Текст книги "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Автор книги: Marge Piercy

Соавторы: Marge Piercy
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

She rolled over, began to cough, to choke on phlegm. Cursing, she spat into a square of toilet paper and reached for the crumpled pack on the chair. Then she froze. Her fingers. That scent. She smelled her arm. Yes, her arm gave off that chemical on Luciente’s fingers. The hair rose on her nape.

Idiot! They’d soon be locking her up again. So she’d got her arm in something, probably cleaning that office, and dreamed about it, like making the ringing of an alarm into a bell tolling. The phlegm she coughed up was brown. A little blood from her throat; that’s what she ought to be worrying about. She was too nervous to stop smoking, even though she knew it was hurting her. Oh, well, a taxi would run her down before she could die of cancer. A mugger would bash her head in. She would get cancer from eating garbage on the little money from welfare.

Her neighbor Mrs. Silva knocked on her door shortly after she came back from shopping, from buying two rolls of toilet paper, bread, bananas, spaghetti, eggs. She wanted hamburger but she hadn’t the money for meat. Her niece Dolores, called Dolly, was on Mrs. Silva’s phone: Luis’s oldest, by his first marriage. Luis had got married a lot and by every wife he had kids. Her favorite was Dolly, who was twenty‑two, plump and sweet as a candied yam. When Dolly had to get hold of her, she called Mrs. Silva.

Dolly asked her to come down to Rivington Street and she grabbed her old green coat and her battered plastic purse and headed for the subway. On the express down to Brooklyn Bridge, she had a little piece of luck. As she was getting into the car she saw a ballpoint lying at the foot of a seat, and when she tried it, it worked. It had the name of a midtown stationer on it and wrote with blue ink. She had not had a pen that worked in months. She had to write her letters in pencil. Now she would write in ink, the way it should be. Tonight with her new pen she would write to both her sisters. She tucked it carefully in her purse before she changed to the QJ train, checking that the tape was still making a repair so the pen would not slip out. She also picked up a Daily Newsthat a man had left in his seat.

At Essex and Delancey she headed north to Rivington, aware with a heavy lopsided sense of Norfolk a block over, where she had lived that year with Angelina in one room, that bad year after Claud had been sent to prison. That room like a box of pain. Dolly had found it for her after she had been kicked out of the apartment she had shared with Claud, three big rooms with their own bathroom just two blocks from Mount Morris Park. Dolly had lived then with her husband on Rivington, where she lived now with her daughter Nita, and the occasional presence of her rotten pimp, Geraldo. There was the bodega where Connie used to try to get credit till her check came, there was the liquor store she had known too well, with its racks and racks of cheap sweet wine.

It was steamy hot in Dolly’s apartment, it always was. Nita was eating in a highchair getting to be too small for her, finishing coconut instant pudding and putting most of it into her mouth by now.

“Ahora comes como una santa!” Connie hovered over her grandniece. “She eats real neat now. She’s such a good girl. Give me a smile, Nita? Hazme los ojitos! Yes? Quй preciosa!”

Dolly’s face was swollen with tears and she rolled up the ruffled sleeve of her blouse to show a bruise.

“Some john did this to you?”

“Geraldo did it!”

“Why do you put up with him? He’s bad to the core.”

Dolly sighed and rolled a joint in the licorice‑flavored paper she liked. “You know how when I got back from San Juan you told me I was carrying?”

Connie nodded, accepting the joint. As she let the smoke seep out she said, “You knew it already. You wanted a baby real bad.”

“I still do! I went, I got one of those tests? I haven’t had my time since then.”

“What did the test say?”

Dolly patted her belly. “I told Geraldo yesterday. He starts yelling at me, that it’s by some john. He starts hitting on me!”

“He makes me so sick. He makes you go with men and then he puts you down for it. It’s his kid. You came back from Puerto Rico with that baby.” She had known as soon as she saw Dolly.

Dolly drew herself up. “The johns are a business thing. Don’t put it down, I make good money. I don’t bring the johns here–I do them in hotels or at Geraldo’s. Listen, every woman sells it. Jackie O. sells it. So?”

“So how do you like it with them?”

“It’s a job.” Dolly sucked in the smoke, glowering. The minutes thickened between them. Finally she sniffled. “You hate yourself, you hate the trick. I never met one woman yet who didn’t hate every stupid trick.”

“Leave him, carita, leave him. Never mind him. He’s not worth your little fingernail.”

“He’s smart, Connie, his mind works like that.” She snapped her fingers. “He has style. The other whores all standon their heads to catch his eye when he comes around … . I thought, why not have a baby with him? Then Ican quit. It’ll be like it was before, only better. A man respects you more if you have his baby. Why not?”

“So you didn’t take your pills in Puerto Rico?”

“I left them here. I didn’t even put them in my purse. I thought too it might be lucky, a baby made on the island. I want to have this baby, Connie!”

“Why not? One child is lonely. Why not have another? You’re a good mother. You quit this whoring and have the baby.”

“He won’t let me! He says I got to have an abortion!”

“No.” Connie banged her fist on the table. A strange gesture for her. Dolly stared. “You have it! Tell him to o.d. and sell his body to the city for rat bait. You come live with me. I’ll help you with the children. I’d love that, you know it’s the truth–”

The phone rang. It was a john. Dolly ran off to the bathroom to fix her face and get herself together. Connie kissed her, fussed over Nita for a couple of minutes, and then reluctantly picked her way down the stairwell. In the street a damp, jagged wind off the East River scraped her face. She pulled her old green coat closer. The lining was gone. She felt high and loose with the grass, too stoned to endure the subway just yet. She decided to walk all the way over to the Spring Street stop on the IRT and take the local uptown, even though it was ten blocks of walking.

In a playground on Elizabeth, some little girls were playing red light, green light. She hunched against the wind, not deciding to walk closer, to stop and stare, but finding herself pressed suddenly into the fence. Brown‑skinned mostly, about the right age. Angie would be one of the lighter, one of the shorter girls. Eddie, her father, had been light and short. She could be that lean quick one with the black hair and creamy skin and big love‑me grin. Getting caught and making a big show of kicking herself. Yes, the girl who kicks herself would be mine!

Two men wheeling a cart on the sidewalk looked at her, and one spoke laughing to the other. Tears were rolling down her face. Rotten dope making her sentimental. Crazy Connie. She started to walk while the street bellied out before her. With the sleeve of her coat she tried to rub her face. The tears ran from her sore eyes, faucets that would not be shut off. Warm and wet over her cheeks. She turned onto Prince and sat down in a doorway, on a cement step recessed into the entrance to a loft building, the door big as a barn door behind. She spread the newspaper for her butt. Nobody around. She blew her nose hard in a wad of toilet paper. Anybody would think she had loved her daughter.

A shadow across her. She began to get up but that hand was extended again. “What’s wrong? You’re weeping. Connie, did I frighten you?”

Shorter than in her dream, just a few inches taller than she would be, standing, he bent toward her, moon face, black turtle bean eyes, that gentle smile.

“I’m going crazy! But it could be the dope. Really powerful–”

“I’m here.I’ve been trying to reach you. But you get frightened, Connie.” Luciente grinned. Really, he was girlish. Mariquita?

“What do you want from me?” Childhood scary tales of brujos, spells, demons. A lot of garbage, but how could this boy creep into her dreams?

“Just to talk. For you to relax and talk with me.”

“Ha! Nobody ever wants to talk to me. Not even my caseworker, Mrs. Polcari. I depress her.” Connie rose stiffly, brushing off the seat of her old coat, and folding her paper, she slipped past him. Her arm grazed his. He was real enough, his arm muscular through the leather jacket. Her belly hardened with fear. El Muro and the way he would wait for her. Then she had been young and succulent as a roasting chicken. Now she was what Geraldo always called her, a bag–a bag full of pain and trouble. She wanted a cigarette bad but she was scared to open her purse in front of him; so easy for him to snatch. She had the plastic pocketbook tucked along with the newspaper between her elbow and her body on the side away from him as he walked beside her with a casual springy step. No, he didn’t walk in a swishy manner. He had a surefooted catlike grace. He moved with grace but also with authority. In her purse were seventeen dollars, some pennies and two subway tokens, also her welfare ID and the keys to her apartment. Where would she replace the seventeen dollars? He could steal her little TV set to pawn. She had two weeks to wait till her next check, if she got it on time.

He wasn’t dressed like a bum. Although nothing was new or flashy, his clothing was substantial and well made. Big heavy boots like the kids wore, black pants cut something like jeans, a red shirt she could glimpse at the throat, a worn but handsome leather jacket with no insignia of gang or social club but instead a pattern in beads and shells in the sleeves. He was without gloves and his hands she remembered. She would have liked to take the hand toward her and lift it to her nostrils. The skin was stained but not with nicotine. What kind of work would stain hands purple? Like the dye used to stamp grades on meat.

She made her voice harsh. “How long you planning to follow me?”

“I’d rather talk to you at home, if you’ll let me.” Luciente recoiled as an ordinary truck roared by. He covered his nose.

“No. Why should I? Who are you?”

“You know my name, Connie. Luciente.”

“Bright boy. What do you want with me?”

His eyes watering, he took a large bright intricately dyed handkerchief out of his pocket to dab at them. “You’re an unusual person. Your mind is unusual. You’re what we call a catcher, a receptive.”

“You like old women?” She’d heard of that but never really believed in it. She was scared but slightly, slightly intrigued.

“Old?” Luciente laughed. “Sure, only women over seventy. I’ll have to wait on you. Tell me, am I so scary? I’m not a catcher myself; I’m what we call a sender.” He kept staring past her at cars, at the buildings right and left, up and down like a jнboro just off the plane; like her own grandmother, who would pass into the street in downtown El Paso by crossing herself, refusing to look at the cars, and stepping straight off the curb as if plunging into deep water.

He’s crazy, she thought. That’s it. She quickened her steps toward the subway station.

“I’m running hard over too much, but where to begin so you’ll comprehend? So you’ll relax and begin to intersee. A catcher is a person whose mind and nervous system are open, receptive, to an unusual extent … . It’s a hard ride explaining.” A jet passed over and he stopped to gape till a building blocked it from sight. “To explain anything exotic, you have to convey at once the thing and the vocabulary with which to talk about the thing … . Your vocabulary is remarkably weak in words for mental states, mental abilities, and mental acts–”

“I had two years of college! Just because I’m Chicana and on welfare, don’t try to tell me what poor vocabulary I speak with. I bet I read more than you do!”

“You plural–excuse me. A weakness that remains in our language, though we’ve reformed pronouns. By your language I mean that of your time, your culture. No personal slinging meant. Believe me, Connie, I have respect for you. We’ve been trying to get through for three months before I chanced on your mind. You’re an extraordinary top catcher. In our culture you would be much admired, which I take it isn’t true in this one?”

“Your culture! What are you into anyway–a real La Raza trip? The Azteca stuff, all that?”

“Now I lack vocabulary.” Luciente reached for her arm, but she dodged. “We must work to commune, because we have such different frames of redding. But that we seeeach other, that feathers me fasure!” The two cabs met at an intersection and both slammed their brakes. Luciente started muttering.

“So where are you from? The high Andes?”

Luciente grimaced. “In space not that far. Buzzard’s Bay.”

Every time they came to a street, Luciente acted barely in control. He must have escaped from Bellevue. Her luck. He kept looking up and sideways and then trying not to. They were almost to Sixth Avenue when he said, “Look. I have to leave. This place unnerves me. The air is filthy. The noise shakes me to the bone. I admire your composure. Think about me when you’re alone, would you?”

“Why should I? You’re crazy as a loon!”

Luciente beamed, capturing her hand in his dry, warm grip. “Ever see a loon, Connie? It’s the sound they make that’s crazy. They’re plain but graceful birds that glide with only the head full out of the water. Like turtles, they swim low. Maybe I can show you loons when they migrate through … . Don’t fear me. I sense you have enemies fasure, but I’m not one … . I need your help badly, but I mean you no harm.” And with that Luciente abruptly was not there.

Not till she was standing in the subway, wedged in, did she cautiously raise to her nose the hand he had seized. Yes, that chemical scent. She was afraid.

She stood swaying between people to her right, her left, her back, clutching her purse and Daily Newsagainst her breasts with one hand while the other just reached the strap above. He was right about the whatever he called it–receptive part. Queasy things happened in her. She never talked about those happenings much–a little to Dolly, who consulted palm readers and bought herbs from the botбnica in spite of speaking Spanish almost as badly as her father, Loois, who prided himself on having forgotten. Sometimes Connie knew at once things about others she should not know. She had known Luis was going to leave one of his wives before he knew he had decided. Her husband Eddie had called her a witch more than once–for instance, when he had been with another woman and came home with that presence and his pride and guilt flickering sulfurlike around him in small yellow flames.

“Who tells you this garbage? Those gossiping women! You do nothing all day but listen to lies!”

“You tell me! You tell me yourself when you walk in!”

Wise she wasn’t. Never could predict, not for herself, not for others. She had tried to tell fortunes and always guessed wrong and knew in her heart she was just guessing. The other event was not something she tried to do any more than seeing that there was a rat scuttling away in the hall. The information entered her as a sound entered her ears. Often when Eddie was about to strike her, she knew it and cowered before he drew back his hand for a blow. If this was a gift, she could not see what good it had ever done her. When Eddie was going to hit her, he hit her anyhow. Maybe she had a moment to raise an arm to protect her face, but if he knocked her down it hurt as much. Her bruises were as sore and shameful. Her tears were as bitter.

Her knowing that he had been with another woman did not make Eddie love her, did not give her flesh back that spicy tang it had held for him briefly, did not make him want to carry her off to bed. It only meant that she was deprived of the comfort she might have felt when from time to time he was sweet to her for the sake of getting some small thing he wanted. To read his contempt for her had turned love acid in her veins. It had made their marriage last a little less long than it would have.

She could have used some of her mother’s resignation. When she fought her hard and sour destiny, she seemed only to end up worse beaten, worse humiliated, more quickly alone–after Eddie had walked out, alone with her daughter Angelina and no man, no job, no money, pregnant with the baby she must abort. She was late for an abortion, past the third month, and it had gone hard with her. When the doctor told her she had been carrying a boy, she had felt a bitter triumph. In fact, she had gone to the bar where Eddie hung out, marched in and told him. He had for one last time beaten her.

A catcher, that’s what the cholo called her. The contemptuous word grated on her, leaving in her mind a trail of sore pride like a snail’s slimy track. Like black people calling each other nigger. She was angry at Luciente’s airs, his beautiful accent in that high‑pitched voice. “By your language, I mean that of your time, your culture … .” What scheme was he working on? What could he hope to get out of her? If he wanted her welfare check, that was a matter of a blow on the head. She was scared. He had wiped Dolly from her mind, leaving her almost envious of Dolly’s sorrow instead of this mystery that must cover some common evil like a cockroach under a plate.

Receptive. Like passive. The Mexican woman Consuelo the meek, dressed in black with her eyes downcast, never speaking unless addressed. Her mother kneeling to the black virgin. Not of course that her mother, Mariana, had lived her life as a peasant. Mariana had been uprooted from a village near Namiquipa, Los Calcinados, and migrated with her family to Texas to work in the fields. In El Paso Mariana met Connie’s father, Jesъs, and bore the first three children who lived, Luis, the oldest and most important son, then Connie, then her brother Joe, her favorite, who had died just out of prison in California, closest to her in age and temperament. And in defeat.

When Connie was seven, they moved to Chicago, where Teresa and Inez came and the last male baby, stillborn. That baby had almost carried Mariana with him, and never had she been well again. They took her womb in the hospital. Afterward that was a curse Jesъs threw in her face: no longer a woman. An empty shell.

Wearily she hauled herself up the steps at 110th and Lexington. PASAJES SEGUROS, the awning flapped. That was a dream. She looked down at herself in a battered green coat. She too, she was spayed. They had taken out her womb at Metropolitan when she had come in bleeding after that abortion and the beating from Eddie. Unnecessarily they had done a complete hysterectomy because the residents wanted practice. She need never again fear a swollen belly; and never again hope for a child. Useless rage began to sleet through her, and she turned her face blindly toward a pleasant smell. Cuchifritos, jugos tropicales, frituras. She crossed Lexington by the CHECKS CASHED, FOOD STAMPS, UTILITY BILLS, where she brought her welfare checks. Hell Gate P.O.

Her knees felt rubbery, her back ached low down. Wind off the East River chafed her face. The dark railroad like the walls of an ancient city, the cars going under in tunnels. Home was at least a refuge, as a mouse must feel about its hole. To crawl in and collapse. Yet she was not safe there from Luciente any more than she had been safe in her apartment in Chicago from El Muro, who had simply shaken down the janitor for the key. I have lived in three cities, she thought as she turned on to 111th Street with its three straight lines–and seen them all from the bottom. Kids played in the street outside–P.S. 101; mothers fetched their little ones from the day care center in the sawed‑off‑looking church across from her, Spanish Methodist. Drumming everywhere. It was spring, although she could hardly believe it, with the mutter of salsa music as loud as the roar of traffic, the growly pulse of the ghetto.

At fifteen she stood in the kitchen of her family’s railroad flat on the near West Side of Chicago, braced against the sink in blue jeans and fluorescent pink sweater. She could remember herself at fifteen and it did not feel different, only louder, more definite. “I won’t grow up like you, Mamб! To suffer and serve. Never to live my own life! I won’t!”

“You’ll do what women do. You’ll pay your debt to your family for your blood. May you love your children as much as I love mine.”

“You don’t love us girls the way you love the boys! It’s everything for Luis and nothing for me, it’s always been that way.”

“Never raise your voice to me. I’ll tell your father. You sound like the daughters of the gangsters here.”

“I’m good in school. I’m going to college. You’ll see!”

“The books made you sick! College? Not even Luis can go there.”

“I can! I’m going to get a scholarship. I’m not going to lie down and be buried in the rut of family, family, family! I’m so sick of that word, Mamб! Nothing in life but having babies and cooking and keeping the house. Mamacita, believe me–oнgame, Mamб–I love you! But I’m going to travel. I’m going to be someone!”

“There’s nothing for a woman to see but troubles. I wish I had never left Los Calcinados.” Mariana closed her eyes and Connie had thought she might burst into tears. But she only sighed. “I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of miles of a strange country full of strange and violent people. I wish I had never seen the road out of the village where I was born.”

From her mother she inherited that Mayan cast to her face,the small chin, the sensuous nose, the almond eyes. They had all traveled far, and all of it bottom class. She knew her mother’s family came originally from Campeche, near Xbonil. Troubles had driven them north, and north again, and again north, generation after generation plodding northward into the cold, into bondage, the desmadrados: taken too early from the mother; or the mother cannot nourish. Her mother had died when Connie was twenty, the year of her first abortion. Year of blood. At fifteen, at seventeen, she had screamed at her mother as if the role of the Mexican woman who never sat down with her family, who ate afterward like a servant, were something her mother had invented. She had shrieked how much better she was going to live her life, until her father came in and gave her the force of his fists. Yes, like the teachers she admired in her high school, she was not going to marry until she was old, twenty‑five even. Like Mrs. Polcari, she was going to have only two children and keep them clean as advertisements. Those beautiful rooms, those clean‑looking men who wore suits, those pretty sanitary babies, not at all like Teresa and Inez when she had to change them and clean up their spilled food.

Yet she understood now, climbing her stoop, that she had wanted her mother’s approval. She had wanted her mother’s comfort. She had wanted Mariana to come with her in her pursuit of knowledge and some better way to live. She had never been mothered enough and she had grown up with a hunger for mothering. To be loved as Luis had been loved. Only the very youngest girl, Inez, had had that. After Mariana had been robbed of her womb, she had lavished affection on the youngest.

So who was the worst fool, then–herself at fifteen full of plans and fire, or the woman of thirty‑seven who had given up making any plans? Despair had stained her with its somber wash and leached from her all plans and schoolbook ideals.

In her box she found a letter from Teresa, married with four kids in Chicago, several miles farther west than their childhood flat. Teresa lived near the old Midway airport in a little house on a street of identical boxes. That Connie should sneer was absurd! What did she live in but a stinking slum? Teresa wrote in her large handwriting with all letters of one size: “Little Joey is sick with a cold and sore throat again, the poor thing. It seems it is one thing after another. I hate to see him so sick. Laura had it too but not so bad, she is big for her age and strong. The dr. says he may have to have his tonsils out. I hope not, not only the expense but it costs so much and the pain it gives him. For kids to go in the hospital. I have been going to Mass whenever I can except lots of times I can’t get away from the house because of children. I don’t want to have to take Joey to the hospital and leave him there.

“Marilyn’s birthday is April 28, I know you remember. What she likes best is dolls with real hair the kind you wash and set … .”

Connie put down the letter on her kitchen table. Now, what did Teresa think she could do? She couldn’t come up with money for any kind of present. She hadn’t had money for a birthday or Christmas present since she and Claud had been busted, almost four years. Teresa had married young, from high school, and never had she worked. Her man drove a bus. Connie wanted to remember her nieces and nephews, and when she had been working she used to send every one of them presents twice a year, to bring toys and pretty clothes to Luis’s various families, all conveniently located in the Greater New York metropolitan area. Number one wife (Carmel, the Puerto Rican) was in the Bronx. Number two (Shirley, the Italian) was on Staten Island. Number three (Adele, the Wasp) was with Luis in Bound Brook, New Jersey. She scanned the rest of the letter for catastrophes and decided to read it carefully later on. She had an urge to go back out, tired as she was. If she lay down she would get more depressed. She turned on the kitchen light. Evening thickened in the noisy streets.

In the refrigerator she found pinto beans in chili sauce, good still. With reheated beans she would fry a couple of eggs. She was tired of eggs and yearned for meat. How she would like to sink her teeth in a pork chop. Her mouth watered in faint hope. She turned on the little black‑and‑white TV she was always hauling back and forth from bedroom to kitchen. The news came on. She listened with half an ear; she did not have it turned loud. The set was company, a human–or almost human–voice. She tended to leave it on even when she was cooking or reading. It was her family, she had once wryly told Mrs. Polcari, who had not understood.

She stood slowly stirring the beans and waiting for the oil in the black frypan to heat up so she could break the eggs. She was in no hurry. What would she hurry toward? Below in the street evening hummed to the rhythm of high and low drums, a rising tide of dealing and hustling, the push of the young and not so young to score, to get laid. At a simmer, the slow bubbles rising through the thick air, sex and traffic quickened El Barrio. In thousands of meetings–accidental, accidental on purpose, clandestine, dating and courting–men were picking up women on corners, on stoops, in the family apartments, couples were going down the rotten stairs shoulder to shoulder, to restaurants and movies and bars and dancing. Women with no money were working magic in front of dim mirrors, frowning with concentration, as they waited for men to arrive. Couples climbed into cars and shot off into the night. Couples picked up barbecued ribs and chicharrones, couples carried packages of Chinese‑Cuban takeout and beer upstairs to their rooms. Men met their pushers and their dealers, or missed them and turned to ash. On the roofs pigeons were released to fly, to circle together fluttering like clean handkerchiefs among the chimneys where kids turned on and shot up and packages and money were exchanged.

That electricity in the streets brushed static from her. She longed to be moving toward someone. She wanted to have someone to go to, someone to meet, someone to come to her; she wanted to be touched and held. So long! Maybe never again.

What did she live for? The beans were sticking to the bottom of the pot, so she turned the flame low and stirred. Protecting Dolly? Could she protect Dolly, really? A fantasy of someday recovering her daughter? Who would not know her. This is the woman the court saw fit to take you from, your evil and criminal and crazy mother. How Angelina had cried. So small, so thin, and so many tears. So many tears.

“I’m too proud to kill myself. Too proud to watch myself o.d. and die,” she said out loud. She turned up Walter Cronkite and seated herself to eat supper with him. Not that he would willingly eat with her, but boxed in her set with his public face hanging out, he had no choice. “Have a bite of chili, Walter?” She held out a fork with bent tines. Ojalб! If only she had a glass of red wine. Even beer would taste good and blur the knife edges, but she had only supermarket‑brand cola, and not much of that. At one time she had bought The New York Timesevery night, when she had been working as secretary–let us say, secretary‑mistress–to Professor Silvester of CUNY, another short time, like her almost two years in the community college, when she had been happy. She had got the job shortly after she had arrived in New York from Chicago. She had adored being secretary–should we say, secretary‑mistress‑errand girl‑laundress‑maid‑research assistant–to Professor Everett Silvester. It was civilized. It was, if she shut her eyes just right, almost where she wanted to be.

“In fact, you make me think of Professor Everett Silvester,” she said to Eric Severeid, and shut the sound off. Eric made fish faces in the TV and she grinned, wiping up her eggs and the remains of the beans with a shoe of bread. Eric had been calling down labor unions, about how they were greedy. Everett Silvester had been fond of calling down the world, one item at a time. A fight was creeping through her wall from the next apartment, a fight in Spanish about money. Even though an oil company ad featuring an oceanful of singing fish was on now, she turned the sound back up. Finally she spread out her Daily Newsand skimmed it.

GIRL SHOOTS M.D.

IN L.A. LOVE SPAT

She smiled, tucking her small chin into her palm. She saw herself marching into Everett’s Riverside Drive apartment and pulling out of a ratty shopping bag a Saturday Night Special. Mamб, how scared he would be; he would shit in his pants with terror. Would the newspapermen ask her to sit on a table showing her legs? It would be sordid but not unsatisfying, to pump at leisure and with careful and by no means wasteful aim several bullets into Professor Everett Silvester of the Romance Languages Department of CUNY, who liked to have a Spanish‑speaking secretary, that is, a new one every year–dismissed when he went away for summer vacation. He called them all Chiquita, like bananas. So many years had run over her since then, he might not recognize her, he might confuse her with some other year’s hot Latin secretary. The anger of the weak never goes away, Professor, it just gets a little moldy. It molds like a beautiful blue cheese in the dark, growing stronger and more interesting. The poor and the weak die with all their anger intact and probably those angers go on growing in the dark of the grave like the hair and the nails.