Elizabeth never gave the crusties money. She gave other people money. Tyrone who hung around the building, a nameless woman with a nameless dog, Earl who was up from the south, permanently jobless, and the Hispanic guy with a patch over his eye, those two alternated duty at the post office, manned the door with cups in hand. But she never gave the crusties money. Even though they had dogs. It was a gimmick, an affront. She considered carrying a machete the way Ricardo did on Halloween. She would wave it in the air when any of them spit at her.
Ricardo lived below her, with Frankie and his grandmother, who was Ricardo’s mother, and the other kids, in the crowded Lopez apartment. There were many children. The children had children. Elizabeth came to appreciate the continuity. She saw life going on, stunted and obstructed as it usually was, but she could understand generations because of the Lopezes. They were people who would survive almost anything.
Ricardo had been away a long time, since before Elizabeth and Roy’s time, that’s what Frankie told her, Ricardo was away, until Frankie told her that Ricardo had been in jail, for drugs. Now he was back, on the block. He carried a machete on Halloween. He stood in front of the laundromat, across the street, holding the machete down the side of his leg. His mother stood next to him, and inside the laundromat Frankie was helping people with their wash. Ricardo was a Puerto Rican nationalist. The Puerto Rican flag hung from their fire escape all year long.
Elizabeth saw the machete. Ricardo held it tight against the side of his body. It shimmered along the leg of his black sweatpants. He had sweat on his forehead. Ricardo explained that gangs were going up and down the streets, with razors, slashing people. For no reason. He was going to get them if they tried anything here. He glared and looked up the block. She knew he wouldn’t kill her, he’d protect her. She lived in his building, she was in his territory, and he liked her. She’d let him patronize her, be macho for her as much as he wanted. She’d like to see him slice off one of the crusties’ heads.
There are three people — a priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer — standing outside a school. It’s on fire, burning down. Children at the window screaming, crying. The Rabbi goes, Oh my God, oh my god… The children, the poor children. The lawyer says, Oh, fuck the children. The priest says, You think we can?
That night when Ernest and Elizabeth walked to the Pick Me Up the crusties were lying on the sidewalk. One of them spit. His spit didn’t hit her. That was lucky. Elizabeth was ready to hit him. She wanted to ask the most disgusting crustie, Do you have sex together? How? But she and Ernest had to talk about the tenant situation and their letter.
Ernest hadn’t gotten any roles lately. He read a lot of the books in the bookstore where he worked. They discussed, with an intensity that astonished Elizabeth, the letter to the landlord. Elizabeth didn’t want the letter to be too meek or too hawkish. She wanted the right tone. When you demand to be treated fairly, you must appear to be just, right but not righteous, and, especially, Elizabeth knew, you must appear to be above suspicion mentally. The last thing she wanted the City to think was that she and Ernest were irrational, that they didn’t have a reasonable leg to stand on.
The very next night Ernest came over. He sat next to her on a chair. She sat at her desk, at her laptop. Roy sat in the kitchen, reading. She typed the letter. They considered everything in it, every detail.
To the City,
xxx and xxy are TWO SEPARATE buildings…[they both wanted capital letters]. No hallway renovation was done in our building; in fact there is NO downstairs hallway at all [a surprising turn; good to be entertaining]… Tenants of our building do not benefit from the hallway work done on the building next door — they are ENTIRELY separate buildings [making the point another way]… Landlord has been belligerent with tenant, who complained of inadequate hall maintenance. [The tenant was Elizabeth. Ernest urged, Go on, put that in. Elizabeth happily typed it in.]… Entry to xxx can be made without key, merely by pushing door open. (Tenant complains of strange man sleeping in hallway 4/93.) [Ernest was on the top floor. Homeless people slept and shit at his door.]… Tenants feel it is unfair for building to have been neglected for so long and then landlord receives increase for fixing it. [Absolutely, they said in unison.]
Elizabeth was especially content with the summary.
The landlord has misrepresented its claims on both xxx and xxy… hallway repairs ACTUALLY done were feeble. [Feeble? Elizabeth asked Ernest. That’s good, he said. His brow furrowed. He repeated the word. FEEBLE. Perfect, be said.] Number of rooms in xxx and xxy is exaggerated. [The use of exaggerated was a convincing understatement.] Cleanliness of xxx in particular is poor. The building is not SAFE. Landlord has received MANY complaints.
Late at night, beyond sleep, she read over and corrected the words she’d typed. She grew more outraged at the landlord’s bold-faced lies. Her aggravated blood made her face and body blush. Indignation charged through her. The letter was a romance novel to her. Roy told her not to believe everything she read. He reminded her that she wasn’t going to do anything about the landlord’s letter until Ernest came along. Elizabeth hung her head in shame. Then she laughed until she cried.
Ernest mailed the fourteen-page, thoroughly documented letter to the appropriate City agency. With the Polaroids, with maps, with drawings of windows, with measurements, with tenant letters and testimonies, with the valuable petition. Ernest had done his work, Elizabeth had done hers too. Ernest and Elizabeth nailed the landlord in a scandal of lies. They also mailed a letter to the landlord, telling the landlord they had filed with the City. The landlord was on notice.
Then Elizabeth and Ernest rested their case. They waited. They waited for months.
A man went to his psychiatrist and said, Doctor, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m a tepee, I’m a wigwam, I’m a tepee, I’m a wigwam, I’m a tepee, I’m a wigwam. The psychiatrist said, Relax, you’re two tents.
The landlord backed down. The landlord was forced to back down. Each tenant received a letter saying that the increase wouldn’t go into effect. The landlord didn’t say why, the landlord didn’t admit to having been challenged by the tenants. The landlord in fact pretended it was out of concern, some human tenderness on its part, that it had decided to rescind the rent hike. For the time being.
It was an empty victory. No one but her, Ernest, Roy, and Herbert, the deaf guy, noticed. No one mentioned it or seemed to care. Everyone went on living their own little lives. The rent for the apartments they lived in, however miserably, hadn’t been raised. She didn’t know why it mattered, why she and Ernest had even bothered.
After their blank victory, Ernest and Elizabeth rarely saw each other. Sometimes she heard him upstairs, walking around or exercising.
Now Elizabeth thought she saw Jeanine go into a doorway several buildings down the block. Elizabeth had to turn her head severely to the right to see that far down the block.