Thomas Disch - 334

Don’t think about it.

“You didn’t care?” Boz asked.

“Care?”

“About the kids in the school.”

“They were insurgents,” Mickey explained. “It was in Pakistan.” Even Mars was more real than Pakistan and no one gets upset about schools burning on Mars.

A flop flop flop of slippers and Mrs. Hanson shambled in with a cup of Koffee. “Politics, you’d try and argue politics with a six-year-old! Here. Go ahead, drink it.”

He sipped the sweet thickened Koffee and it was as though every stale essence in the building, garbage rotting in bins and grease turning yellow on kitchen walls, tobacco smoke and stale beer and Synthamon candies, everything ersatz, everything he’d thought he had escaped, had flooded back into the core of his body with just that one mouthful.

“He’s become too good for us now, Mickey. Look at him.”

“It’s sweeter than I’m used to. Otherwise it’s fine, Mom.”

“It’s no different than you used to have it. Three tablets. I’ll drink this one and make you another. You came here to stay.”

“No, I told you last night that—”

She waved a hand at him, shouted to her grandson: “Where you going?”

“Down to the street.”

“Take the key and bring the mail up first, understand. If you don’t… ”

He was gone. She collapsed in the green chair, on top of a pile of clothes, talking to herself or to him, she wasn’t particular about her audience. he heard not words but the reedy vibrato of her phlegm, saw the fingers stained with nicotine, the jiggle of sallow chin-flesh, the MOD teeth. My mother.

Boz turned his eyes to the scaly wall where roseate AFTER winked to a tawdry BEFORE and Jesus, squeezing a bleeding organ in his right hand, forgave the world for yellow bricks that stretched as far as the eye could see.

“The work she comes home with you wouldn’t believe. I told Lottie, it’s a crime, she should complain. How old is she? Twelve years old. If it had been Shrimp, if it had been you, I wouldn’t say a word, but she has her mother’s health, she’s very delicate. And the exercises they make them do, it’s not decent for a child. I’m not against sex, I always let you and Milly do whatever you wanted. I turned my head. But that sort of thing should be private between two people. The things you see, and I mean right out on the street. They don’t even go into a doorway now. So I tried to make Lottie see reason, I was very calm, I didn’t raise my voice. Lottie doesn’t want it herself, you know, she’s being pressured by the school. How often would she be able to see her? Weekends. And one month in the summer. It’s all Shrimp’s doing. I said to Shrimp, if you want to be a ballet dancer then you go ahead and be a ballet dancer but leave Amparo alone. The man came from the school, and he was very smooth and Lottie signed the papers. I could have cried. of course it was all arranged. They waited till I was out of the house. She’s your child, I told her, leave me out of it. If that’s what you want for her, the kind of future you think she deserves. You should hear the stories she comes home with. Twelve years old! It’s Shrimp, taking her to those movies, taking her to the park. Of course you can see all of that on television too, that Channel 5, I don’t know why they … But I suppose it’s none of my business. No one cares what you think when you’re old. Let her go to the Lowen School, it won’t break my heart.” She kneaded the left side of her dress illustratively: her heart.

“We could use the room here, though you won’t hear me complaining about that. Mrs. Miller said we could apply for a larger apartment, there’s five of us, and now six with you, but if I said yes and we moved and then Amparo goes off to this school, we’d just have to move back here, because the requirement there is for five people. Besides it would mean moving all the way to Queens. Now if Lottie were to have another, but of course her health isn’t up to it, not to speak of the mental thing. And Shrimp? Well, I don’t have to go into that. So I said no, let’s stay put. Besides, if we did go and then had to come back here, we probably wouldn’t have the luck to get the same apartment again. I don’t deny that there are lots of things wrong with it, but still. Try and get water after four o’clock, like sucking a dry tit.”

Hoarse laughter, another cigarette. Having broken the thread of thought, she found herself lost in the labyrinth: her eyes darted around the room, little cultured pearls that bounced off into every corner.

Boz had not listened to the monologue, but he was aware of the panic that welled up to fill the sudden wonderful silence. Living with Milly he’d forgotten this side of things, the causeless incurable terrors. Not just his mother’s; everyone who lived below 34th.

Mrs. Hanson slurped her Koffee. The sound (her own sound, she made it) reassured her and she started talking again, making more of her own sounds. The panic ebbed. Boz closed his eyes.

“That Mrs. Miller means well of course but she doesn’t understand my situation. What do you think she said I should do, what do you think? Visit that death-house on 12th Street! Said it would be an inspiration. Not to me, to them. Seeing someone at my age with my energy and the head of a family.my age! You’d think I was ready to turn to dust like one of those what-do-you-call-its. I was born in 1967, the year the first man landed on the moon. Nineteen. Sixty. Seven. I’m not even sixty, but suppose I were, is there a law against it? Listen, as long as I can make it up those stairs they don’t have to worry about me! Those elevators are a crime. I can’t even remember the last time … No, wait a minute, I can. You were eight years old, and every time I took you inside you’d start to cry. You used to cry about everything though. It’s my own fault, spoiling you, and your sisters went right along. That time I came home and you were in Lottie’s clothes, lipstick and everything, and to think she helped you. Well, I stopped that! If it had been Shrimp I could understand. Shrimp’s that way herself. I always said to Mrs. Holt when she was alive, she had very old-fashioned ideas, Mrs. Holt, that as long as Shrimp had what she wanted it was no concern of hers or mine. And anyhow you’ll have to admit that she was a homely girl, while Lottie, oh my, Lottie was so beautiful. Even in high school. She’d spend all her time in front of a mirror and you could hardly blame her. Like a movie star.”

She lowered her voice, as though confiding a secret to the olive-drab film of dehydrated vegetable oil on her Koffee.

“And then to go and do that. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw him. Is it prejudice to want something better for your children, then I’m prejudiced. A good-looking boy, I don’t deny that, and even smart in his way I suppose. He wrote poems to her. In Spanish, so I wouldn’t be able to understand them. I told her, it’s your life, Lottie, go ahead and ruin it any way you like but don’t tell me I’m prejudiced. You children never heard me use words like that and you never will. I may not have more than a high school education but I know the difference between … right and wrong. At the wedding she wore this blue dress and I never said a word about how short it was. So beautiful. It still makes me cry.” She paused. Then, with great emphasis, as though this were the single unassailable conclusion that these many evidences remorselessly required of her: “He was always very polite.”

Another longer pause.

“You’re not listening to me, Boz.”

“Yes, I am. You said he was always very polite.”

“Who?”

Boz searched through his inner family album for the face of anyone who might have behaved politely to his mother.