Empties (14 page)

Her mother would blink and smile. “It’s good for you to come with us, dear.”
 

“Who does the little bitch think she is,” her father said.
 

“She’s a little lady,” her mother answered, smiling again, “so don’t be crude, Emilio. It sets a bad example for young ears. She won’t make friends easily if she learns to talk that way. Not to worry, she’ll learn better.”
 

“Yeah, she’s a little landlady in training,” her father whispered. “In the butcher business we didn’t squeeze people.”
 

“You gave short weight and short change just like everybody else,” her mother said.
 

“I never did—ever.”
 

Her father had quickly grown to hate owning the building, which he had bought with his brother on a winning lottery ticket as the down payment. Rents paid the mortgage, but there had never been any surplus, and repairs kept becoming more expensive. A year after the partnership, his brother had died in a car crash after drinking all night, leaving Dierdre’s parents as sole owners of the brownstone.
 

No one had ever asked her if she wanted to be a landlady. When she had come back from college—where the professors and students had also failed to make her into something like themselves—to take possession and run the brownstone, she had been grateful when the old tenants had moved out, one by one, as if dubious of the change in management, to be replaced by new ones. Only the water thrower, now an even older woman who refused to die, had stayed.
 

Dierdre remembered the stillness that had come into her during that first year, the peace of being almost no one at all, because the past had fallen away from her and it seemed to her that she was now waiting to become someone else; there was no one left to make her into what they wanted her to be, what they imagined she was.
 

But the past had started filtering back into her, reminding her that she had not been able to go very far from home, only as far as Michigan. And her parents had fought with her even about that: her mother had struggled to hang on to her only child, and her father had complained that his daughter was getting above herself; having a scholarship only proved to him that she had fooled someone into giving it to her.
 

She turned from the window and remembered the fearful thrill of those first few weeks after her discovery, when she had tried out her ability. It had helped her forget Atalanta, for whom she had wept so foolishly, unable for a while to control her tears at unpredictable moments. She practiced her skill because she could. That was the first lesson she had learned. Just like piano practice, except that she could see her talent working, becoming stronger, less tiring. It would defend her fortress self.
 

It was not unlike the special, quick movement she had learned in bringing herself to orgasm, either alone or with a man. Alone it was a twitch of her wrist; with a man it was a short jerk of her hips, a sudden twist of her will, a quirky way of emptying things that were full, of letting things... fall away from her grasp. And it worked best during orgasm, leaving her breathless with the wonder of moving something alive from one place to another in a sudden wild jump that separated cells from each other, severed veins and arteries, leaving an empty space in the head. Of course, use during orgasm would not always be practical.
 

Edwina Foster, the dishwater thrower, Dierdre had let live on the top floor. She was unfinished business that Dierdre had saved up.
 

“You might come and get the rent from me yourself, young lady,” the old hag had said every time, “and not make me suffer up and down four flights.” Every time, the exact same words and wrinkled grimaces.
 

The old woman had never answered her door at rent time, always paying late, at her whim, without minding the stairs, when she knew that Dierdre’s annoyance at her delay would peak.
 

“I have to pay the bills for this house on time,” Dierdre had told her. “Where do you think I get it? I would appreciate the rent before the tenth of the month if you want to go on living here.”
 

“That’s your problem, dearie, not mine.” The old woman had smiled. “I’m sure you have enough to manage, sweetie.”
 

Edwina Foster was well aware that running the building was costing more each year, and that Dierdre needed the rent on time to avoid out of pocket expenses. She had raised rents twice in three years, making the possible loss of a tenant a greater difficulty. A month or two break in the cash flow, if a tenant died or moved, would be a loss of a month or more of income. Edwina knew that she could not be evicted except for non-payment; the dishwater and smelly old soup were all in the past, and could not be brought as a legal complaint today. Any other valid reason for eviction would be a long court case and cost more than it was worth.
 

She paid in cash, and never talked about money. She seemed to have more than enough. Did she keep it in her apartment?
 

The old woman went out one hot summer day and left her door open. Dierdre stepped inside and was appalled by the dirty clothing heaped on chairs, the filthy floor, dusty stuffed animals, old photographs in broken glass frames on the walls, the putrid urine smell from an unflushed toilet that would not flush, about which the old woman had not complained. Dierdre lifted the tank cover and a disconnected lever rod, which she reattached, flushed, then worried for some days that the old witch would notice that she had been visited, but Edwina Foster said nothing. Dierdre had been ready with the excuse that the toilet had posed a danger, to justify what had been her illegal entry into the apartment, since no one had complained of hearing water running.
 

Dierdre followed her one day, and learned that they used the same bank on Fourteenth Street. The old woman kept a safety deposit box there, where Dierdre also had the box she had taken over from her parents.
 

One day, when the old woman was inside the safety deposit vault, Dierdre went in after her and slipped into the adjoining cubicle. When the attendant brought her own long box to her, Dierdre thanked her, waited a moment, then put it on the floor next to the partition, stepped up onto her chair, and looked down into the next cubicle. Edwina Foster was sitting with her open box, resting. After a few moments she began to rummage in her box. She seemed very sad as she brought old photos up close to her eyes and then put the pictures back in the small metal coffin of her past. It seemed that she was trying to remember people.
 

Dierdre slipped back down and waited. The attendant, a young woman in a silly tight skirt, came back and asked the old woman if she needed any help. Dierdre peered over the partition and saw Edwina Foster shake her head. Her trembling hand shook as she held an old picture. The attendant left quickly.
 

Dierdre twitched and emptied the old woman onto the table next to the box and then hurried around to the cubicle. She scooped up the brain with a large handkerchief, wiped the table carefully, and put the mess in her handbag, later dropping the bundle in a street wastebasket on the way home. She had taken only the packets of money, leaving the jewelry and personal items untouched, then put the money in her own box and replaced it in the wall.
 

The old woman’s family doctor, who seemed to be trembling at the edge of his own grave, signed the death certificate without examining the body. The well-dressed daughter and son-in-law drove in from Far Rockaway to clear out the apartment and arrange the funeral. They took away a few choice pieces of old furniture. Dierdre overheard them complaining that the old woman, the wife’s mother, had left no money in the deposit box and not enough in her bank account to clean out her apartment and bury her. They were slow in emptying the rooms, and grudgingly paid an additional month’s rent. The daughter seemed relieved when she came back alone to return the key to Dierdre, and had apologized for the odors that might still be lurking.
 

“I’ve opened the windows,” she said, “so you’ll want to close them before it gets too cold.” Possible odors seemed to distress her most of all.
 

The old woman’s money had cushioned the running of the building. Dierdre left the apartment empty for a few months, and let any rent raises slide until the following year. An aging policeman finally took the apartment for his uncomplaining mother, whom he visited regularly, and Dierdre felt that Edwina Foster had departed much too easily.
 

Dierdre lay down on the sofa, closed her eyes, and remembered her high school years, when she had come to hate people she knew only by sight, or very slightly, because they acted as if they knew something she didn’t. They wanted people to believe that they had a plan, in the way they talked and dressed, but their plan seemed to be only to look like they had a plan.
 

No matter how much she studied them and tried to imitate them, her clothes were always not quite right, her hair the wrong style, her attempts at wit awkwardly delivered, or just misunderstood. Almost everyone around her behaved as if they had something no one else could get, and she hated them for it, because it seemed that there was only a limited supply of things to do and have, and they were planning to get them all for themselves, leaving nothing for her. They had made her feel that she had nothing and would never grow up to be anything.
 

In college she had learned that a scholarship and good grades did not trump the faint mustache she had to have removed by electrolysis, that she had no special academic gifts beyond being a good student, and that she lacked the confidence and poise of the other students, who went out to movies and concerts and football games and beer blasts and parties, where the men seemed to want only to use her. Lonely nights in the dorm had taught her to think of herself as a failure in a world of faces, torsos, thighs, tits, and asses.
 

“Dierdre.” She still remembered the way Ken Raskin had said her name and how the other boys with him had snickered during her first year in high school. Walking down hallways, she had heard them braying, “Deeer-dra.” She had made a collection of their remarks about her uncoolness and lack of tits, all filed under Ken Raskin’s sneer, “Deeer-dra.” She had sometimes hoped to become a “Dee” or “DeeDee,” but she had never achieved the acceptance, much less the love, that went with a nickname. Something evil had simply made her unlovable.
 

People, she had quickly learned, were only examples of a clique, never themselves. In high school, there had been the black rappers, the tough Latinos, the diligent and studious Asians, the working-class ethnics, a few bewildered-looking white kids whose old Sixties radical parents wanted them in a multiracial public school, the gangs and the dropouts, and a mixed group of popular kids who dominated most of the activities, and whose females flirted with the dangerous kids to annoy their boyfriends. There had been one blond college-bound boy, a lone bewildered intellectual type who had told her that he felt like a god reincarnated in the body of a beast and forced to run with them. “Only quoting Nietzsche,” he had said, but what could citing some dead philosopher mean? It was how someone felt about living that counted; one had only to feel hunger, to sweat, to smell one’s own body and that of others, or look into a toilet bowl to feel that the beast was alive and well.
 

Then there had been the college jocks, the sorority girls, the frat boys, more pretentious intellectuals, the future doctors and lawyers, the party animals, the politicians, the one-of-a-kind individuals who belonged to nothing, and the sturdy farm kids. She had never fit in with any of them, and wished now that she been able to use her power to thin out the herd...
 

She steadied herself. A child or adolescent with such power, combined with the hormonal rages of youth, would have given herself away early. Better that her gift had flowered in her in adulthood, as had her good looks, giving her a chance to see through people. Today, none of her detractors would know her; she would have to explain too much, if they remembered her at all.
 

But one of them had come to her—like a gift from the angels.
 

“Is there an apartment for rent?” the woman had asked meekly.
 

“Yes, there is,” Dierdre replied, recognizing the short, redheaded woman. She was fatter, and tired, in a gray business suit that did not quite fit, with a white blouse and low black heels. She clutched a small black purse in her left hand.
 

“Your name?” Dierdre asked.
 

“Ivy... Young,” she said.
 

So she had married, Dierdre thought as she recognized Ivy what’s-her-face from college, the girl in the next dorm room. She had once given Dierdre three dresses as a present and told her that she had bought them for three dollars each. “You’ll look much better in these,” she had said, oblivious to her insult. Dierdre had accepted the dresses with a smile, had endured Ivy’s nagging to wear them during the next two semesters, but had thrown the dresses away when Ivy had finally transferred to a more prestigious university, bragging that she was now going to attend a “real college.”
 

Despite Dierdre’s stare, the apartment hunter had not recognized her, and Dierdre realized that no one knew that Ivy was here. Such a moment would not come again.