Reva led me down a spiral staircase into the basement, where there was a kind of rec room—rough blue carpeting, wood paneling, small windows up by the ceiling, a cluster of half-decent watercolors hanging crookedly above a frowning, wrinkled, mauve vinyl couch.
“Who did those?” I asked.
“Mom did. Aren’t they beautiful? My room’s through here.” Reva opened a door into a narrow, pink-tiled bathroom. The toilet tank was running. “It’s always like that,” she said, jiggling the handle to no effect. Another door led to her bedroom. It was dark and muggy inside. “It gets stuffy down here. No windows,” she whispered. She turned the bedside lamp on. The walls were painted black. The sliding door of the closet was cracked and had been taken off its runner and set to lean against the wall. The closet contained only a black dress and a few sweaters on hangers. Apart from a small chest of drawers, also painted black and topped with a sagging cardboard box, the room had very little in it. Reva turned on the ceiling fan.
“This was your room?” I asked her.
She nodded and pulled back the slippery blue nylon sleeping bag covering the bed, which was just a twin-size box spring and mattress on the floor. Reva’s sheets had flowers and butterflies on them. They were sad, old, pilly sheets.
“I moved down here and painted the room black in high school. To be cool,” Reva said sarcastically.
“It’s very cool,” I said. I put my shopping bag down, finished the coffee.
“When should I wake you up? We should leave here around one thirty. So factor in whatever time you’ll need to get ready.”
“Do you have shoes I can borrow? And tights?”
“I don’t keep much here,” Reva said, opening and shutting her drawers. “You can borrow something of my mom’s, though. You’re an eight in shoes, right?”
“Eight and a half,” I said, getting into the bed.
“There’s probably something up there that will fit you. I’ll just wake you up around one.”
She closed the door. I sat on the bed and turned off the light. Reva was making noise in the bathroom.
“I’m leaving clean towels for you here by the sink,” she said through the door. I wondered if my presence was keeping her from vomiting. I wished I could tell her I wouldn’t mind it if she threw up. I really wouldn’t have. I would have understood. If puking could have brought me any solace, I would have tried it years ago. I waited until I heard her close the outside door of the bathroom and creak up the stairs before I went and looked through her medicine cabinet. There was an old bottle of bubblegum-flavored amoxicillin and a half-empty tube of Monistat anti-itch cream. I drank the amoxicillin. I peed into the running toilet. The underwear I had on was white cotton with an old brown bloodstain. It reminded me that I hadn’t menstruated in months.
I got back under the sleeping bag and listened to Reva’s relatives through the ceiling—footsteps, whining, all that neurotic energy and food getting passed around, jaws grinding, the heartache and opinions and Reva’s pent-up anguish or fury or whatever it was that she was trying to stuff down.
I lay awake for a long time. It was like sitting in a cinema after the lights go down, waiting for the previews to begin. But nothing was happening. I regretted the coffee. I sensed Reva’s misery in the room with me. It was the particular sadness of a young woman who has lost her mother—complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful. I recognized it. But I didn’t feel it inside of me. The sadness was just floating around in the air. It became denser in the graininess of shadows. The obvious truth was that Reva had loved her mother in a way that I hadn’t loved mine. My mother hadn’t been easy to love. I’m sure she was complicated and worthy of further analysis, and she was beautiful, but I didn’t ever really know her. So the sadness in the room felt canned to me. It felt trite. Like the nostalgia for a mother I’d seen on television—someone who cooked and cleaned, kissed me on the forehead and put Band-Aids on my knees, read me books at night, held and rocked me when I cried. My own mother would have rolled her eyes at the thought of doing that. “I’m not your nanny,” she had often said to me. But I never had a nanny. There were babysitters—girls from the college my father’s secretary had found. We always had a housekeeper, Dolores. My mother called her “the maid.” I could make a case for my mother’s rejection of domesticity as some kind of feminist assertion of her right to leisure, but I actually think that she refused to cook and clean because she felt that doing so would cement her failure as a beauty queen.