“I almost forgot,” she said. “Wally Hammer called and invited us to his New Year’s party. I accepted for both of us. But if you don’t want to-”
“Wally?” He frowned. Walter Hammer was about their only crosstown friend. He worked for a local ad agency. “Doesn’t he know we’re, you know, separated?”
“He knows, but you know Walt. Things like that don’t faze him much.”
Indeed they didn’t. Just thinking about Walter made him smile. Walter, always threatening to quit advertising in favor of advanced truss design. Composer of obscene limericks and even more obscene parodies of popular tunes. Divorced twice and tagged hard both times. Now impotent, if you believed gossip, and in this case he thought the gossip was probably true. How long had it been since he had seen Walt? Four months? Six? Too long.
“That might be fun,” he said, and then a thought stuck him.
She scanned it from his face in her old way and said, “There won’t be any laundry people there.”
“He and Steve Ordner know each other.”
“Well, yes, him-” She shrugged to show how unlikely she thought it was that him would be there, and the shrug turned into an elbow-holding little shiver. It was only about twenty-five degrees.
“Hey, go on in,” he said. “You’ll freeze, dummy.”
“Do you want to go?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” He kissed her again, this time a little more firmly, and she kissed back. At a moment like this, he could regret everything-but the regret was far away, clinical.
“Merry Christmas, Bart,” she said, and he saw she was crying a little.
“Next year will be better,” he said, the phrase comforting but without any root meaning. “Go inside before you catch pneumonia.”
She went in and he drove away, still thinking about Wally Hammer’s New Year’s Eve party. He thought he would go.
December 24, 1973
He found a small garage in Norton that would replace the broken back window for ninety dollars. When he asked the garage man if he would be working the day before Christmas, the garage man said: “Hell yes, I’ll take it any way I can get it.
He stopped on the way at a Norton U-Wash-It and put his clothes in two machines. He automatically rotated the agitators to see what kind of shape the spring drives were in, and then loaded them carefully so each machine would extract (only in the laundromats they called it “spin-dry") without kicking off on the overload. He paused, smiling a little. You can take the boy out of the laundry, Fred, but you can’t take the laundry out of the boy. Right, Fred? Fred? Oh fuck yourself.
“That’s a hell of a hole,” the garage man said, peering at the spiderwebbed glass.
“Kid with a snowball,” he said. “Rock in the middle of it.”
“It was,” he said. “It really was.”
When the window was replaced he drove back to the U-Wash-It, put his clothes in the dryer, set it to medium-hot, and put thirty cents in the slot. He sat down and picked up someone’s discarded newspaper. The U-Wash-It’s only other customer was a tired-looking young woman with wire-rimmed glasses and blond streaks in her long, reddish-brown hair. She had a small girl with her, and the small girl was throwing a tantrum.
“I want my bottle!”
“Goddam it, Rachel-”
“BOTTLE!”
“Daddys going to spank you when we get home,” the young woman promised grimly. “And no treats before bed.”
“BAWWWWTLE”
Now why does a young girl like that want to streak her hair? he wondered, and looked at the paper. The headlines said:
SMALL CROWDS IN BETHLEHEM PILGRIMS FEAR HOLY TERROR
On the bottom of page one, a short news story caught his eye and he readit carefully:
WINTERBURGER SAYS ACTS OF VANDALISM WILL NOT BE TOLERATED
(Local) Victor Winterburger, Democratic candidate for the seat of the late Donald P. Naish, who was killed in a car crash late last month, said yesterday that acts of vandalism such as the one that caused almost a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage at the Route 784 construction site early last Wednesday, cannot be tolerated “in a civilized American city.” Winterburger made his remarks at an American Legion dinner, and received a standing ovation.
“We have seen what has happened in other cities,” Winterburger said. “The defaced buses and subway cars and buildings in New York, the broken windows and senselessly marred schools of Detroit and San Francisco, the abuse of public facilities, public museums, public galleries. We must not allow the greatest country in the world to be overrun with huns and barbarians.”
Police were called to the Grand Street area of the construction when a number of fires and explosions were seen by
(Continued page 5 col. 2)
He folded the paper and put it on top of a tattered pile of magazines. The washer hummed and hummed, a low, soporific sound. Huns. Barbarians. They were the huns. They were the rippers and chewers and choppers, turning people out of their homes, kicking apart lives as a small boy might kick apart an anthill-
The young woman dragged her daughter, still crying for a bottle, out of the UWash-It. He closed his eyes and dozed off, waiting for his dryer to finish. A few minutes later he snapped awake, thinking he heard fire bells, but it was only a Salvation Army Santa who had taken up his position on the corner out front. When he left the laundry with his basket of clothes, he threw all his pocket change into Santa’s pot.
“God bless you,” Santa said.
December 25, 1973
The telephone woke him around ten in the morning. He fumbled the extension off the night table, put it to his ear, and an operator said crisply into his sleep, “Will you accept a collect call from Olivia Brenner?”
He was lost and could only fumble, “What? Who? I’m asleep.”
A distant, slightly familiar voice said, “Oh for Chrissake,” and he knew.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll take it.” Had she hung up on him? He got up on one elbow to see. “Olivia? You there?”
“Go ahead, please,” the operator overrode him, not willing to vary her psalm.
“Olivia, are you there?”
“I’m here.” The voice was crackling and distant.
“I’m glad you called.”
“I didn’t think you’d take the call.”
“I just woke up. Are you there? In Las Vegas?”
“Yes,” she said flatly. The word came out with curiously dull authority, like a plank dropped on a cement floor.
“Well, how is it? How are you doing?”
Her sigh was so bitter that it was almost a tearless sob. “Not so good.”
“No?”
“I met a guy my second… no, third… night here. Went to a party and go s-o-o-o fucked up-”
“Dope?” he asked cautiously, very aware that this was long distance and the government was everywhere.
“Dope?” she echoed crossly. “Of course it was dope. Bad shit, full of dex or something… I think I got raped.”
The last trailed off so badly that he had to ask, “What?”
“Raped!” she screamed, so loudly that the receiver distorted. “That’s when some stupid jock playing Friday night hippie plays hide the salami with you while your brains are somewhere behind you, dripping off the wall! Rape, do you know what rape is?”
“I know,” he said.
“Bullshit, you know.”
“Do you need money?”
“Why ask me that? I can’t fuck you over the telephone. I can’t even hand-job you.”
“I have some money,” he said. “I could send it. That’s all. That’s why.” Instinctively he found himself speaking, not soothingly, but softly, so she would have to slow down and listen.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Do you have an address?”
“General Delivery, that’s my address.”
“You don’t have an apartment?”
“Yeah, me and this other sad sack have got a place. The mailboxes are all broken. Never mind. You keep the money. I’ve got a job. Screw, I think I’m going to quit and come back. Merry Christmas to me.”