She opened her eyes again. Ah. There was twelve-year-old Ruby. The sanctimonious and the sulky side emerging in tandem, a surefire sign of her adolescent self. “We could have brought her to the apartment for a little bit, at least,” she said.
“Oh, yeah? And what would we do with her here? Keep her, like a pet?”
“We would figure it out. We would find her some resources. Isn’t meditation supposed to help with compassion?”
“I don’t need a lecture on compassion, Ruby.”
“I’m not lecturing. I’m just saying—”
“Shh.” He held up a hand. “Your mother’s trying to sleep again.”
“You’re being inhuman. So is Mom. If you really cared about Lily, if you were actually sad, you wouldn’t have made her leave.”
“Shut up,” he said. A long silence between them. “You have to be quiet because your mother’s trying to sleep. She’s nervous about her panel. Think about someone other than yourself. Okay?”
She stood there, watching him like he had turned into a muted TV, a commercial she didn’t want to hear.
Well, fine. He could mute her, too. He put on his noise-canceling headphones. He went to his meditation bench to watch his breath alone. He closed his eyes and their apartment disappeared entirely, and his daughter did, too. His heartbeat slowed. His face cooled. His breath was the only sound. It was like he was alone in a vast single-story building, or an echoing hallway, or a familiar chamber, dark, with its own steady pulse.
2 RUBY AND THE TRUE DISGRACE
When Ruby had worked as a barista, the line of customers in the morning often stretched out the door. At least once every single day, she would have no idea how she would be able to process the personalized beverage demands of so many people, the lattes and the cortados, the almond milk and the soy. Dizziness would overtake her, and for several breaths she could not see individuals before her, just a multifaced blob of early-morning want.
The anger Ruby felt for her father after he’d kicked out Lily’s cousin was like that long line of customers, it had so many faces. It was dizzying, her rage; it seemed to portend a wide range of specific demands. Some part of her was angry because of how her father had dismissed the woman in the foyer, and some part of her was angry because of how he’d then dismissed Ruby’s own feelings, and some part of her was angry because her father always seemed to view any inkling of moral certitude she had as the misguided product of an expensive liberal arts education. How would she deal with each face of her anger right now? How would she give each component of her own rage the attention it needed? It would feel good to rip off the headphones her father wore, to scream into his face, which, unlike her anger, was singular, basically immutable. All her life, her father’s face had seemed unchanging to Ruby, even as the logical part of her brain acknowledged that his beard was now streaked with white and his wrinkles had begun to set.
It was especially difficult to notice the wrinkles now, since he was acting like a little kid—moping on his meditation bench, playing pretend enlightenment the way some five-year-old would play pretend in the Kingdom of Make-Believe. Her father had pointed out that she had never been so upset at him for kicking someone out of the building before. And he was right about that. He had received calls about homeless people in the foyer quite a few times during Ruby’s childhood. A man would call and report that someone was sleeping downstairs, his voice suggesting that Ruby’s father had failed at his job. Or a woman would call, say she was sorrysosorry to leave a message at such an early hour, but there was somebody just outside the locked lobby door, and wasn’t that a security concern? Not only had Ruby grown up acclimated to such calls, she’d also grown up acclimated to the queasy guilt that followed them—thanks largely to Caroline, who not only had more toys, but also, seemingly, a stronger moral compass. Once, during a childhood playdate up in 6A, when they were in the middle of Holocaust-orphans-sisters-survivors and pretending to run away from the Nazi guards, Caroline abruptly stopped wheeling her arms around as if a new idea had occurred to her. She had plucked at the lacy white collar on her new denim dress and said, “My mom told me your dad kicks homeless people out of the building.”
Ruby looked down at her own frayed jeans. She was near the end of second grade and something about all the emphasis on place value in math had made her newly aware of loose threads.
“That’s very mean of him. Homeless people need our help. They have no place to go.”
Ruby had said he was just doing what the people in the building told him to do, and Caroline had said that you couldn’t just follow orders or you got World War II. “My mom helps homeless people,” Caroline said. “She donates clothes that they can wear at job interviews.”
It was time to change the subject. “Look!” Ruby said, pointing at a large stuffed animal. “A Nazi! A really big one! Run!”
“A Naziiii!” echoed Caroline. “Run to the forest!” At peak drama in their games, the beauty mark on Caroline’s cheek seemed to throb. “Run run run to the forest, the Nazis don’t know about the forest there!” She gripped the cloth arm of her newest doll.
Caroline’s parents gave her new dolls all the time. She owned dolls that could say “Mama” and dolls that could say “Hungry” and dolls that could piss right in your arms, and she had all the American Girl dolls, except for Addy, the black one, and Molly, the one with glasses. During their playdates, they sometimes made monogrammed pottery for the dolls using Caroline’s clay. If Ruby didn’t have clay on her hands, Caroline would let her not only hold the dolls, but also cover the doll bodies with her own to protect them from Nazis. Caroline was better at playing Holocaust-orphans-sisters-survivors than Ruby was. Even when they were pretending the Nazis were threatening to gas them, Ruby was always sort of smiling. Whereas Caroline could quickly turn stormy, sad. There was something fantastical about the scope of Caroline’s solemnity. Ruby loved watching her face. Even Caroline’s laugh possessed a keening at its core, a sense of rhythmic lamentation underneath her “ha ha ha!”
Caroline’s grandmother had survived Dachau, but her grandmother’s parents had not. Ruby’s own maternal and paternal great-grandparents, who were also Jewish, had come over to New York alone, without family, from somewhere in Eastern Europe, but nobody was sure where exactly because of shifting borders. Her parents knew next to nothing about them. Maybe because Caroline could recite her grandmother’s dark history—give actual dates and names to the places where atrocities happened—she seemed more sophisticated to Ruby, more grown-up, even though Caroline was physically much smaller than Ruby. As a child, Ruby had often imagined that if they had actually been in a concentration camp together, she would have given Caroline some of her rations to keep her from getting too feeble to work. When she became jealous of Caroline, she enjoyed contemplating how she would save her from the death camps in an alternate universe. She thought about how she would shield Caroline’s body with her own whenever Caroline would hold up some new gorgeous jewel-eyed doll and say, “This is Samantha and she’s a lawyer. Okay, Ruby? She’s a very special lawyer for very sick kids and their parents.” A few minutes after she accused Ruby’s father of meanness against the homeless, she held out Jasmina. “Jasmina is a princess, but also she is a journalist. She writes about politics, and she tries to expose evildoing by using her words. Ruby, have you heard of Watergate?”