I walk slowly. I’ll never know why Paulette shouted, either this morning or now, and it probably won’t matter. But my good mood is gone. I feel like going into my office, closing the door, lying down on the battered and stained orange couch I have in there, and going to sleep. I’ve done that only once, after a board meeting when the president—the one who’s leaving—argued against giving my associate director, Jason King, more hours. Jason is also one of the outreach workers and supervises the other two.
That was a year ago. I was afraid Jason would leave, but he didn’t. He took a part-time job at Walmart. I knew he thought I hadn’t argued enough. I argued hard but not skillfully. I’ve been director for five years, and I’ve hardly ever clashed with the board. The members are people I talked into taking on the job for nothing, people who work in similar agencies, but I didn’t know the outgoing president before he joined the board. He’s difficult. He’d say I’m difficult.
Upstairs, Jason is outside his office, talking to one of the other outreach workers, blocking the narrow corridor to my office. He’s leaning on the wall. His right foot, in a heavy brown leather boot, is braced against the opposite wall. The sole of his shoe is pressed against the green paint, which already has a few faint outlines of the sole of Jason’s right shoe. Sometimes I tease him that I’m going to make him repaint that wall. His leg in tan pants makes a barrier. The outreach worker, Mel, is leaning on the opposite wall, next to Jason’s shoe. Her feet, in running shoes, are planted in the middle of the corridor, so between me and my office, as I reach the landing, are both her feet and one of Jason’s legs. Jason’s a good-natured bald man in his forties. He raises a finger to ask if I have a minute. He won’t mind watching me eat the second half of my sandwich. He and Mel seem to have been discussing something for a while.
“He’s not ready,” she says. “No, that’s wrong. He is ready. He’s just not doing it.”
Someone is supposed to come to the center, or allow us to place him in a detox program, or phone for a job interview, or bring in the record of his citizenship, his application for a pardon, his GED certificate. . . .
“I need you,” Jason says to me, somehow lowering his leg without sliding onto the floor. He never slides onto the floor. “Sorry, Mel.”
“No, we’re done,” Mel says. “Hi, Jean.” She bumps down the stairs.
Jason and I go into my office, and I sit on my orange couch. “Sorry,” I say, and pick up the second half of the sandwich.
There’s a book on the couch—an unfamiliar book. I’ve been vaguely aware of it for a few days. Whatever the book is about, it’s not about Paulette Strong, so it’s appealing. My door is often open when I’m out, and I figure someone is lending it to me. Once a week, a poet teaches a writing workshop downstairs. Poems about homelessness and other topics are tacked on bulletin boards. The poet pushes me to read her favorite books. I don’t remember her mentioning this one—Bright Morning of Pain, a creased dust jacket with a picture of a tree and gold lettering—but I figure it’s hers. I liked one book she lent me, didn’t like another one. She’ll be annoyed if I disagree a second time.
“We’ve got a problem,” I say to Jason.
“It’ll be fine,” Jason says.
“What’ll be fine? Don’t cheer me up until you’ve heard.”
“No, we’re okay. Paulette, right? That’s what I wanted to talk about. She’s going to be fine. You worry too much.”
Jason has a wife—a nurse—and four children. He’s a social worker by training. He defers to me as his boss, but I know he thinks he could look after me and correct my mistakes, maybe because I’m just me and he’s a crowd, if you count his wife, children, and pets. His dogs sometimes come to work with him. I have no pets and no people. Early in life, I was married and divorced.
I haven’t told Jason I’m afraid I made the wrong choice when I hired Paulette, but I’m not surprised that he knows. Either of the other candidates—a white woman or a black man—would have been fine. I suspect that Paulette was popular with the board because they thought a black woman would fit nicely with a white woman (me) and a black man (Jason), instead of adding another example of what we already have. Paulette adds something, no question, but it has nothing to do with race or sex.
“She’s good,” he says. “Yesterday, she was great.”
“At what?”
“Intervened in a fight.”
“Where?”
“Sidewalk.”
“Physical fight?”
“I saw it from the window and ran out. That man with the bike?” I know who he means—he’s trouble.
“And who?” I say.
“Dude I never saw before. The bike guy is going with fists—I’m thinking, Knife, knife, get there before he goes for the knife.”
“He’s not allowed in here with a knife.”
“I knew he had one. The way he moved—he knew he could do something else when he got into trouble.”
“So?” I pull my feet out of my shoes. I put down my sandwich.
Jason’s in my chair, which has wheels, and he’s scooting slightly forward and back as he speaks. “So Paulette comes along—back from lunch. And she doesn’t say anything.”
“She didn’t yell?”
“She didn’t yell; she just put her hand on Bike Man’s right arm and started walking him backward. Then she sort of hugs him—she gets herself around him, and by that time, three guys pull the other man away, and that’s that. She kept him talking until he calmed down and the other guy was gone. She’s good, Jean.”
I finish my sandwich.
I decide not to tell him what happened. I’m bothered about the stranger she let into the kitchen—and how she acted when I told her about the rule—even more than the shouting, but maybe she’s one of those people who gets her back up but then does what she should. I ask him what the man in the fight looked like.
“I don’t know. Big.”
“White?” I said. “Long hair?”
“Maybe Latino. I don’t remember the hair.” There’s no way to know if the man is today’s volunteer. I say thanks and stand up, to make him get up. When he leaves, I close the door.
I don’t take a nap. But I pick up the book the poet left for me. An old hardcover novel. I don’t look at the back cover or read the flap; I just open it at the beginning and start reading.
Leaves drooped in clusters close to the screen, tossed lightly by wind. Some were bright, touched by sun. Then the light changed, gray clouds spread, and the leaves flipped to gray. Maybe it would rain. My boyfriend’s arm was stretched across my stomach, and I smelled his sweat.
The words or the rhythms make me drowsy. My legs are drawn up under me, and I lean sideways on the sofa. It’s old but has high sides.
The woman thinking it might rain is in bed with her boyfriend in Brooklyn, looking out the window at the backyard. They have come from a demonstration against the war in Vietnam. (I check the copyright date: 1980.) She lightly draws her hand in circles over his back, but he shifts away. The book seems a little dumb, but that’s okay. I’ve never read a dumb book with politics in it before. I would keep reading, but Darlene sticks her head in. This time it’s the payroll. I sit down at my desk to look over what she’s done, and as I scoot my chair closer to hers, I see a scrap of paper on the floor with unfamiliar handwriting on it.
Someone left me a note that blew onto the floor. I pick it up.
Thurs. am
Jeanne—
Where are you?
JG
“Whoever wrote this spelled my name wrong,” I say.
“JG is Joshua Griffin,” Darlene says.
“Was I supposed to meet him yesterday?”
“No idea.”
I’m used to Darlene.
Today is Friday. I talked to Joshua Griffin early in the week, but we didn’t talk about a meeting. Then I realize that the note has been there since last Thursday, and when I check my calendar, I see that, sure enough, I wrote “Griffin?” o
n that Thursday morning. I don’t know where I was when he came by. When we talked, he sounded annoyed, maybe surprised that I hadn’t phoned him instead of the other way around—now I know why. And I remember that after the last board meeting, he said, “I may drop in on Thursday on my way to school.” I took that to mean, “I may or I may not and I’ll let you know,” but I guess that’s not how Joshua Griffin thinks.
Barker is tense, these weeks, partly because we hired Paulette and partly because nobody likes the board president. He announced he was quitting, but we’re afraid that he’ll change his mind. Two other board members want to be president. I’m for the woman—a psychologist named Ingrid, a friend. The other is this very Joshua Griffin. He serves on several boards and has been on ours for only a few months. He does something in the school system. He’s a presence: Griffins have been leaders for decades in the middle-class black community of New Haven, especially the churches. Joshua Griffin is reserved. I’m thinking that with him in charge, I’ll be dealing not with a man but a scion. He’s not Reverend Griffin, but so many of his relatives have been Reverend that people sometimes call him that.
Ingrid serves on no board but ours. She may not be tough enough to be the president of our cheerful but cantankerous group, but I figure she’ll grow into the job. She and I agree about most things. I don’t know what Joshua Griffin thinks about anything. When Darlene leaves, I send him an apologetic email.
At the board meeting next week, we’ll elect the new president—unless the old one doesn’t quit. Or even if he doesn’t, I now understand. Joshua Griffin will make him quit. For a second, I want Joshua Griffin to be president of the board, because things will happen. Board meetings now are more talk than action. Maybe the board members are too sympathetic to me—except for the president, who has objections but no ideas. Joshua Griffin would have ideas. He would be forceful, and that would be exciting. But it’s dangerous to give forceful people too much freedom. My brief support of Joshua Griffin ends; I want Ingrid again.
What might have occurred to someone else—that the mysterious book is Joshua Griffin’s and that he put it down on the couch when he wrote the note and forgot to pick it up again—does not occur to me. By this time, I almost remember a moment when the poet mentioned it.
A few days later, I find Paulette Strong surrounded by boxes, reorganizing a stuffed supply closet. Darlene has been promising to do it. But Paulette does a better job—she ruthlessly throws things out. I congratulate her and say she should ask me about anything doubtful, and she says, her back to me, “I’m not stupid. I’m not throwing out what we need.”
I hurry into my office before I can say something I’d regret. But I like “we.”
Though I’ve been director for five years, I’m still getting used to the job. I’m often surprised to count up and realize how long I’ve had it and how much time I’ve spent doing the two jobs in other agencies that led up to it. Surprised that I’m doing this at all and surprised that I’m spending my life at it. I grew up in New Haven and majored in economics at UConn. Then for five years, I worked for a chain of women’s clothing stores based in Atlanta, traveling a few days each month. I was slightly powerful and pretty good. My decisions worked out. I had money. I thought about clothes and felt stylish—faking it, but even so. I got married. But after some disappointments (and my divorce), as well as successes that didn’t feel as great as I expected, I got disgusted with myself and the job. I quit, moved back to New Haven for the summer, and stayed with a widowed aunt in a house that was too big for her. My parents had moved to Florida. I took a summer job that a friend of my aunt’s heard of while I thought about graduate school in anthropology.
I had a little money saved up, and I wanted to learn something hard. I had an idea about coming to understand people different from myself and the people who worked for my old company. The summer job was at a food bank, and I was glad when it continued into fall, because I hadn’t found out much about graduate school. Then a woman I met urged me to apply to the agency where she worked, because I understood computers and money. Soon, I was managing the budget and raising money for a shelter. The pay was low, but I still lived with my aunt.
I assumed I would leave the job soon. But I made friends with people who expected to keep doing this kind of work. Even then, before the recession in 2008, we only sometimes got funding for the projects we thought up. My friends and I topped one another’s stories about the tricks our agencies came up with just to keep providing whatever services we offered.
A group of us, men and women, got into the habit of drinks on Friday evenings. That’s how I met Ingrid. We’d talk about our own sorry prospects and the even sorrier ones of our clients. At first I was silent, because, after all, I was leaving. It was a secret—my life was going to be better than theirs. When my friends and I separated for the weekend, I’d intend to spend it investigating my future studying anthropology far from New Haven, then doing research on some remote continent—but I didn’t investigate too hard.
One spring evening, maybe three years after I moved back to New Haven, as we hung around outside the bar, then started down the block, shouting goodbyes as each of us came to his or her car, I noticed that I was feeling regret, even a little envy at what my friends would keep that I planned to give up. There was much to like. The agency where I worked was haphazardly organized, and jobs were fluid, with people taking on something they wanted to do that hadn’t been in their job description. I still spent most of my time on money issues, but I talked with clients as much as with other administrators. My curiosity about people different from me (who often were more like me than I expected) might be satisfied by staying where I was.
The casual mixing of races fascinated me, too. Though I’d grown up in this racially mixed town, I rarely had black friends. Now I did. The people I exchanged jokes and plans with on Friday evenings were sometimes white, sometimes black. The client body was more than half black. I’d finally lost my old self-consciousness in the presence of black people, had finally realized that I should notice people for other reasons—they were competent or inept, shy or bold, funny or dull, friendly or unpleasant.
I wouldn’t miss the belief that I was helping people, because the feeling was rare. Far more frequent was knowing that despite all I’d tried, what I had done had not helped, maybe made things worse. The benefit to humanity was not an argument for staying in this life.
But there was something else, which made me postpone leaving for what turned out to be year after year, until it became clear what my life had decided for me. What we did was finally so simple, in all these agencies: we offered people who needed it rest, food, apartments, sometimes jobs, or just clear explanations of why they couldn’t have what they wanted.
The people we work with have little, sometimes not even sanity. I would be appalled if I noticed myself using their misery to cheer myself: to think that I shouldn’t complain because I was better off. If I did that often, I’d quit. I mind my own problems—lack of a man, for example. My clients complain, whether their problems are their own fault or society’s or somewhere in between, and so do I.
Here’s what finally made it impossible to go away. What we do is so simple and yet so hard. The clients need so much yet are often uncooperative. The American people give us less and less money to help them with. Some people in the field are cynical, lazy, or corrupt. Given all that, what exactly should we do? How, above all, do we keep the agency open?
I stayed for the pleasure of figuring out how to keep doing it. And because now and then I found someone to think about it with. But something remains of my old plan to get out of here. Now and then, I suddenly notice where I am, as if I had actually forgotten I wasn’t somewhere else—and now, I suddenly notice that I’m the director. Responsible. In charge. And past fifty.
In charge of my aunt’s house, too—she left it to me. I catch myself thinking of “her damned closet” or “that impossible basement,” when I could now clear out or change any
thing I wanted to.
As for love, I have the Eight-Year Disease. I meet men, we fall in love, we live together. After eight years, though—okay, six to ten years—we stop being happy. I had three such relationships before I was fifty. The third was in New Haven. After my aunt died, my boyfriend moved in with me for a while, but I was too glad when something took him out of town for a few days, and I broke up with him. It takes a long time to fall in love again after a breakup of a six-to-ten-year love. It’s not like finding yourself alone after being with someone for a year or two, and that’s hard enough. I was a part of families. I didn’t have a child, but once I was almost a stepmother. Each time, the stretch between loves has been longer. Now—the week Paulette starts working, Dunbar says hello, and I find Joshua Griffin’s note—I’m fifty-two. I’ve been alone for six years.
Olive Grossman
Throughout our senior year, Helen made sure I knew what was happening in the war. The number of our troops—mostly reluctant draftees—went way up. Resistance increased, and Helen was often busy in the afternoons. She didn’t invite me along, as if, like writing, protest was private.
But one February day in 1966 she asked if I wanted to go to a demonstration outside the Waldorf Astoria. President Johnson would be speaking inside. Of course, I said yes. The next day, Val and I were the last to leave a meeting of the Sidewalks staff, and as I erased some notes on the blackboard, I sensed that she was stuffing papers into her large leather satchel extra slowly. She wanted to talk with me alone. I felt a brief thrill.
“Johnson’s speaking at the Waldorf,” she said. “Next week.”
I didn’t answer, wondering if Val was proposing that we go to hear the president. She didn’t seem like a protestor any more than she seemed like a writer. Had the school paper assigned her to report on the speech? But she said, “There’s a protest.” She had a flyer. She described what it said at some length. “Want to go?”
Conscience Page 4