“Okay.” That seemed a fair deal to Alida, who was still thinking of how cool it would be to see every visitor on a TV monitor, caught by the camera unawares.
“Hey, I gotta question. Mr. MagiGro!” Arms folded on the tabletop, he leaned forward, grinning at Tad. “I been thinking about the lobby.”
“Lobby? The hallway?” Tad sounded distant, disdainful, and Alida wished that the landlord would stop annoying him with the Mr. MagiGro thing.
“Need new paint down there. Whole building need new paint. But what I think is to make nice with green, like what I see is palm tree in bucket. Would grow okay in lobby?”
“A palm tree, in a bucket.” Tad took off his glasses, wiped the lenses against his shirtfront, and put them back, perching them on the tip of his nose and peering over their tops, exactly as he did in the MagiGro commercials. All traces of irritation were gone from his voice when he looked earnestly at Mr. Lee and said, “You’d be looking at a pygmy Laotian date palm, tolerant of shade.”
Alida had no idea that Tad actually knew something about this gardening stuff. She and her mom had two big window boxes of flowers; he had none. True, he often brought cut flowers home, like the lilies, but he’d never shown interest in growing anything at all.
“Loamy soil,” he said. “You might want to add a little lime to raise its pH.”
Amazing.
“I’d use quite a bit of peat moss. And charcoal. Charcoal’s very good for palms.”
The landlord was nodding slowly, nodding and blinking, like he understood what Tad was talking about, which Alida was sure he didn’t.
“You’d need to keep an eye out for leaf blotch, down there in the…lobby. Then you’ve got to think about winter mulching.”
4
“IF I WAS TALKING about anything at all,” Tad said after the landlord left, “I hope I was telling him how to grow orchids or peonies.”
“You were making all that up?”
“Pardon my French, kiddo, but one load of bullshit deserves another.”
“But why? He was only asking a question.”
“He just dropped in to terrorize us.”
“Terrorize?” Alida felt like the floor was giving way beneath her feet, and there was a long, long way to fall. “He was only trying to make us safer.”
“Oh, Rabbit…” Her mom slid into the landlord’s vacated chair and laid her arm across Alida’s shoulders, then looked at Tad. “Is he going to triple the rent, do you think? Or turn us into a multistory parking garage?”
“Parking garage?”
“Honey, listen. Mr. Lee bought our building. He bought it to make money, and all he talked about, like new plumbing and video systems, costs big money — maybe millions. It was like he was telling us we can’t afford to live here. That’s what Tad means by ‘terrorize.’”
The room swam in and out of focus as Alida fought a humiliating upwelling of tears. “I still don’t get it.”
“We pay eight-fifty for this apartment.”
“Seven for mine,” Tad said.
“Which is incredibly cheap. Mr. Winslow never put up the rents, he just let us live here for almost nothing, compared with most places around here. Parking lots! I bet the horrible Mr. Lee makes more money out of one parking space than he does out of our entire apartment.”
“That’s not true!” Alida recognized home territory when she saw it. “Even if he made five dollars an hour, twenty-four hours in every day, with every single space, that’d be like…” She calculated furiously, squinching up her eyes and holding her breath. “Eight-forty. But it’s not that much! There’s all that Early Bird stuff, and evenings, and weekends, and tons and tons of empty spaces all the time. You have to average it out.”
She was shocked by her own arithmetic, having expected the sum to come to much less than it did; for one single lousy parking space, that was, like, extortionate. Nevertheless, she tried to put a brave face on the figure. “I bet he’d be lucky to get two hundred a week.” She raced over the last few words to minimize their impact, but felt her mom’s grip tighten on her shoulder.
“We pay eight-fifty a month, honey, not eight-fifty a week.”
Crushed, Alida forced a wobbly grin and dared herself to voice the thought that had just come to mind. “Well, I guess you could get maybe eleven ‘Compact Only’ spaces into this apartment.”
There was an uncertain moment of silence, then her mom and Tad began to laugh, and Alida felt instantly buoyant at being the cause of such appreciative adult laughter.
Strange how by saying the very worst thing you could imagine about almost any situation, you could make it funny — sort of. “So we’ll have to live in the Spider and the heap,” she said, but a treacherous, wavering hiccup came into her voice on the word “Spider,” and Tad reached for her hand, not laughing now, as she had meant him to do, but just smiling, like he wanted to reassure, and to Alida it looked plain scary.
“Ali…”
Whatever he was saying was lost in a brain-curdling shivaree that came through the open window — a crazy concatenation of whoops and warbles, yelps and wails, as a parade of emergency vehicles went by a few blocks away. It sounded like they were heading south on Second. Alida picked out the jarring chords of fire trucks and their deep, grunting blasts; the angry tirra-wirra-wirra-wirra of the police; the caterwauling ambulances. From the noise they made, you’d think that all hell had broken out somewhere in the city, but lately the sound had grown so familiar that you just had to shut your ears to it. You never discovered where the sirens were going, or why, but most days you’d hear them racing along I-5 or the waterfront, like they were out there for the simple fun of frightening the pants off everybody with their mad music.
Tad got up to pull the window down, which slightly dulled the racket from outside. “Act Three of the exercise, I guess,” he said. “They must’ve needed me for only Acts One and Two.”
“When does your lease run out?” her mom said.
“September.”
“Ours is December.”
Alida said, “Are you sure we…I mean, like with his weird English and all, couldn’t he maybe just mean…” Impatient with herself for sounding so dumb, she bit down on her lip. “Suppose it’s all just a big misunderstanding? He didn’t have to be lying.”
“You’re right, Rabbit. We’re jumping to conclusions. We shouldn’t prejudge him like this. Perhaps he really did mean what he said.”
But in her mother’s face, Alida saw all the signs of grown-up untrustworthiness — the uncertain tremor in her smile, the sidelong glance at Tad that meant We’ll talk about this later. Everything was impenetrably “ironic,” a maddening equation full of minus numbers. Mr. Lee didn’t mean what he said, and her mom didn’t mean what she said about Mr. Lee. If Mr. Lee was — x and her mom was — y…
Another procession of horns and sirens. This one was going west down Jackson Street, its ferocious clamor muffled by the bulk of the buildings in between.
“God, it’s like being at a Schoenberg concert tonight,” her mom said.
“I was thinking more John Cage.”
Adults!
What had Mr. Lee actually said? That he didn’t want the street people getting in. That he was going to put new locks on the doors. That he was new to being a landlord. That he wanted “feedback.” How did you get from such data to the idea that he was going to turn the Acropolis into a parking garage? Surreptitiously, Alida squeezed a zit on her chin. She thought of the landlord installing a video monitor beside the door, of how she’d innocently believed in it, but now she believed nobody — not Mr. Lee, not her mom, not Tad, and herself least of all. She felt lost in the fog of her own stupidity. The zit popped, discharging a little bead of pus onto the tip of her forefinger, which she wiped on the grainy underside of the table.