'How about them? I've got those, too.'
'Does that lady across the street still rent out rooms by the week?' she called after the shopkeeper.
'If I say you're okay,' he answered over his back, 'she will.'
'Will you say I'm okay?'
His face hardened. 'I always ask a few questions for her. She's a nice old lady who can't hear too well anymore.'
'Okay.' She nodded quickly.
'Just don't fib to me, either, because I do her evictions for her. I mean, I get someone who does it for her, someone who, you know, likes to do evictions.'
'Right.' He's cruel, she thought, so don't beg.
He looked her over, first hanging up a dress. 'Now then, you're back in the city?'
'And need a cheap place to live.'
'What was your last place of residence?'
'Prison, actually.'
'Oh well, forget it!' He waved his hands in frantic dismissal.
'What do you mean, forget it?'
'Forget it means forget it. You're a criminal.'
'Not really.'
'What's that mean?'
'I broke the law, but I'm not a criminal.'
'What did you do?'
She took a breath. In the future she would not mention prison. People couldn't handle it. 'My boyfriend worked in a ring that stole shipments out of cargo warehouses and then resold the stuff. Most of the time I just went to college. But then I dropped out and read a lot. Then I helped him a little bit with his scheduling. I got caught. The others didn't. I didn't talk, which made the D.A.'s Office pretty mad. They had, shall we say, very little compassion.'
'What happened to the rest of the baddies?' said the shopkeeper, arms folded in front of him.
'I have no idea.'
'Was it drugs?'
'The stuff in the trucks? No.'
'Are you a junkie?' he asked Christina.
'You already looked at my arms, I saw you.'
He peered at her through his half-frames. Then, as if losing interest in the conversation, he held up a heavy silvered hand mirror.
'That's very nice.'
'London, turn-of-the-century. I keep it to remember what style those Victorians had.' His eyes, however, narrowed again. 'You have some kind of regular income?'
'Soon.'
'Kids coming to live with you?'
'No.'
He set the mirror down. 'Do you have kids?'
'No.'
Then he sighed, shaking his head. 'Tell me something that lets me understand you, honey, that makes you a person to me, something that lets me see your mind.'
'It's a question of whether or not I'm presentable?'
'You could put it that way.'
She nodded silently and gazed around, as if for a topic of conversation. Then she picked up the old silver mirror and held it close to the shopkeeper's face so that he could see himself, peer at his own whiskers and saggy eyes. 'Victorian England,' she began, 'in addition to the ornately mannered upper-class style that you find so attractive, was notable for its return to the use of flogging minor criminals, a practice that had ceased years before. Under the Vagrancy Act of 1898, those who were convicted of deviant male behavior-including exhibitionism, solicitation of homosexual acts, and masquerading in female attire-were flogged with a lash, often quite brutally.'
He glanced from the mirror into her eyes. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, I think I see. Is that your period? The Victorian era?'
She shrugged.
'Tell me something more.'
'Because you don't believe me?'
'No, just for the pleasure of it. Flog me with another fact or two.'
She looked about the shop for inspiration, spied a man's long wool coat with heavy buttons. 'When Charles Dickens died, the momentousness of his death was such that his grave at Westminster Abbey was left open for two days. During that time thousands of people passed by, gazing down into the earth at his open coffin. Hundreds dropped in bouquets. He was a genius buried in flowers.'
'Yes.' The shopkeeper picked up the phone. 'Yes!'
Twenty minutes later, she had been admitted into the lobby of the blue six-story apartment house across the street and was shaking the gnarled paw of a Mrs. Sanders, who appeared to be about eighty. The woman had been interrupted in her daily practice of chopping up pieces of beef heart for her four cats, who lounged fatly in her dilapidated living room, quite unworried about where their next meal was coming from, while she shuffled across the floor in a stained housecoat and set down a tiny china bowl before each. 'Now then,' Mrs. Sanders said to Christina. 'You want to rent a room and Donald sent you over? Well, that's very good. What's your name?'
'Bettina, Bettina Bedford.'
'Glad to meet you, Bettina. You can pay by the week to start. Cash is fine. Better, in fact. I only have one room, and the girl may come back. Maybe soon, maybe not. That's why I can let it go very cheaply, because if she comes back, then you're out right away, with no complaint. I don't know when, but it's going to waste. She said she would come back sometime this fall, and I suppose I- Now, wait a minute.' Mrs. Sanders probed her leathery right ear with a finger, which still had quite a bit of beef heart adhered to it, and extracted a waxy brown pill, which Christina understood was a hearing aid, and fiddled with a button. She frowned in frustration. 'I can't get it! They make these things too small! Miss, please-' Mrs. Sanders held out the hearing aid in her gnarled hand; it appeared to be nothing so much as the shell of an insect, furry with cat hair. She pointed at a tiny button. 'Please push that twice.'
Christina ventured a finger-a fingernail, really-against the tiny button and pushed twice, each time producing a tiny click. Mrs. Sanders plugged the little brown pill back into her ear. 'Yes, yes, I think that will-Ooh!' She widened her eyes, as if that helped with the fit, frowned, blinked, then smiled at Christina. 'Much better. Let me get my book, just a moment…' She shuffled off to a desk overflowing with cat literature. 'I keep it all- Now, just a moment, yes. Here.' She came back with a thick ledger that she clutched with two hands and sat down on a sofa. 'Here we are in nineteen eighty-'
'Ninety-nine,' Christina said.
'Yes, of course. This is the new one.' Mrs. Sanders pushed open the front cover, which had been repaired with heavy tape. 'This one started in nineteen seventy-seven. But I've been here since fifty-one.'
'Seen all types, I guess.'
'Seen? I've seen them, I've heard them, I've carried out their bodies. One fellow died in the bathtub. We had one of the Black Panthers living here once, we had Woody Allen visiting some friends, we had Janis Joplin sleeping here for three weeks, that fellow Allen Ginsberg left his pants here once-oh, we had quite a bit of it go through this place, let me tell you. We had a man who tried to raise chickens in his apartment, we've had four or five transvestites, we had a man who slept inside a broken refrigerator, we've had everything.'
'I don't have very much money.'
The old woman had heard this before. 'Nobody here does.'
'I don't know if-'
