by Jim Nelson
Meeting with Azami took nearly eight hours: three hours by bus and foot during the rush-hour morning, two hours in Azami's apartment, and over two hours to return to the Beersheba House. A car would have cut the time in half, if not more. That was time she could have used looking for a job. Or a better place to sleep. Or Barry.
She sat on the edge of the cot staring into nothingness. The hot, drawn-out day had sapped her strength. She'd unwrapped a cheese sandwich and was too tired to eat. She forced herself anyway. They kept the lights in the auditorium on full until curfew, so taking a nap meant pulling the scratchy wool blanket the Beers House supplied up over her head. It meant feeling her breath mist hot across her face while she tried to get to sleep.
Even with the mandatory quiet voices in the auditorium, Ruby couldn't help but overhear the four Hagars at the other end jawing about a daycare business screwing them out of their wages. The auditorium's hard walls and once-polished court acted as a natural amplifier of every utterance, sneeze, and snore.
A bridge daughter on a cot near her was talking rat-a-tat-tat into a cell phone. She lay with her head on the airline-sized pillow the shelter provided and with her free hand on her rotund belly. She'd stolen another pillow to prop up her swollen ankles. This was not a smart runaway, Ruby thought. The girl had brought nothing but her bridge dress, a stiff, functional garment of gray fabric with light pink trim. Running away in a bridge dress is like a deer painting a bull's-eye on her neck, she thought.
The bridge was on the verge of tears. She was talking to her mother. She wasn't arguing with her mother. She was talking with her mother, and from the half of the conversation Ruby was forced to hear, the mother was winning her bridge daughter back with entreaties and false sympathy. Finally, tearful and apologetic, the girl hung up.
A little Southern California heatstroke and mild dehydration sapped Ruby. She felt powerless to stand and walk away. Ruby knew the bridge was going to ask for advice, and sure enough, the girl shifted to lie on her side to talk to her. Wetness smeared around her eyes like cheap mascara.
"Hello," the thirteen year-old said. From her bulge, Ruby estimated she had six weeks before she gave birth and died. In six weeks, her parents would be celebrating their new child, all-but-forgetting the little girl who'd carried it for them since her birth.
"Hello," Ruby said wearily.
"I—I shouldn't be here," she said.
Ruby collapsed a little inside. She'd endured pleas like this so many times, from so many little girls in so many different places. The words were different, the girls were different, the places were different—no, the places were the same. They just felt different.
"I don't want to die," the little girl announced, as though she was the first bridge to reach this realization.
"Then you have a decision to make," Ruby said.
"I've made the decision," the bridge said. The hesitation in her voice did not match the confidence of her words. "But I don't know what to do."
"I'm not from around here," Ruby said. "You should ask those women at the other end. They sound local. They probably know where to find a doctor to fix you."
The bridge motioned toward the door leading to the front desk. "I asked the Beersheba people—"
"Beers House won't help you with that."
Ruby was not speaking. It was the gaunt Hagar coughing up blood in the bathroom. She sidled up and sat at a cot kitty-corner from the bridge.
"Beers House can only offer you a bed and maybe a meal," she said. "They can phone a doctor if you have a real problem. But they won't find you a doctor to fix you."
The Hagar waved her hand toward the far end of the auditorium. A podium with a microphone and portable P.A. speaker stood on a makeshift stage.
"Beers House can make you listen to their Bible hokum too," the woman said. "But that's all they can do."
If a Beersheba House was ever caught arranging a procedure for a bridge daughter, the law would come down on them like a hammer. No law protected them from endangering an unborn child. This room of eighty cots would soon be filled with runaways carrying their parents' child and women whose very existence was illegal—a single raid could net enough arrests to fulfill whatever quotas the cops were being held to. No, the cops, the judges, even the neighboring businesses in this rundown part of town silently agreed to leave the Beersheba people alone. It wasn't due to the Hanna Laws, which were only a few years old. It was the gray, look-the-other-way arrangement between the world of law and the world of charity. Like Prohibition, a strict law was passed no one wanted to enforce. A new fissure was created for people like Ruby to wedge themselves within.
"My mother says she'll forgive me." The little bridge was about ready to cry again.
"Don't listen to your mother," the woman said. "Your mother will say whatever she has to say to get her child back."
"You mean the other Michelle, don't you?" The bridge massaged her taut belly through the coarse gray wash-and-wear fabric of her bridge dress. "When you say 'her child,' you don't mean me, do you?"
For thirteen years, this little girl had thought of herself as her mother's daughter. The last year of being a bridge was a year of learning the child inside—the real Michelle—was her mother's child. She was the surrogate, the vessel, the bridge.
"She means the other Michelle," Ruby said. She agreed with every bit of advice the Hagar had imparted. "The girl inside you is all your mother cares about. Believe me."
The bridge began crying. She bawled. The four women jawing at the other end of the auditorium looked over, peeved, and began speaking more loudly among themselves.
"I'm Jun," the woman said.
Ruby leaned over to extend her hand. "Ruby."
"New in town?"
"Just here for a few days."
Jun peered heavenward. "It's not the best Beers House," she muttered, "but it's better than most."
"I'm still figuring out the bus system."
"There's not much to figure out," Jun said. She coughed deeply into her fist. When she drew it away, a bit of blood was smeared across the corner of her mouth.
The bridge had settled. Sniffling and wiping the tears away, she looked at Ruby with wet eyes. "Is that why you ran away? Because your mother didn't care about you?"
"I didn't run away," Ruby said.
The little girl stroked back the wet hair stuck to her face. "Did your mother forgive you?"
"She learned to accept it," Ruby said flatly. "But she never forgave me."
Jun looked at Ruby with slitted, suspicious eyes.
The bridge glanced back and forth between the two of them. "So if I have the procedure and go back—"
It was no use. This little girl wanted the Hagars to tell her what she wanted to hear, that she could avoid dying and go back to living the life of her mother's daughter. Ruby, heat-weakened and mildly faint, could not compose the words to explain to this girl that no bridge daughter—none—had done what she wanted.
Forgiveness is not nullification. Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness is a treaty between two people. Treaties are not forgotten. True forgiveness is to remember the burden but to shed the weight.
"I'm joking," Ruby said to the bridge. "My mother hates me."
"If you have the procedure, you can never see your parents again," Jun told the girl. "Your ties to your family are over."
"But my brother—"
"You can never see your brother again," Jun said. "You'll be sleeping in places like this until you're thirty or so."
"And then what?"
Jun peered down into her cupped hand. "You die."
Ruby wanted to tell Jun to lay off. She let her go on, though. Ruby didn't come to this Beers House to dispense advice, nor was she here to reassure frightened little girls. Ruby had paid for a cot and a place to take a shower. While the girl wept into her hands, Ruby listened to the four Hagars bitching at the end of the auditorium. They were still at it about the day's lost wages.
Four
> In a word, Ruby had been institutionalized. She was not merely institutionalized at the age of fifteen, when she was placed in a state-run bridge house. She lived as ward of the state for three years, bounced between bridge houses in Antioch, Fresno, Sacramento, back to Fresno, and finally in San Jose. At age eighteen, she was registered with the state as pons postlapsarian—a Hagar—and conditionally released. After the second month of visitations by her oversight officer, she fled her state-assigned rooming situation with a gym bag holding all her possessions and an Amtrak ticket in her back pocket. Over the years, Ruby learned how to demand help, how to wiggle her way into shelters full-up on cold nights, and how to talk past the doorman when the meal line had stopped serving. She could plead helplessness in one moment to cadge a hot meal and a shower, and breathe damnation the next when another Hagar tried to take her seat. She knew how to get a job—menial jobs, under-the-table jobs—and she knew when to flee them. Institutionalized only meant Ruby had learned how to game systems.
Beersheba Houses maintained binders and card files of local resources for Hagars seeking employment or medical assistance. These largely were no-questions-asked affairs. The listings were out-of-date—Ruby knew this from experience—but they were a place to start. After an hour of flipping pages, nothing satisfied her. Line cooks, for the most part, and chambermaids for cheap motels. This was the reliable work, she knew, although many of these employers were still liable to withhold a paycheck on a whim or out of spite. Daycare and babysitting, those were the jobs to avoid. A Hagar was never really trusted to care for a child. At best, the Hagar was given a chance, and the smallest slip or foul-up was hard proof they did not deserve that chance in the first place. Being a Hagar meant never receiving the benefit of the doubt. Everyone believed they would not have made Ruby's decision. Everyone also believed they were principled and fair too, yet look at the state of the world.
Azami's revelations made Ruby kick herself. After running down the obvious leads trying to locate Barry, she assumed the state had lied and simply put him up for adoption. She'd been bounced around the state, and so she thought infant Barry had been as well. She could not inquire about him through official channels, even if she didn't have an outstanding warrant for her arrest. She'd been told more than once how tracing adoptions was almost impossible. She'd despaired on ever finding Barry. Going down the list of names in Hanna's old notebook and visiting every person who may have known her family in some way was merely desperation put to action.
The computer in the Resource room was out-of-order. Stacked beside a landline telephone were outdated phone books from a time when phone books were still printed. A sign reading NO PERSONAL CALLS hung on the wall behind the phone. The same message was taped across the phone's handset. The phone had gone strangely unused for the hour Ruby spent in the room. She picked it up and held the handset to her ear. Nothing. The phone smelled of urinal soap. The room smelled of cigarettes smoked twenty years ago.
Ruby spent thirty minutes searching the old phone books for employment agencies. She skipped past those with names she'd seen listed in the ring-bound binders—she sought out employment agencies sketchy enough to hire Hagars but not so sketchy they would stoop to leaving their business card at a Beersheba House. She began making calls.
After an hour of dead-ends and hang-ups, she found a woman with the Carriage House Domestics agency in La Jolla who offered a tip. "Oh, we'd love to have a working relationship with the Abney family," she said off-handedly. Ruby imagined her talking with the phone cradled on her shoulder and busily typing on a computer. "Those are exactly the kind of relationships we love to nurture, but the Abneys don't work with us, unfortunately." Ruby could almost hear the air-conditioning humming in the woman's office. She could almost smell the fresh-cut flowers she kept in a cut-glass vase on her desk. The woman would be eating out for lunch that day, something fresh and light, something Mediterranean.
"Do you know who the Abney family uses for domestic help?"
The woman told Ruby the Abneys used White Glove, and happily recited the number when Ruby asked if she had it handy.
The woman who answered the number was not quite as sociable as the Carriage House woman. "We do not permit our associates to chose their place of employment," she said. "We place you."
"I'm asking about the Abneys because a good friend of mine worked for them," Ruby said. "She told me what a pleasure it was, and how well they treated their help."
"Which friend?" the woman demanded. "Which Abney household? Where was it?"
Ruby stared down at the White Glove ad in the phone book's yellow pages. They presented themselves as respectable and established, delicately indicating in the ad copy they were bonded and insured, "Est. 1966," and the like, but Ruby zeroed in on a small detail casual readers would overlook. Their business logo was a pair of white service gloves, one folded over the other, with loops embroidered into their hems. One of those loops was unmistakably in the shape of Hagar's Urn, right down to the elephant ear jug handles.
"I would be willing to work for almost nothing," Ruby said into her cell phone, enunciating the key words in the sentence. "For the Abneys, I'd work for room and board."
The line went quiet. "That's a…delicate situation to work out with a client," she said softly. "Normally, you're contracted to us and we place you, but for that kind of situation, you'd, ah…have to demonstrate certain flexibilities."
"I would do anything for that kind of opportunity."
"But if you're so…flexible, then you should be willing to work for almost any of our live-in situations."
"I'm only interested if it's with the Abneys." On a stroke of improvisation, she added, "If you can't manage it, I've been speaking with the Carriage House people."
"Really?"
"The woman said they were hoping to open a relationship with one of the Abney households—"
"Which one?" the woman demanded.
"She didn't say," Ruby said. "It sounded like it was something they would like to pursue and they might be able to use someone like me—"
"No need for that," the woman said flatly. "Do you do drugs?"
"No."
"If you have a single needle mark, I can't take you."
"I'm clean," Ruby said.
"Do you have a police record?"
Carefully, Ruby said again, "I'm clean," thinking of the outstanding warrant for her arrest.
"All right then," the woman breathed over the line. "Please hold."
Ruby waited for six drawn-out minutes. A young girl entered the Resource room with a searching look on her face. Too old, not pregnant enough—Ruby read her as a recent Hagar, a fourteen-year-old starting phase two of her life. She needed a bath and she needed a good brushing of her hair. Ruby remembered life in the bridge house at that age—going a week without brushing her teeth, going two weeks without a bath, devouring every meal they scooped on a plate like a dog, thinking it was her last.
The girl picked up the old-fashioned phone's handset, tapped the buttons, made a dissatisfied noise, and hung up. She left just as the woman returned to the phone line.
"The Abney family has several households in the greater Los Angeles and San Diego areas," she said. "All positions we're aware of are staffed at the moment."
Ruby deflated. She almost hung up without saying goodbye. She could smell a brush-off, and this was shaping up as one.
"But—" the woman said with a touch of drama, "we placed a girl at an Abney residence in Pismo Beach six months ago, and we've gotten complaints. If you can drive up the 101, I'll phone ahead and make arrangements for an interview."
"I'll be there tomorrow," Ruby said.
"No you won't," the woman said. "You'll go there when I tell you to go there. Listen to me." The all-business tone returned. "Buy yourself a nice dress. Two of them, if you can afford it. Get yourself some blush and a face scrub and a neutral-colored lipstick. You need to show up looking fresh-faced and clean and presentable. Our girls do not wear an
y scents and they don't go in looking gaudy, so go light on the makeup and tasteful with the dress. No hosiery or heels. And no sneakers. Buy yourself some comfortable flats."
"I can do that," Ruby said. She did not have the money for any of it.
"Where are you calling from?"
"Sunland-Tujunga," Ruby said.
"The Beers House there?"
"Yes."
The woman recommended two chain department stores in town. They were a bus ride away. Ruby associated both chains with fusty discount clothes sold to old women forever seeking bargains.
"Get yourself cleaned up," the woman said. "I want to see you in the office tomorrow." She gave a street address, the same address printed on the yellow pages ad. White Glove was in downtown Los Angeles. Ruby foresaw another eight-hour day. "If you pass muster, you'll have a day or two to get yourself to Pismo Beach. Can you do that?"
Ruby told her she would be in the office before lunch the next day. Ruby's gaming-the-system impulse was to ask the woman for her first week's pay upfront. She would somehow manage to pick up the money, buy what she needed in Los Angeles, and return to the office clean and proper. It was the only way she could afford the luxuries the woman was demanding as a capital investment. It took a moment for Ruby to remember she was offering to work for nothing at all.
Five
Ruby used the goods in her backpack as starting capital. She bartered around the Beersheba House for an old matronly dress and a mix of unmatched cosmetics. Hesitant to spend coin on the single washer-dryer the Beers House made available, she washed the dress in a laundry sink and hung it to dry near an open window in the auditorium. Flats were not to be found, so Ruby gambled she could show up with her old athletic trainers and pull it off. She woke early to beat the rush to the shower and gave herself a vigorous hot-water scrub-down. The showers required a token to get hot water, one token per night paid for, and this token was Ruby's last.