Before she had heard of capitalists and proletarians, owners and renters, haves and have-nots, Sadie was aware that there were economic distinctions between families. Some clans carried themselves with a quiet sense of entitlement, the fathers visible but taciturn, the mothers in their fancy kitchens with stone counters and European appliances, giving gentle directions to their help and, sometimes, to babysitters like Sadie, before vanishing for the evening. These homes were tidy, swept, and, when Sadie first learned the word bourgeois, she immediately used these carefully designed and sparse lofts as her frame of reference.
Sadie came to think of her own family as being like aborigines: indigenous peoples cowering in their fifth-floor walk-up with its soggy butcher-block kitchen counter, Dynavent open-flame heaters, illegally mounted boiler, and bathroom floor through which she could see the downstairs neighbors’ bathroom if she opened the cabinet beneath the sink and peered through the hole where the plumbing snaked south. Her father had moved into the place when nobody else had been interested in living here, and their tenancy was guaranteed by a loft law whose continued jurisdiction her father was constantly signing petitions to ensure. The space was worth millions now, and the landlord was eager to push out Sadie’s family, renovate this unit into one of those tidy, swept designer lofts, and sell it to a member of the bourgeoisie. Yet her father, protected by the legal system he had once professed to despise, was immovable.
Her father had once, in a serious moment, told Sadie that whatever she did, no matter what great odysseys she embarked upon, she must always return to this apartment to maintain her residency and therefore ensure her legal claim. This rent-controlled tenancy was, presumably, her inheritance.
In elementary school, there had been plenty of girls and boys like her. Progeny of artist parents, or at least parents who looked artistic, who had lucked into good deals and now were mingling with the wealthy. But the rich seemed to be arriving in ever-increasing numbers. She hadn’t noticed the transformation at first: the change from battered Fords with hoods as long as ping-pong tables and Volvo station wagons with duct tape instead of rear windows to late-model Mercedes and Land Rovers, looking equally forlorn parked in the dull street light but each, in its shining “notice me” eagerness, a sign the neighborhood was gentrifying, one unvandalized vehicle at a time. Of course, a child doesn’t explicitly posit concepts like gentrification. But Sadie began to understand it intuitively by the end of elementary school, when some of her peers were enrolled in private schools named for saints or rich men while others, like her, would be going to schools with numbers instead of names. She knew, without ever asking her parents, that those fancy-sounding schools were out of the question, just as she knew, without ever asking her friends, that those schools promised entrée into a network of people with fancy kitchens, a world of rich kids.
Those kids, the ones who had gone on to private schools, had indeed become part of a wider social network of young adults. Though they still lived in the neighborhood, and she would run into them from time to time, their friends came from all over the city: from the Upper East Side, from Sutton Place, Brooklyn Heights, Central Park West. They were involved in school activities that took them to Europe, social events for which you bought drinks by the bottle at nightclubs, and in the summer they were inevitably away at their Summer Houses. Sadie remained close to the neighborhood girls and boys who had attended the local junior high school and high school, the public schools. She had a few friends, the pretty girls who, though their families lacked the means to send them to the private schools, had, by virtue of their looks and charms, been included in certain of those tribal rites of the wealthier. Being beautiful, Sadie concluded, was almost like being rich.
There was nothing wrong with Sadie’s looks, but one would be hard-pressed to remark on them. Black hair, brown eyes, a thick arc of black eyebrow, good nose, freckles, thin lips. Pretty enough, analyzed feature by feature, but then, step back and Sadie was just a few crucial inches too short to pass for normal. And she wasn’t thin. The effect of her, then, was like being in the presence of a beautiful block. But what is wonderful about a perfect square?
She had concluded early on that she would have to work hard. And living in close proximity to these successful families afforded her plenty of opportunities to study them, all while making a little money caring for their children after school and in the evenings.
HER FATHER HAD moved to New York to become an artist, and they lived now surrounded by vestiges of that putative vocation. In their railroad loft, along the brick wall that ran east to west, was evidence that he had dabbled in painting and worked for years as a puppeteer. The vinyl cases arranged spine-out in bookshelves made from planks and old phone books were proof that he had also produced some sort of unwatchable video art about those puppets. Sadie had the only proper room in the house—a windowless cavern that served as her bedroom. Her father slept at the rear of the loft, beneath the air-shaft windows. There was one bathroom that he had years ago jerry-rigged with cheap panels, and, for some reason, a Jacuzzi-style bathtub whose jets had never, in Sadie’s recollection, functioned, and were now calcified to a kind of lime-green. His skill, it turned out, was as a tinkerer. Whenever one of the families Sadie looked after would need to dispose of some out-of-favor appliance or component part, Sadie would lug it home or tell her father about it and he would show up with a hand truck and roll the dishwasher or television or karaoke machine back home. He would pull apart the devices, spread the parts across the living-room floor, rendering this space uninhabitable for days, as he patiently studied the array before him, before deducing which was the flawed belt or shaft or cowling or housing, and then he would head down to the last remaining hardware store in the neighborhood to seek a replacement. He had rebuilt dozens of machines, and that was the reason the family had a wide-screen television (in its heyday, a shockingly expensive model) that displaced as many cubic feet of prime Manhattan real estate as a parked car. (The screens of the sleeker families were all flat.) They had a double-door fridge and, stacked in the living room disrupting the viewing of the monstrous television set, was a washer and dryer that Sadie’s father also had resurrected.
Her father lamented the closing of each mediocre neighborhood restaurant though they rarely dined in them, every crappy discount store that you only went to when you were too lazy to walk to Staples or J&R, even the Dominican-run pawnshop down on Chambers in which he had never set foot. He saw each closing as setting the stage for further gentrification. And Sadie knew that if there was one thing her father was not down with, it was an upgraded neighborhood.
Her mother, Caroline, worked at Harvest House, a nonprofit that coordinated the distribution of free meals to indigent families. She was, more than anything else, gone: she had moved out of the loft when Sadie was twelve to a floor in a brownstone on the wrong side of a park in Brooklyn. Sadie’s custody had been determined by her school district, the one in Tribeca generally considered better, i.e., whiter, than the one in Brooklyn.
Her parents had maintained cordiality, primarily because of Sadie—drop-offs, pickups, forgotten homework, parent-teacher conferences, and emergency babysitting. Now that Sadie was largely determining her own wheres and whens, she suspected her parents would soon go months without speaking, then years, and then eternity.
She was guiltily aware of her father’s deep and unrelenting love for her. The way he watched her, the quick smile and upturned eye-corners whenever she would roll back into the loft. He who was so indifferent to food, could live on rice crackers, peanut butter, and marijuana for months, would order takeout from Zen Palate or Takahachi if Sadie was home. He asked her about everything, told her about everything, and wished the world for her, but for a long time, Sadie wanted nothing to do with him. It had to do with the sense, steady as cicada buzz, that he had succumbed to life rather than seized it. She had studied the other dads, and they had this eager, unvanquished quality; Pop-pop, on the other hand, seemed to shy away from life. Still, she was coming to appreciate his steady current of adoration and feckless gestures of support. He would never be good for tuition, but if you needed the tube changed on your bike he would get that done lickety-split.
Fathers are mysterious to their daughters. For most of their youths, girls barely stop to wonder about the middle-aged male in their life. He’s good for a shoulder ride, or to hang up a white board, or to teach you how to ride a bike or swim. But he is also distant, quiet, confused, bumbling, sleepy, indifferent, slow to anger but once riled unmerciful in handing out groundings and confiscating cell phones. But he was there, always there. And Sadie was just now beginning to see who he was, and that he was the only person who saw Sadie as the absolute center of the universe. And that would always count for something.
SADIE WALKED DOWN the five flights of creaky stairs to the grimy ground-floor landing. Here, the building’s tenants haphazardly leaned their bicycles into one another so that pedals became enmeshed with spokes and handlebars caught brake-lines. Gradually, those bikes that were infrequently used would migrate to the back of the metallic jumble where tires would eventually deflate, chains rust, and seats become covered with dust. Sadie’s big old Baker Continental, the discard of a publicist mother who had purchased the vintage bike on sight without ever riding it, was among the most used and therefore nearly always at the outside of the pack. The one-speed bike was heavy, creaky, and slow to pick up speed. Once in motion, though, the bike’s weight and bulk seemed to give it a momentum of its own and only a minimum of effort was required to keep the Baker moving at a stately pace down Hudson and then across Duane.
She parked on the street, unfurling from around her chest the heavy chain and alarm clock–size lock she used to secure the bike to one of the bicycle docks that had started popping up around the neighborhood. She let herself into the building and rode up to the third floor, where she found the Asian-looking father standing by himself before the stone counter in the kitchen, looking at a photocopy of a flyer—a badly reproduced image of a man who looked like him.
He smiled as he greeted her but she suspected he was unsure of who, exactly, she was. Sadie knew that he worked in the music or entertainment business; that he did something technical with sound for television shows and films. He was often distracted, coming and going from the loft with no discernible schedule. He seemed similar, in many ways, to her father, only with much more money and far less resentment.
The girls were in their part of the apartment, and Sadie found her way across the loft to the vast area that the mother referred to as the nursery. Sadie was fond of the girls, and the youngest did not yet fully comprehend that Sadie was an employee and not a friend. So her arrival meant to them the presence of another playmate.
Her job, if she were asked to summarize it in one sentence, was: Keep the girls in their nursery and then, at some point, remove them from the loft. She deposited them in ballet studios, gymnastics classes, or music practice rooms. Sometimes she brought the girls to their friends’ houses for playdates, where Sadie would sit in the living room, often accompanied by a fellow nanny of Caribbean or Asian descent, the two of them having nothing to say to each other and, seemingly, little in common save their similar relationships with wealthy people. And lately, she’d had to bring the elder one, Cooper, to various modeling go-sees and castings.
It was while walking to and from these various appointments that Sadie and the girls engaged in long and often surprising conversations. They were still young enough to be clueless as to the ages of adults. The younger, Penny, guessed that her mother was eighteen years old and that Sadie was twelve. Sadie was, of course, close to eighteen now and the girls’ mother was closer to forty. The girls asked Sadie if she liked various Disney shows she was vaguely aware of, and then what she wanted to do when she grew up. This last question Sadie always found to be a challenge as she walked, a little girl’s hand in each of hers and her backpack filled with juice boxes and other kid detritus—Missus Possum plush toys, notebooks, pencils, sunglasses, hats, towels, jewelry, and, of course, iPods and/or iPhones—she had stuffed in before leaving the loft. (When did American children begin to emulate mountaineers in their view of how much gear was appropriate when leaving their homes? Sadie recalled leaving her house with what she could stuff in her pockets. These kids needed a Sherpa.) What did Sadie want to be?
She had applied to a half-dozen colleges, liberal arts institutions spread throughout the Northeast and Midwest, with little idea of what she might actually study when she was there. She suffered from the misconception endemic to a certain kind of New York childhood: she had been raised to believe that each human endeavor, from science to art to finance to animal husbandry to music, was equally valid and necessary. Rich kids, those she had grown up amidst, had that idea drilled into them by their winner parents. You can be anything you fancy. As if the world had an unlimited appetite for artists and designers and actresses. The neighborhood lent credence to this mistaken belief. Weren’t there such creative types all around them, living effortlessly in lovely places? Yet Sadie had seen the flops too and, rather late in high school, had concluded that perhaps all professions weren’t created equal. Her father, she had long ago realized, was not going to miraculously emerge from his rent-controlled cocoon to become a great, well-paid, creative butterfly. Yet by now, with her leaky arithmetic and indifference to algebra, it was too late for Sadie to change course and indicate to prospective universities a great interest in accounting or finance.
So she was destined, she suspected, for the English department of whichever college would pony up the biggest saddlebag of financial aid. Her transcript had been fine, her test scores on the lower end of good, and she had deduced that the same meek, respectful, good nature that allowed her to win favor, and $15 an hour, from these families might also win over admissions officers. She had preferences: she’d prefer a private liberal arts school to a large public institution. The girls from the New York City private schools, she guessed, would go on to private liberal arts colleges, at least those who weren’t admitted to an Ivy League school.
Her father had been a non-resource during that period of filling out applications and gathering recommendations. Having never attended college himself, and never one to expertly fill out a form—save those that guaranteed his continued occupancy—he had encouraged Sadie with platitudes about expressing herself and then gone back to studying the inner workings of a food processor.
Her mother had been more helpful, sliding on reading glasses to study Sadie’s essays, and she proved to be of particular use in completing the financial aid forms in a manner intended to elicit not pity but sympathy.
Unstated during this whole process, by her mother, by her college and career counselor, had been that if massive financial aid were not forthcoming, then Sadie wasn’t going anywhere. Or, there was always the junior college on the West Side or Hunter uptown, but she wouldn’t be joining and catching up, finally, a little, with those girls who had headed off to private school all those years ago.
Now, as Penny and Cooper asked her this simple question—What did she want to be?—Sadie couldn’t help but run through these calculations in her head, and had to resist answering that if the money doesn’t come through, she wouldn’t be anything.
SHE WAS STILL in touch with a few of the girls she had known in elementary school, when they had all been tucked into the cute little classrooms behind the wrought-iron gate; when their world extended only to the cut-out letters on the wall, their names and birthdays written on the white board, and whatever art projects the teacher had festooned throughout the classroom. (Oh, and the innumerable Indian projects they worked on. By now, there must have been as many elementary school projects devoted to Native Americans as there had actually been pre-apocalypse Native Americans.) At what age was she aware that some girls were different, that their parents had the means to live in a certain mode while Sadie’s folks were outmoded? They were done with that little school at the end of fifth grade, but she must have noticed the differences earlier. Fourth? End of third? The girls with summer houses, with mothers who drove around Lower Manhattan in SUVs, the girls who were collected in the yard after school by nannies instead of a curious-looking father in crooked sunglasses and paint-smeared Chuck Taylors. Those girls had begun to pair off, to arrange themselves in quivers of better clothing, fancier shoes, suntans after Christmas and winter break. And these days, as she often found herself back in that yard to pick up Penny and Cooper after school, she could see the girls segregating themselves in the same manner. Cooper seemed particularly adept at befriending those similarly stationed and Sadie saw a hierarchy emerging; the more powerful females rejecting the weaker, the prettier and more desirable already segregating themselves. It broke her heart, a little, to see the suddenly bewildered and less powerful females tossed from the pod, left to wander at the fringes of the cliques as the classes made their way out the double-doors into the yard. Broke her heart, yes, but also filled her with a kind of hatred for Cooper and girls like her, who were already castigating, ostracizing, selecting in or out.
Sadie occasionally saw a few of her old friends. They texted periodically, inviting her over on slow nights when they had nothing better going on. Often, Sadie would end up watching television while her better-connected acquaintances iChatted on their laptops or texted other friends, engaging in a long and winding loop of gossip about boys and parties, a vast and glittery-seeming world whose primary attribute, from where Sadie sat watching muted DVR episodes of shows that before this evening she had barely been aware of, was that Sadie had no part in it.
Yet it was Sadie’s gift that she could sit by while her friends made their more glamorous plans and never make them feel even a flicker of pity. She was used to being the one who got a little less, who wasn’t cut into the good deals or added to guest lists or there for opening night. And these girls liked having an audience. They enjoyed safe, nonjudgmental Sadie, easy-to-impress Sadie, Sadie from around the way who they had known forever and ever and who they could call whenever and she would roll up—on a bicycle!—and it didn’t matter if they didn’t have cool people over or chronic or Krug, she would show up and hang, impressed that they had a Wii for fuck’s sake. It was a little embarrassing that she worked as—for real!—a nanny. But Sadie was good people. Even the badass girls, the connected sirens who fancied themselves as manipulative as nighttime teen soap biddies, needed a low-maintenance friend.
Here, in the center of so many cultural and financial circles, amid families connected to the power and wielding the power, why was it so hard to envision a future anywhere but in nightclubs? Kids around the country, around the world, didn’t they dream bigger? Didn’t they have grand notions of the law or medicine, of directing blockbusters or dreaming up a killer app? But these girls, nominally her peers, they seemed to have become mired in the quicksand of their parents’ success. Because wasn’t one of the reasons those kids in flyover states dreamed of making it big was to make it here? To be on the list at The Box on Friday? And for Sadie, who took so many of her cues as to what she should be, how she should act, what she should think, from the families of the children she cared for and, to an even greater extent, the better, fancier-heeled girls from just around the block, it sometimes seemed like nobody was casting a glance much past, say, Friday night. She hadn’t yet encountered the word provincialism, and though she had been suspended and choked in the web of stultifying thought thrown off by that blindered sensibility, she was now, for the first time, catching gusts of fresher, less cloyingly perfumed, cleaner air. You look through those college handbooks, an unlikely source yet still, for Sadie, the aspirational antipode of fashion magazines or The Hills. You study those photos of kids walking on diagonal paths across broad lawns, backpacks slung over their shoulders, or the trio of students—one white, one black, one Asian—engaged in an earnest conversation around a microscope. They didn’t care about being on the list. They had reached some nirvana, where, Sadie had come to believe, the means of your family was irrelevant. Maybe college was an El Dorado for the moderately attractive financially challenged. Strangely, the girls she knew in her hood, like this crew this evening, were called privileged by the media. They were from Saint Anne’s and Dalton, sitting around the—what was this room, this little elbow segregated from but somehow linked to the den? Did it even have a name? This extra little spit of living space, like an afterthought larded with a flat screen and a Wii and sectional leathers?
Sadie slid onto the floor, her butt against some sort of carpet that felt old and thick and hairy, like the hide of a prehistoric mammal. They were talking about the girl who had been molested, just down the street. The guy totally followed her into her building, then into the elevator to the basement, where he, like, forced her to blow him and then shot it all over her face. Some of the girls knew her. She was a freshman at Claremont. Brunette, sort of cute but no sizzle. So, like, why did that freak pick her? There were so many hotter girls.
But, eeeewwww, it was so gross, that guy, that, you know, black guy, not that that mattered because they all knew brothers who were totally hot, but, just thinking of—
“I heard,” said one girl, “that he totally butt-raped her.”
Eeeeeewwwww.
“But he wasn’t black?” Sadie ventured, recalling the poster she had seen around the neighborhood. “He was, like, Mexican.”
Whatever. It’s still gross.
WHY DID CERTAIN girls rule and others follow? Was it entirely a matter of wealth? Was it permissive parenting that forbade nothing? That took the view that every misbehavior, every cruelty perpetrated by one kid on another should be let slide in the name of letting kids be kids? (Let them be kids, really let them, and you will end up with a tribe of bulimic eugenicists with huge amounts of credit card debt.) No, Sadie had to admit, for in every bloom, there was the girl or two who wasn’t rich, but she had something else. Looks helped, of course, but some girls just knew how to be mean in the right way. They knew how to be mean first, to gain the upper hand in every relationship by being cruel before anyone was cruel to them. Sadie had failed at that. In elementary school, when the ostracism had begun, she had been stunned when the pretty girls modeling for Vogue Bambini or Gap Kids shunned her when she approached them in the yard, with a quick, smirking, “You know, Sadie, you don’t stay friends with the same people forever.”
She backed away at a loss for words, hoping she didn’t look too hurt. It was like finding out the devil was real.
She wondered what those girls had that she didn’t. Was there a mean gene? Or could meanness be learned, and if so, should she learn it? Wasn’t good-natured Sadie, helpful, decent Sadie useless? Wasn’t she obsolete? Was it time to learn to be mean?
She had decided Sadie 2.0 would be unveiled in college. But how would she ever get to college, with her deadbeat dad and her mother barely subsisting? Sadie earned as much as she could nannying, picking up and making the rounds with Penny and Cooper, the long afternoons and Saturdays, the Wednesdays and alternate Friday nights. The hours-long stretches of Candyland, then Monopoly, and now, god help her, Cranium and Apples to Apples.
How much could she make? She often calculated this as she rode the Baker around Tribeca on her way to pick up the girls at school. At $15 an hour, sixteen hours a week, that wasn’t even two honeys a week. And college cost, what, a zillion dollars a year? She didn’t like to read that part of the brochures, the part where it broke down tuition, housing, meal plans, activity fees, and books. Sometimes Penny and Cooper’s mom would talk to Sadie about college. She had attended Sarah Lawrence, and she either carefully avoided the subject of tuition or, more likely, Sadie believed, just couldn’t imagine that it could ever be an issue. For these people, the money was always there, magically replenishing, like a child’s conception of how an ATM worked. She recalled walking with Penny and Cooper through SoHo, past a store that Penny and Cooper insisted on stopping at, a fancy clothing store that Sadie had assumed wouldn’t sell children’s wear. But there, to one side, were little dresses and cute kids’ jeans and tiny little wool coats with fur collars. The girls had begun picking through the racks, finding jackets and dresses they liked, oohing and aahing. Sadie had glanced at the price tags and was shocked by the numbers: many hundreds of dollars for little kids’ clothes that would be outgrown in a matter of months. “This stuff is crazy,” she said, more to herself, “nobody would buy this stuff.”
Then later, back at home, as she was pulling off Penny’s dress, she noticed a label from that very store.
So how could these people even imagine that you could get into a college, a good college, and then not be able to go?
She thought about the girls she had gone to elementary school with, girls not unlike Penny and Cooper, and wondered again about the mean gene, and realized that if she didn’t have it, then she would have to learn it. She could be, what was it? What were those girls? Ruthless, that’s it. The girls were like that, and their parents must have been too; that’s how they got here.
THERE WERE SO many bright girls in New York, her College-and-Career Lady warned her. She sat behind a plain white table with chrome legs that ended in little black rubber cups, presumably to keep them from scraping the linoleum floor. Piled on her table and atop the filing cabinets in her office were hundreds of those brochures, the marketing paraphernalia of the education industry, trade schools touting Personalized Professional Training and liberal arts colleges promising Higher Learning with a Purpose. The ivy, the granite, the old buildings, the stadiums. It was like they were selling four-year package tours instead of school. Sadie had lacked the scratch to pay for the Kaplan Test Prep classes and Kumon math tutorials, but she had nonetheless tested respectably; her grades had been good but not great—the overall impression created by her transcript was of moderate intelligence and academic diligence. Would it be enough? In this city of bright Asian girls from Stuyvesant and the carefully curated extracurricular résumés of rich girls with fancy last names from Trinity? Of course not, Sadie decided. Not if she needed hundreds of thousands in financial aid. Wouldn’t they give that money to a brilliant Gujarati with science chops or to a Korean violinist?
There were state schools, she was reminded, that provided a comparable education at a more reasonable price. How about SUNY Purchase?
No. She dreamed of finally leveling the playing field. This ambition caught even Sadie off guard, appearing one day as this vague desire to finally get a taste of what it felt like to be in instead of out. And the idea wouldn’t let go, so that even after the applications had been sent, with her safety school, Rutgers, dutifully included, she refused to consider that possibility.
So when a trickle of acceptance letters started arriving—Wellesley, Kenyon, Vassar—and she showed them to the College-and-Career Lady, she was taken aback by the praise she received; it was given as if, see, you are every bit as smart as those other girls, now you won’t feel so bad about what you are missing while you’re at Purchase. But bullshit, she thought. No. Just because they weren’t offering much scholarship money, and just because even with PELL grants and Staffords she wouldn’t be able to close the gap, never mind eat or sleep in a bed while she was there, she refused to admit she wouldn’t be attending one of these prestigious, fancy institutions of higher learning. She had conceded so many times and in so many ways. Enough.
ONE AFTERNOON, AS she was emptying the girls’ mac ’n’ cheese plates into the compactor, she decided she would just ask. What could it hurt? They were rich, right? They might even enjoy such an act of philanthropy.
After the girls’ bath, when she had gathered up her backpack to go, she knocked on the door to the guest bedroom, Brooke’s office space.
“Hi there.” Brooke turned from the computer where she was reading about the memoirist who had made everything up. He lived just a few blocks from here, Sadie knew, and Brooke had known his wife, or they had worked together or something like that.
“What’s up?”
Sadie set down her backpack and then took a seat on the fold-out sofa. “Um, you remember when we were talking about college?”
Brooke smiled.
“Um, so I think I want to go to Wellesley.”
“That’s awesome.”
Sadie almost didn’t ask but then just blurted it out. “Can you guys help me?”
“Help?”
“With the budget issues.”
Brooke inhaled. She furrowed a brow. Sadie assumed she was thinking about the question when what she was really thinking about was how to say no.
“Sadie, we love you. You are an incredible girl,” Brooke said. “But we’re not your parents. And we have two daughters of our own we are going to have to get through college. Not to mention private school for six years before that.”
Sadie nodded. Suddenly, she felt ashamed she had asked.
SO WHAT WAS Dad thinking anyway? She was sitting on the sofa, eating a bowl of Kashi and soy milk, watching a cartoon. Sadie blurted it out: This was her big dream, and, well, what did he ever dream about?
“What was yours? What is yours?”
Her father, who still had a swirl of white spackle in his hair from some work he had been doing to the rear of the loft, turned to her. His beard was growing in gray and erratic, the follicles going everywhere like the whirly antennae of lobsters you see in Chinatown tanks, his facial pores seemed to be widening as he aged, black holes in flesh, tunnels into his head. But Pop-pop, no matter how he aged, he just kept looking more and more like himself. He was so totally and completely himself that he could almost pass for invisible as he walked down Tribeca streets nowadays. The other grown-up dads wore Steven Alan or Rogan, and looked like overgrown little kids; her dad walked around in denim overalls from the fucking Gold Rush and old work boots.
“I, I . . .” He was about to say, his dream, his big idea, but then he paused.
Her dad looked at her for a while as if trying to think of what to say, and then went to one of the cinder-block-and-plank bookcases piled high with waterlogged paperbacks and old art magazines and came back with a videotape. He still had a VCR wired into the big-tube TV, and he popped in his video and grainy black-and-white footage soon tracked into focus. A robot, assembled from tin cans, with a rolled-back sardine-can top as a quiff, marched onto the screen and did an elaborate and primitive dance. It moved, Sadie imagined, sort of like cavemen would move, or Indians dancing around a campfire in front of their wigwams. The robot’s dance was appropriately jerky, a Frankensteinian clunkiness that was just how a robot like this would dance. It was a puppet, Sadie knew; there was a hand at the back of the robot, and strings controlling the condensed milk–can legs. The puppet’s movement was so perfect, so robotic, that Sadie for the first time—she had seen this footage before, she must have—understood what her father had been doing with these strange videos.
The video then cut to an anthropomorphic monkey wrench with iron-filing hair, the oddly feminine-looking tool bouncing up and down in a state of childlike distress. The rusty monkey wrench was agitated about something, was frightened, its fear communicated by her father’s manipulation and careful movement of—of a monkey wrench! He was making a monkey wrench seem frightened, seem like a little person. By simply moving it a certain way, holding it at an angle, bouncing it up and down once or twice, he was imbuing this monkey wrench with humanity.
And then the robot bounded into the frame and, okay, this was weird, sort of raped the little monkey wrench. But it was also somehow funny—totally insane, no doubt—but still, really fucking funny.
She began laughing. She had seen these old videos her father had made decades ago, had watched them as a child when she was too young to appreciate them, and they had always just seemed dark and dreary and just weird, the total opposite of the bright, airy happiness of the Tribeca she knew and worked in. But now she was old enough: she got it. They were dark and dreary, and they did make you uncomfortable, but that was because they were supposed to make you feel that way.
She watched the whole series of them, eight little short films, seeing the full scope and range of the human spirit reduced to metallic puppets bashing into each other, fucking each other, giving birth to each other, and betraying each other. It was amazing, she began to think, but it was so unlike any other regular achievements that it was no wonder they had been forgotten, or, actually, never really discovered. It was a uniquely weird thing he had done, and beautiful, in a crazy way.
She was proud of him.
“Why did you stop?” she said.
“I don’t know,” Pop-pop said. “I let things get in the way. I let people get in the way. I didn’t—”
He rubbed his beard. “I wasn’t, I wasn’t, I was, I—” He picked up Sadie’s empty cereal bowl and stood up to take it to the kitchen.
“Ruthless. I wasn’t ruthless. That’s what you have to be. That’s what everyone who makes it is. Everyone around here. And you have to be that, because there’s no penalty for ruthless. Only upside.”
SUCH WAS HER state of mind as she dolled up that night to meet a few of her old friends for drinks at a local tavern. It was one of those cash-only joints over on the other side of West Broadway, where the bars were lax about policing IDs, so there were enough cute girls to offset the suits pouring in from Citi a few blocks away. The mood of this gaggle of girls was celebratory. Most had been accepted into a college, if not the college of their choice. Most of the institutions were in or near New York—Sarah Lawrence, NYU—with one or two of the girls being bold enough to venture as far as Bennington or New Haven.
Sadie didn’t find the bar comfortable. It was a little paneled room with doors that looked like hatches on a submarine and straight-backed booths with mirrors over them on which were crayoned specials. The staff was a hirsute, mustachioed bunch of dudes wearing string ties and white shirts, the desired affect being Roaring Twenties, Sadie guessed. But then why was the waitress turned out like a Spanish peasant, thick-soled, clunky heels, black dress with floral top, and a red flower in her carefully tied-up bun? It was tiring to try to understand where this was all coming from, or going, and after two of the meticulously measured, blended, and poured cocktails—Sadie was drinking old-fashioneds, each running her nine carefully hoarded dollars—she decided that she wasn’t fond of bars, and never understood why among her girlfriends it was considered a coup when they got all glammed up and tricked a local into selling them drinks.
Sadie saw him as he walked in. At first, he didn’t recognize her, his eyes adjusting to the light. Penny and Cooper’s dad, after an instant, saw the friend he was meeting at the bar and joined him, the two of them taking stools and turning their backs on the rest of the room. Sadie became suddenly self-conscious, wondering if her being at this bar would disqualify her from caring for his daughters. Suddenly wary, she gulped her drink, the sickly sweet bourbon making her queasy for a moment as she forced it down.
Her friends, noticing Sadie gone more taciturn than usual, asked her what was going on.
It was embarrassing to explain the awkwardness, but she saw no alternative. The dad she worked for, she explained, the father, was over there.
They craned. They saw.
One commented that he was kind of cute.
“Eeeeew,” another one said. “He must be like forty!”
Sadie shrugged. She was thinking of slipping away when the father walked past, on his way out the door to smoke a cigarette. He stopped when he saw Sadie. Smiled. And continued on his way out.
They kept their discreet distance, Sadie downing another cocktail, the father over by the bar, drinking, turning once in a while to see if Sadie was still there. At one point, they both ended up outside the bar smoking and So, hey, how are you doing?
They didn’t talk about Penny or Cooper. Instead, the father began asking Sadie about what she was planning to do with her life, where she would be going to college. She mentioned her desires, her choices, Wellesley, Kenyon, or Vassar. He nodded. He told her he had gone to a state school in California. He wasn’t the student type, he said. He’d been more into playing in bands, the music scene, and he was probably lucky that he wasn’t as successful as some of his friends, because he had found his way into the whole sound-editing business and had sort of grown that into, like, this whole business. It never would have happened, he said, if he had been in a more successful band. You never know how it all adds up, or doesn’t. Something seems like a bad break and ends up lucky. You are pissed off at what goes wrong and then, a few years later, you realize it was a stroke of good fortune.
Her father occasionally spun such long-run nonsense, but coming from this dad, from the head of a successful family, it had a certain credibility. It almost sounded like wisdom.
He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, she now realized. With his long black hair, prominent nose, he reminded Sadie of the cartoons of American Indians they had studied when she was in grade school.
They continued talking at the bar, the father even buying all the girls drinks, which lent Sadie a little more status than usual, seen as she was to be jocking this older guy. She ordered another old-fashioned, her dizzying fourth, then another.
SHE REMEMBERED WALKING with him, down the darkened street, leaning into him, both joking that he had to protect her from the molester who was supposedly still at large.
THERE ARE IDEAS that arrive fully formed, complete with words and images, and even our ideas about those ideas are in place as soon as the thoughts manifest, so that the concept as edifice can be studied, walked around, so to speak, and then more axons fire into more dendrites so that an even denser supporting structure for the idea is built.
Sadie would later marvel at this process, at the sudden appearance of her big idea. It seemed to have arrived simultaneously with the seduction, but already it was so there: of course that’s what she already had been thinking.
And Sadie had to smile, for she was already becoming more calculating than she had ever thought herself capable of being. Like those other girls, those richer, prettier girls.
Ruthless.
THEY WERE AT his sound-effects studio, in a darkened little room with a box of gloves and little children’s shoes and what must have been a hundred belts. There was a shoebox full of zippers and another of different kinds of light switches and remote controls and various domestic objects that clicked. Where did he get all this stuff? she drunkenly wondered, as he worked on unbuttoning her blouse. When they were finished, the act still unfamiliar to Sadie, though she was not completely inexperienced, the simplicity of the solution was before her. She would ask him to pay for her education, or at least that part of it which wouldn’t be underwritten by scholarships and grants and loans, and of course he would pay for it. Or she would tell Brooke, the pretty brunette wife, what had happened here, would explain that he had bought her drinks and then had his way.
What choice would he have?