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And she realizes that she doesn’t even know what she wants to do.
She thinks again of her mother’s letter, those words that clutter her brain against her will. I only knew who I was in relation to somebody else. For years I was somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, somebody’s friend, somebody’s daughter. And for once, I wanted to be somebody for myself. Arden has a flash of understanding this because tonight, for the first time in her memory, she is being somebody for herself.
They come to a complicated intersection, with a half dozen different streets converging around a small patch of land that has an enormous cube-shaped metal sculpture in its center. “What’s that?” Arden asks, pointing at the cube, which is balancing on one of its eight corners.
“It’s a sculpture,” Peter explains. “It’s been here my whole life. Come on, let me show you something cool. ”
She nods, and he leads the way across all the lanes of traffic. Cars swerve around them, every one of them honking, but somehow they make it to the traffic island still alive.
Up close, the cube looks even bigger than it did from across the street. Arden’s head barely reaches the lower corners. There’s a man who looks to be homeless lying down under a gray blanket on one side of the cube’s base, and on the other side three punk kids with green Mohawks and safety pins through their lips are sitting and sharing a bag of French fries.
“Excuse me,” Peter loudly addresses the crowd. Arden reflects on how much he’s had to drink and wonders whether he declaims at strangers when he’s not full of whiskey.
The three punks look at him with evident hostility. The homeless man doesn’t even muster up that much of a response. Arden wonders if the cool thing she is about to witness is Peter getting punched in the face. She hopes not. His is a face that deserves better than a punch.
“Arden here has never been to our city before,” Peter goes on. He pauses, as if waiting for the strangers to say Welcome, Arden! They do not. He continues. “So, since this is her first time, she’s never seen what this cube can do. Would you mind standing up, all of you, so that I can show her?”
For a moment nobody moves.
“I really don’t want to step on you,” Peter adds.
The girl punk shrugs. “What the hell. ” She gets up, moves away from the cube, and stands there with her arms crossed, ready to return to her post the instant she’s granted permission. Once she’s up, her two friends join her, and, observing that he is the only holdout, the homeless man heaves a weary sigh and also moves aside.
Now the area directly under the cube is clear, and Peter shoots Arden a dazzling smile. “Ready?” he asks. “Go put your hands on that corner. ” She does. He puts his hands on the next corner over. “Now push!” he shouts.
She does. At first she feels like an idiot, standing and pushing all her weight against an immobile steel slab, with her not-amused audience. But a minute later, with her pushing at her corner and Peter pushing the corner in front of her, the cube starts to rotate on its axis. Slowly at first, like it’s been stationary for a long time and forgotten that it knows how to spin. But then it shakes off the inertia and picks up speed, spinning so quickly that Arden nearly has to run to keep up with it. She notices that two of the punks have joined in, each of them grabbing a corner of their own and running. They whoop and holler. They are going so fast that Arden’s feet lift off the ground, just a little bit, and she holds on to her corner as tight as she can, because for a moment, she feels like she’s flying.
After a few minutes, they slow down, and the cube grinds to a halt. The punks sit back down and resume eating their fries. The homeless man returns to bed. And Arden and Peter walk off into the night. Peter seems a little unbalanced, from some combination of the alcohol and the spinning, she suspects.
“What did you think?” he asks.
“I loved it,” she says. “Now it’s my turn. Do you want to see something cool?”
“Sure. ” He looks around. “What is it?”
“Come with me,” she says, “and I’ll show you. ”
Arden goes back to the start
After forty-five minutes of walking, they reach Arden’s destination. It shouldn’t have taken quite that long, but Arden was navigating by the map on her phone and made a few wrong turns at the beginning. By the time they get close, her phone has died completely.
“It’s a grid,” Peter has said loudly, multiple times. “You know the streets are laid out in a grid, right? Do you want to just tell me where we’re going and I’ll find it?”
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“Shh,” Arden keeps responding. She’s concluded that Peter is, in fact, drunk. Most likely quite drunk, when she thinks about how much she’s seen him imbibe over the course of the night versus how little he ate at dinner. He’s holding it together better than anyone she saw drunk at Matt Washington’s party, though.
At one point along their walk, Arden saw a small dark shape dart across the road before her, emerging from one of the piles of trash bags and then disappearing into a crack in a building facade. Even before she consciously realized what it was, she let out a shriek and grabbed hold of Peter’s arm.
“What?” he asked.
“That was a rat!” Still holding on to Peter, Arden hurried him forward down the road to get away from the pile of trash that seems to have been the rat’s lair—but ahead there is another pile of garbage bags, and beyond that still another pile, and Arden can’t run forever—she can barely run at all—and there seemed to be no place on the street that was safe from rats.
“Did it touch you?” Peter asked, confused.
“Thank God, no. ”
He shrugged. “Then don’t worry about it. Did you know there are as many rats in this city as there are people?”
“Are you kidding me?”
Peter still looked unfazed. “Nope. ”
Arden shook her head. “This place is horrifying,” she said. “I am horrified. ” She kept hold of his arm as they walked on. Just in case.
And now here they are.
It’s a big stone building on Fifth Avenue, in among the department stores and steak houses, not too far from Times Square. The walls to the first four floors of the building are covered in windows, so passersby can see the displays.
“Here we are,” Arden says.
Peter reads the sign aloud. “The Just Like Me Dolls Store. Oh, yeah, I remember Just Like Me Dolls. All the girls in my elementary school had them. I even wanted one for a while, but my dad said boys don’t play with dolls. My dad is inappropriately tied to gender norms. ”
Arden hasn’t been here since she was nine years old. It looks startlingly familiar, and she realizes that her one visit here has been lodged in her brain all these years. In science class earlier this year, they’d learned about something called flashbulb memories—incredibly vivid and precise memories of monumental moments in one’s life. Arden’s mind had formed a flashbulb memory of her trip to the Just Like Me Dolls Store, and she didn’t even know it until she saw it again.
“My mom took me here when I was a little girl,” Arden reminisces. “It was our first trip without my father and brother. Our last trip without them, too. Mom said the Just Like Me Dolls Store was not going to hold any interest to a little boy and a grown man. ” She shoots Peter a smile. “Maybe she’s too invested in gender norms, too. ”
Arden looks through the front window, which is floor-to-ceiling Jessalynn, the Just Like Me Girl of the Year, who is “patriotic and athletic, always bringing a ray of sunshine to everybody’s day. ” Jessalynn is blond and brown-eyed and tan, and Arden can tell from her accoutrements that she is in her school’s color guard. The Jessalynn Doll is surrounded by an absurd number of flags.
Arden wonders what will become of Jessalynn when she grows up. What if she learns new information about America, about its role in wars or corruption in its government, and she doesn’t feel so patriotic anymor
e? What if she gives up flag-spinning and athletics in order to spend more time with a boyfriend or a girlfriend, or to join a gang, or to study for the SATs? What if she no longer wants to bring a ray of sunshine to everybody’s day? What if that becomes just too much responsibility, or she simply loses the knack for it?
“Do you want to buy one?” Peter asks. “They’re not going to be open for a few hours, you know. That’s okay, though. We can wait. And when they open up, I will buy you a doll, Arden. I will buy you whatever doll you want. I’ll buy myself one, too, just to piss off the old man. ”
She doesn’t pay attention to him. She walks around the store, peering in all its windows. And there, in the farthest window around the corner, she finds herself.
This window sports a banner saying JUST LIKE ME GIRLS OF THE PAST, and its risers bear all the dolls of the past fifteen years. There’s Tabitha, her Tabitha, “graceful and inspiring. ” There’s “brave and committed” Jenny, “quick-witted and fun-loving” Katelyn, and dolls who were created after them, girls whom Arden does not recognize because she was already too old by the time they came about.
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And there’s Arden.
Brown hair, hazel eyes, overalls perfect for playing in the woods. She looks the same as the Arden Doll in the glass case in Arden’s bedroom, but it’s different seeing her here, among her doll brethren.
“That’s me,” Arden tells Peter, pointing at her doll, sandwiched in between Tabitha and Lucy.
“I know,” he says.
She turns to him, shocked. How would he know such a thing? Could he have figured it out on his own? Nobody has ever discovered this fact about Arden without her telling them—but maybe it would make sense, for Peter to know something hidden about her when she knows so many hidden things about him.
“That’s me, too,” he goes on, and he waves at the store window and makes a funny face.
She turns back around, trying to understand what he’s talking about or if he’s just so drunk that he’s not talking sense. Then she exhales as she understands what’s going on. The two of them are reflected in the window, ghostly outlines of themselves visible in the streetlights. That’s all he means.
She can see her sexy dress and her windblown hair and the words written in marker all over her torso. She sees herself so faint in the window, right next to the Arden Doll behind the glass, and for a moment it’s hard to tell which one of them is real.
“No,” she says to Peter. “I mean, that’s me. ” She points to the doll. “Do you see where it says ‘Arden is recklessly loyal’?” He leans forward to read it, then nods. “That’s me,” she repeats. “The Just Like Me Dolls Company based that doll on me. ”
He looks at her, not quite comprehending.
“Do you see?” she asks. “See how her hair is brown, like how my hair is brown? And her eyes are hazel, just like mine? That’s me. ”
He just shakes his head, unwilling to engage the mental energy to decipher her meaning. “Don’t be silly,” he says. “You’re not a doll. ”
It feels like the entire night grows still: the cars stop rumbling past, the streetlights cease their buzzing, the spring breeze calms.
“How do you know?” she whispers.
“Because,” he says, looking impatient. “It doesn’t make any sense. People can’t be dolls. ”
He sits down on the sidewalk. Arden stays standing, staring at the dolls without seeing any of them. A long time passes.
“What does it mean, anyway?” he mumbles from behind her.
“What?”
“Loyalessly wreckful, or whatever it says. ”
“It means being there for someone you love, no matter what,” Arden explains. Her voice grows bitter when she adds, “Even when you don’t want to be. ”
“If you don’t want to do something, then you don’t have to do it,” Peter says. “No one can make you do anything. It’s a free country. ”
Arden at last turns away from the window display of dolls. “But if I wasn’t recklessly loyal,” she asks, “then who would I be?”
Peter takes off his glasses, as if to see her better, and in the glow of the streetlights his face looks so naked and so pure. “You’d be Arden, of course. ”
She sits down beside him on the curb and holds her knees in tight to her chest. She pictures her own pristine Arden Doll safe at home, looking exactly like this one, and she feels like Peter has swung a wrecking ball right through her case, shattering glass everywhere. She will never be able to piece it together again. Not even if she wants to. And what she found on the other side of that glass pane is just a doll. Not a mandate, not a future, not herself. Just an inanimate object for children to play with and then outgrow. Nothing more.
Sleeping with Peter
By the time Arden and Peter head to Peter’s home in Gramercy, it’s past five in the morning. Peter gives the taxi driver his address and spends the ride there with his head propped against the window, his eyes closed. He doesn’t say anything, and neither does Arden. She’s trying to figure out what’s about to happen. She’s going to sleep over at Peter’s house, right? Why else would she be in a taxi with him? Where else would she sleep?
But sleeping over at Peter’s … what does that mean?
She doesn’t ask. Because if she asks, Peter might realize exactly what it is that they’re doing.
They get out of the taxi and Peter hands the driver a wad of cash—too much, it looks like, but the driver doesn’t protest, so neither does Arden. Peter’s building is one of a dozen or so that encircle a small park. The park has a wrought-iron fence around it, and the gates to enter it are locked. “You can only go in there if you’re rich,” Peter says. “Normal people can’t go into that park. But if you’re rich, you get a key. We have a key. Not on me, though. ”
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“All rich people get to go into that park?” Arden asks, perplexed.
He blinks at her, as if she is the confusing one. “No. Just the ones who live here. ”
Okay.
They approach Peter’s building, and he mutters at her, “Just act natural. ”
An instant later, she sees why. A fully uniformed doorman, with a cap and everything, holds open the door for them. “Good evening, Peter,” the doorman says. He tips his head at Arden. “Miss. ”
“What’s up, Kareem,” Peter replies. Arden smiles meekly.
Kareem calls the elevator for them, and Arden keeps smiling meekly until she and Peter get inside. As soon as the doors close, she starts squealing. “I didn’t know you were going to have a professional door opener! Is he going to tell your parents? Are we going to get in trouble?”
“For what?” Peter asks.
Where to start. “For coming home at five thirty a. m. , when you’ve clearly been drinking and you have some random girl in tow for God knows what purpose?” She blushes at the last part, but she didn’t say it because she thinks he has designs on her. She just knows that’s what parents would assume. Look at Mrs. Ellzey.
“Kareem won’t tell,” Peter says. “He never tells. He’s cool. ”
Arden wonders what else Kareem has never told. About Peter, about Peter’s brother when he lived here, about Peter’s parents. Kareem must keep so many secrets under that flat-topped doorman cap of his.
The elevator stops on the eighth floor, and Peter says, “My parents should be asleep. My mom takes sleeping pills. She almost never wakes up. But—be quiet, okay?”
Arden shivers and nods. She wonders what Peter’s parents would say if they saw her here. She could try to explain, of course. But what exactly would her explanation be? And she has no idea how she will leave here later without attracting parental attention, but she pushes that off as a problem for another time. For now she focuses on only one goal: making it to Peter’s bedroom.
The elevator doors open, and they are deposited into Peter’s apartment. Even in the dark and shadows,
Arden can make out the art hanging in heavy frames on the walls, the wispy drapery covering the broad windows overlooking the rich-people park, the mahogany credenza in the front hall. Everything in here is quiet and climate-controlled. It seems like the sort of place where nothing bad could ever happen, which is confusing because Arden knows for a fact that bad things happen in this family all the time.
The two of them creep down the hall, which is, fortunately for their purposes, covered in a cream-colored carpet. It seems like sound is incapable of permeating this thick carpet and the even thicker windows, so the only things Arden hears are the rhythmic tick-tock of the art deco clock on the side table and her quick, anxious breathing.
They reach Peter’s room.
He closes the door behind them and locks it.
They both breathe a deep exhale.
“I’m going to use the bathroom,” he says. “I’ve had to pee since Thirtieth Street. ”
He disappears into the bathroom attached to his room, and Arden takes this moment to look around. This room has the same wall-to-wall carpeting as the rest of the apartment, and his bed is sleek and modern, with a low headboard and shimmery gray sheets. Arden’s bedsheets are white and patterned with faded flowers, and this is the first time in her life that it occurs to her that looking at somebody’s sheets could actually tell you something about them.
Peter’s hung a few quotes and prints around his room, like Arden’s mother’s embroidered You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed and Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. None of that is what Peter’s wall art says, though. His say things like A writer is someone who has written today and There is no friend as loyal as a book. —Ernest Hemingway.
A long bookshelf runs along one entire wall of his room, and under it is a desk sporting a brand-new laptop computer. That’s the computer he writes Tonight the Streets Are Ours on. That’s where the words come from. Arden cannot believe that she’s in the same room as that computer. She cannot believe this is happening.
Peter opens the bathroom door, comes out, and flops down on his bed, clothes and all. “What a night,” he mumbles.
Arden agrees. She stands there.