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The church people come for a visit
By CAROL MANLEY
I had to give the people credit for climbing those
stairs. The security lock on the door had been broken for a year. When I
had moved into that building, pregnant and with a baby on my hip, I had to
pay a $10 security deposit for a key to that door. Of the less than $300 a
month I was living on, that $10 had been a lot of money to me. I asked for
it back when I realized that the door was never going to get fixed, but I
never saw that money again. So anybody could come in off the street, and anybody
did. The stairwell became a shelter for every imaginable bodily function
and a repository for every type of bodily fluid. Mostly it was urine. The
light bulbs were often broken or missed, so I’d memorized the places
in the stairs where wear patterns allowed puddles to form. That helped me
avoid contact — but there was no avoiding the stench. By the time you got to the fifth floor, though, to my
apartment, the odor of urine had given way to something sweeter —
glue. The local kids called it “tolly.” They squeezed it into
paper bags, fitted the bags over their mouths and noses, and breathed it
in. It was a cheap and dangerous high. I’d first seen it done around
the entrance to the building, where a group of hungry-looking teenagers
shared a paper bag, their heads bobbing stupidly on their rubbery necks,
open-mouthed and drooling. And when a very young girl moved in across the hall
with a baby, that sicky-sweet odor became my neighbor. I worried about her
baby. One day when the building manager seemed approachable, I spoke to her
about. Somebody should report it, I told her, thinking that that someone
would be her. She gave me a hard look. “She ain’t doing
nothing,” the manager said of the glue-sniffing teenage mother.
“I’ve known her and her family all her life.” She looked
me in the eye. “And it’s a big family. Ain’t nobody
reporting nothing.”
The baby I’d been pregnant with when I moved
into the building was on my arm, and my daughter, who was about 2 years
old, held obediently onto the edge of my jacket. They were my only family,
and that building manager knew that. I took her comment about this
girl’s family as a threat. But it wasn’t just cowardice that kept me from
calling Child Protective Services. I had no phone myself and the pay phone
cost 25 cents. Quarters were scarce. When I had one, it meant a can of pork
and beans or a box of macaroni and cheese. It meant that my children might
not whimper in their sleep from hunger on those end-of-the-month nights
when the cupboard was bare. And I knew that my own parenting couldn’t
bear much scrutiny.
So I held my children close and kept as much distance
as possible from the people around me. I don’t even know why I opened
the door that Christmas Eve. Maybe I thought that my children’s
father had come to see them, though I should have known better by then.
Somebody knocked, and I opened the door. There stood
five people in warm, clean clothes, smiles orchestrated onto their faces, a
little fear in their eyes. They announced the name of some suburban church
and thrust a paper bag into my hands.
They were the type of people I had been before a
marathon of poor judgment had led me to this life and this building. They
huddled together, elbows tucked in, not one thread of their woolen jackets
touching the walls. I stepped back from the doors and gestured for them
to come in. It was a one-room apartment. My children were napping on the
fold-out couch that we all three slept on. The frame had bent so that it
never folded back up. I had no curtains, but it wasn’t much of a
problem to me. The only other building near enough to allow anyone a view
into my apartment was a burned-out shell. Hanging on the windows were the
pieces of laundry I’d washed in the bathtub that day: clothes for the
kids and a couple of stained sheets I’d been given when I left the
Salvation Army shelter the previous year. The strangers, in response to my invitation, gave a
collective shudder, shook their heads, and backed away, murmuring
unintelligible politenesses. When they reached a safe distance, they
remembered what they’d come to say. “Merry Christmas!”
they chimed as they edged away from my door. I closed the door and looked in the bag. There were
three boxes of macaroni and cheese, a loaf of bread, and a box of
cornflakes. Each had a sterile white label stamped with black letters. I looked at those generic labels, impersonal and
punitive in their lack of color. I needed that food. How could I not be
grateful? Yet somehow I felt condemned by it. I ached for the luxury of
red-and-blue stripes on the bag of a normal loaf of bread. I carried that bag of joyless groceries to the alcove
that served as a kitchen in the studio apartment. I put the bread and
cornflakes in the refrigerator to protect them from roaches. I would try to
save the cornflakes until my next check, when I’d be able to buy some
milk. Without a colorful rooster or bright-yellow rising sun, that miserly
box would camouflage itself in the white interior of the fridge. I had a
little salad dressing, so I’d be able to make the macaroni and cheese
without milk or butter, but the thought of it made me weary. I looked around my shabby apartment. I was paying for
my sins, for those twin evils of gullibility and fertility. Out the window
I could see the red and green traffic lights on Wilson Avenue, the white
headlights and red taillights of the cars on the street, and the broad
palette of Chicago brick colors in the buildings surrounding me. I looked
at that colorless box of macaroni in my pale hand. Then I sat down on the
pullout couch where my beautiful brown children slept. I rummaged in its
crevices until I found a crayon and began to draw red ribbons on the bland
box of generic macaroni and cheese.
The gratitude I should have felt continued to elude
me. But I had to give those people credit for climbing those stairs.
Carol Manley’s short story collection Church Booty will be released
in May by Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama.
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2007.
