In the Slammer With Carol Smith (23 page)

Before I leave, I’ll send them all cards, those persons who have their niches in my life. That way, I’ll practice the continuity. Some would call it love.

Home?

Dangerous as any four-letter word in English.

In German,
Heimat,
said with a holy whine. The French are smarter; they cut it in two, and apportion a mite of its power to everybody:
chez moi, chez soi.
Meanwhile, keeping the ‘house’—
à la maison—
an official pace away.

Inhabit home or leave it—I’m thinking as I came in here—it’s whereby you have to explain your life.

When I came in from that walk, the cards on the table confronted me still, and the letter on its shelf. It’s possible not to open a letter at all, or to stash it until one is safely away. But that wouldn’t be fair, to a person so fair to me that I waver under the burden. No, I’ll read the letter before I go. Surely it will contain love. That I’ll carry with me. Also those cards, written while I too was traveling—in the byways of the mind.

But never sent. Some might be recent, others not; it was a dateless time. Some would be only a sentence or two, scatty and quick. Those were the hardest to write, and leave be. Some brood longer, on the life I was living. But not merely on the mode of the streets, which is public knowledge, whose warps any passerby can see. What if that same life is assumed as conscious experience? An indulgence, say, that no priest can give?

I set out the cards at random. A ghostly solitaire. Laid out by someone who doesn’t quite know how to play.

To Carmen Rodriguez, that madonna of the inside, before whom even the roaches bow. Who seems to me in recall like a saint’s picture in one of those nooks off a nave. But who hangs her headbands on a plaster Virgin rescued from an ashcan.

‘—Remember me to the roaches. I drink tea from your cup.’

To Daisy Gold, whose carry-all held all the sorrows of Job, though more freely distributed.

‘—A welfare worker is not supposed to “identify” with the client. You did. Thanks.—’

To Mungo, whose contradictions were like a sea with all its waves in reverse:

‘—You helped me walk on glass. Thanks—’

To Angel, who was the first to offer me newspapers. Touched by God, that boy, in the best way: smarter than his parents, but still nice to them.

‘—I’m reading the news now. Enjoy the bike. And don’t ever change your name. Thanks—’

Tact—I think, reading those. I must be making the break to it. But for honesty’s sake, I hope it doesn’t go too far.

Turning up an angry card to Ms. Mickens, I can chuckle off that concern:

‘—To Bryna Mickens, Substitute:

—Call me anytime. I’m in social work—’

When I open Martyn’s letter I see it is postmarked eight days ago.

My mother has received her memorial. My elder brother, the head-of-police, attended with men of his unit. Readers of my mother’s books attended also, mostly Anglo couples with their children and children’s children, for whom my mother’s fierce blend of South African flora-fauna and Brit principle was thought to be ideal.

At the graveside my brother and I stood together. Sharpshooters managed to wing us both. The crowd stood fast. So did the unit. I was proud of both sides.

My brother is in hospital, but will survive, to live on my mother’s land, which rightly goes to him; it was his father’s. The monies from the books, which apparently lie unspent, and any future earnings therefrom, come to me. Some I will take out of the country if I can. Any theater I have in me I get from her, and she wouldn’t care where it’s used. The balance will go to the troupe.

My dear Carol: If you will live with me half the year, I will walk outside with you the other half—either six months to begin as you choose.

I should be able to return within the next week.

Love,

Martyn

The scene at the graveside is so vivid to me that what he proposes at first scarcely pushes in. The brother and his men are in uniform, a khaki the color of dark honey, that doesn’t show sweat; their caps are absolutely level, their foreheads red with righteousness. The crowd, mostly women and children, pressed together thin as books read at bedtime, are on a shelf of tableland, to one side. Some who might be women from the cookbook are among them. The coffin, on a mechanized platform, sinks slowly out of sight. The corpse, who surely would have preferred to be lowered by human effort, does not protest. The sharpshooters, a duo at a distance only the dead can see without binoculars, make the sign of the cross before they fire.
Ping.
A sound like a witty remark. I cannot see what Martyn is wearing. But two men fall.

What’s his wound? Wou-ound. The sound reverberates in those foothills I cannot see.

Not so serious that the hospital won’t soon release him. And he can walk. I take heart at the word ‘winged.’

I step out of the shell of myself. I take heart.

October 29th

The six o’clock light comes on. Two days have passed. My month is long since up, yet I am still here. No need to bring out the checkers to tell me why. I’m not foolish enough to think that one ever stops playing games with oneself. So I sit here, in wonder at how I have been weaned.

When I went to the stationer’s again, resuming that routine, the daughter and her cousin were not there, but as I accepted the newspaper the father handed me, he unbent. ‘She’s at school,’ he said. ‘On her motorbike.’ He would have said more, but just then the woman lurking in the rear stepped forward to reveal herself, the mother, all sinuous garment and coiled hair. ‘Thank you,’ I say to the father, and as I pass, the mother echoes it. She does not say for what. But she knows the English for it. It’s well past dinner-time, the lottery customers are gone—but I’m in luck. I am now part of their story. The city has begun to let me in.

I am no longer angry at Martyn’s offer. At first I thought he mocked the way I had lived, and assumably planned to go on living. The trouble is—I see how he might. What’s a Jeanne d’Arc, if no one sees her burning?

My childhood did not allow anger. If there was reason for rage, whether on someone else’s part or mine, I was programmed to remain oblivious. Of how our breasts swelled, the voice muttered, the fist sounded in the palm—a stand-in for the enemy we could not afford to have.

This time, I catch my own posture, swollen and inarticulate. The solitary glass bangle at my wrist, silent for want of a companion, reminds me. Anger without just cause is the psyche’s noise. I think how Martyn would burst out laughing at the sight of me, and am ashamed.

I glance over at the line of drums. They and I have a small secret that I will not confide even to a machine.

October 31st

One recognition of a day’s date even the confirmedly dateless are allowed. Maybe a street seller thrusts a flyer in your hand and you hold onto it, so as to keep track of when your next welfare check is due? Or the collector of aluminum cans for turn-in money, loading his barrow, turns up a half-empty, that if left unopened would have been good for two years yet—and shakes his head at that beery improvidence.

But date two entries, as I now have, and you join the calendared planet, all the way back to Copernicus. With maybe a clutch of Aztecs and Chaldeans at your elbow. To say nothing of Stonehenge.

Dusk comes earlier now. The year turns, and I don’t need a weatherman to tell me so. Venture out, and I see all the astrology of the street. Jealousy nips me. Do I want to join the charts?

Saunter anywhere in a city’s dust and you are forced to mark the two divided streams of the populace. First, always first, the mainstream of those who have appointments with tunnels, subways, buses or limos, no matter what their position is in society, and whether or not they are going home. Sooner or later they will—and home implies the calendared life. Everybody there takes for granted that days have labels. Life is conducted behind a curtain of numerals: bank statements, salaries, taxes, that sound their warning bells morning to evening, a background music that some repress, many enjoy.

Side by side with that flowing current, are those who live in the dateless country, their hobbled transportation likely to be themselves. In prison, the only date is your sentence, in hospital it’s your feared or craved for ‘release.’ Once outside, we special ones meld with the commoners—those so low or dumb or hapless that they have been ousted even from the ranks of the resident poor.

But we are not that. We are the freed.

That’s what the SW’s don’t understand.

Before Daisy Gold I had a man worker, given me by design. A cozy hipster with a ring in his ear and an extra in his nose for weekends; for our confabs he wore both. ‘You can have a job, Carol, and still hang loose. Look at me. You don’t have to be passive, dear, to be cool. And I myself spend the wee hours in a shelter, once a month.’ All the lingo he had learned from his shrink he shook out on me.

‘You’re trying to rape me with theory, Manny,’ I told him. ‘I could complain.’ But to be smart only spurs their interest.

He and a photographer friend wanted to do a documentary on me, for some nights following me on camera to wherever I crashed. Finally I say to them: ‘If I had a pad, I’d call the cops on you. As it is, well—scram. I’m not a documentary. I’m a case record.’ I see how he and the friend exchange glances. ‘Carol—’ Manny says. ‘How’d you get so clean?’

They had found me in that spot near the George Washington Bridge, where I’d set up the Sterno. The night before, a girl sharing the archway with some of us, had had a miss and bled all over me before we got her into a cab and to Columbia Presbyterian, where she O.D.’d. ‘The nurses let me wash up,’ I tell him. The guy with the camera raises his flash but Manny stops him. ‘Why—’ he says to me, ‘why do you so love the abyss?’

I remember how the hot came up in my cheeks, the way it does when you hear a piece of your story, from somebody else. And the truth drags out of you. ‘I came from where the horrors are. I have to be where they still are. Or I don’t feel—honorable.’

The six pm light comes on. Light is never humdrum, but the zigzag of pleasure at this near-ceremonial has lessened. I am too used to it.

When Manny was transferred to another precinct, he gave me a present. ‘It’s a vita. An employment history. Got it from that record of yours—hey? So what if they date, some? Lot of janes re-entering the work force. You could use this any time.’

On the ward you could talk about your ‘life’ until doomsday, all the while knowing you were on hold. A girl who later took pills said to Heather and me: ‘When you commit suicide—do you “do yourself in?” Or out?’ She always wore her dark glasses, even to the Thursday films. When they found her, months later, in an abandoned cemetery, the skeleton was still wearing its shades.

I never considered suicide. ‘Ah Carol—’ Dr. Cee said, in that probing which never touches you but whose fingers you can feel in your brain, ‘you’re pro-life.’

They had such an orderly facsimile charted for us: Mondays for single therapy, Wednesdays for group, Fridays, if on the mend, you went downtown unsupervised, but in twos—how could they counterpart the real pile of straws that faced each of us? That faces me, the fur district, and man-woman-and-chick—citywide?

The night the girl miscarried and then O.D.’d, when I got back from the Presbyterian I found my fire had been tended by the others under the archway. A wine and hash party was the idea, each addict to his own, with coffee for coming down. ‘We could pool for eats,’ I said, and they stared at this innocent, but tolerated. ‘You see what she did—one said, excusing me, ‘it gives you an appetite.’ So I could break out my wiener and soda picked up on the way back. No one else ate. But a campfire breeds talk.

Not all of the four had been inside. The two buddies I figured had been thieving soon skipped, once they were high, letting drop—‘Lotta cars just asking for it, on the lower Drive.’ The two who were left, a former ’tec who wore a thick toupee for warmth, and a black girl who wore a chainmail of beads, carried a suitcase, and could pass for being off to a weekend, were agreed. ‘You lose your apartment, you can’t hold onto your job. You lose your job, you can’t keep up the apartment. I’m not a homeless,’ she said. ‘I’m a secretary, when I can get it. But you have to have a phone. Tonight—I just ran out of relatives.’ The detective said, ‘I have a habit, yes. But I don’t steal for it. Do a little business for that, and you get by. But I can’t save up, neither.’

I was new to it then. To how almost all of those you meet on the road are in the ward of themselves.

And walking, walking, on the proud stilts of a philosophy—wasn’t I?

Down below, the street light goes on. The sky is a gasp of pink. Outside-versus-inside holds the moment in clarity. Like used to happen in that bay window, the last of daylight breathing over our game.

Your turn, Carol. Pull a straw.

I am going to pull one straw from the pile.

The flower market over east will still be open. I sometimes stroll past for the fresh ozone from trees and plants set out on the sidewalk, and in the rear of the store the bouquets waiting like movie stars for delivery to restaurants. Plus in the window a few corsages for the pre-theater trade.

I won’t buy an orchid. But before I leave here, I’ll pay my rent.

On the way, I’m thinking how the wait for Martyn has been like one long evening. None quite so calm as this one, the night when one decides—to decide.

At the market, only one stall is still open, the last of the Greek ones still catering to weddings, and to the belly-dancer cafés. No plants. But a trellis within is hung with frail bunches in the watercolor hues that dried flowers always are. I buy several bunches. They will rustle into winter on their own.

It’s 9 pm Saturday, the Sunday papers will be out. I like knowing this fact of the city’s household. Stopping at a vendor I pick up a Times, part of what my metropolitan holding brings in. But I can’t carry it all, my arms are full.

‘Just give me the Help Wanted,’ I tell the vendor, an Afghani by the look of him. He is not surprised. So laden, blending with others passing on their late hunt for fruit and vegetables, one saunters or plods, destination pleasantly displayed. There’s no adventure-to-come beyond the ampleness of food, and time. At the week’s end, for those on the calendar. Will that now include me?