This one was straight realism, which was a departure for her, and which meant not stringing the wires with lights when they flew the heroes in and out. She still had to have heroes, but this time she imagined what they said to each other when they sat on rooftops looking for jewel thieves. She imagined they talked about the weather and the girls they liked and how to avoid getting ID’d by the cops. The only non-superhero character in the play was the cop who was trying to figure out who they were. She never did.
A week into rehearsals, she sat on a chair at the edge of the stage, watching Otto block actors, listening to lines, following along in her copy of the script, making notes when she thought something else would sound better. She’d think something else would sound better long after the play had had its run and closed.
Otto had been on the same page for half an hour and was on his fourth try, arranging actors, repeating lines. In a minute he’d do something off the wall and unexpected and that would be the version that worked. All she had to do was wait, and wonder how it would all turn out.
Leaning back in her chair, she looked up into the rails, ropes, chains, and lights of the fly system, distant ladders and rafters lost in shadow, and saw a masked face looking back at her, smiling.
M. L. N. Hanover
Hurt Me
There weren’t many three-bedroom houses that a single woman could afford. 1532 Lachmont Drive was an exception. Built in the 1930s from masonry block, it sat in the middle of a line of houses that had once been very similar to it. Decades of use and modification had added character: basement added in the 1950s, called “finished” only because the floor was concrete rather than dirt; garage tacked on to the north side that pressed its outer wall almost to the property line; artificial pond in the backyard that had held nothing but silt since the 1980s. The air smelled close and musty, the kitchen vent cover banged in the wind, and the air force base three miles to the north meant occasional jet noise loud enough to shake the earth. But the floors were hardwood, the windows recently replaced, and the interiors a uniform white that made the most of the hazy autumn light.
The Realtor watched the woman—Corrie Morales was her name—nervously. He didn’t like the way she homed in on the house’s subtle defects. Yes, there had been some water damage in the bathroom once. Yes, the plaster in the master bedroom was cracking, just a little. The washer/dryer in the basement seemed to please her, though. And the bathtub was an old iron claw-footed number, the enamel barely chipped, and she smiled as soon as she saw it.
She wasn’t the sort of client he usually aimed for. He was better with new families, either just-marrieds or first-kid types. With them, he could talk about building a life and how the house had room to grow in. A sewing room for the woman, an office for the man, though God knew these days it seemed to go the other direction as often as not. New families would come in, live for a few years, and trade up. Or traffic from the base—military people with enough money to build up equity and flip the house when they got reassigned rather than lose money by paying rent. He had a different set of patter for those, but he could work with them. New families and military folks. Let the other Realtors sell the big mansions in the foothills. Maybe he didn’t make as much on each sale, but there were places in his territory he’d sold three or four times in the last ten years.
This woman, though, was hard to read: in her late thirties and seeing the place by herself; no wedding ring. Her face had been pretty once, not too long ago. Might still be, if she wore her hair a little longer or pulled it back in a ponytail. Maybe she was a lesbian. Not that it mattered to him, as long as her money spent.
“It’s a good, solid house,” he said, nodding as a trick to make her nod along with him.
“It is,” she said. “The price seems low.”
“Motivated seller,” he said with a wink.
“By what?” She opened and closed the kitchen cabinets.
“Excuse me?”
“Motivated by what?” she said.
“Well, you know how it is,” he said, grinning. “Kids grow up, move on. Families change. A place maybe fits in one part of your life, and then you move on.”
She smiled as if he’d said something funny.
“I don’t know how it is, actually,” she said. “The seller moved out because she got tired of the place?”
The Realtor shrugged expansively, his mental gears whirring. The question felt like a trap. He wondered how much the woman had heard about the house. He couldn’t afford to get caught in an outright lie.
“Well, they were young,” he said. “Just got hitched, and they had all these ideas and plans. I don’t like selling to newlyweds. Especially young ones. Too young to know what they’re getting into. Better to go rent a few places, move around. Find out what you like, what you don’t like.”
“Bought it and didn’t like it?”
“Didn’t know quite what they were getting into,” he said.
The sudden weariness around the woman’s eyes was like a tell at a poker table. The Realtor felt himself relax. Divorced, this one. Maybe more than once. Alone now, and getting older. Maybe she was looking for someplace cheap, or maybe it was just the allure of new beginnings. That he was wrong in almost every detail didn’t keep him from playing that hand.
“My wife was just the same, God rest her,” he said. “When we were kids, she’d hop into any old project like she was killing snakes. Got in over her head. Hell, she probably wouldn’t have said yes to me if she’d thought it through. You get older, you know better. Don’t get in so many messes. They were good kids, just no judgment.”
She walked across the living room. It looked big, empty like this. Add a couch, a couple chairs, a coffee table, and it would get cramped fast. But right now, the woman walked across it like it was a field. Like she was that twenty-year-old girl with her new husband outside getting the baggage or off to work on the base. Like the world hadn’t cut her down a couple times.
He could smell the sale. He could taste it.
“Lot of rentals in the neighborhood,” she said, looking out the front window. He knew from her voice that her heart wasn’t in the dickering. “Hard to build up much of a community when you’re getting new neighbors all the time.”
“You see that with anything near the base,” he said, like they were talking about the weather. “People don’t have the money for a down payment. Or some just prefer renting.”
“I can’t rent anymore.”
“No?”
“I smoke,” she said.
“That’s a problem these days. Unless you’ve got your own house, of course.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The Realtor had to fight himself not to grin. Here we go.
“Wrap it up,” she said. “I’ll take it.”
MR. AND MRS. Kleinfeld had lived at 1530 Lachmont Drive for eight years, making them the longest-standing residents of the block. To them, the U-Haul that pulled up on Sunday morning was almost unremarkable. They ate their toast and jam, listened to the preacher on the radio, and watched the new neighbor start unloading boxes. She wore a pair of old blue jeans, a dark T-shirt with the logo of a long-canceled television show across the front, and a pale green bandana. When the breakfast was over, Mrs. Kleinfeld turned off the radio and cleaned the plates while Mr. Kleinfeld ambled out to the front yard.
