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.