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The first two, Tiger and Thumper, had not presented any problems on the rational level. She could tell herself that millions of women did it, that it was the only ethical way for homosexuals to procreate, that the children themselves were happier and better off growing up in the country or wherever with professional attention, and so on through a dozen other rationalizations, including the best of all, money. Subsidized motherhood certainly beat the pittance she could get killing herself for Con Ed or the even deadlier fates she’d met after she’d been fired from that. Logically what could be better than to be paid for what you craved?

Even so, through both pregnancies and the contractual months of motherhood she suffered attacks of unreasoning shame so intense that she often thought of donating herself and the baby to the charity of the river. (If her hangup had been feet she’d have been ashamed to walk. You can’t argue with Freud.)

The third was another story. January, though she was willing to go along with the thing on the fantasy level, was firmly opposed to the fantasy being acted out. But going in and filling out the forms, what was that but enjoying the fantasy at an institutional level? At her age and having had two already, it didn’t seem likely that her application would be approved, and when it was, the temptation to go in for the interview was irresistible. It was all irresistible right up to the moment that she was spread out on the white platform, with her feet in the chrome stirrups. The motor purred, and her pelvis was tipped forward to receive the syringe, and it was as though the heavens opened and a hand came down to stroke the source of all pleasures at the very center of her brain. Mere sex offered nothing to compare.

Not till she was home from her weekend in the Caribbean of delight did she give any thought to what her vacation would cost. January had threatened to leave her when she’d heard about Tiger and Thumper, who were then ancient history. What would she do in this case? She
would
leave her.

She confessed one particularly fine Thursday in April after a late breakfast from Betty Crocker. Shrimp was into her fifth month and couldn’t go on much longer calling her pregnancy menopause. “Why?” January asked, with what seemed a sincere unhappiness. “Why did you do it?”

Having prepared herself to cope with anger, Shrimp resented this detour into pathos. “Because. Oh, you know. I explained that.”

“You couldn’t stop yourself?”

“I couldn’t. Like the other times—it was as though I were in a trance.”

“But you’re over it now?”

Shrimp nodded, amazed at how easily she was being let off the hook.

“Then get an abortion.”

Shrimp pushed a crumb of potato around with the tip of her spoon, trying to decide whether there’d be any purpose in seeming to go along with the idea for a day or two.

January mistook her silence for yielding. “You know it’s the only right thing to do. We discussed it and you agreed.”

“I know. But the contracts are signed.”

“You mean you won’t. You
want
another fucking baby!”

January flipped. Before she knew what she was doing it was done, and they both stood staring at the four tiny hemispheres of blood that welled up, swelled, conjoined, and flowed down into the darkness of Shrimp’s left armpit. The guilty fork was still in January’s hand. Shrimp gave a belated scream and ran into the bathroom.

Safe inside she kept squeezing further droplets from the wound.

 January banged and clattered.

“Jan?” addressing the crack of the bolted door.

“You better stay in there. The next time I’ll use a knife.”

“Jan, I know you’re angry. You’ve got every right to be angry. I admit that I’m in the wrong. But wait, Jan. Wait till you see him before you say anything. The first six months are so wonderful. You’ll see. I can even get an extension for the whole year if you want. We’ll make a fine little family, just the—”

A chair smashed through the paper paneling of the door. Shrimp shut up. When she screwed up the courage to peek out through the torn door, not much later, the room was in a shambles but empty. January had taken one of the cupboards, but Shrimp was sure she’d be back if only to evict her. The room was January’s, after all, not Shrimp’s. But when she returned, late in the afternoon, from the therapy of a double feature (
The Black Rabbit
and
Billy McGlory
at the Underworld) the eviction had already been accomplished, but not by January, who had gone west, taking love from Shrimp’s life, as she supposed, forever.

Her welcome back to 334 was not as cordial as she could have wished but in a couple days Mrs. Hanson was brought round to seeing that Shrimp’s loss was her own gain. The spirit of family happiness returned officially on the day Mrs. Hanson asked “What are you going to call this one?”

“The baby, you mean?”

“Yeah. it. You’ll have to name it something, won’t you? How about Fudge? Or Puddle?” Mrs. Hanson, who’d given her own children unexceptionable names, openly disapproved of Tiger’s being called Tiger, and Thumper Thumper, even though the names, being unofficial, didn’t stick once the babies were sent off.

“No. Fudge is only nice for a girl, and Puddle is vulgar. I’d rather it were something with more class.”

“How about Flapdoodle then?”

“Flapdoodle!” Shrimp went along with the joke, grateful for any joke togo along with. “Flapdoodle! Wonderful! Flapdoodle it’ll be. Flapdoodle Hanson.”

Flapdoodle Hanson was born on August 29, 2024, but as she had been a sickly vegetable and was not, as an animal, any healthier, Shrimp returned to 334 alone. She received her weekly check just the same, and the rest was a matter of indifference. The excitement had gone out of the notion of babies. She understood the traditional view that women bring forth children in sorrow.

On September 18 Williken jumped or was pushed out of the window of his apartment. His wife’s theory was that he hadn’t paid off the super for the privilege of operating his various small businesses in the darkroom, but what wife wants to believe her husband will kill himself without so much as a discussion of the theory? Juan’s suicide, not much more than two months before, made Williken’s seem justifiable by comparison.

She’d never given any thought to how much, since she’d come back to 334 in April, she’d come to depend on Williken to get through the evenings and the weeks. Lottie was off with her spirits or drinking herself blotto on the insurance money. Her mother’s endless inanities got to be a Chinese water torture, and the teevee was no defense. Charlotte, Kiri, and the rest were past history—January had seen to that.

Just to escape the apartment she began seeing movies, mostly in the pocket theaters on 1st Avenue or around N.Y.U., since they showed double features.

Sometimes she’d sit through the same double feature twice in a row, going in at four o’clock and coming out at ten or eleven. She found she was able to watch the movies totally, any movie, and that afterwards she remembered details, images, lines of dialogue, tunes, with weird fidelity. She’d be walking through the crowds on Eighth Street and she’d have to stop because some face, or the gesture of a hand, or some luscious, long-ago landscape would have returned to her, wiping out all of her data. At the same time she felt completely cut off from everyone and passionately involved.

Not counting second helpings, she saw a total of fifty-three movies in the period from October 1st to November 16th. She saw:
A Girl of the Limberlost
and
Strangers on a Train;
Don Hershey as
Melmoth
and
Stanford White;
Perm’s
Hellbottom; The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle; Escape from Cuernavaca
and
Singing in the Rain;
Franju’s
Thomas l’Imposteur
and
Jude; Dumbo;
Jacquelynn Colton in
The Confessions of St. Augustine;
both parts of
Daniel Deronda; Candide; Snow White
and
Juliet;
Brando in
On the Waterfront
and
Down Here;
 Robert Mitchum in
The Night of the Hunter;
Nicholas Ray’s
King of Kings
and Mai Zetterllng’s
Behold the Man;
both versions of
The Ten Commandments;
Loren and Mastroianni in
Sunflower
and
Black Eyes
and
Lemonade;
Rainer Murray’s
Owens
and
Darwin; The Zany World of Abbott and Costello; The Hills of Switzerland
and
The Sound of Music;
Garbo in
Camille
and
Anna Christie; Zarlah the Martian;
Emshwiller’s
Walden
and
Image, Flesh, and Voice;
the remake of
Equinox; Casablanca
and
The Big Clock; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion;
Star Gut
and
Valentine Vox;
The Best of Judy Canova;
Pale Fire; Felix Culp; The Green Berets
and
The Day of the Locust;
Sam Blazer’s
Three Christs of Ypsilanti; On the Yard; Wednesdays Off;
both parts of
Stinky in the Land of Poop;
the complete ten-hour
Les Vampires; The Possibilities of Defeat;
and the shortened version of
Things in the World.
At that point Shrimp suddenly lost interest in seeing any more.

It was delivered by some derelict messenger. January didn’t know what to make of the uniform, but the card that Shrimp had enclosed tickled her pink. She showed it to the people at work, to the Lighthalls, who always enjoyed a good joke, to her brother Ned, and all of them got a chuckle out of it. The outside showed a blithe, vulgar little sparrow. Written underneath in music was the melody he was chirping:

The lyrics of the song were on the inside: Wanna fuck? Wanna fuck? I do! I do!

At first January was embarrassed playing nurse. She was a largish girl, and the uniform, even though Shrimp had guessed her size correctly, didn’t want to move the way her body moved. Putting it on, she would always feel, as she hadn’t for a long time, ashamed of her real job.

As they got to know each other more deeply, January found ways of combining the abstract qualities of Shrimp’s fantasies with the mechanics of ordinary sex. She would begin with a lengthy “examination.” Shrimp would lie in bed, limp, her eyes closed or lightly bandaged, while January’s fingers took her pulse, palpated her breasts, spread her legs, explored her sex. Deeper and deeper the fingers, and the “Instruments” probed. January eventually was able to find a medical supply store willing to sell her an authentic pipette that could be attached to an ordinary syringe. The pipette tickled morbidly. She would pretend that Shrimp was too tight or too nervous and had to be opened wider by one of the other instruments. Once the scenario was perfected, it wasn’t that much different from any other kind of sex.

Shrimp, while all this was going on, would oscillate between an excruciating pleasure and a no less excruciating guilt. The pleasure was simple and absolute, the guilt was complex. For she loved January and she wanted to perform with her all the acts that any ordinary pair of women would have performed. And, regularly, they did: cunnilingus this way and that, dildos here and there, lips, fingers, tongues, every orifice and artifice. But she knew, and January knew, that these were readings from some textbook called
Health and Sex,
not the actual erotic lightning bolt of a fantasy that can connect the ankle bone to the shin bone, the shin bone to the leg bone, the leg bone to the thigh bone, the thigh bone to the pelvis, the pelvis to the spine, and onward and upward to that source of all desire and all thought, the head. Shrimp went through the motions, but all the while her poor head sat through yet another screening of those old classics,
Ambulance Story, The White Uniform, The Lady and the Needle,
and
Artsem Baby.
They weren’t as exciting as she remembered them but nothing else was playing, anywhere.

Shrimp thought of herself as basically an artist. Her eyes saw colors the way a painter’s eyes see colors. As an observer of the human comedy she considered herself to be on a par with Deb Potter or Oscar Stevenson. A seemingly offhand remark overheard on the street could trigger her imagination to produce the plot for a whole movie. She was sensitive, intelligent (her Regents scores proved that), and up-to-date. The only thing she was conscious of lacking was a direction, and what was that but a matter of pointing a finger?

Artistry ran in the Hanson family. Jimmie Tom had been well on the way to becoming a singer. Boz, though unfocused as Shrimp herself, was a verbal genius. Amparo, at age eight, was doing such incredibly detailed and psychological drawings at her school that she might grow up to be the real thing.

And not just her family. Many if not most of her closest friends were artists one way or another: Charlotte Blethen had published poems; Kiri Johns knew all the grand operas inside out; Mona Rosen and Patrick Shawn had both acted in plays. And others. But her proudest alliance was with Richard M. Williken, whose photographs had been seen all over the world.

Art was the air she breathed, the sidewalk she walked on to the secret garden of her soul, and living with January was like having a dog constantly shitting on that sidewalk. An innocent, adorable, cuddly puppy—you had to love the little fellow but oh my.

If January had simply been indifferent to art, Shrimp wouldn’t have minded. In a way she’d have liked that. But alas, January had her own horrendous tastes in everything and she expected Shrimp to share them. She brought home library tapes the like of which Shrimp had never suspected: scraps of pop songs and snatches of symphonies were strung together with sound effects to tell such creaky tales as “Vermont Holiday” or “Cleopatra on the Nile.”

January accepted Shrimp’s snubs and snide remarks in the spirit of tolerance and good humor in which she thought they were intended. Shrimp joked because she was a Hanson and all the Hansons were sarcastic. She couldn’t believe that anything she enjoyed so much herself could be abhorrent to another person. She could see that Shrimp’s music was a better
kind
of music and she liked listening to it when it was on, but all of the time and nothing else? You’d go nuts.