Windfalls: A Novel (30 page)

At noon she entered the soup kitchen reluctantly, her head down so that she could see only the grimy floor and her own torn shoes. She was so terrified that the whole roomful of strangers would recognize her as the mother who had no children that only the fierceness of her hunger managed to force her through the door. It was strange to be inside a building. The air was warm and damp and thick with the steam of heavy food, a smell that made her stomach clench with the nausea of hunger.

A line of people straggled along one wall, and Cerise claimed a timid place at the end of it, took a fork and a paper napkin when the person in front of her did, got a tray from the stack and then slid it down the aluminum tubing of the counter, watching as the strangers on the other side assembled plates of food. When it was her turn, she took a plate in her tender hands and gave a ragged nod of thanks.

Long rows of tables filled the room. She found a place at one with empty chairs on either side of her, and as soon as she sat down, she bent her head over her tray. It was a gift she kept waiting to be snatched from her—food that hadn’t come from the trash—a scoop of macaroni salad, a pile of brussels sprouts, a bun covered with a circle of pink bologna and a square of orange cheese. The food reminded her so much of Woodland Manor that when, halfway through her meal, she raised her eyes timidly from her plate, she felt a moment’s confusion because the faces that surrounded her were not all old.

A few were elderly, and some looked as grim and weary as she, but others appeared no different from people who might be eating at the food court in the mall. There were women in well-kept outfits, men in clean T-shirts and jeans. Children threaded among the chairs, and several families clustered together, eating intently. Across the table from Cerise a man sat with closed eyes and a half smile, as though, amidst the clamor, he was praying. Beside him, in front of a well-cleaned plate, was a large dark woman in bright clothes. Her hands were busy beneath the table while she studied the room with unmasked curiosity. When Cerise sensed their eyes were about to meet, she glanced away as though she’d just ducked a blow.

She spent the afternoon wandering the damp streets. Toward evening, as the light above the buildings began to seep away, she found two Dumpsters at the end of an alley and tucked herself between them, sat with her legs folded against her chest and her arms wrapped about her knees while the night city throbbed around her.

Because her life was a scrap she would gladly do without, the shouts and sirens did not frighten her. But after a while, beneath or beyond those sounds, she thought she could hear the sound of a telephone ringing—maybe in an apartment where no one was home to pick it up, or maybe in an unlit room where someone sat ignoring its plea. On and on it rang, echoing relentlessly through the darkness, begging someone to answer.

Huddled between the Dumpsters, Cerise could not help but think of the stranger named Melody and the phone call she would surely make, calling home again to brag about her new life. She wondered when Melody would place that call, and she wondered what would happen when she did—would Melody hear the ringing of a phone that no longer existed, or a message announcing that the number she’d called was no longer a working one?

Sitting on the cold asphalt, Cerise tried to ignore the endless ringing that seemed to fill her head, tried not to imagine Melody’s call groping toward the heap of ashes that had once been their home, tried not to see the person who was no longer her daughter shrugging and turning away from the phone. Shivering in the darkness, Cerise tried only to endure till dawn.

T
HEY WERE STOPPED AT A LIGHT ON
S
ANTA
D
OROTHEA
A
VENUE ON
their way to Lucy’s dance class when Lucy caught sight of the woman standing on the traffic island next to them. It was raining, and the woman’s hair was clumped with water, her face so slick and chilled and expressionless that it reminded Anna of Ellen’s birth face. The woman was wearing a torn raincoat, and she held a tattered square of cardboard with a crayoned message scrawled across it.

“What’s that say?” Lucy asked from the backseat, and Anna winced in anticipation of what was coming as Lucy slowly sounded out the words on the woman’s sign, “‘Home-less. Bad Heart. Will work for food.’”

“That’s good reading,” Anna said lightly. “You’re really learning fast.”

“What’s a bad heart?” Lucy asked, staring out the window at the immobile woman.

Cautiously Anna answered, “I guess it means her heart’s sick.”

“Heartsick means sad, like homesick,” Lucy said.

“Sometimes. But she’s probably saying that her heart doesn’t work as well as it should.”

“She’s not sad?” Lucy asked, studying the woman whose stony gaze was lifted above the roofs of the cars toward the flat gray sky.

“She might be sad,” Anna answered. “I don’t know for sure.”

“What does homeless mean?”

As gently as possible Anna said, “It means that she doesn’t have a home.”

“How could she not?”

“Some people don’t. They lose their homes, somehow.”

“They lose their homes?” Lucy sounded astonished.

“Not like misplacing them,” Anna explained. “But maybe they don’t have enough money to pay for them, so they have to move out.” She felt a sudden complicity, as if her very explanation was turning people out into the streets.

“Where do they sleep?” asked Lucy.

The light finally changed to green. Anna stepped on the accelerator and pulled into the intersection, leaving the woman standing motionless as a weary statue. “Under bridges, maybe, or in deserted buildings. I don’t really know.”

“Like camping?” Lucy asked, twisting her head to get a last glimpse of the woman.

“Kind of, I suppose. Though they probably don’t have tents.”

“In the rain?” Lucy persisted.

“If it’s raining, yes,” Anna answered reluctantly.

“Oh,” Lucy said in the smallest possible voice. A minute later she asked, “Why does she want to work for food?”

“I suppose she doesn’t have any money to buy food. And she’s hungry.”

Anna glanced in the rearview mirror at Lucy’s expression, saw the horror of a new understanding creep across it.

“She’s hungry?”

“She could be hungry, if she wants money for food.”

“Why doesn’t she have any money?”

“Well, I doubt she has a job.”

“Why doesn’t she have a job?”

“I really don’t know. Lots of reasons, maybe. Sometimes people have problems that keep them from being able to work.”

“We could give her a job,” Lucy said brightly. “She could work for us.”

“We don’t have anything for her to do.”

“She could clean my room.”

“You need to clean your room.”

“She could take care of me and Ellen so you could work in your new darkroom.”

Anna felt a jolt of alarm. Carefully she said, “I’m not sure that lady would make a very good babysitter.”

“Because of her bad heart.” Lucy nodded knowingly. She looked worried for a moment, and then she brightened. “I could give her some of my food, Mommy, couldn’t I, if she’s hungry? Couldn’t I give her some of mine?”

For a moment Anna considered turning back. She imagined handing the woman a few dollars or giving her the package of rice cakes and the apple she’d managed to grab from the kitchen for Lucy to eat after her class. But they were on a one-way thoroughfare. To turn back would cost at least ten minutes. They’d be late for Lucy’s class if they turned back, and then it all got complicated so quickly—because what if the woman were drunk or belligerent, what if she started crying, or begging for more than Anna felt safe to give? How was Anna to know if her sign was the truth, that her heart was truly bad? How could she be sure the woman would really spend Anna’s money on food? How could she encourage Lucy’s generosity and appease her worries without lying to her, or adding to her fears?

But as they pulled into the parking lot outside the dance studio, it was Lucy who asked the hardest question of all. With a kind of astonished horror in her voice, she said, “Is the world bad?”

“Oh, no,” Anna replied. She turned off the ignition and fumbled an answer about love and beauty and the goodness of people while the rain dashed the roof of the car and the windows fogged with the steam. She talked about the importance of hope and tried to explain how there were reasons for bad things to happen that human beings couldn’t always understand. But even as they unbuckled their seat belts and raced across the parking lot to Lucy’s class, she knew that nothing she could say would erase the woman standing in the rain.

T
HE NEXT TIME
C
ERISE WENT TO THE SOUP KITCHEN, IT WAS SO CROWDED
that there was no place for her to sit where she could put a chair between herself and the person next to her. For a moment, as she clutched her tray and faced that mob of diners, she considered leaving without eating. But she couldn’t think how to abandon her untouched meal in a way that no one would notice, so she pushed herself blindly into the first empty chair. Snippets of conversation battered her as she ate.

“The whole city blames me. But I came here with a bank account. I came here with good in my heart, with democracy, and caring for others—”

“—give you a bag on Mondays, but it’s always moldy.”

“That’s where I place my faith, in God the—”

“—condemned to life—”

“—the prettiest wedding. I’d grown all the roses, too.”

“If I could just talk to a lawyer—”

“Packed, ain’t it?”

It took a moment before Cerise realized the words were meant for her, and when she did, she jumped and bent her head further over her food. A second later she ventured a quick glance at the person beside her, and recognized the woman she’d noticed across the table the day before. Her wide lap was piled with an afghan whose colors were as loud and variegated as the lights on a carnival fairway. In one hand she wielded a crochet hook that flashed like a fishing lure, while a length of acid yellow yarn danced between her dark fingers and the accreting rim of the blanket.

She said, “Know why, doncha?”

Cerise kept her eyes on the silver hook and yellow yarn and made her head shake no.

“End of the month. Plus rain. That’s what drives ’em to this restaurant. Your check must’ve run out, too. I’ve only seen you here once before.”

“I don’t get a check,” Cerise whispered, though the words rasped in her throat like sandpaper, and she suddenly feared she’d be told to leave because she didn’t have a check.

“Me, neither,” the woman said complacently, as her hook darted in and out. “Goddamn state made it so hard to play their game, I told the lady she could play with herself instead. Ha!” she added in a harsh burst of humor. “That’s cutting off my nose to spite my face, I know. State don’t give two farts in a shithouse if old Barbara freezes to death on the streets. But fuck ’em.

“Butt fuck ’em, I mean,” Barbara went on, pleased with her pun, “Someday the truth will out, someday they’ll know the plain, pure, unadorned truth about our lives, and then they’ll get down on their knees and beg us for forgiveness.

“Homeless,” she scoffed while her fingers kept up their twist and dance. “The homeless. What kind of dumbfuck word is that, anyway?

“What’s the opposite of homeless?” she asked.

“Homeful? Homed?” she went on when Cerise looked bewildered. “Homemore?” She cackled, “Used to wish my old man’d be homemore.

“They have a ‘no home’ box on the food stamp application,” she said. “When I saw that, I told the lady we’ve been institutionalized. They count on us, see, the feds do. They need us to make this great country what it is.”

She shifted her thighs on the seat of her chair and paused in her crocheting to dig a fist into the small of her back. “But what the holy fuck do I know? My mama said it, a million times, ‘If you’re so goddamn smart, why ain’t you rich?’”

A towheaded toddler in blue overalls lurched past them, pausing for a moment to steady himself by clasping Cerise’s knee as casually as if she were a piece of furniture. She caught her breath and tried to empty her mind of everything, tried to hold herself still as stone even as his touch scorched every cell. The wad of yarn in Barbara’s left hand had diminished to a final tail. She smiled benevolently at the baby, and then with a grunt she leaned down to reach into the shopping bag that sat on the floor beside her.

The toddler turned as if he’d heard a voice he knew in all that noise, and his face bloomed into a grin. Cerise glanced in the direction he was looking, saw a young woman kneeling down, her tattooed arms stretched out toward him. He grinned and pitched joyously toward the woman, and Cerise felt so dizzy she wondered if she would faint.

Barbara was tying one end of a cantaloupe-size ball of brick red yarn to the yellow tail. “Little fucks,” she said, her voice round with good humor.

Cerise croaked, “What?”

“Well, they are. No matter how much some might want to deny it, we’re all sex acts of some kind or another. Came from sex, got sex wired in us. You got kids?”

The question tore Cerise’s entrails and seared her lungs. The question took her answer away.