In the Slammer With Carol Smith (2 page)

‘What’s Mrs. Lopez’s opinion? On the roaches?’

‘She says we’re doing a community service. If the downstairs wants, it can always join in.’

She hoots. ‘You wanted moral advice. There you are.’

But I’m not sure she isn’t hooting at the Lopez’s. And now, she sniffs. All the cartons and cans of the week, and the food papers; they’re piled under the sink. Along with maybe a sanitary pad. When Angel comes to tinker with the bike, he usually cleans under there, not saying anything. But it’s not the weekend yet.

‘I forgot,’ I say. ‘I was so busy eating.’

‘I’m no martinet, Carol. I’m not even a very good housekeeper myself. I just hope you can learn—’

‘To live indoors. To love it even.’ I look at the TV, the radio clock, the toaster, all the stuff for starting over, given me by kind persons along the way, whose names I should remember: a little hurt comes each time I do. ‘So’s I can be happy as a clam, being me in a house.’ And forget the outside. ‘Maybe by summer I will.’

‘Not like last summer. Please.’

When I never went out. ‘Once I decided I had to hate the heat—I hated it.’

‘This year—try not.’

‘Okay.’ She’s very tiring. But that is supposed to be good for me.

‘Anything else you want to tell me, Carol.’

‘Don’t want to, Gold. I have to.’

She ignores this. This is the waiting game. And sometimes, I win.

‘Mrs. Lopez sounds like a practical person, Carol.’

‘She is. She is the only nice practical person I know.’ I give her a stare. And want to know something? She spends a lot of time on the street. They all do, here.’

‘Puerto Ricans are a tropical people. They like to think they’re still there. And you haven’t seen them in winter yet.’

‘Maybe I should have been a tropical person.’ I go off a little, dreaming. ‘Gee. Then there wouldn’t be any difference, except maybe a straw curtain. Between the outdoors and the in.’

‘Maybe you could be—yes I can see you in one of those countries.’

She fires up easy; that’s when we get on together best. ‘But we’re not exporting you yet. Meanwhile, looks like you’re learning some useful Spanish.’

When they start on that we’re not far from what the want-ads would call my ‘secretarial skills.’ For the job that wouldn’t be just me being me.

‘I only speak with Angel. He’s in trouble too.’ Imagine coming here only eighteen months ago, along with that grandmother. And then being an Angel, in a U.S. school. ‘And he understands about the street.’

She is digging in her purse. Now out will come the week’s supply of pacifiers. Suddenly, I begin to weave. Over to the right foot. Over to the left.

‘Carol. You know you’re doing that. You’re doing that on your own. On purpose. You’ve been off the compazine for weeks. And the tofranil.’

‘Have I? I never look at the boxes. They’re all so much alike.’

‘What you’re on now doesn’t have that side-effect. Come on. Stop.’

‘Why? It’s good to have a purpose, didn’t you say?’

‘And stop being sly. It’s bad for you.’ And then I see the tears in her eyes. ‘Oh Carol. You’ve come so far.’

She puts her arms around me. We weave back and forth together. Like we don’t know who the enemy is, but we have the same one. ‘Yes, I’m learning Spanish,’ I whisper. ‘Downstairs, those men who hang around the bar next door? One of them whistles at me. I’m standing on the stoop, doing left foot, right foot, maybe it’s not the medicine only; it’s when I’m thinking: will it be outside, or inside? And a guy who lives in this building, he says to the guy who whistled ‘No, Pedro, no. She is touched by God.’

‘So? That’s not so bad to be. With a little help.’ She’s holding something out to me. It’s a doctor’s prescription.

‘On my own, I’m to go get it?’

‘On your own. You’re responsible.’

A word I no longer go for. Once you have to be told to be that, you aren’t. The prescription is ordinary black-and-white, like for cough syrup, for anything. ‘I won’t fill it at the drugstore around here,’ I say, though I don’t know why not. When I bought the barette they said, ‘Come again.’ The barrio can be very polite.

When she is leaving I say: ‘You going back to the office, Daisy?’

She turns to look at me. ‘Yes, Carol. Why?’

I’m not good at thanking people.

‘You got a lunch-spot on your plaid.’

S
HE WENT TO
the big Rite-Aid blocks away to fill the prescription. It was so early in the morning that no one else was in the store. Behind the counter the pharmacists were cold as ice in their white smocks; if you were setting up a new record, this was the place to go. There was a guard at the door to watch you didn’t lift anything from the too friendly open shelves. ‘That’s not my problem, buddy,’ she said to him as she left. Walking back to the pad she said to herself: I’ll always do the dose inside.

In front of the sink she had the impulse to empty out the whole bottle, but resisted. You’re just a sink. I can swallow too. The one-a-day she tipped into her palm was brightly striped. Too fancy for a placebo? The world runs on trust.

Now comes the bad moment of the morning, the tug. Will she take to the outside, or the in? When you’ve had a little warmth you want more. That’s the rub.

Three mornings she went to lean on the stone wall. Turned out, so had he, never on the same days. When they finally met and exchanged this she said, ‘Pure coincidence.’ She had combed her hair through. ‘That’s a great ornament you wear,’ he said. She stood there feeling the breeze the phrase made. He had on an orange sweater instead of the brown. ‘Orange looks good on you,’ she told him.

He said: ‘It’s my other one.’

So all was understood.

When he said ‘Want to join the Cat Club? It’s where some of us crash?’ she said, ‘Why not?’

On the subway she said, ‘It’s not a halfway house?’

‘No way.’

‘Can I just visit?’

‘That’s what we all.’

The Cat Club was a storefront in the Village. The tenement above had been condemned as unlivable. ‘Until the landlord comes back from Florida and fixes it up. She won’t; she’s notorious. Her former husband or her brother—we don’t know which but he hates her guts—comes in from Long Island City now and then to check the building.’ Along with his girlfriend. ‘Older even than him, and all in fur. Hil-ari-ous. He’s a broken down gigolo; in his day the Village must have been steamy with them.’ Alphonse had stopped to buy a bottle beforehand. He took a swig, swinging his long haircut, which was tidy but not greased. ‘Long Island City. On a Sunday. They live in the carpet-cleaning warehouse the girlfriend owns. No wonder we’re their bright errand.’

She watched the stations foam by; this was an express. ‘That from Shakespeare?’

‘Dunno. Never did him.’

‘Could be a film title. Maybe should be.’

‘So you went to college,’ he said. ‘So did I. Adirondack Community College. My cousins still own land up there. Buy their kids snowmobiles. Hunt wild turkey in the fall. Can’t see why they never catch any. Turkeys have the last word.’

She is quiet, searching for what she can say next. Not what kind of actor is he. Nor if he ever really has—acted. Nor what had brought him to the city. No questions asked is only fair; he hasn’t asked her that much. What you can’t ask really tells you what you want to know. One foot up on the wall, elbow on his knee, he hasn’t forgotten her, merely recognized her, in the same trust. If you haven’t been on the inside somewhere, why would you make such a business of being out?

‘You’re not a gigolo,’ she said. Neat. Took care of everything. And she made him laugh.

‘If you’re so smart, why’re you such a—a pixie?’

She didn’t need to answer that. They were safe in the routine. He was blunter at it though than she was.

The club was on a street so meager and crooked that the city still disdained it. Once the storefront had sold wallpaper that still patterned the inside in faint pinks and greens, so the window looked frugal and occupied. The cat, a yellow tom, sunning in the window by day, he said, and now shining its eyes at them in the dark, completed it.

He could tell she didn’t want to go in.

‘Not afraid of cats, are you.’

‘Not—categorically.’

‘Oh wow, Carol.’

But she still stood there. Then she too began to laugh. That cat looked so much like a nurse, the ones at the Receiving Desk, who do just that, and no more. With a stony purr.

‘We go in the back, Carol. Just we.’ He touched her hand but didn’t take it. ‘In or Out is always optional. Nobody has a key. Nobody.’

The back alley was murky, offering anybody that dead-end feel of being at the bottom of trouble until morning. No garbage cans though, no smell. Attached to the rear of the house was an old added-on wooden shed, dank with weather but still firm. Its iron bolts were gored deep in, two sets of them. He tripped them, one-two and a three. ‘Couldn’t have done it, on brick.’ Inside the shed the back door to the house proper was ajar. It was all so flimsy, so outdoor connected that she still felt safe.

‘We’re in the basement.’ They crept down the battered steps.

All along she’d wondered whether the ‘we’ meant only a friend, man or girl, though she’d plumped for girl. It wouldn’t be one of those imitation pads, though, that she’d encountered in her singles-bar days. It would be a real one.

It was. But communal.

‘Floor’s concrete, or we couldn’t have done it. The city socked a sewage violation on the old girl once, when there still were tenants.’ He smacked his lips: ‘Pure poured concrete.’

An odd rejoicing. But she could see what he meant.

Only one of the bed-downs set at intervals along that poured gray was really a bed—an old painted-iron one with a naked metal spring, underneath it what might be sleeping bags. The other bed-downs were more like piles of preferences. Some of the stashes were familiar ones. Army blankets went with knapsacks, and a predictable owner. Tartan coveralls, stolen from the city shelter, or the churches. Old moth-holed polo-coats, once royalty in the thrift-shops. A couple of beach umbrellas neatly stacked, by some nomad capable of carrying two, or unable to pass either of them by, wherever found. She’s seeing all the angles, once again. Boots and more boots of course, everywhere. One cane, leaning up against a pile covered with the grand-daddy of capes—or the grandma. Each heap is one person’s answer to winter. Not always a barricade. Sometimes an embrace.

Nothing thin enough for summer? Yes, there—a wash-line hung with shirts of all sorts drying stiffly in the chill.

‘We been hanging the shirts over the underwear. Neater.’ Alphonse said. ‘What you looking for, hey?’

The walls have no pin-ups. ‘Rules.’

‘No rules, though. People change.’

‘Oh. The membership. Or you mean—in themselves?’

‘Hey. Don’t look so terrified. We don’t do anything. Strictly come and go. Maybe we’re the only club in the world with no membership.’

He saw that she was soothed. She could belong.

T
HAT SUMMER IS
a game of pick-up sticks: those long slivers of wood, tinted magenta, frog-green, pumpkin and dragonfly-blue, which one shook into a teepee, from which each player by turn tried to extract one sliver without making the whole feathery shape slide. If one succeeded, the heart flew. If not, the sticks lay, a malevolent nest. The airy heap, each time tossed, was never the same as before. The failed nest always was.

The yellowy stick, safely pulled, is for when she got her prescription refilled in the neighborhood pharmacy after all, where no one looked at her cross-eyed. The blue and the green were for her first shopping tours, the one for the vegetables, at a stall, easy, the other at the supermarket, on a kind of catch-all sortie for boxed goods. So many she’d never seen, they helped pull her along the aisles. Sometimes she even purchases for Mrs. Lopez—‘You going A&P, carita, buy me Armour Baking Soda. Not just for the bugs. Make-a the cold-a box no stink.’

In her own hoard under the sink she now had a line of cleansers, with names either out of woolly-bear country: Soft-Scrub, Easy Fluff, or from flash television: Electrosol, which was for the dishwasher she didn’t have. Imitating Carmen Lopez, she was loathe to reveal she had never cleaned a house or stocked one, until she realized that Carmen knew. ‘No, I can’t buy you bleach, Carmen,’ she dared to say to her one day. ‘I’m an environmentalist.’ Behind her, memory unfurled a line of Boston faces at her back, dim but strong.

The red match-sticks were for the painfully long bus ride to the Club, during which she’d clench her fingers onto the seat in order not to jump off and away. At the end of that first run, when the only riders by then, a tourist couple, said to the driver: ‘Is this SoHo?’ he answered, ‘No-ho, this is No-ho,’ including her in his jolly black-and-white smile. Puzzled though, when she said with a relieved gust of breath, ‘Puns are everything.’ Meanwhile, with each ride another color bloomed at her, returning: the happy, fuzzy peach of a girl’s sweater, the seal’s-fur shine purpling a raincoat, a man’s camouflage jacket, toad-spotted or brown. Dogs too were said to see only in shades of gray, as she had been doing up to then; if a person had acquired dog-seeing, or been immured in it, could that be called a ‘skill?’ She knows better than to ask Gold.

The night Alphonse had first brought her to the non-club—her own term for it that she kept secret—the man who belonged to the iron bed was already there. ‘We don’t come ’til dark,’ he said to her, nodding at Alphonse. ‘But it is already dark.’ Though it wasn’t quite. He lent her a blanket so that she could sit on the cold floor, like the other people shortly to drift in would soon do. ‘Name’s Mungo.’

The name went so well with his bluff red face, walrus mustache and worn safari khaki, that it took her some while to catch on that he might have tagged himself with it. He had twitched the blanket off the bed, then immediately pulled out another from beneath the bed to make it up again. His orderliness was several times interrupted by his itch to lend. He never ate at the club, never stayed longer than it took to finish the two bottles of fizzy water he brought with him, but came earliest in order to clean out the night’s collection of milk cartons, paper cups, take-out boxes, soda cans and wine bottles, that others had left.