2
The Sacred Heart, gold beard, pink cheeks, blue blue eyes, gazed intently across twelve feet of living space and out the window unit at long recessions of yellow brick. Beside him a Conservation Corporation calendar blinked now BEFORE and then AFTER views of the Grand Canyon. Boz turned over so as not to have to look at Jesus, the Grand Canyon, Jesus. The tuckaway lurched to port side. Mrs. Hanson had been thinking of having someone in to fix the sofa (the missing leg led an independent existence in the cabinet below the sink) ever since the Welfare people had busted it on the day how many years ago that the Hansons had moved in to 334. She would discuss with her family, or with the nice Mrs. Miller from the MOD office, the obstacles in the way of this undertaking, which proved upon examination so ramiform and finally so formidable as very nearly to defeat her most energetic hopes. Nevertheless, some day.
Her nephew, Lottie’s youngest, was watching the war on the teevee. It was unusual for Boz to sleep so late. U.S. guerillas were burning down a fishing village somewhere. The camera followed the path of the flames along the string of fishing boats, then held for a long time on the empty blue of the water.
Then a slow zoom back that took in all the boats together. The horizon warped and flickered through a haze of flame. Gorgeous. Was it a rerun? Boz seemed to think he’d seen that last shot before.
“Hi there, Mickey.”
“Hi, Uncle Boz. Grandma says you’re getting divorced. Are you going to live with us again?”
“Your grandma needs a decongestant. I’m only here for a few days. On a visit.”
The apple pie colophon, signaling the end of the war for that Wednesday morning, splattered and the decibels were boosted for the April Ford commercial, “Come and Get Me, Cop.”
It was a happy little song, but how could he feel happy when he knew that Milly was probably watching it too and enjoying it in a faculty lounge somewhere, never even giving a thought for Boz, or where he was, or how he felt. Milly studied all the commercials and could play them back to you verbatim, every tremor and inflection just so. And not a milligram of her own punch. Creative? As a parrot.
Now, what if he were to tell her that? What if he told her that she would never be anything more than a second-string Grade-Z hygiene demonstrator for the Board of Education. Cruel? Boz was supposed to be cruel?
He shook his head, flip flop of auburn. “Baby, you don’t know what cruel is.”
Mickey switched off the teevee. “Oh, if you think this was something today you should have seen them yesterday. They were in this school. Parkistanis, I think. Yeah. You should have seen it. That was cruel. They wiped them out.”
“Who did?”
“Company A.” Mickey came to attention and saluted the air. Kids his age (six) always wanted to be guerillas or firemen. At ten it was pop singers. At fourteen, if they were bright (and somehow all the Hansons were bright), they wanted to write. Boz still had a whole scrapbook of the advertisements he’d written in high school. And then, at twenty …?
Don’t think about it.
“You didn’t care?” Boz asked.
“Care?”
“About the kids in the school.”
“They were insurgents,” Mickey explained. “It was in Pakistan.” Even Mars was more real than Pakistan and no one gets upset about schools burning on Mars.
A flop flop flop of slippers and Mrs. Hanson shambled in with a cup of Koffee. “Politics, you’d try and argue politics with a six-year-old! Here. Go ahead, drink it.”
He sipped the sweet thickened Koffee and it was as though every stale essence in the building, garbage rotting in bins and grease turning yellow on kitchen walls, tobacco smoke and stale beer and Synthamon candies, everything ersatz, everything he’d thought he had escaped, had flooded back into the core of his body with just that one mouthful.
“He’s become too good for us now, Mickey. Look at him.”
“It’s sweeter than I’m used to. Otherwise it’s fine, Mom.”
“It’s no different than you used to have it. Three tablets. I’ll drink this one and make you another. You came here to stay.”
“No, I told you last night that—”
She waved a hand at him, shouted to her grandson: “Where you going?”
“Down to the street.”
“Take the key and bring the mail up first, understand. If you don’t… ”
He was gone. She collapsed in the green chair, on top of a pile of clothes, talking to herself or to him, she wasn’t particular about her audience. he heard not words but the reedy vibrato of her phlegm, saw the fingers stained with nicotine, the jiggle of sallow chin-flesh, the MOD teeth. My mother.
Boz turned his eyes to the scaly wall where roseate AFTER winked to a tawdry BEFORE and Jesus, squeezing a bleeding organ in his right hand, forgave the world for yellow bricks that stretched as far as the eye could see.
“The work she comes home with you wouldn’t believe. I told Lottie, it’s a crime, she should complain. How old is she? Twelve years old. If it had been Shrimp, if it had been you, I wouldn’t say a word, but she has her mother’s health, she’s very delicate. And the exercises they make them do, it’s not decent for a child. I’m not against sex, I always let you and Milly do whatever you wanted. I turned my head. But that sort of thing should be private between two people. The things you see, and I mean right out on the street. They don’t even go into a doorway now. So I tried to make Lottie see reason, I was very calm, I didn’t raise my voice. Lottie doesn’t want it herself, you know, she’s being pressured by the school. How often would she be able to see her? Weekends. And one month in the summer. It’s all Shrimp’s doing. I said to Shrimp, if you want to be a ballet dancer then you go ahead and be a ballet dancer but leave Amparo alone. The man came from the school, and he was very smooth and Lottie signed the papers. I could have cried. of course it was all arranged. They waited till I was out of the house. She’s your child, I told her, leave me out of it. If that’s what you want for her, the kind of future you think she deserves. You should hear the stories she comes home with. Twelve years old! It’s Shrimp, taking her to those movies, taking her to the park. Of course you can see all of that on television too, that Channel 5, I don’t know why they … But I suppose it’s none of my business. No one cares what you think when you’re old. Let her go to the Lowen School, it won’t break my heart.” She kneaded the left side of her dress illustratively: her heart.
“We could use the room here, though you won’t hear me complaining about that. Mrs. Miller said we could apply for a larger apartment, there’s five of us, and now six with you, but if I said yes and we moved and then Amparo goes off to this school, we’d just have to move back here, because the requirement there is for five people. Besides it would mean moving all the way to Queens. Now if Lottie were to have another, but of course her health isn’t up to it, not to speak of the mental thing. And Shrimp? Well, I don’t have to go into that. So I said no, let’s stay put. Besides, if we did go and then had to come back here, we probably wouldn’t have the luck to get the same apartment again. I don’t deny that there are lots of things wrong with it, but still. Try and get water after four o’clock, like sucking a dry tit.”
Hoarse laughter, another cigarette. Having broken the thread of thought, she found herself lost in the labyrinth: her eyes darted around the room, little cultured pearls that bounced off into every corner.
Boz had not listened to the monologue, but he was aware of the panic that welled up to fill the sudden wonderful silence. Living with Milly he’d forgotten this side of things, the causeless incurable terrors. Not just his mother’s; everyone who lived below 34th.