334

by Thomas M. Disch

  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 s
tamps. 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.