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1. The Teevee (2021)

Mrs. Hanson liked to watch television best when there was someone else in the room to watch with her, though Shrimp, if the program was something she was serious about—and you never knew from one day to the next what that might be—, would get so annoyed with her mother’s comments that Mrs. Hanson usually went off into the kitchen and let Shrimp have the teevee to herself, or else to her own bedroom if Boz hadn’t taken it over for his erotic activities. For Boz was engaged to the girl at the other end of the corridor and since the poor boy had nowhere in the apartment that was privately his own except one drawer of the dresser they’d found in Miss Shore’s room it seemed the least she could do to let him have the bedroom when she or Shrimp weren’t using it.

With Boz when he wasn’t taken up with l‘amour, and with Lottie when she wasn’t flying too high for the dots to make a picture, she liked to watch the soaps. As the World Turns. Terminal Clinic. The Experience of Life. She knew all the ins and outs of the various tragedies, but life in her own experience was much simpler: life was a pastime. Not a game, for that would have implied that some won and others lost, and she was seldom conscious of any sensations so vivid or threatening. It was like the afternoons of Monopoly with her brothers when she was a girl: long after her hotels, her houses, her deeds, and her cash were gone, they would let her keep moving her little lead battleship around the board collecting her $200, falling on Chance and Community Chest, going to Jail and shaking her way out. She never won but she couldn’t lose. She just went round and round. Life.

But better than watching with her own children she liked to watch along with Amparo and Mickey. With Mickey most of all, since Amparo was already beginning to feel superior to the programs Mrs. Hanson liked best—the early cartoons and the puppets at five-fifteen. She couldn’t have said why. It wasn’t just that she took a superior sort of pleasure in Mickey’s reactions, since Mickey’s reactions were seldom very visible. Already at age five he could be as interior as his mother. Hiding inside the bathtub for hours at a time, then doing a complete U-turn and pissing his pants with excitement. No, she honestly enjoyed the shows for what they were—the hungry predators and their lucky prey, the good-natured dynamite, the bouncing rocks, the falling trees, the shrieks and pratfalls, the lovely obviousness of everything. She wasn’t stupid but she did love to see someone tiptoeing along and then out of nowhere: Slam! Bank! something immense would come crashing down on the Monopoly board scattering the pieces beyond recovery. “Pow!” Mrs. Hanson would say and Mickey would shoot back, “Ding-Dong!” and collapse into giggles. For some reason “Ding-Dong!” was the funniest notion in the world.

“Pow!”

“Ding-Dong!” And they’d break up.

2. A & P (2021)

It was the best time she could remember in how long, though it seemed a pity none of it was real—the rows and stacks and pyramids of cans, the lovely boxes of detergents and breakfast food—a whole aisle almost of each!—the dairy shelf, and all the meat, in all its varieties. The meat was the hardest to believe. Candy, and more candy, and at the end of the candy a mountain of tobacco cigarettes. Bread. Some of the brands were still familiar, but she passed by these and put a loaf of Wonder Bread in the shopping cart. It was half full. Juan pushed the cart on ahead, moving to the half-heard melodies that hung like a mist in the museum’s air. He rounded a corner toward the vegetables but Lottie stayed where she was, pretending to study the wrapper of a second loaf. She closed her eyes, trying to separate this moment from its place in the chain of all moments so that she’d always have it, like a pocketful of pebbles from a country road. She grappled details from their context—the nameless song, the spongy give of the bread (forgetting for the moment that it wasn’t bread), the waxiness of the paper, the chiming of the registers at the check-out counters. There were voices and footsteps too, but there are always voices and footsteps, so she had no use for these. The real magic, which couldn’t be laid hold of, was simply that Juan was happy and interested and willing to spend perhaps the whole day with her.

The trouble was that when you tried this hard to stop the flow it ran through your fingers and you were left squeezing air. She would get soggy and say the wrong thing. Juan would flare up and leave her, like the last time, staring at some insane cloverleaf miles from anywhere. So she put the so-called bread back and made herself available, as Shrimp was always saying she didn’t, to the sunshine of here and now and to Juan, who was by the vegetables, playing with a carrot.

“I’d swear it’s a carrot,” he said.

“But it isn’t, you know. If it were a carrot you could eat it, and it wouldn’t be art.”

(At the entrance, while they were waiting for a cart, a voice had told them what they were going to see and how to appreciate it. There were facts about the different companies who’d cooperated, facts about some of the more unusual products such as laundry starch, and what it would have cost the average person shopping for a week’s groceries in terms of present-day money. Then the voice warned that it was all fake—the cans, the boxes, the bottles, the beautiful steaks, everything, no matter how realistic it might look, all just imitations. Finally, if you were still thinking of lifting something just for a souvenir, it explained the alarm system, which worked chemically.)

“Feel it,” he said.

It felt exactly like a carrot, not that fresh, but edible.

“But it’s plastic or something,” she insisted, loyal to the Met’s tape.

“It’s a carrot, bet you a dollar. It feels like a carrot, it smells like a carrot—.” He took it back, looked at it, bit into it. It crunched. “It is a carrot.”

There was a general sense of letdown among the people who’d been watching, of reality having intruded where it didn’t belong.

A guard came and told them they’d have to leave. They wouldn’t even be allowed to take the items they’d already chosen through one of the check-out counters. Juan got obstreperous and demanded his money back.

“Where’s the manager of this store?” he shouted. Juan, the born entertainer. “I want to talk to the manager.” At last, to get rid of him, they refunded the price of both tickets.

Lottie had been wretched through the whole scene, but even at the bar under the airfield afterward she didn’t bother to contradict his version. Juan was right, the guard was a son of a bitch, the museum deserved to be bombed. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the carrot. “Is it a carrot,” he wanted to know, “or is it a carrot?”

Dutifully she set down her beer and took a bite. It tasted like plastic.

3. The White Uniform (2021)

Shrimp tried to focus on the music—music was the major source of meaning in her life—but she could only think of January. January’s face and her thick hands, the pink palms roughened with calluses. January’s neck, the tense muscles slowly melting beneath the pressure of Shrimp’s fingers. Or, in the opposite direction: January’s heavy thighs pressing against the tank of a bike, bare black flesh, bare black metal, its dizzying sound as it idled, waiting for the light, and then before it had gone quite to green its roar as it went tearing down the freeway on the way to … What would be a suitable destination? Alabama? Spokane? South St. Paul?

Or this: January in a nurse’s uniform—brisk, crinkly, blinding white. Shrimp would be inside the ambulance. The little white cap rubbing against the low ceiling. She would offer her the soft flesh of her inner arm. The dark fingers searching for a vein. A little daub of alcohol, a moment’s chill, the hypodermic, and January smiling—“I know this hurts.” Shrimp wanted to swoon at that point. Swoon.

She took out the plugs and let the music wind on, unheard, inside the little plastic case, for a car had left the street and pulled up to the little red charger. January lumbered out from the station, took the man’s card, and stuck it in the credit slot, which replied “Ding.” She worked like a model in a shop window, never pausing, never lifting her eyes, off in her own universe, through Shrimp knew that she knew that she was here, on this bench, looking at her, longing for her, swooning.

Look at me! she thought at January fiercely. Make me exist!

But the steady flow of cars and trucks and buses and bikes between them dispersed the thought-message as though it were smoke. Perhaps some driver a dozen yards past the station would glance up with momentary panic, or a woman riding the 17 bus home from work would wonder what had reminded her of some boy she had thought she had loved twenty years before.

Three days.

And each day returning from this vigil. Shrimp would pass in front of a drab shop with a painted sign, Myers Uniforms & Badges. In the window a dusty moustached policeman from another town (the sprinkles on his jacket were wrong for New York) brandished, in a diffident way, a wooden billy club. Handcuffs and canisters dangled from his black gunbelt. Touching the policeman, yet seeming not to notice, a fireman decked out in bright yellow rubber striped with black (another out-of-towner) smiled through the streaked glass at, in the opposite window, a tall black girl in a nurse’s white uniform. Shrimp would walk past slowly and on as far as the traffic light then, like a boat when its engine conks out and it can no longer fight against the current, she would drift back to the window, the white uniform.

The third day she went inside. A bell clanked. The sales-clerk asked could he help her.

“I’d like—” she cleared her throat “—a uniform. For a nurse.”

He lifted a slim yellow tape measure off a stack of visored caps. “You’d be… a twelve?”

“It’s not—Actually, it isn’t for me. For a friend. I said that since I’d be passing by here … ”

“What hospital would she be with? Each hospital has its own little requirements, you know.”

Shrimp looked up in his young-old face. A white shirt, the collar too tight. A black tie with a small, crisp knot. He seemed, in the same indefinite way as the mannikins in the windows, to be in uniform.

“Not a hospital. A clinic. A private clinic. She can wear … whatever she likes.”

“Good, good. And what size is she, your friend?”

“A large size. Eighteen? And tall.”

“Well, let me show you what we have.” And he led Shrimp, enraptured, into the farther twilight of the shop.

4. January (2021)

She’d met Shrimp at one of the open sessions of The Asylum, where having come to recruit she’d found herself, in the most shameful way, recruited—to the point of tears and, beyond tears, of confessions. All of which January reported faithfully at the next meeting of the cell. There were four cell members besides herself, all in their twenties, all very serious, though none were intellectuals or even college dropouts: Jerry and Lee Lighthall, Ada Miller, and Graham X. Graham was the link upward to the organization but not otherwise “leader” since one thing they were against was pyramidal structures.

Lee, who was fat and black and liked to talk, said what they were all thinking, that having emotions and showing them was a completely healthy direction. “Unless you said something about us?”

“No. It was more just sexual things. Or personal.”

“Then I don’t see why you brought it up here.”

“Maybe if you told us something more about it, Jan,” Graham suggested, in Graham’s gentle way. “Well, what they do at The Asylum—”

“We’ve all been to The Asylum, honey.”

“Stop being a fucking bully, Lee,” his wife said.

“Lee’s right, though—I’m taking up all our time. Anyhow I was there early, sort of sizing them up as they came in, and I could tell the minute this one arrived—her name is Shrimp Hanson—that she wasn’t one of the regulars. I think she noticed me right away too. Anyhow we started off in the same group, breathing and holding hands and all that.” Ordinarily January would have firmed up a narrative of this length with some obscenities, but any resemblance to bluster now would only have made her feel sillier than she did. “Then she started massaging my neck, I don’t know, in a particular way. And I started crying. For no reason at all I started crying.”

“Were you up on anything?” Ada asked.

January, who was stricter than any of them on that score (she didn’t even drink Koffee), could legitimately bridle. “Yeah, on your vibrator!”

“Now, Jan,” said Graham.

“But she was up,” she went on, “very much up. Meanwhile the regulars were swarming around us like a pack of vampires. That’s what most of them come there for, the sludge and the blood. So we went off into one of the booths. I thought we’d screw and that would be that, but instead we started talking. That is, I did—she listened.” She could remember the knot of shame, like the pain of a too sudden swallow of water, as the words came out. “I talked about my parents, about sex, about being lonely. That kind of thing.”

“That kind of thing,” Lee echoed, supportively.

January braced herself and took a deep breath. “About my parents. I explained about their being Republicans, which is all right of course, but I said that I could never relate sexual feelings with love because of their both being men. It doesn’t sound like much now. And about being lonely I said—” she shrugged, but also she closed her eyes “—that I was lonely. That everyone was lonely. Then I started crying again.”

“You covered a lot of ground.”

She opened her eyes. No one seemed to be angry with her, though they might have taken the last thing she’d said as an accusation. “We were at it most of the fucking night.”

“You still haven’t told us anything about her,” Ada observed.

“Her name is Shrimp Hanson. She said she’s thirty, but I’d say thirty-four, or older even. Lives somewhere on East 11th, I’ve got it written down, with a mother and I can’t remember how many more. A family.” This was, at root, exactly what the organization was most against. Authoritarian political structures only exist because people are conditioned by authoritarian family structures. “And no job, just her allowance.”

“White?” Jerry asked. Being the only nonblack in the group, it was diplomatic for her to be the one to ask.

“As fucking snow.”

“Political?”

“Not a bit. But I think she could be guided to it. Or on second thought—”

“How do you feel about her now?” Graham asked.

He obviously thought she was in love. Was she? Possibly. But just as possibly not. Shrimp had reduced her to tears; she wanted to pay her back in kind. What were feelings anyhow? Words floating through your head, or hormones in some gland. “I don’t know what I feel.”

“What is it you want us to tell you then?” Lee asked. “Whether you should see her again? Or whether you’re in love? Or if you should be? Lordie, girl!” This, with a heave of all that good-natured fat. “Go ahead. Have fun. Fuck yourself silly or cry your heart out, whatever you like. No reason not to. Just remember, if you do fall in love— keep it in a separate compartment.”

They all agreed that that was the best advice, and from her own sense of being defluttered she knew it was what she’d wanted to be told. Now they were free to go on to basics—quotas and drops and the reasons why the Revolution, though so long delayed, was the next inevitable step. Then they left the benches and for an hour just enjoyed themselves. You would never have thought, to look at them, that they were any different from any other five people on the roller rink.

5. Richard M. Williken (2024)

They would sit together in the darkroom, officially the bedroom of his son. Richard M. Williken. Jr. Richard Jr. existed for the sake of various tiles in offices about the city, though upon need a boy answering to the name could be got on loan from his wife’s cousin. Without their imaginary son the Willikens could never have held on to a two-bedroom apartment now that their real children had left home.

They might listen to whatever tapes were being copied usually since they were his specialty to Alkan or Gottschalk or Boagni. The music was the ostensible reason, among other ostensible reasons such as friendship, that she hung around. He would smoke, or doodle, or watch the second hand simplify another day. His ostensible reason was that he was working, and in the sense that he was copying tapes and taking messages and sometimes renting out, for next to nothing an hour, his fictitious son’s bed, he was working. But in the sense that counted he was not.

The phone would ring. Williken would pick it up and say. “One-five, five-six.” Shrimp would wrap herself in her thin arms and watch him until by the lowering of his eyes she knew the call wasn’t from Seattle.

When the lack of some kind of mutual acknowledgment became too raw they would have pleasant little debates about Art. Art: Shrimp loved the word (it was right up there with “epithesis,” “mystic,” and “Tiffany”), and poor Williken couldn’t leave it alone. Despite that they tried never to descend to the level of honest complaint, their separate, secret unhappinesses would find ways to poke up their heads into the long silences or to become, with a bit of camouflage, the real subjects of the little debates, as when Williken, too worn out to be anything but serious, had announced: “Art? Art’s just the opposite, true heart. It’s patchwork. It’s bits and pieces. What you think is all flow and force— ”

“And fun,” she added.

“—are an illusion. But the artist can’t share it. He knows better.”

“The way prostitutes aren’t supposed ever to have orgasms? I talked to a prostitute once, mentioning no names, who said she had orgasms all the time.”

“It doesn’t sound very professional. When an artist is being entertained his work suffers.”

“Yes. yes, that’s certainly true,” brushing the idea from her lap like crumbs, “for you. But I should think that for someone like—” she gestured toward the machinery, the four slowly revolving mandates of “From Sea to Shining Sea” “—John Herbert MacDowell, for instance. For him it must be like being in love. Except that instead of loving one person, his love spreads out in every direction.”

Williken made a face. “I’ll agree that an is like love. But that doesn’t contradict what I said before. It’s all patchwork and patience, art and love both.”

“And passion? Doesn’t that come in at all?”

“Only for the very young.” Charitably he left it for her to decide if that shoe fit.

This went on, off, and on for the better part of a month, and in all that time he indulged in only one conscious cruelty. For all his personal grubbiness—the clothes that looked like dirty bandages, the skimpy beard the smells—Williken was a great fusspot, and it was his style of fuss (in housekeeping now as it had been in art) to efface the evidences of his own undesirable presence, to wipe away the fingerprints and baffle his pursuers. Thus each object that was allowed to be visible in the room came to possess a kind of heightened significance, like so many skulls in a monk’s cell: the pink telephone. Richard Jr.’s sagging bed the speakers, the long silvery swan-neck of the water faucet, the calendar with lovers rumbling in the heavy snows of “January 2024.” His cruelty was simply not changing the month.

She never said as she might have, “Willy, it’s the tenth of May, for Christ’s sake.” Possibly she found some grueling satisfaction in whatever hurt his reminder caused her. Certainly she gnawed on it. He had no first-hand knowledge of such feelings. The whole drama of her abandonment seemed ludicrous to him. Anguish for anguish’s sake.

It might have gone on like that till summer, but then one day the calendar was gone and one of his own photographs was in its place.

“Is it yours?” she asked.

His awkwardness was sincere. He nodded.

“I noticed it the minute I walked into the room.”

A photograph of a glass half full of water resting on a wet glass shelf. A second, empty glass outside the picture cast a shadow across the white tiles of the wall.

Shrimp walked up close to it. “It’s sad, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Williken said. He felt confused, insulted, anguished. “Usually I don’t like having my own things hanging about. They go dead on you. But I thought—”

“I like it. I do.”

6. Amparo (2024)

On her birthday, the 29th of May, she had realized that she hated her mother.

Her eleventh birthday. It was a horrible realization, but Geminis can’t deceive themselves. There was simply nothing about Mama you could admire and so much to loathe. She bullied herself and Mickey mercilessly, but what was worse were the times she’d miscalculate her stupid pills, slime off into a glorious depression and tell them sob-stories about her wasted life. It was, certainly, a wasted life but Amparo couldn’t see that she’d ever made any effort not to waste it. She didn’t know what work was. Even around the house she let poor old Grummy do everything. She just lay about, like some animal at the zoo, snuffling and scratching her smelly cunt. Amparo hated her.

Shrimp, in the way she sometimes had of seeming telepathic, said to her, before the dinner, that they had better have a talk, and she concocted a thin lie to get her out of the apartment. They went down to 15, where a Chinese lady had opened a new shop, and Shrimp bought the shampoo she was being so silly about.

Then to the roof for the inevitable lecture. The sunshine had brought half the building up on top but they found a spot almost their own. Shrimp slipped out of her blouse, and Amparo couldn’t help thinking what a difference there was between her and her mother, even though Shrimp was actually older. No sags, no wrinkles, and only a hint of graininess. Whereas Lottie, with every initial advantage on her side, had let herself become a monster of obesity. Or at least (“monster” was perhaps an exaggeration) she was heading down the road lickety-split.

“Is that all?” Amparo asked, once Shrimp had produced her last pious excuse for Lottie’s various awfulnesses. “Can we go downstairs now that I’m properly ashamed?”

“Unless you want to tell me your side of the story?”

“I didn’t think I was supposed to have a side.”

“That’s true when you’re ten years old. At eleven you’re allowed to have your own point of view.”

Amparo grinned a grin that said, Good old democratic Aunt Shrimp. Then she was serious. “Mama hates me, it’s as simple as that.” She gave examples.

Shrimp appeared unimpressed. “You’d rather bully her—is that your point?”

“No.” But giggling. “But it would be a change.”

“You do, you know. You bully her something dreadful. You’re a worse tyrant than Madame Who’s-It with the goiters.”

Amparo’s second grin was more tentative. “Me!”

“You. Even Mickey can see it, but he’s afraid to say anything or you’ll turn on him. We’re all afraid.”

“Don’t be a silly. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Because I say sarcastic things now and then?”

“And then and then. You’re as unpredictable as an airplane schedule. You wait till she’s down, completely at the bottom, and then you go for juggler. What was it you said this morning?”

“I don’t remember anything I said this morning.”

“About the hippopotamus in the mud?”

“I said that to Grummy. She didn’t hear. She was in bed, as usual.”

“She heard.”

“Then I’m sorry. What should I do, apologize?”

“You should stop making things worse for her.”

Amparo shrugged. “She should stop making things worse for me. I hate to always harp about it, but I do want to go to the Lowen School. And why shouldn’t I? It’s not as though I were asking permission to go to Mexico and cut off my breasts.”

“I agree. It’s probably a good school. But you’re at a good school.”

“But I want to go to the Lowen School. It would be a career, but of course Mama wouldn’t understand that.”

“She doesn’t want you living away from home. Is that so cruel?”

“Because if I left, then she’d only have Mickey to bully. Anyhow I’d be here officially, which is all she cares anyhow.”

Shrimp was silent for a while, in what seemed a considering way. But what was there to consider? It was all so obvious. Amparo writhed.

At last Shrimp said, “Let’s make a bargain. If you promise not to be Little Miss Bitch, I’ll do what I can to talk her round to signing you up.”

“Will you? Will you really?”

“Will you? That’s what I’m asking.”

“I’ll grovel at her feet. Anything.”

“If you don’t, Amparo, if you go on the way you’ve been going, believe me, I’ll tell her I think the Lowen School will destroy your character, what little there is.”

“I promise. I promise to be as nice as—as what?”

“As a birthday cake?”

“As nice as a birthday cake, absolutely!”

They shook hands on it and put on their clothes and went downstairs where a real, rather sad, rather squalid birthday cake was waiting for her. Try as she might, poor old Grummy just couldn’t cook. Juan had come by during the time they’d been on the roof, which was, more than any of her crumby presents, a nice surprise. The candles were lit, and everyone sang happy birthday: Juan, Grummy, Mama, Mickey, Shrimp.

“Make a wish,” Mickey said.

She made her wish, then with one decisive gust, blew out all twelve candles.

Shrimp winked at her. “Now don’t tell anyone what it was or you won’t get it.”

She hadn’t, in fact, been wishing for the Lowen School, since that was hers by right. What she’d wished instead was for Lottie to die.

Wishes never come true the way you think. A month later her father was dead. Juan, who’d never been unhappy a day in his life, had committed suicide.

7. Len Rude (2024)

Weeks after the Anderson debacle, when he’d last been able to assure himself that there’d be no dire consequences, Mrs. Miller summoned him uptown for “a little talk.” Though in the long-range view a nobody (her position scarcely brought her to middle management level), Mrs. Miller would soon be writing up his field summary, which made her, for now, a rather godlike nobody.

He panicked disgracefully. All morning he couldn’t think of anything but what to wear, what to wear? He settled on a maroon Perry Como-type sweater with a forest green scarf peeking out. Wholesome, not sexy, but not pointedly not-sexy.

He had a twenty-minute wait outside the lady’s cubbyhole. Usually he excelled at waiting. Cafeterias, toilets, launderettes—his life was rich in opportunities to acquire that skill. But he was so certain he was about to be axed that by the end of the twenty minutes he was on the brink of acting out his favorite crisis fantasy: I will get up, I will walk out the door. Every door. With never a word of good-bye nor a look backward. And then? Ah, there was the rub. Once he was out the door, where could he go that his identity, the whole immense dossier of his life, wouldn’t trail after him like a tin can tied to his tail? So he waited, and then the interview was over, and Mrs. Miller was shaking his hand and saying something bland and anecdotal about Brown, whose book had been decorating his lap. Then, thank you, and thank you for coming in. Good-bye, Mrs. Miller. Good-bye, Len.

What had been the point? She hadn’t mentioned Anderson except to say in passing that of course the poor man ought to be in Bellevue and that a few like that are statistically inevitable for anyone. It was better than he’d expected and more than he deserved.

Instead of the axe there was only his new assignment: Hanson, Nora/ Apartment 1812/ 334 E. 11th St. Mrs. Miller said she was a nice old lady—“if a little difficult at times.” But all the cases he was put on this year were nice and old and difficult, since he was studying, in the catalogue’s words, “Problems of Aging.” The one odd thing about this Hanson was that she had a sizable brood under her wings (though not as large as the printout had indicated; the son was married now) and would not seem to be dangerously lonely. However, according to Mrs. Miller, her son’s marriage had “unsettled her” (ominous word!) which was why she stood in need of his warmth and attention four hours a week. A stitch in time seemed to be what Mrs. Miller had in mind.

The more he thought about it the more this Hanson woman sounded like an impending disaster. Mrs. Miller had probably called him in to cover herself, so that if and when this one went in the same wrong direction Anderson had gone, it would be his fault, not the nice old difficult lady’s, and not absolutely Alexa Miller’s. She was probably doing her memorandum for the file right now, if she hadn’t done it in advance.

All this for two miserable dollars an hour. Sweet fucking Jesus, if he’d known four years ago what he’d be getting into, he’d never have switched his major from English. Better to teach assholes to read the want ads than be an emotional nursemaid to senile psychotics.

That was the dark side. There was also a bright side. By the fall semester he’d have cleared up his field requirements. Then two years of smooth academic sailing, and then, O happy day, Leonard Rude would be a Doctor of Philosophy, which we all know is the next best condition to out-and-out freedom.

8. The Love Story (2024)

The MODICUM office had sent round an apologetic, shaggy boy with bad skin and a whining midwestern accent. She couldn’t get him to explain why he’d been sent to visit her. He claimed it was a mystery just as much to him, some bureaucrat’s brainstorm, there was never any sense to these projects but he hoped she’d go along with it for his sake. A job is a job is a job, and this job in addition was for his degree. He was going to the university?

Yes, but not, he assured her at once, that he’d come here to study her. Students were assigned to these make-work projects because there wasn’t enough real work to go around. That was the welfare state for you. He hoped they’d be friends.

Mrs. Hanson couldn’t bring herself to feel unfriendly, but what she asked him quite bluntly were they supposed to do, as friends? Len—she kept forgetting his name and he kept reminding her it was Len—suggested that he read a book to her.

“Aloud?”

“Yes, why not? It’s one I have to read this term anyhow. It’s a super book.”

“Oh, I’m sure it is,” she said, alarmed again. “I’m sure I’d learn all kinds of things. But still.” She turned her head sideways and read the golden title of a fat, black book he’d laid down on the kitchen table. Something OLOGY.

“Even so.”

Len laughed. “Fiddle-dee-dee, Mrs. Hanson, not that one! I can’t read that one myself.”

The book they were to read was a novel he’d been assigned in an English class. He took it out of his pocket. The cover showed a pregnant woman sitting naked on the lap of a man in a blue suit.

“What a strange cover,” she said, by way of compliment.

Len took this for another sign of reluctance. He insisted that the story would seem quite commonplace once she accepted the author’s basic premise. A love story. That’s all. She was bound to like it. Everyone did. “It’s a super book,” he said again.

She could see he meant to read it, so she led him into the living room and settled herself in one corner of the sofa and Len in the other. She found the Oralines in her purse. As there were only three left, she didn’t offer one to him. She began sucking complaisantly. Then, as a humorous afterthought she fit a premium button over the end of the stick. It said, I DON’T BELIEVE IT! But Len took no notice or else he didn’t get the joke.

He started reading and right from page one it was sex. That in itself wouldn’t have upset her. She had always believed in sex and enjoyed it and though she did think that having sex ought to be a private matter there was certainly no harm in a candid discussion. What was embarrassing was that the whole scene took place on a sofa that was wobbling because one leg was missing. The sofa that she and Len were sitting on also had a missing leg and wobbled, and it seemed to Mrs. Hanson that some sort of comparison couldn’t be avoided.

The sofa scene dragged on and on. Then nothing at all happened for a few pages, talk and descriptions. Why, she kept wondering, would the government want to pay college students to come to people’s homes and read pornography to them? Wasn’t the whole point of college to keep as many young people as possible occupied and out of jobs?

But perhaps this was an experiment. An experiment in adult education! When she thought about it, no other explanation fit the facts half so well. Viewed in this light the book suddenly became a challenge to her and she tried to pay closer attention. Someone had died, and the woman the story was about—her name was Linda—was going to inherit a fortune. Mrs. Hanson had gone to school with someone called Linda, a dull-witted Negro girl whose father owned two grocery stores. She’d disliked the name ever since. Len stopped reading.

“Oh, go on,” she said. “I’m enjoying it.”

“So am I, Mrs. Hanson, but it’s four o’clock.”

She felt obliged to say something intelligent before he went off, but at the same time she didn’t want to show that she’d guessed the purpose of the experiment. “It’s a very unusual plot.”

Len bared small, stained teeth in a smile of agreement.

“I always say there’s nothing that can beat a good love story.”

And before she could add her little joke (“Except perhaps a bit of smut”), Len had chimed in with: “I’ll agree with that, Mrs. Hanson. Friday, then, at two o’clock?” In any case it was Shrimp’s joke.

Mrs. Hanson felt she hadn’t shown herself at all to advantage, but it was too late. Len was gathering himself together, his umbrella, his black book, talking steadily all the while. He even remembered the wet plaid cap she’d hung up on the hook to dry. Then he was gone.

Her heart swelled up inside her chest, hammering as though it had slipped gears, ker-whop! ker-wham! She went back to the sofa. The cushions at the end where Len had sat were still pressed down. Suddenly she could see the room as he must have seen it: linoleum so filthy you couldn’t see the patterns, windows caked, blinds broken, heaps of toys and piles of clothing and tangles of both everywhere. Then, as if to complete the devastation, Lottie came staggering out of her bedroom wrapped in a dirty sheet and reeking.

“Is there any milk?”

“Is there any milk!”

“Oh Mom. What’s wrong now?”

“Do you have to ask? Look at this place. It looks as if a bomb hit it.”

Lottie smiled a faint, mussed smile. “I was asleep. Did a bomb hit it?”

Poor silly Lotto, who could ever stay angry with her? Mrs. Hanson laughed indulgently, then started to explain about Len and the experiment, but Lottie was off in her own little world again. What a life, Mrs. Hanson thought, and she went out to the kitchen to mix up a glass of milk.

9. The Air Conditioner (2024)

Lottie could hear things. If she were sitting near the closet that used to be the foyer she could understand whole conversations taking place out in the corridor. In her own bedroom anything else happening in the apartment was audible to her—the turbulence of voices on the teevee, or Mickey lecturing his doll in what he imagined was Spanish, or her mother’s putterings and sputterings. Such noises had the advantage of being on a human scale. It was the noises that lay behind these that she dreaded, and they were always there, waiting for those first masking sounds to drop, ready for her.

One night in her fifth month with Amparo she’d gone out walking very late, through Washington Square and past the palisades of N.Y.U. and the junior deluxe co-ops on West Broadway. She stopped beside the window of her favorite shop where the crystals of a darkened chandelier caught glints from the headlights of passing cars. It was four-thirty, the stillest hour of the morning. A diesel roared past and turned west on Prince. A dead silence followed in its wake. It was then she heard that other sound, a sourceless far-off rumble, like the first faint premonition, as one glides down a quiet stream, of the cataract ahead. Since then the sound of those falls had always been with her, sometimes distinctly, sometimes only, like stars behind smog, as a dim presence, an article of faith.

Resistance of a kind was possible. The teevee was a good barrier, when she could concentrate and when the programs weren’t themselves upsetting. Or talk, if she could think of something to say and find someone to listen to her. But she’d been submerged by too many of her mother’s monologues not to be sensitive to signals of boredom, and Lottie could not, like her mother, keep going regardless. Books demanded too much and were no help. Once she’d enjoyed the stories, simple as tic-tac-toe, in the romance comics that Amparo brought home, but now Amparo had outgrown comic books and Lottie was embarrassed to be buying them for herself. In any case they cost too much for her to get addicted.

Mostly she had to get by with pills and mostly she could.

Then, in the August of the year Amparo was to start at the Lowen School, Mrs. Hanson traded off the second teevee, which hadn’t worked for years, for a King Kool air conditioner of Ab Holt’s that also hadn’t worked for years except as a fan. Lottie had always complained about how stuffy her bedroom was.

Sandwiched between the kitchen and the main bedroom, its only means of ventilation was an ineffective transom over the door to the living room.

Shrimp, who was back home again, got her photographer friend from downstairs to take out the transom and install the air conditioner.

The fan made a gentle purring sound all through the night with every so often a tiny hiccoughing counterbeat, like an amplified heart murmur. Lottie could lie in bed for hours, long after the children were asleep in the bunks, just listening to the lovely syncopated hum. It was as calming as the sound of waves, and like the sound of waves it sometimes seemed to be murmuring words, or fragments of words, but however closely she strained to hear exactly what those words were, nothing ever clearly emerged. “Eleven, eleven, eleven,” it would whisper to her, “thirty-six, three, eleven.”

10. Lipstick (2026)

She assumed it was Amparo who was messing about in her makeup, had even gone so far as to mention the matter once at dinner, just her usual word to the wise. Amparo had sworn she hadn’t so much as opened a drawer, but thereafter there were no more lipstick smudges on the mirror, no spilled powder, no problem. Then one Thursday coming back wasted and worn out from one of Brother Cary’s periodic nonappearances, she found Mickey sitting at the dresser carefully laying on a foundation. His giggly dismay at her return was so ludicrous in the present blanked-out condition of his face that she simply burst out laughing. Mickey, without ever losing his look of comic horror, began laughing too.

“So—it was you all along, was it?”

He nodded and reached for the cold cream, but Lottie, misinterpreting, caught hold of his hand and gave it a squeeze. She tried to remember when she’d first noticed things out of place, but it was one of those trivial details, like when a particular song was popular, that wasn’t arranged chronologically in her memory. Mickey was ten, almost eleven. He must have been doing this for months without her being aware.

“You said,” in a self-justifying whine, “that you used to do the same thing with Uncle Boz. You’d dress up in each other’s clothes and pretend. You said.”

“When did I say that?”

“Not to me. You said it to him and I heard you.”

She tried to think of the right thing to do.

“I’ve seen men wear makeup. Lots of times.”

“Mickey, have I said anything against it?”

“No, but— ”

“Sit down.” She was brisk and businesslike, though looking at his face in the mirror she felt close to breaking up all over again. No doubt the people who worked in beauty shops had that problem all the time. She turned him round, with his back to the mirror, and wiped at his cheeks with a hankie.

“Now to start with, a person with your fair skin doesn’t need a foundation at all, or next to none. It isn’t the same, you know, as frosting a cake.”

She continued a stream of knowledgeable patter as she made him up: how to shape the lips so there always seems to be a little smile lurking in the corners, how to blend in the shadows, the necessity, when drawing on the brows, of studying their effect in profile and three-quarter views. All the while, in contradiction to her own sensible advice, she was creating a doll mask of the broadest exaggerations. When she put on the last brush stroke she framed the result with pendant earrings and a stretch wig. The result was uncanny. Mickey demanded to be allowed to look in the mirror. How could she say no?

In the mirror her face above his and his face below hers melted together and became one face. It was not simply that she had drawn her own features on his blank slate, or that one was a parody of the other. There was a worse truth—that this was the whole portion Mickey stood to inherit, nothing but these marks of pain and terror and certain defeat. It she’d written the words on his forehead with the eyebrow pencil it couldn’t have been any clearer. And on hers, and on hers. She lay down on the bed and let slow, depthless tears rise and fall. For a while Mickey stared at her, and then he went outside, down to the street.

11. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (2026)

The whole family was there for the program—Shrimp and Lottie on the sofa with Mickey between them, Mrs. Hanson in the rocker, Milly, with little Peanut in her lap, in the flowered armchair, and Boz beside them being a nuisance on one of the chairs from the kitchen. Amparo, whose triumph this was to be, was everywhere at once, fretting and frothing.

The sponsors were Pfizer and the Conservation Corporation. Since neither had anything to sell what everybody wasn’t buying already, the ads were slow and heavy, but no slower and heavier, as it turned out, than Leaves of Grass.

Shrimp tried gamely for the first half hour to find aspects to admire—the costumes were ultra-authentic, the brass band went oomp-pa-pa very well, and there was a pretty sequence of some brawny blacks hammering a wooden house together. But then Don Hershey would reappear as Whitman, bellowing his dreadful poems, and she would just shrivel up.

Shrimp had grown up idolizing Don Hershey, and to see him reduced to this! A dirty old man slobbering after teenagers. It wasn’t fair.

“It makes a fella kinda glad he’s a Democrat,” Boz drawled, when the ads came on again, but Shrimp gave him a dirty look: no matter how dreadful it was they were obliged, for Amparo’s sake, to praise it.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Shrimp said. “I think it’s very artistic. the colors!” It was the utmost she could manage.

Milly, with what seemed honest curiosity, filled up the rest of station identification with classroom-type questions about Whitman, but Amparo brushed them aside. She no longer kept up a pretense that the show was about anyone but herself.

“I think I’m in the next part. Yes, I’m sure they said part two.”

But the second half hour concerned the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination:

O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night!—O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!

For half an hour.

“You don’t suppose they’ve cut out your scene, do you, Amparo?” Boz teased. They all came down on him together. Clearly it was what they’d all thought to themselves.

“It’s possible,” Amparo said dourly.

“Let’s wait and see,” Shrimp advised, as though they might have done anything else.

The Pfizer logo faded away, and there was Don Hershey again in his Santa Claus beard roaring off into a vast, new poem:

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,

The simple, compact, well-joined scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,

The similitudes of the past and those of the future,

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk on the street and the passage over the river….

And so on, endlessly, while the camera roved about the streets and over the water and looked at shoes—floods of shoes, centuries of shoes. Then, abrupt as flipping to another channel, it was 2026, and an ordinary crowd of people mulled about in the South Ferry waiting room.

Amparo rolled herself into a tight ball of attention. “This is it, coming up now.”

Don Hershey rolled on, voice-over:

It avails not time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,

Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river….

The camera panned past conglomerations of smiling, gesturing, chattering people, filing into the boat, pausing now and then to pick out details—a hand picking nervously at a cuff, a yellow scarf lifting in a breeze and falling, a particular face.

Amparo’s.

“There I am! There!” Amparo screamed.

The camera lingered. She stood at the railing, smiling a dreamy smile that none of them watching could recognize. As Don Hershey lowered his volume and asked:

What is then between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Amparo regarded, and the camera regarded, the moving surface of the water.

Shrimp’s heart splattered like a bag of garbage dropped to the street from a high rooftop. Envy spilled out through her every vein. Amparo was so beautiful, so young and so damnably beautiful, she wanted to die.

12. The Bedroom (2026)

In cross section the building was a swastika with the arms revolving counterclockwise, the Aztec direction. 1812, the Hansons’ apartment, was located halfway along the inner forearm of the swastika’s northwest limb, so that its windows commanded an uninterrupted view of several degrees southwestwards across the roofs of the lower buildings as far as the windowless, megalithic masses of the Cooper Union complex. Above: blue sky and roving clouds, jet trails and smoke wreathing up from the chimneys of 320 and 328. However one had to be right at the window to enjoy this vista. From the bed Shrimp could see only a uniformity of yellow brick and windows variegated with different kinds of curtains, shades, and blinds. May—and from two until almost six, when she needed it most, there was direct, yellow sunlight. It was the only advantage of living so near the top. On warm days the window would be opened a crack and a breeze would enter to ruffle the curtains. Lifting and falling, like the shallow erratic breathing of an asthmatic, billowing, collapsing, the curtains became, as anything watched intently enough will, the story of her life. Did any of those other curtains, shades, or blinds conceal a sadder story? Ah, she doubted it.

But sad as it was, life was also irrepressibly comic, and the curtains caught that too. They were a mild, elaborate joke between Mrs. Hanson and her daughter. The material was a sheer spun chintz in sappy ice cream colors patterned with sprigs and garlands of genitalia, his and hers, raspberry, lemon, and peach. A present from January, some ages ago. Loyally Shrimp had brought it home for her mother to make her a pajama suit from, but Mrs. Hanson, without overtly disapproving, had never got round to the job.

Then, while Shrimp was in the hospital, Mrs. Hanson had made the material up into a pair of curtains and hung them in their bedroom as homecoming surprise and peace offering. Shrimp had to admit that the chintz had met its just reward.

Shrimp seemed content to float through each day without goals or ideas, just watching the cunts and cocks wafted by the breeze and whatever other infinitesimal events the empty room presented her with. Teevee annoyed her, books bored her, and she had nothing to say to visitors. Williken brought her a jigsaw puzzle, which she worked on on an upside-down dresser drawer, but once the border was assembled she found that the drawer, through it had been measured in advance, was an inch too short. Surrendering with a sigh, she swept the pieces back in the box. In every way her convalescence was inexplicable and calm.

Then one day there was a tapping at the door. She said, prophetically, “Come in.” And January came in, wet with rain and breathless from the stairs. It was a surprise. January’s address on the West Coast had been a well-kept secret.

Even so, it wasn’t a large enough surprise. But then what is?

“Jan!”

“Hi. I came yesterday too, but your mother said you were asleep. I guess I should have waited, but I didn’t know whether—”

“Take off your coat. You’re all wet.”

January came far enough into the room to be able to close the door, but she didn’t approach the bed and she didn’t take off her coat.

“How did you happen to— ”

“Your sister mentioned it to Jerry, and Jerry phoned me up. I couldn’t come right away though, I didn’t have the money. Your mother says you’re all right now, basically.”

“Oh, I’m fine. It wasn’t the operation, you know. That was as routine as taking out a wisdom tooth. But impatient me couldn’t stay in bed and so—” She laughed (always bearing in mind that life is comic too) and made a feeble joke. “I can now, though. Quite patiently.”

January crinkled her eyebrows. All yesterday, and all the way downtown today, all the way up the stairs, feelings of tenderness and concern had tumbled about in her like clothes in a dryer. But now, face to face with Shrimp and seeing her try the same old ploys, she could feel nothing but resentment and the beginnings of anger, as though only hours had intervened since that last awful meal two years before. A Betty Crocker sausage and potatoes.

“I’m glad you came.” Shrimp said half-heartedly.

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

The anger vanished and guilt came glinting up at the window of the dryer. “The operation, was it for—Was it because of what I said about having children?”

“I don’t know, January. My reasons, when I look back, are still confused. Surely I must have been influenced by things you said. Morally I had no right to bear children.”

“No, it was me who had no right. Dictating to you that way. Because of my principles! I see it now.”

“Well.” Shrimp took a sip from the water glass. It was a heavenly refreshment. “It goes deeper than politics. After all, I wasn’t in any immediate danger of adding to the population, was I? My quota was filled. It was a ridiculous, melodramatic gesture, as Dr. Mesic was the first—”

January had shrugged off her raincoat and walked nearer the bed—She was wearing the nurse’s uniform Shrimp had bought for her how many years ago. She bulged everywhere.

“Remember?” January said.

Shrimp nodded. She didn’t have the heart to tell her that she didn’t feel sexy. Or ashamed. Or anything. The horror show of Bellevue had taken it out of her—feeling, sex, and all.

January slipped her fingers under Shrimp’s wrist to take her pulse. “It’s slow,” she observed.

Shrimp pulled her hand away. “I don’t want to play games.”

January began to cry.

13. Shrimp, in Bed (2026)

“You know?

“I’d like to see it working again, the way it was meant to. That may sound like less than the whole revolution, but it’s something that I can do, that I can try for. Right? Because a building is like … It’s a symbol of the life you lead inside it.

“One elevator, one elevator in working order and not even all day long necessarily. Maybe just an hour in the morning and an hour in the early evening, when there’s power to spare. What a difference it would make for people like us here at the top. Think back to all the times you decided not to come up to see me because of these stairs. Or all the times I stayed in. That’s no way to live. But it’s the older people who suffer most. My mother, I’ll bet she doesn’t get down to the street once a week nowadays, and Lottie’s almost as bad. It’s me and Mickey who have to get the mail, the groceries, everything else, and that’s not fair to us. Is it?

“What’s more, do you know that there are two people working full time running errands for the people stranded in their apartments without anyone to help. I’m not exaggerating. They’re called auxiliaries! Think what that must cost.

“Or if there’s an emergency? They’ll send the doctor into the building rather than carry someone down so many steps. If my hemorrhaging had started when I was up here instead of at the Clinic, I might not be alive today. I was lucky, that’s all. Think of that—I could be dead just because nobody in this building cares enough to make the fucking elevators function! So I figure, it’s my responsibility now. Put up or shut up. Right?

“I’ve started a petition, and naturally everyone will sign it. That doesn’t take any effort. But what does is, I’ve started sounding out a couple of the people who might be helpful and they agree that the auxiliary system is a ridiculous waste, but they say that even so it would cost more to keep the elevator running. I told them that people would be willing to pay for tickets, if money’s the only problem. And they’d say yes, no doubt, absolutely. And then—fuck off, Miss Hanson, and thank you for your concern.

“There was one, the worst of them so far, a toadstool at the MODICUM office called R.M. Blake, who just kept saying what a wonderful sense of responsibility I have. Just like that: What a wonderful sense of responsibility you have, Miss Hanson. What big guts you have, Miss Hanson. I wanted to say to him, Yeah, the better to crush you with, Grandma. The old whitened sepulcher.

“It’s funny, isn’t it, the way we’ve switched round? The way it’s so symmetrical. It used to be I was religious and you were political, now it’s just the reverse. It’s like, did you see The Orphans the other night? It was sometime in the Nineteenth Century and there was this married couple, very cozy and very poor, except that each of them has one thing to be proud of. the man has a gold pocket watch, and the woman, poor darling, has her hair. So what happens? He pawns his watch to buy her a comb, and she sells her hair to get him a watch chain. A real ding-dong of a story.

“But if you think about it, that’s what we’ve done. Isn’t it? January?

“January, are you asleep?”

14. Lottie, at Bellevue (2026)

“They talk about the end of the world, the bombs and all, or if not the bombs then about the oceans dying, and the fish, but have you ever looked at the ocean? I used to worry, I did, but now I say to myself—so what. So what if the world ends? My sister though, she’s just the other way—if there’s an election she has to stay up and watch it. Or earthquakes. Anything. But what’s the use?

“The end of the world. Let me tell you about the end of the world. It happened fifty years ago. Maybe a hundred. And since then it’s been lovely. I mean it. Nobody tries to bother you. You can relax. You know what? I like the end of the world.”

15. Lottie, at the White Rose Bar (2024)

“Of course, there’s that. When people want something so badly, say a person with cancer, or the problems I have with my back, then you tell yourself you’ve been cleared. And you haven’t. But when it’s the real thing you can tell. Something happens to their faces. The puzzlement is gone, the aggression. Not a relaxing away like sleep, but suddenly. There’s someone else there, a spirit, touching them, soothing what’s been hurting them so. It might be a tumor, it might be mental anguish. But the spirit is very definite, though the higher ones can be harder to understand sometimes. There aren’t always words to explain what they experience on the higher planes. But those are the ones who can heal, not the lower spirits who’ve only left our plane a little while ago. They’re not as strong. They can’t help you as much because they’re still confused themselves.

“What you should do is go there yourself. She doesn’t mind if you’re skeptical. Everybody is, at first, especially men. Even now for me, sometimes I think—she’s cheating us, she’s making it all up, in her own head. There are no spirits, you die, and that’s it. My sister, who was the one who took me there in the first place—and she practically had to drag me—she can’t believe in it anymore. But then she’s never received any real benefit from it, whereas I—Thank you, I will.

“Okay. The first time was at a regular healing service I went to, about a year ago. This wasn’t the woman I was talking about though. The Universal Friends—they were at the Americana. There was a talk first, about the Ka, then right at the start of the service I felt a spirit lay his hands on my head. Like this. Very hard. And cold, like a washcloth when you’ve got a fever. I concentrated on the pain in my back, which was bad then, I tried to feel if there were some difference. Because I knew I’d been healed in some way. It wasn’t till after the meeting and out on Sixth Avenue that I realized what had happened. You know how you can look down a street late at night when things are quieter and see all the traffic lights changing together from red to green? Well, all my life I’ve been color-blind, but that night I could see the colors the way they really are. So bright, it was like—I can’t describe it. I stayed up all that night, walking around, even though it was winter. And the sun, when it came up? I was on top of the bridge, and God! But then gradually during the next week it left me. It was too large a gift. I wasn’t ready. But sometimes when I feel very clear, and not afraid, I think it’s come back. Just for a moment. Then it’s gone.

“The second time—thanks—the second time wasn’t so simple. It was at a message service. About five weeks ago. Or a month? It seems longer, but—Anyhow.

“The arrangement was, you could write down three questions and then the paper’s folded up, but before Reverend Ribera had even picked up mine he was there and—I don’t know how to describe it. He was shaking her about. Violently. Very violently. There was a kind of struggle whether he’d use her body and take control. Usually, you see, she likes to just talk with them, but Juan was so anxious and impatient, you see. You know what he was like when his mind was set on something. He kept calling my name in this terrible strangled voice. One minute I’d think, Yes, that’s Juan, he’s trying to reach me, and the next minute I’d think, No, it can’t be, Juan is dead. All this time, you see, I’d been trying to reach him—and now he was there and I wouldn’t accept it.

“Anyhow. At last he seemed to understand that he needed Reverend Ribera’s cooperation and he quieted down. He told about the life on the other side and how he couldn’t adjust to it. There were so many things he’d left unfinished here. At the last minute, he said, he’d wanted to change his mind but by then it was too late, he was out of control. I wanted so much to believe that was true and that he was really there, but I couldn’t.

“Then just before he left Reverend Ribera’s face changed, it became much younger, and she said some lines of poetry. In Spanish—everything had been in Spanish of course. I don’t remember the exact words, but what it said, basically, was that he couldn’t stand losing me. Even though this would be the last heartbreak that I’d ever cause him—el último dolor. Even though this would be the last poem he’d write to me.

“You see, years ago Juan used to write poems to me. So when I went home that night I looked through the ones I’d saved, and it was there, the same poem. He’d written it to me years before, after we first broke up.

“So that’s why when somebody says there’s no scientific reason to believe in a life after this one, that’s why I can’t agree.”

16. Mrs. Hanson, in Apartment 1812 (2024)

“April. April’s the worst month for colds. You see the sunshine and you think it’s short-sleeve weather already and by the time you’re down on the street it’s too late to change your mind. Speaking of short sleeves, you’ve studied psychology, I wonder what you’d say about this. Lottie’s boy, you’ve seen him, Mickey, he’s eight now—And he will not wear short sleeves. Even here in the house. He doesn’t want you to see any part of his body. Wouldn’t you have to call that morbid? I would. Or neurotic? For eight years old?

“There, drink that. I remembered this time and it’s not so sweet.

“You wonder where children get their ideas. I suppose it was different for you—growing up without a family. Without a home. Such a regimented life. I don’t think any child—But perhaps there are other factors. Advantages? Well, that’s none of my beans-on-toast. But a dormitory, there’d be no privacy, and you, with all your studying! I wonder how you do it. And who looks after you if you’re sick?

“Is it too hot? Your poor throat. Though it’s little wonder that you’re hoarse. That book, it just goes on and on and on. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m enjoying it. Thoroughly. That part where she meets the French boy, or was he French, with the red hair, in Notre Dame Cathedral. That was very… What would you call it? Romantic? And then what happens when they’re up on the tower, that was a real shockeroo. I’m surprised they haven’t made a movie of it. Or have they? Of course I’d much rather be reading it, even if… But it isn’t fair to you. Your poor throat.

“I’m a Catholic too, did you know that? There’s the Sacred Heart, right behind you. Of course, nowadays! But I was brought up Catholic. Then just before I was supposed to be confirmed there was that uprising about who owned the churches. There I was standing on Fifth Avenue in my first woolen suit, though as a matter of fact it was more of a jumper, and my father with one umbrella, and my mother with another umbrella, and there was this group of priests practically screaming at us not to go in, and the other priests trying to drag us over the bodies on the steps. That would have been nineteen-eighty … One? Two? You can read about it now in history books, but there I was right in the middle of a regular battle, and all I could think of was—R.B. is going to break the umbrella. My father, R.B.

“Lord, whatever got me started on that track? Oh, the cathedral. When you were reading that part of the story I could imagine it so well. Where it said how the stone columns were like tree trunks, I remember thinking the same thing myself when I was in St. Patrick’s.

“You know, I try and communicate these things to my daughters, but they’re not interested. The past doesn’t mean anything to them, you wouldn’t catch one of them wanting to read a book like this. And my grandchildren are too young to talk with. My son, he’d listen, but he’s never here now.

“When you’re brought up in an orphanage—but do they call it an orphanage, if your parents are still alive?—do they bother with religion and all of that? Not the government, I suppose.

“I think everyone needs some kind of faith, whether they call it religion or spiritual light or what-have-you. But my Boz says it takes more strength to believe in nothing at all. That’s more a man’s idea. You’d like Boz. You’re exactly the same age and you have the same interests and—

“I’ll tell you what, Lenny, why don’t you spend tonight here? You don’t have any classes tomorrow, do you? And why go out in this terrible weather? Shrimp will be gone, she always is, though that’s just between you and me. I’ll put clean sheets on her bed and you can have the bedroom all to yourself. Or if not tonight, some other time. It’s a standing invitation. You’ll like it, having some privacy for a change, and it’s a wonderful chance for me, having someone I can talk to.”

17. Mrs. Hanson, at the Nursing Home (2021)

“Is this me? It is. I don’t believe it. And who is that with me? It isn’t you, is it? Did you have a moustache then? Where are we that it’s so green? It can’t be Elizabeth. Is it the park? It says ‘July the Fourth’ on the back, but it doesn’t say where.

“Are you comfortable now? Would you like to sit up more? I know how to. Like this. There, isn’t that better?

“And look—this is that same picnic and there’s your father! What a comical face. The colors are so funny on all of these.

“And Bobby here. Oh dear.

“Mother.

“And who is this? It says, ‘I’ve got more where that came from!’ but there’s no name. Is it one of the Schearls? Or somebody that you worked with?

“Here he is again. I don’t think I ever—

“Oh, that’s the car we drove to Lake Hopatcong in, and George Washington was sick all over the back seat. Do you remember that? You were so angry.

“Here’s the twins.

“The twins again.

“Here’s Gary. No, it’s Boz! Oh, no, yes, it’s Gary. It doesn’t look like Boz at all really, but Boz had a little plastic bucket just like that, with a red stripe.

“Mother. Isn’t she pretty in this?

“And here you are together, look. You’re both laughing. I wonder what about. Hm? That’s a lovely picture. Isn’t it? I’ll tell you what, I’ll leave it in here, on top of this letter from …? Tony? Is it from Tony? Well, that’s thoughtful. Oh, Lottie told me to be sure to remember to give you a kiss for her.

“I guess it’s that time. Is it?

“It isn’t three o’clock. I thought it was three o’clock. But it isn’t. Would you like to look at some more of them? Or are you bored? I wouldn’t blame you, having to sit there like that, unable to move a muscle, and listening to me go on. I can rattle. I certainly wouldn’t blame you if you were bored.”

18. The New American Catholic Bible (2021)

Years before 334, when they’d been living in a single dismal basement room on Mott Street, a salesman had come round selling the New American Catholic Bible, and not just the Bible but a whole course of instructions that would bring her up to date on her own religion. By the time he’d come back to repossess she’d filled in the front pages with all the important dates of the family’s history:

The salesman let her keep the Bible in exchange for the original deposit and an additional five dollars but took back the study plans and the looseleaf binder.

That was 1999. Whenever in later years the family enlarged or contracted she would enroll the fact faithfully in The New American Catholic Bible the very day it happened.

On June 30, 2001, Jimmy Tom was clubbed by the police during a riot protesting the ten o’clock curfew that the President had imposed during the Farm Crisis. He died the same night.

On April 11, 2003, six years after his father’s death. Boz was born in Bellevue Hospital. Dwight had been a member of the Teamsters, the first union to get sperm preservation benefits as a standard feature of its group life policy.

On May 29, 2013, Amparo was born, at 334. Not until she’d mistakenly written down Amparo’s last name as Hanson did she realize that as yet the Bible possessed no record of Amparo’s father. By now, however, the official listing had acquired a kind of shadow of omitted relatives: her own stepmother Sue-Ellen, her endless in-laws, and Shrimp’s two federal contract babies who had been called Tiger (after the cat he’d replaced) and Thumper (after Thumper in Bambi). Juan’s case was more delicate than any of these, but finally she decided that even though Amparo’s name was Martinez, Lottie was still legally a Hanson, and so Juan was doomed to join the other borderline cases in the margin. The mistake was corrected.

On July 6, 2016, Mickey was born, also at 334.

Then, on March 6, 2011, the nursing home in Elizabeth phoned Williken, who brought the message upstairs that R.B. O’Meara was dead. He had died peacefully and voluntarily at the age of eighty-one. Her father—dead!

As she filled in this new information it occurred to Mrs. Hanson that she hadn’t looked at the religious part of the book since the company had stopped sending her lessons. She reached in at random and pulled out, from Proverbs: “Scorn for the scorners, yes; but for the wretched, grace.”

Later she mentioned this message to Shrimp, who was up to her eyebrows in mysticism, hoping that her daughter would be able to make it mean more than it meant to her.

Shrimp read it aloud, then read it aloud a second time. In her opinion it meant nothing deeper than it said: “Scorn for the scorners, yes; but for the wretched, grace.”

A promise that hadn’t been and obviously wouldn’t be kept. Mrs. Hanson felt betrayed and insulted.

19. A Desirable Job (2021)

Lottie had dropped out in tenth grade after her humanities teacher, old Mr. Sills, had made fun of her legs. Mrs. Hanson never lectured her about going back, certain that the combination of boredom and claustrophobia (these were the Mott Street days) would outweigh wounded pride by the next school-year, if not before. But when fall came Lottie was unrelenting and her mother agreed to sign the permission forms to keep her home. She only had two years of high school herself and could still remember how she’d hated it, sitting there and listening to the jabber or staring at books. Besides it was nice having Lottie about to do all the little nuisance chores—washing, mending, keeping the cats off—that Mrs. Hanson resisted. With Boz, Lottie was better than a pound of pills, playing with him and talking with him hour after hour, year after year.

Then, at eighteen, Lottie was issued her own MODICUM card and an ultimatum: if she didn’t have a full-time job by the end of six months, dependent benefits would stop and she’d have to move to one of the scrap heaps for hard-core unemployables like Roebling Plaza. Coincidentally the Hansons would lose their place on the waiting list for 334.

Lottie drifted into jobs and out of jobs with the same fierce indifference that had seen her through a lifetime at school relatively unscarred. She waited on counters. She sorted plastic beads for a manufacturer. She wrote down numbers that people phoned in from Chicago. She wrapped boxes. She washed and filled and capped gallon jugs in the basement of Bonwit’s. Generally she managed to quit or be fired by May or June, so that she could have a couple months of what life was all about before it was time to die again into the death of a job.

Then one lovely rooftop, just after the Hansons had got into 334, she had met Juan Martinez, and the summertime became official and continuous. She was a mother! A wife! A mother again! Juan worked in the Bellevue morgue with Ab Holt, who lived at the other end of the corridor, which was how they’d happened to coincide on that July roof. He had worked at the morgue for years and it seemed that he would go on working there for more years, and so Lottie could relax into her wife-mother identity and let life be a swimming pool with her season ticket paid in full. She was happy, for a long while.

Not forever. She was a Capricorn, Juan was Sagittarius. From the beginning she’d known it would end, and how. Juan’s pleasures became duties. His visits grew less frequent. The money, that had been so wonderfully steady for three years, for four, almost for five, came in spurts and then in trickles. the family had to make do with Mrs. Hanson’s monthly checks, the supplemental allowance stamps for Amparo and Mickey, and Shrimp’s various windfalls and makeshifts. It reached the point, just short of desperation, where the rent instead of being a nominal $37.50 became a crushing $37.50, and it was at that point that the possibility developed of Lottie getting an incredible job.

Cece Benn, in 1438, was the sweep for 11th Street for the block between First and Second Avenues, a concession good for twenty to thirty dollars a week in tips and scroungings plus a shower of goodies at Christmas. But the real beauty of the job was that since your earnings didn’t have to be declared to the MODICUM office, you lost none of your regular benefits. Cece had swept 11th Street since before the turn of the century, but now she was edging up to retirement and had decided to opt for a home.

Lottie had often stopped at the corner in decent weather to chat with Cece, but she’d never supposed the old woman had regarded these attentions as a sign of real friendship. When Cece hinted to her that she was considering letting her inherit the license Lottie was flabbergasted with gratitude.

“If you want it, that is,” Cece had added with a shy, small smile.

“If I want it! If I want it! Oh, Mrs. Benn!”

She went on wanting it for months, since Cece wasn’t about to forfeit a consideration like Christmas. Lottie tried not to let her high hopes affect the way she acted toward Cece. but she found it impossible not to be more actively cordial, to the extent eventually of running errands for her up to 1438 and back down to the street. Seeing how Cece’s apartment was done up, imagining what it must have cost, made her want that license more than ever. By December she was groveling.

Over the holidavs, Lottie was down with flu and a cold. When she was better, there were new people in 1438, and Mrs. Levin, from 1726, was out on the corner with the broom and the cup. Lottie found out later from her mother, who had heard it from Leda Holt that Mrs. Levin had paid Cece six hundred dollars for her license.

She could never pass Mrs. Levin on the street without feeling half-sick with the sense of what she had lost. For thirty-three years she had kept herself above actually desiring a job. She had worked when she had had to work but she’d never let herself want to.

She had wanted Cece Benn’s job. She still did. She always would. She felt ruined.

20. A & P, continued (2021)

After their beers under the airport, Juan took Lottie to Wollman Rink and they skated for an hour. Around and around, waltzes, tangos, perfect delight. You could scarcely hear the music over the roar of the skates. Lottie left the rink with a skinned knee and feeling ten years younger.

“Isn’t that better than a museum?”

“It was wonderful.” She pulled him close to her and kissed the brown mole on bis neck.

He said “Hey.”

And then: “I’ve got to go to the hospital now.”

“Already?”

“What do you mean already? It’s eleven o’clock. You want a ride downtown?”

Juan’s motive in going somewhere was so he could drive there and then drive back. He was devoted to his car and Lottie pretended she was too. Instead of telling the simple truth that she wanted to go back to the museum by herself, she said, “I’d love to go for a ride, but not if it’s only as far as the hospital. Then I’d have nowhere to go but home. No, I’ll just plop down on a bench.”

Juan went off, satisfied, and she deposited the butt of the souvenir carrot in a trash bin. Then through a side entrance behind the Egyptian temple (where she’d been led to worship the mummies and basalt gods in second, fourth, seventh, and ninth grades) into the museum.

A cast of thousands was enjoying the postcards, taking them out of the racks, looking at them, putting them back in the racks. Lottie joined. Faces, trees, people in costumes, the sea, Jesus and Mary, a glass bowl, a farm, stripes and dots, but nowhere a card showing the replica of the A & P. She had to ask, and a girl with braces on her teeth showed her where there were several hidden away. Lottie bought one that showed aisles disappearing at the horizon.

“Wait!” said the girl with braces, as she was walking away. She thought she’d had it then, but it had only been to give her the receipt for twenty-five cents.

Up in the park, in a baffle away from the field, she printed on the message side: “I Was here today + I Thout this woud bring back the Old Times for you.” Only then did she consider who she’d send it to. Her grandfather was dead, and no one else she could think of was old enough to remember anything so far back. Finally she addressed it to her mother, adding to the message: “I never pass throuh Elizebeth without Thinking of you.”

Then she emptied the other postcards out of her purse—a set of holes, a face, a bouquet, a saint, a fancy chest-of-drawers, an old dress, another face, people working out of doors, some squiggles, a stone coffin, a table covered with more faces. Eleven in all. Worth, she jotted the figures on the back of the card with the coffin—$2.75. A bit of shoplifting always cheered her up.

She decided that the bouquet, “Irises,” was the nicest and addressed it to Juan: Juan Martinez Abingden Garage 312 Perry St. New York 10014.

21. Juan (2021)

It wasn’t because he disliked Lottie and his offspring that he wasn’t regular with his weekly dues. It was just that Princess Cass ate up his money before he could pay it out, Princess Cass being his dream on wheels, a virginal ’15 replica of the last great muscle car, Chevy’s ’79 Vega Fascination. About the neck of his little beauty he had hung five years of sweat and tears: punched out power with all suitable goodies; a ’69 vintage Weber clutch with Jag floorbox and Jag universals; leather insides; and the shell and glory of her was seven swarthy per-spectivized overlays with a full five-inch apparent depth of field. Just touching her was an act of love. And when it moved? Brm brm? You came.

Princess Cass resided on the third floor of the Abingdon Garage on Perry Street, and as the monthly rent plus tax, plus tax, was more than he would have to pay at a hotel, Juan lived there with, and in, the Princess. Besides cars that were just parked or buried at the Abingdon, there were three other members of the faith: a Jap ad man in a newish Rolls Electric. “Gramps Gardiner in a self-assembled Uglicar that wasn’t much more, poor slut, than a mobile bed; and, stranger than custom, a Hillman Minx from way back and with zero modifications, a jewel belonging to Liz Kreiner, who had inherited it from her father Max.

Juan loved Lottie. He did love Lottie, but what he felt for Princess Cass went beyond love—it was loyalty. It went beyond loyalty—it was symbiosis.

(“Symbiosis” being what it said in little gold letters on the fender of the Jap junior executive’s Rolls.) A car represented, in a way that Lottie would never understand for all her crooning and her protests, a way of life. Because if she had understood, she wouldn’t have addressed her dumb card in care of the Abingdon. A blurry mess about some dumb flower that was probably extinct!

He didn’t worry about an inspection, but the Abingdon’s owners had shit-fits when anyone used the place as an address, and he didn’t want to see the Princess sleeping on the street.

If Princess Cass was his pride, she was secretly also his shame. Since eighty per cent of his income was extra-legal, he had to buy her basic necessities—gas, oil, and glass fiber—on the black market, and there was never enough, despite his economies in every other direction. Five nights out of seven she had to stay indoors, and Juan would usually stay there with her, puttering and polishing, or reading poems, or sharpening his brains on Liz Kreiner’s chessboard, anything rather than have some smart-ass ask, “Hey. Romeo, where’s the royal lady?”

The other two nights justified any suffering. The very best and happiest times were when he met someone who could appreciate largeness and they’d set off down the turnpike. All through the night, not stopping except to fill the tank, on and on and on and on. That was colossal but it wasn’t something he could do all the time, or even with the same someone again. Inevitably they would want to know more and he couldn’t bear to admit that this was it—the Princess, himself, and those lovely white flashes coming down the center of the road. All. Once they found out, the pity started flowing, and Juan had no defenses against pity.

Lottie had never pitied him, nor had she ever been jealous of Princess Cass, and that’s why they could be, and had been, and would be, man and wife. Eight fucking years. Like Liz Kreiner’s Hillman, she’d lost the flower of youth, but the guts were still sound. When he was with her and things went right, it was like butter on toast. A melting. The edges vanished. He forgot who he was or that there was anything in particular that had to be done. He was the rain and she was a lake, and slowly, softly, effortlessly, he fell.

Who could ask for more?

Lottie might have. Sometimes he wondered why she didn’t. He knew the kids cost her more than he provided, yet the only demands she tried to make were on his time and presence. She wanted him living, at least part of the time, at 334, and not so far as he could tell for any other reason than because she wanted him near. She kept pointing out ways he’d save money and other kinds of advantages, like having all his clothes in one place instead of scattered over five boroughs.

He loved Lottie. He did love her, and needed her too, but it wasn’t possible for them to live together. It was hard to explain why. He’d grown up in a family of seven, all living in one room. It turned people into beasts living that way. Human beings need privacy. But if Lottie didn’t understand that, Juan didn’t see what else he could say. Any person had to have some privacy, and Juan just needed more than most.

22. Leda Holt (2021)

While she was shuffling, Nora hatched the egg that she had so obviously been holding in reserve. “I saw that colored boy on the steps yesterday.”

“Colored boy?” Wasn’t that just like Nora, to find the worst possible way to put it? “When did you start keeping company with colored boys?”

Nora cut. “Milly’s fellow.”

Leda swam round in pillows and comforters, sheets and blankets, until she was sitting almost upright. “Oh yes,” archly, “that colored fellow.” She dealt the cards out carefully and placed the pack between them on the emptied-out cupboard that served as their table.

“I practically—” Nora arranged the cards in her hands “—had to split a gasket. Knowing that the two of them were in my room the whole while, and him wasting away for it.” She plucked out two cards and put them in the crib, which was hers this time. “The droop!”

Leda was more careful. She had a 2, a pair of 3’s, a 4, and a pair of 7’s. If she kept the double run, she had to give Nora the 7’s. But if she kept her two pairs and the starter didn’t offer additional help … She decided to risk it and put the 7’s in the crib.

Nora cut again and Leda turned up the Queen of Spades for the starter. She dissembled her satisfaction with a shake of her head, and the opinion, “Sex!”

“Do you know, Leda?” Nora laid down a 7. “I can’t even remember what that was all about.”

Leda played the 4. “I know what you mean. I wish Ab felt that way about it.”

A 6. “Seventeen. You say that, but you’re young, and you’ve got Ab.”

If she played a 3, Nora could take it to 31 with a face card. She played the 2 instead. “Nineteen. I’m not young.”

“And five makes twenty-four.”

“And three. Twenty-seven?”

“No, can’t.”

Leda laid down her last card. “And three is thirty.” She advanced a hole.

“Five,” and Nora took her hole. Then, at last, came the contradiction Leda was waiting for. “I’m fifty-four, and you’re, what? Forty-five? It makes all the difference.” She spread her cards beside the Queen. “And another crucial difference—Dwight has been dead for twenty years now. Not that I haven’t had my opportunities now and then—Let’s see, what have I got? Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair is six, and two runs is six, is twelve.” She jumped the second match-stick forward. “But now and then is not the same thing as a habit.”

“Are you bragging or complaining?” Leda spread her own cards.

“Bragging, absolutely.”

“Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and a pair is six, and two runs, it’s just the same as yours, look—twelve.”

“Sex makes people crazy. Like that poor fool on the steps. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. I’m well out of it.”

Leda plugged her matchstick into a hole just four short of game. “That’s what Carney said about Portugal, and you know what happened then.”

“There’s more important things,” Nora maundered on, undeterred.

Here it comes, Leda thought, the theme song. “Oh, count your crib,” she said.

“There’s only the pair you gave me. Thanks.” She went ahead two holes. “The family—that’s the important thing. Keeping it together.”

“True, true. Now get on with it, my dear.”

But instead of taking the cards and shuffling, Nora picked up the cribbage board and studied it. “I thought you said you had twelve?”

“Did I make a mistake?” Sweetly.

“No, I don’t think so.” She moved Leda’s matchstick back two holes. “You cheated.”

23. Len Rude, continued (2024)

After his initial incredulity, when he realized she really did want him to move in, he thought: Arggh! But after all, why not? Being her lodger couldn’t be much worse than living in the middle of a mother-fucking marching band the way he did now. He could trade in his meal vouchers for food stamps. As Mrs. Hanson herself had pointed out, it didn’t have to be official, though if he played his cards right he might be able to get Fulke to give him a couple credits for it as an individual field project. Fulke was always bitching at him for scanting case work. He’d have to agree. It was only a matter, really, of finding the right ribbon to tie around it. Not “Problems of Aging” again, if he didn’t want to be sucked down the drainhole of a geriatrics specialty. “Family Structures in a Modicum Environment.” Too vast, but that was the direction to aim in. Mention his institutional upbringing and how this was an opportunity to understand family dynamics from the inside. It was emotional blackmail, but how could Fulke refuse?

It never occurred to him to wonder why Mrs. Hanson had extended the invitation. He knew he was likable and was never surprised when people, accordingly, liked him. Also, as Mrs. Miller had pointed out, the old lady was upset about her son marrying and moving away. He would replace the son she had lost. It was only natural.

24. The Love Story, continued (2024)

“Here’s the key,” and she handed Amparo the key. “No need to bring it up here, but if there’s a personal letter inside—” (But mightn’t he write to her on office stationery?) “No, if there’s anything at all, just wave your arms like this—” Mrs. Hanson waved her arms vigorously and the dewlaps went all quivery.

“I’ll be watching.”

“What are you expecting, Grummy? It must be awfully important.”

Mrs. Hanson smiled her sweetest, most Grummy-like smile. Love made her crafty. “Something from the MODICUM office, dear. And you’re right, it could be quite important—for all of us.”

Now run! she thought. Run down those stairs!

She took one of the chairs from the table in the kitchen and set it by the living room window. She sat down. She stood up. She pressed the palms of her hands against the sides of her neck as a reminder that she must control herself.

He’d promised to write whether he came that night or not, but she felt sure he’d forget his promise if he didn’t intend to come. If a letter were there, it could mean only one thing.

Amparo must have reached the mailboxes by now. Unless she’d met a friend of hers as she went down. Unless she— Would it be there? Would it? Mrs. Hanson scanned the gray sky for an omen but the clouds were too low for planes to be visible. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass, willing Amparo to come round the corner of the building.

And she was there! Amparo’s arms made a V and then an X, a V, and an X. Mrs. Hanson signaled back. A deadly joy slithered across her skin and shivered through her bones. He had written! He would come!

She was out the door and at the head of the stairs before she recollected her purse. Two days ago, in anticipation, she’d taken out the credit card from where she kept it hidden in The New American Catholic Bible. She hadn’t used it since she’d bought her father’s wreath, when, two years ago? Nearer three.

Two hundred and twenty-five dollars, and even so it was the smallest he got. What the twins must have paid for theirs! It had taken over a year to pay it back, and all the while the computer kept making the most awful threats. What if the card weren’t valid now!

She had her purse and the list and the card were inside. A raincoat. Was there anything else? And the door, should she lock it? Lottie was inside asleep but Lottie could have slept through a gang bang. To be on the safe side she locked the door.

I mustn’t run, she told herself at the third landing down, that was how old Mr.—I mustn’t run, but it wasn’t running that made her heart beat so—it was love! She was alive and miraculously she was in love again. Even more miraculously, somebody loved her. Loved her. Madness.

She had to stop on the ninth-floor landing to catch her breath. A temp was sleeping in the corridor in a licensed MODICUM bag. Usually she would only have been annoyed, but this morning the sight affected her with a delicious sense of compassion and community. Give me your tired, she thought with elation, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. How it all came pouring back! Details from a lifetime ago, memories of old faces and old feelings. And now, poetry!

By the time she was on one the backs of her legs were trembling so she could barely stand up straight. There was the mailbox, and there, slantwise inside it, was Len’s letter. It had to be his. If it were anything else she would die.

The mailbox key was where Amparo always left it behind the scarecrow camera. His letter said:

“Dear Mrs. Hanson—You can set an extra plate for dinner Thursday. I’m happy to say I can accept your kind invitation. Will bring my suitcase. Love, Len.”

Love! There was no mistaking it, then: Love! She had sensed it from the first, but who would have believed—at her age, at fifty-seven! (True, with a bit of care her fifty-seven could look younger than someone like Leda Holt’s forty-six. But even so.) Love!

Impossible.

Of course, and yet always when that thought had come to her there were those words beneath the title on the cover of the book, words that, as if by accident, his finger had pointed to as he read: “The Tale of an Impossible Love.” Where there was love nothing was impossible.

She read the letter over and over. In its plainness it was more elegant than a poem: “I’m happy to say I can accept your kind invitation.” Who would have suspected, reading that, the meaning which for them was so obvious?

And then, throwing caution to the winds: “Love, Len”!

Eleven o’clock, and everything still to be done—the groceries, wine, a new dress, and, if she dared—Did she? Was there anything she didn’t dare now?

I’ll go there first, she decided. When the girl showed her the chart with the various swatches she was no less decisive. She pointed to the brightest, carroty orange and said, “That.”

25. The Dinner (2024)

Lottie opened the door, which hadn’t been locked after all, and said, “Mom!”

She had figured out, coming up the stairs, just what tone to take and now she took it. “Do you like it?” She dropped the keys into her purse. Casualness itself.

“Your hair.”

“Yes, I had it dyed. Do you like it?” She picked up her bags and came in. Her back and shoulders were one massive ache from hauling the bags up the stairs. Her scalp was still all pins and needles. Her feet hurt. Her eyes felt like the tops of lightbulbs covered with dust. But she looked good.

Lottie took the bags and she looked, but only looked, at the mercy of a chair. Sit down now and she’d never get up.

“It’s so startling. I don’t know. Turn around.”

“You’re supposed to say yes, stupid. Just ‘Yes, Mom, it looks fine.’” But she turned round obediently.

“I do like it,” Lottie said, taking the recommended tone. “Yes, I do. the dress too is—Oh Mom, don’t go in there yet.”

She paused with her hand on the knob of the living room door, waiting to be told of whatever catastrophe she was about to confront.

“Shrimp’s in your bedroom. She’s feeling very, very bad. I gave her a bit of first aid. She’s probably sleeping now.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“They’ve busted up. Shrimp went and got herself another subsidy—”

“Oh Jesus.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“A third time? I didn’t think that was legal.”

“Well, her scores, you know. And I suppose the first two must have their own scores by now. Anyhow. When she told January, there was a row. January tried to stab her—it’s nothing bad, just a scratch on her shoulder.”

“With a knife?”

Lottie snickered. “With a fork, actually. January has some kind of political idea that you shouldn’t have babies for the government. Or maybe not at all, Shrimp wasn’t too clear.”

“But she hasn’t come here to stay. Has she?”

“For a while.”

“She can’t. Oh, I know Shrimp. She’ll go back. It’s like all their other arguments. But you shouldn’t have given her pills.”

“She’ll have to stay here. Mom. January’s gone to Seattle, and she gave the room up to some friends. They wouldn’t even let Shrimp in to pack. Her suitcase, her records, everything was sitting in the hall. I think that’s what she was upset about more than anything else.”

“And she’s brought that all here?” A glance into the living room answered the question. Shrimp had emptied herself out everywhere in layers of shoes and underwear, keepsakes and dirty sheets.

“She was looking for a present she’d got me.” Lottie explained. “That’s why it’s all out. Look, a Pepsi bottle, isn’t it pretty?”

“Oh my God.”

“She bought us all presents. She has money now, you know. A regular income.”

“Then she doesn’t have to stay here.”

“Mom. be reasonable.”

“She can’t. I’ve rented the room. I told you I might. The man is coming tonight. That’s what those groceries are for. I’m cooking a nice simple meal to start things off on the right foot.”

“If it’s a question of money. Shrimp can probably—”

“It’s not a question of money. I’ve told him that the room is his, and he’s coming tonight. My God, look at this mess! This morning it was as neat as a, as a— ”

“Shrimp could sleep here on the couch,” Lottie suggested, lifting off one of the cartons.

“And where will I sleep?”

“Well, where will she sleep?”

“Let her be a temp!”

“Mother!”

“Let her. I’m sure it wouldn’t be anything new. All the nights she didn’t come home, you don’t suppose she was in somebody’s bed, do you? Hallways and gutters, that’s where she belongs. She’s spent half her life there already, let her go there now.”

“If Shrimp hears you say that—”

“I hope she does.” Mrs. Hanson walked right up to the door of the bedroom and shouted, “Hallways and gutters! Hallways and gutters!”

“Mom, there’s no need to—I’ll tell you what. Mickey can sleep in my bed tonight, he’s always asking to, and Shrimp can have his bunk. Maybe in a day or two she’ll be able to find a room at a hotel or somewhere. But don’t make a scene now. She is very upset.”

“I’m very upset!”

But she let herself be mollified on condition that Lottie cleared away Shrimp’s debris.

Mrs. Hanson, meanwhile, started the dinner. The dessert first, since it would have to cool after it cooked. Cream-style Strawberry Granola. Len had mentioned liking Granola as a boy in Nebraska, before he’d been sent to a home. Once it was bubbling she added a packet of Juicy Fruit bits, then poured it into her two glass bowls. Lottie licked the pot.

Then they transported Shrimp from the front bedroom to Mickey’s bunk. Shrimp wouldn’t let loose of the pillow Mrs. Hanson had put out for Len, and rather than risk waking her she let her keep it. The fork had left four tiny punctures like squeezed pimples all in a row.

The stew, which came in a kit with instructions in three languages, would have taken no time at all, except that Mrs. Hanson intended to supplement it with meat. She’d bought eight cubes at Stuyvesant Town for $3.20, not a bargain but when was beef ever a bargain? The cubes came out of two Baggies dark red and slimy with blood, but after a fry in the pan they had a nice brown crust. Even so she decided not to add them to the stew till the last minute so as not to upset the flavor.

A fresh salad of carrots and parsnips, with a small onion added for zest—she’d been able to get these with her regular stamps—and she was done.

It was seven o’clock.

Lottie came into the kitchen and sniffed at the fried cubes of beef. “You’re certainly going to a lot of trouble.” Meaning expense.

“First impressions are important.”

“How long is he going to stay here?”

“It probably depends. Oh, go ahead—eat one.”

“There’ll still be a lot left.” Lottie chose the smallest cube and nibbled at it delicately. “Mm. Mm!”

“Are you going to be late tonight?” Mrs. Hanson asked.

Lottie waved her hand about (“I can’t talk now”) and nodded.

“Till when do you think?”

She closed her eyes and swallowed. “Till morning sometime if Juan is there. Lee made a point of inviting him. Thanks. That was good.”

Lottie set off. Amparo had been fed some snaps and sent up to the roof. Mickey, plugged into the teevee, was as good as invisible. In effect, till Len came, she was alone. The feelings of love that she had felt all day on the street and in stores returned, like some shy child who hides when there is company but torments you afterwards. The little rascal frolicked through the apartment, shrieking, sticking his tongue out, putting tacks on chairs, flashing images at her, like the glimpses you’d catch, switching past Channel 5 in the afternoon, of fingers sliding up a leg, of lips touching a nipple, of a cock stiffening. Oh, the anxiety! She delved into Lottie’s makeup drawer, but there wasn’t time for more than a dab of powder. She returned a moment later to put a drop of Molly Bloom beneath each earlobe. And lipstick? A hint.

No, it looked macabre. She wiped it off.

It was eight o’clock.

He wasn’t going to come.

He knocked.

She opened the door, and he stood before her, smiling with his eyes. His chest in its furry maroon rose and fell, rose and fell. She had forgotten, amid the abstractions of love, the reality of his flesh. Her erotic fancies of a moment before were all images, but the creature who came into the kitchen, hefting a black suitcase and a paper carrier full of books, existed solidly in three dimensions. She wanted to walk around him as though he were a statue in Washington Square. He shook her hand and said hello. No more.

His reticence infected her. She couldn’t meet his gaze. She tried to speak to him, as he spoke to her, in silences and trivialities. She led him to his room.

His hand stroked the bedspread and she wanted to surrender to him then and there, but his manner didn’t allow it. He was afraid. Men were always afraid at the start.

“I’m so happy,” she said. “To think you’ll really be staying here.”

“Yeah, so am I.”

“You must let me go into the kitchen now. So that I can … We’re having stew, and a spring salad.”

“That sounds terrific, Mrs. Hanson.”

“I think you’ll like it.”

She put the fried cubes of meat into the simmering paste and turned up the heat. She took the salad and the wine out of the icebox. As she turned round he was in the doorway looking at her. She held up the wine bottle with a gesture of immemorial affirmation. The weariness was gone from her back and shoulders as though by the pressure of his gaze he’d smoothed the soreness from the muscles. What a gift it is to be in love. “Haven’t you done your hair differently?”

“I didn’t think you’d noticed.”

“Oh, I noticed the moment you came to the door.”

She started laughing but stopped short. Her laughter, though its source lay deep in her happiness, had sounded harshly in her ears.

“I like it,” he said.

“Thank you.”

The red wine spurting from the Gallo tetrahedron seemed to issue from the same depths as her laughter.

“I really do,” Len insisted.

“I think the stew must be ready. You sit.”

She dished the stew out onto the plates at the burner so that he wouldn’t see that she was giving him all of the real meat. But in the end she did take one of the cubes for herself.

They sat down. She lifted her glass. “What shall we drink to?”

“To?” Smiling uncertainly he picked up his own glass. Then, getting her drift: “To life?”

“Yes! Yes, to life!”

They toasted life, ate their stew and salad, drank the red wine. They spoke seldom but their eyes often met in complex and graceful dialogues. Any words either of them might have spoken at this point would have been in some way untrue; their eyes couldn’t lie.

They’d finished the dinner and Mrs. Hanson had set out the chilled pink Granola, when there was a thud and a loud cry from Lottie’s room. Shrimp had awakened!

Len looked at Mrs. Hanson questioningly.

“I forgot to tell you, Lenny. My daughter came home. But it isn’t anything for you to—”

It was too late. Shrimp had stumbled into the kitchen in one of Lottie’s dilapidated transparencies, unbuckled and candid as an ad for Pier 19. Not till she’d reached the refrigerator did she become aware of Len, and it took her another little while for her to remember to wrap her attractions in the yellow mists of the nightgown.

Mrs. Hanson made introductions. Len insisted that Shrimp join them at the table and took it on himself to spoon out some Granola into a third bowl.

“Why was I in Mickey’s bed?” Shrimp asked.

There was no help for it. Briefly she explained Shrimp to Len, and Len to Shrimp. When Len expressed what polite interest the situation required, Shrimp started in on the sordid details, baring her shoulder to show the tine wounds.

Mrs. Hanson said, “Shrimp, please—”

Shrimp said, “I’m not ashamed, Mother, not anymore.” And went right on. Mrs. Hanson stared at the fork resting on her greasy dinner plate. She could have taken it and torn Shrimp to pieces.

When Shrimp led Len off into the living room, Mrs. Hanson got out of hearing any more by pleading the dishes.

Len had left three of the cubes of beef on the side of his plate untasted. The ounce of Granola he’d kept for himself was stirred about in the bowl. He’d hated the meal.

His wine glass was three-quarters full. She thought, should she pour it down the sink. She wanted to but it seemed such a waste. She drank it. Len came back to the kitchen finally with the news that Shrimp had returned to bed. She couldn’t bear to look at him. She just waited for the blade to drop, and it didn’t take long.

“Mrs. Hanson.” he said “it should be obvious that I can’t stay here now, not if it means putting your pregnant daughter out on the street.”

“My daughter! Ha!”

“I’m disappointed and—”

“You’re disappointed!”

“Of course I am.”

“Oh. of course, of course!”

He turned away from her. She couldn’t bear it. She would do anything to keep him. “Len!” she called after him.

He returned in no time with his suitcase and his bag of books, moving at the uncanny, hyped-up speed of the five-fifteen puppets.

“Len!” She stretched out a hand, to forgive him, to beg forgiveness. The speed! The terrible speed of it!

She followed him out into the corridor, weeping, wretched afraid. “Len.” she pleaded “look at me.”

He strode ahead heedless, but at the very first step of the stairs his bag swung into the railing and split open. Books spilled out onto the landing.

“I’ll get you another bag.” she said calculating quickly and exactly what might hold him to the spot.

He hesitated.

“Len. please don’t go.” She grasped handfuls of the maroon sweater. “Len, I love you!”

“Sweet fucking Jesus, that’s what I thought!”

He pulled away from her. She thought he was falling down the steps and screamed.

Then there were only the books at her feet. She recognized the fat black textbook and kicked it out through the gap in the rails. Then the rest, some down the steps, others into the abyss of the stairwell. Forever.

The next day when Lottie asked her what had become of the boarder, she said, “He was a vegetarian. He couldn’t live anywhere where there was meat.”

“He should have told you that before he came.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Hanson agreed bitterly. “That’s what I thought.”

26. Messages Are Received (2024)

Financially, being a widow was way ahead of being a wife. Lottie was able to phone Jerry Lighthall and tell her that she didn’t need her job now, or anyone else’s. She was free and then some. Besides the weekly, and now completely reliable, allotment, Bellevue paid her a lump sum settlement of five thousand dollars. With Lottie’s go-ahead the owner of the Abingdon sold what was left of Princess Cass through Buy-Lines for eight hundred and sixty dollars, off the top of which he skimmed no more than was reasonable. Even after paying out a small fortune for the memorial service that no one came to and and wiping up the family’s various existing debts, Lottie had over four thousand dollars to do with as she pleased. Four thousand dollars. Her first reaction was fear. She put the money in a bank and tried to forget about it.

It was several weeks later before she found out, from her daughter, the probable explanation for Juan’s killing himself. Amparo had heard it from Beth Holt who’d pieced it together from scattered remarks of her father’s and what she already knew. Juan had been dealing with resurrectionists for years. Either Bellevue had just found out, which didn’t seem likely, or the Administration had been pressured, for reasons unknown, to pounce on someone: Juan. He’d had time, apparently, to see it coming, and instead of concurring tamely in his sacrifice (it would have amounted to two or three years at most) he’d found this way to go out of the game with honor unblemished. Honor: for years he’d tried to explain to Lottie the intricacies of his private system of reckoning which squares were black and which white and how to move among them, but it had always made about as much sense to her as the engine under Princess Cass’s hood, a man’s world of mathematics—arbitrary, finicking, and lethal.

Emotionally it wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. She cried a lot, but with a bounded grief. Some of Juan’s own affectionate indifference seemed to have rubbed off without her ever realizing. In between the spells of mourning she experienced unaccountable elations. She went for long walks in unfamiliar neighborhoods. Twice she stopped in to visit places where she’d once worked, but she never managed to be more than a source of embarrassment. She increased her evenings with the Universal Friends to two nights a week at the same time that she began to explore in other directions as well.

One day, riding the crest of the highest wave yet, she wandered into Bonwit’s for no other reason that it was right there on 14th and might be a bit cooler than the September concrete. Inside the sight of the racks and counters affected her like a lungful of amyl nitrate on top of morbihanine. The colors, the immense space, the noise overwhelmed her—first with a kind of terror, then with a steadily mounting delight. She’d worked here most of a year without being impressed and the store hadn’t noticeably changed. But now! It was like walking into a gigantic wedding cake in which all the desires of a lifetime had become incarnate, beckoning her to touch and taste and ravish. Her hand reached out to stroke the yielding fabrics—sleek blacks, scratchy russets, grays that caressed like a breeze from the river. She wanted all of it.

She began taking things from the racks and off the counters and putting them in her carryall. How strangely convenient that she should have that at hand today! She went to the second floor for shoes, yellow shoes, red shoes with thick straps, frail shoes of silver net, and to four for a hat. And dresses! Bonwit’s was thronged with dresses of all descriptions, colors, and lengths, like a great host of disembodied spirits waiting to be called down to earth and named. She took dresses.

Descending a step or two from the heights, she realized that people were watching her. Indeed she was being followed about, and not only by the store detective. There was a ring of faces looking at her, as though from a great distance below, as though they yelled “Jump! Jump! Why don’t you jump!” She walked up to a cash cage in the middle of the floor and emptied her purse out into a hamper. A clerk took off the tags and fed them into a register. The sum mounted higher and higher, dazzling, until the clerk asked with heavy sarcasm: “Will that be cash or charge?”

“I’ll pay cash.” she said and waved the brand-new checkbook at his scruffy little beard. When he asked for ID she rummaged among all the scraps and tatters at the bottom of her purse until she found all munched up and bleached her Bonwit’s Employee Identification Card. Leaving the store she tipped her new hat, a big, good-natured floppy tiling dripping with all widths of (because she was a widow) black ribbon, and smiled a big smile for the benefit of Bonwit’s detective, who had followed her every inch of the way from the cash cage.

At home she discovered that the dresses, blouses, and other bodywear were all lightyears too small for her. She gave Shrimp the one dress that still looked life-enhancing in the dark of common day, kept the hat for its sentimental value, and sent back all the rest the next day with Amparo, who already, at age eleven, had the knack of getting what she wanted from people in stores.

Since Lottie had signed the forms to let her transfer to the Lowen School, Amparo had been behaving tolerantly toward her mother. In any case she enjoyed the combat of a refund counter. She wasn’t able to get cash, but she wangled what for her own purpose was better, a credit slip for any department in the store. She spent the rest of the day selecting a back-to-school wardrobe for herself in careful, mezzo-forte taste, hoping that after the explosion her mother, seeing the sense of sending her out into the world dressed in real clothes, would let her keep as much as half of what she’d pirated. Lottie’s explosion was considerable, with screams and a whack or two of the belt, but by the time the late news was over it all seemed to be forgotten, as though Amparo had done nothing worse than to glance in the store’s windows. The same night Lottie cleared out one whole drawer of the dresser for the new clothes. Jesus, Amparo thought, what a superannuated ass!

Not long after this adventure Lottie realized that she was no longer holding steady at 175, which was bad enough; she was gaining. She bought a Coke machine and loved to lie in bed and let it fizzle the back of her throat, but noncaloric as this pleasure was, she went on gaining alarmingly. the explanation was physiological: she ate too much. Soon Shrimp would have to give up her polite fiction about her sister’s Rubens-like figure and admit that she was just plain fat. Then Lottie would have to admit it too. You’re fat, she’d tell herself, looking into the dark mirror of the living room window. Fat! But it didn’t help, or it didn’t help enough: she couldn’t believe that she was the person she saw reflected there. She was Lottie Hanson, the five-dollar tomato; the fat woman was someone else.

Early one morning in the late fall, when the whole apartment smelled of rust (the steam had come on during the night), the explanation of what was going and had gone wrong presented itself to her in the plainest terms: “There’s nothing left.” She repeated the phrase to herself like a prayer and with each repetition the circumference of its meaning would expand. The terror of it slowly wound its way through the tangle of her feelings until it had merged with its opposite. “There’s nothing left”: it was cause to rejoice. What had she ever had that it wouldn’t be a liberation to lose? Indeed, too much still clung to her. It would be long before she could say that there was nothing left, absolutely, blessedly nothing at all. Then, the way revelations do, the brilliance faded, leaving her with only the embers of the phrase. Her mind grew furry and she started developing a headache from the smell of the rust.

Other mornings there were other awakenings. Their common feature was that they all seemed to place her squarely on the brink of some momentous event, but facing in the wrong direction, like the tourists in the living room calendar’s “Before” view of the Grand Canyon, smiling into the camera, oblivious of what lay behind them. The only thing she knew for sure was that something would be demanded of her, an action larger than any she’d ever been called on to perform, a kind of sacrifice. But what? But when?

Meanwhile her regular religious experience had enlarged to include the message services at the Albert Hotel. The medium, Reverend Inez Ribera from Houston, Texas, was the female side of the coin of Lottie’s tenth-grade nemesis, old Mr. Sills. She spoke, except when she was in trance, in the same flutey teacherish voice—broad r’s, round vowels, whistling sibilants. Her less inspired messages were the same sour compound of veiled threat and headlong innuendo. However, while Sills had played favorites, Reverend Ribera’s scorn withered impartially, which made her, if no more likable, somewhat easier to take.

Besides, Lottie could understand the bitterness that drove her to lash out in all directions. Reverend Ribera was genuine. She achieved real contact only now and again, but when she did it was unmistakable. The spirits that laid hold on her were seldom gentle, and yet once they’d established their presence, the ridicule, the threats of aneurisms and financial ruin were replaced by mild, rambling descriptions of the other side. Instead of the usual abundance of counsels, the messages of these spirits were uncertain, tentative, even distressed and puzzled. They made little gestures of friendship and reconciliation, then skittered off, as though expecting to be refused. It was invariably during these visitations, when Reverend Ribera was so visibly not herself, that she would pronounce the secret word or mention the significant detail that proved her words weren’t just the spiritual outpourings of some vague elsewhere but unique communications from real, known people. The first message from Juan, for instance, had been “his” beyond any doubt, for Lottie had been able to return home and find the same words in one of the letters he’d written to her twelve years before:

The poem wasn’t Juan’s in the sense that he’d written it, though Lottie had never let him know that she’d known that. But even if the words came from someone else, the feelings had been his, and were his now more certainly than when he’d copied them into the letter. With all the poems there are in Spanish, how could Rev. Ribera have picked just that one? Unless Juan had been there that night. Unless he’d wanted to find some way to touch her so that she could believe that he had.

Later messages from Juan tended to be less other-directed and more a kind of spiritual autobiography. He described his progress from a plane of existence that was predominantly dark brown to a higher plane that was green, where he met his grandfather Rafael and a woman in a bridal gown, barely more than a girl, whose name came through as Rita or ’Nita. The ghostly bride seemed determined to make contact with Lottie, for she returned on several occasions, but Lottie was never able to see what the connection was between herself and this Rita or ’Nita. As Juan advanced to higher planes, it became harder to distinguish his tone from that of the other spirits. He alternated between wistfulness and hectoring. He wanted Lottie to lose weight. He wanted her to visit the Lighthalls. Finally it became clear to Lottie that Reverend Riber a had lost contact with Juan and was now only faking it. She stopped coming for the private meetings, and shortly thereafter Rafael and other distant relatives began to foresee all kinds of dangers in her path. A person that she trusted was going to betray her. She would lose large sums of money. There was, somewhere ahead, a fire, possibly only a symbolic fire but possibly it was real.

About the money they had been well-informed. By the first anniversary of Juan’s death the four thousand dollars had been reduced to a little more than four hundred.

It was easier than it might have been to say good-bye to Juan and the rest because she had begun to establish her own, more direct lines of communication with the other side. Off and on over the years Lottie had attended gospel meetings at the Day of Judgment Pentecostal Church, which met in a rented hall on Avenue A. She went there for the sake of the music and the excitement, not being deeply concerned about what seemed to draw in the majority of the others—the drama of sin and salvation. Lottie believed in sin in a general way, as a kind of condition or environment like clouds, but when she felt around inside herself for her own sins she drew a blank. The nearest she could approach to guilt was thinking about the ways she’d messed up Mickey’s and Amparo’s lives, and even this was a cause rather of discomfort than of out-and-out anguish.

Then one dreadful August night in ’25 (an inversion layer had been stifling the city for days, the air was unbreathable) Lottie had stood up in the middle of the prayer asking for spiritual gifts and begun to prophesy in tongues. It lasted only a moment the first time and Lottie wondered if it might not be just a simple case of heat prostration, but the next time it was much clearer. It began with a sense of constriction, of being covered and enclosed, and then another kind of force struggled against this and emerged through it.

“Like a fire?” Brother Cary had asked her.

She remembered Juan’s grandfather’s warning about a fire that might be symbolic or might be real.

It was utterly dependable. She spoke in tongues whenever she came to the Day of Judgment Pentecostal Church and at no time else. When she felt the clouds gathering about her, she would stand, no matter what else might be happening, a sermon, a baptizing, and the congregation would gather round her in a great circle, while Brother Cary held her and prayed for the fire to come down. When she felt it coming she would begin to tremble, but when it touched her she felt strong, and she spoke in a voice that was loud and clear with praise:

“Tralla goody ala troddy chaunt. Net nosse betnosse keyscope namallim. Zarbos ha zarbos myer, zarbos roldo teneview menevent. Daney, daney, daney sigs, daney sigs. Chonery ompolla rop!”

Or:

“Dabsa bobby nasa sana dubey. Lo fornival lo fier. Ompolla meny, leasiest mell. Woo—lubba dever ever onna. Woo—molit ule. Nok! Nok! Nok!”

27. Having Babies (2024)

Shrimp’s hangup was having babies—first the begetting, with the sperm; then the foetus growing inside her; finally the completed baby coming out. Since the Regents’ System had gone into effect it was a fairly widespread syndrome, compulsory contraception having hit many of the old myths and icons with hurricane force, but with Shrimp it took a special form. She had enough psychoanalysis to understand her perversion but she went on having babies anyhow.

Shrimp had been thirteen years old and still a virgin, when her mother had gone to the hospital to be injected with a new son. The operation had had a doubly supernatural quality—the sperm had come from a man five years dead and the result was so clearly intended to be a replacement for the son Mrs. Hanson had lost in the riot: Boz was Jimmie Tom reborn. So when Shrimp had fantasies of the syringe going up into her own womb, it was a ghost that filled her, and its name was incest. The fact that it had to be a woman who did it for her to get excited probably made it even more multiple incest.

The first two, Tiger and Thumper, had not presented any problems on the rational level. She could tell herself that millions of women did it, that it was the only ethical way for homosexuals to procreate, that the children themselves were happier and better off growing up in the country or wherever with professional attention, and so on through a dozen other rationalizations, including the best of all, money. Subsidized motherhood certainly beat the pittance she could get killing herself for Con Ed or the even deadlier fates she’d met after she’d been fired from that. Logically what could be better than to be paid for what you craved?

Even so, through both pregnancies and the contractual months of motherhood she suffered attacks of unreasoning shame so intense that she often thought of donating herself and the baby to the charity of the river. (If her hangup had been feet she’d have been ashamed to walk. You can’t argue with Freud.)

The third was another story. January, though she was willing to go along with the thing on the fantasy level, was firmly opposed to the fantasy being acted out. But going in and filling out the forms, what was that but enjoying the fantasy at an institutional level? At her age and having had two already, it didn’t seem likely that her application would be approved, and when it was, the temptation to go in for the interview was irresistible. It was all irresistible right up to the moment that she was spread out on the white platform, with her feet in the chrome stirrups. The motor purred, and her pelvis was tipped forward to receive the syringe, and it was as though the heavens opened and a hand came down to stroke the source of all pleasures at the very center of her brain. Mere sex offered nothing to compare.

Not till she was home from her weekend in the Caribbean of delight did she give any thought to what her vacation would cost. January had threatened to leave her when she’d heard about Tiger and Thumper, who were then ancient history. What would she do in this case? She would leave her.

She confessed one particularly fine Thursday in April after a late breakfast from Betty Crocker. Shrimp was into her fifth month and couldn’t go on much longer calling her pregnancy menopause. “Why?” January asked, with what seemed a sincere unhappiness. “Why did you do it?”

Having prepared herself to cope with anger, Shrimp resented this detour into pathos. “Because. Oh, you know. I explained that.”

“You couldn’t stop yourself?”

“I couldn’t. Like the other times—it was as though I were in a trance.”

“But you’re over it now?”

Shrimp nodded, amazed at how easily she was being let off the hook.

“Then get an abortion.”

Shrimp pushed a crumb of potato around with the tip of her spoon, trying to decide whether there’d be any purpose in seeming to go along with the idea for a day or two.

January mistook her silence for yielding. “You know it’s the only right thing to do. We discussed it and you agreed.”

“I know. But the contracts are signed.”

“You mean you won’t. You want another fucking baby!”

January flipped. Before she knew what she was doing it was done, and they both stood staring at the four tiny hemispheres of blood that welled up, swelled, conjoined, and flowed down into the darkness of Shrimp’s left armpit. The guilty fork was still in January’s hand. Shrimp gave a belated scream and ran into the bathroom.

Safe inside she kept squeezing further droplets from the wound.

January banged and clattered.

“Jan?” addressing the crack of the bolted door.

“You better stay in there. The next time I’ll use a knife.”

“Jan, I know you’re angry. You’ve got every right to be angry. I admit that I’m in the wrong. But wait, Jan. Wait till you see him before you say anything. The first six months are so wonderful. You’ll see. I can even get an extension for the whole year if you want. We’ll make a fine little family, just the—”

A chair smashed through the paper paneling of the door. Shrimp shut up. When she screwed up the courage to peek out through the torn door, not much later, the room was in a shambles but empty. January had taken one of the cupboards, but Shrimp was sure she’d be back if only to evict her. The room was January’s, after all, not Shrimp’s. But when she returned, late in the afternoon, from the therapy of a double feature (The Black Rabbit and Billy McGlory at the Underworld) the eviction had already been accomplished, but not by January, who had gone west, taking love from Shrimp’s life, as she supposed, forever.

Her welcome back to 334 was not as cordial as she could have wished but in a couple days Mrs. Hanson was brought round to seeing that Shrimp’s loss was her own gain. The spirit of family happiness returned officially on the day Mrs. Hanson asked “What are you going to call this one?”

“The baby, you mean?”

“Yeah. it. You’ll have to name it something, won’t you? How about Fudge? Or Puddle?” Mrs. Hanson, who’d given her own children unexceptionable names, openly disapproved of Tiger’s being called Tiger, and Thumper Thumper, even though the names, being unofficial, didn’t stick once the babies were sent off.

“No. Fudge is only nice for a girl, and Puddle is vulgar. I’d rather it were something with more class.”

“How about Flapdoodle then?”

“Flapdoodle!” Shrimp went along with the joke, grateful for any joke togo along with. “Flapdoodle! Wonderful! Flapdoodle it’ll be. Flapdoodle Hanson.”

28. 53 Movies (2024)

Flapdoodle Hanson was born on August 29, 2024, but as she had been a sickly vegetable and was not, as an animal, any healthier, Shrimp returned to 334 alone. She received her weekly check just the same, and the rest was a matter of indifference. The excitement had gone out of the notion of babies. She understood the traditional view that women bring forth children in sorrow.

On September 18 Williken jumped or was pushed out of the window of his apartment. His wife’s theory was that he hadn’t paid off the super for the privilege of operating his various small businesses in the darkroom, but what wife wants to believe her husband will kill himself without so much as a discussion of the theory? Juan’s suicide, not much more than two months before, made Williken’s seem justifiable by comparison.

She’d never given any thought to how much, since she’d come back to 334 in April, she’d come to depend on Williken to get through the evenings and the weeks. Lottie was off with her spirits or drinking herself blotto on the insurance money. Her mother’s endless inanities got to be a Chinese water torture, and the teevee was no defense. Charlotte, Kiri, and the rest were past history—January had seen to that.

Just to escape the apartment she began seeing movies, mostly in the pocket theaters on 1st Avenue or around N.Y.U., since they showed double features.

Sometimes she’d sit through the same double feature twice in a row, going in at four o’clock and coming out at ten or eleven. She found she was able to watch the movies totally, any movie, and that afterwards she remembered details, images, lines of dialogue, tunes, with weird fidelity. She’d be walking through the crowds on Eighth Street and she’d have to stop because some face, or the gesture of a hand, or some luscious, long-ago landscape would have returned to her, wiping out all of her data. At the same time she felt completely cut off from everyone and passionately involved.

Not counting second helpings, she saw a total of fifty-three movies in the period from October 1st to November 16th. She saw: A Girl of the Limberlost and Strangers on a Train; Don Hershey as Melmoth and Stanford White; Perm’s Hellbottom; The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle; Escape from Cuernavaca and Singing in the Rain; Franju’s Thomas l’Imposteur and Jude; Dumbo; Jacquelynn Colton in The Confessions of St. Augustine; both parts of Daniel Deronda; Candide; Snow White and Juliet; Brando in On the Waterfront and Down Here; Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter; Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings and Mai Zetterllng’s Behold the Man; both versions of The Ten Commandments; Loren and Mastroianni in Sunflower and Black Eyes and Lemonade; Rainer Murray’s Owens and Darwin; The Zany World of Abbott and Costello; The Hills of Switzerland and The Sound of Music; Garbo in Camille and Anna Christie; Zarlah the Martian; Emshwiller’s Walden and Image, Flesh, and Voice; the remake of Equinox; Casablanca and The Big Clock; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; Star Gut and Valentine Vox; The Best of Judy Canova; Pale Fire; Felix Culp; The Green Berets and The Day of the Locust; Sam Blazer’s Three Christs of Ypsilanti; On the Yard; Wednesdays Off; both parts of Stinky in the Land of Poop; the complete ten-hour Les Vampires; The Possibilities of Defeat; and the shortened version of Things in the World. At that point Shrimp suddenly lost interest in seeing any more.

29. The White Uniform, continued (2021)

It was delivered by some derelict messenger. January didn’t know what to make of the uniform, but the card that Shrimp had enclosed tickled her pink. She showed it to the people at work, to the Lighthalls, who always enjoyed a good joke, to her brother Ned, and all of them got a chuckle out of it. The outside showed a blithe, vulgar little sparrow. Written underneath in music was the melody he was chirping:

The lyrics of the song were on the inside: Wanna fuck? Wanna fuck? I do! I do!

At first January was embarrassed playing nurse. She was a largish girl, and the uniform, even though Shrimp had guessed her size correctly, didn’t want to move the way her body moved. Putting it on, she would always feel, as she hadn’t for a long time, ashamed of her real job.

As they got to know each other more deeply, January found ways of combining the abstract qualities of Shrimp’s fantasies with the mechanics of ordinary sex. She would begin with a lengthy “examination.” Shrimp would lie in bed, limp, her eyes closed or lightly bandaged, while January’s fingers took her pulse, palpated her breasts, spread her legs, explored her sex. Deeper and deeper the fingers, and the “Instruments” probed. January eventually was able to find a medical supply store willing to sell her an authentic pipette that could be attached to an ordinary syringe. The pipette tickled morbidly. She would pretend that Shrimp was too tight or too nervous and had to be opened wider by one of the other instruments. Once the scenario was perfected, it wasn’t that much different from any other kind of sex.

Shrimp, while all this was going on, would oscillate between an excruciating pleasure and a no less excruciating guilt. The pleasure was simple and absolute, the guilt was complex. For she loved January and she wanted to perform with her all the acts that any ordinary pair of women would have performed. And, regularly, they did: cunnilingus this way and that, dildos here and there, lips, fingers, tongues, every orifice and artifice. But she knew, and January knew, that these were readings from some textbook called Health and Sex, not the actual erotic lightning bolt of a fantasy that can connect the ankle bone to the shin bone, the shin bone to the leg bone, the leg bone to the thigh bone, the thigh bone to the pelvis, the pelvis to the spine, and onward and upward to that source of all desire and all thought, the head. Shrimp went through the motions, but all the while her poor head sat through yet another screening of those old classics, Ambulance Story, The White Uniform, The Lady and the Needle, and Artsem Baby. They weren’t as exciting as she remembered them but nothing else was playing, anywhere.

30. Beauty and the Beast (2021)

Shrimp thought of herself as basically an artist. Her eyes saw colors the way a painter’s eyes see colors. As an observer of the human comedy she considered herself to be on a par with Deb Potter or Oscar Stevenson. A seemingly offhand remark overheard on the street could trigger her imagination to produce the plot for a whole movie. She was sensitive, intelligent (her Regents scores proved that), and up-to-date. The only thing she was conscious of lacking was a direction, and what was that but a matter of pointing a finger?

Artistry ran in the Hanson family. Jimmie Tom had been well on the way to becoming a singer. Boz, though unfocused as Shrimp herself, was a verbal genius. Amparo, at age eight, was doing such incredibly detailed and psychological drawings at her school that she might grow up to be the real thing.

And not just her family. Many if not most of her closest friends were artists one way or another: Charlotte Blethen had published poems; Kiri Johns knew all the grand operas inside out; Mona Rosen and Patrick Shawn had both acted in plays. And others. But her proudest alliance was with Richard M. Williken, whose photographs had been seen all over the world.

Art was the air she breathed, the sidewalk she walked on to the secret garden of her soul, and living with January was like having a dog constantly shitting on that sidewalk. An innocent, adorable, cuddly puppy—you had to love the little fellow but oh my.

If January had simply been indifferent to art, Shrimp wouldn’t have minded. In a way she’d have liked that. But alas, January had her own horrendous tastes in everything and she expected Shrimp to share them. She brought home library tapes the like of which Shrimp had never suspected: scraps of pop songs and snatches of symphonies were strung together with sound effects to tell such creaky tales as “Vermont Holiday” or “Cleopatra on the Nile.”

January accepted Shrimp’s snubs and snide remarks in the spirit of tolerance and good humor in which she thought they were intended. Shrimp joked because she was a Hanson and all the Hansons were sarcastic. She couldn’t believe that anything she enjoyed so much herself could be abhorrent to another person. She could see that Shrimp’s music was a better kind of music and she liked listening to it when it was on, but all of the time and nothing else? You’d go nuts.

Her eyes were like her ears. She would inflict well-meaning barbarities of jewelry and clothes on Shrimp, who wore them as tokens of her bondage and abasement. The walls of her room were one great mural of unspeakable, sickly-cute junk and sententious propaganda posters, like this jewel from the lips of a black Spartacus: “A Nation of Slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their Master, who, in the abuse of Absolute Power, does not proceed to the last extremes of Injustice and Oppression.” Bow-wow-wow. But what could Shrimp do? Walk in and rip them from the walls? January valued her crap.

What do you do when you love a slob? What she did—try and become a slob herself. Shrimp wallowed diligently, losing most of her old friends in the process. She more than made up for her losses by the friendships January brought with her as a dowry. Not that she ever came to like any of them, but gradually through their eyes she learned that her lover had virtues as well as charms, problems as well as virtues, a mind with its own thoughts, memories, projects, and a personal history as poignant as anything by Chopin or Liszt. In fact, she was a human being, and though it took a day of the very clearest air and brightest sunshine for this feature of January’s landscape to be visible, it was such a fine and heartening sight that when it came it was worth every other inconvenience of being, and remaining, in love.

31. A Desirable Job, continued (2021)

After the sweeping license fell through, Lottie had one of her bad spells, sleeping up to fifteen hours a day, bullying Amparo, making fun of Mickey, living for days on pills and then demolishing the ice-box on a binge. In general she fell apart. This time it was her sister who pulled her out. Living with January seemed to have made Shrimp one hundred per cent more human. Lottie even told her so. “Suffering,” Shrimp said, “that’s what does it—I suffer a lot.” They talked, they played games, they went to whatever events Shrimp could get freebies for. Mostly, they talked; in Stuyvesant Square, on the roof, in Tompkins Square Park. They talked about growing old, about being in love, about not being in love, about life, about death. They agreed that it was terrible to grow old, though Shrimp thought they both had a long way to go before it got really terrible. They agreed that it was terrible to be in love but that it was more terrible not to be. They agreed that life was rotten.

They didn’t agree about death. Shrimp believed, though not always literally, in reincarnation and psychic phenomena. To Lottie death made no sense. It wasn’t death she dreaded so much as the pain of dying.

“It helps to talk, doesn’t it?” Shrimp said during one magnificent sunset up on the roof with rose-colored clouds zooming by.

“No,” said Lottie, with a sour. here-I-am-again type smile to say to Shrimp that she was on her feet and not to worry, “it doesn’t.”

It was that evening that Shrimp mentioned the possibility of prostitution.

“Me? Don’t be silly!”

“Why not You used to.”

“Ten years ago. More! And even then I never earned enough to make it worthwhile.”

“You weren’t trying.”

“Shrimp, for God’s sake, just look at me!”

“Many men are attracted to large. Rubens-type women. Anyhow I only mentioned it. And I was going to say that if—”

“If!” Lottie giggled.

“If you change your mind. January knows a couple who handle that son of thing. It’s safer than doing it as a free lance, so I’m told and more businesslike too.”

The couple that January knew were the Lighthalls, Jerry and Lee. Lee was fat and black and something of an Uncle Tom. Jerry was wraithlike and given to sudden meaningful silences. Lottie was never able to decide which of them was actually in charge. They worked from what Lottie believed for months was a bogus law office, until she found out that Jerry actually belonged to the New York State Bar. The clients arriving at the office behaved in a solemn deliberate way, as though they were after all here for a legal consultation rather than a good time. For the most pan they were a son of person Lottie had had no personal experience with—engineers, programmers, what Lee called “our technologically ee-leete clientele.”

The Lighthalls specialized in golden showers, but by the time Lottie found this out, she had made up her mind to go through with it, come what may. The first time was awful. The man insisted that she watch his face the whole while he kept saying, “I’m pissing on you, Lottie. I’m pissing on you.” As though otherwise she might not have known.

Jerry suggested that if she took a pink pill a couple hours beforehand and then sank back on a green at the start of a session it was possible to keep the experience at an impersonal level, as though it were taking place on teevee. Lome tried it and the result for her was not so much to make it impersonal as to make it unreal. Instead of the scene becoming a teevee screen, she was pissed on by one.

The single largest advantage of the job was that her wages weren’t official. The Lighthalls didn’t believe in paying taxes and so they operated illegally, even though that meant charging much less than the licensed brothels. Lottie didn’t lose any of her regular MODICUM benefits, and the necessity of spending what she made on the black market meant that she bought the fun things she wanted instead of the dull things she ought to have. Her wardrobe trebled. She ate at restaurants. Her room filled with knickknacks and toys and the fruity reek of Fabergé’s Molly Bloom.

As the Lighthalls got to know and trust her, she began to be sent out to people’s homes, often staying the night. Invariably this would mean something beyond golden showers. She could see that it was a job that she could grow to like. Not for the sex, the sex was nothing, but sometimes afterwards, especially on assignments away from Washington Street, the clients would warm up and talk about something besides their own unvarying predilections. This was the aspect of the job that appealed to Lottie—the human contact.

32. Lottie, in Stuyvesant Square (2021)

“Heaven. I’m in heaven.

“What I mean is, anyone if he just looked around and really understood what he saw … But that’s not what I’m supposed to say, is it? The object’s to be able to say what you want. Instead, I guess what I was saying was that I’d better be happy with what I’ve got, cause I won’t get any more. But then if I don’t ask for more … It’s a vicious circle.

“Heaven. What is heaven? Heaven is a supermarket. Like that one they built outside the museum. Full of everything you could ever ask for. Full of fresh meat—I wouldn’t live in any vegetarian heaven—full of cake mixes and cartons of cold milk and fizzies in cans. Oh, the works. And lots of disposable containers. And I would just go down the aisles with my big cart in a kind of trance, the way they say the housewives did then, without thinking what any of it was going to cost. Without thinking. Nineteen-fifty-three a.d.—you’re right, that’s heaven.

“No. No, I guess not. That’s the trouble with heaven. You say something that sounds nice but then you think, would you really want it a second time? A third time? Like your highway, it would be great once. And then? What then?

“You see, it has to come from inside.

“So what I want, what I really do want… I don’t know how to say it. What I really want is to really want something. The way, you know, when a baby wants something? The way he reaches for it. I’d like to see something and reach for it like that. Not to be aware that I couldn’t have it or that it wasn’t my turn. Juan is that way sometimes with sex, once he lets loose. But of course heaven would have to be larger than that.

“I know! The movie we saw on teevee the other night when Mom wouldn’t shut up, the Japanese movie, remember? Do you remember the fire festival, the song they sang? I forget the exact words, but the idea was that you should let life burn you up. That’s what I want. I want life to burn me up.

“So that’s what heaven is then. Heaven is the fire that does that, a huge roaring bonfire with lots of little Japanese women dancing around it and every so often they let out a great shout and one of them rushes into it. Whoof!”

33. Shrimp, in Stuyvesant Square (2021)

“One of the rules in the magazine was that you can’t mention other people by name. Otherwise I could just say, ‘Heaven would be if I were living with January’ and then describe that. But if you’re describing a relationship, you don’t let yourself imagine all you could and so you learn nothing.

“So where does that leave me?

“Visualize, it said.

“Okay. Well, there’s grass in heaven, because I can see myself standing in grass. But it isn’t the country, not with cows and such. And it can’t be a park, because the grass in parks is either sickly or you can’t walk on it. It’s beside a highway. A highway in Texas! Let’s say in nineteen-fifty-three. It’s a clear, clear day in nineteen-fifty-three, and I can see the highway stretching on and on past the horizon.

“Endlessly.

“Then what? Then I’ll want to drive on the highway, I suppose. But notby myself, that would be anxiety-making. So I’ll break the rule and let January drive. If we’re on a motorcycle, it’s scarcely a relationship, is it?

“Well, our motorcycle is going fast, it’s going terribly fast, and there are cars and gigantic trucks going almost as fast as we are. Toward that horizon. We weave in and out, in and out. Faster we go, and faster and faster.

“Then what? I don’t know. That’s as far as I see.

“Now it’s your turn.”

34. Shrimp, at the Asylum (2024)

“What do I feel? Angry. Afraid. Sorry for myself. I don’t know. I feel a bit of everything, but not— Oh, this is silly. I don’t want to be wasting everyone’s time with—

“Well, I’ll try it. Just say the one thing over and over until— What happens?

“I love you. There, that wasn’t so bad. I love you. I love you, January. I love you, January. January, I love you. January, I love you. If she were here it would be a lot easier, you know. Okay, okay. I love you. I love you. I love your big warm boobs. I’d like to squeeze them. And I love your … I love your juicy black cunt. How about that? I do. I love all of you. I wish we were together again. I wish I knew where you were so you’d know that. I don’t want the baby, any babies, I want you. I want to be married. To you. For all time. I love you.

“Keep going?

“I love you. I love you. I love you very much. And that’s a lie. I hate you. I can’t stand you. You appall me, with your stupidity, with your vulgarity, with your third-hand ideas that you take off the party line like— You bore me. You bore me to tears. You’re dumb nigger scum! Nigger bitch. Stupid! And I don’t care if—

“No, I can’t. It’s not there. I’m just saying the words because I know you want to hear them. Love, hate, love, hate—words.

“It isn’t that I’m resisting. But I don’t feel what I’m saying, and that’s the truth. Either way. The only thing I feel is tired. I wish I were home watching teevee instead of wasting everyone’s time. For which I apologize.

“Somebody else say something and I’ll shut up.”

35. Richard M. Williken, continued (2024)

“Your problem,” he told her, as they were rocking home in the RR after the big nonbreakthrough, “is that you’re not willing to accept your own mediocrity.”

“Oh shut up,” she said. “I mean that sincerely.”

“It’s my own problem, just as much. Even more so, perhaps. Why do you think I’ve gone so long now without doing any work? It isn’t that if I started in nothing would happen. But when I’m all done I look at what I’m left with and I say to myself, ‘No, not enough.’ In effect that’s what you were saying tonight.”

“I know you’re trying to be nice, Willy, but it doesn’t help. There’s no comparison between your situation and mine.”

“Sure there is. I can’t believe in my pictures. You can’t believe in your love affairs.”

“A love affair isn’t some goddamn work of art.” The spirit of argument had caught hold of Shrimp. Williken could see her struggling out of her glooms as though they were no more than a wet swimsuit. Good old Shrimp!

“Isn’t it?” he prompted.

She plunged after the bait without a thought. “You at least try to do something. There’s an attempt. I’ve never gone that far. I suppose if I did I would be what you say—mediocre.”

“You attempt too—ever so visibly.”

“What?” she asked.

She wanted to be torn to pieces (no one at the Asylum had bothered even to scream at her), but Williken didn’t rise above irony. “I try to do something; you try to feel something. You want an inner life, a spiritual life if you prefer. And you’ve got it. Only no matter what you do, no matter how you squirm to get away from the fact, it’s mediocre. Not bad. Not poor.”

“Blessed are the poor in spirit. Eh?”

“Exactly. But you don’t believe that and neither do I. You know who we are? We’re the scribes and Pharisees.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“You’re a bit more cheerful now.”

Shrimp pulled a long face. “I’m laughing on the outside.”

“Things could be a lot worse.”

“How?”

“You might be a loser. Like me.”

“And I’m a winner instead? You can say that! After you saw me there tonight?”

“Wait,” he promised her. “Just wait.”

36. Boz

“Bulgaria!” Milly exclaimed, and it took no special equipment to know that her next words were going to be: “I’ve been to Bulgaria.”

“Why don’t you get out your slides and show us,” Boz said, clamping the lid gently on her ego. Then, though he knew, he asked, “Whose turn is it?”

January snapped to attention and shook the dice. “Seven!” She counted out seven spaces aloud, ending up on Go to Jail. “I hope I stay there,” she said cheerfully. “If I land on Boardwalk again that’s the end of the game for me.” She said it so hopefully.

“I’m trying to remember,” Milly said, elbow propped on the table, the dice held aloft, time and the game in suspense, “what it was like. All that comes back is that people told jokes there. You had to sit and listen for hours to jokes. About breasts.” A look passed between them and another look passed between January and Shrimp.

Boz, though he’d have liked to retaliate with something gross, rose above it. He sat straighter in his chair, while in languid contrast his left hand dipped toward the dish of hot snaps. So much tastier cold.

Milly shook. Four: her cannon landed on theb & O. She paid Shrimp $200, and shook again. Eleven: her token came down on one of her own properties.

The Monopoly set was an heirloom from the O’Meara side of the family. The houses and hotels were wood, the counters lead. Milly, as ever, had the cannon, Shrimp had the little racing car, Boz had the battleship, and January had the flatiron. Milly and Shrimp were winning. Boz and January were losing. C’est la vie.

“Bulgaria,” Boz said, because it was such a fine thing to say, but also because his duty as a host required him to lead the conversation back to the interrupted guest. “But why?”

Shrimp, who was studying the backs of her property deeds to see how many more houses she could get by mortgaging the odds and ends, explained the exchange system between the two schools.

“Isn’t this what she was being so giddy about last spring?” Milly asked. “I thought another girl got the scholarship then.”

“Celeste diCecca. She was the one in the airplane crash.”

“Oh!” Milly said, as the light dawned. “I didn’t make the connection.”

“You thought Shrimp just likes to keep up with the latest plane crashes?” Boz asked.

“I don’t know what I thought, Trueheart. So now she’s going after all. Talk about luck!”

Shrimp bought three more houses. Then the racing car sped past Park Place, Boardwalk, Go, and Income Tax, to land on Vermont Avenue. It was mortgaged to the bank.

“Talk about luck!” said January. The talk about luck continued for several turns round the board—who had it and who lacked it and whether there was, outside of Monopoly, any such thing. Boz asked if any of them had ever known anyone who’d won on the numbers or in the lottery. January’s brother had won five hundred dollars three years before.

“But of course,” January added conscientiously, “over the long run he’s lost more than that.”

“Certainly for the passengers an airplane crash is only luck,” Milly insisted.

“Did you think about crashes a lot when you were a hostess?” January asked the question with the same leaden disinterest with which she played at the game.

While Milly told her story about the Great Air Disaster of 2021, Boz snuck around behind the screen to revise the orzata and add some ice. Tabbycat was watching tiny ballplayers silently playing ball on the teevee, and Peanut was sleeping peacefully. When he returned with the tray the Air Disaster was concluded and Shrimp was spelling out her philosophy of life:

“It may look like luck on the surface but if you go deeper you’ll see that people usually get what they’ve got coming. If it hadn’t been this scholarship for Amparo, it would have been something else. She’s worked for it.”

“And Mickey?” January asked.

“Poor Mickey,” Milly agreed.

“Mickey got exactly what he deserved.”

For once Boz had to agree with his sister. “People, when they do things like that, are often seeking punishment.”

January’s orzata chose just that moment to spill itself. Milly got the board up in time and only one edge was wet. January had had so little money left in front of her that that was no loss either. Boz was more embarrassed than January, since his last words seemed to imply that she’d overturned her drink deliberately. God knew, she had every reason to want to. Nothing is quite so dull as two solid hours of losing.

Two turns later January’s wish came true. She landed on Boardwalk and was out of the game. Boz, who was being ground into the dust more slowly but just as surely, insisted on conceding at the same time. He went with January out onto the veranda.

“You didn’t have to give up just to keep me company, you know.”

“Oh, they’re happier in there without us. Now they can fight it out between themselves, fang and claw.”

“Do you know, I’ve never won at Monopoly? Never once in my life!” She sighed. Then, so as not to seem an ungrateful guest, “You’ve got a lovely view.”

They appreciated the night view in silence: lights that moved cars and planes; lights that didn’t move, stars, windows, street lamps.

Then, growing uneasy, Boz made his usual quip for a visitor on the veranda: “Yes—I’ve got the sun in the morning and the clouds in the afternoon.”

Possibly January didn’t get it. In any case she intended to be serious. “Boz, maybe you could give me some advice.”

“Me? Fiddle-dee-dee!” Boz loved to give advice. “What about?”

“What we’re doing.”

“I thought that was more in the nature of being already done.”

“What?”

“I mean, from the way Shrimp talks, I thought it was a—” But he couldn’t say “fait accompli,” so he translated. “An accomplished fact.”

“I suppose it is, as far as our being accepted. They’ve been very nice to us, the others there. It isn’t us that I’m worried about so much as her mother.”

“Mom? Oh, she’ll get along.”

“She seemed very upset last night.”

“She gets upset but she recovers quickly, our Mom does. All the Hansons are great bouncers-back. As you must have noticed.” That wasn’t nice but it seemed to slip past January with most of his other meanings.

“She’ll still have Lottie with her. And Mickey too, when he gets back.”

“That’s right.” But his agreement had an edge of sarcasm. He’d begun to resent January’s clumsy streaks of whitewash. “And anyhow, even if it is as bad as she seems to think, you can’t let that stand in your way. If Mom didn’t have anyone else, that shouldn’t affect your decision.”

“You don’t think so?”

“If I thought so, then I’d have to move back there, wouldn’t I? If it came to the point that she was going to lose the place. Oh, look who’s here!”

It was Tabbycat. Boz picked her up and rubbed her in all her favorite places. January persisted. “But you’ve got your own … family.”

“No, I’ve got my own life. The same as you or Shrimp.”

“So you do think we’re doing the right thing?”

But he wasn’t going to let her have it as easy as that. “Are you doing what you want to? Yes or no.”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s the right thing.” Which judgment pronounced, he turned his attention to Tabbycat. “What’s going on in there, huh, little fella? Are those people still playing their long dull game? Huh? Who’s going to win? Huh?”

January, who didn’t know the cat had been watching television, answered the question straightforwardly. “I think Shrimp will.”

“Oh?” Why had Shrimp ever …? He had never understood.

“Yes. She always wins. It’s incredible. The luck.”

That was why.

37. Mickey

He was going to be a ballplayer. Ideally a catcher for the Mets, but lacking that he’d be content so long as he was in the major leagues. If his sister could become a ballerina, there was no reason he couldn’t be an athlete. He had the same basic genetic equipment, quick reflexes, a good mind. He could do it. Dr. Sullivan said he could do it and Greg Lincoln the sports director said he had as good a chance as any other boy, possibly better. It meant endless practice, rigid discipline, an iron will, but with Dr. Sullivan helping him to weed out his bad mental habits there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t meet those demands.

But how could he explain that in half an hour in the visitors’ room? To his mother, who didn’t know Kike Chalmers from Opal Nash? His mother who was the source (he could understand that now) of most of his wrong ways of thinking. So he just told her.

“I don’t want to go back to 334. Not this week, not next week, not …” he pulled up just short of the word “never.”

“Not for a long time.”

Emotions flickered across her face like strobes. Mickey looked away. She said, “Why, Mickey? What did I do?”

“Nothing. That’s not it.”

“Why then? A reason.”

“You talk in your sleep. All night long you talk.”

“That’s not a reason. You can sleep in the living room, like Boz used to, if I keep you up.”

“Then you’re crazy. How’s that? Is that a reason? You’re crazy, all of you are.”

That stopped her, but not for long. Then she was pecking away at him again. “Maybe everyone’s crazy, a little. But this place, Mickey, you can’t want to—I mean, look at it!”

“I like this place. The guys here, as far as they’re concerned, I’m just like them. And that’s what I want. I don’t want to go back and live with you. Ever. If you make me go, I’ll just do the same thing all over again. I swear I will. And this time I’ll use enough fluid and really kill him too, not just pretend.”

“Okay, Mickey, it’s your life.”

“Goddamn right.” These words, and the tears on which they verged, were like a load of cement dumped into the raw foundation of his new life. By tomorrow morning all the wet slop of feeling would be solid as rock and in a year a skyscraper would stand where now there was nothing but a gaping hole.

38. Father Charmain

Reverend Cox had just taken down Bunyan’s Kerygma, which was already a week overdue, and settled down for a nice warm dip into his plodding, solid, reassuring prose, when the bell went Ding-Dong, and before she could unfold her legs, again, Ding-Dong. Someone was upset.

A dumpy old woman with a frazzled face, curdled flesh, the left eyelid drooping, the right eye popping out. As soon as the door opened the mismatched eyes went through the familiar motions of surprise, distrust, withdrawal.

“Please come in.” She gestured to the glow from the office at the end of the hall.

“I came to see Father Cox.” She held up one of the form letters the office sent out: If you should ever experience the need …

Charmain offered her hand. “I’m Charmain Cox.”

The woman, remembering her manners, took the hand offered her. “I’m Nor a Hanson. Are you … ?”

“His wife?” She smiled. “No, I’m afraid I’m the priest. Is that better or worse? But do come in out of this dreadful cold. If you think you’d be more comfortable talking with a man. I can phone up my colleague at St. Mark’s, Reverend Gogardin. He’s only around the corner.” She steered her into the office and into the comfy confessional of the brown chair.

“It’s been so long since I’ve been to church. It never occurred to me, from your letter … ”

“Yes, I suppose it’s something of a fraud on my part, using only my initials.” And she went through her disingenuous but useful patter song about the woman who had fainted the man who’d snatched off her pectoral. Then she renewed her offer to phone St. Mark’s, but by now Mrs. Hanson was resigned to a priest of the wrong sex.

Her story was a mosaic of little guilts and indignities, weaknesses and woes, but the picture that emerged was all too recognizably the disintegration of a family. Charmain began to assemble all the arguments why she wouldn’t be able to take an active role in her struggle against the great octopus, Bureaucracy—chief among them that in the nine-to-five portion of her life she was a slave at one of the octopus’s shrines (Department of Temporary Assistance). But then it developed that the Church, and even God, were involved in Mrs. Hanson’s problems. The older daughter and her lover were leaving the sinking family to join the Sodality of St. Clare. In the quarrel that had fumbled the old lady out of her building and into this office the lover had used the poor dear’s own Bible as ammunition. From Mrs. Hanson’s extremely partisan account it took Charmain some time to locate the offending passage, but at last she tracked it down to St. Mark, third chapter, verses thirty-three to thirty-five:

And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren?

And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!

For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

“Now I ask you!”

“Of course,” Charmain explained, “Christ isn’t saying there that one has a license to abuse or insult one’s natural parents.”

“Of course he isn’t! ”

“But has it occurred to you that this … is her name January?”

“Yes. It’s a ridiculous name.”

“Has it occurred to you that January and your daughter may be right?”

“How do you mean?”

“Let’s put it this way. What is the will of God?”

Mrs. Hanson shrugged. “You’ve got me.” Then, after the question had settled, “But if you think that Shrimp knows—ha!”

Deciding that St. Mark had done enough harm already, Charmain stumbled through her usual good counsels for disaster situations, but if she had been a shop clerk helping the woman to pick out a hat she couldn’t have felt more futile or ridiculous. Everything Mrs. Hanson tried on made her look grotesque.

“In other words,” Mrs. Hanson summed up, “you think I’m wrong.”

“No. But on the other hand I’m not sure your daughter is. Have you tried, really, to see things from her side? To think why she wants to join a Sodality?”

“Yes. I have. She likes to shit on me and call it cake.”

Charmain laughed without much zest. “Well, perhaps you’re right. I hope we can talk again about this after we’ve both had a chance to think it over.”

“You mean you want me to go.”

“Yes, I guess that’s what I mean. It’s late, I have a job.”

“Okay, I’m going. But I meant to ask: that book on the floor …”

“Kerygma?”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s Greek for message. It’s supposed to be one of the things that the Church does, it brings a message.”

“What message?”

“In a nutshell—Christ is risen. We are saved.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Hanson. But what I believe doesn’t matter—I’m only the messenger.”

“Shall I tell you something?”

“What?”

“I don’t think you’re much of a priest.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hanson. I know that.”

39. The Five-Fifteen Puppets

Alone in the apartment, doors locked, mind bolted, Mrs. Hanson watched the teevee with a fierce, wandering attention. People knocked, she ignored them. Even Ab Holt, who should have known better than to be playing their game.

“Just a discussion, Nora.” Nora! He’d never called her Nora before. His big voice kept smashing through the door of the closet that had been a foyer. She couldn’t believe that they would really use physical force to evict her. After fifteen years! There were hundreds of people in the building, she could name them, who didn’t meet occupancy standards. Who took in any temp from the hallway and called them lodgers. “Mrs. Hanson, I’d like you to meet my new daughter.” Oh yes! The corruption wasn’t all at the top—it worked its way through the whole system. And when she’d asked, “Why me?” that slut had had the nerve to say, “Che sera sera, I’m afraid.” If it had been that Mrs. Miller. There was someone who really did care, not a lot of fake sympathy and “Che sera sera.” Maybe, if she phoned? But there wasn’t a phone at Williken’s now, and in any case she wasn’t budging from where she was. They’d have to drag her. Would they dare go that far? The electricity would be shut off, that’s always the first step. God knew what she’d do without the teevee. A blonde girl showed her how easy something was to do, just one, two, three. Then four, five, six, and it would be broken? Terminal Clinic came on. The new doctor was still in a feud with Nurse Loughtis. Hair like a witch, that one, and you couldn’t believe a word she said. That mean look of hers, and then, “You can’t fight City Hall, Doctor.”

Of course, that’s what they wanted you to believe, that the individual person is helpless. She switched channels. Fucking on 5. Cooking on 4. She paused.

Hands pushed and pulled at a great ball of dough. Food! But the nice Spanish lady—though really you couldn’t say she was Spanish, it was only her name—from the Tenants’ Committee had promised her she wouldn’t starve. As for water, she’d filled every container in the house days ago.

It was so unfair. Mrs. Manuel if that was her name, had said she was being hung in a loophole. Somebody must have had their eye on the apartment for a long time, waiting for this opportunity. But try and find out from that asshole Blake who was moving in—oh no, that was “confidential.” She’d known from one look at his beady eyes that he was getting his orange juice.

It was only a matter of holding out. In a few days Lottie would come home. She’d gone off before like this and she’d always come back. Her clothes were all here, except the one little suitcase, a detail she hadn’t pointed out to Miss Slime. Lottie’d have her little breakdown or whatever and then come home and there’d be two of them and the department would have to grant a statutory six months’ stay. Mrs. Manuel had emphasized that—six months. And Shrimp wouldn’t last six months at that convent so-called. Religion was a hobby with her. In six months she’d have thrown it all up and started on something new, and then there’d be three of them and the department wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

The dates they gave you were just a bluff. She saw that now. It was already a week past the time they’d set. Let them knock on the door all they liked, though the idea of it drove her crazy. And Ab Holt, helping them. Damn!

“I would like a cigarette,” she said calmly, as if it were something one always says to oneself at five o’clock when the news came on, and she walked into the bedroom and took the cigarettes and the matches from the top drawer.

Everything was so neat. Clothes folded. She’d even fixed the broken blind, though now the slats were stuck. She sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. It took two matches, and then: Phew, the taste! Stale? But the smoke did something necessary to her head. She stopped worrying around in the same circle and thought about her secret weapon.

Her secret weapon was the furniture. Over the years she’d accumulated so much, mostly from other people’s apartments when they’d died or moved out, and they couldn’t evict her without clearing away every rag and stick of it. That was the law. And not just out into the corridor, oh no, they had to bring it down all the way to the street. So what were they going to do? Hire an army to take it down those stairs? Eighteen floors! No, so long as she insisted on her rights, she was as safe as if she were in a castle. And they’d just keep going on like they’d been going on, exerting psychological pressure so that she’d sign their fucking forms.

On the teevee a bunch of dancers had gotten up a party at the Greenwich Village office of Manufacturers Hanover Trust. The news was over and Mrs. Hanson returned to the living room, with her second awful cigarette, to the tune of “Getting to Know You.” It seemed ironic.

At last the puppets came on. Her old friends. Her only friends. It was Flapdoodle’s birthday. Bowser brought in a present in a gigantic box. “Is it for me?” Flapdoodle squeaked.

“Open it,” Bowser said, and you knew from the tone of his voice it was going to be something pretty bad.

“For me, oh boy! It’s something for me!” There was one box inside another box, and then a bo x inside that, and then still another box. Bowser got more and more impatient.

“Go on, go on, open the next one.”

“Oh, I’m bored,” said little Flapdoodle.

“Let me show you how,” said Bowser, and he did, and a gigantic wonderful hammer came out on a spring and knocked him on the head. Mrs. Hanson laughed herself into a fit, and sparks and ashes from the cigarette splashed all over her lap.

40. Hunt’s Tomato Catsup

Before it was even daylight the super had let the two of them in through the closet with his key. Auxiliaries. Now they were packing, wrapping, wrecking the whole apartment. She told them politely to leave, she screamed at them to leave, they paid no attention.

On the way down to find the Tenants’ Committee woman she met the super coming up. “What about my furniture?” she asked him.

“What about your furniture?”

“You can’t evict me without my belongings. That’s the law.”

“Go talk to the office. I don’t have anything to do with this.”

“You let them in. They’re there now, and you should see the mess they’re making. You can’t tell me that’s legal—another person’s belongings. Not just mine, a whole family’s.”

“So? So it’s illegal—does that make you feel better?” He turned round and started down the stairs.

Remembering the chaos upstairs—clothes tumbled out of the closet, pictures off the walls, dishes stacked helter-skelter inside cheap carrier cartons—she decided it wasn’t worth it. Mrs. Manuel, even if she could find her, wasn’t going to stick her neck out on the Hansons’ behalf. When she returned to 1812, the red-haired one was pissing in the kitchen sink.

“Oh, don’t apologize!” she said, when he started in. “A job is a job is a job, isn’t it? You’ve got to do what they tell you to.”

She felt every minute as though she was going to start roaring or spinning in circles or just explode, but what stopped and held her was knowing that none of that would have had any effect. Television had supplied her with models for almost all the real-life situations she’d ever had to face—happiness, heartbreak, and points between—but this morning she was alone and scriptless, without even a notion of what was supposed to happen next. Of what to do.

Cooperate with the damned steamrollers? That’s what the steamrollers seemed to expect, Miss Slime and the rest of them in their offices with their forms and their good manners. She’d be damned if she would.

She’d resist. Let the whole lot of them try to tell her it wouldn’t do her any good, she’d go on resisting. With that decision she recognized that she had found her role and that it was after all a familiar role in a known story: she would go down fighting. Very often in such cases, if you held out long enough against even the most hopeless odds the tide would turn. She’d seen it happen time and again.

At ten o’clock Slime came round and made a checklist of the destruction the auxiliaries had accomplished. She tried to make Mrs. Hanson sign a paper for certain of the boxes and cupboards to be stored at the city’s expense—the rest presumably was garbage—at which point Mrs. Hanson pointed out that until she’d been evicted the apartment still belonged to her and so would Miss Slime please leave and take her two sink-pissers with her.

Then she sat down beside the lifeless teevee (the electricity was off, finally) and had another cigarette. Hunt’s Tomato Catsup, the matchbook said. There was a recipe inside for Waikiki Beans that she’d always intended to test out but never got around to. Mix up Beef or Pork Chunkies, some crushed pineapple, a tablespoon of Wesson Oil, and lots of catsup, heat, and serve on toast. She fell asleep in the armchair planning an entire Hawaiian-style dinner around the Waikiki Beans.

At four o’clock there was a banging and clattering at the door of what was once again the foyer. The movers. She had time to freshen herself before they found the super to let them in. She watched grimly as they stripped the kitchen of furniture, shelves, boxes. Even vacant, the patterns of wear on the linoleum, of stains on the walls, declared the room to be the Hansons’ kitchen.

The contents of the kitchen had been stacked at the top of the stairs. This was the part she’d been waiting for. Now, she thought, break your backs!

There was a groan and shudder of far-off machineries. The elevator was working. It was Shrimp’s doing, her ridiculous campaign, a final farewell slap in the face. Mrs. Hanson’s secret weapon had failed. In no time the kitchen was loaded into the elevator and the movers squeezed in and pressed the button. The outer and then the inner doors closed. The disc of dim yellow light slipped from sight. Mrs. Hanson approached the dirty window and watched the steel cables shiver like the strings of gigantic bows. After a long, long time the massive block counterweight rose up out of the darkness.

The apartment or the furniture? It had to be one or the other. She chose—they must have known she would—the furniture. She returned one last time to 1812 and got together her brown coat, her Wooly© cap, her purse. In the dusk, with no lights and the blinds off the windows, with the walls bare and the floors cluttered with big sealed boxes, there was no one to say good-bye to except the rocker, the teevee, the sofa—and they’d be with her on the street soon enough.

She double-locked the door as she left. At the top of the stairs, hearing the elevator groaning upwards, she stopped. Why kill herself? She got in as the movers came out. “Any objections?” she asked. The doors closed and Mrs. Hanson was in free fall before they discovered they couldn’t get in.

“I hope it crashes,” she said aloud, a little afraid it might.

Slime was standing guard over the kitchen which was huddled together beyond the curb in a little island of light under a street lamp. It was almost night.

A sharp wind with dry flakes of yesterday’s snow swept down 11th Street from the west. With a scowl for Slime, Mrs. Hanson seated herself on one of the kitchen chairs. She just hoped that Slime would try and sit down too.

The second load arrived—armchairs, the disassembled bunk, cupboards of clothes, the teevee. A second hypothetical room began to form beside the first. Mrs. Hanson moved to her regular armchair and tried, with her hands in the coat pockets, to warm her fingers in her crotch.

Now Miss Slime judged the time had come to really twist and squeeze. The forms came out of the briefcase. Mrs. Hanson got rid of her quite elegantly. She lit a cigarette. Slime backed off from the smoke as though she’d been offered a teaspoonful of cancer. Social workers!

All the bulkiest items came in the third load—the sofa, the rocker, the three beds, the dresser with the missing drawer. The movers told Slime that in one more trip they’d have it all down. When they’d gone back in, she started in again with her forms and her ballpoint.

“I can understand your anger, and I sympathize, Mrs. Hanson, believe me. But someone has to attend to these matters and see that things are handled as fairly as the situation permits. Now please do sign these forms so that when the van comes … ”

Mrs. Hanson got up, took the form, tore it in half, tore the halves in half, and handed the scraps back to Slime, who stopped talking. “Now, is there anything else?” she asked in the same tone of voice as Slime.

“I’m only trying to help, Mrs. Hanson.”

“If you try to help for one more minute, so help me, I’ll spread you all over that sidewalk like so much … like so much catsup!”

“Threats of violence don’t solve problems, Mrs. Hanson.”

Mrs. Hanson picked up the top half of the lamp pole from the lap of the rocker and swung, aiming for the middle of her thick coat. There was a satisfying Whap! The plastic shade that had always been such an eyesore cracked off. Without another word Slime walked away in the direction of First Avenue.

The last boxes were brought out from the lobby and dumped beside the curb. The rooms were all scrambled together now in one gigantic irrational jumble. Two colored brats from the building had begun bouncing on a stack made from the bunk mattresses and the mattress from Lottie’s bed. Mrs. Hanson chased them off with the lamp pole. They joined the small crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk, just outside the imaginary walls of the imaginary apartment. Silhouettes watched from the lower windows.

She couldn’t let them have it just like that. As though she were dead and they could go through her pockets. This furniture was her own private property and they just stood about, waiting for Slime to come back with reinforcements and take her off. Like vultures, waiting.

Well, they could wait till they dropped—they weren’t going to get a thing! She dug into her freezing purse for the cigarettes, the matches. There were only three left. She’d have to be careful. She found the drawers for the wooden dresser that had come from Miss Shore’s apartment when Miss Shore had died. Her nicest piece of furniture. Oak. Before replacing them she used the lamp pole to poke holes through the pasteboard bottoms. Then she broke open the sealed boxes looking for burnables. She encountered bathroom items, sheets and pillows, her flowers. She dumped out the flowers, tore the broken box into strips. The strips went into the bottom drawer of the dresser. She waited until there was no wind at all. Even so it took all three matches to get it started.

The crowd—still mostly of children—had grown, but they kept well back from the walls. She scouted about for the kindling. Pages of books, the remains of the calendar, and Mickey’s watercolors (“Promising” and “Shows independence”) from the third grade were fed into the dresser. Before long she had a nice little furnace going inside. The problem now was how to get the rest of the furniture started. She couldn’t keep pushing things into the drawers.

Using the lamp pole she was able to get the dresser over on its side. Sparks geysered up and were swept along by the wind. The crowd, which had been closing in more tightly around the bonfire, swayed back. Mrs. Hanson placed the kitchen chairs and table on the flames. They were the last large items she still had left from the Mott Street days. Seeing them go was painful.

Once the chairs had caught she used them as torches to start the rest of the furniture going. The cupboards, loosely packed and made of cheap materials, became fountains of fire. The crowd cheered as each one, after smoking blackly, would catch hold and shoot up. Ah! Is there anything like a good fire?

The sofa, armchairs, and mattresses were more obstinate. The fabric would char, the stuffing would stink and smolder, but it wouldn’t burn outright. Piece by piece (except for the sofa, which had always been beyond her), Mrs. Hanson dragged these items to the central pyre. The last mattress, however, only got as far as the teevee and her strength gave out.

A figure advanced toward her from the crowd, but if they wanted to stop her now it was too late. A fat woman with a small suitcase.

“Mom?” she said.

“Lottie!”

“Guess what? I’ve come home. What are you doing with—”

A clothes cupboard fell apart, scattering flames in modules scaled to the human form.

“I told them. I told them you’d be back!”

“Isn’t this our furniture?”

“Stay here.” Mrs. Hanson took the suitcase out of Lottie’s hand, which was all cut and scratched, the poor darling, and set it down on the concrete. “Don’t go anywhere, right? I’m getting someone but I’ll be right back. We’ve lost a battle, but we’ll win the war.”

“Are you feeling all right, Mom?”

“I’m feeling fine. Just wait here, all right? And there’s no need to worry. Not now. We’ve got six months for certain.”

41. At the Falls

Incredible? Her mother running off through the flames like some opera star going out for a curtain call. Her suitcase had crushed the plastic flowers. She stooped and picked one up. An iris. She tossed it into the flames in approximately the direction her mother had disappeared in.

And hadn’t it been a magnificent performance? Lottie had watched from the sidewalk, awestruck, as she’d set fire to … everything. The rocker was burning. The kid’s bunk, in two pieces, was burning propped up against the embers of the kitchen table. Even the teevee, with Lottie’s own mattress draped over it, though because of the mattress the teevee wasn’t burning as well as it might. The entire Hanson apartment was on fire. The strength! Lottie thought. The strength that represents.

But why strength? Wasn’t it as much a yielding? What Agnes Vargas had said years ago at Afra Imports: “The hard part isn’t doing the job. The hard part is learning how.” Such a commonplace thing to say, yet it had always stuck with her.

Had she learned how?

The beauty: that was what was so remarkable. Seeing the furniture standing about on the street, that had been beautiful enough. But when it burned!

The flowered armchair, which had only been smoldering till now, took hold all at once, and all its meaning was expressed in a tall column of orange flames. Glorious!

Could she?

At the very least she could try to approach it.

She fiddled open the locks of the suitcase. Already she’d lost so many of the things she’d brought with her, all the little bones and bijoux from her past that hadn’t for all her worrying at them yielded her one dribble of the feelings they were supposed to hold. Postcards she’d never sent. Baby clothes. The book of autographs (including three celebrities) she’d started keeping in eighth grade. But what junk she had left she’d gladly give.

At the top of the suitcase, a white dress. She threw it into the lap of the burning chair. As it touched the flames years of whiteness condensed into a moment’s fierce flare.

Shoes, a sweater. They shriveled inside lurid haloes of green flame.

Prints. Stripes.

Most of these things didn’t even fit her! She lost patience and dumped the rest in all in a heap, everything except the photographs and the bundle of letters. These she fed to the fire one by one. The pictures winked into flame like the popping of so many flashbulbs, leaving the world as they’d entered it. The letters, on lighter paper, went even more quickly: a single whoosh! and then they rose in the updraft, black weightless birds, poem after poem, lie upon lie—all of Juan’s love.

Now she was free?

The clothes she wore were of no importance. As little time as a week ago she might have thought at this moment that she’d have to take her clothes off, too.

She herself was the clothing she must remove.

She went to where her own bed had been prepared atop the teevee. All else was in flames now, only the mattress still smoldered. She lay down. It was no more uncomfortable than entering a very hot bathtub, and as the water might have, the heat melted away the soreness and tension of the last sad days and weeks. This was so much more simple.

Relaxing, she became aware of the sound of the flames, a roaring all around her, as though she had finally come to the head of the falls she had been listening to so long. As her little boat had drifted towards this moment. But these waters were flames and fell upwards. With her head thrown back she could watch the sparks from the separate fires join, in the updraft, into a single ceaseless flow of light that mocked the static pallid squares of light gouged in the face of the brick. People stood within those squares of light, watching the fire, waiting, with Lottie, for the mattress to go.

The first flames curled around the edge, and through these flames she saw the ring of onlookers. Each face, in its separateness, in the avidity of its gaze, seemed to insist that Lottie’s action was directed in some special way at him. There was no way to tell them that this was not for their sake but for the sake, purely, of the flames.

At the very moment that she knew she couldn’t go on, that her strength would fail, their faces disappeared. She pushed herself up, the teevee collapsed, and she fell, in her little boat, through the white spray of her fear, towards the magnificence below.

But then, before she could see quite through the curtain of the spray, there was another face. A man. He aimed the nozzle of the fire-hose at her. A stream of white plastic foam shot out, blanketing Lottie and the bed, and all the while she was compelled to watch, in his eyes, on his lips, everywhere, an expression of insupportable loss.

42. Lottie, at Bellevue, continued

“And anyhow the world doesn’t end. Even though it may try to, even though you wish to hell it would—it can’t. There’s always some poor jerk who thinks he needs something he hasn’t got, and there goes five years, ten years, getting it. And then it’ll be something else. It’s another day and you’re still waiting for the world to end.

“Oh, sometimes, you know, I have to laugh. When I think—Like the first time you’re really in love and you say to yourself, Hey! I’m really in love! Now I know what it’s about. And then he leaves you and you can’t believe it. Or worse than that you gradually lose sight of it. Just gradually. You’re in love, only it isn’t as wonderful as it used to be. Maybe you’re not even in love, maybe you just want to be. And maybe you don’t even want to be. You stop bothering about songs on the radio and there’s nothing you want to do but sleep. Do you know? But you can only sleep for so long and then it’s tomorrow. The icebox is empty and you have to think who haven’t you borrowed any money from and the room smells and you get up just in time to see the most terrific sunset. So it wasn’t the end of the world after all, it’s just another day.

“You know, when I came here, there was a part of me that was so happy. Like the first day of school, though maybe that was terrifying, I can’t remember. Anyhow. I was so happy because I thought, here I am, this is the bottom. At last! The end of the world, right? And then, it was only the next day, I was up on the veranda and there it was again, this perfectly gorgeous sunset, with Brooklyn all big and mysterious, and the river. And then it was as though I could take a step back from myself, like when you’re sitting across from someone in the subway and they don’t know you’re watching them, I could see myself like that. And I thought, Why you dope! You’ve only been here one day, and here you are enjoying a goddamned sunset.

“Of course it’s also true, what we were saying before, about people. People are shits. In here just as much as out there. Their faces. And the way they grab things. It’s like, I don’t know if you’ve ever had children, but it’s like that, eating at the same table with children. At first you can enjoy it. Like watching a mouse—nibble, nibble, nibble. But then there’s another meal, and another, and if you don’t see them other times there doesn’t seem to be anything to them but an endless appetite. Well, and that’s what I think can be so frightening, when you look at somebody and you can’t see anything but their hungry face. Looking at you.

“Do you feel that way ever? When you feel something very strongly, you always suppose other people must have felt the same way, but do you know what? I’m thirty-eight years old, tomorrow I’ll be thirty-nine, and I still wonder if that’s so. Whether anyone ever feels the same way.

“Oh! Oh, the funniest thing, I have to tell you. This morning when I was on the can, Miss What’s-It comes in, the nice one, and very matter-of-fact as though it were my office or something she asks did I want a chocolate birthday cake or a white birthday cake? For my birthday! A chocolate birthday cake or a white birthday cake? Because, you see, they had to order it today. God, I laughed. I thought I’d fall off the stool I laughed so hard. ‘A chocolate birthday cake or a white birthday cake. Which will it be, Lottie?’

“Chocolate, I told her, and I was very serious about it too, believe me. It had to be chocolate. Nothing else would do.”

43. Mrs. Hanson, in Room 7

“I’ve thought about it. For years. I don’t talk about it because I don’t think it’s something you can discuss. Once. Once I met a lady in the park, that was a long time ago. We talked about it but I don’t think that either of us … Not then. Once you’re serious, it isn’t something you care to talk about.

“Here it’s a different situation. I know. I don’t mind discussing it with you. It’s your job and you have to do it. But with my family, you see, that’s a different matter. They’d try to argue against it but only because they felt they ought to. And I understand that. I was the same myself. I can remember visiting my father when he was in the hospital—that would be Twenty-twenty or twenty-one, in there, and talking away at him a mile a minute. Lord. But could I look him in the eye? Not for a moment! I kept showing him photographs, as though … But even then I knew what he must have been thinking. What I didn’t know was that it can all seem so possible.

“But I suppose you’ll need better reasons than that for the form you’re filling out. Well, just put down cancer. You must have a copy of my medical report. I’ve been cut open just once, to have my appendix taken out, and that was enough. The doctors explained to me what I can expect and that my chances are better than fifty-fifty and I believe them. It’s not the risk I’m afraid of. That would be silly, wouldn’t it?

“What I am afraid of is turning into some kind of old vegetable. There’s so many like that where I am now. Some of them are just completely … I stare at them sometimes. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help myself.

“And they don’t realize. They don’t have any idea. There’s one of them who’s gone like that just in the time I’ve been there. He used to spend every day off somewhere, independent wasn’t the word for it, and then—a stroke. And now he can’t control himself. They wheel him out on the porch with all the rest of us, and suddenly you hear him in his tin pot, tinkle tinkle tinkle. Oh, you have to laugh.

“Then you think, that could be me. I don’t mean to say that pissing is so important. But the mental change! Old pisspot used to be such a sharp bastard, crusty, full of fight. But now? I don’t care if I wet my bed but I don’t want my brains to go soft.

“The attendants are always joking about this one or that one. It’s not malicious, really. Sometimes I have to laugh myself at what they say. And then I think. After my operation I might be the one they’re making jokes about. And then it would be too late. You can see that in their eyes sometimes. The fact that they’ve let their chance slip by, and that they know it.

“After a certain point you ask yourself why. Why go on? Why bother? For what reason? I guess it’s when you stop enjoying things. The day-to-day things. It’s not as though there’s all that much to enjoy. Not there. The food? Eating is a chore for me now, like putting on my shoes. I do it. That’s all. Or the people? Well, I talk to them, they talk to me, but does anyone listen? You—do you listen? Huh? And when you talk, who listens to you? And how much are they paid?

“What was I talking about? Oh, friendship. Well, I’ve expressed my thoughts on that subject. So, what’s left? What is left? Teevee. I used to watch teevee a lot. Maybe if I had my own set again, and my own private room, maybe I could gradually just forget about everything else. But sitting there in that room at Terminal Clinic—that’s our name for it—with the others all sneezing and jabbering and I don’t know what, I can’t connect with the screen. I can’t make it take me over.

“And that’s it. That’s my life, and I say, who needs it? Oh, I forgot to mention baths. Twice a week I get a nice warm bath for fifteen minutes and I love it. Also, when I sleep I enjoy that. I sleep about four hours a night. It’s not enough.

“I’ve made sense, haven’t I? I’ve been rational? Before I came here I made a list of the things I meant to say, and now I’ve said them. They’re all good reasons, every one of them. I checked them in your little book. Have I left any out?

“Oh. Family relationships. Right. Well, I don’t have any left that count. After a certain age that’s true for everyone, and I’ve reached that age, I guess. It took a while, but I’m there.

“As I understand it, you’ve got to approve my application. If you don’t, I’ll appeal. As I have a right to. And eventually I’ll win. I’m smart, you know. When I have to be, I am. My whole family was a smart family, with very high scores. I never did much with my intelligence, I have to confess, but I’ll do this. I’ll get what I want and what I have a right to. And sincerely, Miss Latham, I do want it. I want to die. The way some people want sex, that’s how I want death. I dream about it. And I think about it. And it’s what I want.”