§1 — Hook
Monday at 2:45 I am on the corner of Hicks and Joralemon, fifteen minutes early, with the Chase statement in my coat pocket and a Ziploc of saltines in my bag because I have read three message-board threads since Saturday with the words snack in the subject line and what they all agreed on was to bring a bag of something that had not been in your apartment longer than four days. The saltines have been in my apartment since November. I figure they are old enough to have stopped being a snack and started being a prop.
The brownstone is the third one in from the corner. In the sober, weekday morning version of itself, it is a shorter building than I remembered. The brass on the bell has been polished again — or it has been polished once and I keep needing it to mean something — and the stoop has been swept. I step up. I ring. The door opens before I can decide whether the bell rang.
He says: — You''re early.
— Fifteen minutes.
— That''s early.
— Iris said it was.
— Iris is right about that.
He moves out of the doorway. I come in. The apartment in daylight is a different apartment. The kitchen at 2:45 on a Monday is a room that has had a morning in it — there is a cereal bowl in the sink, half-full of milk; a paper napkin on the counter with a smear of strawberry jam; the kettle on the stove has gone cold and not been emptied; the spelling list on the fridge has been updated. The new word at the top, in fresh marker, is beautiful. The avocado magnet is one inch lower than it was on Friday.
He says: — The contract is on the counter.
— You wrote a contract.
— You said there had to be one.
I cross to the counter. The contract is one page, handwritten, on the back of a sheet of graph paper that has, on the front, what looks like a structural drawing for a window header. The handwriting is the handwriting of someone who learned to print before they learned to write — small, square, and unironic. The contract has six clauses. Pickup, drop-off, the seven o''clock end-of-day, weekly pay, what to do if the kid is sick, what to do if I am sick. There is no clause for the apartment.
— There is no clause for the apartment.
— Meaning.
— Meaning what I am allowed to do in the apartment. I am going to be in the apartment for four hours a day for three months. There has to be a clause.
— What kind of clause.
— What I can move. What I cannot move. Where the dishes go. What the laundry rules are. What is mine to handle and what is — not.
He looks at me. The sweater today is a different gray, slightly bluer, but the cuffs are pushed up the same way and the watch on the inside of his wrist is the same watch.
He says: — You can move anything.
— That is not a clause. That is the absence of a clause.
— Anything in the kitchen. Anything in Iris''s room with her. Anything in the front parlor, including the books and the desk and the drafting table, you can move except the rolled drawings on top of the bookshelf — those are clients''.
— And the bedroom.
— I will not be in the bedroom while you are here. You will not need to be in the bedroom.
— Theo.
— Yes.
— There are two more rooms in this apartment.
He looks at the entry.
He says: — The hallway runs from the front door to the back garden door. There is a Polaroid in the hallway. I would prefer you not move the Polaroid.
He does not point. He does not have to. I have been registering the Polaroid since I came in the door. The Polaroid is in a thin black frame at eye level — his eye level, which is six inches above mine — between the kitchen doorway and the bathroom doorway. It is a square photograph the color of October light. I cannot see it from where I am standing. I can see the frame.
I say: — I won''t move the Polaroid.
He says: — Thank you.
He picks up the contract. He hands me a pen. The pen is the kind of pen architects have — heavier than a regular pen, the barrel hexagonal, the clip metal. I sign at the bottom under the line he has labeled the new one. I cross out the new one and write Dana Lerner. He looks at the cross-out. He almost says something. He does not.
§2 — Build
He leaves at 2:54. He does not give me a tour. He says — the alarm is the year Iris was born — and walks out, and I stand in his kitchen for forty seconds without moving, because the year Iris was born is a number I do not know, and then I work it out (she is seven, the year is 2026, she is going to be eight in February — Saturday, I will learn in three weeks; the eighth birthday is a beat I do not know yet) and the year is 2018 and I do the math on the alarm — 2018 is four digits — and I have not been alone in someone else''s apartment, with permission to be there, in a count I do not let myself count to.
I do the dishes. The cereal bowl, the napkin, the kettle. I do not move the avocado magnet. I do not look at the second shelf. I do, halfway through drying a glass, look at the second shelf. The pale blue mug is still there. The dust line around the base of the mug is the same dust line. The mug has a chip at the rim that you can see from the counter; the chip is on the side facing out. Whoever put the mug on the shelf put it down with the chip facing out, which is not the way you put down a mug you are still using.
I do not pick up the mug.
I leave at 2:58. I walk to P.S. 8. The walk takes seven minutes, not six, because the light at Henry is bad. The school gates open at 2:55 and the second-grade door is the one on the corner. I have been told I am wearing a green coat. I am wearing a green coat. The teacher, when she comes to the door, does not need to ask me anything because Iris is already over her shoulder, watching the door, with a backpack on, and Iris sees me and does not wave. Iris taps the teacher''s elbow.
The teacher says: — You must be Dana.
I say: — I am.
The teacher hands me a green folder. The folder has Iris Marsh on the spine in marker.
— Wednesday she has a spelling test. There''s a permission slip for the field trip on Friday — you can sign it, her dad said you could.
— Okay.
— She''s a great kid.
— Okay.
I get Iris''s hand. I do not get her hand because I take it; I get it because she puts it in mine the way you put change into a pocket — without comment, without ceremony, and looking somewhere else. We walk west on Joralemon. At the corner of Henry her hand reaches up without looking and I hold it across the street and I let it go on the other side and she says — you''re supposed to keep holding it for half a block after.
I say — says who.
She says — says my dad.
I keep holding it for half a block after.
We get back to the apartment at 3:31. I had told myself the first day pickup would be 3:08; it is, the next day, 3:08; today it is 3:31 because Iris stops on the stoop to tell me the name of the dog the upstairs neighbor has, which is Mister Chambers, and the rule about the dog, which is Mister Chambers does not come down the stairs, Mister Chambers comes down the elevator.
The apartment does not have an elevator. The building has an elevator that opens on the second floor.
I say — Mister Chambers takes the elevator and you take the stairs.
She says — Mister Chambers is twelve.
— That is older than you are.
She says — yes.
We have, by 3:34, established a parameter for how much I am allowed to be sarcastic in this apartment. The parameter is: less than the dog.
§3 — Twist
The afternoon proceeds. Iris does the spelling list on the kitchen counter while I try to remember how to make a sandwich for someone other than me. The sandwich on the message board was a turkey-and-cheese with the crust cut off. I cut off the crusts. Iris looks at the plate and says — I don''t do crusts off.
— You said you didn''t do crusts.
— I do crusts. I don''t do crusts off.
I put the crusts back. They do not go back on. Iris eats the sandwich and the crusts separately. The crusts go last. She finishes the spelling list before the sandwich. The spelling list has the words necessary, beautiful, breakfast on it from Friday and three new ones — library, scissors, Wednesday. She gets eight out of six because she has done the new ones twice.
— Library does not have a c, she says.
— It has two i''s.
— I know that.
— You wrote it with a c.
— I was practicing — necessary.
— That''s a different word.
— I know that.
— Then why was library on the necessary list.
She looks up at me. She has a streak of strawberry jam on her cheek that has been there since I met her on Friday and that I now realize is not the same streak; she has jam on her cheek as a chronic condition. She says — because I get tired.
I write the word library on the spelling list under Wednesday in my own handwriting, which is the handwriting of someone who learned cursive in 1998 and never trusted it. I cross out necessary. I write necessary underneath the cross-out.
I say — don''t mix up the lists.
She says — I know.
She finishes the sandwich. She finishes the crusts. She gets in the bath at 5:45, which is twenty minutes earlier than the schedule on the fridge says, because the schedule on the fridge says bath: 6:05 and I have learned, over four hours, that the schedule on the fridge is aspirational. She takes one of the saltines out of my bag on her way to the bathroom. She does not ask. She comes back out of the bathroom thirty seconds later with the saltine still in her hand and says — can I have it after.
I say — yes.
She says — put it on the counter.
I put it on the counter.
I cook. Theo''s note on the kitchen counter from this morning had said — roast chicken in the fridge, sweet potatoes in the bottom drawer, oven 425 for forty minutes, do not bother with the vegetables, Iris does not eat the vegetables. I oven 425 for forty minutes. Iris, in the bath, sings a song that I think she has made up, that has, as its only lyrics, the words Mister Chambers, Mister Chambers, Mister Chambers in a different order. I am in the kitchen with my hands in a sink full of suds and a dishwasher that has not been run since before I got here, and I am — and this is the thing I am not going to admit to Naomi for at least three weeks — I am, in this kitchen, having an okay afternoon.
§4 — Cliffhanger
Theo gets home at 6:55. He comes in through the front door. He does not call out. He hangs his coat on the second hook. There are two hooks. The hook on the right has a child''s coat on it that has been there since 9 a.m. — a yellow puffer with a small tear at the cuff. The hook on the left, until 6:55, was empty. He hangs his coat on the left.
He comes into the kitchen.
He looks at the oven. He looks at the spelling list. He looks at the sink. He looks at me. Each look is a measurement.
He says — you didn''t have to.
I say — I know.
I do not say — I know the way I would say it to Naomi. I say it the way Iris says it. The way Iris says it is: declarative, with a small downward slope at the end of the word, the way you say I know to a person you have already started agreeing with.
He registers the slope. He does not look at me long enough to say anything about the slope. He turns toward the hallway. He is, I will realize three steps later, going to drop his keys in the bowl on the entry table. The bowl on the entry table is between the front door and the Polaroid. I have not — in four hours, in seven minutes of being in this apartment after the contract was signed — I have not been able to bring myself to walk past the Polaroid.
He passes the Polaroid. He does not look at it. He does not look away from it. He passes it the way you pass a wall in your own apartment, the way you pass a wall in your own apartment when you are aware of every nail in it. He drops the keys. He starts to come back.
He stops in front of the frame.
He stops for a count of three.
I am at the kitchen island. I have a dish towel in my hand. I do not move. I have learned, in the four hours of this Monday, that there are rooms in this apartment that have weather, and the weather in the hallway, at 6:55 on a Monday, is — for three seconds — the kind of weather where a man stops because the woman in the photograph is wearing the same gray sweater he is wearing now.
I see the photograph for the first time from the kitchen island. I can see the shape of it. A woman in a gray sweater on the front stoop in October. Her arm around a small girl. The small girl with two front teeth out — Iris at four, the toothless year, a little blurred, both of them laughing at something off-frame. The woman''s hair is pulled back. The woman''s shoulder, in the photograph, is not the shoulder of a woman who is going to call her name from the bedroom and not — and I do not finish the sentence I am thinking, because I have not earned the sentence, and because Theo, in the hallway, has just put one hand flat on the wall above the frame and the other hand on the wall below the frame, the way he braced one hand on the doorframe Friday night, the way he brushes a doorframe in his own apartment because he is the man who measures distances all day.
He breathes in.
He breathes out.
He turns and walks into the kitchen the way a man walks into a kitchen on a Monday. He says — the chicken smells good. He says — thank you for the spelling list. He says — Iris, teeth, please. Iris, from the bath: — I know, Dad.
I put the dish towel down on the island. The avocado magnet is one inch lower than it was Friday because Iris this morning, before school, had taken it off to put up a drawing and had put it back lower. I have not moved it. I will not move it. Theo, at the stove, takes the chicken out. He plates two plates. He plates a third without thinking. He stops with the third plate in his hand. He looks at the third plate. He looks at me.
He says — would you stay.
I say — I — leave at seven.
He says — of course.
He puts the third plate back. He does not put it back in the cupboard. He puts it on the counter, upside down, the way you put down a thing you are not done with. The pale blue mug on the second shelf, the one with the chip facing out, is in my line of sight now over his shoulder, and the woman in the Polaroid in the hallway is in my line of sight in my head, and I have been in this apartment since 2:45, and the schedule on the fridge says parent home: 7:00, and my coat is on the chair by the door, and I have not, in seven years, stayed in any apartment that wasn''t mine past the time I told myself I would leave, and the third plate is on the counter, upside down, and Theo''s hand has not left the rim of the plate, and his hand on the rim of the plate is the same shape as his hand on the wall above the Polaroid was, and I am — at the kitchen island, on a Monday at 6:58 in March — being looked at by a man who has, in the four hours I have been in his apartment today, been looked at by his daughter and looked at by the wall and now, for the first time in two and a half years and four hours, looked at by someone who has signed a contract on graph paper to be in his kitchen until seven.
He has not finished closing the apartment around me. The apartment has not finished closing around him. The third plate is on the counter and the chip on the mug is facing out and the Polaroid in the hallway is the photograph of the year Iris was four, and Theo has not, in two and a half years, taken the photograph down, but he has — and this is the cliffhanger I was not looking for, and the one Iris''s grandmother is going to be on the kitchen floor about in four weeks — he has, this Monday, between when he came home and when he turned around to go put his keys in the bowl, looked at me from the kitchen island the way he has not looked at the Polaroid in the hallway in eighteen months.
I do not know yet, on this Monday, that the dust line on the second shelf is eighteen months old. I will know in three weeks. I will know on the Sunday Iris''s grandmother does not call, which is the Sunday Theo says her name aloud in the kitchen for the first time since the day she stopped being a person you could call from a hallway.
For now I take my coat off the chair. I put it on. Theo is at the counter with the third plate upside down.
I say — seven o''clock.
He says — I''ll see you tomorrow.
I leave at 6:59. The door closes behind me. The door, this time, closes.
— to be continued in Ep3