Their apartment was a little broken. The windowpanes didn’t quite fit their frames. Drafts got in, and soot. The crack across the kitchen wall had recently gotten bigger. And there was an actual hole in the floor of the upstairs hallway that looked right down onto the couch. It was not big enough for a penny, but you could push a Tic Tac through. Once, a bracelet Annamae had gotten as a party favor broke and she lay on her stomach and encouraged all the clear pink seed beads toward the hole. They rained down with a satisfying patter on the living room part of the downstairs. “Pennies from heaven,” said her mother drily from the couch, where some of the pink beads landed.
“They’re not pennies,” called Annamae, one eye to the hole. “And this isn’t heaven!”
“Idiom,” said her mother.
To this day, you could still sometimes find one of the beads stuck between the cushions.
Also the apartment had crooked floors. In some of the rooms the floor slanted this way and in some of the rooms it slanted that way. In the kitchen, it managed to slant both ways.
The kids used this to their advantage when they were building marble runs. They knew just how to work with all the various slopes and dips to maximize speed and smoothness. “You’re real connoisseurs of the topography,” their mother remarked.
“What does that mean?” they wanted to know. They thought she was calling them a type of dinosaur.
But no, she explained. Topography meant the surface features of a place. And connoisseurs, she said, meant “You know these floors like the back of your hand.”
At this, Annamae and Danny stopped putting together pieces of marble track and examined the backs of their hands. Annamae felt she did not know hers all that well. There was a little freckle or mole on one that she’d never noticed before. And some purple marker she didn’t realize she had gotten on herself. Also her veins looked weird. The longer she studied them, the stranger her own hands looked.
Their mother told them a story about the crooked floors. When she and their father had been apartment hunting and they’d come to this one, their mother had liked it, but their father had said, “We can’t live here; the floors are tilted.”
“No they’re not,” their mother had said.
“Give me your lipstick,” said their father.
So she handed him the tube of lipstick from her purse and he set it at his feet and it rolled straight across the room.
“So he was right,” said Danny.
“He was.”
“But you wound up here anyway.”
“We did.”
Then Danny didn’t say anything else, although for several moments it looked like there was something else he wanted to say.
For Annamae, the most interesting part of the story was learning that their mother had once carried lipstick in her purse.