“I have an idea,” I said. “Let’s make a list of the stuff we’ll need for it.” I used my prettiest stationery and headed it, “For Our Apartment.”
(In my memory box I found the list Laine and I made. I thought of sending it to Laine to remind her of what good friends we used to be, but we aren’t friends anymore and I don’t think she’d appreciate receiving it.)
Anyway, here’s the list:
The day we made that list Laine called me as soon as she got home. “I thought of three more things to put on the list,” she said. “Write them down.”
I got out the list and a pen and went back to the phone. “Shoot,” I said.
“Add: ‘TV,’ ‘VCR,’ and ‘telephone.’ ”
“Why do we need a phone?” I asked. “We’ll be living together so we don’t need to call each other.”
“Sta-cey,” she said, “we need a phone to order take-out.”
I laugh when I think of it now. But that weekend Laine and I were very serious about our plans. We vowed that we would save all of our gifts and allowance money from that day forward so we’d have enough money for our apartment. We figured by fifth grade, latest, we’d have convinced our parents we could live alone.
The next day I asked Laine, “What if the landlord asks why two kids are by themselves? What will we say?”
“We’ll tell him that we’re orphans and that we have a kind old grandmother who comes by every couple of days to check on us.”
“Why aren’t we living with our grandmother?” I asked.
Even Laine was stumped by that. But only for a minute. She put her hands on her hips. “Because she lives in a nursing home, of course.”
“And we’ll say we’re sisters,” I added.
Laine and I smiled at one another. “Perfect,” she said.
Sunday night while I was taking a bubble bath I thought of some other things to add to our apartment list: “bubble bath, soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste.” I could hear my mother in her room talking on the phone, but I couldn’t make out the words, just that she was talking to Mrs. Cummings.
While I was sitting there making a beard out of bubbles, my mother came into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub. “Well, Stacey,” she said, “you and Laine are the luckiest girls in the world.”
Was it possible that our parents had agreed that Laine and I could get our own place? How amazingly easy!
“Why are we lucky?” I asked.
“We’ve enrolled you both in the Beresford Ballroom Dance Academy,” she said. “You begin on Tuesday.”
“Ballroom dancing!” I shouted. “That’s dorky and boring. Only babies do it.” I couldn’t believe Laine had agreed to this. “Does Laine know?”
My mother said that of course Laine knew. That it was her mother’s idea. “Someday,” my mother said, “you’ll be grateful that you know ballroom dancing. It’s a skill you’ll use through your life. And you’ll enjoy the classes, too.”
“Fat chance,” I mumbled.
After my bath I went into the living room to complain to my father. But he just said, “You’re a big girl now, Boontsie. You can’t stand on a guy’s feet the way you used to do with me.”
When I was little (and he called me ‘Boontsie’ all the time) I would stand on his feet and he would dance me around. But I hadn’t done that in years.
“Laine and I do fast dances,” I told him. “I want to learn how to moonwalk. Ballroom dancing is for babies and sissies.”
“I beg to differ with you,” my father said. He got up and changed the station on the radio from the classical station to a light music one. Then he walked over to my mother who was sitting on the couch and bowed. “May I have this dance?”
She smiled and got up. They danced around the room. I knew it was hopeless to argue with them that night. And it was too late to call Laine and plan a counterattack. So I went to bed.
Over the next two days Laine and I tried pleading, sulking, and bribing. We even both promised we’d do all our homework before calling one another on the phone everyday. But nothing would change their minds.
My mother closed the discussion by saying, “We already paid. Six lessons won’t kill you.”
On Tuesday we had to wear “appropriate ballroom dancing attire” to school so we’d be ready for the four o’clock ballroom dancing class. The dress my mother decided was “appropriate” for ballroom dancing was a pink silk shift dress with a lace collar, white tights, and black patent leather shoes. I really loved that dress, but I never, ever would have worn it to school. So I wore my longest sweater over it and kept it on all day. Laine did the same thing to cover up her plaid satin dress.
Mrs. Cummings picked us up from school to take us across town for our ballroom dancing lesson. In the cab she told us, “Now, you two, be sure you take off your sweaters and, Laine, comb that hair of yours. And don’t worry if your hands get sweaty when you dance with boys. That always happens at first. It’s normal.”
Boys! That was going to be the worst of it. And holding hands! How could we?
When we got out of the cab Mrs. Cummings leaned out the window and reminded us that my mother would be picking us up in an hour. “Now hurry,” she said. “I can tell you’re dawdling. You don’t want to be late on your first day.”
“Oh, yes we do,” Laine mumbled as we walked toward the building as slowly as we dared.
When we got on the elevator to go to the fifth floor I said, “I can’t go through with it.”
“Me either,” Laine agreed.
“So let’s not,” I said as we got off the elevator. “Let’s ditch it.”
As the elevator doors closed behind us we found ourselves face-to-face with an ornate gold-on-white sign: Beresford Ballroom Dance Academy. From behind the door we heard the kind of music we both thought was “sappy.” Laine and I looked at one another. She said, “Okay. Let’s ditch it.”
Just then the academy door opened and a mother walked out. “Girls,” she said. “You made it just in the nick of time. Hurry.”
I said, “We don’t go here.”
“Of course you do,” she said. “Look at those darling shoes and pretty white stockings. And shy is written all over your faces. Now go ahead. You’ll have a wonderful time.”
She was still holding the door open and gesturing for us to go in. The door closed behind us and we were standing alone in a small waiting area. To our right were two big windows that looked into the studio. Through the windows we saw twenty or so boys and girls nervously (and miserably) waiting for the class to begin. The music was coming from a piano where a young man sat with his back to us. The teacher, in a calf-length royal blue cocktail dress, was facing away from us, too. She was putting a pile of sheet music in front of the piano teacher.
We ducked down before she turned around to begin the class. Laine pulled my hand and whispered, “This way.” We crawled on our hands and knees into a cloakroom that was no bigger than a large closet and sat on the floor to strategize.
We decided to take turns spying on the class. The first thing we needed to know was if the teacher took attendance.
Laine went first. In a few minutes she came back to report, “She didn’t take attendance. I don’t think she ever will.”
It was my turn. I took a quick peek at the class and scurried back. “Laine, you’re not going to believe who’s in the class. Randal Peterson the third!” Randal was the snobbiest boy in our grade. He bragged that he was going to be a senator someday. And then president. If a teacher, or even another kid, didn’t add “the third” when they said his full name he would correct them. Laine and I whispered to one another that Randal Peterson the third figured he better learn ballroom dance so he’d look good at his inaugural ball when he became president.
“President of jerks,” Laine added.
Laine went to see if we knew anyone else in the class. “Samantha and Cecile,” she reported. They were girls we knew who were so super proper that they always wore stockings to s
chool. They hated us. Laine thought they were jealous, but I think we seemed as weird to them as they did to us.
“Are they dancing yet?” I asked.
“They’re learning how to say hello to one another at a dance. It’s so dorky.”
We spent the rest of the class like that, sneaking peeks and giggling in the cloakroom.
It was my turn to watch when Mrs. Dandyworth announced that they’d have one more number. (Her name makes her sound old, but she’s my mother’s age, which wasn’t very old then.) I crept back to Laine and whispered, “We better go.”
On the elevator I told Laine that Randal Peterson the third was doing something called the box step with Samantha. Laine said, “Samantha could be the first lady the third someday.” We giggled all the way down.
When my mother arrived we were waiting for her in the lobby. She said, “I’d hoped to get a glimpse of the class.”
“You can’t anyway,” Laine said. “It’s not allowed.”
“I guess it would make you all shyer if parents watched,” my mother said. The three of us were walking down the street toward Central Park. “I hope they have a recital at the end of the course.”
“Sorry, Mom,” I told her. “No recital.”
“Take my hands,” she directed as we stepped off the curb to cross Fifth Avenue. Laine and I exchanged an exasperated look behind her back as we each took one of her hands. She still treated us like babies.
Our next ballroom dancing class was on Friday. Laine and I had forgotten about having our own apartment. We were too busy strategizing our coverup for not going to ballroom dance class. We’d already told our mothers that “Appropriate Ballroom Dance Attire” included denim skirts. And they bought it.
“Well, you girls are the ones attending the class,” Mrs. Cummings told Laine. “You should know.”
When she dropped us off in front of the building for class, instead of going in we stood at the front door and waved good-bye to her. As the cab pulled away she was gesturing out the window for us to get going. We did. But not into the building. As soon as the cab was out of sight, Laine and I ran to the sidewalk and headed east.
We decided that if we spent ten minutes on each block we could walk the square block around the building and be back before my mother came to pick us up.
The next block was Madison Avenue. We went into a deli and got a pack of gum to split. Then we went into a stationery store that had toys, too. We played “I have this” for awhile. When the ten minutes we’d allocated for Madison Avenue were up we went back outside and walked around the corner. But Eighty-fifth Street wasn’t very interesting. There were only brownstones with parking garages under them. So we retraced our steps to Madison Avenue and went back into that deli to get candy. Laine got Gummi Bears and I got Milk Duds.
We walked quickly back down Eighty-fifth Street to make up for the second visit to the Madison Avenue deli. We were out of breath when we turned onto our next street, which wasn’t a street at all but an Avenue — Park Avenue. While Park Avenue is really wide and pretty, it’s extremely boring to an eight-year-old. The only thing we could think of to do was count the hundreds of red tulips in the center strip that separates the cars that are going uptown from the cars that are going downtown.
When the ten minutes were up (and we’d counted 305 tulips) we turned the corner to walk the half block back to the front of the building where we were to meet my mother. By the time we got there we were laughing like crazy from the stories we made up about what was going on in the ballroom dancing class.
I said, “Samantha and Randal Peterson the third are doing the waltz with sweaty palms.”
We were still laughing when my mother arrived a few minutes later.
“How was class?” she asked. “Did you have a good time?”
“Terrific,” I said.
“When do we come again?” Laine asked.
My mother was in a great mood all the way home. “I just knew you girls would like it,” she boasted.
I said, “I can’t wait until Tuesday.”
“Me either,” Laine agreed.
When I think about it now I’m amazed that we got away with cutting our dance classes. But for the next two sessions that’s what happened.
On Tuesday we were confident enough to go all the way to Lexington Avenue to get ice cream cones to eat while we window-shopped.
On Friday we took the same route, but this time went a little further to Second Avenue where we spent most of our time in a fancy children’s bookstore. Then we went into a diner and sat at the counter and ordered Cokes.
And we still got back in plenty of time.
We’d discovered a happy solution to ballroom dance classes. Our parents thought we were taking ballroom dancing, which made them happy. We were not taking ballroom dancing, which made us happy.
“What’ll we do today?” I asked Laine on Tuesday when her mother had pulled away in the cab.
“Let’s go to FAO Schwarz,” Laine answered.
“That’s too far,” I said. We were savvy New York kids and knew that FAO Schwarz (the best toy store in the world) was on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-eighth Street. We were near Fifth Avenue, but from Eighty-sixth to Fifty-eighth was two miles.
“We’ll take the bus, of course,” Laine said as she reached in her pocket. “I have four tokens.” She opened her hand to show me. “We take the Fifth Avenue bus downtown. Let’s go.”
As the bus inched along we talked about the other times we’d been to FAO Schwarz and the wonderful toys we’d seen there. It was exciting to be going there on our own. After awhile I said, “This bus is slow.”
“There’s a lot of traffic lights,” Laine replied.
I looked through the front window. “And traffic,” I said. Just then a car horn honked as if to prove my point.
The bus crept along. “We’re not going to have much time in the store,” Laine said.
We started counting passengers. More people were getting on the bus than were getting off it and now there was standing room only, and not much of that. “I’m glad we got seats,” I told Laine.
The briefcase belonging to a man standing over me hit me on the head. I slumped in my seat so it wouldn’t happen again.
“I wonder what time it is,” Laine said as she pushed up her sleeve to look at her watch. I looked at her watch too. It read ten minutes to five.
We stared at one another, our eyes big and scared. “Class is over in ten minutes,” I told her.
“We’re almost there,” Laine said. She stood up to get a look out the window past the standing passengers. “It’s the next stop, Stacey.”
I stood up next to her. “It took us forty-five minutes to get this far. Even if we go back now we’ll be thirty-five minutes late.” (I told you I was good in math.)
“So let’s go back,” Laine said. At the next stop we got off the bus and crossed the street to wait for the bus going uptown. We stood there for five minutes before I realized that we were at the wrong bus stop. Fifth Avenue only goes downtown.
We ran all the way to Madison Avenue.
The only good luck we had that day was that a bus came right away. We hopped on, put our tokens in the meter, and joined the crush of passengers. My watch read 5:10. We were already ten minutes late.
Laine and I didn’t say much during that slow, slow bus ride up to Eighty-sixth Street. We both kept checking our watches and feeling jittery. I silently prayed, “Please, bus, hurry. Please, bus, hurry.” I didn’t dare think what would happen when we got to our destination.
I checked my watch one last time as we ran the half block from the bus stop to the dance school. Five-thirty. We were half an hour late. And there was a police car parked outside.
We got on the elevator just as the doors were closing. “Hey there, young ladies,” one of the other passengers cautioned. “You could get caught in the door that way.”
I looked up to see that the speaker was a cop. So was the woman standing next to him. “Wh
at floor would you like, girls?” she asked.
“Five, please,” Laine said in a weak un-Laine-like voice.
“Looks like we’re all going to five,” the police officer said.
They were smiling and friendly. I wondered how they would treat us when they found out we were the missing girls.
Laine and I took one another’s hands. When the elevator door opened we were facing a crowd that started in the waiting room of the Beresford Ballroom Dance Academy and spilled out into the hall. There were students and their mothers, my mother, Mrs. Cummings, Mrs. Dandyworth, the piano player, and a bunch of other people, including uniformed security guards from the building.
Mrs. Dandyworth said, “The police are here.”
“Stacey!” my mother shrieked.
“Laine!” Mrs. Cummings shouted. “Oh, thank heaven.”
“I’ve never seen these girls before,” Mrs. Dandyworth said.
Laine and I stood close together as we exited the elevator but our mothers yanked us apart.
It was one of those confusing but happy scenes like at the end of a lot of movies. Our mothers were hugging us, and they were happy because we hadn’t been kidnapped. Mrs. Dandyworth was happy because it wasn’t her fault that we were missing. The cops were happy because this was a case that wouldn’t end with mounds of paperwork. And Samantha, Cecile, and Randal Peterson the third were thrilled because they had a great story to tell about us in school the next day.
Everyone was happy except Laine and me.
The first sign of big trouble was when we walked out of the building a few minutes later and our mothers decided to take us home in separate cabs.
“Let’s keep them apart for awhile,” my mother suggested.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Mrs. Cummings said. “But, please Maureen, let’s not let this ruin our friendship.”