Free The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud Page B

barely cross. I saw the light and the space and felt the auguries gathered for me, to bring me back to life, back to my art. I didn’t ask myself if I needed the studio, if I would use it; I blocked from my mind the filthy alley, the echoing stairwell, the smell. All I could think was “Yes, yes, yes.”
    We signed the lease by five o’clock, at Eddie Roy’s cinder-block office next to the chicken shop on Highland Avenue. It was again dark, and drizzling still, but we stood hatless on the pavement for a bit, each holding our new keys, and Sirena gave me a sudden hug, in the courseof which I took in a mouthful of her hair, and had awkwardly to disentangle myself.
    “For me,” she said, “I know this will change everything. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even make Wonderland here.”
    “Why not?”
    “It’s my next project. Before we knew we would come here. I was planning it for months. Alice through the looking-glass, you know?”
    “Through the looking-glass—like being in the Fun House. I know,” I said.
    “What will you do?”
    “I don’t know yet. But I’ll be doing.”

    That night I went to dinner at Didi and Esther’s place in Jamaica Plain. Didi and I had been in art classes together in college, but we really became friends years later when I moved back to Boston. She was—she is—almost six feet tall, Amazonian, but soft. Her skin has no lumps or pores and her hair is like an amber cloud. She wears crimson lipstick. When I was at the Museum School, we’d walk around the pond together and play pool until late at the Milky Way and complain about our lives. Recently divorced from her college boyfriend, she was working at the BU radio station, but she chucked it in when she turned thirty-one to open a vintage clothing store on Centre Street, not far from the animal hospital. She met Esther—who is very small and high-strung, with curly dark hair and eyes like a pug—when Esther was trying on fifties party frocks to wear to her brother’s wedding in Colorado. When Didi first spoke of her, she said Esther looked like Betty Boop. Esther is an oncologist at MGH, a breast cancer specialist, and it always surprises me how happy they are together because they are so different. Didi is more comfortable in her skin than anybody else I’ve ever known, and I’ve always felt that being friends with her makes me closer to the person I imagine myself to be: someone who doesn’t care about all the wrong things, like money or fashion or status, but who ferrets out the genuinely interesting. And while I’ve grown to be very fond of Esther, who is spiky and crossish in a bracing way, Ido think she cares about that stuff, even cares a lot, whereas I wonder whether Didi is even really aware of it.
    When she lived on her own, Didi’s apartment was decorated with posters from Godard films and chili pepper Christmas lights around the mantelpiece, and all the furniture had been salvaged and restored by her own hand. Her coffee table was a giant wooden bobbin for telephone cables that she’d picked out of the dump and painted bright orange. But once she and Esther set up house, all of that was gone. It was all Saarinen this and Eames that, stainless steel and granite, and their condo was beautiful but it looked like a boutique hotel, like nobody really lived there.
    At least once they had Lili, she made it messy. Lili is their daughter, adopted from China. She’s tiny, like Esther, and round-faced, with skinny brown limbs; and quiet, but naughty, in a good way. Lili was about four then, and still young enough to love her mothers’ friends as if they were her own, and when I came in the door she grabbed me by the hand and said, “Come see my world, Nora! I’ve made a world!”
    I spent the evening’s first twenty minutes cross-legged underneath a table on their enclosed summer porch, helping Lili feed gingerbread and cold tea, served in perfect tiny china cups, to an array of stuffed animals: an elephant in a Batman