This time Mrs. Nolan didn’t even wait for Ann to get back from classes. She waylaid her in the morning as she was coming out of her room. Mrs. Nolan was holding a can of Drano and had dark circles under her eyes. Somehow this made her look younger. She’s probably not much older than I am, Ann thought. Until now she had considered her middle-aged.
“I guess you saw the mess in there,” she whispered.
“Yes, I did,” Ann said.
“I guess you heard all that last night.” She paused.
“What happened?” Ann asked. In fact she really wanted to know.
“He had some dancing girls in there! Three dancing girls, and two other men, in that little room! I thought the ceiling was gonna come right down on our heads!”
“I did hear something like dancing,” Ann said.
“Dancing! They was jumping, it sounded like they jumped right off the bed onto the floor. The plaster was coming off. Fred wasn’t home, he’s not home yet. I was afraid for the kids. Like, with those tattoos, who knows what they was working themselves up to?” Her sibilant voice hinted of ritual murders, young Jimmy and runny-nosed Donny sacrificed to some obscure god.
“What did you do?” Ann asked.
“I called the police. Well, the dancing girls, as soon as they heard I was calling the police, they got out of here, I can tell you. Put on their coats and was down the stairs and out the door like nothing. You can bet they didn’t want no trouble with the police. But not the others, they don’t seem to know what police means.”
She paused again, and Ann asked, “Did they come?”
“Who?”
“The police.”
“Well, you know around here it always takes the police a while to get there, unless there’s some right outside. I know that, it’s not the first time I’ve had to call them. So who knows what they would’ve done in the meantime? I could hear them coming downstairs, like, so I just grabs the broom and I chased them out. I chased them all the way down the street.”
Ann saw that she thought she had done something very brave, which meant that in fact she had. She really believed that the man next door and his friends were dangerous, that they were a threat to her children. She had chased them single-handedly, yelling with fear and defiance. But he had only been throwing a party.
“Heavens,” she said weakly.
“You can say that again,” said Mrs. Nolan. “I went in there this morning, to get his things and put them out front where he could get them without me having to see him. I don’t have such good nerves, I didn’t sleep at all, even after they was gone. Fred is just gonna have to stop driving nights, I can’t take it. But you know? He didn’t have no things in there. Not one. Just an old empty suitcase?”
“What about his native costume?” Ann said.
“He had it on,” Mrs. Nolan said. “He just went running down the street in it, like some kind of a loony. And you know what else I found in there? In one corner, there was this pile of empty bottles. Liquor. He must’ve been drinking like a fish for months, and never threw out the bottles. And in another corner, there was this pile of burnt matches. He could’ve burnt the house down, throwing them on the floor like that. But the worst thing was, you know all the times he borrowed my vacuum cleaner?”
“Yes,” Ann said.
“Well, he never threw away the dirt. There it all was, in the other corner of the room. He must’ve just emptied it out and left it there. I don’t get it.” ,Mrs. Nolan, by now, was puzzled rather than angry.
“Well,” Ann said. “That certainly is strange.”
“Strange?” Mrs. Nolan said. “I’ll tell you it’s strange. He always paid the rent though, right on time. Never a day late. Why would he put the dirt in a corner like that, when he could’ve put it out in a bag like everyone else? It’s not like he didn’t know. I told him real clear which were the garbage days, when he moved in.”
Ann said she was going to be late for class if she didn’t hurry. At the front door she tucked her hair under her plastic scarf. Today it was just a drizzle, not heavy enough for the umbrella. She started off, walking quickly along beside the double line of traffic.
She wondered where he had gone, chased down the street by Mrs. Nolan in her scuffles and flowered housecoat, shouting and flailing at him with a broom. She must have been at least as terrifying a spectacle to him as he was to her, and just as inexplicable. Why would this woman, this fat crazy woman, wish to burst in upon a scene of harmless hospitality, banging and raving? He and his friends could easily have overpowered her, but they would not even have thought about doing that. They would have been too frightened. What unspoken taboo had they violated? What would these cold, mad people do next?
Anyway, he did have some friends. They would take care of him, at least for the time being. Which was a relief, she guessed. But what she really felt was a childish regret that she had not seen the dancing girls. If she had known they were there, she might even have risked opening her door. She knew they were not real dancing girls, they were probably just some whores from Scollay Square. Mrs. Nolan had called them that as a euphemism, or perhaps because of an unconscious association with the word Arabian, the vaguely Arabian country. She never had found out what it was. Nevertheless, she wished she had seen them. Jetske would find all of this quite amusing, especially the image of her backed against the door, drinking sherry in the dark. It would have been better if she’d had the courage to look.
She began to think about her green space, as she often did during this walk. The green, perfect space of the future. She knew by now that it was cancelled in advance, that it would never come into being, that it was already too late. Once she was qualified, she would return to plan tasteful mixes of residential units and shopping complexes, with a lot of underground malls and arcades to protect people from the snow. But she could allow herself to see it one last time.
The fence was gone now, and the green stretched out endlessly, fields and trees and flowing water, as far as she could see. In the distance, beneath the arches of the aqueduct, a herd of animals, deer or something, was grazing. (She must learn more about animals.) Groups of people were walking happily among the trees, holding hands, not just in twos but in threes, fours, fives. The man from next door was there, in his native costume, and the mathematicians, they were all in their native costumes. Beside the stream a man was playing the flute; and around him, in long flowered robes and mauve scuffies, their auburn hair floating around their healthy pink faces, smiling their Dutch smiles, the dancing girls were sedately dancing.
Giving Birth
But who gives it? And to whom is it given? Certainly it doesn’t feel like giving, which implies a flow, a gentle handing over, no coercion. But there is scant gentleness here, it’s too strenuous, the belly like a knotted fist, squeezing, the heavy trudge of the heart, every muscle in the body tight and moving, as in a slow motion shot of a high-jump, the faceless body sailing up, turning, hanging for a moment in the air, and then—back to real time again—the plunge, the rush down, the result. Maybe the phrase was made by someone viewing the result only: in this case, the rows of babies to whom birth has occurred, lying like neat packages in their expertly wrapped blankets, pink or blue, with their labels scotch-taped to their clear plastic cots, behind the plate-glass window.