While Ruby drew, Lily talked. Sometimes she read from one of her many in-progress manuscripts, but often she simply reminisced. She went on about her history with voice acting (“What I hated in the end was how the work made it seem like I was totally void of a body”), and her cat (“An undiagnosed manic-depressive”), and her parents (“Drunken louts, not in a nice way, why do you think I decided not to have kids, because god, what if I became my parents, Rubes?”), and the art that she loved, especially the paintings of Alice Neel (“They’re realistic, but distorted, Ruby, and nobody else will ever so perfectly capture the beauty and vulnerability of belly rolls”). Sometimes she railed against those in the building she called “Big Money Folks,” people she said were just waiting for an excuse to kick her out of her rent-controlled apartment, and other times she talked to Ruby about how she was happy to watch her while her mother worked at the library because libraries were the last true public spaces in a democracy gone to the wolves. Occasionally, while Lily ranted, Ruby would look up at her from her sketch pad and try to draw her. Lily was the most beautiful old person Ruby had ever seen. She had a large, soft body, blue eyes made huge behind her glasses, long pale earlobes that resembled blanched Swedish Fish, and hair dyed a dark brown. She smelled like litter-box deodorizer, tangy sweat, and citrus—along her windowsills were gnarled orange peels curling into the fetal position. She claimed the peels kept away cockroaches. In her drawings of Lily, Ruby always made sure she was surrounded by orange peels that looked like smiling mouths.
Everything would have been fine that day if Ruby and Caroline had been able to go to Lily’s apartment while Martin dealt with the leak. But Caroline was allergic to cats (“Not to cats, technically,” she liked to say, “but to the protein pests in their dander”). And so Lily lumbered downstairs to babysit Ruby and Caroline in the basement. She smiled at Ruby, frowned at Caroline, and immediately reclined on the couch and turned on the TV once Ruby’s father left. “Long night,” she said to the TV. “Hardly slept. Back pain. What a comfy couch.”
“It’s got cows on it,” Ruby said, in case Lily hadn’t noticed.
“These kinds of rustic prints were popular postwar,” Lily said. “Mass-produced couches referencing the artisanal. Everyone wanted to pretend they could just go back to the happy days on the farm. Utter delusion.”
“If the farm was so happy, why do the cows look so sad?”
“It’s a good question, my Ruby. If you didn’t love ice cream so much, I’d tell you.”
“Can you take us to the museum?” Caroline asked.
“I told your dad we’d stay here. Let’s watch TV.”
“Don’t babysitters usually have activities?” Caroline said.
“Not this one,” Lily said.
“Come on.” Ruby took Caroline’s hand and led her to her room. Her stomach hurt a little. Usually their playdates occurred in Caroline’s apartment, with all its light and toys, and the fantastic off-white leather swivel club chair they used for interrogation scenes during Holocaust-orphans-sisters-survivors. But Ruby’s room had just a bed, a small chair, a gaggle of worn-out bears and dolls. Caroline picked up a baby doll with its eyes stuck wide open in an expression of pure terror.
“That’s Joan,” Ruby said quickly. “She’s a journalist.”
Which was a lie. The doll was named Cindy Baby and she’d never had a job in her life. Caroline put Cindy Baby down again and sighed, but very quietly, like she wanted Ruby to believe she was nobly repressing the weighty oomph of her disappointment.
“I’m sorry we’re not looking up at the big whale right now,” Ruby said.
“Do you know the biggest heart in the known universe is the blue whale’s?”
Do you know do you know do you know. Caroline was always starting sentences this way, as if she was not content just to own and share spectacular dolls, but must own and share, too, the spectacular and strange facts of the universe. The protein pests in cat dander, the big hearts of whales, which Olsen twin had been born first, the name of the most recent glacier to glide across and cover Central Park twelve thousand years ago. She knew all these things.
The steam pipe in Ruby’s bedroom gurgled and hissed. Ruby would have liked nothing more in that moment than to kick Caroline out, the way her father had kicked out homeless people. Leave, she wanted to tell Caroline, or I’ll call the police.
She said instead, “We could draw.”
“I just came from art class.”
“Maybe we could play hide-and-seek?”
“How? The room’s so tiny.”
She was right. Ruby’s room was too small for hide-and-seek. And yet she never wanted to trade her room for Caroline’s. Because while Ruby’s room was small, in some ways the whole basement felt like hers. The laundry room, the boiler room, the storage room. All a part of her father’s kingdom, something to which Caroline had no claim.
That gave her the idea: There were other places in the basement they could go. They did not need to stay in this tiny space. “Follow me,” Ruby said.
Lily was still on the couch, her knuckles white from clutching the remote. When she saw Ruby and Caroline emerge, she pointed at a girl on TV advertising pills to make a person less sad. The girl stood in a meadow filled with wildflowers. “Are you searching for a sense of purpose?” the girl asked.
“Do you hear the gurgle in that voice?” Lily said. “Goddamn, like her larynx is giving birth to llama babies. How do they let these people’s voices on TV?” Although Lily’s voice now sounded a little croaky, she often told Ruby that during her time as a voice-over actress, her voice flowed like honey and her larynx was lauded for its flexible ligaments. She had been especially skilled at declaring, in a bubbly but sassy-girl voice, one detergent’s superiority over the other when it came to making stains, grime, and unseemly streaks vanish just like that.
“It is very difficult to get on television,” Caroline said, looking at the sincere TV girl. “She’s probably trying very hard, Lily.”
“It’s not about trying, kiddo,” Lily said. “It’s about sounding.”
“I’m not a kiddo,” Caroline said. “I’m a kid.”
“I think that lady on TV sounds awful,” Ruby said. Then she told Lily that she and Caroline wanted to play a game of hide-and-seek in the laundry room, which was just down the hall from the apartment.
“Your dad lets you do that?” Lily asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay, okay.” Lily waved her hand. “It’s like the way kids in suburbs play in the yard, I guess. You basement kids play in the laundry room.”