Revenge of a Not-So-Pretty Girl (2 page)

“So, who are you girls looking for?” she asks as she takes her keys out of her little brown pocketbook and opens up the second set of lobby doors. Her voice is small and faint.

“Um. Cheryl. On the third floor,” Caroline says.

Gillian and I exchange looks. Caroline does have a friend who lives in the building—the same friend who
happened to tell Caroline about this old lady once being a movie star—but that girl’s name is Janet, and she lives on the fifth floor.

“I don’t know a Cheryl. She’s a young girl like you all? What’s her last name? Maybe I know her family.”

“Oh, I don’t even know. She goes to my school. I know where her apartment is, but I can’t remember the number,” Caroline says.

I gotta admit, I’ve always been in awe of how quickly Caroline can come up with things. It’s a true art.

“Well, come on in,” the old woman says once the door is open. She holds it out to us with one hand as she grabs her grocery bag with the other.

Caroline doesn’t move at first, and I can tell she’s nervous. And Caroline’s never nervous. The old lady turns toward her, and Caroline steps forward and kind of wrenches the bag from the old lady.

“I can carry it for you,” Caroline says. “Where do you live?”

It takes the lady a few seconds to respond, as if she’s thinking over whether to answer Caroline or not.

“End of the hall, near the stairs,” she finally says. “That’s very nice of you to help.”

Caroline’s gotta be the gutsiest person I’ve ever known. I watch as she walks alongside the old woman, whose little boots squeak against the lobby’s marble floors. They pass a big fake fireplace with a mantel that must be eight feet high, then continue down the hall we just came from. Gillian and I follow a few feet behind them but stop once we reach the
elevator. That was the plan. Hang back at the edge of the lobby and wait for Caroline to make her way into the old lady’s apartment. Once she’s had a chance to check things out, she’ll signal us. So I just stand there, looking up once more at the tiny glass chandeliers. With any luck, this will all go very quickly.

The old lady’s door
opens and she disappears inside. Then Caroline disappears. And now there’s an empty hallway, quiet except for the racket being caused by the wind.

I’m pretty sure only a few seconds pass before Caroline sticks her hand out the door and starts waving it like she’s swatting at flies, but it feels like hours. Gillian and I just look at each other; then we run down to the apartment. The squeak of my sneakers against the floor sounds as loud as a train coming to a quick stop on metal rails. Caroline closes the door the minute we’re in, and I see the old woman propped up against the wall like a rickety wooden chair. The groceries are all scattered on the floor, and Caroline’s got hold of the lady’s pocketbook.

“What did you do?” I ask her as I stare at the old woman.

“Is she dead?” Gillian asks, her mouth slack, like she’s got no control over her jaw.

“She ain’t dead!” Caroline yells in frustration. “How’s she gonna be dead if she’s still halfway standing? And I didn’t
do
anything
. Just pushed her so she’d move away from the door, and she went falling into the wall in slow motion, like the Bionic Woman or something.”

I see the lady trying to straighten up, only it’s taking way more energy and effort than it should. Her little old feet in her
Little House on the Prairie
ankle boots are slipping and sliding around.

We’re standing in her hallway, and on the walls are three colorful paintings of three really depressed-looking people. But they look a bit cartoonlike. There’s a bathroom to the right side of us and a really big kitchen straight ahead. There’s a radiator in the hall—one of those long pole types that stretches from floor to ceiling. It spits and whistles a little. I can’t tell if the apartment is really hot or if it’s just my nerves. To the left is the living room.

Caroline walks over to the lady and stands in front of her. She’s not a very good-looking girl from a straight-on angle, so I’m just imagining what she must look like if you have to look up at her, like the old lady has to from her bent position.

“Well, at least let’s put her in a chair or something,” I say as I look toward the kitchen.

As we move her down the hall, I start thinking of how fabulous this is going to be. According to Caroline’s friend, this woman keeps all her money under her mattress and in the pockets of the clothes in her closets. Now, we’re not planning on taking every penny of her savings. That would just be wrong. But even if we only score a thousand bucks each, we’ll be set for a good long while. I mean, the only
time I ever see anything in the way of an allowance is on the few occasions Daddy shows up after lucking out with some musical gigs. And then it’s usually only ten or twenty bucks. Mama would never part with her hard-earned dollars. As she delights in telling me, she pays the rent, light bill, gas, and telephone. She works so I can have food in my belly and clothes on my back, so why the hell should she have to give me extra cash so I can flutter about at leisure, having the time of my life? Oh, and let’s not forget her number-one philosophy—which she totally plagiarized:
The greatest gifts in life are free
.

Just to set the record straight, we don’t normally go after the life savings of old, decrepit people. We’re not completely heartless. We usually have more-deserving targets—pretty, stuck-up girls with loads of extra cash in their pockets. The type who are used to getting whatever they want, whenever they ask for it. The type who are so used to being called beautiful, the word doesn’t even have meaning for them anymore. They come in all shades and sizes. And their clothes are always name-brand. Their moms would never think of getting them shoes from the value bin at the Kmart. But what really sets them apart is their foul attitude, which you can sniff out from a mile away. They have a way of looking down their perfect noses at anyone they feel is not worthy of sharing the air with them. They have a way of making us regular girls feel inferior for not winning the gene pool lottery. Torturing them is simply our way of getting a little revenge. Although, I do have to admit that recently it’s kind of become more
about how much money we can score. It’s nice to be able to go to the movies, and to buy records and some cool T-shirts. But with the boatload of cash we’ll be getting from this old movie star, we can go back to getting even with these girls first and earning a little extra money second. Heck, after today, it won’t even matter if they don’t have much cash on them. We’ll be like the Brooklyn version of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Only, instead of giving to the poor, we’ll be giving power to the plain and non-outstanding.

Once we get to the kitchen, Caroline continues rummaging through the old lady’s purse. She throws a pocket pack of Kleenex on the floor, then some mints. When she comes across a wallet, she pulls out six dollars. Gillian and I begin easing the old lady onto one of the chairs at the table in the center of the large room, but before we can get her down, Caroline is stuffing her giant mitts into the lady’s coat pockets. Geez, couldn’t she have had the decency to take the coat off first? If a person isn’t being a jerk, they should be allowed to have some level of dignity during a mugging. Anyway, the only thing Caroline seems to find there are a couple of pennies. And I can sense her frustration as she undoes the bottom buttons on the old woman’s coat and pats her down all NYPD-style.

“Tell us where you hide your money!” Caroline hollers as she throws the pocketbook on the floor. But the lady just shakes her head.

“Don’t be acting like you don’t got none. I mean, look at all the stuff you have in this place. Nice paintings on the
walls, china in that cabinet over there. Tell us where you hide the money.”

“What you took from my purse, that’s all I have,” the old lady says, hardly above a whisper. So Caroline just steps past her, walks out of the kitchen and to the doorway leading into the living room. She stands there surveying the scene for a few seconds, then turns to Gillian and tells her to look through everything in the kitchen. She tells me to hit the living room.

“And, Gillian, keep an eye on her,” she says as she walks through the living room and into another hall that has one door on one side and two on the other.

The first thing I notice about the living room is all this big, fussy wooden furniture. Everything looks as if it weighs about four thousand pounds. There’s this giant wall-unit thing that has these little pink chandeliers on either side. I can’t figure out if it’s ugly or not. And the couch is big and purple and plush. I’m thinking if I sit in it, I might just sink right on down to the floor and never make it back up.

“Fay, don’t forget to look under those chair pillows!” Caroline yells.

I start with the couch. I tuck my hand behind the cushions, afraid my fingers might touch something fingers have no business touching. But then I realize how clean the place is. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing in the love seat either. I open the doors of the big wall-unit thing, and there are all these crystal liquor bottles, but no liquor in them. I close the doors. On the sides of the unit are little animal figurines and some pictures. There’s a big black-and-white
photo of some fancy-looking woman and man standing in front of a huge car. I pick it up. I’m thinking they’re in California, ’cause there are palm trees behind them. And they’re wearing old-time clothes and hats and look like something out of one of those old Abbott and Costello movies they put on WPIX on Sunday mornings. The woman is all glamorous, and I wonder if it’s the old lady. The thing is, I never think of old people as being pretty or ugly. I just think of them as being old. But then you see pictures of them from when they were young, and it’s like you’re looking at a whole other person.

Caroline suddenly walks into the living room. She grabs the photograph from me and throws it onto the floor. But the glass doesn’t break, on account of the carpet being so thick and fluffy.

“Why you out here looking at pictures? Come inside with me. We have to turn over the mattress in the bedroom.”

We struggle trying to flip the thing over. And I’m starting to sweat, being all packed into my scarf and coat and hat like I am. We finally get the mattress off the box spring, but there’s nothing there. There’s nothing under the bed either.

I notice some of the chunky, antique-looking brooches and necklaces scattered across the floor.

“Maybe that stuff’s worth something,” I say.

“Maybe. But it’ll be too much of a hassle to sell. And I don’t want to risk some cop or somebody tracing it back to us.”

She has a point. Cash is cleanest. So we start going through all the clothes in her closet, pulling them off
hangers, checking the pockets, and tossing them onto a pile. What’s weird is, even though she looks borderline homeless, the old woman has some really nice clothes. Maybe she just doesn’t believe in wearing her good wardrobe in wintry conditions.

I go through all her button-down blouses quickly, since there’s really nowhere on them to stash any money. The skirts take a little longer because she has like a million of them—tweed ones, wool, cotton—but most don’t have pockets. Some have matching suit jackets, but those pockets are mostly empty. Every now and then I come across something and think it could be a wad of cash, but when I pull it out, it’s only crumpled-up tissues or an old receipt.

We have to get a chair from the kitchen to reach the ten or so hatboxes stacked on the shelf at the top of the closet. But we don’t find anything there either—except for big, flamboyant hats.

I follow Caroline into another room, which has a desk and chair and daybed. There’s no money there either. And Caroline begins breathing all hard and looking all crazy. I’m thinking, Maybe she needs a slice of cake or something. Then I look down at my watch to see that it’s nearly five-thirty. An hour and a half till Mama gets home, and I haven’t even started dinner or washed the dishes I left in the sink this morning.

“Caroline, it’s getting kinda late,” I say. “I need to get—” But it’s as if she doesn’t even hear me.

“Gillian!” she yells. “You find anything in there?”

“Um, no,” Gillian yells back, only her voice sounds
muffled. Caroline glances at me and walks out of the room. I follow behind her.

The old lady is where we left her, but her coat is now completely unbuttoned, and for the first time, I notice her patchwork quilt sweater and the giant flower brooch with a silver stem and different-colored petals clasped up near the collar. Then my eyes drift down to her hands, which are resting on her lap, and for some reason, this makes me a little sad. See, her fingers are Keebler-elf small and bowed. And there are so many brown spots, her hands don’t even seem like they belong to a white person. My eyes make their way back up to her face, and she suddenly lifts her head and stares right at me. And there’s a strange look in her pale green eyes. It kind of gives me the creeps, so I turn my back to her and face Gillian, who’s standing near the counter, removing ginger snaps from a cookie jar.