Depends what you smoke, he had said. And she had laughed, a little uncertainly, and then later on he had mentioned pot and she had remembered the marijuana smokers in her own neighborhood, the marijuana smokers and the heroin users. Her disapproval had shown at the time and he had laughed at her, telling her that marijuana was not bad for you at all, that a New York Public Health Report had certified it as harmless, that it wouldn’t hurt you a bit. She had not been sure whether she should believe him or no.
“Emptiness,” he repeated, waking her up again. And she nodded slowly and focused on the tip of her cigarette. It was glowing dully.
“It’s all set up,” she said. “All patterned out. My whole life, practically. I live with my grandmother. She’s a nice old lady. And she keeps the place looking good, Joe. It’s supposed to be a slum—you know, East Harlem, a slum, it says so in the paper. But our apartment—I’ve seen worse, believe me.”
He nodded. She closed her eyes for a moment and pictured the apartment, her grandmother curled up in the cane-bottom rocker, rocking slowly, shriveled, small. Anita opened her eyes.
“I go to Hunter,” she said. “If you come from New York and you do well in high school you go to college for free. I did well in high school, Joe. They told me I was very bright. So I went to Hunter. You know what I’m majoring in?”
“You told me,” he said. “History, isn’t it?”
“Government—not very different, really. It’s sort of interesting some of the time. The courses.”
Joe nodded and thought about Smollett.
“And I go out on dates,” she went on. “I’m not a wallflower. I’ve even got a steady boyfriend. Isn’t that a stupid word? Boyfriend. He’s a friend and he’s a boy. His name is Ray. Ray Rico. He’s good-looking and he’s smart. Goes to Cooper Union, studying to be an engineer. You’ve got to be a whip to get into Cooper Union. He’ll walk out of that school and walk into a job with IBM or somebody at ten thousand dollars a year. You know how much that is? Two hundred dollars a week. That’s a lot of money. And the more he works for them the more money he makes. He told me he ought to be able to go as high as twenty-five thousand. You know what’s funny? When you don’t make much money it’s so much a week. A steno makes sixty-five a week, not three thousand and something a year. Nobody makes four hundred a week. You don’t think about it that way. It’s funny, I guess.”
Joe smiled. “I worked in a drugstore once,” he said. “I made seventy-five cents an hour. While I was in high school. Deliveries, dusting the stock, sweeping the floor. That type of scene. You ever hear anybody talk about making twenty bucks an hour?” But Anita’s eyes were staring into the far-away. What was she looking at, Joe wondered. Emptiness, perhaps. Space.
“All in a pattern,” she said. “When Ray graduated from high school he knew what kind of a job he would finally have. Now he knows he’ll marry me. We go out once, twice a week. A movie, a cup of coffee. At first he kissed me once at the door every night before I went inside. On the mouth. Now we sit on the roof once in a while and he touches my breasts. That sounds funny, doesn’t it? But that’s what he does. He touches my breasts. I guess pretty soon he’ll start putting his hand under my skirt. Then when there’s nothing else to do but go to bed—we’ll be married. And he’ll graduate and get his good job and we’ll buy a little house on the Island. A split-level. I’ve seen pictures of them. Small and ugly but very chic, very modern.”
She closed her eyes and saw the pictures of the split-levels. She remembered wondering why anybody would want to live in one of them.
“I’ll have an electric kitchen,” she said. “Electric range and electric refrigerator and electric dishwasher and electric frying pan and electric coffee maker and an electric sink. They’ll probably have electric sinks by then. They’ve got everything else. And we’ll have two-point-three children and one of them will have to be a boy and one a girl and God knows what the fraction will be. And we’ll have a big television set and we’ll sit in front of it every night. All of us. All four-point-three of us. We’ll stare at that screen and let it think for us nice and electrically. Real togetherness. We wouldn’t watch television alone. It wouldn’t be right. Do things in a group. The family that prays together stays together.”
“You make it sound pretty sad,” Joe ventured.
She looked hard at him. “That’s just it,” she said. “I make it sound terrible. And, you know, it is not that terrible. Not for most people. They would tell me I’m insane to make such a fuss. Look at me, I’ve got a nice guy, he’ll make money, we’ll have a good life. It’s nice. Isn’t that a great word? Nice. And it fits. It’s nice. For everybody else in the world it’s nice and I don’t want it.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you?”
Anita put out her cigarette. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything. I think I’m cracking up. Can you believe that? I think I’m cracking up. A nice intelligent nice Italian nice bright nice nice nice girl and I’m positively cracking up. Let’s get out of here, Joe.” She glanced at the check for the first time—no more than a dollar-seventy. She was pleasantly surprised. She put two dollars on the table and they walked out.
They walked over Eighth Street to Macdougal to the park and found a bench to sit on. On the way she didn’t know whether to take his arm or no.
They sat on the bench and were silent. She observed the passers-by and she wondered who she was. She had to be somebody. She watched boys, men with beards, girls with very long and very wild hair, and she wondered if she were one of them. She thought about the girls and boys in her classes at Hunter, the other girls and boys in her neighborhood, and she wondered if she were like them. She had to be like somebody. You couldn’t be all by yourself, she thought. You would go crazy that way.
“I talked a blue streak,” Anita said. “Before. In the restaurant. I really went on. I ran off at the mouth.”
“You had things to say.”
“I never said them before. I hardly thought them.”
“But they were still there.”
“But I hardly even thought them,” she said. “I could never tell them to anybody. Not to Ray. If I tried, he would look at me as though I were insane. And I met you for the second time and I can tell you everything.”
“Maybe it’s because you don’t know me.”
“Or because I do.”
Joe lit a cigarette and gave one to Anita who took it without hesitation, smoking it for the first time without the persistent sensation of there being something inherently wrong with the act.
“What do you do, Joe?”
“Not much.”
“I don’t mean for a living. I mean what do you do? You know what I mean.”
He shrugged. “I live with another guy. I mentioned him. Shank. The guy I was with at The Palermo.”
She nodded.
“You sure you want to know all this? Some of it isn’t pretty. You may want to go away from me. You may not like me as much anymore,” Joe said carefully.
“I want to hear.”
“He sells marijuana,” he said. “He makes a living. He pays the rent, slips me a buck now and then. He supports me, you could say. I don’t cost much. Food, rent, a buck now and then to ball with. Nothing much else.”
“He’s a…pusher?”
“Not a pusher. He buys and sells. You could call him a connection, sort of. Strictly small-time. He makes enough money so that we live. Not in style but we live.”