Free No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman Page A

noticed. No one mentioned it or seemed to care. Everyone went on living their own little lives. The rent for the apartments they lived in, however miserably, hadn’t been raised. She didn’t know why it mattered, why she and Ernest had even bothered.
    After their blank victory, Ernest and Elizabeth rarely saw each other. Sometimes she heard him upstairs, walking around or exercising.
    Now Elizabeth thought she saw Jeanine go into a doorway several buildings down the block. Elizabeth had to turn her head severely to the right to see that far down the block.
    It was Jeanine.
    Jeanine prostituted for drugs sometimes, for rent other times. She was a runner for a dealer on the corner. She and Elizabeth had known each other a while. Jeanine came over to her, on the corner, when it was cool, when the corner wasn’t busy, and they’d talk. The dealers and runners were a stable crew, and though they were busted in sweeps once in a while they always came back, and were part of the neighborhood. They knew Elizabeth and she knew them, and they didn’t hassle each other. When a fight erupted over turf, she made sure not to be there.
    It was Jeanine.
    Jeanine had been the girlfriend of one of the Lopezes, Jorge. She was the mother of their three children. Elizabeth bought the first baby a present. Jeanine said it was the only one the baby received.
    Jorge and Jeanine sat on the stoop in front of the building holding the infant, and then they didn’t because it was taken away by the City. Jeanine explained that they had to go to the agency to see it. The agency controlled chunks of Jeanine’s and Jorge’s lives, because they’d had a child and they themselves were legally children and on drugs. Jeanine said she was trying to stay straight.
    Jeanine became pregnant again. Then this child was taken away from her, and Jorge and she started getting high again. Then Jorge got deeper into shit, and into more trouble, and they both went down, down the well together, and the third baby was taken away. All the kids were placed in foster care. Then Jeanine went to prison. The Lopezes said Jorge was in Puerto Rico. Jorge was in jail. He and Jeanine were over.
    If Jeanine wasn’t on the street, dealing, if she wasn’t in jail upstate, she lived at her mother’s.
    Looking out the window, Elizabeth remembered the afternoon Jeanine came over and slept on her bed. She remembered it as if it were yesterday. Roy was at work. Jeanine’d been up all night. Her mother wouldn’t let her into their apartment.
    —Until I was about five, we all lived together. It was, like, happy. My mother had four girls and four boys. My mother separated from my father, she became a drunk, started using drugs, heroin, and when they got back together, he molested me, and he ended up molesting my little brother and sister. I think he molested my other brother too, but I’m not sure. They don’t speak on it. It caused problems between my mother and me. She blamed me for it. She was in denial for a long time. It happened to my little brother and sister when I went to jail the first time. My father was a really messed-up guy. He used to be a numbers man. He took money and disappeared. Then she had another boyfriend, but she’s always insecure about me and her men, like maybe they want me, or I want them. I’m like, please, these old men, get out of my face.
    Elizabeth was thinking about how she’d do in jail.
    —It’s all how the mind handles it, if they break your spirit. I guess it’s tough because people tell you when to eat, when to sleep, when to shit. And they do any little thing to provoke you to get into trouble to lock you in solitary, make it hard for you to get out. ’Cause if you’re in the city, you can do up to a year, and you have a day to go home; but if you’re upstate, they can keep you from going home, they can hold you there. You’re dead. You hear from the outside world, but their life goes on without you, so it’s like you don’t