“Thank you,” I say and go inside. My mother has never been home when I got home from school but someone used to be there—a nanny, the housekeeper, or my sister before she moved out. I do my homework and make some scrambled eggs with dill, and go watch Julia Child. The next afternoon the elevator is broken again. He hangs the sign and I follow him to the service elevator.
“You, uh, want to drive the elevator?” he says after the door closes.
“No thank you.” Why he wants me to have a turn driving the elevator is beyond me. What is his problem? I always thought this doorman was weird. I miss Charlie the doorman from Park Avenue. Charlie had soft brown hair and a lilting voice that sounded like the beginning of a show tune. His face lit up when he saw me like he was really happy to see me. This doorman looks like a hit man and he talks like he’s got a bunch of loose teeth in his mouth. He’s gross but you can tell he thinks he’s really hot shit, which makes him grosser.
“Come here,” he mumbles. “I’ll show you how it works. Hold on to here. Come.”
I touch the lever. “Okay. I’m done. Thank you,” I say. I think we are finished.
“No. Come closer. Sit up here and I’ll show you,” he says.
“That’s all right,” I assure him. “I don’t need to drive the elevator.”
“Come over here.” He pats a space between his legs on the seat he’s sitting on. “Sit over here.” I shuffle over and sit between his legs on the little metal elevator stool and he takes my hand and puts it on the lever. “There,” he whispers sliding my hand and the lever across his lap. He lets go of my hand and holds on to my hips sliding me up and down. I run out of the elevator when we get to my floor.
The next week the elevator is broken two more times. It is never broken on any other doorman’s shift or in the mornings. Oh well. This is my new afterschool activity, I guess, riding my doorman’s crotch. I follow him to the back. He never talks anymore, he just holds my hips and slides me up and down very slowly while I stare straight ahead counting the floors to my apartment, where I go inside and space out until my mother comes home and the sun goes down, putting this day out of its misery.
“What is it that you would like me to do?” my mother replies in a voice I don’t expect.
“I don’t know. Something,” I suggest feebly. “I mean don’t you think it’s weird that the elevator is broken all the time and I have to go up the back with him?”
“Well, what do you think I should do?”
“I don’t know, Mom.” I really don’t know what she should do. “But don’t you think you should do something?”
“Well, I could write a letter,” she says finally.
“Okay,” I say, assuming the conversation is over.
“But he’ll probably lose his benefits.”
“Okay.”
“Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know. I guess so.” I just want to go in my room and rock.
“He’ll get fired.”
“Okay.”
“And he will lose all his benefits, Cathy.”
“Okay.”
“Well, no, Cathy. It’s not okay. He probably has a wife and kids and they need those benefits.”
“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
“Their benefits. They’re probably all covered under his benefits. Their life insurance. Their health insurance. Their dental insurance. Is that what you want? It’s a very serious matter. Do you want them to lose all those things?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t want to ride up in the elevator with him anymore.”
“I don’t understand what you are doing with him in the elevator in the first place,” she says.
“The elevator’s always broken.”
“Well it’s not broken now, I just came up in it.”
“It was broken this afternoon.”
“Well it’s not broken now,” she says as though the problem is solved. She’s making me feel bad. But if I tell her she will say, “No one makes anyone anything, Cathy. You can’t make a person do or say or feel anything. I don’t make you do anything, whatever you do you do yourself.”
“What is it Cathy?”
“I don’t know,” I say, whining.
“I don’t know what you want me to do. Do you want me to write a letter? I will. He will lose his benefits. But I will do it. Is that what you want?”
“No. I guess not,” I say. It’s only nine floors.
My mother has found herself.
After eleven years of being the female traveling companion to a male executive, she has reentered the work force. Through a connection to NYU and the benefit of several grants, she runs an office operating out of a third-floor space above the Bleecker Street Cinema called the Alternate Media Center. She carries a porta-pack everywhere and is always talking about two-way video interactive this and telecommunications that. It is a very exciting time in her life. She is having a renaissance. Not me. I am in the Dark Ages. She works constantly and the more she works the happier she is. When she goes away on business trips a designated adult stays with me at night and during the day I am on my own. She leaves me with two twenty-dollar bills for my expenses.
“I expect the change,” she says.
“Here,” I say when she comes back.
“What is this?” she says.
“The change,” I say.
“The change? I don’t want the change, where are the receipts? What did you spend the money on?”
“The bus, a sandwich. What are you talking about?” I say like she is crazy.
“I want to see what you spent the money on,” she says. “I want an accounting.” I roll my eyes; she catches me. I am still a child and she is the adult and for some insane reason she is in charge. There is nothing I can do about it. I am supposed to do what she says. The next time she goes away I take a piece of paper and write down what I spend the money on: $2.99 on Clairol Herbal Essence Shampoo, $3 on ham sandwich with mustard and mayonnaise on roll, $3 on bus tokens, 49¢ on blue ballpoint pen. When she comes home I give it to her.
“What is this?”
“It’s what I spent the money on,” I say.
“This is not what I asked for. Where are the receipts? This is not an accounting. This is a list. I don’t want a list. I want to see what you did with the money. I want an accounting with the receipts and a tallying up of what you spent against what you were given.” I stand there, dumbfounded.
“Honestly, Cathy. Use your head.”
In the middle of eighth grade I suggest boarding school. A friend of my brother and sister’s who wrote a hit song for Carly Simon suggests his alma mater. And even though everyone more than slightly suspects him of stealing every single one of my mother’s flower and bug pins at a Christmas party three years ago to buy drugs, his suggestion is accepted. The