Ruby had not heard of Watergate.
“Well,” Caroline said, “Jasmina fixed it. She fixes all the things in the world that are a true disgrace.”
A true disgrace. Caroline said those words just like she had said Watergate, as if they were the name of a special, powerful doll Ruby would never have met without Caroline as her conduit. Ruby’s dolls did not pee, did not talk, did not come with their own career trajectories or historical backstories. Ruby must have unconsciously adopted a tragic air of deprivation, because later on during their playdate, Caroline had adjusted her lace collar again, and said, “I’m sorry I told you that your dad was mean for kicking people out.”
“It’s okay.”
“I know he can’t help it.”
“It’s his job,” Ruby said.
Then Caroline had given Ruby one of her American Girl dolls, the Colonial Williamsburg–era redhead. “You can watch Felicity until our next playdate, if you want.”
Ruby was always leaving 6A with borrowed stuff. Caroline’s parents would give her educational books on animals and ecosystems and history and famous artists, then ask her if she felt properly stimulated in school, if she was being presented with educational opportunities. But now she had something better than an educational opportunity. She had one of Caroline’s fanciest dolls.
Back in the basement apartment, Ruby had gone to her father and, clutching Felicity to her chest, said, “It’s very mean, what you’re doing. Homeless people have no place to go.”
He laughed in her face. Her father had never laughed at her like that before, had always laughed with her. She’d been so stunned, she’d let go of the doll, which hit the ground with a smack. Ruby picked the doll back up, turned her around and around, looking for signs of damage. The doll was fine. But Ruby’s limbs tingled. Had it actually been thrilling, for a second, thinking she had harmed Caroline’s doll? No, that made no sense. Caroline was her kind, generous friend. And this doll was a total plastic innocent.
Her father said, “You shouldn’t be borrowing stuff from tenants, anyway. If you damage their dolls, who do you think gets in big trouble?”
“You,” Ruby said.
“That’s right.”
Ruby looked down into Felicity’s glassy eyes. If her father were fired, they would lose their apartment. Ruby, her father, and her mother would wander the streets of the Upper West Side together, sleeping in Central Park by the ducks, huddling together by a campfire near Bow Bridge, waking up every day in some outdoor place filled with all the natural light the basement apartment didn’t receive. They’d wear rags like the orphans in Annie (which she’d just watched with Lily, who had lectured the whole time about how the ridiculously rich Daddy Warbucks was the real villain even if he adopted children, because hadn’t his own wealth generated the systems that created and forgot orphans in the first place; did Ruby understand?). Rag-wearing Ruby would pass Caroline in Strawberry Fields, and Caroline would look away, deeply ashamed. Ruby would be the girl who was at last poor enough to be truly noble and sympathetic and orphan-like, instead of a regular girl with a home and nice enough parents. If she smashed this doll somehow, if she dropped her from a great height, or burned her beautiful doll hair—then the role Ruby played in Caroline’s life might change.
But of course she didn’t do any of that. She took good care of Felicity, read to her every night, and returned her to Caroline unharmed.
* * *
—
A few weeks after Caroline accused Ruby’s father of being very mean, something bad happened to Ruby and Caroline when nobody was watching. The girls had just graduated from second grade and were not supposed to be alone. Ruby’s father was meant to babysit them during their playdate. But there had been a waste-pipe leak in 2D, damaging 1D’s ceiling. Something in one of the apartment units was always breaking, everything always on the verge of flood or fire. Back then Ruby saw her father as a kind of magician, preventing the building from succumbing to a range of biblical afflictions: infernos, deluges, pestilence. He was the one to call the firemen, the plumbers, the bedbug guy. He was responsible for saving them all from disaster. On top of that, their apartment was rent-free! Ruby was proud of this fact—she felt like they were getting away with something, especially knowing Caroline’s parents had paid a lot of money to buy their apartment. Ruby and Caroline never discussed this difference.
If the leak had not occurred, the girls would never have been alone in the building to begin with. They would have been at the Museum of Natural History, one of Ruby’s favorite places in the world, especially during summer vacation when the air-conditioning was a welcome relief. While Caroline’s parents and Ruby’s mother all had to work that day, Ruby’s father’s week had been slower than usual, the calls to his answering machine almost nonexistent, as many residents were away on vacation. He had promised to take her and Caroline to see the largest-ever scientific reconstruction of a dinosaur. “The paleontologists looked at all these bone fragments,” he’d said to Ruby the night before. Even though they were eating dinner, he still wore a baseball hat streaked with plaster, which he liked to call “the guts of good real estate.” His beard was dark then, his back still very straight. “They looked at all these tiny bone pieces. And they guessed at where the muscles might be.”
Ruby had gazed at her plate. Her mother was taking night classes, and dinner without her always meant boneless fish sticks, corn, and rice. With the right amount of salt, it tasted okay.
“You know what a paleontologist is, Ruby? A paleontologist is like a plumber of the prehistoric. A paleontologist is trying to figure out how the insides of something huge and ancient are meant to flow together. When we go see that dinosaur tomorrow, it’ll be like seeing the oldest pipes in the oldest building in the world.”
But the next day, just as they all were about to leave the building to head to the museum, there was a panicked call from 1D. Ruby’s father called Ruby’s mother and told her about the leak, but she was at work and couldn’t get away. So he called Lily in 5A, to see if she might babysit Ruby and Caroline while he managed the issue.
Lily often watched Ruby for free, taking her to the playground, to the park, to the Met. “It’s good for me to have a reason to get out,” she said. Other times Ruby hung out in 5A, an apartment even more fun than Caroline’s because not only did it have a cat slinking around, it was also full of all the best non-doll stuff: art supplies from Lily’s “I’ll be an artist” phase, gems from Lily’s “I believe in the power of healing crystals” phase, videocassettes from Lily’s “I’ll write a neo-Marxist critique of Hollywood” phase. It was like a mini-museum dedicated to Lily’s shifting obsessions. Plus, any time Ruby was there, Lily gave her a bowl of ice cream and provided her with drawing pencils.