“No,” Billy the Exterminator said. “I dream more about the chickens. I do feel bad about the chickens. The chickens and the cows. I grew up on fast food and I didn’t think about it, but then I saw one of those animal cruelty documentaries. Made me rethink my whole childhood. A secret for you, Martin.” Billy the Exterminator breathed in. “I’m vegan.” He breathed out. “Don’t tell any of the guys.”
Martin had stared for so long that Billy the Exterminator added, “I’m kidding.”
“Are you?” Martin asked.
* * *
—
Forget Billy and his fast food and all his pests. Forget the interlinked web of tenants’ complaints he carried in his head like a map. Forget the blue whale’s new belly button. Forget Lily and her voice and her death. Meditation was supposed to lift you out of harmful neural pathways, build up the brain’s gray matter. What did that mean? Martin wasn’t sure, but if his work as a super had taught him anything, it was that people always wanted to build something. If you didn’t have the money to build a new apartment, why not build your gray matter? So: back to the breath.
Was Ruby’s breathing kind of shallow? Normally, when he meditated alone, Martin wore noise-canceling headphones, but he wasn’t wearing them now. He had wanted to get a sense of how mindful her meditation really was. Her breaths definitely weren’t deep enough. She was stressed, probably. She kept calling the museum job she was interviewing for today her dream job. Dream job. One of those terms used by overeducated upper-class adults, that she’d picked up at college, or from Kenneth’s daughter and her friend, Caroline, probably. The idea that a job was a cloud, a fantastical package of nine-to-five wish fulfillment. What would Martin’s dream job be? He had never had one. He just had jobs for getting by. Like this one as a super, which was a good job, which required no college degree, which came with a rent-free apartment and health insurance and all of that, a fine job, but not a dream job; instead a job that often gave old dudes nightmares about dead tenants.
He looked over to the answering machine. No blinking red light. No urgent messages. Ruby still had her eyes closed, but she winced a little, like she’d finally heard Martin’s thoughts running amok. Or maybe the floor really was too cold for her.
“You need a cushion?” Martin said.
Ruby’s eyes opened. “What?”
“Might be more comfortable with a cushion, is all. Or if you want, next week, I could make you a meditation bench like mine.”
“You made that yourself?”
“Yeah. I made it out of the floorboards in Lily’s apartment. As kind of, you know, a memorial.”
Oops. Not smart. Ruby’s eyelids did their cry-prep crinkling thing that he knew so well from the weepy moments of her kidhood. She had loved Lily as Martin had, as a kind of family member, a grandmother figure. Lily, who had been estranged from her own family, often babysat Ruby, taking her to museums, the park, marathoning movies on VHS with her, or sometimes just reading to her from her many perpetually in-progress manuscripts—a treatise on capital in the new millennium, a Trotskyite rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, a novel about a Victorian factory worker who gets away with killing her overseer. All those childhood days spent with Lily had meant Ruby was wrecked when she’d heard of her death. She had called Debra and cried on the phone to her every day for two weeks. Now Martin waited for the tears. But Ruby only shook her head.
“Neilson in 3C told me something catchy the other day, during one of our meditation sessions,” Martin said, once the threat of sobs passed. “He said a good movie, a good TV show, a good story almost always begins with action. But if you want a good day, that begins with inaction.”
“Inaction, huh?” Ruby rubbed at her temples. “Well, I’m pretty skilled at inaction. I can’t believe you meditate with that idiot.”
“He’s not an idiot,” Martin said. “He’s just a tenant.”
“Same difference.”
“Ruby,” Martin said, but he was smiling, glad that Ruby’s don’t-generalize-about-the-tenants-empathy-for-all campaign had clearly ended. Ruby smiled back, encouraged. “I’ll never forget when he left that message on the machine at two in the morning,” she said. “Right before I had to take the SAT. Totally hysterical because he’d seen a mouse.”
“But you still did good.”
“Imagine how brilliant I’d have done if 3C didn’t wake me up with his fear of rodents. Well. It doesn’t matter now.” Before Martin could study her face, figure out if she were telling the truth, she yawned. Probably, instead of meditating, they should both be trying to sleep. Martin had only gotten a few hours. Ruby’s voice had kept him from sleeping until one (even as Debra snored away). She had been on the phone with Caroline. The girls had been close friends as children—all the playdates and imaginary worlds, the molding of clay spoons and plates for their dolls, the classes at the Art Students League. But despite the time she’d spent with Caroline in her youth, Martin had never felt Ruby properly understood the differences between them. In the middle of their hushed conversation last night, Ruby laughed a triumphant hoot of a laugh, and he thought he heard her say, “Listen, Caroline, the thing about my dad is . . .” before lowering her voice again.
The way she’d laughed had put a feeling in Martin’s chest like a stone. The thing about my dad is.
The thing about Martin’s own dad was he’d been an angry man. The thing about Martin’s own dad was sometimes he’d smack Martin if Martin so much as smiled at him funny. The thing about growing up with a dad like that was Martin would never have laughed about his father on the phone. So it was progress, really, that Ruby could laugh at him.
“Let’s get back to meditation,” Martin said. He closed his eyes, tried to feel the cold of the floor beneath him. He breathed in. For the sake of his own heart health, he must forget the barbed sound of Ruby’s laugh.
Although Ruby was an only child, sometimes Martin felt he had dozens of daughters housed within her. There was the outer-daughter husk—tall, dark-haired, thick straight eyebrows often raised and face often pink—and then inside that? Not just the Ruby who stayed up late the night before a job interview, laughing about him on the phone, but also the one who had studied hard all through high school, peeling the dead skin around her cuticles, the girl her teachers had labeled (less like a student than like some scholastic specimen) “bright and creative,” “determined to succeed.” And also the Ruby who, in college, had asked that Martin and Debra buy her sculpting clay in lieu of the contributions they had insisted on making toward her tuition. And also the Ruby he had taken to the Museum of Natural History as a little girl, the hair-in-braids Little House on the Prairie–ish Ruby who had looked at a diorama of a wolf and said, “I want to go inside there, please.” And when Martin said no, it wasn’t allowed, you could look and learn, but not go inside the diorama groups—she had cried and then cried over her crying, wiping her running nose on the back of her hand until the skin gleamed like the wolf’s glass eyes.