion generally continued until at least five o’clock. It didn’t leave a spare second to phone Ned.

  By the time she staggered into her apartment, her briefcase bulging and her left hand barely able to close around a thick stack of mail, much of it Christmas catalogs from companies that sold sterling-silver martini sets, ergonomic neck pillows, fleece blankets featuring patterns of mallard ducks and other such luxuries that Libby would never be able to buy because she’d already committed herself to crushing debt, it was nearly six. She was exhausted, yet her heart raced. Would Reva be home? Would she lie to Libby about how she’d spent her afternoon? Would Libby call her on it? Would Ned arrive ninety minutes from now to find the two of them dead on the floor with their hands wrapped tightly around each other’s necks?