I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (21 page)

They buzzed me into the double doors. In the president’s office, I don’t tell him how close I am to homelessness myself. How my brother had given me rent money. So had a retired nun and her husband, and my sad boyfriend, and a temp agency. I’ve never worked for a social service agency before. He hires me anyway. Outside the president’s window, we can see people gathered in the fenced-in picnic area. “What kind of relationship will I have with the clients?” I ask him.

“None,” he said. “No interaction. Just focus on writing grants.” Through the glass, one of the staff is holding a client’s baby on his hip.

I don’t want anyone to know I’m back in Orlando. The marriage off. So, I stay in my apartment except for work and a walk
at night around the lake. I feel humiliated, foolish that I’d been so hopeful. Lonely. At the shelter, I have my own office the size of a closet, away from the administrative offices and my colleagues. I work where people live. At night, they line up in the hallway outside my door for dinner. Kids hop up and down to peek into my tiny window. People live behind me—I can hear a radio, feet kicking our shared wall. The clients’ main entrance is just to the left of my office. The emergency rooms for victims of abuse and their kids are in another building, on another street. Those walls are white, the blankets, even the sky looks white—the kind of white you’d see from sudden pain, like a baseball hitting you in the face when tears aren’t even there yet.

The help desk is at the end of the hallway, across from the staff bathroom. I’m waiting for someone to emerge from the storage closet behind the desk, so I can ask for hand soap. Beside me a baby girl who doesn’t look old enough to be standing raises her hands up to me. She’s covered in something sticky, all over her face, fingers. It looks like candy melted. But I’m grateful for the way she reaches up, as if I’m part of her family. Settled on my hip, she’s so at ease. I could be a tree.

The only people who reach out to me, reach out their hands, are children. A lot of kids I only see a few times, but Tiny and her brother I see every day for six months. Every day, Tiny’s brother stretches out his arm like a baseball player to clap my hand as if I’ve won something. Tiny gives me hugs, sometimes two a day. Once I was so low, and she’s outside my door like a minuscule grandmother saying, “Give me a hug.” She is two and a half years old when I meet her, her brother is seven. She gives me fashion advice (button my coat) and turns her stroller upside-down in the hallway to make a patient chair. She offers me a seat. When I plead my size, Tiny has me turn around like a model to see if I’m too big. I try to keep my distance, as the president asked, but one day
Tiny is in the fenced-in yard, caught up in pushing her stroller, when a need to pee catches her by surprise. On that gray concrete, the brightness looks like sun. But Tiny is stricken with humiliation and crying on one side of the fence, me on the other. Her father yells from a picnic table where he sits with several women. Finally her brother holds out his baseball-player hand to her and breaks the spell. After that, I bring a
Madeline
book for them, an against-the-rules gift, but when I find their case manager’s office in a maze of rooms, she said the children and their family had left early that morning to look for another shelter. The parents hadn’t worked their case plan, so the whole family was exited. Exited. Though, when I speak to the program director, corner her in the dining room that night, she lies, says, “They’ve been reunited with family.” The case manager, Iris, said, “Tiny wouldn’t let go of my neck.” Like the day Tiny had dressed in her new white shirt, her hair in barrette curls, not wanting to go the doctor.

I’d last seen Tiny and her brother the night before. They were playing in the hall, and Tiny pushed on my stomach twice, gently, as if I was stuck, a kind of statue. Something she’d never done before. But she’d wanted me to play, to get going while there was still time.

With Tiny gone, I think I can’t go back to work. She’d lived at the shelter for six months, there when I arrived. But in the morning, I take Parramore, past the men in wheelchairs with missing limbs, the woman who cries at the window of any car that stops at the red light. Past the small concrete building behind the grocery store that says in big red letters, NONE SHALL LACK. I pass the three hundred homeless men who mill on the street after leaving the metal Men’s Pavilion. They get a meal, spend the night on the floor. Each man gets a parking spot—a human-length rectangle painted in white on concrete, and a bright blue sleeping pad that fits inside the lines. The parking lot is full of pee streams from
homeless men who don’t want to wait in line for the bathroom. Urine like a cloud in my throat.

Another day, at the clients’ reception desk I was going to ask to be buzzed in, but a woman is talking to the receptionist. Her baby sits on the counter, Josiah. He is so beautiful, I have to say hello. Josiah, a King of Judah in the seventh century
BC
. Josiah, meaning
the Lord supports.
Later, there is a fire alarm, and I hold him in my arms. It is what I want most, to hold a baby in my arms. No one here is afraid of my brokenness—everyone so shattered, no one even sees it. When I hold the baby, it’s as if everything inside me is blanketed with light. I stop echoing and sputtering, and shaking. He stops crying when I speak to him, looks into my eyes. A thoughtful king, listening.

On my first day at the shelter, the program manager opens the door to my office. My desk doesn’t have any drawers. No writing utensils. No wastebasket. Filthy air vent overhead. The building is an old television station from the 1950s. Cramped and mazy. The small offices could sleep up to two families. No windows. No fresh air.

When I meet the first girl, she is walking in the hallway with her belongings in a plastic bag. Three or four years old. She hears my door click closed, and turns around, asks, “Where are you going?”

And I say, “Home,” her dad up ahead, waiting for her to catch up so they can go through the doors to the family rooms. The girl blew me a kiss. I blew one back. Mine takes a few seconds. She touches her cheek, surprised. I don’t hear her name when she says it and am embarrassed to ask again. As if I’m at a cocktail party, so afraid of forgetting my own name that I don’t hear anyone else’s. Forgetting she’s three years old and has been pretty forgiving.

Nefertiti in the Head Start trailer had earned her name. Regal, straight-backed in her chair, head half-turned toward me while
the other kids sing three songs in a row. Shining, quiet, Nefertiti holds out her hand to pull me down to sit on the carpet. Demands I listen to her read me a story.

To make photocopies, I have to go down the hall to the admin office. Every time I leave my office, I have to lock it. It’s a lot of locking, unlocking. I’m fiddling with my keys when I see a boy barely old enough to walk, at the main door. My keys fly out of my hand as if he’s called them. His mother’s yellow and green muumuu is so bright I can’t take my eyes off it. She said, “Did you make the lady nervous?” The boy starts to run toward me, which makes his mother laugh, “Go ahead, Moo Moo, give her a hug.” He runs right into me, grabs my knees hard, like a post—the Lady of the Flying Keys.

When the half-assed air conditioner breaks completely, I have to keep my door open to breathe. A girl floats in, asks, “Do you have any candy?” The only bright object in my office is a Kleenex box with flowers, so she pulls one out like a scarf.

One day after work, in the parking lot I see the Boys & Girls Club lady standing with children and a man with a ringed pole, as if he’s in a circus. He’s come for the stray dog that lives here. But he can’t find her puppies. The B&G lady asks, “Can’t you take her later?” The stray has just given birth—she’d just been pregnant, and now is gaunt again. The puppies newborn; they need their mother. The B&G lady thinks the pups are under her portable building. She says, “It’s going to smell if they die.” But the maintenance guy says no, they’ve been calling Animal Control for two months, and every time, the stray disappears. The man with the ringed pole catches her then, screaming like any mother. Tosses her in the back of his trailer. He says something to the maintenance guy. The trailer so close, I can almost reach into the darkness, undo the ring around her throat.

The next morning, I walk by the B&G portable, listen for crying.
One of the clients in the alcohol and drug treatment program, Michael, keeps walking the grass perimeter until he hears yelps. Another guy with jagged teeth crawls underneath the portable, in the dirt, scoops out nine puppies—white, brown, black. He finds a dirty pink blanket, a plastic milk crate, makes a bed. They’ve been alone all night. No protection, no food. I was afraid they’d be dead. But when Michael comes toward me, I hear mewling. Eyes still closed—they’re a couple of days old.

Sharon in the intake office opens her closet, comes out with a box of Similac in tiny bottles, nipples to attach to each. Michael sits down on a bench in the playground, reaches out his hands the way you’d cup water, takes a puppy from Sharon, yellow milk. So I sit beside him for puppy number two, white, one ear wet. He doesn’t know how to suck yet. A girl opens the puppy’s mouth for me so I can get the milk taste on his tongue. We don’t have nine sets of hands, so the black puppy is still unfed. When I share the bottle with him, he sucks and sucks without a breath. I’d burp him, but he’s drinking away, almost the entire bottle.

And then he falls asleep on my forearm, in the flower beads of my black sweater, his mouth open, pink tongue lolling. Dreaming. He shits on my arm, a glittery iridescent green that someone brushes away. Yesterday, I’d seen his mother—auburn, shag coat, at ease with her big belly in the parking lot so rank with piss. I blew each breath back out as if I were filling balloons. When I’d headed toward the shelter’s main door, she’d gone toward the portable building. The president walks outside the main doors, sees me sitting with the clients and the puppies. Sees the bottle in my hand. Shakes his head.

I need to raise two and a half million dollars in grants a year, just for the basics. Every night, 750 people live here, eat here. Two hundred are children, most under seven years old.

In my dim office, I’m filling out government forms when the
CSI team drives up in their white truck. Cops block the side streets, round up the guys who fought in the overcrowded bathroom. One man stabbed another, though after the slew of cops arrives and they have the men in hand, the crime is downgraded to a slashing. Maybe the victim was high, someone says, and it didn’t hurt so bad. I think one of them is the man who always waves to me in the morning, yelling, “Mami.”

There is a new baby from the Salvation Army in the day care. The day care ladies busy with bottles and diapers, and Delia is crying on the carpet, so my arms are useful to pick her up. She settles in on my hip. Her eyelashes black, paintbrush wet, hair cloudy curls, almond eyes. Jowled cheeks of an old man. I hold Santa for her, and he said,
Hello
; Elmo said
Hello
, and a paper bird floating on a string, and finally Delia replies in song. It is like talking to a bird in my arms. I want to recline in the rocking chair with Delia, as I did the day my son was born, the only day the doctor let me rock him. When I give Delia to another woman and she cries, reaches for me from across the room, the woman laughs, said, “That’s not your mother.” But she won’t be soothed, keeps reaching.

George knows me from day care, sees me coming in to work. Before I get to the front door, he leans against me, rests his face against my bare legs, the flowers on my skirt, as if I were a field. When I’d arrived at the shelter two years before, I wasn’t even sure my body was still here.

The day Tiny turned three, she’d worn a blue bubble blouse, white striped with sleep. She saw the new lamplight coming from my office and walked inside. I heard her whisper to my desk: “Is there a present for me?” And I was ashamed of myself, but Tiny kept looking. She walked up to each lamp, saying, “I like your light.” Her whole outfit was new: white barrettes, a purple satin purse that Iris gave her. I was so grateful to Iris of the big
eyes and dangly earrings that spelled her name. When Iris said, “You’re beautiful,” Tiny said, “My name is Tiny, not Beautiful.” Tiny, Mary, Kadesha each high-five, screech from the jungle gym on seeing me—yelling, “My friend”—each kiss blown, wave, and touch is a light. Here, my knees are coming back where a child hung on.

First, there’s the squall of walking down the narrow aisle with my too-big suitcase, navigating the bored stares of the already seated. The mutiny of belting in. Breath to my right, sneakers beside my feet, a boy turning a tight left to say, “Hi.” Outstretched hand. His throat level with my eyes.

I’d already been building a transparent wall between seats, deeding him the armrest to avoid possible contact and conversation on the flight. But I look up. An open smile. Clear-eyed. A boy in his early twenties. My hand feels stationary, but I lift it from my silver buckle. My body already silting into the blue seat, but I lean forward, give him my hand. “I’m going to Boston to visit my dad’s relatives,” the boy says. He’s been traveling many hours, from Australia. “I haven’t seen them since I was eight.”

“Did you like them?” I wonder if it was like my visits to cousins I saw once a year, standing in their grass, sitting at their table, admiring them from an aquatic distance. The boy says that it’s hard to remember. But there’s something low, fine cinders—some nerves, I guess.

The boy’s hair is black, which doesn’t address the issue of darkness. The voice of the flight attendant is essentially a tube color, midrange cad red, permanent green. But her demonstration
is acid yellow, and it’s hard to follow her instructions, meet her bright eyes. I’ll have to locate the exit doors later.

On the adjoining seat rest, I forget and touch the boy’s arm, the basilic vein running up the inside. Really it was both our arms, the accidental touching of elbows, forearms. The boy is a little younger than my son would be. I imagine my son would be like this, saying hello, giving his hand to a stranger traveling alone. The contact is a little trance. “I work in a library,” he says. Points to his dad a few seats ahead, on the aisle. That helps explain his reading a little, the
Wind-up Bird Chronicle
in his bag, his love of Anne Michaels’s
Fugitive Pieces,
which I share. Which I’ve never shared with anyone sitting next to me. All his book talk. It’s like a steady combing of my hair.