Mindless, heartless, she was on the edge. She was close to the bliss of being unconscious, bodiless. She rubbed her eyes.
Frankie came out on the street again. It was time to open the laundromat. Frankie stretched floridly. His long tan arms flew out from his body and reached to the torrid sky. He stretched his legs. He was a dancer, limbering up. He glanced both ways. He wasn’t afraid of cars. He took in the street. It was his as much as anybody’s. It was his more than anybody’s. He took out the key to the laundromat. He unlocked the padlock. He lifted the heavy iron gate on the plate-glass window. He pushed it up and grunted. The heavy gate made a dramatic, yawning sound.
Frankie’s presence was a comfort. Frankie was doing what he was supposed to do. Elizabeth’s eyes shut. Her head dropped. Her troublesome body relaxed. She slid onto the couch. She slid below the window and disappeared from sight. Frankie entered the laundromat.
The man in the third-floor window closed his blinds. He turned on the light. He dressed. He cursed.
Jeanine was on another couch, at home, coming down. Her mother was screaming at her, Jeanine ignored her.
— You pay to stay home, you pay to stay somewhere else. I gotta give her drugs, because I know she has a fit. She’s had a hard time. My mother’s father raised them. Her mother abused them from when she was little. My mother was in the hospital for three years because she was getting beaten very badly. Then they grew up in homes, because they took them away from her father because back then it was a man with little girls. Then my mother came back home, and she was with my father since she was thirteen years old. My father was older, twenty-six, she was like thirteen or something. Hello. She should have realized then the man had a problem.
Elizabeth couldn’t help herself. She tucked the street, the endless night, away, into her, she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and when she couldn’t see what was going on, all the details, the sidewalk antics, when everything was crushed, broken up, and shoveled into the unruliness called her, exceeding her, all more and less than her, then sleep found her, against her will.
Now Elizabeth didn’t exist to herself. She wasn’t anywhere.
A circus tent fell down, they were trapped, rabid dogs were roaming, cars overturned, bridges down, wolves with blood on their mouths grimaced, some people escaped, they carried everything on their backs, there were cresting waves and falling screams, a vast territory with decrepit buildings, and something was moving very fast, she was in slow motion.
Her feet were stuck, the boss was not in his office, and her mother was sad, she was unable to walk, and small people, dwarfs, made high-pitched yowling noises, they were bedraggled, they were children, and no one had shoes on, her mother was wasting away, dying, she didn’t think anyone loved her, she couldn’t remember who loved her, she wouldn’t ever again know where she was, and Elizabeth, who was old, then young, a teenager, walked unevenly into the movie theater, with her mother, who was frail, she had to be carried to her seat, but she didn’t have her ticket, and handed in her shoes which didn’t have heels on them, and a black ten-year-old boy with a golden boombox told her a glass bottle had exploded, white hyenas had thrown bottles at him, and the young boy dropped his pants, and there were shards of glass stuck in his ass, he was bleeding, Jeanine was in a doorway, a woman’s face appeared in a mirror, she was putting on make-up, her face was a nightmare, she was almost dead, and popcorn was overflowing, and greasy, and her shoes were wrong, and they wouldn’t let her in, she pulled a long hair from her coat, and her mother was lost, it would be her turn next, where’s the ticket to leave, and there was jostling for a place, ladders collapsing, and noise, but somehow she entered the hall, nothing on the screen, a rope around her waist, she was tugged along, she saw some friends, she was naked suddenly, they asked, what are you doing here, you weren’t supposed to be here, you don’t live here…
YOU DON’T LIVE HERE.
THIS IS A BLOCK PARTY.
Day and Night
I have never believed in decorating cells.
We can only laugh when a joke has come to our help.
In jail, after she’d murdered the moron, she’d be given one phone call, but only after she’d demanded it. She’s gonna lawyer up, a sleek cop would whisper to his partner, the beer-bellied one. Elizabeth didn’t know who she’d phone from jail. Roy would think it was a joke. She didn’t have a lawyer.
I have the right to remain silent. I have the right to remain single. I have the right to live with someone. I have the right to have a lawyer. I have the right to be sad. I have the right to be stupid. I have the right to be happy when other people are miserable. I have the right to make one telephone call.
Silently Elizabeth gave herself a Miranda warning. You aren’t Latin, you aren’t going to wiggle your hips for money and wear fruit on your head, you aren’t going to turn yourself in to the authorities, even though you are guilty. You will try to destroy the authority within. You are not going to destroy yourself. You will sleep tonight. You are going to quit your job. You are going to tell the fat man off. You are going to tell her to leave you alone.
A car alarm shrieked. The block’s wake-up call. Elizabeth flipped over on the couch. She covered her ears with her hands. The alarm screeched, wailed, pulsated, pounded. It demanded and sounded like inevitability. It was torture. There were fewer car alarms. No one paid attention to them because they cried wolf.
The chimes on the church across the street rang dully a few minutes after the hour. 8 A.M.
Her friend used to keep a dozen eggs on his windowsill. When a car alarm went off under his window, especially when he was sick and couldn’t sleep, he was always ready to toss eggs. He was tall and had long arms. She never asked him if he hit a car. It was too late to ask. He was dead.
Elizabeth watched the clock tick silently while the car alarm screamed. If one of her foes saw her throw eggs, and that foe owned the car or knew the person whose car it was, if the young super caught her doing it, it could mean trouble for her on the block. She worried about retaliation.
Cops didn’t respond to car alarms. She didn’t want to think about her dead friend. If she phoned the cops, they’d say they were sending a car. They always said that.
Being alive was its own reward.
Roy was sleeping. So was Fatboy. The alarm clock rang. Unconscious, Roy reached for it. He had a hard time finding it on the floor. He did and shut it off. He was still in Roy’s underworld. The car alarm stopped. Heavy feet stomped up the stairs. Doorbells buzzed. Their doorbell. Twice. Rebellious, resigned, Elizabeth grunted and crossed the room. She walked to the broken clothes closet. She was naked. She pulled on her thickest robe. It was the Con Ed man.
The Con Ed man always rang twice. He appeared regularly, once a month. Depending on how eager he was to finish his day, which was the beginning of her day, he woke her at 7, 8, or 9 A.M. She’d put on her robe — he’d be shouting, CON ED CON ED CON ED, buzzing everyone’s doorbell — and she’d let him in. He’d beam his flashlight at the meter, he’d punch in the numbers on his blue electronic notepad. Then he’d leave.
Elizabeth wondered how he felt about people in general, what kind of feelings he had about waking everyone, if he did, and how he felt about seeing people in semiconscious states, in their ratty robes, or half-naked, and whether he wanted the job so that he could see people like that. She wondered if his job made him like people more or less.