Latchkey Kid

Sylvie Samuels had her own keys and her own life after school that did not involve any grown-ups.

Veronica would be so sad without Mary. Wonderful, kind, loving Mary, Mary who was alone in the Hospital for Special Surgery. Sylvie did not have a Mary. Or maybe they were alone in the Samuels apartment because they were supposed to complete their science projects without any help from parents or other outside sources. Veronica had concluded that Randolf students had gotten a lot of help on their projects in the past and this year the teachers were cracking down.

But from the way Sylvie flipped on the lights, put her book bag down, and seemed so at ease, Veronica could tell Sylvie came home to an empty apartment every day.

“Oh. Do you mind taking your shoes off?” Sylvie asked. “And just hang your coat in the closet.” She hung up her coat and disappeared into some other part of the apartment.

Veronica stood in the front hall, dismayed. What did she expect? A tour of the house? She took her coat off and opened the closet. Maybe no one else would find a coat closet with space for coats unusual, but Veronica did. The Morgan coat closet was like a gag from a Marx Brothers movie. Everything from tennis rackets to boxes of holiday cards—fully addressed and stamped but never sent—to art projects Veronica had made in kindergarten was stuffed in there. You opened that door at your own risk. Mr. Morgan had opened it about a year ago and was promptly hit on the nose by a sand wedge from an old set of golf clubs. No one even knew who those golf clubs belonged to. The Morgans had hung their coats on hooks outside the closet ever since.

Veronica took off her shoes, not knowing where to go. Sylvie wasn’t a very good hostess. She took her backpack, wandered into the living room, and plopped down on a long beige couch amid the craziest assortment of pillows. She loved all the patterns, stripes, and tribal designs mixed with paisleys and so many colors. Some living rooms looked like rooms people were supposed to get out of before getting comfortable in, but not this one. She nestled into the pillows and pulled a paisley cashmere throw that hung over the back of the couch around her. She wished her house could be like this, filled with nice things, but not cluttered. Marion Morgan collected everything.

Sylvie made a lot of clanging noises. She must be in the kitchen. Veronica missed Mary desperately and wanted her Oreos. At lunch, she hadn’t had much of an appetite and now she was sitting in a stranger’s living room with a stomach roaring like a lion. She covered her tummy with a striped pillow.

There was a table to her right with a few photographs of Sylvie and her parents. They weren’t recent. It was the same in Veronica’s house. Parents seemed to lose interest in documenting their lives as their children got older. Like the novelty of having a family just wore off or something. Sylvie’s mother was much younger than Veronica’s mother. She was also very pretty.

Sylvie called. Veronica followed her voice into a breakfast nook off the kitchen. It had a window that faced an airshaft. From Sylvie’s window, you could see into the apartments on the other two sides of the airshaft. It was like having rows of television sets that played the stories of real people’s lives.

At the moment, most of the rooms Veronica could see were dark and empty. But a few had life in them. A housekeeper vacuumed in one. An old man read the newspaper in another. Veronica was wondering about the other people and their lives when Sylvie set a platter of scrambled eggs and toast down on the table.

“Are you hungry?” Sylvie asked. She handed Veronica a fork and a napkin.

“Sort of,” Veronica said, praying the growling of her stomach wouldn’t betray her. She wanted to eat slowly, but honestly, scrambled eggs had never tasted so good. And the toast, for some strange reason, was the most satisfying food she had ever eaten. She should remember to tell Mary that this would be a good snack from now on. When they were finished eating, Veronica followed Sylvie and watched her put their dishes in the dishwasher.

“I guess we should start our project,” Sylvie said after everything was cleaned up. She opened a cabinet and took out a pile of neatly folded newspapers. She spread them out on one of the counters.

“What kind of chemicals do you want to put in?” Sylvie asked. She turned over one of the pots and dumped out a plant, separating the soil from the roots.

“I don’t know, ammonia and bleach?” Veronica said, immediately regretting it. Dr. Snope would call that kind of comment “provocative.”

Sylvie rummaged around the kitchen displaying no sign of provocation whatsoever. “I was thinking we could put in cleaning things that wouldn’t, like, gas us out of the house,” she said.

“Okay, I guess that’s the more sensible approach,” Veronica said. Sylvie examined rows upon rows of products: Ajax, Windex, silver polish, and Fantastik.

“Should we just use them all?” Sylvie asked.

“Sure,” Veronica said by default.

Sylvie piled everything on the counter and Veronica followed her lead, pouring and spraying and sprinkling the pile of soil. It reminded Veronica of potion making, an activity mothers detested because it was so messy, but there was no one at Sylvie’s house to object. After Veronica poured a pile of borax over the mixture, Sylvie squirted silver polish into the middle. The container made a noise like a fart. She did it again. Was she trying to be funny? Veronica didn’t want to laugh, just in case Sylvie had done it by accident. Instead she dumped a pile of Ajax in the middle and stirred it around with a wooden spoon. She threw all caution to the wind and unscrewed the spray nozzle from the Fantastik and poured a big stream into their soil. It was more fun than she had had in weeks. She and Sylvie were up to their elbows in soil. When it was thoroughly blended Sylvie showed Veronica how to put a few rocks at the bottom of the new pots for drainage and how to repot the plants. One plant got fresh and clean potting soil. The other one got the contaminated mixture.

Sylvie put the contaminated plant in the linen closet and turned off the light. Veronica suggested they put the other plant by a window. She hoped the window Sylvie chose would be in some other part of the apartment she hadn’t seen yet. But Sylvie thought it best to put it in the living room.

“This is the sunniest spot in the house,” she said. They went back to the kitchen and scrubbed their hands with a nailbrush. It took half a bottle of soap to get clean.

Mrs. Morgan picked up Veronica at six o’clock.

“Bye, Veronica. This was fun,” Sylvie said.

“It was,” Veronica said. “See you tomorrow.”