“She gets cold,” I said. For a moment, he looked as if he might believe me. In the last month or so, Pamela had taken to wearing layers of skirts, multiple sweaters and shawls, two hats or three, and painting her cheeks with bright round circles of red.
“It’s her affect,” he said. “The whole package. Affect means the overall impression she gives,” he lectured. “You understand? She gives an impression of being strong, but there’s something off-key there. Does she have a history of emotional disturbance?”
I knew I should answer his questions, but I didn’t want to. There was something about this that bothered me, scared me. Yes, Pamela was a little peculiar, but so what? That was the way she was.
“Were there any incidents in your family with your sister?” His hand, with a pen in it, was poised over a yellow legal pad.
Something kept me from speaking. Was it pride? Mother wouldn’t like me talking about family problems, nor would Father. But maybe it was just fear that they could take Pamela away and lock her up, and me with her.
“Your affect, on the other hand,” he said, putting down his pen, “is the opposite of your sister. Pleasant, a bit timid.”
“Timid,” I repeated. I didn’t like that, either.
* * *
We had been in the shelter for over a week. We slept on cots in a room with a dozen other women. Some of them cried, some of them smelled, some of them tried to talk to us. “Don’t you talk to anyone,” Pamela warned me. She clutched my arm. “They’re all crazy in here.” Every morning we folded the stiff green blankets at the foot of the beds and then washed in the crowded bathroom, before we got breakfast. Every day we had to leave the shelter and stay away until the evening meal. The weather was cold and we discovered different places where we could sit without being bothered. The library was good, and so was the ladies’ lounge in one of the big department stores. If we had money — mostly we didn’t, but once we found a ten dollar bill while we were crossing the street, and a few times we begged — we bought food and ate it there. The doors on the stalls creaked open and shut, open and shut, and the toilets flushed, but it was warm.
* * *
When Mr. Elias asked my age, I told him seventeen. I sat up straight and said it without expression.
“You’re small for your age,” he said.
“Like my mother.” I wound my hands together in my lap.
“Where is your mother?”
“Dead.”
“And your father?”
I hesitated, then said, “Dead.” It was true, in a way, wasn’t it?
“So it’s just you and your sister?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He leaned across the desk. “It must be hard. Are you scared of Pamela?”
“Scared? No.”
“You have no difficulty dealing with her?”
I shook my head.
“You’re devoted to her.”
“She’s my sister.”
He sat there, looking at me. Was he thinking about my “affect”? I wondered how long we could go on staying here, and how we were going to live when we left. Crazy Pamela. Timid me.
“What are your plans?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Have you looked for work?”
I shook my head.
“What about your sister? Can she hold down a job?”
I shrugged. “She gets fired. She fights with people.”
“Ah,” he said, as if he weren’t surprised. “She might qualify for a disability check. But you need to find a job.”
“Okay.” I wondered what I could do, and who would even want to hire me.
* * *
Mr. Elias arranged for Pamela to have two interviews with a psychologist. After the first one, she was in a fury. “You hear those idiot questions he asked me? All he wanted was to get in my brain and mess it up. That little turd, he wanted me to draw pictures for him. Fruck I will!” She pinched me hard. “And you love it, you and Elias, you two billing and cooing together, you love me going there.”
I rubbed my arm. “Pamela, you got it wrong.” We were in the ladies’ lounge in the department store. “I told you, Mr. Elias said if you go to the interviews, maybe you could get a check every month. Remember? It wouldn’t be much, he said, but it would be someth —”
“Don’t tell me again what frucking Feelius said! He’s another moron. I’m not going back!” Her cheeks had a raw flush, and she slapped me.
“Fine,” I managed to say. I didn’t cry. I never did when she hit or pinched me, but sometimes the effort seemed to drive the tears back into my head like nails. I went to the watercooler and drank. “We’ll just go on staying in the shelter forever.”
She smirked, as if I’d finally said something sensible, but the following week she went to the second appointment.
“You have to project confidence when you’re looking for work, Em,” Mr. Elias said.
“Yes,” I said.
“You have to speak up.”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes you whisper. Like now, I can hardly hear you. I want you to use a big voice. All right?”
“All right.”
“Louder!”
“All right.”
“Good. And smile. Like that. That’s right. You have a nice smile.”
* * *
The first place I tried was the department store where Pamela and I had waited out hours in the ladies’ lounge. I filled out an application, then sat on a bench outside the personnel office. A parade of people with important-looking folders under their arms rushed in and out. An hour passed before I was called. A man wearing a white shirt and a blue bow tie sat behind a desk.
“Yes, what can I do for you?” he said without looking at me.
“I’m … looking for work.” It came out in a whisper.
He held out his hand for my application. “Do you have any experience as a salesperson?”
“No.”
“What can you do?”
“Anything you want me to.”
He looked up and almost smiled. “I don’t have anything now. Try me again in a month.”
* * *
I went to the next place. And the next. And then another place. And the next day I did the same thing. And the day after that. Every day I walked in and out of offices, shops, and factories, as if on a treadmill or in a dream. At night, under the green blanket, my dreams were crowded with offices and applications and voices asking me questions. Can you use a computer? Are you willing to work Saturdays? How old are you? Do you have any experience? How long were you on your last job?
In the dreams and in life, I filled in each line of the endless applications, using my best handwriting, and I answered every question, even the ones for which I had no answers. And in the dreams and in life I was told, No work now. Try again in a month. I’ll put your application on file.
My first job was at the food counter in a variety store downtown. I was hired as a temp, filling in for a woman on family leave. I microwaved sandwiches, kept the coffeepot filled, and served juice, soda, whatever the customer ordered. “Easy deal,” Pamela said. I was sure she was right, but every day I seemed to find something else to do wrong. I served coffee that was too hot or not hot enough, didn’t smile enough for some people (“You ever crack that little poker face of yours?”) and didn’t talk enough for others (“Cat got your tongue, honey?”). I gave people too little change or too much. The man I’d shorted glared, as if I meant to steal his quarter. The woman I handed a ten instead of a one handed it back. Lucky for me. Some nights, I hardly slept for thinking about all this. Even though I was surrounded by food, I kept losing weight.
When Mindy, the woman I was filling in for, came back, she inspected the counter and the machines and the refrigerator. “Clean,” she approved. Then she looked me over. “Sweetie, are you one of those anorexic types?” she asked. She made me a hamburger and stood over me while I ate it. I liked her freckled face, and I
was happy when she said she was going to ask the boss to keep me on as her helper. At first he said no. Then he came back and said okay, but only until the end of the summer.
By then we had moved into an apartment, which Mr. Elias had helped us find. Bradley Towers sounded grand, but it was just three tall concrete boxes set around a big parking lot with some grass and trees. I was fifteen now. I had my Social Security number, and lying about my age no longer made my stomach ache. Every day I went to work. Sometimes Pamela did things in the apartment, made a meal or mopped the floor, but mostly she just fed herself and watched TV. Toward the end of the year, she started a project to make a quilt with scraps. She got tired of it, though, and instead made her first Monica, a knitted doll.
She talked about it as if it were alive. She perched her on the back of the couch and warned me not to pick her up. “She doesn’t like anyone but me to touch her.” She said that the Monica — and, later on, the first Mortie — was there to watch me.
“She sees everything you do.” The Monica’s eyes were flat black buttons, and they did seem to follow me around the room, to be gazing fixedly at me, no matter where I was. After a while, they were the first things my eyes went to when I came home every day.
After the counter job, I had a whole series of jobs. I handed out flyers for a store opening, baby-sat in a sports club, washed windows in a florist shop, and sold pretzels in a closet-sized booth in a mall. Some of my jobs lasted a week, some as long as three or four months. Every job ended for a different reason. I worked in a knitting store until the owner, a tall wide-hipped woman, asked if I could lend her money. When I said I didn’t have any, she nodded in an unsurprised way and said there wasn’t enough business to keep me on anyway, and I might as well pick up my check and not return.
Sometimes when I lost a job, Pamela threw food on the floor or knocked over books and lamps. Once she swept all the glasses out of the cupboard. It took me hours, crawling around on the floor, to find every tiny shard. She sat on the couch, Mortie and her first and second Monica behind her, all of them watching me.
I lost the pretzel-shop job because of a pimple on my chin. Pamela didn’t believe me. “Did the boss say that?”
“No.”
“What’d he say?”
“Said he didn’t need me anymore. He was cutting back.”
“So why’d you lie to me?”
“I didn’t. It’s the pimple.” I had seen him staring at it. I had seen the expression on his face.
“Don’t give me that crap. What’d you do, steal?” She heaved herself out of her chair, her cheeks puffy and streaked raw. I backed away, but she came after me. In this mood, she could move fast. She bumped me into the wall, pulled me, and knocked me to the floor. She kicked me. When she was through, she cried. She always cried afterward. One time, she punched her hand into the wall and said it was my fault it happened; I’d made her do it, and she never would have, if it wasn’t for me and my big mouth.
I thought she might be right. I told myself to be more careful, not to blurt everything out. Why tell her I had lost this job or that? Why say anything I didn’t have to? But when I walked into the apartment and saw the Morties and the Monicas staring at me, I felt they knew everything anyway.
* * *
It was spring again. My birthday was close, my third without Mother. One morning, very early, I left the apartment. I had lost another job a few days before. My face was still bruised and tender, but heading into the cool air I was jubilant, as if I’d carried off an amazing feat. Maybe I had. I’d gotten out of the apartment without waking Pamela. I walked the streets for a long time. The sun rose. Slowly, my jubilation wore off. There was nowhere to go. I put on sunglasses to cover my swollen eyes. I was tired and I felt old.
In a diner, I ordered coffee and sat in a booth, listening to people talking and joking. Their voices slapped over me like a big wash of water. They were blurs, big loose shapes sitting on the stools, moving and swaying, like beasts with voices, the words indistinguishable. I wondered if I was going crazy.
I got up and left. In a park I almost fell down on a bench. I thought of Pamela sitting in her chair, waiting for me to return. She would sit there and wait, and wait, and wait. What if I never went back? What if I started walking and didn’t stop until I was far away? What would happen to Pamela? Who would shop for her, who would cook, set traps for the roaches, and bring her mystery books from the library? Who would watch out for her and be good to her? Who would be the good girl?
* * *
I got a job in a gift shop. The store was owned by Hallie Langstrom. She was tall and pretty, with curly gray hair. She’d had three husbands and four children, she told me, and had traveled all over the world. She took an interest in me and said I should pin my hair up in a French knot and never wear yellow. She gave me other advice, and I listened to everything she said, and sometimes told her things too. But not about Pamela. Not why I had bruises. It was like being in eighth grade and wanting to write only pretty words for Mrs. Karyl.
Hallie was like Mrs. Karyl in another way too, saying I could do things I’d never done. “You should be in college,” she said one day, when she saw me reading on lunch break. “You’re intelligent. I want you to have a plan.” She looked at me as if she really cared if I had that plan. “Save your money and go to school, Em.”
“All right,” I said, as if I could do that. As if it were a real thing.
I started waiting for poems again, then, for words. I had never really stopped, just put it off. I thought I might tell Hallie about Mrs. Karyl but before I could she told me she was closing down the shop. “I’m declaring bankruptcy. I’ve been losing money for months. I’m going the Chapter Seven route.”
“What?”
“This is my last day open to the public. I won’t need you after today. I can inventory and pack up, all that, myself.”
“What about me?” I said.
“What about you?”
“This is my job.”
“Oh, you’ll get another one. You’ll be all right,” she said, as if she hardly knew me, as if we’d never talked about anything. “You’re young,” she added.
* * *
After he hired me to be his assistant, Mr. Pumero could never seem to remember my name. He started with the E and then couldn’t stop. He called me Emily or Emeline or Evelyn or even Ermingrave. “Em is just too short for him, I guess,” I said to Pamela. I made her laugh, reciting the names he called me.
Every day I brought her little cakes, cookies, candy bars or doughnuts, and stories about Mr. Pumero and his customers. I made the people who came into his hardware store silly types who stumbled around, fumbling with money and credit cards, falling in the aisles, sending boxes and pails crashing to the floor.
“Heh-heh-heh-heh,” Pamela would laugh, hitting herself on the head. “You’re killing me.” The crazier I made it, the more destruction there was, the more she liked it. The nights she laughed were the good nights. The nights that weren’t so good were when she chewed hard on her food and nothing I said was funny. There was no way to know how those nights would end. No way to know if, in the morning, I would move slowly and carefully, and cover myself with long sleeves, makeup, and sunglasses.
“What’s the matter with you, Emeline, wearing dark glasses?” Mr. Pumero said. He had a square, close-cropped head. “There’s no sun in here.”
I tried for a smile, tried to walk as quickly as usual, to work as hard as ever. My back hurt and my eyes were wet behind the concealing lenses. When the phone rang, I knew it was Pamela, even before I picked up. “Pumero’s,” I said. “How may I help you?”
“Em! Is that you, Em? What are you doing?”
“I’m working, Pamela.” I kept the phone close to my lips. She had fallen into the habit of calling me. “Is there something you have to tell me, Pamela?”
“Hey! Can’t I say hello if I want to say hello? You got something against me saying hello? I just want to say hello to my littl
e sis, so I say hello.” It was her way of apologizing.
I glanced over at Mr. Pumero at his desk. He was watching me. “You really shouldn’t call me here,” I said quietly.
“Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! Hey! Don’t talk to me like that. It’s a free country, in case you forgot! I’ll pick up the damn phone and talk to you any damn time I want to.”
I knew she liked the sound of all that. I heard the rough sparkle in her voice.
* * *
“Was that your sister again?” Mr. Pumero said one day, after Pamela had called for the second time.
“Yes, sir.”
“This is a business, Emily. She shouldn’t be calling here.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Well, don’t be sorry. Just tell her to cut out the calls. I don’t mind once in a while, but this is a business,” he repeated.
“I’ll tell her,” I said.
After supper that night, I tried to talk to her about it. She barely let me get through my first sentence. “And just who the hell does he think he is?”
“He’s the boss, Pamela.”
“And that means he can tell me what to do? He can’t tell me what to do. Can he tell me what to do, Monica?” She turned to the doll, her hands on her hips. “No, he can’t!” she said in the Monica voice.
“It’s his business, Pamela. He owns it. He’s the boss.” I said all the things I’d said before. “He doesn’t want the phone tied up. A customer might be trying to call.”
“Well, screw him and his business and his customers, and his crazy nutty frucking memory. I’ll call you when I want to, and you can tell him I said so.”
A few days after Mr. Pumero fired me, I told Pamela I was going out to buy a loaf of bread. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I put on sunglasses to cover my eyes and a jacket to cover my arms. In my pocketbook, I had stuffed a pair of underpants and a blouse. I wanted to take Mother’s green sweater, the one with the cat buttons, but I couldn’t find it. I hadn’t seen it for a long time. Pamela said I must have misplaced it.
When She Was Good (9780545361910) Page 7