‘Two my father sister, four my mother.’
I hold my breath. ‘Mine were both adopted. The diddly two of them.’ What’s ‘diddly?’ A word you use when you don’t say more. But I have mentioned the house, almost.
Gold’s eyes are wide, her mouth too. She knows that history, which we never discuss.
‘Say where—’ I say to her. ‘I want to. But I can’t.’
‘In Dedham, Mass.’ Then she covers up, by sucking the straw.
Angel bursts in, his father behind him. Lopez has brought up ice-cream bars for Carmen and me. And for ‘the lady.’ ‘We are having mate,’ Carmen says, haughty. ‘Angel, go put those in the freezer.’ She smiles at me. ‘I save for us.’
It’s different when you introduce a man. ‘He fixed the wires,’ I say. ‘From now on, Gold, you can use the bell.’ I see he is disappointed in Gold.
She wants to notice only me. ‘I know Carol for three years now,’ she says to him, almost with an accent. Though she scores me, for talking slum.
‘Carol teach me to talk,’ Carmen says. She brings Lopez a mate. In the wedding picture his chest sticks out like an apache’s; now he is just a greaser with a beer waistline. But he still likes his women slick.
‘Yes—you have conversation now,’ Gold says to me. ‘And I must go.’ She digs in her bag.
‘Come on, Angel,’ Lopez says. They leave. Carmen is listening for whether the two of them go all the way downstairs to the bar again. We hear their home door open and close, one flight down. ‘No, stay—’ I tell Carmen, who is making like to follow them. She needs to be away from Lopez. So she half stays, washing the cups. I am watching Gold, who is still digging.
‘I hate that bag,’ I say. Because of what it has in it.
‘So do I—,’ she says. ‘But I must carry it.’
I used to think it had all our case-records in it, and that mine must be what made it so heavy, but no, she said, ‘those stay at the office; we don’t take them into the field.’ Which is what they call visiting the ‘clients’—‘going into the field.’ ‘Sounds like you’re picking flowers,’ I said. I wouldn’t say that now, the bag is so worn. Three years of me, and all her other cases. Rent vouchers, for those who aren’t able to deal on their own moneywise, blanket coupons, and the food stamps I wouldn’t accept. And the prescriptions.
Usually those are clipped neat; today they are loose in the bag. She hands me mine. ‘The substitute, Ms. Mickens, will bring you the next. Watch your step with her. She’s new.’
I will, I know what that means. Rules. Meanwhile Gold is wanting to say goodbye to Carmen who is bent over the sink, but her ears are sticking through those curls. I am not sure how to balance the two of them.
‘I had a medal like that once,’ Gold says to her.
On a chain always around Carmen’s neck, I don’t know for which saint. But I know what the tiny leather doll hanging next to it is for. The Lopez’s are more tropical than they are Catholic.
‘You did, Gold? I didn’t know you were Catholic.’
‘I was. Gold wasn’t. And the little charm? What’s that for?’
What’s come over her? A good SW doesn’t ask. And a client’s friend—in the record I am the ‘client’—comes under that.
‘You say, Carol. My English no good.’ But Carmen’s teeth shine. Against her, Carol looks musty, older, though their children are the same ages. Carmen will get plumper, but she’ll stay hard-colored.
‘It’s to keep the bull in the barn.’
‘Hmm. I should have had one of those dolls.’
‘I give you, missus. I get more.’
‘Thanks. Too late to shut the barn door.… Well, Carol, hasta la vista. Keep well.’
‘Have a good vacation.’ Her gray is showing. ‘Get blonder.’ I feel generous. ‘And remember me to the kids.’
‘Their father has them.’ She is looking at me like at a person. Like I am one. ‘I’m going in retreat. Up Hudson. I’ll send you a card, hair freak.’
She never told me anything personal before. I don’t even know her maiden name. ‘In retreat? Don’t do that. I had a college friend did that. She came out a nun.’
‘Oh, Carol. Know something? You’re great.’ She shoulders the bag. ‘And I have to—get the year in repair. I have to.’ She is gone.
‘So what means “re-pair”?’
How can I say? It’s what I’m in. ‘Have to get you a dictionary, Carmen. So you can pick these things up on your own.’
‘Also you.’ She squeezes the dishrag, draping it carefully over the sink’s edge; there’s no hook for it. ‘That lady, I think she is no more good for you.’ She drops a Spanish phrase I don’t catch.
‘What’s that mean?’
A shrug, a headshake, a smile; she’s not going to say. ‘¡Cuidado!’ she shrieks suddenly, stamping her tiny foot.
‘What, what?’ I know already.
‘A roach.’
‘DOES BEING WELL scare you, Ms. Westmount?’
August twenty-fifth. Mickens and me. For the third time.
She’s the same as she was the first time, fresh-crowned with her SW degree ‘from Brandeis,’ cool as her vinyl rain-cape, stiff as her brand-new jogging shoes—and hell-bent on not being anybody’s substitute.
That first time, she found Lopez’s gimpy bell-system pronto—which was more than the firemen could when the second-floor-rear’s oven exploded. And she was up the four flights to me before you could say crackerjack; she has never sat on a stoop.
I was scattering the bicarb-borax when she banged on the door, and in answer to my ‘Who is it?’ yells back like they’re calling out the troops: ‘The visitor!’
That’ll be the substitute, I think; they’re always louder than the original. So when I open up and she walks right in past me, I let her. Those thick shoe-soles of hers send up the powder like we’re on maneuvers. With a SW you always are, but the dust is not usually that visible.
Her pitch is total honesty, she tells me. Even though I wouldn’t know her name is BRYNA, except for her fourteen-carat gold bracelet saying it. ‘Total’ means she interviewed my own neighbors before visiting me, but didn’t say. I only catch on when she asks me do I really feel touched by God? I say ‘I could only wish. It would save everybody energy.’
The new style in social psychiatry is not to pussyfoot anymore ‘but to confront.’ She is up to her earrings in the new style. And even that first time, making sure I expect it. She’s read my record in full, and knows I have ‘the requisite IQ.’ What she’s really saying is that she’s got my number—which if she has, she will be the first, not excluding me—and that I am to play pattycake with her confront.
And now this double-whammy question. Does being well scare me? When after what happened over Gold’s last prescription, I am scared, yes. To unbutton my lip to this dame about anything.
… When I brought in that prescription to the drugstore down the corner, the pharmacist, who is also the owner, gives me a smile; by now he knows me, I don’t mind. He takes the folded white slip into the back, like always. But after a minute he comes out again. He is a nice, shriveled little man in a dirty white coat. ‘I can’t fill this, Miss. Some mistake maybe. Is this yours?’ On examination it wasn’t. Not for me, and not for tofranil or compazine either. Or for what I’d been getting. ‘For a controlled substance,’ he says. ‘—one on special register. In the name of Daisy Gold.’ ‘They mailed me a mistake,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to go to the office.’ He could give me one of my usual, to tide me over, he said; ‘I know how that office goes, Miss; you could spend the day.’ And he did give me the one pill. Calling me ‘Miss’—but he kept that prescription.…
I did go to the office. I’m responsible. They took a long time looking up my case, which is listed as I want it, under Carol Carol. Though the other names must be in it for the record, Gold always did her best for me, in those conferences, where they decide. This time I did my best for her. When I said to the worker at the desk, a you
ngish black man: ‘I’ll need a new prescription, my bag was stole,’ I could even hear her voice. ‘Say “stolen,” Carol. Stop putting on.’
She wasn’t too honest to have faith.
‘Would you repeat the question, Mrs. Mickens?’ I say now. I know quite well the substitute’s not a Mrs. Just like she must know what I’m not.
‘Miss Mickens.’ But she repeats the question.
‘I’m not Westmount.’
‘We know.’
Gold always said ‘I.’ Her and me. ‘We’ was the office.
‘Westmount is in Montreal,’ I say. ‘A suburb.’
‘A fancy one. Like all your names. For fancy places.’
Miss Evanston, Miss Bridgehampton, Miss Paget—that’s Bermuda. The list is long. All in memory of the nice home-places a nice orphan college girl at a democratic college got invited to for the school holidays. Places as good as anywhere for stopping up your ears against the call of the wild. Around the country-club pool, in the borrowed bathing-suit.
For a time, all that girl thinks to do is to swing. So did a lot of others then. So do a lot of us always, until after graduation we are pulled back—all but a few of us. If the suburbs don’t do it for sure, the city job will. Or the family job.
But there are always some, a few, who are determined not to have just a single history. Funny how you think you can manage that—when you’re young.
… Bomb camaraderie. In the basement of a brownstone front—so appropriate. Amateurs, playing the matchstick game. The others around that work-talk table all have parents who are too rich to love. They envy me my aunts, and my orphan freedom. I marvel at the electrical know-how and other survival lore that the top private prep schools seem to provide. Later on in the afternoon the lace-curtained windows in the house across the street will shatter in the blast. I’m told I wasn’t there; those who should know keep telling me that I’d gone for sandwiches. I can’t recall. But the weather-in-the-streets later—I too would have wanted that. So, like the others, I went on the run.…
‘Eastlake. Northwood.’ Mickens is being chummy. ‘Why?’
Nine out of ten she’s hoping to do a paper on me. Funny, how it squints the eyes.
‘I was seeking direction,’ I said.
When she’s about to leave she recalls that I haven’t answered the first part of her question.
Does she mean that I am well? Or may shortly be considered so? The balance is hard. And winter is coming. To stay on the outside, you have to be just well enough.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ I say. ‘But by the time Daisy comes back, I may.’
‘Daisy? Oh—Mrs. Gold. I’m afraid—she’s not coming back.’
Mickens is not ‘afraid.’ One thing the pills do, they make you see other people’s body movements. The involuntary ones you no longer have. She has planted her feet. She doesn’t know what ‘afraid’ is. ‘You may as well know. Mrs. Gold is no longer on the job.’
I expected that. Those druggists have to report.
I look her over. Showing nothing of what I may be thinking. This makes her nervous. She knows she’s not real enough. For these lower depths.
I stare until she falters. This takes experience.
Shrink back only a step like she has, and you’re in the pad’s little half-room, if you can call it that. I don’t have anything more to put there. You could crowd an extra cot in, if you needed. The guy beneath me has a Moog. ‘Good heavens,’ she says, pointing. ‘What’s that?’
Lopez’s handyman jobs will never earn him a license, or a union membership. The bell downstairs, when pressed, often gives one a shock. Up here he’s criss-crossed scrap metal every which way over the window on the shaft, and daubed it black. It takes up all the wall.
‘Why—this is almost a room,’ she says, turning slow on her heel. ‘You could have a desk. And a chair. I could get you the vouchers.’
Some SW’s keep wanting to give you. It’s the way they see for you to live. Or that’s how they view giving. Last thing they want to do for clients is to identify with them. Giving keeps them from doing that.
To me, they always want to give a desk.
‘No thanks.’
‘Why not?’
Because, in the end all furniture blows away, in the bomb blast. Silent though some of those may be. Nest down in any alley, and you’re safer. Only have enough blankets. Then you’re in control.
‘Just take down that awful black thing, Carol. And you could have a workroom. We know you worked for environmental causes. Or you could do just typing. You’re very literate.’
They’re ganging up on me like always. I can hear them saying that: she’s very literate. A SW is a gang all-in-one. With concealed weapons ever to hand.
The best thing you can do with empty house-space is to keep it that way—clear. Fill it, and the day will come when you know better. And watch out, meanwhile, that you don’t fill your head to match.
‘No, no.’ I remember my manners. ‘Thanks very much. But no.’
‘Why not, Carol dear? It could be a darling space.’
So now we have the intimacy needle. And the ‘we-girls’ one.
‘It’s where I keep the gorilla,’ I said.
AT THE CAT Club, the cry tonight is—‘Everything’s at sixes and sevens.’ Nobody knows who started it.
‘Why isn’t it at twelves and thirteens?’ the dancing-girl asks. ‘Wouldn’t that make more sense?’ How, she doesn’t say. Nobody has to make sense here, but she won’t relax. She is our house-fly, Alphonse says; there’s no getting rid of her. ‘Because ever so often, a go-go girl has no place to.’
‘It refers to dice,’ a big-breasted woman named Margaret says. One of those sweet fatties who dress like they haven’t heard of jeans—a gingham housedress and a bow in her hair—she never seems to feel the cold. Alphonse has started to call her Mavorneen, saying to me, ‘We have to have one from time to time.’ More and more he’s on top of things, or on the bottle less and less, though alcohol is cagy. When I came in tonight he whispered: ‘I’m on the wagon. Wagon’s full of nails.’
Seems the couple from Long Island City, the owner’s manager and his ‘common-law wife,’ are expected to come by. Alphonse saw them parking their truck, a new gray-and-red Ram with a long wheelbase but empty, in front of the greasy spoon hash-house on the Avenue. The woman stayed in the cab while he went in; maybe they expect the owner also. ‘Her hair is as red as her fur.’
‘In summer?’ the go-go says. ‘Only cats wear fur.’
Ours is where we can’t see him, in the ground-floor window, in front of that screen—but we know he’s there, paws tucked in. Cats don’t fade.
It is now mid-September. When the desk Mickens insisted on sending me finally came, Angel and I upended it against the wall opposite Lopez’s construction. Then we hung the bike on it. But insurrection worries me. I mustn’t let it go too far.
‘They’ll be having lunch, that couple. I know their routine.’ Alphonse is in real pain, real white, but he hasn’t jacked out the pint bottle; maybe it’s in the corner he jokes is his office, in with the cat stuff, the cleaning rags and the packets of toilet paper, the flat kind he cadges from a public restroom somewhere. His own private stash of belongings wanders the place, a couple of bags giving way whenever we’re crowded, but always very neat. If ever I forget the necessaries, he’s said he’ll lend me. But when I roll up or stretch out on the newspapers he keeps stacked here, my one thick sweater does me, along with the trenchcoat some worn-out debutante left at the thrift, alongside me my shoulder bag, that almost matches it, in the bag a pewter flask that keeps water fresh, matchbooks, and an airline pillow I’ve had forever. Winter tricks, that I keep as reminders. On top I scatter summer: Handi-wipes, Kool-aid. I never bring anything to leave.
‘The old girl, our landlady, she has other Village property,’ Alphonse is saying. ‘The kind she keeps up all right, all right, you bet. That pair will be making the rounds there first. The old woman must pay them
a price. They’ll leave this place until last.’
‘Whatever could go wrong?’ I say, checking the floor, which has been swept, each stash on it practically geometrical, the drying underwear all disposed under the shirts and tee-shirts. It’s not perfect here. There’s that acrid smell of jeans-crotch and cheesy underarm; you can’t wash a human being at a launderette. And transiency casts its cloud; you would never mistake this joint for more than a shake-down. I find that reassuring. But on the up-and-up we have all done our best. At least on this floor. Above, all is ruin, but not ours.
‘Everything’s neat beyond the call of duty, Alphonse. If you ask me, the brass here is kind of a nag.’
He loves it, when we call him the brass. But now he looks shamed. ‘I never told you the real deal. The old lady down there in Florida, she once got her mug in the papers as the worst slum landlord in Manhattan. Now she’s moved up in the world, to a suburb of Palm Beach. But he and the redhead, they hate her guts; this here was to be their revenge. Nobody’s supposed to live here; she’s holding to sell for the land. The deal they cut with me; I was to sneak people in; they would keep hands off. Over the summer. We were to trash this place, but still occupy it. A health menace, so they can turn the old lady in. But I couldn’t hack it. Not that deal.’
‘Hey—,’ I say low. ‘Hey.’ We look at each other across the others.
‘Oh wow—,’ the dancer says. ‘Let’s. Like it could be an art piece—performance art.’ She does a twirl. ‘Let’s trash.’ She does a great scoop of a twirl, calling out ‘La Trasherero’ and swirls a curtsy to the floor. Her black ballet slippers are split and chalky, but I see there was more to her than go-go once.
‘But we only just tapped into the electric again,’ a kid who did that bypass for us wails. He’s thin from AIDS but did a very good job; his uncle, an electrician, threw him out, right while he was learning the business.
Big Margaret beats her breasts; she’s always at them; her pills are for fits. ‘Hopin’ to bake bread, I was.’ In her stash she carries old kitchen appliances, a toaster and a countertop oven, but the kid hasn’t let her plug in, for fear the newly spliced bypass might blow.
In the Slammer With Carol Smith Page 3