There are men in the kitchen breaking down a wall. I never saw the old lady who lived on the other side of it. Now she is dead, and we own her apartment, too.
Our apartment is already too big. Three bedrooms, an eat-in kitchen, a TV in every room so we don’t have to watch the same thing, a dining room with a long wooden table, covered by a tablecloth we’re not allowed to eat on, and stuffed underneath it, department-store shopping bags containing the original store receipts in case my mother decides to return anything.
The living room is where we sit with guests during the Jewish holidays. There is a plate of nuts in a crystal bowl on the coffee table. My sister’s head shot is framed in silver on the piano. It was taken six years ago, when she was twelve and acting in commercials. Next to it is another photograph from that same day when I was told to join her on a stool between two silver lamps with blazing hot moons inside of them. When I sat down on my sister’s lap, she locked her arms around me and leaned in. Sweaty cotton pressed against my skin. Moonbeams pressed against our eyes. Cheek skin pressed against cheek skin. “And smile,” said the man with the camera. So we did. Then my sister pulled her head back and loosened her arms. I missed her already.
My mother is always giving her friends tours of the apartment. She points to the floor and says wainscoting. She points to the ceiling and says crown molding. She points to a light and says sconce. She doesn’t say this out loud, but a mandate has been set for all the bedrooms: The curtains must be trimmed with the same fabric as the duvet covers.
This holds true in the master bedroom, where the duvet is white with pink floral bouquets. The bed is king-sized and rests in a sleigh-shaped mahogany bed frame. The TV is in the armoire. Old report cards are in the bottom drawer of the built-in desk. My father’s soft pack of Vantage cigarettes is in his night table. (I smoked two.) My mother’s bottle of Valium, for when she flies, is in a cosmetic bag underneath their bathroom sink. (I swallowed three.)
In the library my father opens a stack of mail with a gold dagger. Beneath him is a gold trash can stuffed with crinkled paper. When he’s finished, he lies on the couch flipping through channels, pausing when ticker tape runs across the screen. I don’t care what he watches, as long as I get to sit with his feet on my lap and pull off his wool socks from the toe. Each one is matted to his feet with sweat, and when I yank them off, my father lets out a big, long sigh.
Across from the front door is a gold-framed mirror. When you enter, you see yourself, and behind you, on the opposite wall, a large oil painting of a homeless woman lying on a bench next to a shopping cart. It was by a painter named Serge who borrowed our beach house. When it arrived, my mother carefully unwrapped the brown paper and leaned it against the wall. “Where should I put it?” she asked. It moved around the apartment for a few weeks, before a nail was hammered into the hallway wallpaper.
If you were to count the number of couches throughout the apartment, we’d have enough to sleep ten homeless people. That’s including the love seats and two sofas that open up into queen-sized beds. Eleven if someone uses the bed in my sister’s room, since she’s away at college anyway. It seems such a waste. So many people without beds. So many beds without people.
The first winter after we moved here, I bought a hot chocolate and a doughnut for the homeless man who sings outside the bank across the street. I planned to give him a bag of old blankets, too. That was two years ago. Now he nods at me when I walk by. I try to remember to cross the street so he doesn’t have to.
When you walk into our building, two doormen in blue suits and matching blue bellhop hats open the heavy glass doors. A third sits behind a desk with a phone that rings but has no dial. My parents went to a board meeting to vote on whether they should wear white gloves. It just looks nicer was the final decision.
Once my mother came home to find one of the doormen had let himself into our apartment. He was in her bedroom, opening drawers. When she found him, he began to cry. He had a wife and kids, he said. He didn’t make enough. “Please don’t call the police.” My mother didn’t call the police, but the spare key was removed from the lobby along with the doorman. Now she keeps a lockbox in her closet. The key is in a drawer in the hallway under a pile of silk scarves. If you use it to open the lockbox, you’ll find another key that opens another lockbox on Seventy-Ninth Street. My mother has told me this in case she and my father die at the exact same time.
“Everything we have goes to you and your sister,” she says.
“I don’t want anything,” I tell her, not because it’s the truth, but because I hate it when she reminds me that she’ll die someday.
Two years ago we moved to Park Avenue. Before that, we lived in a smaller apartment on a smaller block across the street from my school. My parents slept on a pullout bed that fit inside a closet. My sister and I shared a bedroom severed in two by a white plaster wall my mother had installed. On my sister’s side was an A-ha poster—the first concert she ever attended. Her clock radio was set to 100.3, Z100, and our shared telephone had a built-in answering machine, which we’d use to record raps. I’d beatbox while she’d read from a notebook: “We’re not here, but don’t you weep. Leave a message right after the beep.”
On my side of the room was a window, fifteen flights above the street, that faced the windows of other buildings. At night, my sister and I would watch ourselves in the reflection as we danced to all of Billy Joel’s The Stranger. The whole album, a litany of grown-up complaints we pretended to understand. Divorce. Heart attacks. Rent money. Difficult women.
And here were our matching Formica beds, pressed against either side of the wall.
“Once this was all one room,” Mom would say as if it were a fairy tale. “Now it’s two.”
When the lights were off and the blankets were over us, I’d talk to my sister through the wall’s cracking corner.
“What do you want to dream about tonight?” I’d ask to keep her awake, but she’d always be asleep.
When we were five and ten, we played Thirteen and Eighteen—a game where we pretended we were both teenagers, still five years apart but more mature, more into dance competitions and spraining our ankles and being carried offstage by imaginary boyfriends, who were also our twin brothers.
Then we’d transform my bed into the display case for a boutique called Pizzazz. We sold oily stickers, puffy pencil cases, and an assortment of scented erasers.
When my sister and I grew tired of that, we’d turn the puffy pencil cases into Barbie beds. “I’m so tired, I’m going to sleep,” my sister’s Barbie would say, resting her head on an eraser pillow.
In a dream, ghosts in nightgowns stood in a circle around my bed. In another dream, they picked up my bed and carried it into the jungle.
In our old apartment, the living room carpet was thick and red. A pink doll-shaped squeaky toy named Baby lived between the fibers. She belonged to our old dog, Tinkerbell. The dog spent her last night alive under the piano in the living room, tucked into a comforter. All through the night my mom photographed Tinkerbell so she would be remembered. When the pictures were developed, Tinkerbell’s eyes glowed red. So my mom took a Sharpie and colored round black circles over the redness. A real dog with black cartoon eyes. “Much better,” my mother said, and I believed her.
A few years earlier, when I was five, I ran away. I took the stairs down fifteen flights, and when I got to the bottom, I asked the doorman to call my mom on the house phone. “I ran away,” I said. “Come back upstairs now,” my mother told me. What I knew: Don’t take the elevator alone. Something terrible had happened in an elevator once to a girl or a woman, because of a man in a long overcoat. And candy.
So I took the stairs back up, flight after flight, pausing on each landing to catch my breath. The stairwell was gray, dingy, and ice cold, with each floor number painted on the door in emergency yellow.
When I didn’t come up right away, my mother grew frantic, believing I had really run away or was lost or stolen. “Mommy, I’m here,” I said when I had climbed all the stairs and pushed open the door to our apartment. “It’s okay, she’s here,” she said and hung up the phone. Then she crouched down so she could look me in the eyes, and spoke slowly so I wouldn’t forget: “Don’t ever leave my sight.”
When I was six, I got lost. I was in the park across the street on a playdate. Another girl, another mother in charge. I left the monkey bars to get a drink from the water fountain. When I turned around, I couldn’t find the girl or her mother. Don’t ever leave my sight. Then I couldn’t remember what they looked like. Don’t talk to strangers. Then I couldn’t see through my eyes because they were all blurry. In one direction was more park, in the other the street. Don’t cross the street by yourself.
I walked to the street corner. Don’t get hit by a bus. Don’t get in a car with a person you don’t know. Watch out for cars. “DON’T WALK,” said the light. The sun was going down. Don’t stay out after dark. Everywhere were men in overcoats. If someone you don’t know offers you something, run. I found an old lady. She told me to take her old lady arm. Don’t bother the nice lady. “WALK,” said the light. She led me across the street, and when I pointed to my building, she took me to it. Home.
We went inside the elevator. I stood in one corner; she stood in the other. On a silver panel above the elevator door, a light moved from one number to the next: 11, 12, 14. Our apartment, 15E, was at the end of the hall. Don’t tell anyone where you live. The door was closed and looked like every other door. Ding-dong. I took one big breath and held it. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. The dog barked, her dog tags jangled. Ding-dong.
I banged on the door with two balled fists. I screamed, “Mommy! I’m here! I’m here!” The old lady crouched down so I could see her face, but I wouldn’t look. Look someone in eye when they’re talking to you. She asked if I knew my phone number. Don’t talk to strangers!
I kept beating on the door and screaming, this time, not words but one long sound so high and sharp it ripped the back of my throat. Then a lock unsnapped, and another, too. And the dog was licking my legs and the door had become my mother’s skirt—navy blue with purple tears falling every which way.
In my parents’ old bedroom, my mother recorded movies onto blank VHS tapes. The Dark Crystal. The Flamingo Kid. And a movie with Dudley Moore about Santa Claus that my sister almost starred in.
“They went with a girl with red hair,” a woman had explained to our answering machine when my sister was eleven and I was six. When my sister heard the news, she cried and cried as my mother held her. I wished I had a reason to cry, too.
My sister always wanted to be an actress, so I wanted to be an actress. She was twelve and I was seven when I accompanied her to an audition. In the waiting room, my mother opened a black case and pulled out the photograph of my sister’s face. Around the room were other mothers with other faces in their hands. One mother whisked blush on her daughter’s cheeks. Another sat with a pile of sweaters on her lap while her daughter scanned the room and reconsidered her outfit. My sister’s name was called and she went into a room. When she came back out, a lady asked my mother if I could go into the room as well.
From there I started going into rooms more often. The waiting areas were all the same, with the same kids and their parents sitting in foldout chairs. The redheaded twins, the blond boy with the big lips, the girl with the golden ringlets whose mother was always whisking blush on her cheeks.
In one room, a woman asked if I could cry on command. When I said I couldn’t, she asked, “What makes you frightened, what makes you sad?” My sister had already warned me about this challenge. Her tactic was to imagine our grandfather dying, and eventually tears would come out, but that didn’t work for me. Instead, I came up with my own method. I thought of the time I got lost, when for a moment, with the door locked in front of me, I had no mother and no home. My whole life depended on her opening that door. My whole face swelled up with tears.
At home, in the old apartment, a message on the answering machine said I got the part, but then my mother read the script. It was a TV movie about a man who loves a little girl. That sounded okay, I told her, because some men are nice and some little girls are wise and, I imagined, sometimes they could be friends. But her mind was made up: I was too young to play a part like that. In her bedroom, as the red record light flickered on the VCR, it was my turn to cry. I didn’t care about the movie, I just wanted her to hold me.
When I was eight, all the suitcases came down from the top shelf of the hallway closet in the middle of the night. We were to pack our bags for Florida, our father told us, but we weren’t to bother Mommy. When I went to find her, she was in her bedroom in her nightgown facing the window. Her shoulders were moving up and down and she was whimpering little birdie calls. When she turned around her eyes were swollen. “My daddy died,” she said, as if she were the littlest girl in the room.
Once, after a bath, I was wrapped in a towel with a hood and carried to my crib.
Once I reached up from my crib to touch one of my sister’s braids.
Once I lay in bed imagining what I would look like when I was older.
Once I whispered into the crack in the wall, “Are you asleep?”
In our old apartment, the dining room was originally a patio, but my parents covered it in windows to seal it up. Once my sister opened one of the windows and dragged on a Marlboro Light. Then she handed it to me just to try. She was sixteen, I was eleven.
When we were seventeen and twelve, my mother announced the wall between our beds was coming down, and it was yanked out like a big white tooth.
A few months later, we packed up our room to move to Park Avenue. My sister’s boxes were divided: Half would go with us to the new apartment, half would go with her to college. When all of the rooms were emptied out, we took turns saying “Goodbye, apartment,” and after we shut the door, our world changed.
Now it’s all heels on hardwood floors and Missus Weiss and Park Avenue and the guest bathroom and the maid’s room and Your father is tired and Quiet, adults are talking and men in the house with drills and hidden keys and Ralph Lauren on the beds, the walls, the windows, in the curl of perfumed smoke rising from the wick of a candle and the elevator man, the cleaning lady, the cleaning lady’s lace-collared uniform hanging in the maid’s room and board meetings and Missus Weiss, can we help you with that? and Would you like us to bring up your dry cleaning, Mister Weiss? and invitations with silver indented letters magnetized to the fridge and coming home to darkness and the sound of the new dog rattling the door she’s locked behind and the new dog’s leather leash and smoking alone out the bathroom window, smoking alone in the stairwell and the armoire and the foyer and Pierre Deux on Madison Avenue and Demarchelier between Madison and Park and Do you know who that was? and Can we get a taxi? and Give him a single and Give her my regards and the secret thing my mother whispered, palms flat on the gleaming, white kitchen island: We’re rich.