It’s hot up here; my room is the oven of the house. She shrugs off her jacket, the same plaid one as always, and lets it fall. I pick it up; the floor is always powdery.
‘Let it lie,’ she says. ‘It could use a spot or two.’
The jacket is dead clean, and flat out of the wringer. Like it no longer wants a body in it. This is the way the clothes you go in with come back to you when you leave.
‘It’s been disinfected, huh?’ Now I am shivering.
‘It’s been in the vat, yes. Of community wrath.’
We are both whispering.
‘They said you were in retreat. That Mickens; she did.’
‘Who’s she?’
She doesn’t remember?
‘The new worker.’
‘That was kind of her.’
I am out of talk. Ordinary talk-fest—I’m beginning to be able to. But when an emotion comes up, I have to wait. Funny, that it was Gold herself suggested how to handle that. Count to twenty, she’d said—or to whatever the traffic will bear. So I do twenty-five.
‘She’s no substitute.’ I hack out then. ‘Not for you.’
‘That’s kind of you.’ She chokes. ‘Can I have some water?’
I keep it cold in an old milk bottle I bought at the thrift. There’s more food in the fridge now because of the Club—little goodies I bring there. It’s worth it to see maybe the dancer’s face light up with a yearn. And so as not to push for thanks, I’d have to eat along with them.
Gold stands in front of the fridge like before a shrine. Everything is in perfect rows there. I’m not squeaky clean. But it is. ‘Still not—’ she whispers.
‘Not what?’
‘Casual.’
‘I keep telling you. Don’t ask me to be what I can’t.’
‘Why not? That’s what they asked of me.’
Shame colors her face. When people first come out they are too delicate; they don’t want to be asked anything. But where’s she been?
‘Up the Hudson, were you, Gold? You never sent me that card.’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Rockland State, was it? They do drug rehabs.’
She goes so quiet. With such a look. Must be hard for her profession. When it crosses over to being us.
‘That what Mickens told you?’
‘Come on, Gold. When does a worker really tell you anything?’
Not fair. She did, sometimes.
She’s fisted up. So have I. I put my fist against hers, giving it a little push. ‘Besides—.’
‘Besides what, Carol?’
Almost the old voice. Maybe they put her in jail after all. Most people would prefer that. ‘Else—why would you come back here?’
She is drinking the water. She puts the glass on the table. Lopez has bolstered the table’s gimpy leg. She sees the desk, still upended with the bike on it, but Angel has slung a great blue-glass parking-chain on the handlebars, the kind you wear around your neck for decoration when you’re riding. It all looks like I’m using the bike. She sees the new window-blind. ‘I was in emergency—Bellevue. I did take pills, a lot of them. But only once. They pumped me out. When the nuns at the retreat wouldn’t take me, the hospital made me stay on. Last week—they let me go.’
So that’s why she doesn’t look streetwise yet; only no longer housebred. I know the whole route. ‘Where’d they put you?’
Laugh—and that’s only a joke. Answer on the level, and it’s routine.
‘My mother-in-law wouldn’t take me back either. My husband’s family home, in New Rochelle. Two years ago, when he got a job teaching out there, we went to live with her. Temporarily. When he left me for someone else, the kids and I had to stay on; my take-home wouldn’t cover a move. Now she wants the kids. Their father is alone again. He’s moving back in with her. He teaches their same school; maybe it’s best for them. Keep them out of the inner city, where I’d have to be; maybe he and his mother are right.’
She’s already folded her hands. Body posture. On the ward you learn to recognize it. Underneath all the social work.
‘New Rochelle don’t have drugs, Gold? Angel here don’t drug.’
Don’t, doesn’t. She used to nag me my street lingo was an affectation. Now she doesn’t even notice.
‘I make a fuss, he and my mother-in-law are set to declare me incompetent. And where could I take the kids right now on my own? Up there, they have their own room. I no longer even have furniture.’
‘Thrift shops. Except for the beds. By law, they can’t resell those.’ I like sleeping on the floor. But since we exterminate Carmen has lent me a cot. Anyway, soon I’ll have a sleeping-bag.
‘Carol. I don’t even have where.’
‘You’re—not on the street?’
She draws back, like a bird. ‘In a parish house, in the Bronx. They have a program.’
A rehab program. I’ve gone on those. ‘That’s good.’ It’s what you say. And sometimes you can touch a tamed bird, if you move slow. I do, just the back of her hand. ‘You’re on interim, hey.’ I smile, to show I recall the lingo. Interim relief was what I was on when I first came on her load.
She takes so long to answer I wonder what medication they’ve put her on.
‘Carol. My first job after I took my degree, the hardest thing to do in a city court was to separate mother from child. Any mother. My first load, I had a crazy, her half-grown kids still in diapers, fed on sour milk, never out in the air, the house a sty. In court—she was Mary, mother of God. Now it’s all turned round. Child abuse—one hint of it. And my mother-in-law and he will hint.’
‘Abuse? Those kids? They didn’t even know you were there.’
Shouldn’t have said that. You can’t always say what you think. When you’re on the mend—the docs all say to me—that’ll be the hardest for you. Tact—it’s not really a lie. Means you’re making the break, Carol, from just being only you.
‘Maybe I wasn’t there enough for them.’
‘You? With how you do for people. They didn’t appreciate.’ I know they didn’t. Pure brats.
‘They were jealous of that. My husband too. He said he didn’t want a woman with misery always on her mind. That I couldn’t turn off, when I got home.’
Home. Homes can twist people. Some tribes, maybe they’re the smart ones, they make a different camp every night. The load of being stock-still inside a house is too terrible.
‘But you didn’t turn us off, Gold. Here you are.’
‘Not that way. The office—they put me on leave. They say I’m burned out. Indefinite leave.’
‘But you’re here, Gold; you’re back.’ She’s looking at me funny. ‘So why? You going to come see us for free?’
She looks so gone I say, ‘Hey. Joke.’ She used to say that was why she had hopes for me, that I could joke. That we two could. But now she’s transferred it all to me?
‘I came into the city for a hearing, Carol. On me. At the office. Severance pay-to-come—and thank you very much. “You had too heavy a case-load, Gold; it can happen to the best of us.”’ She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Too nice to say the real load was me.’
I get up to walk. Even inside, I have to. The pad has more excuses to now. I can make tea. I can shift the blind.
‘And then they console me how good I was at the job. How well some of you worked out. “There’s that case you had forever, Gold. Remarkable.”’
I keep walking.
‘So I came by, Carol. Unprofessional of me. But anybody can use a little upbeat. So I came by. To sit on your stoop. And have a peek at my success.’
Do I want to be that? To anyone?
I shift the blind. Pull a cord, and the outside pays you a call.
‘Yeah, your pad looks great, Carol,’ she says behind me.
Even before I turn I pick up that nasty tone of hers. I never minded; it kind of braced me. That she would take the trouble.
When I do turn, she’s scrunched up on the desk chair. Who does
she remind me of? Head between the shoulders, ready to spit. ‘Yeah, the pad. But does that mean you yourself have to look as if you’ve been to-hell-and-gone? Like you’ve slipped back?’
I had honestly forgot.
I touch myself, the smear on my tee-shirt where I leaned on the sill, the all-over dust. The dirt-bobbles the rafters must have shed on my hair. ‘Oh Jesus God.… Look Daisy. This is not the way I’m being anymore.’ How can I say it? ‘I been going to a kind of club; it’s been good. People I can hang out with. Reasons to eat. I even help out. But last night, they had—an accident. Bad. Nobody was to blame. But when the police came, I hid, that’s all. In a dirty place. The rest of the members had lit out. And I walked home. Where you met me.’
I go on my knees to her. ‘Don’t be disappointed. Don’t. Listen—you always wanted me to have a mirror, right, but I wouldn’t? … Wait.’
The full-length mirror’s in the ell too. Don’t use it much, only when I feel I can afford to. It’s good value, four dollars, got at my usual. No frame, just leans against a corner. A mirror with the silver backing so scratched there are empty streaks in it. But you can still see a smile in it. How long since you last did that, facing yourself, Carol? … Now use the shower Ramon Lopez fixed you, even if it spills into the sink. Out with the clean tee and the dungarees. Brush the hair hard. And listen, Carol. Be-ee ca-a-sual.
When I come back—well; I emerge. A fashion plate. Earrings even. Angel gave me. They almost match the barette.
I see she is not disappointed. Very offhand, I open the refrigerator and take my pill-of-the-day. That reminds her. I see that the pill she takes from her box is over-the-counter. Take more of that kind and you would just throw up.
She watches me watch her take it; I can’t help myself.
I make the tea.
Sleeping on the floor of this old tenement is like sleeping on the ground. Basic thoughts creep toward me from the sidewalks down below, and up through the old lead water-pipes that no Lopez can fix. I saw New York ground-dirt once—when our eighth-grade class from Dedham visited, at a time when the last empty spaces in midtown were being ‘improved.’ In the construction sites a giant gamboge mud oozed from the deep of the planet, swelling toward the curbside vans lined up to hold it in, thinning to a yellow glaze on avenues long ago paved. Teacher said iron oxide caused the color, but we were used to neat brown garden earth and knew we were catching a glimpse of the planet’s true turd.
Nowadays any such wounded sites are quickly fenced in, with whimsical crescents cut in the solid planking for passers-by to peer through—but only after the foundations are in. No one sees the city’s underpinning any more except the pit-workers, whose hard hats maybe hold down the iron thoughts reddening their necks. I sympathize with whoever is that close to the ground.
Gold sleeps in the ell, on the cot. Day after she arrived we phoned the mission in the Bronx, to report. First she talked to them, citing her search for a job down here. Then I. I was the ‘cousin’ housing her, the Dedham accent returning cool and New England to my tongue. When we finished I put a quarter in the box the Lopez’s keep on the kitchen table for any neighbor’s use of the phone, then added the second quarter I always insist on: ‘It’s for the overhead.’ A word that Carmen doesn’t take to; maybe she considers it anti-tropical. This time she waits until Gold, at her suggestion, goes off to do her clothes at the new launderette three stores down from the bar, then nudges me aside, though there is no one else in the apartment. ‘Your friend, she’s how old?’ She insists on calling Gold my friend.
‘I don’t know—maybe forty?’
It still amazes me that Carmen is only a year older than me. She says she has the jump on me ‘only in the body,’ while I have been ‘happened to’ in the mind. Not that she rules this out for herself. She has given Lopez an ultimatum. When she is thirty, things being as usual with him, she will kill that woman in the bar.
Now she says ‘Forty, s-s-s?’ between her teeth. ‘And nobody clapping—si?’
So that night, using my sink, we do Gold’s hair. A soft female light comes through the blind. Angel sticks his head in the door, mocking us—‘Yah-h-h.’ Such a stink—zal hedor—should he phone the gas company? When we are done Carmen claps her hands in front of Gold like she did in front of the plaster virgin she’d found in an ashcan, after she repainted it. Gold is standing as still as that statue, which is now in the Lopez’s bedroom, with Carmen’s headbands stacked on it. Carmen pats Gold’s cheek. ‘Now your hair is the same as your name.’
Carmen is a circus I have come to love. Where I have been taken into the scene behind the acts. Before she let me use the floor to sleep on again she made me sweep it, and wash with her latest discovery, oil soap. She held up the bottle, worshiping. Together we have repaired my year. I say, ‘Tell Angel to come, later tonight. For the bike.’
I see she knows what that means. She’s looking at my new possession, which for want of anywhere else to put it, I have slung on the gorilla cage. A one-person backpack which can unfold to serve as an outdoor shelter. First designed according to the newspapers, by a minister in Philadelphia, it is reputed to have saved many a life-in-the-cold. Thousands are said to be now in use. People who still live inside tend to avert their eyes from the user carrying one; it is a badge. A few stare in envy. Not Carmen.
‘Found it at the thrift,’ I say in awe. ‘Brand-new.’ Everything in life ends up at that shop. There’s a moral lesson in every bin. I touch her cheek. ‘No bugs.’ She touches mine.
Tenement people are used to partings. It’s then you can embrace.
‘You no come back, Carol? You no can stay?’
What can I answer? My talent is otherwise. I bury my face in her shoulder. My hands grasp hers. I leave the barette in them.
By the time Angel comes, Daisy is back, and sleeping again. Sleep is her tent just now, but she is a house person. I shall be leaving her mine.
Angel lifts the bike down, cradling it. I unwind the glittering blue glass chain from the handlebars and put it around his neck. ‘Don’t go for too many marathons.’
He has something for me, from his mother. One of the mate gourds with its silver spoon, and a sack of mate.
I say, ‘I’ll send you a card.’
Now that the bike is gone, the freed desk looks at-the-ready. Like it’s upended only at night, to give the sleeper on the cot more elbow-room. Like it’s waiting, like any good desk, for me to practice my secretarial skills on it, including some not too classic Spanish. From the opposite wall, the rolled-up backpack answers it.…
In Dedham, September was the month we brought out the Hudson Bay blankets; in the mornings their stripings glowed like grates. Once a week we burned one of the lumps of cannel coal which were—as I had learned to say after the aunts each Sunday—‘As big as Titus’s heart’—he being the owner of the coal-and-wood yard who every New Years sent over the quarter ton we stretched throughout the year.
Titus’s great-grandfather, helped to come North by the abolitionists, the aunt’s great-grandfather among them, ended his days in that man’s household service, as what was known in the turreted mansions of that era as ‘the useful man’—his tasks, where other servants were of course kept, being to carry and sweep for them, attend the furnace and polish the brass only, the silver being the butler’s or housekeeper’s chore. All duties of lower degree, but in no sense a slave’s. Titus’s father had established the coal-yard. Titus’s own son, who went to Howard University and died in a war, attended high school with my aunts; in the pile of yearbooks he stands in the class picture between the two of them. He too perhaps had a heart.
A night-wind is moving the blind. We face the east here also, though city chill is not the same as in a house with enough windows for the decades to rattle through, and a staircase wide enough for all that had blown in. City steam swells and steeps you in your own juices, rather than truly warms. Cannel coal burned cleaner than the low-grade bits which served the one wing of the house
that we kept open in winter, though any that came to us from Titus’s yard was first washed down. When the old man died my aunts, two fiercely single women who had learned from manuals how to solder burst pipe and rewire cables the mice had gnawed, took to washing the coal themselves. I—the useful child, helping. The aunt who taught in the daytime roused me for school; the one who taught in the evenings greeted my return. The air in that house was pure—like an ethic one didn’t know one had. I didn’t know they were saving for more than the college I mightn’t get a scholarship to. For the trust.…
Time for my pill. I’ll miss the refrigerator, which whenever I open it spoons out its own mite of encouragement. My Miss Tidy, waiting every day to be refilled, it belongs to a stationary future. A backpack is always urging you on. When I go, I’ll stick the note already in my pocket on the fridge door. ‘I’m off, Gold. For what you did for me there is no substitute. Keep on the room here if you want to. For yourself, not for me. Carmen will tell you where to pay the rent. Good luck. I’ll send you a card.’ Once the note was written up I saw I should have said Daisy instead of Gold, but let it be.
I take my pill. The past—the pills bury it. Else why do those on the ward, both the meek and the violent, try to refuse them, until forced? A pill buries the self that you are, that others must make manageable. Docile, one feels guilty for not being faithful to those depths.
Gold sleeps on, heavily. A ‘good’ SW is instructed not to ‘identify’ with the ‘clients.’ That is their lingo. But Gold is now merely the SW of herself. Before she slept we had a long gab, from cot to floor, floor to cot. I am in Angel’s Boy Scout sleeping-bag, which his mother pressed on me the night Gold came; it smells of boy, and woodsmoke. Gold, bending down at me, smells of her new hair. ‘You never did tell us—’ she says. ‘How you were orphaned. Why you had to live with your aunts.’
In my childhood, half the people in town knew some of it. Or thought they knew all of it. But once you turn yourself in, you are mostly a footnote. The facts are there, but in a public facility nobody much notices them. Still later on, from transfer to transfer, from a detention set-up to a medical one, public to private, the case-record fattens, the facts all but disappear. And the names—I had so many. But in any record, your conduct—the most recent—is what counts.
In the Slammer With Carol Smith Page 5