We did it, she thought, plopping Emma down on the hardwood of the living room and wriggling her tiny feet into their puppy slippers. We’re here.
“Now,” Alex said, spooning brown sugar into his oatmeal. “I was thinking. Why don’t I take the ragamuffin to ballet, and then to the playground or whatever. You relax for the morning and meet us for lunch.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Totally.”
“Dada’s going to take me?” Emma sang, pirouetting unevenly on the hardwood. “Dada’s going to take me!”
“You’ve been working like a madwoman to get this place put together and then had to be on duty all day yesterday. Take a break.”
“OK. I mean, I still need a couple things at the drugstore. And if the bank’s open—”
“No. Sue. Chillax. I implore you.”
As she showered, Susan laughed at herself for freaking out about the teensy smudge on her pillowcase. She located her overreaction in a lifelong pattern of jumping to the worst possible conclusions. In college, for example, she had been certain on two separate occasions that she’d contracted Lyme disease, based on the scantest possible symptomatology. In her twelfth week of carrying Emma, after binging on alarmist websites, she’d frantically announced to Alex that hers was an ectopic pregnancy — a fear that proved mercifully fantastical.
Susan smiled a goony smile at herself in the mirror as she combed her hair, darkened and wet from the shower. The house is great, she told herself. The neighborhood is great. And I even did some painting last night.
She dressed quickly, not bothering to glance again at the spot on her pillow.
Susan trotted down the interior steps and out the door of 56 Cranberry Street an hour and a half later in black flats and a simple blue cotton jersey dress — a perfect ensemble for meeting one’s charming husband and daughter for lunch on Montague Street. Andrea Scharfstein was at the bottom of the front stoop, looking up at the big red front door, almost as if waiting for Susan to emerge. Her hands were planted on her hips, and she wore a wide-brimmed gardening hat, a flowing green housedress, and those crazy old-lady sunglasses Susan so admired.
“Good morning,” called Susan, waving brightly as she came down the stairs.
“Hello, hello.” Andrea squinted over the tops of the glasses. “Where’s the family? Did they leave you and find some other mother?”
“No. They’re out and about,” said Susan, thinking, strange joke. “I’m on the way to meet them for lunch.” She stopped at the bottom of the steps and turned to stand next to Andrea. “Whatcha looking at?”
“Oh, nothing. Nothing, really.”
Andrea slipped one old, sticklike arm through the crook of Susan’s arm and leaned her head against her shoulder, like they were best friends, or mother and daughter. The gesture, so intimate and unexpected, flustered Susan, but she recovered and brought her other hand across her midsection to pat Andrea on the forearm. Susan’s mother had been struck and killed by a drunk driver, two years after Susan’s college graduation. She had been on a hostel-hopping painting tour of Europe, having the time of her life, when she got the telephone call. She had cried for seven hours on a plane from Paris and signed up to take the LSAT three days after the funeral.
“I hope the apartment is OK,” said Andrea throatily, then coughed twice and turned her face toward Susan’s. “Is the apartment OK?”
There was a deep-set, unsettled melancholy under the growl in Andrea’s voice, and a sort of confusion. For the first time Susan wondered if Andrea, for all her seeming vigor and spiritedness, wasn’t beginning to slip into senility. The arm still linked in Susan’s was old but it was sturdy, yellow and clustered with age spots. Halfway up the forearm was a small open sore, red and bright and glistening in the sun.
“The apartment is just fine, Andrea. Thank you. We love it.”
“There’s nothing I can do to make it better for you?” Andrea lifted her sunglasses and searched Susan’s face. “I want so much for you and your family to be happy here.”
It occurred to Susan that Andrea wanted her to throw out a couple of problems that she could solve, that her elderly landlady somehow craved the reassurance of being responsible for someone else’s welfare. “She seems … oh, just sad, I guess,” Louis had said. “The house has a whole lot of sadness in it.”
“Well, OK,” said Susan. “Actually, there are a couple of, you know, just a couple of little things.” Quickly she ran down the short list of minor problems they’d discovered since moving in last week: the broken floorboard on the upstairs landing; the cracking paint in the downstairs bathroom; the loose outlet cover in the kitchen.
“Those aren’t little things, Suze,” said Andrea. “Not at all.”
Suze? The nickname made Susan’s skin crawl, but she said nothing. Andrea at last pulled her arm free from Susan’s, the wrinkles around her eyes and on her forehead multiplying as she furrowed her brow. “It’s an old house, as I told you. As I warned you, really. But of course, of course, I will get Louis to take a look at everything, just as soon as he can.”
“Thanks.” Susan paused, bit her lip. “I feel like there was one more thing.”
“Yes?”
The word scurried across her throat again, nearly slipped out onto her tongue: bedbugs. Bedbugs. Tell her about the—
But of course she had decided there were no bedbugs — hadn’t she? — and she could hardly complain to the landlady about a spot of dirt on her pillowcase. “Oh, right, I know. There’s been this kind of noise. Like a …” She gestured vaguely with her hands. “Like a ping, kind of.”
“A ping?” Andrea narrowed her eyes. She was now standing with one foot on the bottom step, and Susan noticed that she had come outside wearing a pair of thin-soled lime green slippers. “Where is it coming from?”
“Well, that’s what’s weird,” Susan said, a little embarrassed even to have brought it up. “I’m not exactly sure. We’ve just sort of heard it, generally. Mostly in the living room area, I guess. It’s extremely faint, and it never lasts for very long. Not a big deal, really.”
“Don’t worry,” said Andrea. “I’ll take care of it myself.”
Somewhere out over the East River the sun drifted behind a bank of gray clouds, and 56 Cranberry Street was momentarily cast in shadow, silhouetted like a black crepe cutout hung on the backdrop of sky. It was almost noon, time for Susan to be at Theresa’s with her man and child, eating a tuna sandwich and hearing funny stories about ballet class. As if sensing her impatience, Andrea abruptly began to hike up the stoop.
“Anyway, Suze,” she said. “We’ll speak another time.” As Susan watched, Andrea pulled the big red door closed behind her.
The rest of the weekend unspooled in a series of happy, easy hours. After lunch on Montague Street, Susan, Alex, and Emma strolled the tree-lined streets, exploring their new neighborhood as a family. They stopped at the drugstore, at the bank, and at Area Toys to buy Emma a jigsaw puzzle. At the farmer’s market on Cadman Plaza they bought a bag of ripe Honeycrisp apples, a thing of frozen sausage, and three bundles of asparagus. After nap, Susan and Emma did the jigsaw puzzle, Susan marveling as her precocious genius-child patiently sorted through the twenty-four oversized pieces to assemble the barnyard scene.