One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [103]
“You’re selling the house?” she asked, aghast.
“The bank’s selling it.”
“What does that mean?” Lola asked. It began to dawn on her that her mother was serious after all. Dread rose to her throat; she could barely speak.
“They take all the money,” Beetelle said.
“But why?” Lola wailed.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Beetelle said. She popped open the trunk and wearily lifted out Lola’s suitcases. She began carrying them into the house, pausing on the landing, where she appeared dwarfed by the columns, by the house, and by the enormity of her situation.
“Lola,” she asked. “Are you coming?”
Sam Gooch never looked forward to Christmas. Everyone he knew went away, while he was stuck in the city with his parents. Mindy said it was the best time in New York, with everyone gone and just the tourists, who rarely ventured into their neighborhood. Sam would return to school after New Year’s to find a classroom full of kids chattering about their exotic vacations. “Where’d you go, Sam?” one of them would joke. Someone else would answer, “Sam took a tour of the Empire State Building.”
One year, the Gooches had gone away to Jamaica. But Sam was only three then, and he barely remembered it, although Mindy sometimes brought it up with James, making a negative reference to an afternoon he spent with a Rastafarian.
Walking back to One Fifth from Washington Square Park, where Sam had taken Skippy to the dog run (Skippy had attacked a Rottweiler, which gave Sam a perverse sort of pride), he wondered why they couldn’t go away this year. After all, his father was supposedly getting money from his book—but it hadn’t changed their Christmas plans. As usual, they would drive to Pennsylvania early on Christmas morning to visit his mother’s parents; after a traditional Christmas dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, they would drive to Long Island to see James’s father. James’s family was Jewish and didn’t celebrate Christmas, so they would have dinner at a Chinese restaurant.
Skippy was attached to a retractable leash; when walked, he liked to be as far away from his owner as possible. He ran into One Fifth several feet ahead of Sam; by the time Sam got into the building, Skippy had tangled his leash around Roberto’s legs. “You’ve got to train that dog, man,” Roberto said.
“He’s my mother’s dog,” Sam reminded him.
“She thinks that dog is a child,” Roberto said. “By the way, Mrs. Rice was looking for you. Something’s wrong with her computer.”
Annalisa Rice was on the phone when Sam knocked on her door. “I’m so sorry, Mom,” she was saying. “But Paul wants to go away with these people…” She motioned for Sam to come in.
Every time Sam stepped into the Rices’ apartment, he’d try to summon up a nonchalance at his surroundings, but he was always awed. The floor in the foyer was a sparkly white marble; the plaster walls were yellow cream and looked like frosting. The foyer was deliberately spare, though an astounding photograph hung on one wall: an image of a large dark hairy woman nursing an angelic blond baby boy. The woman’s expression was both maternal and challenging, as if she were daring the viewer to deny that this was her child. Sam was mesmerized by the woman’s enormous breasts, with areolas the size of tennis balls. Women were strange creatures, and out of respect for his mother and Annalisa, he pulled his eyes away. Beyond this foyer was another entry with a grand staircase, the likes of which one saw only in black-and-white movies. There were a few duplexes in the building, but they had narrow, sharply turning staircases, so anyone over the age of seventy-five always moved out. This staircase, Sam guessed, was at least six feet wide. You could have an entire