Florence Darkly’s skirting of poverty had always been contaminated by a hint of pretense. Throughout the string of punk jobs for which she was overeducated, she’d always known that in a pinch she could turn to Grand Man. Her grandfather had a parsimonious streak, but he was generous on birthdays, and open to well-reasoned appeals to make “good investments”—which is how Jarred copped a failing upstate farm that was starting to look a shade less wacky. Without Grand Man, she’d never have managed the down payment on the house, and at Adelphi she lied to co-workers about renting. Serving a population on the absolute edge, Florence was ashamed of the leg up. Advantage was separating. Having even limited access to wealth two generations away was like having secret powers. Those superheroes were always lonely.
But this last July, her parents had organized a conference on fleXface, breaking it to all three kids at once that Dad hadn’t, after all, brought Grand Man and Luella back to Carroll Gardens simply to spend more quality time with his father during Douglas Mandible’s final years. Receiving the news with grim stoicism, Avery made a great show of concern for their parents, who were the real victims of fortune-go-blooey. Oh, no, what about that ranch in Montana? (The overdone performance usurped Florence’s traditional role as the considerate one. And it was a bit too easy for Avery to suppress Fuck, so much for that kitchen extension, given a lifelong affluence of which Florence could only dream.) Jarred spouted his standard bilge about governmental treachery; what the hell, he’d already snagged his farm. The great-heart legendarily oblivious to worldly prosperity, Florence alone was detectably dolorous. But honestly, someone had to find the annihilation of God knew how many millions just a little bit depressing.
Suddenly becoming mortal should have made her feel closer to the others in her “community,” who’d never enjoyed surreptitious resort to a loaded old man in New Milford. Instead she felt frightened. It was hardly comforting to be all in the same boat when the boat was sinking. That whole helping-hand lark—turning to one another in times of tribulation—only worked when who was under the gun varied from week to week. It did not work when everyone had a crisis at once—at which point the community atomized into a large number of people in the same place, who wanted and needed the same things, and lacking the means of getting them might take what they required by deception or force. As the urban crime rate escalated across the nation, Florence marveled that it had ever been possible to walk down the road with a wallet, or to wear a fancy watch. Late in the day, she appreciated the miracle of civilization, whereby people paraded sacks of groceries, or jingled keys to a car, and were not immediately set upon. Even all those beggars in downtown Brooklyn: they were still asking.
Real poverty is about doing what you have to do as opposed to what you want. So while Florence didn’t warm to her father’s suggestion that she take in her aunt from France, Willing’s forecasts were proving accurate: the mortgage interest continued to soar; her cost-of-living raises lagged behind roaring prices. Every trip to Green Acre Farm fostered post-traumatic stress disorder. She shunned ironing to avoid paying for the electricity. To skip showers, she cultivated the pirate-style bandana into a permanent affectation at work. For a time, Kurt had hung on at the florist; Asian tourist dollars spilled into Brooklyn, and restaurant bouquets kept the shop afloat. But news of muggings and racist gang murders discouraged moneyed travelers, restaurants suffered, and the florist closed. Kurt had missed paying his usual pittance two months running, and she couldn’t bear to say anything. Besides, even if her tenant improbably kept current, his rent had been set in 2027, and no longer covered his share of the utilities.
She would have to replace Kurt with a relative who had “resources.”
“I don’t know,” Esteban said quietly on the sofa, now duly repaired with duct tape. “Kurt’s an asslick, but he keeps to himself. Family—they butt into your business. Can’t see your aunt mousing around the basement, never saying a word about the tromping, yakking, and television overhead.”
Esteban put a premium on privacy, since he kicked around the house all day. When he first lost his job with Over the Hill, he was almost relieved. On one trek he led in the spring, a ruined banker threw himself off the Palisades, plunging hundreds of feet and missing the Hudson River with a sickening crunch. Numerous other instances of older clients who’d lost everything scraping together the remnants of their savings to go out in style made leading expeditions stressful. It was hard enough to worry about elderly clients accidentally slipping down the mountainside without also worrying that they’d pitch themselves into oblivion on purpose. Over the Hill acquired a murky reputation, and no business could prosper long from a consumer base that was self-eliminating—not when said consumer base was both suicidal and broke.
Thereafter, he’d picked up temporary kitchen work in Manhattan, also enabled by bargain-hunting foreigners, for whom whole meals cost less than a soda at home. (Some subsequent violence insensitive tourists were said to have brought on themselves—as by singing loud, snide renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” while weaving drunkenly down Sixth Avenue.) Esteban hated the work; his people had served their time with piles of china smeared with Bolognese, and the grungy, invisible job seemed a generational demotion. Yet he hated idleness more. He’d stooped to loitering on corners for day labor, as his father had, but the competition was stiff, including from gringos, and when construction crews came shopping, he seldom got picked. Esteban had lost the hunched, I’ll-do-anything-and-ask-for-nothing quality evinced by his father’s generation of immigrants. He stood too straight. He looked people in the eye. He came across as a man who expected to be paid what was agreed on at the start, and who would raise a fuss if he were shafted. Who wants to hire that?
“My aunt is a writer, or was, so she must value her solitude,” Florence said. “I don’t know her well, since she moved to Europe in the latter 1990s and only came back to the US for book tours. She’s incensed that novelists don’t earn royalties anymore, so for the last ten years she’s been on strike; even my dad doesn’t think it’s writer’s block. But she did swing through New York on general principle about three years ago, when you were away on an expedition. She and Willing went on a marathon walk to Manhattan, just the two of them—which surprised me, since my dad claims Nollie ‘hates children.’ There’s always been some friction between her and my dad, but I thought she was pretty cool—careless—when I was a kid. My dad was the play-it-safe sort; Nollie was the brave one. Mouthy, adventurous, always involved in torrid romances that blew up with a lot of shouting and breaking of stuff. She used to be a looker. Fit. But Jesus, she must be … seventy-three? Not the kind of woman you imagine becoming seventy-three.”
“After Over the Hill, I can imagine anybody seventy-three,” Esteban said. “Everybody I see just pre-old.”
“Including me?”
“I keep waiting for you to turn sixteen”—he kissed her—“so that I can’t be done for statutory. Now, you really want to swap a timid, no-problem suck-up for a crazy old lady you’ve barely seen since you were twelve?”
“I don’t want anyone in this house but the three of us. But we need the money.”
She dreaded Kurt’s eviction. When she first took in a tenant, she hadn’t considered that, for landlords with a conscience, renting was closer to foster care than commerce. She couldn’t bear kicking someone out who had no place to go.
Steeling herself in the kitchen the next evening, Florence knocked delicately on the door to the basement. She hadn’t laid eyes on Kurt since he’d missed the first rent payment. He must have been mortified. “Can I come down?”
“Of course, it’s your house, Florence!” When she arrived downstairs, he was feverishly stuffing a pair of socks into the hamper. “Look, I’m super sorry, if I’d known you were coming, I’d have cleaned up.”
“Cleaned up what?” Florence said, scanning the Germanic order of his domain. The bedding was cornered and smooth. The carpet was thin and a strangely depressing off-blue, but it was spotless. A grainy scatter on the counter beside the stove only stood out because every other surface was immaculate.
Kurt followed her line of sight, and immediately began sponging the counter. “Sorry,” he said again. “I’ve been learning to make tortillas.”
An odd complaint for a landlord, but the basement was too clean. Aside from one bag of cornmeal and a canister of salt, the shelves above the kitchen unit were bare. On a hunch, she sidled to the small fridge, and sure enough: only a juice bottle filled with tap water and a crumple of margarine foil. “Kurt, you’ve got to eat better than this.”
“Oh, I’m not that into shopping, and I put it off.” He was thinner. Sunken cheeks combined with the teeth to make him look ghoulish.
“And it’s chilly down here!” Florence said. “It’s November. Some warmth bleeds from upstairs, but I told you to make free with the space heater. It’s very efficient, and I was assured it wasn’t a fire hazard. Also …” She sniffed. “I don’t mean to embarrass you, but that toilet needs flushing.”
Kurt blushed, and did the honors. “I just know that, you know, water is …”
“Pricey, but a necessity. I warned you this was an illegal tenancy, but that means I’m breaking the rules. It doesn’t mean you have no rights.”
Kurt bent his head and clasped his hands. “Look,” he said to the floor. “I’m surprised you didn’t knock on the door a long time ago. You’ve been really, really decent, beyond the call. And I’ve been applying for jobs all over—”
“So has everyone else,” she said gently, taking a seat at the small laminated table. “And since your job at the florist was part-time, I guess you don’t qualify for unemployment. Do you have any family?”
“We’ve sort of, um, lost touch.”
“The trouble is, I have family myself. An aunt, who’s coming back from abroad and needs a place to stay.” She left out the part about Nollie having “resources.”
“I immense, immense understand,” Kurt said hurriedly. “I’ll get out of your hair like, tomorrow. And promise, soon as I’m back on my feet, I’ll get you that back rent—”
“But where will you go?”
“If you could lend me a tarp, I hear the encampments in Prospect Park are malicious,” he said with forced cheer. “Everybody singing, and playing instruments, and telling stories. Just like Woodstock! It could be a great experience. Something to tell the grandkids.”
Florence thought reflexively, You’re not having any grandkids with those teeth. “That’s not what I hear the encampments are like. More like malicious in the old sense of the word. Central Park is even worse. And winter’s coming.”
“There’s always, you know, city-subsidized … the projects …”
“The waiting list for social housing is closing in on a million applications.” Florence was exasperated to find herself on the wrong side of this conversation, and tried to wrest back her rightful role. “But there’s always the city’s shelter system.”
Though she’d rehearsed it, the suggestion was disingenuous. The shelters were overwhelmed. Lines in the morning were as long as the ones for the banks a year before. Adelphi tried to get the word out that all their rooms were taken by de facto permanent clients, even after the facility doubled the building’s occupancy by forcing more than one family to share the same small units—resulting in the kind of conditions that in the old world of investigative reporters might have produced a lacerating exposé. Staff couldn’t police the ban on food in the rooms and had given up. Rats and roaches scuttled through the halls. Toilets overflowed. Drains backed up. Meal portions in the cafeteria were stingy. Fights broke out over dinner rolls. And still they came. Yet who arrived had changed. The slept-in clothes were from L.L.Bean. The strollers were wide-bodied, with snap-up plastic covers for inclement weather and expandable side pockets for shopping and snacks; baby blankets were cashmere. These strollers once went for thousands, and more than one bedraggled foreclosure victim camping on the sidewalk had been mugged for their luxury transport. When she turned this type away, she often heard railing about how much they’d paid in taxes. If she informed this latest brand of homeless that they had to register with the DHS in the Bronx first, they weren’t having any of it, refusing to give up their places on line. Florence was accustomed to stories from the homeless about having once been nuclear physicists, too—occasionally from educated but unbalanced former professionals who’d suffered breakdowns a while back and dropped off the map, more often from raving fantasists. But the new homeless had been nuclear physicists in good standing just last week. If they were demented, it was with rage.
Florence stood and raked her hair. Kurt would all too willingly shuffle out the door with his few belongings in canvas hold-alls and make his way to the park. But in comparison with the shelter, this house had space.
“There is the attic,” she introduced reluctantly. “It’s not finished, but it’s big enough for a mattress and chest of drawers.”
“Oh, man, Florence, no problem, and I promise, I’d be so quiet up there, you’ll never know—”
Florence raised her hand. “You misunderstand. You’re six-foot-what? You’d die from a hemorrhage in five minutes. I was thinking we could put my aunt up there. She’s barely over five feet. You could stay down here. But only if you give me a hand clearing all the junk out, cleaning up the dust and mouse shit, and making the space livable. And you’ll need to accommodate more storage down here, for anything in the attic we decide to keep.”
By asking him for favors, she was doing him one. Kurt had started to cry. Esteban was going to kill her.
All that time in Paris, and I never had a proper garret,” Nollie said approvingly. Spruced up, woody, and aglow with strategically warm indirect lighting, the attic was cozy, although the new arrival was also being a good sport.
Short and bony, Nollie dressed like a kid, in worn, dated jeans; red Converse All Stars; a LIFE’S TOO SHORT TO DRINK BAD WINE T-shirt; and an enormous, beaten-up leather jacket that looked to have been around the world twice. Her ponytailed hair was thin to be kept that long. Her face was lined, but it was easy to discern the acerbic, smartass younger woman she seemed to believe she still was. She moved with an abrupt, angular authority: she was used to getting her way. Florence couldn’t say her father hadn’t warned her.
The septuagenarian clambered nimbly up the last three ladder rungs and slung the jacket onto the mattress. The sleeveless tee revealed the kind of arms that Esteban had mocked at Over the Hill: stringy and sinuous, with mean, hard-won muscles, but nonetheless sagging with the shriveled skin beneath the biceps that boomers tried so heartbreakingly hard to avoid. Standing in the middle of the attic, she clapped her arms at her sides, then raised them in an arc overhead until her fingers touched, barely missing the roof beams. “Check!” she announced. Florence didn’t get it.
Nollie’s having arrived with scads of luggage was a pain, yet also an indicator that if she could pay for extra baggage, she must indeed have savings. Willing helped hoist the cases through the hatch.
“I’ve got a few contributions for dinner,” their new resident announced, tossing Willing a bag. “But first I need to earn it. Shake off the flight.” With an impatient smile, she shooed them from the attic and retracted the ladder.
In the kitchen, Florence unpacked the lavish gifts: sausage, acorn-fed ham, smoked horsemeat of all things, exotic French cheeses. They’d have a feast.
“Fuck me, qué es eso?” Esteban exclaimed. The frame of the house had begun to quake, poom, poom, poom.
Florence and Willing crept back upstairs and stared up at the ceiling. “What do you think she’s doing?” her son whispered over the rhythmic din.
“Home improvements, already?” Florence puzzled. “It sounds like construction.”
They shrugged and slunk back down. The pounding lasted about half an hour—a very long half an hour—and proved especially grating for the fact that the pummeling was unexplained. “Christ,” Florence muttered. “What have I done to us?”
In due course, Nollie reappeared downstairs, cheeks flushed, and wearing a fresher version of the same down-market uniform; she’d have passed herself off as in good trim for seventy-three if only she dressed her age. It was a generational blindness. Young people could pull off ill-fitting rags as stylish; Florence’s niece Savannah would look sexy in a paper bag. Past cohorts had understood that beyond sixty or so you compensated for the shabbiness of your birthday suit by cloaking it as nattily as possible. Grand Mimi wore silk brocade, stockings, and tasteful pumps for trips to the post office. But the following generation dressed badly first as a political statement, later out of indolence, and latterly from delusion. Boomers considered old age one more conspiracy to expose, like the Pentagon Papers.
Florence gestured to the spread. “Nollie, this is so generous. But how did you get this stuff past Customs?”
“Oh, it’s murder to get anything out of the United States,” Nollie said. “You can get almost anything in.” She flourished three bottles of red wine and a liter of brandy.
They’d invited Kurt, already sliding from freeloader to family. His insistence on being helpful put an extra burden on his host; with a repast of cold cuts, there was nothing to do. Florence no longer merely worked at a homeless shelter; she lived in one, too.
Oiled with alcohol, dinner was raucous, Nollie presiding. Florence tried to savor the enlivening of her aunt’s strident views, which could soon begin to wear. She was starting to feel the strain of real generosity, as opposed to the more formal charity for which, after all, she was paid. Real generosity entails no recompense. It means giving up something you fiercely value and cannot replace. In this case, the sacrifice was of privacy, intimacy, and quiet. The addition of the garrulous old woman and obsequious ex-tenant to life upstairs completely transformed what it felt like to walk around her own house, even in the unlikely instance that those two kept their mouths shut. Newly self-conscious, she felt observed and judged; when making an ordinary request that Willing fetch Nollie a towel, a whiff of performance parenting polluted the instruction: Look how I have raised my son to lend a hand. Despite the evening’s casual plates-on-laps dining style, she didn’t dare plunge hungrily into the platter of meats and cheeses on the coffee table, but hung back to ensure her guests got enough prosciutto first. That was the biggest change: Florence checked everything she did and said now for whether it was polite—surely the very antithesis of what it was supposed to feel like to be home.
“The national debt was bound to come to a head eventually,” Nollie held forth on her third glass of wine. “It was just hard to predict when. And prophets too ahead of their time are always ridiculed. Take population. In my teens, the species was allegedly reproducing itself into extinction. Last time I checked, the human race was still here. Now we’re closing on nine billion—a tripling in seventy years. But what if the ‘overpopulation’ hysterics were right, just too soon? Same with debt. Twenty years ago, doom-and-gloomers were foaming at the mouth about excessive borrowing. Nothing happened then, either—until a year ago, when everything happened. Familiar with complexity theory? It helps to explain why everything can be fine for a long time and then go to hell all at once.”
“I’m betting if we all had PhDs in ‘complexity theory,’” Esteban said, “you’d tell us about it anyway.” Nollie was the sort of know-it-all whom Esteban couldn’t abide. After Over the Hill, he cut no one slack merely for being old.
“Complexity theory isn’t itself all that complex,” Nollie said pleasantly, not rising to the bait. “As systems become more complex, they grow exponentially more unstable. They can keep puttering along, getting messier and messier, until one tiny disturbance sends the whole shebang into meltdown. Like those towers of playing cards, where you add a single queen of hearts and suddenly it’s fifty-two pickup. Or jugglers who can keep ten balls in the air, but not eleven. Feeding, watering, and employing nine billion people and rising is the ultimate complex system. You never know when adding that one last baby boy sends all the balls in the air to the floor.”
“That’s absurd,” Esteban said.
“Is it?” Nollie said mildly. “The straw that broke the camel’s back is complexity theory in a nutshell. Economics—same idea. Massively complex, massively unstable. It doesn’t take much. See, that’s the other rule: complex systems collapse catastrophically. Look out the window.”
“This is nothing,” Willing said.
The company turned to the boy.
“Care to elaborate?” Nollie asked.
“No.”
Her son’s obscure pronouncement was freaky, and Florence was relieved when her fleX tringed. “Dad! I guess you want to say hello to Nollie. She’s right here.”
“I guess, but I mostly wanted to ask if you’ve talked to Grand Mimi.” Her father looked harried. But then, didn’t he always.
“Not for a while, why?”
“I can’t raise her. Fair enough, though I’ve imposed a fleX on her, she never turns it on. But my mother is one of the last holdouts with a landline. Which for weeks she hasn’t picked up. Maybe she’s been out, and the voicemail being full could be simple inattention. But now the line is dead.”
“But the landline is dead in general. Telecoms don’t maintain the network. I wouldn’t worry too much. She has live-in help.”
“When she first moved in, Margarita seemed energetic and capable, but that was fifteen years ago. She’s pretty damned old herself.”
“If you’re that concerned, maybe you should stop by, then.”
“I can’t, that’s the point,” her father said irritably. “You have no idea what we’re dealing with here. I say we loosely speaking. Your mother barricades herself in her Quiet Room all day, and I have to beg her to babysit just to run out for milk.”
“Can’t Grand Man take care of his own wife?”
“He’s not strong enough. She can get violent. And he’s become so passive. Without any investments to manage, Pop’s lost all sense of purpose. He fleXts, noses around the net, but rarely leaves his chair. We tried leaving them on their own for an afternoon, and when we got back the house looked as if there’d been a tornado. You keep asking us over for dinner. Why do you think we haven’t accepted?”
Florence sifted discreetly into the kitchen. “I’m responsible for a full-time job, a kid, an unemployed husband, and a tapped-out tenant, not to mention your sister—who as far as I can tell takes up a lot of room. Like, the whole house. It’s not going to be easy for me to find time to go on another care mission. Couldn’t Nollie stop by?”
“Good luck with that!” her father jeered. “Those two haven’t spoken for thirty-five years.”
Florence promised that someone would check on Grand Mimi. The call ended before she realized that her father hadn’t tried to talk to his sister. Ever since taking his father and stepmother in, he’d churned in a sustained state of wrath, and some of that anger seemed aimed at Nollie. The put-upon posture was a pity. Having sidelined his own life to care for elderly parents, he came across as unkind.
When she returned to the feast, Willing was addressing his great-aunt with unnerving focus. “That can’t be the real reason. You wouldn’t leave France only because people don’t like you. After all. You must be used to it.”
“Ha!” Nollie said. “You’re right there. I guess there was more to it. I have a penchant for being where the action is. I’m a writer. I like story.”
“Mom says you don’t write anything anymore.”
She smiled. “You don’t go out of your way to ingratiate yourself either, do you? As for writing, no, I don’t see the point. But you don’t lose a certain mindset.”
“The United States is a bad place to be,” Willing said sorrowfully. “You should have stayed as far away as possible.”
“I’ve been an expat a long time,” Nollie reflected. “I always thought I haven’t bothered to get French citizenship because jumping the bureaucratic hoops was too much trouble. When the dollar crashed, I realized that my reluctance to swear fealty to France went deeper than laziness. It’s weird, because I don’t believe in nationalism. I’ve always dismissed patriotism as blind, mindless cheerleading. I don’t have many friends left in the States, and I haven’t been that close to our family. But I felt pulled back. I can’t help—caring. It’s been unbearable, watching this last year from afar.”
“You’re an American,” Willing translated.
“I’ll always be American to Europeans, and maybe I’m tired of fighting it.”
Willing didn’t appear to find the explanation satisfying. “I think you’re crazy.” He cut himself another slab of Camembert. “This cheese won’t last, and then what?”
The following afternoon, Florence returned from work to find a large van double-parked in front of the house. A burly Central American was unloading cartons onto the sidewalk. Willing was schlepping the delivery inside. On inspection in the light of the streetlamp, the boxes were all addressed to Enola Mandible, c/o Florence Darkly. Scrawled on the side of the uppermost box: BLT, PB—UK.
“What’s this,” Florence asked Nollie, who was overseeing the operation, “first the cheese, now bacon, lettuce, and tomato and peanut butter?”
Her aunt chuckled. “Better Late Than. British paperback.”
Florence hadn’t read it. In her early teens, everyone seemed to be reading Enola Mandible’s bestseller except for her own family. At a glance, BLT seemed to dominate the shipment: BLT, HB—PORTUGUESE; BLT, TRD—SERBIAN; BLT, BK CLB—FLEMISH.
“You know,” Florence said carefully, “this house is already pretty cluttered.”
“Oh, I left all the chairs and whatnots behind, even most of the clothes. But I wasn’t about to leave the books.”
“This is all books?” Florence was staggered that anyone would pay to transport anything so superfluous. Her father had regaled her with the story of Grand Man having packed up his library in the ludicrous expectation that Dad would store all those formal anachronisms in his house. But as she decoded the labels in black marker—VF = Virtual Family, AO = Ad-Out, C2G = Cradle to Grave, TIM = Time Is Money—she registered with astonishment that these were multiple copies of the same books, mostly in languages that no one in the household spoke, including Nollie herself, and which presumably the addressee had already read because she wrote them. The vanity of the consignment beggared belief.
“They’ll have to fit in the attic.” Florence felt awkward issuing an edict to an elder. “That’s all the space we can spare you, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, I think we’ll manage. Uh-uh! I’ll take that one.” Nollie intercepted a box marked Foul Matter, and struggled it possessively up the stoop stairs herself. Foul Matter being the only good title of the lot, Florence was moved to inquire.
“It’s a term of art for original manuscripts and their permutations en route to publication,” Nollie said. “Invaluable material for literary critics, biographers, and doctoral students. Sold to a university library, those papers could be worth a great deal.”
Willing and his great-aunt did miraculously cram the dozens of cartons in long, snug lines below the eves, though Florence was crestfallen that after her homey redecoration the space now looked trashy and cramped. But even more was she distressed by her aunt’s glaring failure to have digested what had been happening in the United States. Maybe the woman really did need a good dose of the country up close—where “literary critics” comprised a few online cranks who deplored any screed downloaded by more than ten people, and self-published authors who talked up their own work under assumed names; where people were too resentful about having to relinquish their own dreams to read biographies about lucky predecessors who’d been allowed to realize theirs; where no student who could manage to remain in school would squander tuition on anything as trifling as literature, while universities were furiously selling off the very real estate that might improbably have accommodated the weak first drafts of an aging one-hit-wonder who’d exiled herself to France.
Florence had kept abreast of her sister’s travails in DC, but it had been difficult to take them seriously. Avery’s life had always seemed charmed. The younger sister was the mercenary, the materialist, the conformist, the conservative, whose politics had grown only more rightwing. She’d never seemed to work that hard, yet milk and honey flowed effortlessly in her direction: the townhouse, the luxury cars, the sumptuous dinner parties, the three perky children who were nicely spaced and brimming with arty talents. Her barmy therapeutic practice had been backstopped by a husband with a solid academic post in an institution at the very heart of establishment Washington. Avery had chosen the safe route, the wide, well-paved road.
In short, her sister was rich—in Florence’s circle, a permanent designation, one that stripped the so anointed of any right to pathos. Florence eked by from month to month, but people like Lowell kept money in jars all over the house. He may have lost his job, but people like Lowell got another one. If Florence had to repress a trace of satisfaction that at last her sister had troubles, too, she had to try harder still to appreciate that the troubles were real, that they were large, that they were insoluble.
“We’re selling the house,” Avery declared, without even saying hello. Nollie’s preposterous shipment just installed in the attic, Florence was disappointed by her sister’s cut to the chase on fleXface. She was dying to tell Avery about the delusional chutzpah with which their aunt expected her papers to be purchased by a prestigious university library.
“Well, it’s not a bad idea to downsize, is it?” Florence supposed. “With Savannah soon off to college—”
“Savannah’s not going to college.”
“I thought you said she accepted delayed admission.”
“The delayed admission is a fiction. And we’re not downsizing.” In contrast to her musing ruminations of yore, Avery’s discourse had grown jagged and declarative.
“What’s the point of moving if you’re not—”
“If-we-do-not-sell-the-house,” Avery spelled out staccato, “we-will-face-foreclosure. That is the ‘point’ of moving out.”
Her sister’s frustration made Florence worry that a certain humoring quality on her part may have infected their conversations hitherto—conversations into which she’d never have expected a word like foreclosure to make an appearance. Nonplussed, she said neutrally, “So what’s the plan?”
“Fortunately, real estate has appreciated. But we’ve built no equity, other than the increase in value, a whack of which will be seized to cover defaulted interest payments.”
“But you can use the profit as a down payment on something cheaper, right?”
“Florence, you idiot! You don’t put a down payment when you can’t get a mortgage!”
Had they been in the same room, Florence would have taken a step back. Whatever she said seemed to enrage her sister, and the next question would prove no different: “Why can’t you get a mortgage?”
“I have no job! My husband has no job! We have no income, other than Lowell’s pissy unemployment checks! What bank is going to give us a loan of, like, a million dollars?”
“You don’t get unemployment, too …?”
“Not if you were self-employed! Florence, you’ve really got to start paying attention here! I have three children. We’re living on meatloaf. Goog keeps getting beaten up at school. He’s a target because he doesn’t speak Spanish.”
“It might have been a good idea if you’d encouraged him to study—”
“In the olden days it wasn’t illegal to learn German instead, the language of Goethe and Günter Grass and Bertolt Brecht, which he actually likes. And which, by the by, they don’t teach at Roosevelt, either. They don’t teach anything at Roosevelt, as far as I can tell, besides the lyrics to ‘Guantanamera’ and how to punch out a kid with just enough restraint so that he can come back the next day and you can do it again.”
Florence decided this wasn’t the time to take on her sister’s racial insensitivities. “So could you rent for a while, then?”
“Landlords aren’t going to leap at a couple without jobs, either. Maybe if we flashed the cash from the house. But it wouldn’t last long, since new leases are astronomical. It would be better if we could cool our heels for a while until the economy recovers.” Avery had disciplined herself into using a more reasonable tone, even a pleading one.
“Like where?” Florence asked warily.
“Somewhere urban, ideally. Where Lowell could jump on any university openings.”
“What are Lowell’s job prospects?”
“Right now?” Despite the suggestion of a snarl, Avery kept trying to control herself. “Abysmal. The irony has come home to me late in the day that economists are of very limited economic utility. And he’s useless in every other regard, too. I have to do everything. I was the one who found a buyer for the house.”
“Who can stretch to property like that, unless they pulled some fiddle before the crash? I heard tycoons with connections in Congress made out like bandits.”
“Sorry not to play to your leftwing conspiracy theories. Who can swing a nice American house, really? Some guy from Shanghai. Asians are buying up everything. Not only residential real estate, but companies. Landmarks. Any day now it’s going to be the Mao Monument in the middle of the Mall.”
Florence sighed. “Talk about conspiracy theories! Dad says we went through the same thing in the 1980s with the Japanese—Oh, those slant-eyes are taking over, they’re buying up Rockefeller Center—and now look at them.”
“Florence.” In the proceeding silence, there was a girding. “Would you mind. For just a little while. Would it be all right—if we stayed with you?”
In Florence’s silence, a horror.
“We’d bring the cash,” Avery continued. “We wouldn’t be a burden. We could help with expenses. Help with other things, too. And everything’s getting so weird. Maybe we should band together. Rally around, as a family. Florence. I already asked Dad, about our staying in Carroll Gardens, and he said”—she was choking up now—“he said no. He just kept railing about Luella.”
Florence’s mind was racing. The money would have been more tempting had Nollie not unobtrusively delivered an envelope of bills to defray expenses that very morning. “But this is only a two-bedroom, and full to the gills. With a tenant in name only. Nollie … You don’t have to be in the city, do you? What about Jarred?”
“I asked Jarred, too,” Avery said glumly. “He said maybe if I’d asked earlier in the summer, but then he hired some ‘temporary’ farm workers, and now they won’t leave. With their families, and everything. It sounded creepy. Like, it wasn’t exactly his idea. Halfway between having serfs and being held hostage. He said he actually pointed a rifle at them, and they laughed. They could tell he wouldn’t use it. I couldn’t take the kids up there even if he said the more the merrier. It doesn’t sound safe.”
“Why not turn to Lowell’s family? Why is this purely a Mandible problem?”
“My in-laws also live in a two-bedroom, in Fort Lauderdale. Where my brother-in-law, his wife, and their two kids just moved in. They were all wiped out in the Renunciation—thanks to my husband’s peerless investment advice.”
“You’re not doing your marriage any favors by blaming him like that.” Florence was stalling for time. “He didn’t personally default on the national debt.”
“Sorry, but the urge to blame someone you can get your hands on is irresistible. These days, taking on the sins of the world is Lowell’s only constructive function.”
Once in a while, when you have a great deal at stake, like turning a small, quiet nightmare into a big, out-of-control one, your brain actually works. “Listen! Why not approach Grand Mimi?” The inspiration was such a relief that Florence felt weak.
“But I hardly know her …,” Avery faltered. “She’s always been so remote …”
“Like you said, this is about family, about pulling together. And she’s got two bedrooms gathering dust. She’s, what, ninety-five, ninety-six? But not that out of it. She must have some idea what’s going down. It’s not that big an ask, even if she is kind of private.”
As they discussed the proposal further, both sisters relaxed. It was a good plan. The Stackhouses would simply need to keep to themselves, and be respectful. The caretaker Margarita was a good-hearted woman, more companion than nurse, who would surely see as well that this was a Mandible emergency.
But when Florence mooted the idea at the dinner table, Willing was skeptical. “Why should she?”
“Because she’s family,” Florence reiterated, with a sentimentality she didn’t quite buy herself. “We’re talking about her grandchild, and her great-grandchildren.”
“I don’t get the impression she feels any connection to us. She’s always looked at me like some floor lamp.”
“Willing’s right,” Nollie said. “My mother can be one cold customer.”
“She never talks to me,” Willing said. “It’s only, you know, Do you want a cookie?”
Grand Mimi paid her familial dues by giving a rather formal Christmas Eve cocktail party every year, and she did always seem glad when the kids skittered to their parents’ sides for removal. Mimi could barely extend herself to grown grandchildren, and giving a hoot about yet another generation was a bridge too far.
“Maybe it’s better if I clear off,” Kurt said. “Make room for your blood kin.”
“Even if I were willing to throw you out on the street,” Florence said, “it’s not going to help me to lose one houseguest and gain five.”
“It’s not going to help us,” Esteban said testily. He was touchy about pronouns in relation to a house whose deed remained in Florence’s name. With their dinners now crowded with two people neither of whom he cared for, he was touchy, period.
“Nollie?” Florence implored. “I told you my dad hoped you could check up on Grand Mimi, and you weren’t keen on the idea. But now you could go with a mission. Best of all, not on your own behalf.”
“I’d be the worst possible emissary with that woman, on anybody’s behalf.”
“Your appearance would have shock value,” Florence pressed. “It would underscore that these are extraordinary times, calling for extraordinary measures.”
Nollie shrank into herself, looking queasy. It was bizarre to see a woman of seventy-three afraid of her own mother. But with enough manipulative appeals to her lifelong “bravery,” she relented.
Nollie mobilized in a spirit of gritty resolve. Attached to a reputation as intrepid, she insisted on taking the bus to the Jay Street subway stop, though in light of the previous morning’s fat envelope she might easily have covered taxi fare. It was a Saturday afternoon, and after drilling her aunt with directions, Florence was glad for once that the woman dressed so shabbily. Public transport was getting chancy. Anonymous sneakers and jeans lowered the likelihood of her being accosted. Florence almost asked Esteban to act as an escort, but that seemed condescending, and if mother and daughter got into a heart-to-heart, he could be waiting for hours.
Yet Nollie came back more rapidly than expected. On the return journey, she did take a taxi—stepping out shakily, looking wildly up and down the street as she pocketed the change from the fare. As Florence turned from the window, Nollie let herself inside, bolted the top lock, and secured the chain. She headed straight for the cognac.
“So …,” Florence said. “How’d it go?”
Nollie burrowed into the sofa and tucked her feet under her thighs, cradling her juice glass. She looked like a six-year-old with progeria.
“Was she mean to you? Could she honestly be harboring a grudge over Better Late Than this many decades later?”
“I have no idea,” Nollie said robotically.
Willing crept downstairs and sat on the third step to eavesdrop.
“You came back awfully soon,” Florence prodded. “Was she not home, then?”
“She wasn’t home.” Nollie’s rigid manner did not convey the experience of an unanswered doorbell.
“Would you … be willing to try again? Avery’s family has to relinquish their house within days—”
“We can’t try again.”
“Nollie, what happened? This is pulling teeth.”
Willing slipped to the doorway. “She likes story, she said. Stories are about not telling you what happened. When you blurt out the ending, it’s not a story.”
Nollie eyed her grandnephew. “I’m not sure I do like story. Real story. I think maybe I only like the fake kind. Or only real stories about someone else.”
Willing turned to his mother. “See? She’s still doing it. Carter says she’s ‘a hack.’ Who only wrote ‘one bare-all success that titillated literary circles back when there were literary circles.’ But I think she’s good at it. I think she’s got the knack.”
Florence blushed. “Nollie, please don’t take my father’s remarks to heart. Willing’s quoting him immense out of context.”
“I’m familiar with the context,” Nollie said. “I know what Carter thinks of my work. And if I didn’t, I’d be grateful to Willing for letting me know.”
There already seemed a thread between those two, and now Florence appreciated how Esteban must sometimes feel: jealous.
“Go on,” Willing said.
“I was taken aback by Manhattan.” Nollie took a stiff swig. “All the panhandlers. Very aggressive, too. Threatening. When I lived on the Upper West Side, the bums were crazy. Now they’re sane enough, but rancorous. I was surprised: rancor is worse. Crazy people are sealed in their own world, and their energy churns around and around, like in a blender. But this bile is straight arrow. It’s aimed at other people.
“You folks are used to it. But for me … The families camped out on the meridians in the middle of Broadway. So many shops closed. Restaurants still open keeping their shutters down. The news reports in Europe—they don’t include what it’s like to walk down the street. Less like New York, and more like Lagos.
“I’d hopped off a station short, at Seventy-Ninth Street. I thought I’d go to Zabar’s, show up with my mother’s favorite smoked sable, as a peace offering. Zabar’s has been at Eighty-First and Broadway for a hundred years. I’ve made runs there for whole-grain mustard and pop-up sponges since I was a kid. But the store has been vandalized. Someone slashed graffiti over the plywood, EAT YOUR SALMON. I thought that was almost witty. I decided to skip bringing a present.
“At my mother’s building, there was no more doorman. Fortunately I brought the keys, which I’ve carried all over Europe since 1996.” Nollie turned. “See, I didn’t fight this assignment that hard, Florence. I’ve never been resigned to not seeing her again. We’re both so willful, feasting on our grudges. But generating all that anger, year after year, has worn me out. And by now, the whole feud thing isn’t only exhausting, but exhausted. It’s been feeling a little stupid for quite a while.”
“All grown up, at seventy-three,” Florence said. “There’s hope for us all, then.”
“The floor was gritty. Mailboxes were listing open. Fifty-eight’s had a copy of Foundation Journal jammed inside, but the issue was from back in September. The elevator was broken, so I took the stairs. Some guy walking down bumped into me, hard, as if on purpose. His clothes were disheveled, with one exception: an immaculate white fedora. I thought, That’s weird, because when I was a kid my father had one just like it.
“When I rang the bell, I was shaking. I’d no idea how she’d respond to me, with no warning. I didn’t want to give her a heart attack. And that was the other worry: what if she hadn’t answered the phone because of a health crisis.”
Florence said, “If Grand Mimi were in the hospital, someone—”
“I don’t mean that kind of health crisis. The thing is, I wasn’t shaking only because she might still refuse to speak to me. Or because she might be indisposed. Something felt wrong. After I buzzed, the peephole cover lifted. There was an eye. It wasn’t my mother’s.”
Florence said, “Margarita—”
“The peephole cover dropped, and spun around, as if someone flicked it. No one opened the door. I tried the bell again, and heard laughter on the other side. Youngish voices. Then the man on the stairs came back, carrying a bottle of gin. He shouldered me aside and said, ‘Got a problem, lady?’ He took out a set of keys. I recognized them. Looped with a red ORGAN DONOR tag. They had to have been my mother’s. That man didn’t look like an organ donor, unless he was planning to donate someone else’s.”
Florence said, “Maybe she’s had to take in tenants—”
Nollie ignored her niece’s jive theory. “I know I get myself into trouble. I have a temper. My last ex, Gerard, told me I have to learn to rein it in. He said I’ve no idea how small I am, how old I am, how I’m not as strong as I think. Gerard said I had to learn to be cowed. But I don’t have a talent for cowed. So when this man began to bully in the door, I demanded, ‘Where is Mimi Mandible? This is my mother’s apartment, and I need to check she’s all right.’ He repeated ‘Mimi Mandible’ as if that were the funniest, stupidest name he’d ever heard. I insisted he explain what he was doing there, and he said something like, ‘Piss off, you old bag.’ He shoved me, and I fell.”
“Are you okay?” Florence asked.
“Achy, but nothing broke. While I was still on the floor, the man doffed the fedora with mock chivalry, and repeated, ‘Mimi Mandible! Mimi Mandible!’ before letting himself in. No one has ever found my mother’s name quite so hilarious.
“At that point, I should have left, I realize that now. But I was so angry. Apartment fifty-eight is my home—and somehow having been banished from it for over thirty years makes it more mine. I thought, this place has already been taken away from me once, and twice is beyond the pale. Carter and I raced each other as kids on that staircase. I grew up on the other side of that door, which is full of my mother’s things, her jewelry, her perfume, her beautiful shoes—and we wear the same size. Someday those should be my things, mementoes of my childhood and of my mother. For decades, I’ve held on to the idea that she picked the fight to begin with, and she owes me an apology. After living with Pop so many years, surely Momma of all people should appreciate the importance of a book, and how art has to take precedence over feelings.” If Nollie was sneering, it was at herself. “Anyway, suddenly it all seemed so wasteful. Even I didn’t care about my book, or any book. I had to get in there. In my imagination, I’d rescue her from that awful man who made fun of her name, and she’d cling to me, and weep in gratitude, and she’d forgive me.”
“You used your keys,” Willing said.
“Everything happened very fast, but I saw enough—and I wish I hadn’t. The place was a wreck. Trash, dried-up sandwiches, hypodermics on the floor. Someone sleeping or high in the hallway was rolled up in one of Momma’s Persian carpets. A girl naked below the waist wandered past wearing the shreds of Momma’s mink; that girl looked right at me and didn’t see me. It was freezing; the utilities must be shut off. And it reeked. Encrusted pieces of my parents’ wedding china, the teal with the silver edge, were crashed around everywhere in shards. It looked as if they’d been using Momma’s collection of art vases for football practice; chunks of them were rolling around the hall. Through the entrance to the living room, I could see more young people, mostly out cold. The cream upholstery was covered in what looked like vomit. Carter and I got into terrible trouble if we ever ate chocolate sitting on that set.”
“Tell me you got out of there,” Florence said.
“I only stood in the doorway a few seconds. Then the man in the fedora sauntered into the hall, down by the dining room, swigging from the bottle of gin. His eyes lit up, and he lunged toward me. I picked up a chunk of vase at my feet—the clear Deco one with the crystal jags; I always thought it was ugly—and I hurled it. I only hit his knee, but I think it hurt. Then I ran. When Carter and I raced on those stairs, I always won. I didn’t even turn to see if the man gave chase, just powered to Broadway and flagged down a taxi. Finally fifty years’ worth of all that tedious exercise proved good for something.” The story, more than the sprint, seemed to have worn her out.
“We should call the police,” Florence said.
“I already did,” Nollie said flatly. “The dispatcher promised to send someone around, but I’m not convinced. She warned me that ‘squatting’ incidents were rife, and when I explained my mother was ninety-six I could hear her lose interest. The police were ‘overstretched,’ she said. They had to ‘prioritize.’”
“Everyone at school,” Willing said, “says contacting the police is a waste of time. They’re mostly obsessed with protecting themselves.”
“What have those people done with Grand Mimi, and Margarita?” Florence said.
“I’m not sure that bears thinking about,” Nollie said.
“But how would strangers get in to begin with?”
Nollie shrugged. “Must be easy to dog two old women with their shopping. Don’t you ever feel vulnerable, inserting a key in the front door? I sure will from now on.”
“Nollie is right,” Willing said. “We can’t go back there. Not without a gun.”
“Willing!” Florence admonished. “We don’t carry guns in this family!”
“I should have swallowed my pride, back in the nineties,” Nollie said, “and come to terms with my mother. I thought it was a matter of artistic integrity, refusing to regret writing the very novel that made my reputation. But it was ordinary stubbornness. The truth is, the portrayal of the mother in BLT isn’t flattering. I sure wouldn’t appreciate anyone publishing that I was ‘as sexual as a dead mackerel,’ for all the world to read. I never needed to unwrite the book, which is impossible anyway. All I ever had to say was that I was sorry for hurting her feelings, which would have cost me nothing.” She rose to pour another finger. “I made a terrible mistake.”
“The mistake,” Willing said, “was not taking a gun.”