Random Acts of Senseless Violence (8 page)

‘And darlings I'll keep editing horrible manuscripts' Mama said. ‘I'm dumbfounded how illiterate writers are these days.' Speak for yourself Daddy said and they both laughed again. ‘What's a pubic hair factory?' Boob kept asking and she was laughing too. I started feeling upset
because things are obviously really bad Anne but everybody else in my family is acting like there's nothing to worry about. If they just wanted to make the best of it that's okay. But they go manic depressive, everything will be whoopdeedo until it's not and then everything's gloomy-doom. They're so crazy. All I can do is prepare for the worst and that way I won't feel as bad when they crash and then I can cheer them up, maybe.

Then Daddy said remember I told you we might have to move somewhere else for a few months? Boob stopped laughing and got real quiet. Here I thought we weren't going to have to because they never said anything else about it. ‘Oh darlings it's as I said it'll just be for a little while' Mama said but I don't think she knows. This is the way it'll work. Daddy says we'll sublet our apartment until he gets his next contract. He was able to get another loan from someone he knows to pay the back rent. Another writer who's in the Western Guild will live here and pay the rent on our apartment plus extra for our trouble. With that and what he makes at work Daddy'll pay the rent on our new apartment. They've already signed the lease. Daddy went to Columbia and he rigged something with them that lets us move into one of their buildings. Not one of their dorm buildings but a regular one. Daddy says it's a safe neighborhood and we'll be able to live cheaper there. Me and Boob will have to share a room again of course. ‘Booz and me together again' Boob said. That doesn't make me happy but I expected that might be one of my sacrifices. ‘Will we have to leave school?' I asked.

‘Oh sweetie never not until they throw you out' Mama said. Daddy says he's paid our tuition for this year and he's sure there'll be money to pay for it next fall. He said he'd talked to Miss Taylor and he thinks everything's worked out. ‘What did you tell her?' I asked. He told me not to worry about it. ‘I'll keep looking to see if anyone wants to have me as a teacher' Mama said.

Daddy says we're going to have to start packing. We're
going to have to move out next weekend! We'll be leaving a lot of our furniture here but we'll take our beds and the couch and some of the chairs, also chests of drawers and dressers. Daddy says I can take my new desk. Some of our stuff we'll put in storage but everything we need we'll take with us when we move. ‘We're not nomads darlings we'll just be carrying our worldly possessions on our slight backs because we won't be gone that long I'm sure of it' Mama said. ‘I believe you' I said. ‘I'm sure of it darling oh don't worry' Mama said. Then I knew she was trying to convince herself and not me so I didn't say anything else. ‘I want to see the new apartment' Boob said. Daddy said we could go over this weekend once the old tenants were out. This weekend is the day after tomorrow.

Mama and Daddy gave us hugs and kisses. Daddy said it'd be tough but it was a good thing not to get too spoiled. ‘Were you spoiled?' I asked and Daddy said no. ‘Darling he was so rotten you couldn't stay in the same room with him his mama said' Mama said. ‘We're not spoiled either we're precious jewels' Boob said and then it was hee hee hee all around again. When we finished talking Boob went into her room to go to bed and didn't come out the rest of the night even when I knocked. I wanted to talk to her tonight to see how she felt. When I opened the door I saw she was already asleep. She was wearing her My L'il Fetus which now has no arms. She doesn't know what happened to them but I think she probably ate them in her sleep.

The only thing I can say about how I feel is that I don't feel good. I always have had this fear Anne that we wouldn't be able to live as good as we do forever and I'm afraid I'm being proven right. Once we move I guess I'll have a better idea of what it's going to be like living some other way. I'm lying on the floor to write this. I hate my stupid bed and desk and I don't want to take them along. I know that's childish but it's the way I feel right now and I'm not sorry. I don't want to move Anne I don't.

Night night.

MARCH
20

Today was Friday and the last week of Spring break. When I woke up it was early so I went in Boob's room. She was still snoozing away so I sat down and shook her. ‘Scram' she said when she saw it was me. ‘Are you okay Boob?' I asked. ‘I want to sleep' she said.'We have to get up so we can start packing Boob so get up' I said. ‘Don't want to get up.' ‘You have to.' ‘Don't want to.'

As you can imagine Anne it went on like that for some time before I finally got Boob sitting up conscious. ‘How do you feel Boob?' I asked. ‘About what?' ‘About having to move' I said and she lay down in bed again. ‘Too sleepy' she said. ‘I mean move out of the apartment somewhere else' I said. ‘We'll be back' she said. ‘It's like when we went to London. We had another apartment then.' ‘That was just for the summer Boob and of course we came back then' I said. ‘This is different.' ‘No it's not' she said.

She never would look at me while we were talking and finally I gave up. If she's not upset there's no sense trying to make her upset, it'll happen soon enough. Anyway once everybody got up and we had breakfast we spent the whole day packing and getting rid of stuff. We cleaned out the foyer closet and the hall closets and everything in the laundry room. Mama had Boob sorting piles into other piles to keep her busy. Once we had the closets done Mama went back to editing manuscripts. I can tell she's upset but she's acting like nothing's wrong at all.

On the news tonight they said everything is calmed down in Brooklyn but they have other riots in other places in Long Island. The Mayor was saying he was going to ask the President to bring in more of the Army. They said the President was busy and didn't say if he would or wouldn't yet.

Tonight I can't write you as much as I've been writing. It's very late and I'm about to fall over. Every muscle I've got is ripped and I can hardly walk I'm so tired. More packing tomorrow. Will write tomorrow unless I have a complete breakdown.

MARCH
21

I woke up before anybody else did this morning. I was so stiff I knew I should move around and get loosened up. I went in the living room and was doing exercises. This being Saturday morning the credit guy called again. I recognized his voice right away and tried to hang up on him before he had a chance to say anything mean. Didn't work though because he recognized me and said ooh they're going to get you. ‘Shut up' I said and hung up and took the phone off the hook. I thought at first Daddy hadn't paid off all the bills yet, but then I wondered if maybe the credit guy was calling back trying to get me like he was making obscene phone calls. It wouldn't surprise me.

After twenty minutes of exercising I felt much better. My gym teacher Miss Norris told me I'm very strong for my age and should think about going out for tennis or even fencing. I'm almost as tall as Daddy is now and I'll probably be stronger than he is before you know it. Daddy isn't exactly macho after all. I'm glad he's not, I couldn't stand him if he was. He'd be like those stupid boys at Lori's party that we're always having to fend off. He went to a mixed school and not a boy's school and I think that helped. Going to a boy's school just makes them worse, I think.

When I got dressed I came back in the living room and sat on the couch for a while watching the light come in the window as the sun came up. The fireplace got all gold first and then white again. Where Daddy took some of the paintings down the wall is much lighter and I can't believe how dirty the paint is. Our living room is ours Anne, it's nobody else's. I'm going to miss it so much even if they're all right and we do come back soon. I've never even thought about living somewhere else forever before. Even when we lived in London that summer I knew we'd be back soon and the last week we were there I couldn't wait to come back.

Nobody was up still so I went into my room and started going through my chest of drawers. Luckily I threw out a
lot of junk when my new furniture that I hate so much now came last month, so it wasn't hard sorting it out. Daddy brought home boxes from the liquor stores on 86th yesterday and so I started packing away like a pack rat. When everybody else woke up they got to work too. I can't believe how much we're throwing out that I've never even seen. I don't think Mama and Daddy have ever cleaned out any of their stuff before.

This afternoon Daddy boxed up six boxes of his books and took them to the Strand downtown. He has thousands of books so that doesn't seem that many Anne but I've never known him to get rid of any before, he loves all of his books so much. ‘Oh darling they're nothing they're just old college textbooks and full of silly nonsense now we went to school so long ago' Mama said. But I've looked for books for school when we've gone to the Strand before and they don't sell textbooks. So they must have been real books.

I love my books too but I don't have nearly as many as Mama and Daddy. I'd never get rid of any of mine either, unless I had to like I think Daddy has had to. Mine are all packed up now and ready to go and so are my summer clothes and my old stuffies and so much of everything of mine. Boob and Mama went through everything in her messy room today and tried to straighten it out. Boob wasn't goofing like usual, and I asked her if she was feeling all right. ‘Tummy troubles' she said and slapped My L'il Fetus like she was trying to hurt it. ‘I got an ulcer.'

Anne I'd write more but I'm too too tired. Maybe I ought to exercise more like I did this morning. We're going to go over to the new apartment tomorrow. I'll let you know everything about how it looks.

MARCH
22

Today Sunday was the first day we saw the new apartment where we'll be staying. I can't call it our new apartment because it'll never be ours like our apartment is. It's not
new at all, it's much older than ours. It's in an old red brick building at the corner of Tiemann Place and Broadway right below 125th Street. It's the most northern part of Morningside Heights. Boob calls it Alaska. Above 125th Street is Harlem. The subway is an el on Broadway at Tiemann and goes over a gigantic iron bridge that's all rusty and dirty. Old broken down cars are parked underneath. Mama and Daddy say we shouldn't catch the subway there. We can catch the bus to the east side on Broadway at 123rd and then ride over to Fifth Avenue and then we can catch the 86th Street bus to East End and then walk down to Brearley. We have to leave for school an hour earlier every morning to get there on time. I'll never get enough sleep again!

Daddy says the neighborhood looks worse than it really is. A lot of Columbia people live there and some of the buildings on the north side of Tiemann are even co-ops though I can't believe it. The people on the street all look poor and unhappy. Tiemann Place only goes two blocks and then it ends at Riverside Park. Daddy says we shouldn't go in, it's much more dangerous than Central Park which is much nicer anyway.

The apartment itself is really bad Anne and I'm not just saying that because it's not ours. The floors are all worn out and the walls are cracked. It's sort of big but not nearly as big as our place and not at all as nice. There's a living room and a small room like a dining room and two bedrooms and a kitchen and a bathroom. Daddy is going to use the small room to write in. A long dark hall connects everything. It seems like it'll be really hot in the summer though we're bringing air conditioners to put in the windows in our bedrooms. There're only two closets in the whole place and they're all crumbly inside.

‘It's a slum' Boob said and Daddy said it wasn't, it was student housing. He said we were getting a bargain because they always charged students more. Mama didn't look very happy with the place but she didn't say anything. I think
she was doing more medication today than usual because she was very quiet and seemed to drift off all the time whenever she sat down. After we saw the apartment we walked down Broadway. Nobody I saw looked much like a student until we got closer to Columbia. The buildings along Broadway where the campus is are all being strung up with barbed wire because the crime is so bad and the people at the gate looked like real policemen with machine guns like at the airport. Even the students didn't look much like students somehow.

We took the bus home catching it at 110th and riding over and then down Fifth. When we got back to our apartment we heard an echo when we walked in because some of the rugs are already rolled up and the curtains are down in Daddy's study. He says they were expensive enough and he doesn't want anything to happen to them while someone else is living there. The walls are covered with lighter spaces now like they have measles. We've been stacking the boxes in the front room where it'll be easier to get them when it comes time to move.

Daddy went to bed early as he has to go to work in the morning. Mama says it's the first time he's had to go to a job since he was thirty-five. He's fifty now and Mama's forty-seven. It seems to me that they're getting pretty old for all these changes and that's strange because I never really thought of them as old before. I sat in the living room tonight with Mama while she cleaned out a chest of drawers. It was very sad. ‘Oh sweetie look at this silly picture of Michael and me' Mama said and she showed me an old photo of them in Rockefeller Center. It was Christmas and the tree was up behind them. ‘If your father was taller it'd look like the star was coming out of his head' Mama said. ‘Were you married then?' I asked. ‘Were we?' she asked looking at the photo. ‘I think we were darling but it's hard to tell with old pictures it could have been taken anytime.' She threw the photo on the pile of stuff she was throwing out. ‘Don't do that I want it' I said. ‘Oh angel I
didn't mean to throw it there so certainly rescue it and if you want it sweetie you keep it next to your heart' Mama said. ‘I'll keep it in my diary' I said and here it is right now, tucked in this page. Then we talked about you Anne.