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 physiologicaclass="underline" 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.