Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (15 page)

The apartment was a relief, it was so clean and ordered. Harriet had been holding her breath intermittently all the way up the stairs, and now she let it out and took in a deep breath of safe apartment air. She followed Carrie through the living room to a bedroom, where Carrie laid her charge’s overnight bag on a tightly made bed.

“This is where you’ll sleep, Rabbit,” Carrie said, smoothing the child’s hair. “Do you like it?”

Harriet nodded politely. “Where will you sleep?” she asked as Carrie picked up a net from her dresser and did mysterious things to her hair with it.

“I’ll sleep on the couch tonight. I want you to get a good night’s sleep so your mama knows I took good care of you.”

Carrie stationed Harriet at her little kitchen table with a glass of milk, poured from a new carton, while she fixed their supper of franks and beans. She put them all together in one pan to warm them up.

The two were eating pound cake that Carrie had brought to the table in a white box when Harriet heard the sound of a key in the lock. She looked anxiously at Carrie, who laughed and said, “That must be Dwight,” and Harriet understood. She liked Dwight. He was one of Carrie’s twin sons, and he sometimes appeared at the Roses’ house and did yard work. The other twin, David, had always been more distant. He had a mustache, and Carrie had recently discovered that he also had a wife and child. Now they didn’t “recognize” each other.

“That great big rusty boy, could you imagine he would do all that and not tell me I was a grandmother?” Carrie had testified in the kitchen at 23 Rutland Close, to Harriet mostly, as the child ate lunch while Carrie ironed. “I could have gone to my grave not knowing I had grandkids,” she said more than once. Harriet was not surprised at anything David had done behind his mother’s back. He had always seemed shifty, and the mustache had seemed like a disguise that made him the false twin. Once, Harriet saw him closing her mother’s handbag as she came into the kitchen right after he had gone in for a cold drink. He had slipped his hands into his pockets and winked at Harriet, who had pretended to ignore him.

Dwight was, Harriet thought, handsome. He had been a teenager when his mother had first come to work for the Roses; now he was twenty-five. He wore tight white T-shirts and he lifted weights. It wasn’t clear to Harriet where he lived, and as he pulled up the third kitchen chair and helped himself to pound cake, she was concerned that by her presence she
was somehow displacing him as well as Carrie. He asked the little girl questions about school while he ate. He tipped his chair back and reached around behind him with one hand to open the refrigerator door in a practiced gesture, but as his hand closed on what Harriet could see was a beer bottle, she saw Carrie shake her head and tilt it in Harriet’s direction, and he let go of the bottle and groped toward a half-empty soda bottle instead, which he drained in one long pull. Harriet loved the way the skin on his forehead was shiny and perfect-looking. When Carrie said it was time for small people to have a bath, Dwight tweaked Harriet’s nose, kissed his mother on the cheek, and left.

From her bath, Harriet could hear Carrie washing dishes, and then she could hear voices. At first she thought it was a radio, but she recognized Carrie’s laugh and hurried to finish the bath and put on her pajamas before anyone came into the bathroom. As she dried herself with Carrie’s flowered towel—at home all the towels were one blue—she was fascinated by the mottled green linoleum floor, which looked like marble or a myopic seascape. Harriet had never seen linoleum on a bathroom floor. She thought it was beautiful.

When Harriet emerged from the steamy bathroom, the air in Carrie’s living room seemed especially clear and cool. Two strange ladies were drinking coffee in the kitchen with Carrie. She introduced Harriet proudly, and as the little girl shook hands with them and said how do you do the way very polite children did, Harriet pretended that she didn’t see them exchange looks over her head.

As there were only the three kitchen chairs, Harriet stood in her bare feet while the ladies chatted, unsure about what she was supposed to do next. Carrie drew her onto her lap, where she felt too big, but it was nice.

“So this is the child,” said one of the ladies, looking at Harriet with momentarily sad eyes.

“What kind of car does your daddy drive?” asked the other one in a chirping, too bright voice, waving her hand in a warning gesture to her friend. Harriet had no idea who they were, but gathered they were also part of this project.

“Well, it’s a Cadillac”—here, the ladies looked at one another knowingly—“but we got it for free from a man who owed my father money,” Harriet explained, not wanting them to think the Rose family rich.

“L. T. just got himself a Pontiac last week,” one lady said to Carrie, who seemed to know who L. T. was. Who was L. T.? “And I told him, I says to him, ‘L. T.,’ I says, ‘L. T., do you know what Pontiac stands for?’ ” The lady was already laughing before she could get out the rest. “And then I told him, ‘Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s a Cadillac!’ ”

They all laughed uproariously. Harriet was shocked by the use of the word nigger, which she was forbidden to utter and had only whispered alone, experimentally, looking in the bathroom mirror. She couldn’t believe that these three ladies were smiling and laughing. Hadn’t they heard? Soon after, it was time for the visitors to leave, and they all did their polite handshaking routine again, and then it was bedtime.

Carrie made sure that Harriet brushed her teeth, and she washed the child’s face all over with a soapy flowery washcloth. Harriet had forgotten to wash her face in the bath. Then Carrie tucked Harriet tight into her bed, which smelled faintly of her.

Carrie asked, “Do you want to say prayers with me?” Harriet didn’t answer, and Carrie murmured some sort of prayer with her hand on the small head that lay on her pillow. She sat with the child in the dark for a while, and Harriet listened to the tick of Carrie’s bedside clock, and to the sound of a siren that passed nearby. When it had died away completely, Harriet startled her by saying, “Carrie?”

“Here I thought you were asleep. Did the siren wake you?”

“No, I wasn’t sleeping. Carrie? That lady said ‘nigger.’ ”

“Oh, Alice doesn’t mean no harm. L. T.’s an old fool.”

“But, isn’t it a bad word?”

“Sometimes it is, sometimes it is,” Carrie said, smoothing the covers over Harriet.

Harriet thought the words a dozen times before she said them. Then: “What is a nigger?”

Carrie chuckled softly. Then she said, “It’s a nasty word for black people.”

Harriet gazed up into Carrie’s face. She saw what she had always seen and never noticed. “You’re black,” she whispered, reaching up to touch a smooth cheek with one fingertip. Carrie smiled down at her and didn’t say anything.

The next day, after a breakfast of cornflakes, they retraced their subway ride back. By the time they had walked from the subway station to Rutland Close, it was the time Harriet usually got up on school mornings. Harriet could hardly believe it was only early morning after all that. She was exhausted.

Carrie had worn her uniform to work this morning. She didn’t always. Sometimes she arrived in a pretty skirt and sweater and changed into her uniform, which hung in a closet in the guest room on the third floor. She only worked a half day on Saturdays.

Ruth Rose met them at the front door, a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She was wearing the bathrobe she put on when she wasn’t planning to get dressed at all. Harriet wondered if she had been crying.

When her mother bent down to kiss her, Harriet could smell on her breath the winey sweetness that was typical of grown-up breath when they came to tuck you in during a dinner party. Gay was different, though. Gay never had any bad
smells. Harriet suddenly missed Gay and wished she wasn’t in Paris for so many weeks.

“It’s all done,” Harriet’s mother said to Carrie, then straightened and turned half away from Harriet. She took one last drag on her cigarette and stubbed it out on the inside of the cup. She dropped the butt into the inch of milky coffee and it floated there. She handed the cup to Carrie and added, gazing out the open front door into the middle distance, “There are some bags of things for your church. You should take a taxi today. Let me know how much it is, okay?”

Harriet stood close by Carrie a moment longer, not liking the feeling of change in the air. What was all done?

Ruth Rose hunkered down again and took Harriet by her shoulders. Carrie carried the cup past them toward the kitchen, and then Harriet could hear water running and the sounds of dishes being washed. “I’ve cleared out your brother’s things,” her mother said, staring into Harriet’s face as if she was searching for something. Harriet avoided her gaze and looked down. “Harriet?”

“What?”

“Adam’s things are taken care of. I’m leaving that room locked for now. I put some of his toys into your playroom. Do you understand? I don’t want you trying to go into his room for anything. There isn’t anything in there you would want. It’s just a room now.”

Carrie had the sink filled with sudsy water, and her gloved hands were dipping in and out with glasses and plates. The radio on the counter was playing softly. It was the kind of music that Harriet recognized as the kind Gay liked best, with a man singing about love while music tootled along.

The music reminded Harriet of the moment the previous
week when the principal of the school, an old lady with bluish hair named Mrs. Gregory, had walked into the classroom. Mrs. Gregory had apparently been very impressed when she learned from Adam’s obituary notice in the newspaper that Harriet was the granddaughter of Gay Gibson. Her condolence call, and her attempt to bring this into a conversation with Harriet’s mother, irritated Ruth, who told Harriet that she now had a new, additional reason for avoiding Mrs. Gregory at PTA meetings.

Lately, whenever Mrs. Gregory passed Harriet in the hallways, she bestowed on her the smile she saved for her most favored children, the ones whose parents invited her for dinner or gave her nice presents for Christmas. Mrs. Martin was just then fiddling with the radio to find the music enrichment program to which they were supposed to listen when Mrs. Gregory arrived in the classroom.

“I thought I’d found the girl of my dreams / Now it seems / This is how the story ends …,” had poured out of the radio, sung by one of those men with a big, creamy voice.

“Harriet Rose will now tell us all who is singing,” Mrs. Gregory had announced, astonishingly, pointing to Harriet.

“Bing?” Harriet had guessed, scrambling to her feet, knowing that it would have to be Bing or Frank or Mel. Those were the ones her grandmother liked best. Mrs. Gregory beamed at her, and Harriet was relieved to have guessed right. She never did understand why Mrs. Gregory had assumed that she would know something like that.

Barbara and Harriet could sit on their stoops and wave to each other, because of the curve of Rutland Close.

Harriet loved the way the eight houses on Rutland Close matched: she thought of the Roses’ house as a right and the Antlers’ house as a left. Both had nearly identical entry halls when you walked in the front door, but what Ruth Rose called her front hall Anita Antler called her “foyay.” The Roses’ sun-porch was to the right of the front hall. The Antlers called the analogous room the music room and kept there an out-of-tune grand piano of which they were terribly proud. The Roses’ piano was in the living room, “where a piano belongs,” according to Harriet’s mother, who disdained the pretension of a music room.

Harriet’s bedroom window faced Barbara Antler’s bedroom window. Harriet could hardly believe that their rooms were the same size, as Barbara’s seemed somehow smaller. When Harriet stood in her own bedroom and looked across into Barbara’s, she could see through the room and out into the hallway, where a few spokes of the third-floor stair banister always seemed to glow like illuminated organ pipes, despite the general gloom of the Antlers’ dark house.

Harriet would arrange the door to her room so that it was
a matching degree of openness. If one of the Antlers were to look in her window, the Roses’ organ-pipe banisters would be equally, identically visible. When is a door not a door? Harriet knew: when it’s ajar. The closet doors in these small front bedrooms had mirrors set into them. Harriet thought if she and Barbara both left their closet doors open wide at an exactly equal angle, then there would be an infinity of mirrored rooms mirrored forever. (It never happened. Harriet was always on the lookout, but Barbara, an untidy girl in so many other ways, always kept her closet door completely shut, for fear of monsters.)

The Roses’ house seemed to have more sunlight. It was partly because the Antlers had enormous rhododendron bushes in front of their house, but it was mainly because Mrs. Antler was always reminding Octavia, the housekeeper, to “draw the drapes.” Harriet knew from Gay that common people say drapes and well-bred people say draperies, or better yet, curtains.

Gay Gibson was a woman who had spent her seventy years mastering rules for others to live by, when she wasn’t publishing light and witty verse about her many marriages and divorces. She found Harriet’s reports of the Antlers’ “foy-ay” quite hilarious. “Do they by any chance have those cut-glass crescent-shaped salad plates?” she asked her granddaughter. “I do sincerely hope so. What marvelous people.” Harriet often accepted secret missions from Gay, and finding out if Anita Antler harbored such salad plates was one of many objectives she achieved with distinction. (Mrs. Antler did indeed.)

The Antler household was full of baby gates blocking free movement from one room to the next, and their living room was dark and shrouded in plastic. There were no windows in there because Mrs. Antler’s idea of decorating the room had been to install an entire wall of smoky mirror panels.

The Antlers, it turned out, had moved to New York from
Philadelphia because just around the time Mr. Antler’s father had died and the older brother, Murray, was supposed to take over the family glass and mirror business, Murray had gotten into big trouble with the law. (Harriet could never figure out—could never overhear enough—to know what exactly that meant.) Murray Antler was uncooperative, whatever
that
meant (Harriet wondered if the word had another meaning; she knew that desperate substitute teachers applied the term to the worst children), so he wasn’t going to be around to run the business for a long time. So Albert Antler, who had been forced out of Antler Glass and Mirror in the first place by his unscrupulous brother, had sold his fence company, packed up his family, and come back to New York.