Rachel and Her Children (15 page)

This, then, is her first concern; but there are others. The bathroom plumbing has overflowed and left a pool of sewage on the floor. A radiator valve is broken. It releases a spray of scalding steam at the eye level of a child. The crib provided by the hotel appears to be unstable. It may be that it was damaged by another resident or perhaps by one of Laura’s children. One of the screws is missing. When I test it with my hand, it starts to sway. The beds in the room are dangerous too. They are made of metal frames with unprotected corners; the mattresses do not fit the frames. At one corner or another, metal is exposed. If a child has the energy or playfulness to jump or do a somersault or wrestle with a friend, and if he falls and strikes his head against the metal ridge, the consequences can be serious. A child on the fourteenth floor, for instance, fell in just this way, cut his forehead, and required stitches just a week before. Most of these matters have been brought to the
attention of the hotel management; in Laura’s case, complaints have brought no visible results.

All of this would seem enough to make life difficult for an illiterate young woman in New York, but Laura has one other urgent matter on her hands. It appears that she has failed to answer a request for information from her welfare office. She’s been cut from benefits for reasons that she doesn’t understand. The timing is bad: It’s a weekend. The crisis center isn’t open, so there’s nobody around to tide her over with emergency supplies. Her children have been eating cheese and bread and peanut butter for two days.

“Those on welfare,” writes the Community Service Society of New York, may be suddenly removed from welfare rolls “for reasons unrelated to their actual need” or even to eligibility standards. This practice is called “churning” by the New York City welfare system. Laura and her children now are being churned.

The room is lighted by fluorescent tubes fixed high above us on the ceiling. They cast a stark light on four walls of greenish paint smeared over with some sort of sludge that drains from someone’s toilet on the floor above. There is an infant girl, two boys with dark and hollowed eyes. A third boy is outside and joins us later. The children have that washed-out look of children in the half-light photographs of Walker Evans that accompanied James Agee’s book
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
.

There are four beds—those with the metal frames—a grimy sofa, the crib, two chairs, and a refrigerator. There is a television set that doesn’t work. A metal hanger is attached instead of an antenna, but there is no picture on the screen. Instead, there is a storm of falling flakes and unclear lines. I wonder why she keeps it on.

There are no table lamps to soften the fluorescent glare, no books, no Christmas tree, no decorations. She tells
me that her father is of Panamanian birth but that she went to school in New York City. Spanish is her first language. I don’t speak Spanish well. We do the interview in English.

“I cannot read,” she says. “I buy the
New York Post
to read the pictures. In the grocery I know what to buy because I see the pictures.”

What of no-name products—the generic brands that have no pictures but could save her a great deal of money?

“If there are no pictures I don’t buy it. I want to buy pancakes, I ask the lady: ‘Where’s the pancakes?’ So they tell me.”

She points to the boys: “He’s two. He’s five. Matthew’s seven. My daughter is four months. She has this rash.” She shows me: ugly skin eruptions on the baby’s neck and jaw. “The carpets, they was filthy from the stuff, the leaks that come down on the wall. All my kids have rashes but the worst she has it. There was pus all over. Somewhere here I have a letter from the nurse …” She shuffles around but cannot find the letter. “She got something underneath the skin. Something that bites. The only way you can get rid of it is with a cream.”

She finds the letter. The little girl has scabies.

“I been living here two years. Before I came here I was in a house we had to leave. There was rats. Big ones they crawl on us. The rats, they come at night. They come into our house, run over my son’s legs. The windows were broken. It was winter. Snow, it used to come inside.

“My mother lived with us before. Now she’s staying at my grandma’s house. My grandma’s dying in the bed. She’s sixty-five. My mother comes here once a week to do the groceries. Tomorrow she comes. Then she goes back to help my grandma.

“I know my name and I can write my name, my children’s names. To read I cannot do it. Medicines: I don’t know the instructions.

“I was living here when I was pregnant with Corinne. No. I didn’t see no doctor. I was hungry. What I ate was rice and beans, potato chips and soda. Up to now this week we don’t have food. People ask me: ‘Can you help? Do you got this? Do you got that?’ I don’t like to tell them no. If I have something I give it. This week I don’t got.

“I can read baby books—like that, a little bit. If I could read I would read newspapers. I would like to know what’s going on. My son, he tells me I am stupid. ‘You can’t read.’ You know, because he wants to read. He don’t understand what something is. I tell him: I don’t know it. I don’t understand. People laugh. You feel embarrassed. On the street. Or in the store.” She cries. “There’s nothing here …”

She gestures in a wide arc, but I can’t tell if she means that gesture to take in the room or something more: all of her life, all of the city, all the cities of the earth. Then she makes her meaning clear: “Everything I had, they put it on the sidewalk. When I was evicted. I don’t know if that’s the law. Things like that—what is the law, what isn’t? I can’t read it so I didn’t understand. So I lost everything I had.”

Erikson writes of the belongings lost by people when they are uprooted: “These goods are more than a form of decoration or a cushion against want; they are … the furniture of self.” To lose the sum of one’s belongings, he observes, is to lose evidence of who one is: “In that sense, too, the terrain has become undependable.”

For few people anywhere on earth could the terrain seem less dependable than for this woman: “I sign papers. Somebody could come and take my children. They could come. ‘Sign this. Sign that.’ I don’t know what it says. Adoption papers I don’t know. This here paper that I got I couldn’t understand.”

She hands me another letter. This one is a notice from the management of the hotel: “This notice is to inform you
that your rent is due today. I would appreciate your cooperation in seeing to it that you go to your center today.” Another form she hands me asks her to fill out the names and ages of her kids. “Papers, documents—people give it to me. I don’t know it. I don’t understand.

“I’m a Catholic. Yes: I go two weeks ago to church. This lady say they have these little books that learn me how to spell. You see the letters. Put them together. I would like to read. I go to St. Francis Church. Go inside and kneel: I pray. I don’t talk to the priest. I done so many things—you know, bad things. I buy a bottle of wine. A bottle of beer. That costs a dollar. I don’t want to say to God.

“I get $173, restaurant allowance. With that money I buy clothes. Food stamps: I get $200. That’s for groceries. Subway tokens I take out $10. Washing machine, I go downstairs. Twenty-five dollars to dry and wash. Five dollars to buy soap. Thirty dollars twice a month.”

These costs are about the same as those that Gwen reported. Another woman at the Martinique calculates her laundry costs at my request. She comes out to nearly the same figure. These may be the standard rates for a midtown location. The difficulty of getting out and traveling across town to find lower prices, whether for laundromats or groceries, cannot be overstated. Families at the Martinique are trapped in a commercial district.

I ask Laura who stays with the children when she does her chores.

“My mother keeps the children when I do the wash. If she can’t, I ask somebody on the floor. ‘Give me three dollars. I watch your kids.’ For free? Nothing. Everything for money. Everybody’s poor.

“This is the radiator. Something’s wrong.” She shows me where the steam sprays out. I test it with my hand. “Sometimes it stops. The children get too close. Then it
starts—like that! Leak is coming from upstairs down.” I see the dark muck on the wall. “The window is broke. Lights broke.” She points to the fluorescent tubes. They flicker on and off. “I ask them: Please, why don’t you give me ordinary lights? They don’t do nothing. So it been two weeks. I go downstairs. They say they coming up. They never come. So I complain again. Mr. Tuccelli said to come there to his office. Desks and decorations and a lot of pictures. It’s above the lobby. So the manager was there. Mr. Tuccelli sat back in his chair. He had a gun. He had it here under his waist. You know, under his belt. I said: ‘Don’t show it to me if you isn’t going to use it.’ I can’t tell what kind of gun it was. He had it in his waist. ‘You are showing me the gun so I will be afraid.’ If he was only going to show it I would not be scared. If he’s going to use it I get scared.

“So he says: ‘You people bring us trouble.’ I said: ‘Why you give my son lead poison and you didn’t care? My child is lead poisoned.’ He said: ‘I don’t want to hear of this again.’ What I answer him is this: ‘Listen. You live in a nice apartment. You got a home. You got TV. You got a family. You got children in a school that learn them. They don’t got lead poison.’

“I don’t know the reason for the guards. They let the junkies into the hotel. When my mother comes I have to sign. If it’s a family living good they make it hard. If it’s the drug dealers, they come in. Why they let the junkies in but keep away your mother?

“The guards, you see them taking women in the corner. You go down twelve-thirty in the night, they’re in the corner with the girls. This is true. I seen it.

“How I know about the lead is this: Matthew sits there and he reach his fingers in the plaster and he put it in his mouth. So I ask him: ‘Was you eating it?’ He says: ‘Don’t hit me. Yes, I was.’ So then I took him to the clinic and they
took the blood. I don’t know if something happen to him later on. I don’t know if it affects him. When he’s older …”

I ask her why she goes to church.

“I figure: Go to church. Pray God. Ask Him to help. I go on my knees. I ask Him from my heart: ‘Jesus Christ, come help me, please. Why do you leave me here?’

“When I’m lying down at night I ask: Why people got to live like this? On the street, the people stare at you when you go out of the hotel. People look. They think: ‘I wonder how they live in there?’ Sometimes I walk out this door. Garbage all over in the stairs. When it’s hot, a lot of bugs around the trash. Sometimes there are fires in the trash. I got no fire escape. You have to get out through the hall. I got no sprinkler. Smoke detector doesn’t work. When I cook and food is burning, it don’t ring. If I smoke it starts to ring. I look up. I say: ‘Why you don’t work? When I need you, you don’t work. I’m gonna knock you down.’ I did!” She laughs.

There is a sprinkler system in the corridor. Several women tell me it is unreliable. I ask her if the older children are enrolled in school.

“This one doesn’t go to school. He’s five. I need to call tomorrow. Get a quarter. Then you get some papers. Then you got to sign those papers. Then he can start school.

“For this room I pay $1,500 for two weeks. I don’t pay. The welfare pays. I got to go and get it.” The room, because it is divided, is regarded as a two-room suite. “They send me this. I’m s’pose to sign. I don’t know what it is. Lots of things you s’pose to sign. I sign it but I don’t know what it is.”

While we speak Matthew comes in. A dark-eyed boy, he sits beside his mother. He lowers his eyes when we shake hands.

“Looking for a house, I got to do it. I can’t read so I
can’t use the paper. I get dressed. I put my makeup on. If I go like this they look afraid. They say: ‘They going to destroy the house!’ You got to dress the children and look nice. Owners don’t want homeless. Don’t want welfare. Don’t want kids. What I think? If they pay one thousand and five hundred dollars every two week, why not pay five hundred dollar for a good apartment?”

She hands me another paper. “Can you tell me what is this?”

It’s a second letter from the hospital, telling her to bring her son for treatment.

“Every day my son this week, last week, was vomiting. Every time he eat his food he throw it right back out. I got to take him to the clinic …

“Christmas: they don’t got. For my daughter I ask a Cabbage Patch. For my boys I ask for toys. I got them stockings.” What she shows me are four cotton stockings. They are tacked into the wall with nothing in them. “They say: ‘Mommy, there’s no toys.’ I say not to worry. ‘You are going to get something.’ But they don’t. They don’t get nothing. I could not afford. No, this isn’t my TV. Somebody lended it to me.

“No. Christmas tree I can’t afford. Christmas I don’t spend it happy. I am thinking of the kids. What we do on Christmas is we spend it laying on the bed. If I go outside I feel a little better. When I’m here I see those walls, the bed, and I feel sad. If I had my own apartment maybe there would be another room. Somewhere to walk. Walk back and forth.”

I ask her: “How do you relax?”

“If I want to rest, relax, I turn out the light and lie down on the bed.

“When I met his father I was seventeen. One night he bought me liquor. I had never tasted. So he took me to this
hallway. Then my mother say that what I did is wrong. So I say that I already did it. So you have to live with what you did. I had the baby. No. I did not want to have abortion.

“The baby’s father I still see. When he has a job he brings me food. In the summer he worked in a flower store. He would bring me flowers. Now he don’t have any job. So he don’t bring me flowers.”

Again that gesture: “Nothing here. I feel embarrassed for the room. Flowers, things like that, you don’t got. Pretty things you don’t got. Nothing like that. No.”

In the window there’s a spindly geranium plant. It has no flowers but some of the leaves are green. Before I leave we stand beside the window. Snow falling slantwise hits the panes and blurs the dirt.