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“Just a discussion, Nora.” Nora! He’d never called her Nora before. His big voice kept smashing through the door of the closet that had been a foyer. She couldn’t believe that they would really use physical force to evict her. After fifteen years! There were hundreds of people in the building, she could name them, who didn’t meet occupancy standards. Who took in any temp from the hallway and called them lodgers. “Mrs. Hanson, I’d like you to meet my new daughter.” Oh yes! The corruption wasn’t all at the top—it worked its way through the whole system. And when she’d asked, “Why me?” that slut had had the nerve to say,
“Che sera sera
, I’m afraid.” If it had been that Mrs. Miller. There was someone who really did care, not a lot of fake sympathy and
“Che sera sera.”
Maybe, if she phoned? But there wasn’t a phone at Williken’s now, and in any case she wasn’t budging from where she was. They’d have to drag her. Would they dare go that far? The electricity would be shut off, that’s always the first step. God knew what she’d do without the teevee. A blonde girl showed her how easy something was to do, just one, two, three. Then four, five, six, and it would be broken? Terminal Clinic came on. The new doctor was still in a feud with Nurse Loughtis. Hair like a witch, that one, and you couldn’t believe a word she said. That mean look of hers, and then, “You can’t fight City Hall, Doctor.”

Of course, that’s what they wanted you to believe, that the individual person is helpless. She switched channels. Fucking on 5. Cooking on 4. She paused.

Hands pushed and pulled at a great ball of dough. Food! But the nice Spanish lady—though really you couldn’t say she was Spanish, it was only her name—from the Tenants’ Committee had promised her she wouldn’t starve. As for water, she’d filled every container in the house days ago.

It was so unfair. Mrs. Manuel if that was her name, had said she was being hung in a loophole. Somebody must have had their eye on the apartment for a long time, waiting for this opportunity. But try and find out from that asshole Blake who was moving in—oh no, that was “confidential.” She’d known from one look at his beady eyes that he was getting his orange juice.

It was only a matter of holding out. In a few days Lottie would come home. She’d gone off before like this and she’d always come back. Her clothes were all here, except the one little suitcase, a detail she hadn’t pointed out to Miss Slime. Lottie’d have her little breakdown or whatever and then come home and there’d be two of them and the department would have to grant a statutory six months’ stay. Mrs. Manuel had emphasized that—six months. And Shrimp wouldn’t last six months at that convent so-called. Religion was a hobby with her. In six months she’d have thrown it all up and started on something new, and then there’d be three of them and the department wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

The dates they gave you were just a bluff. She saw that now. It was already a week past the time they’d set. Let them knock on the door all they liked, though the idea of it drove her crazy. And Ab Holt, helping them. Damn!

“I would like a cigarette,” she said calmly, as if it were something one always says to oneself at five o’clock when the news came on, and she walked into the bedroom and took the cigarettes and the matches from the top drawer.

Everything was so neat. Clothes folded. She’d even fixed the broken blind, though now the slats were stuck. She sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. It took two matches, and then: Phew, the taste! Stale? But the smoke did something necessary to her head. She stopped worrying around in the same circle and thought about her secret weapon.

Her secret weapon was the furniture. Over the years she’d accumulated so much, mostly from other people’s apartments when they’d died or moved out, and they couldn’t evict her without clearing away every rag and stick of it. That was the law. And not just out into the corridor, oh no, they had to bring it down all the way to the street. So what were they going to do? Hire an army to take it down those stairs? Eighteen floors! No, so long as she insisted on her rights, she was as safe as if she were in a castle. And they’d just keep going on like they’d been going on, exerting psychological pressure so that she’d sign their fucking forms.

On the teevee a bunch of dancers had gotten up a party at the Greenwich Village office of Manufacturers Hanover Trust. The news was over and Mrs. Hanson returned to the living room, with her second awful cigarette, to the tune of “Getting to Know You.” It seemed ironic.

At last the puppets came on. Her old friends. Her only friends. It was Flapdoodle’s birthday. Bowser brought in a present in a gigantic box. “Is it for me?” Flapdoodle squeaked.

“Open it,” Bowser said, and you knew from the tone of his voice it was going to be something pretty bad.

“For me, oh boy! It’s something for me!” There was one box inside another box, and then a bo x inside that, and then still another box. Bowser got more and more impatient.

“Go on, go on, open the next one.”

“Oh, I’m bored,” said little Flapdoodle.

“Let me show you how,” said Bowser, and he did, and a gigantic wonderful hammer came out on a spring and knocked him on the head. Mrs. Hanson laughed herself into a fit, and sparks and ashes from the cigarette splashed all over her lap.

Before it was even daylight the super had let the two of them in through the closet with his key. Auxiliaries. Now they were packing, wrapping, wrecking the whole apartment. She told them politely to leave, she screamed at them to leave, they paid no attention.

On the way down to find the Tenants’ Committee woman she met the super coming up. “What about my furniture?” she asked him.

“What about your furniture?”

“You can’t evict me without my belongings. That’s the law.”

“Go talk to the office. I don’t have anything to do with this.”

“You let them in. They’re there now, and you should see the mess they’re making. You can’t tell me that’s legal—another person’s belongings. Not just mine, a whole family’s.”

“So? So it’s illegal—does that make you feel better?” He turned round and started down the stairs.

Remembering the chaos upstairs—clothes tumbled out of the closet, pictures off the walls, dishes stacked helter-skelter inside cheap carrier cartons—she decided it wasn’t worth it. Mrs. Manuel, even if she could find her, wasn’t going to stick her neck out on the Hansons’ behalf. When she returned to 1812, the red-haired one was pissing in the kitchen sink.

“Oh, don’t apologize!” she said, when he started in. “A job is a job is a job, isn’t it? You’ve got to do what they tell you to.”

She felt every minute as though she was going to start roaring or spinning in circles or just explode, but what stopped and held her was knowing that none of that would have had any effect. Television had supplied her with models for almost all the real-life situations she’d ever had to face—happiness, heartbreak, and points between—but this morning she was alone and scriptless, without even a notion of what was supposed to happen next. Of what to do.

Cooperate with the damned steamrollers? That’s what the steamrollers seemed to expect, Miss Slime and the rest of them in their offices with their forms and their good manners. She’d be damned if she would.

She’d resist. Let the whole lot of them try to tell her it wouldn’t do her any good, she’d go on resisting. With that decision she recognized that she had found her role and that it was after all a familiar role in a known story: she would go down fighting. Very often in such cases, if you held out long enough against even the most hopeless odds the tide would turn. She’d seen it happen time and again.

At ten o’clock Slime came round and made a checklist of the destruction the auxiliaries had accomplished. She tried to make Mrs. Hanson sign a paper for certain of the boxes and cupboards to be stored at the city’s expense—the rest presumably was garbage—at which point Mrs. Hanson pointed out that until she’d been evicted the apartment still belonged to her and so would Miss Slime please leave and take her two sink-pissers with her.

Then she sat down beside the lifeless teevee (the electricity was off, finally) and had another cigarette. Hunt’s Tomato Catsup, the matchbook said. There was a recipe inside for Waikiki Beans that she’d always intended to test out but never got around to. Mix up Beef or Pork Chunkies, some crushed pineapple, a tablespoon of Wesson Oil, and lots of catsup, heat, and serve on toast. She fell asleep in the armchair planning an entire Hawaiian-style dinner around the Waikiki Beans.

At four o’clock there was a banging and clattering at the door of what was once again the foyer. The movers. She had time to freshen herself before they found the super to let them in. She watched grimly as they stripped the kitchen of furniture, shelves, boxes. Even vacant, the patterns of wear on the linoleum, of stains on the walls, declared the room to be the Hansons’ kitchen.

The contents of the kitchen had been stacked at the top of the stairs. This was the part she’d been waiting for. Now, she thought, break your backs!

There was a groan and shudder of far-off machineries. The elevator was working. It was Shrimp’s doing, her ridiculous campaign, a final farewell slap in the face. Mrs. Hanson’s secret weapon had failed. In no time the kitchen was loaded into the elevator and the movers squeezed in and pressed the button. The outer and then the inner doors closed. The disc of dim yellow light slipped from sight. Mrs. Hanson approached the dirty window and watched the steel cables shiver like the strings of gigantic bows. After a long, long time the massive block counterweight rose up out of the darkness.

The apartment or the furniture? It had to be one or the other. She chose—they must have known she would—the furniture. She returned one last time to 1812 and got together her brown coat, her Wooly© cap, her purse. In the dusk, with no lights and the blinds off the windows, with the walls bare and the floors cluttered with big sealed boxes, there was no one to say good-bye to except the rocker, the teevee, the sofa—and they’d be with her on the street soon enough.

She double-locked the door as she left. At the top of the stairs, hearing the elevator groaning upwards, she stopped. Why kill herself? She got in as the movers came out. “Any objections?” she asked. The doors closed and Mrs. Hanson was in free fall before they discovered they couldn’t get in.

“I hope it crashes,” she said aloud, a little afraid it might.

Slime was standing guard over the kitchen which was huddled together beyond the curb in a little island of light under a street lamp. It was almost night.

A sharp wind with dry flakes of yesterday’s snow swept down 11th Street from the west. With a scowl for Slime, Mrs. Hanson seated herself on one of the kitchen chairs. She just hoped that Slime would try and sit down too.

The second load arrived—armchairs, the disassembled bunk, cupboards of clothes, the teevee. A second hypothetical room began to form beside the first. Mrs. Hanson moved to her regular armchair and tried, with her hands in the coat pockets, to warm her fingers in her crotch.

Now Miss Slime judged the time had come to really twist and squeeze. The forms came out of the briefcase. Mrs. Hanson got rid of her quite elegantly. She lit a cigarette. Slime backed off from the smoke as though she’d been offered a teaspoonful of cancer. Social workers!

All the bulkiest items came in the third load—the sofa, the rocker, the three beds, the dresser with the missing drawer. The movers told Slime that in one more trip they’d have it all down. When they’d gone back in, she started in again with her forms and her ballpoint.

“I can understand your anger, and I sympathize, Mrs. Hanson, believe me. But someone has to attend to these matters and see that things are handled as fairly as the situation permits. Now please do sign these forms so that when the van comes … ”

Mrs. Hanson got up, took the form, tore it in half, tore the halves in half, and handed the scraps back to Slime, who stopped talking. “Now, is there anything else?” she asked in the same tone of voice as Slime.

“I’m only trying to help, Mrs. Hanson.”

“If you try to help for one more minute, so help me, I’ll spread you all over that sidewalk like so much … like so much catsup!”

“Threats of violence don’t solve problems, Mrs. Hanson.”

Mrs. Hanson picked up the top half of the lamp pole from the lap of the rocker and swung, aiming for the middle of her thick coat. There was a satisfying
Whap!
The plastic shade that had always been such an eyesore cracked off. Without another word Slime walked away in the direction of First Avenue.

The last boxes were brought out from the lobby and dumped beside the curb. The rooms were all scrambled together now in one gigantic irrational jumble. Two colored brats from the building had begun bouncing on a stack made from the bunk mattresses and the mattress from Lottie’s bed. Mrs. Hanson chased them off with the lamp pole. They joined the small crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk, just outside the imaginary walls of the imaginary apartment. Silhouettes watched from the lower windows.

She couldn’t let them have it just like that. As though she were dead and they could go through her pockets. This furniture was her own private property and they just stood about, waiting for Slime to come back with reinforcements and take her off. Like vultures, waiting.

Well, they could wait till they dropped—they weren’t going to get a thing! She dug into her freezing purse for the cigarettes, the matches. There were only three left. She’d have to be careful. She found the drawers for the wooden dresser that had come from Miss Shore’s apartment when Miss Shore had died. Her nicest piece of furniture. Oak. Before replacing them she used the lamp pole to poke holes through the pasteboard bottoms. Then she broke open the sealed boxes looking for burnables. She encountered bathroom items, sheets and pillows, her flowers. She dumped out the flowers, tore the broken box into strips. The strips went into the bottom drawer of the dresser. She waited until there was no wind at all. Even so it took all three matches to get it started.