Lightning People Read Online Free Page B

them she was visiting a friend in Brooklyn. “Take a taxi,” her mother would plead. “We will send you the money if you cannot afford it.” (This from a woman who felt spending more than twenty dollars on a dress constituted financial delusion.)
    Her parents would not have approved of the scant fifth-floor apartment she and Joseph called home. The ceiling in the kitchen had turned a septic brown from water leaks, and scabs of paint dangled over the table, ready to drift like dandruff over their meals. The dark oak floorboards in the living room were severely warped, sprouting loose nail heads that left the soles of her feet in a constant callus. But the worst was the heat. Even when she moved into the apartment in the bitter January cold, carrying box after box up five flights and tracking snow across the wood until most of her belongings sat in puddles, the rooms hung to their fever. That winter the windowpanes shriveled until they no longer sealed out the wind. But a few feet from the frosted glass, Del and Joseph danced to her collection of old records, sweating in shorts and stretched-out T-shirts, as if they alone had fallen into a billboard advertisement for a tropical timeshare while the rest of the city was submerged in ice.
    They used the air conditioner sparingly all summer. The mayor and the evening news warned of tri-borough blackouts. “They’ll pull the power whether we use it or not,” Joseph said, fingers threatening to engage the on-switch. “They’re telling us this because Con Edison’s already worked a few well-timed blackouts into their yearly budgets.” “Don’t be stupid,” she replied. “They are afraid of mass revolts in the street. Can you imagine what crimes would go on if this city were left for a night in total darkness? Do you want to be stuck in an elevator for ten hours? It’s serious, Joe.”
    She carried the glass down the hallway and into the living room, where she noticed the stereo’s needle skipping on the last grooves of a record. Her stereo. Now theirs . The stereo had been one of her chief contributions to the mingling of appliances. She wondered how long
it would be until those distinctions would dissolve, possessives failing to modify, his and hers being ours without the slightest impulse to claim. They never argued over drawers or closets or cabinet shelves. The fights they had about the heat or his juvenile actor friends could hardly be classified as arguments. Often when her voice hardened into the first signs of irritation, Joseph would draw a slow smile, nod his head in quiet concession, and let her opening assault be the last words on the issue. Madi always said that silence was the male form of hysteria, “All that quiet is just another way of screaming their dicks off.” But Del couldn’t help but be impressed by Joseph’s composure, and usually her highly charged rage would suddenly transform into a hungry adrenaline, her lips guiding toward his mouth and her hands wrapping around his ears, and then she’d go hot for him, because he was so attractive when he didn’t realize he had done anything to stop her dead in her tracks.
    â€œDel,” he called from the bedroom.
    It amazed her how quickly the evening had returned to normal. The night she asked Joseph to marry her almost a month ago, she walked into the living room ready to supply him with a list of incentives. She had spent her subway ride home from the zoo merging love with legalities—“You see, I don’t have to be tied to a working visa,” she rehearsed, “You see, they can’t kick me out of the country just because I feel like quitting. You see, I’d only be tied to you”—until those words almost reduced her to tears. She imagined him looking at her like an extinguished bulb, two eyes with popped filaments, skin the shade of gray glass, and her teeth chattered and her throat went