Stephen Dixon - Frog

“She’s coming home from shopping. Two shopping bags — too much to carry — but it was a nice day so instead of ordering by phone and getting perhaps not their best produce and paying a five dollar service charge, she went to the supermarket and of course bought too much. A man comes up behind her as she starts down the steps to her brownstone. She turns around quickly, says ‘Yes?’ He says ‘Nothing, lady, what’s with you? I’m only going inside.’ ‘May I ask what your business is in this building? You don’t live here.’ ‘No, I’m visiting a friend.’ ‘Who?’ ‘A man — a guy I know.’ ‘What’s his name? I know all the tenants here.’ ‘This one just moved in,’ and he goes past her, into the vestibule and rings several bells. She puts down her bags, opens the vestibule door and keeps it open with one foot and says from the outside ‘You rang more than one bell. That doesn’t seem as if you’re ringing your friend.’ ‘He told me his bell’s not working so to ring a few others to get in.’ Someone on the intercom says ‘Hello?’ ‘I’m looking for Bob,’ the man says. ‘No Bob here,’ and the person cuts off. ‘I know he’s there,’ the man says to her. ‘Maybe he’s in the bathroom. I’ll go in with you and knock on his door.’ ‘What floor is he on?’ ‘I know what floor. The one above this one or the next. It has a little peephole in it, I think.’ He thinks a moment. That’s right, it has.’ ‘There’s a law in this city that every apartment’s front door has to have a peephole in it, not that every landlord complies with it. This one has though. And there isn’t any Bob in the building. No Robert, Rob, Bobby — no name like that. I even know the men who live with the single women in the building, and the names of the two sons of the married couple. No Bobs. I’m sorry but I’m afraid if you don’t leave I’ll have to summon the police.’ He punches her in the face, pulls her into the vestibule by her blouse and grabs her pocketbook as she’s going down. She goes down and holds on to her pocketbook and tries to pull it back while she’s screaming. He gets over her and punches her in the head and face and then kicks her in the stomach. She lets go of the pocketbook and he runs outside with it. She said she tried to scream again but started blacking out. She said she was afraid of blacking out for she thought the man, thinking she could identify him, might come running back and kick and punch her till she was dead. She said she knew, even while she was saying it, that she shouldn’t have said she’d summon the police. She also regretted mentioning there were single women in the building and that she had spoken sarcastically to him about the city law on peepholes. A delivery boy passing the building sees her in the vestibule, comes downstairs and opens the vestibule door and asks if anything’s wrong or maybe she’s just a homeless lady resting. She can’t answer, tries to lift a finger, just stares at him. ‘Are these your bags out here? That’s what made me see you. I knew no one would just leave them there like that. Something you want me to do for you like bring them in? Are you hurt? Now that I see you close, you look it. But I don’t have much time.’ She said he kept looking up to the sidewalk as if to make sure nobody was taking his shopping cart filled with orders. Her mouth’s full of blood and a tooth or two is broken and a temporary bottom bridge also broke loose and is in her mouth somewhere and she’s afraid of choking on it. She starts swallowing blood, spits it out and the boy runs upstairs and quickly pushes the cart past the building. She said he probably was revolted by the sight of such an ugly old woman spitting like that and what she was spitting and must now look like. She lies there. People pass on the sidewalk but none look her way. No sound comes out when she tries screaming. A tenant leaving the building opens the door into the vestibule. ‘Mrs. T?’ he says. He sits her up. She points to her mouth and starts choking. He says ‘Something inside your mouth?’ She nods. ‘Is it the blood,’ he says, wiping her mouth, ‘or you want me to take whatever it is out?’ She nods. ‘You can’t spit it out?’ She tries to, shakes her head. She said she felt the bridge was getting more lodged in her throat and she was starting to panic over it. She starts gagging. The man didn’t want to stick his hand in her mouth, he later told her. Not because he was squeamish but that he was afraid she might lose control of her reflexes and chomp down hard and bite off his fingers. He’d heard where that had happened. Or read it in a newspaper. “‘Good Samaritan Gets Fingers Chewed off by Person He Saved” or something,’ he joked about the headline saying, ‘if it was a paper where I’d learned of it.’ She later told her son the man probably gave that excuse to spare her feelings and that he really didn’t want his hand in her ugly broken mouth. He lies her flat on her front, slaps her back, raises her to her knees and forearms and slaps her back, when that doesn’t work he grabs her ankles and holds her upside down and keeps bouncing her on her head or in the air till the bridge and two teeth come out. ‘Is that it?’ he says, still holding her upside down. ‘Yes.’ ‘All there is? The isolated little teeth and the connected ones?’ moving them with his foot below her face so she could see them. ‘Please. I feel vomit coming.’ When she’s being wheeled on a stretcher to the ambulance she overhears him say to one of the medical crew ‘I still can’t believe I actually did it. I just took a chance, thought I might even be making things worse, but it worked. I’ve been in a position to but never helped anyone that way before or ever had such physical strength. I felt I could have held her up and bounced her up and down for hours, and it was such fucking ecstasy after her teeth came out.’ Later in the hospital one of her sons says she should think about moving. ‘The neighborhood’s getting too rough.’ The neighborhood’s never been better,’ she says. ‘The best boutiques, good restaurants, fancy bars and bookshops. Landlords are getting two thousand a month for one-bedroom apartments, fifteen hundred for studios. People are doubling and tripling up in studios just to afford living in them. It’s all fair-market value now, once a rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartment becomes vacant and the landlord puts in an air conditioner and splashes on a little paint, and those are the going fair market rents. It’s crazy to pay it, but the whole area’s been vastly upgraded with all these young hardworking people moving in and brownstones being converted almost everywhere you look.’ ‘But with all this so-called nicer clientele more and more druggies and ripoff artists are coming in to rob them. You’re elderly. They think you have money because you live around there. Or else they jump you for the few dollars they think you might have on you, if you happen to be wearing your knockaround clothes on the street, because you’re an easy target. There’s got to be some solution. No old age home or moving in with Jerry or me, since you’re much too independent for that and for your age still pretty healthy. Maybe a building with a doorman or guard always downstairs and elevators and that’s monitored in the laundry room and places and everything’s safe and well run and clean. If you want, in the same neighborhood but not in a small unprotected walkup where a thief can just lean on the front door to open it.’ ‘I’ve lived in that building — what are you, fifty-three?’ ‘Two.’ ‘Then for fifty-one years and I’ll never get the same space I need and like anywhere else for the rent I can pay. It happened once, this beating, and mostly because I had a big mouth, but it won’t happen again. I’ll get my locks changed at my own expense, walk the other way, as your dad used to say, from possible muggers, and only go out when I’m next to sure the streets are more crowded than yesterday.’ ‘And if, despite all these precautions of yours — an alarm system on your windows, for instance. That’s a must anywhere in New York on the ground and second floor. But if some nice-looking, well-dressed mugger or two, for that’s what I read how they often appear these days, to fool you, besides being well-spoken and with a couple of books under their arms too But if one does come up behind you as you’re going into your building, what’ll you do?’ ‘If I don’t recognize him, male or female, and there’s even an inkling he’s suspicious, I’ll say “Oop’s, wrong building — not you, me,” and walk back to the sidewalk and call the police from the callbox at the corner, not that it’ll work and if it does, that they’ll come in time to catch him. But please don’t think you’re going to keep me locked inside all day and turn me into a hermit only reading books and baking cookies and breads. My life’s empty enough.’”