BY THE SAME AUTHOR After Delores GirJs, Visions and Everything The Sophie Horowitz Story PEOPLE IN TROUBLE SARAH SCHULMAN E. P. DUTTON NEW YORK ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Different friends read this book in various versions. Each had a wholly unique and personal set of criteria that they brought to the project. I thank them for their time and attention, especially Maxine Wolfe, Bettina Berch, Abigail Child, Christie Cassidy, Meg Wolitzer, Julia Scher, David Leavitt, Shelley Wald, Michael Korie, Stewart Wallace, Beryl Satter, Robert Hilferty and Ana Maria Simo. People in Trouble was financed, in part, through generous grants and loans from Charlie Schulman, Susan Seizer, my parents, Jennifer Miller, Abigail Child, Rachel Pfeffer, Beryl Satter, Diane Cleaver with Sanford Greenburger Associates, the Mac- Dowell Colony, Cummington Community for the Arts, and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. I thank them for their support and patience. My editor, Carole DeSanti, engaged this book with a high level of concentration and creativity. I am grateful for her insightful and intelligent contributions throughout the many drafts. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Vll It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness. KARL MARX AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA It was the beginning of the end of the world but not everyone noticed right away. Some people were dying. Some people were busy. Some people were cleaning their houses while the war movie played on television. The cigarette in the mouth of the woman behind the register was cemented with purple lipstick. She had lipstick smeared on her smock. Tiny caterpillars of gray ash decorated the sticky glass countertop. “I’ll take these two,” Kate told her, holding each bra in a different hand. “You’d better try them on,” the clerk answered with a quick professional assessment. “These are too big for you, miss, and after a certain age you can’t count on growing any more in that direction.” “They’re not for me,” Kate said, enjoying herself thoroughly. “Cash please.” AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA 1 Which one would Molly wear first? She held them in her hands absentmindedly running the material through her fingers. Kate would see them on Molly’s body before she touched them in place. There was the demure lace that opened from the front, like walking in through a garden gate. Then there was the really dirty push-up that didn’t need to open. Kate could lift Molly’s breasts right out over the top. Kate held them in her hands. She could run her fingers over the lace and feel its texture as she felt Molly’s nipples changing underneath. “Leopard-print crotchless panties on sale,” the woman added, folding ashes into the wrapping paper. “Maybe your friend would like a pair of these too. Great with skirts.” It would be three days before she saw Molly again. Kate climbed the stairs to her lover’s apartment and left the package by the front door with a private note. When they did meet on schedule, Kate felt a certain nervous eroticism wondering which one Molly had chosen, which one was waiting for her under Molly’s soft blouse. “You’re sexy,” Kate told her at dusk. “You have languid eyes and beautiful breasts. I gift wrap them as a present to myself. Your breasts are beautiful, creamy and sweet.” She pressed her hands from Molly’s face to her chest and felt the shape of the lace underneath, but then kept going back to that wisp waist and the sloping shelf at the end of her back. “But it’s your ass that turns me on tonight. Tonight it’s your ass that’s hot.” Then she thought Am I really saying these things? Molly pulled her out of the early streetlight and into a shadow, so the gypsy reading fortunes in the storefront across the way wouldn’t have to push her kids into the back room out of sight. Molly arched her ass, sliding over Kate’s flesh so that Kate felt her lover’s warm body against her chest and the cool brick wall on her back. “Let’s go up on your roof,” Kate said. “You really want to do it, don’t you?” Molly laughed, her neck smelling like cucumber. “Guess so.” 2 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA “Let’s go,” Molly said, looking sparkly and quite lovely. “Besides, there’s not that much time left.” There was a change, then, to a quiet happiness and a certain sense of contentment that accompanied them up the stairs. On top of the building there was only heaven and a radio rising from illuminated shapes. A man was smoking somewhere—they could hear him cough. The radio was a thin reed. There was a child to the right and silverware clattering, all below. There were undiscernible cars, frequently, and a chime and a voice. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA 3 PETER AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA There was a fight in the coffee shop that morning that got out of hand very quickly. Then Peter walked an entire block to avoid some kind of turf war between two young black men who were probably selling crack. We New Yorkers always have something else to fear, he told himself, turning up University Place. First it was herpes, this year it’s crossfire. Originally he’d just been wandering, but was seduced, on the spot, by the idea of a bowling alley occupying two floors of an office building, and decided to duck in. Where he grew up, bowling alleys had always been white stucco boxes with a giant-size pin towering over the parking lot. The bowlers had been divided into two groups; league competitors and amateurs on dates. Anyone could pick out the regulars because they looked so serious. The women had that lacquered 4 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAi hair, teased and dyed red, bleached or frosted. They wore over- size bowling jackets with their husbands’ names embroidered on their backs. The men had regulation jackets that fit, regulation shoes and little personalized carrying cases for their bowling balls. City people, on the other hand, didn’t take tenpins to heart. They had a thousand other fascinating ways to occupy their time and so retreated, one rainy Sunday a year, to broken shoes and chipped balls. In Manhattan, bowling is symbolic. It is nostalgia for a simpler life. Peter stepped into an elevator that was two by three with a skinny Chinese operator chain-smoking Kents. There was no ventilation, so passengers held their breath until the old contraption clanked to the second floor. There, the hand-operated iron-grate door creaked open to reveal a faded hall of crashing pins and a few timeless Italian kids yelling “Joey.” Most everyone else, though, seemed too modern to be bowling. It wasn’t a sport to them, it was only a kick. When Peter was growing up in New Hampshire, the light had been delicate, not globbed on like wet plaster New York style. Night in Manhattan is never dark, only the days can be. But New England nights were black underneath, covered with a layer of starlight and then midnight blue. That elusive color showed itself only twice a year; once during the rainy period of early April that felt like fall and then in the clarity days of October that smelled like spring. It was a symbol of sensual confusion. As a child he’d ride on his bike or be in a car at night and every so often he’d pass a house in which there was a yellow glow for someone to come home to. He would sit in it later, wearing pajamas, waiting for two headlights, more pale yellow than the kitchen’s straw. They threw shadows on the driveway that were followed by the crunch of gravel. That was how he remembered his mother most clearly. She would step out of the car in her pink uniform and white shoes, kicking them off first thing. Then she’d count the tips. Every night until he went to work himself Peter watched his mother divide up all the change, starting with the pennies, saving the AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA 5 quarters for last. She’d lean back in her chair so they could stare at the coins together. She knew exactly what the stacks could and could not do for her. After Peter was put to bed, his mother spoke briefly to herself. She’d talk back to a customer, list everything that had gone undone, recall or invent conversation. Then she’d pour a whiskey. He could hear the ice clinking in the kitchen. She’d turn on the radio a shade too low and that was the last sound in his head when Peter fell asleep at night; the murmur of the radio with his mother’s occasional duet. The particular yellow that brought her home from work was the first chapter in his lifetime of light and stayed strong as a memory until he’d finally applied it thirty years later to a small musical uptown. In the third act the hero, having escaped over a prison wall, burst into song. After the last note of the final refrain, the police switched on their ignition, trapping him in the eye of their headlights. It pleased Peter every night to see the convict’s expression of fright, hearing the audience gasp, when he knew all along that it was only his mother driving home from work with an apronful of nickels. Memory, he thought, is part of what light means to me. The rented bowling shoes matched the pins; white, with red stripes.