The dates they gave you were just a bluff. She saw that now. It was already a week past the time they’d set. Let them knock on the door all they liked, though the idea of it drove her crazy. And Ab Holt, helping them. Damn!
“I would like a cigarette,” she said calmly, as if it were something one always says to oneself at five o’clock when the news came on, and she walked into the bedroom and took the cigarettes and the matches from the top drawer.
Everything was so neat. Clothes folded. She’d even fixed the broken blind, though now the slats were stuck. She sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. It took two matches, and then: Phew, the taste! Stale? But the smoke did something necessary to her head. She stopped worrying around in the same circle and thought about her secret weapon.
Her secret weapon was the furniture. Over the years she’d accumulated so much, mostly from other people’s apartments when they’d died or moved out, and they couldn’t evict her without clearing away every rag and stick of it. That was the law. And not just out into the corridor, oh no, they had to bring it down all the way to the street. So what were they going to do? Hire an army to take it down those stairs? Eighteen floors! No, so long as she insisted on her rights, she was as safe as if she were in a castle. And they’d just keep going on like they’d been going on, exerting psychological pressure so that she’d sign their fucking forms.
On the teevee a bunch of dancers had gotten up a party at the Greenwich Village office of Manufacturers Hanover Trust. The news was over and Mrs. Hanson returned to the living room, with her second awful cigarette, to the tune of “Getting to Know You.” It seemed ironic.
At last the puppets came on. Her old friends. Her only friends. It was Flapdoodle’s birthday. Bowser brought in a present in a gigantic box. “Is it for me?” Flapdoodle squeaked.
“Open it,” Bowser said, and you knew from the tone of his voice it was going to be something pretty bad.
“For me, oh boy! It’s something for me!” There was one box inside another box, and then a bo x inside that, and then still another box. Bowser got more and more impatient.
“Go on, go on, open the next one.”
“Oh, I’m bored,” said little Flapdoodle.
“Let me show you how,” said Bowser, and he did, and a gigantic wonderful hammer came out on a spring and knocked him on the head. Mrs. Hanson laughed herself into a fit, and sparks and ashes from the cigarette splashed all over her lap.
40. Hunt’s Tomato Catsup
Before it was even daylight the super had let the two of them in through the closet with his key. Auxiliaries. Now they were packing, wrapping, wrecking the whole apartment. She told them politely to leave, she screamed at them to leave, they paid no attention.
On the way down to find the Tenants’ Committee woman she met the super coming up. “What about my furniture?” she asked him.
“What about your furniture?”
“You can’t evict me without my belongings. That’s the law.”
“Go talk to the office. I don’t have anything to do with this.”
“You let them in. They’re there now, and you should see the mess they’re making. You can’t tell me that’s legal—another person’s belongings. Not just mine, a whole family’s.”
“So? So it’s illegal—does that make you feel better?” He turned round and started down the stairs.
Remembering the chaos upstairs—clothes tumbled out of the closet, pictures off the walls, dishes stacked helter-skelter inside cheap carrier cartons—she decided it wasn’t worth it. Mrs. Manuel, even if she could find her, wasn’t going to stick her neck out on the Hansons’ behalf. When she returned to 1812, the red-haired one was pissing in the kitchen sink.
“Oh, don’t apologize!” she said, when he started in. “A job is a job is a job, isn’t it? You’ve got to do what they tell you to.”
She felt every minute as though she was going to start roaring or spinning in circles or just explode, but what stopped and held her was knowing that none of that would have had any effect. Television had supplied her with models for almost all the real-life situations she’d ever had to face—happiness, heartbreak, and points between—but this morning she was alone and scriptless, without even a notion of what was supposed to happen next. Of what to do.
Cooperate with the damned steamrollers? That’s what the steamrollers seemed to expect, Miss Slime and the rest of them in their offices with their forms and their good manners. She’d be damned if she would.
She’d resist. Let the whole lot of them try to tell her it wouldn’t do her any good, she’d go on resisting. With that decision she recognized that she had found her role and that it was after all a familiar role in a known story: she would go down fighting. Very often in such cases, if you held out long enough against even the most hopeless odds the tide would turn. She’d seen it happen time and again.
At ten o’clock Slime came round and made a checklist of the destruction the auxiliaries had accomplished. She tried to make Mrs. Hanson sign a paper for certain of the boxes and cupboards to be stored at the city’s expense—the rest presumably was garbage—at which point Mrs. Hanson pointed out that until she’d been evicted the apartment still belonged to her and so would Miss Slime please leave and take her two sink-pissers with her.
Then she sat down beside the lifeless teevee (the electricity was off, finally) and had another cigarette. Hunt’s Tomato Catsup, the matchbook said. There was a recipe inside for Waikiki Beans that she’d always intended to test out but never got around to. Mix up Beef or Pork Chunkies, some crushed pineapple, a tablespoon of Wesson Oil, and lots of catsup, heat, and serve on toast. She fell asleep in the armchair planning an entire Hawaiian-style dinner around the Waikiki Beans.
At four o’clock there was a banging and clattering at the door of what was once again the foyer. The movers. She had time to freshen herself before they found the super to let them in. She watched grimly as they stripped the kitchen of furniture, shelves, boxes. Even vacant, the patterns of wear on the linoleum, of stains on the walls, declared the room to be the Hansons’ kitchen.
The contents of the kitchen had been stacked at the top of the stairs. This was the part she’d been waiting for. Now, she thought, break your backs!
There was a groan and shudder of far-off machineries. The elevator was working. It was Shrimp’s doing, her ridiculous campaign, a final farewell slap in the face. Mrs. Hanson’s secret weapon had failed. In no time the kitchen was loaded into the elevator and the movers squeezed in and pressed the button. The outer and then the inner doors closed. The disc of dim yellow light slipped from sight. Mrs. Hanson approached the dirty window and watched the steel cables shiver like the strings of gigantic bows. After a long, long time the massive block counterweight rose up out of the darkness.
The apartment or the furniture? It had to be one or the other. She chose—they must have known she would—the furniture. She returned one last time to 1812 and got together her brown coat, her Wooly© cap, her purse. In the dusk, with no lights and the blinds off the windows, with the walls bare and the floors cluttered with big sealed boxes, there was no one to say good-bye to except the rocker, the teevee, the sofa—and they’d be with her on the street soon enough.