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Now, what if he were to tell her that? What if he told her that she would never be anything more than a second-string Grade-Z hygiene demonstrator for the Board of Education. Cruel? Boz was supposed to be cruel?

He shook his head, flip flop of auburn. “Baby, you don’t know what cruel is.”

Mickey switched off the teevee. “Oh, if you think this was something today you should have seen them yesterday. They were in this school. Parkistanis, I think. Yeah. You should have seen it. That was cruel. They wiped them out.”

“Who did?”

“Company A.” Mickey came to attention and saluted the air. Kids his age (six) always wanted to be guerillas or firemen. At ten it was pop singers. At fourteen, if they were bright (and somehow all the Hansons were bright), they wanted to write. Boz still had a whole scrapbook of the advertisements he’d written in high school. And then, at twenty …?

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.

“My brother-in-law?”

Mrs. Hanson nodded. “Exactly. Juano. And she also said why didn’t I try religion.” She shook her head in a pantomime of amazement that such things could be allowed.

“She? Who?”

The dry lips puckered with disappointment. The discontinuity had been intended, a trap, but Boz had slipped past. She knew he wasn’t listening but she couldn’t prove it.

“Mrs. Miller. She said it would be good for me. I told her one religious nut in the family is enough and besides I don’t call that religion. I mean, I enjoy a stick of Oraline as much as anyone, but religion has to come from the heart.” Again she rumpled the violet, orange, and heather-gold flames of her bodice. Down below there somewhere it filled up with blood and squirted it out into the arteries: her heart.

“Are you still that way?” she asked.

“Religious? No, I was off that before I got married. Milly’s dead against it too. It’s all chemistry.”

“Try and tell that to your sister.”

“Oh, but for Shrimp it’s a meaningful experience. She understands about the chemistry. She just doesn’t care, so long as it works.”

Boz knew better than to take sides in any family quarrel. Once already in his life he had had to slip loose from those knots, and he knew their strength.

Mickey returned with the mail, laid it on the TV, and was out the door before his grandmother could invent new errands.

One envelope.

“Is it for me?” Mrs. Hanson asked. Boz didn’t stir. She took a deep wheezing breath and pushed herself up out of the chair.

“It’s for Lottie,” she announced, opening the envelope. “It’s from the Alexander Lowen School. Where Amparo wants to go.”

“What’s it say?”

“They’ll take her. She has a scholarship for one year. Six thousand dollars.”

“Jesus. That’s great.”

Mrs. Hanson sat down on the couch, across Boz’s ankles, and cried. She cried for well over five minutes. Then the kitchen timer went off: As the World Turns. She hadn’t missed an installment in years and neither had Boz. She stopped crying. They watched the program.

Sitting there pinned beneath his mother’s weight, warmed by her flesh, Boz felt good. He could shrink down to the size of a postage stamp, a pearl, a pea, a wee small thing, mindless and happy, nonexistent, utterly lost in the mail.

Shrimp was digging God, and God (she felt sure) was digging Shrimp: her. Here on the roof of 334; Him, out there in the russet smogs of dusk, in the lovely poisons of the Jersey air, everywhere. Or maybe it wasn’t God but something moving more or less in that direction. Shrimp wasn’t sure.

Boz, dangling his feet over the ledge, watched the double moire patterns of her skin and her shift. The spiral patterns of the cloth moved widdershins, the flesh patterns stenciled beneath ran deasil. The March wind fluttered the material and Shrimp swayed and the spirals spun, vortices of gold and green, lyric illusions.

Off somewhere on another roof an illegal dog yapped.
Yap, yap, yap;
I love you, I love you, I love you.

Usually Boz tried to stay on the surface of something nice like this, but tonight he was exiled to inside of himself, redefining his problem and coming to grips with it realistically. Basically (he decided) the trouble lay in his own character. He was weak. He had let Milly have her own way in everything until she’d forgotten that Boz might have his own legitimate demands. Even Boz had forgotten. It was a one-sided relationship. He felt he was vanishing, melting into air, sucked down into the green-gold whirlpool. He felt like shit. The pills had taken him in exactly the wrong direction, and Shrimp, out there in St. Theresa country, was no aid or comfort.

The russet dimmed to a dark mauve and then it was night. God veiled His glory and Shrimp came down. “Poor Boz.” she said.

“Poor Boz,” he agreed.

“On the other hand you’ve gotten away from this.” Her hand whisked away the East Village roofscape and every ugliness. A second, more impatient whisk, as though she’d found the whole mess glued to her hand. In fact, it had
become
her hand, her arm, the whole stiff contraption of flesh she had managed for three hours and fifteen minutes to escape.

“And poor Shrimp.”

“Poor Shrimp too,” he agreed.

“Because I’m stuck here.”

“This morning who was telling me it isn’t where you live, it’s how you live?”

She shrugged a sharp-edged scapula. She hadn’t been speaking of the building but of her own body, but it would have taken too much trouble to explain that to blossoming Narcissus. She was annoyed with Boz for dwelling on his miseries, his inner conflicts. She had her own dissatisfactions that she wanted to discuss, hundreds.

“Your problem is very simple, Boz. Once you face it. Your problem is that basically you’re a Republican.”

“Oh, come off it, Shrimp!”

“Honestly. When you and Milly started living together, Lottie and I couldn’t believe it. It had always been clear as day to us.”

“Just because I have a pretty face doesn’t mean—”

“Oh, Boz, you’re being dense. You know that has nothing to do with it one way or the other. And I’m not saying you should vote Republican because I do. But I can read the signs. If you’d look at yourself with a little psychoanalysis you’d be forced to see how much you’ve been repressing.”

He flared up. It was one thing to be called a Republican but no one was going to call him repressed. “Well, shit on you, sister. If you want to know my party, I’ll tell you. When I was thirteen I used to jerk off while I watched you undress, and believe me, it takes a pretty dedicated Democrat to do that.”

“That’s nasty,” she said.

It was nasty, and as untrue as it was nasty. He’d fantasized often enough about Lottie, about Shrimp never. Her short thin brittle body appalled him. She was a gothic cathedral bristling with crockets and pinnacles, a forest of leafless trees; he wanted nice sunshiny cortiles and flowery glades. She was a Dürer engraving; he was a landscape by Domenichino. Screw Shrimp? He’d as soon turn Republican, even if she was his own sister.