More Than Words(11)

11



The next Monday night, Nina headed to her dad’s for their weekly Jeopardy! and dinner date. Like Tim, Joseph Gregory was a creature of habit, and, especially after her mom died, Nina found comfort in the predictability. When she was a kid, they would have Chinese food together at least once a month on Monday nights, and they still did. As Nina walked to the Chinese food restaurant, she said hello to Janusz, who’d been working in the pharmacy on Columbus since Nina was in high school, and waved through the window at Penny, who had been ringing people up at the diner across the street since Nina was in lower school. Visitors often criticized New York City for feeling impersonal, too filled with people to make any lasting connections, but Nina had found the opposite to be true. The blocks around her father’s apartment seemed like a small village. The pizza place, the fruit stand, the dry cleaner, the clothing boutique. Nina thought, not for the first time, that New York City really was made up of hundreds of different worlds, each right next to another. She wouldn’t go to a pharmacy five blocks away any more than she would go to one in New Jersey. Carrying the bags of Chinese food, Nina headed into her father’s building.

Earlier that year Priscilla’s parents had moved out of the apartment she’d grown up in, and Pris had been sadder about it than Nina had expected. “It’s my whole childhood!” she kept saying. “It’s gone!”

“It’s not gone,” Nina had reassured her. “Your memories are there, no matter where your parents live.”

But ever since then, Nina had felt extra fond of this building, the place she learned to walk and talk, where she lived with people who watched her grow and mature. In Manhattan, a building like this was a community, a small town in a big city—and everyone here, staff and residents, had played a role in turning Nina into the person she’d become.

When she got up to 21-B, she walked into the gallery and called out to her father. “Dad!” she said. “I’m here! Where are you?”

“In the dining room,” he called back. She noticed that his voice sounded weaker than it used to. And his words were punctuated by a cough. But only one.

Nina walked through the great room, which was broken into different sections with rugs and furniture; one area had couches, another a table and chairs, and another was filled with bookcases and a love seat. Pieces from her grandmother’s art collection hung on the walls.

Through the great room was the kitchen, and then the dining room. Their housekeeper, Irena, had set the table with Nina’s grandmother’s gold-rimmed china and put a vase full of daisies in the center of the table. Six months after Irena had started working for the Gregorys, when Nina was in sixth grade, Irena had told her a story about her two sons who were in middle school, too, in Brighton Beach. Nina had realized then that when Irena was at her house, she wasn’t home with her own kids. After that Nina had started telling Irena she was going to have dinner with friends after school, so Irena could go home early. Sometimes Nina actually did go over to Priscilla’s place on the Upper East Side, or Tim’s a few blocks away. But sometimes she spent the afternoon at the Met, doing her homework in the Temple of Dendur and then having an early dinner in the Trustees Dining Room on the fourth floor. They didn’t usually serve dinner on weekdays, but the chef made an exception for her, their secret.



* * *



? ? ?

“You think Will’s going to win again?” her father asked, as he opened up the television cabinet he’d had installed specifically for their Monday night dinners. He’d been talking about Will all last week, the bartender from Texas who’d been on a winning streak. “I bet you a lollipop he does.”

Nina unpacked the food and spooned it into the dishes Irena had laid out on the table. They’d been betting candy on the results of the game show for as long as they’d been watching it together.

“I don’t know,” Nina said. “Most champions don’t even get to day four. The chances he makes it to day five are slim. How about a Hershey bar he doesn’t?”

Nina’s father laughed. “Playing it safe, I see. You’re not taking into account the Ken Jennings principle that some people are just smarter and can keep a streak going for a while.”

Nina put the empty cartons in the take-out bag and tossed them into the kitchen trash. “Ken Jennings is one in a million,” she said.

“Maybe Will is, too,” her father replied, picking up his soup spoon.

Alex Trebek came on the screen, and Nina and her father ate and watched, until one of the contestants chose the Daily Double.

“Three Tootsie Rolls she misses this Daily Double,” her father said. The category was circus equipment, and the Daily Double was behind an $800 clue.

“No way,” Nina answered. “Two Hershey’s Kisses she gets it. She’s answered three questions right in this category already.”

Joseph Gregory shook his head. “But she hasn’t gotten one $800 clue yet. Her knowledge is limited to the $600 level.”

Her father insisted that Jeopardy! clue amounts were tied to difficulty, though Nina wasn’t quite sure that was the case. He used the analogy in real life, too, when assessing people. Nina wondered sometimes what level he thought her knowledge was limited to, but she was afraid to ask. For her whole life, whenever Nina did something that her father found unimpressive, he would tell her: You’re smarter than that. Those words always made her try to be better, to work harder, to think things through. But they hurt, too. And made her wonder if she really was smarter than that, or if her father was expecting her to be at the $2000 level, but she was only at $1600.