No Lease on Life
Lynne Tillman
Red Lemonade
a Cursor publishing community
Brooklyn NY
2011
Night and Day
Clip, clop, clip, clop—BANG.
Clip, clop, clip, clop—BANG BANG.
Clip, clop, clip, clop—BANG.
Clip, clop, clip, clop—BANG BANG.
What’s that?
I don’t know.
An Amish drive-by shooting.
They were just fucking around. They yelled and ran. They overturned all the garbage cans on her block. They were probably going to the park. They were methodical. They turned them over, one after another, and bellowed. They leaped around, up and down, and then one of them—four males and a female—threw a garbage can at a first-floor window. He missed. Then he and another guy aimed garbage cans at a car, which they hit. Any moron can hit a car with a garbage can.
Car alarms went off. No one could sleep. Windows opened wide. People hung out their windows. Their mouths hung open too. It was pathetic.
Elizabeth was looking out her window.
Everyone was asleep and in messed-up T-shirts or ratty robes, tied strangely at the waist. They all looked strangled. It was the middle of the night or the morning. It was hot. Only people with their air conditioners on ever slept through the night. That’s how the block divided in the summer, with A/C or without. It was pathetic.
Elizabeth wanted to kill them. Someone should kill them. She wanted to use a crossbow and steel arrow. Much easier to buy than a gun, entirely legal, no waiting period. But crossbows had just been on the news, and she suspected that everyone would be buying them, the way everyone suddenly bought red eyeglasses. Maybe she was too exhausted to be unique, but she would take severe satisfaction in shooting an arrow right into a guy’s head—right through the middle of it, between his eyes or from one ear to the other. He’d look like a comic book character sporting that goofy toy parents bought for their kids years ago. Made them look like they’d had their skulls split in half.
Elizabeth’s arrow would be real, and she’d murder the guy, and the instant before his death, he’d be surprised, but still he’d exhibit no remorse and she’d feel no regret. The cops would be called. She’d be taken away. So what if she went to jail. She’d have the support of the neighborhood, the block anyway. She didn’t have a record. How long would they keep her in. Eight years was the max. She wasn’t sure why, but that figure occurred to her. Maybe because she’d heard about a serial rapist who’d been let out after eight years and he’d mutilated one of his victims, left her to die. That’s cruel. Maybe she’d be able to read in jail. She wondered if it was quiet in there. She wondered if the women were as noisy as the men or noisier or not noisy at all. There have been so few women in prison movies, she didn’t know. She’d kill a white guy. Maybe he’d even be in school or have a job, so his weekend, late-night marauding would be less likely to be described as driven or desperate. Her victim would be no deprived social misfit. Just a jerk, a prankster. She wasn’t Bernhard Goetz, subway vigilante, going berserk and into overkill. She’d kill someone like herself, she’d make a clean hit, have a clean and lucid, if angry, response. It would be a reaction, and, she’d be called a reactionary. She could handle that, especially in jail, where other people would’ve done much worse things. More senseless anyway. Her reaction would be considered crazy, or she would be. Everyone she knew would think she was nuts and had overreacted. She could hear people saying that, see their mouths moving, and she felt like throwing up.
Everyone would know what it was about. She’d make sure of that. It was about being able to sleep through the night. Being able to turn down your covers and get into bed and not have to wake every hour and run to the window because someone was screaming, sitting on a stoop, screaming and laughing or blasting music and yelling. About nothing. It was always stupid stuff. But even if it was smart, she’d hate it, hate them. Who cares then.
She couldn’t sleep. She might as well stand by the window, vigilant about nothing. 911 didn’t come unless you screamed Murder.
Some neighborhood morons who lived on the street, not bridge and tunnel or whatever, woke her the other night. They were on the church steps, playing stickball with glass bottles. Yelling every time a bottle shattered. It was 5 A.M. Elizabeth opened the window as wide as it would go, and stuck her head and body out. She watched one of the males saunter to the pile of beer bottles and choose one carefully. As if it mattered what kind of bottle he hit. Three females followed the play like despondent cheerleaders. Another male wound up, on the street mound, and pitched to the hitter. He missed. The bottle shattered. The hitter assumed the stance for another swing.
Elizabeth restrained herself from leaping onto the fire escape. She walked through the dark apartment, trying not to wake Roy. She phoned the precinct. The desk cop said he’d send a car. Thirty minutes passed. They were still shrieking. Bottles crashed to the ground again end again Elizabeth called the precinct again. The precinct’s phone machine answered. At the end of the recorded message, the same cop picked up:
—Fifth Precinct.
—This is the woman who called before.
—Yeah.
—There’s been no car.
—Yeah? You haven’t seen it? ’Cause I sent one.
—I haven’t seen it. and I’ve been standing here pretty much for the whole thirty minutes.
—Yeah… Well. I sent one.
—They’re still breaking bottles. I can’t sleep.
—Yeah. I asked for a car, but we’re a little busy this time of night… Unfortunately.
Unfortunately. The cop sounded rueful. It was rueful. Having to call cops or be a cop. At least he hadn’t lied. She hated being lied to. Except that she lied too. When Elizabeth phoned about an all-night party, a female cop said, We’re sending a car. The car never came, the music kept blasting. Elizabeth took a pill. The party was for the Policemen’s Benevolent Association. In the basement of the church where a variety of morons often sat on the steps.
Now Elizabeth leaned out the window. Garbage was everywhere. She’d murder the guy. She’d murder him with an acute pleasure that might last only a second. It would thrill wildly in her body for an evanescent, unimportant moment, but it might be worth it. He was bouncing up and down now, rocking with laughter at how the car’s window had shattered, how broken bottles were lying everywhere, how spilled garbage wantonly littered the sidewalk. It would rot and become fetid. It would rot and smell. She was rotting and rotten. She would smell when it came time for her to die.
The arrow would pierce his insignificant, preemie brain, and blood would spurt from the wound, the way it did in a Peckinpah movie, which is the only thing you remember about his movies, so it was a mistake to do it, not what she was intending, what Peckinpah did. A special effect is no legacy. She’d say her response was about—she’d say this when she was interviewed—not hatred, but dignity and a social space, a civil space, actually a civilian space. Not a place where life is a series of unwanted incidents. A place where people could thrive without having to move to the country or a small city, to expire quietly from lack of interest. She’d wax romantic about what you could expect or hoped to get from other people, and what you didn’t get. She’d call it respect. Everyone did.
You talk mostly about what you’re not getting. Respect, sex, money, sleep. If you have it, you don’t need to mention it. When you have it, you’re bored if other people even bring it up. Of course, people with lots of money also think about it all the time and want more of it, were afraid of losing it, but they probably had the sense not to talk about wanting it in public.
The morons were spilling garbage on the church steps. T
hey were proud. The wild ones, the wild morons. The mild ones. Roy called himself and his friend Joe the mild ones. Elizabeth laughed silently.
She was capable of doing it, she could murder them. She didn’t care. In prison she’d laugh maniacally, she’d sing, she’d write her jail notes, she’d take care of birds, she’d become famous for her legal acumen, she’d find a calling, she’d discover the nobility of suffering. She’d destroy herself meticulously.
The morons were proud of how they destroyed things. Things are easily destroyed. Elizabeth was proud of her restraint. She didn’t climb out the window and run down the fire escape, holding her robe so her nakedness wouldn’t be exposed, fly onto the street, arms flailing, and strangle them or stab them repeatedly, leaving a multitude of gashes. They wouldn’t know what hit them.
She might lose her mind, lose herself, just long enough to be declared legally incompetent, temporarily insane, and do it.
Judge, your honor, I found myself standing on the street in my robe and my hands were around his neck. Their necks. I had a knife in my hand. I don’t know who put it there. I was surrounded by dead people. They were everywhere. Blood was everywhere. It was awful. I don’t know what happened. There was so much noise and then I saw red. I suppose it was blood. And everything went black. I fainted dead away.
She probably wouldn’t say fainted dead away.
The fantasy contented her for a vacant minute. It became the content of her life. Her fantasies were tacky home movies, not features. At the movies she wasn’t in her own world, she was in another world that was hers for the time of the movie. Ninety minutes, two hours, three hours. In her own movie house, she was wrapped up, projecting, and it might just be a few seconds. A few seconds devours a lifetime.
Time was getting later or earlier. Elizabeth had spots in front of her eyes. The clock rested on a black metal stool. It turned time out and over. Like garbage. Elizabeth—the Lizard, to Roy—stared at its eternally dumb face. She watched the little hand spit its way forward. The hands of time jerked on. How much time would it take to murder the morons. She clenched her hands. They weren’t big enough to strangle anyone big.
A couple strolled on the other side of the street. They were holding hands, their arms and bodies entangled, octopus like, they were devouring each other. Then they saw the garbage. They moved away fast into the middle of the empty street. They kissed there. There were no cars around. Just garbage. And rats. The lovers didn’t care about the rats underground or behind the garbage cans, their homes uprooted. Love lets you forget rats. She wondered which of them would be disappointed first. Which of the lovers. The disappointment of rats was beyond her.
When she and Roy were new, sometimes she waited for him to come home. She’d stare at the clock’s face, expecting it to talk. The hands ticked, Where is he? Then he’d show up, tock, tick, drunk, impish, surly, or tired. She’d be angry, ragged, or relieved. With time passing, that didn’t happen anymore. She didn’t worry when he came in. She trusted Roy. He had no reason to hurt her. Not that you had to have a reason to hurt somebody.
Roy was sleeping.
He was inexplicable. They loved each other, whatever that was. Sometimes they hated each other. They had love scenes and hate scenes. They interested each other over time. He wished Elizabeth cooked, but she didn’t.
Lights turned on across the street. Third floor. A man leaned out. T-shirt, no shorts, no pants. Hard to tell. He was half a body. He stared down at the garbage and then across and up. He looked her way, like TV screens registering each other. Elizabeth moved away, to the side of the window, so that she couldn’t be seen, only in profile, if at all. She couldn’t really tell if he was looking at her. If he was, she couldn’t tell if his look was complicitous, a garbage-thrower-watching look, or hostile, lascivious, or sinister. She couldn’t tell if he was a danger to her or the community. At a distance it’s hard to tell who’s an enemy. She wouldn’t be able to identify him in a lineup. The distance was too great. His face was mushy, blurred. She couldn’t make him, she’d tell the cop who was encouraging her to nail the guy. She couldn’t say, Yes, that’s him, instead she’d have to say, I can’t make a positive identification. The cop would be pissed and tell the other officers out of earshot, except she’d hear, She couldn’t ID the guy. Scared.
The man in the third-floor window turned his light off.
Elizabeth didn’t know if he was a potential enemy. She had some enemies. A couple had been friends of hers. It’s hard to make a positive ID even when you’re up close. Her best friend had been the worst. Her mother hated Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a threat. She remembered that and her friend’s big, placid, lying eyes, her laugh, and that her friend hated to vomit. Now, whenever Elizabeth thought about her, she thought about vomit. Another friend schemed behind her back. Elizabeth found out. The friend manipulated everyone. She had no friends. She didn’t know that.
A few enemies were strays, accidental acquaintances. Accidents are sometimes dressed up as people. She’d had sex with some accidents. Accidents were always waiting to happen. Maybe she’d looked at someone funny once. Maybe she’d sided with someone in an unimportant bar argument and another person she hadn’t even noticed became enraged. This person was plotting against her secretly. She had a few secret enemies.
A couple of her enemies were blatant. They were disappointed, dangerously overweight men. She worked with them one week on, one week off, in the proofroom. She read proof with them. It was an outdated occupation. The two fat men taught her not to sympathize automatically with unhappy people. The emotionally crippled and downtrodden can be vicious. She worked with a lot of miserable people. There were many miserable people in the company, misery wants company. Proofreading didn’t make her miserable. She liked focusing on typos and misspellings, on periods, commas, quotation marks, neutral characters in her life.
Five out of ten working days she rolled out of bed and over to the proofroom and worked late into the night. Ten hours, twelve hours, silver time, golden time, good overtime. The first time she saw the proofroom, she was in the building to take a proofreading test. She’d prepared and memorized the symbols, for delete, add, cap, small cap, wrong font. They were listed in any adequate dictionary.
Elizabeth didn’t know it, but on the way to the test, she passed her future co-workers. They were sitting in a small room, with no door, at a long table, reading aloud to each other. Doing hot reads, she learned after she had the job. When you read silently to yourself, it’s a cold read. It was confusing, six voices going simultaneously, people reading business articles to each other. Others were eating takeout food from different restaurants, but all the restaurants used the same plastic or Styrofoam containers. Some were reading the paper. Some were waiting for copy to come through a slot in the wall.
There’s a field of ostriches. They all have their heads stuck in the ground. Another ostrich comes along. He looks around and says, Hey, where is everybody?
The proofreaders were low down in the company. It was obvious from their exposed quarters. The proofroom was similar to a stall in a barn, there was no privacy. No door, no windows. Company status was exhibited by the size of the office, the number of windows, closeness to the boss, a door that shuts others out. Status used to be access to the telephone, but now even janitors in the company had remotes.
The proofroom had one phone for twelve people. Even though proofreaders might do nothing for hours, might be waiting for the editors to edit, for the writers to finish writing or the fact checkers to check facts, they weren’t supposed to be in touch with the outside world.
During their work time they were supposed to be available. They were supposed to be ready for copy that dropped through a slot in the wall like slop thrown at pigs or food shoved under the door for prisoners in isolation. When the pages would finally drop through the slot into the metal basket, they produced a swishing sound. All the proofreaders would hear it. The person nearest the slot in the wall was the supervisor or the next in
command. One of them took the copy out of the basket, logged it in, and handed it out.
The proofreaders were a despised minority, a rung above the lowest group, the mailroom workers. The mailroom was in the basement. The mailroom workers were male, mostly black or Hispanic. Occasionally, when Elizabeth mailed one of her own letters and didn’t want it routed through the system, because she wasn’t supposed to use the company’s system, she hand-delivered it to the mailroom. She went down in the elevator. She saw the black and Hispanic men. They were always surprised when one of the people from above came down. They stopped sorting the mail briefly to take in her presence, or anyone’s. Though she was a nothing in the company’s eyes, she still came from the world above, two floors up. It was pathetic.
The proofreaders were white, college graduates, middle-class misfits who accepted inferior jobs and were not ambitious. They had no future except the copy desk. The copy desk was allowed to change sentences. Proofreaders could only correct mistakes in spelling or find errors in fact. Any other change had to be reported to the desk. The proofreaders were beneath the desk, beneath contempt. The proofreaders were also beneath the janitors, who called the head of the company Boss. The janitors lived in houses in the suburbs and had two cars.
Elizabeth had won the steady part-time job over many applicants. She’d scored high on the test and the head of the room liked her best. Elizabeth had worn black socks with heels, a black jacket, and black pants to her interview. The socks made her a weirdo in the supervisor’s eyes. The supervisor decided she’d fit in with the room. The proofreaders referred to their quarters as “the room.” It was a correctional facility, Roy said.
A doctor said to his patient: I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that you have two weeks left to live. The good news is that I fucked my secretary this morning.
Elizabeth joined the proofroom with reluctance. She was getting older, freelance didn’t cut it anymore, and the room provided health insurance. If she was hit by a car or contracted HIV or MS, she was covered. The company also had a pension plan.
No Lease on Life Page 1
