Mama Day, Page 3

  I inherited the clipboard from the one who’d forgotten her social security card, and she was in and out still babbling about that damn number before I had gotten down to Educational Background. Beyond high school there was just two years in business school in Atlanta—but I’d graduated at the top of my class. It was work experience that really counted for a job like this. This wasn’t the type of place where you’d worry about moving up—all of those boxes and file cabinets crowded behind the receptionist’s shoulder—it was simply a matter of moving around.

  One job in seven years looked very good—with a fifty percent increase in salary. Duties: diverse, and more complex as I went along. The insurance company simply folded, that’s all. If I’d stayed, I probably would have gone on to be an underwriter—but I was truly managing that office. Twelve secretaries, thirty-five salesmen, six adjusters, and one greedy president who didn’t have the sense to avoid insuring half of the buildings in the south Bronx—even at triple premiums for fire and water damage. Those crooked landlords made a bundle, and every time I saw someone with a cigarette lighter, I cringed. I was down to Hobbies—which always annoyed me; what does your free time have to do with them?—when Patent Leather Hair was called in. She stood up the way women do knowing they look better when all of them is at last in view. I wondered what she had put down for extracurricular activities. I sighed and crossed my legs. It was going to be a long wait. After twenty minutes, Kumquat smiled over at me sympathetically—at least we both knew that he didn’t have a possible ace in the hole anymore.

  The intercom button on the receptionist’s phone lit up, and when she got off she beckoned to the Oriental guy.

  “Mr. Andrews is still interviewing, so Mr. Stein will have to see you. Just take your application to the second door on the left, Mr. Weisman.”

  He grinned at me again as I felt my linen suit losing its final bit of crispness under the low-voltage air conditioner. God, I wanted to go home—and I meant, home home. With all of Willow Springs’s problems, you knew when you saw a catfish, you called it a catfish.

  Well, Weisman was in and out pretty fast. I told myself for the thousandth time, Nothing about New York is ever going to surprise me anymore. Stein was probably anti-Semitic. It was another ten minutes and I was still sitting there and really starting to get ticked off. Couldn’t Mr. Stein see me as well? No, she’d just put through a long-distance call from a client, but Mr. Andrews would be ready for me soon. I seriously doubted it. He was in there trying to convince Patent Leather that even though she thought she was applying for a position as a lifeguard, they could find room for someone with her potential. I didn’t give her the satisfaction of my half-hour wait when she came flaming out—I was busily reading the wrapper on my pack of Trident, having ditched my newspaper before I came in. The thing was irreversibly creased at the classifieds, my bag was too small to hide it, and you never wanted to look that desperate at an interview. And there weren’t even any old issues of Popular Mechanics or something in the waiting area—bottom drawer all the way.

  I was finally buzzed into the inner sanctum, and without a shred of hope walked past the clutter of file cabinets through another door that opened into a deceptively large network of smaller offices. I entered the third on the left as I’d been instructed and there you were: blue shirt, knitted tie, nice teeth, and all. Feeling the box of mint toothpicks press against my thigh through the mesh bag as I sat down and crossed my legs, I smiled sincerely for the first time that day.

  Until you walked into my office that afternoon, I would have never called myself a superstitious man. Far from it. To believe in fate or predestination means you have to believe there’s a future, and I grew up without one. It was either that or not grow up at all. Our guardians at the Wallace P. Andrews Shelter for Boys were adamant about the fact that we learned to invest in ourselves alone. “Keep it in the now, fellas,” Chip would say, chewing on his bottom right jaw and spitting as if he still had the plug of tobacco in there Mrs. Jackson refused to let him use in front of us. And I knew I’d hear her until the day I died. “Only the present has potential, sir.” I could see her even then, the way she’d jerk up the face, gripping the chin of some kid who was crying because his last foster home hadn’t worked out, or because he was teased at school about not having a mother. She’d even reach up and clamp on to some muscled teenager who was trying to excuse a bad report card. I could still feel the ache in my bottom lip from the relentless grip of her thumb and forefinger pressed into the bone of my chin—“Only the present has potential, sir.”

  They may not have been loving people, she and Chip—or when you think about it, even lovable. But they were devoted to their job if not to us individually. And Mrs. Jackson saw part of her job as making sure that that scraggly bunch of misfits—misfitted into somebody’s game plan so we were thrown away—would at least hear themselves addressed with respect. There were so many boys and the faces kept changing, she was getting old and never remembered our individual names and didn’t try to hide it. All of us were beneath poor, most of us were black or Puerto Rican, so it was very likely that this would be the first and last time in our lives anyone would call us sir. And if talking to you and pinching the skin off your chin didn’t work, she was not beneath enforcing those same words with a brown leather strap—a man’s belt with the buckle removed. We always wondered where she’d gotten a man’s belt. You could look at Mrs. Jackson and tell she’d never been a Mrs., the older boys would say. Or if she had snagged some poor slob a thousand years ago, he never could have gotten it up over her to need to undo his pants. But that was said only well out of her earshot after she had lashed one of them across the back or arms. She’d bring that belt down with a cold precision that was more frightening than the pain she was causing, and she’d bring it down for exactly ten strokes—one for each syllable: “Only the present has potential, sir.”

  No boy was touched above the neck or below his waist in front. And she never, ever hit the ones—regardless of their behavior—who had come to Wallace P. Andrews with fractured arms or cigarette burns on their groins. For those she’d take away dinner plus breakfast the next morning, and even lunch if she felt they warranted it. Bernie Sinclair passed out that way once, and when he woke up in the infirmary she was standing over him explaining that he had remained unconscious past the dinner he still would have been deprived of if he hadn’t fainted.

  Cruel? No, I would call it controlled. Bernie had spit in her face. And she never altered her expression, either when it happened during hygiene check or when she stood over him in the infirmary. Bernie had come to us with half of his teeth busted out, and he hated brushing the other half. She was going down the usual morning line-up for the boys under twelve, checking fingernails, behind ears, calling for the morning stretch (hands above head, legs spread, knees bent, and bounce) to detect unwashed armpits and crotches. Bernie wouldn’t open his mouth for her and was getting his daily list of facts (she never lectured, she called it listing simple facts): If the remainder of his teeth rotted out from lack of personal care, then the dentist would have to fit him for a full plate instead of a partial plate. And it would take her twice as long to requisition twice the money that would then be needed from the state. That would lead to him spending twice as long being teased at school and restricted to a soft diet in the cafeteria. She said this like she did everything—slowly, clearly, and without emotion. For the second time she bent over and told him to open his mouth. He did, and sent a wad of spit against her right cheek. Even Joey Santiago cringed—all six feet and almost two hundred pounds of him. But Mrs. Jackson never blinked. She took out the embroidered handkerchief she kept in her rolled-up blouse sleeve and wiped her face as she listed another set of facts: she had asked him twice, she never asked any child to do anything more than twice—those were the rules at Wallace P. Andrews. No lunch, no dinner, and he still had his full share of duties. I guess that’s why he passed out, no food under the hot sun and weeding our garden—th
at and fear of what she was really going to do to him for spitting on her. He was still new and didn’t understand that she was going to do nothing at all.

  Our rage didn’t matter to her, our hurts or disappointments over what life had done to us. None of that was going to matter a damn in the outside world, so we might as well start learning it at Wallace P. Andrews. There were only rules and facts. Mrs. Jackson’s world out there on Staten Island had rules that you could argue might not be fair, but they were consistent. And when they were broken we were guaranteed that, however she had to do it, we would be made to feel responsibility for our present actions—and our actions alone. And oddly enough, we understood that those punishments were an improvement upon our situations: before coming there, we had been beaten and starved just for being born.

  And she was the only person on the staff allowed to touch us. Even Chip, who had the role of “good cop” to her “bad cop”—you needed a shoulder to cry on sometimes—could only recommend discipline. It must have been difficult with sixty boys, and I’d seen some kids really provoke a dorm director or workshop leader, and the guy would never lay a hand on them. They all knew her rules, and it was clear those men were afraid of her. And I could never figure it out, even with the rumor that was going around, which Joey Santiago swore by. Joey was a notorious liar, but he was the oldest guy there when I was growing up. And he said that some years back there was a dorm director who used to sneak into the rooms where we had the “rubber sheet jockeys”—kids under eight—and take them into the bathroom. After he was finished with them, they’d fall asleep on the toilet, where he’d make them sit until their rectums stopped bleeding. Mrs. Jackson and Chip came over one night, caught him at it, and she told the boys she was going to call the police. They took him back to the old stucco house she lived in on the grounds. The police car never came, but her basement lights stayed on. And Joey swore you could hear that man screaming throughout the entire night, although all of her windows were bolted down. It was loud enough to even wake up the older ones in the other dorms. That man was never seen again, and they knew better than to question Mrs. Jackson when she came over to pack up his things herself. And Chip had absolutely nothing to say about what had happened but “Keep it in the now, fellas” as he dug Mrs. Jackson a new rose garden the following morning. Every staff member and boy who came to Wallace P. Andrews heard that rumor and, one way or another, went over to see those roses in the corner of her garden. I can only tell you this, they were incredibly large and beautiful. And in the summer, when the evening breeze came from the east, their fragrance was strong enough to blanket your sleep.

  Some thought that I was her favorite. I was one of the few who had grown up there through the nursery, and she couldn’t punish me the way she did them, because I had a congenital heart condition. So she took away my books, knowing that I’d rather give up food or even have her use her strap. And once pleaded with her to do so, because I said I’d die if I had to wait a full week to find out how the Count of Monte Cristo escaped from prison. She said that was a fitting death for little boys who were caught cheating on their math exams. But fractions are hard, and I wanted a good grade at the end of the term. Ah, so I was worried about the end of the term? Well, she would now keep my books for two weeks. “Only the present has potential, sir.”

  And the discipline she tailor-made for all of us said, like it or not, the present is you. And what else did we have but ourselves? We had a more than forgettable past and no future that was guaranteed. And she never let us pretend that anything else was the case as she’d often listed the facts of life: I am not your mother. I am paid to run this place. You have no mothers or fathers. This is not your home. And it is not a prison—it is a state shelter for boys. And it is not a dumping ground for delinquents, rejects, or somebody’s garbage, because you are not delinquents, rejects, or garbage—you are boys. It is not a place to be tortured, exploited, or raped. It is a state shelter for boys. Here you have a clean room, decent food, and clothing for each season because it is a shelter. There is a library in which you study for three hours after school—and you will go to school, because you are boys. When you are eighteen, the state says you are men. And when you are men you leave here to go where and do what you want. But you stay here until you are men.

  Yes, those were the facts of life at Wallace P. Andrews. And those were her methods. And if any of the boys complained to the state inspectors about being punished, nothing was ever done. I guess at the bottom line, she saved them money. We grew and canned a lot of our own food, painted our own dorms, made most of the furniture, and even sewed curtains and bedspreads. And the ones she turned out weren’t a burden on the state, either. I don’t know of anyone who became a drug addict, petty thief, or a derelict. I guess it’s because you grew up with absolutely no illusions about yourself or the world. Most of us went from there either to college or into a trade. No, it wasn’t the kind of place that turned out many poets or artists—those who could draw became draftsmen, and the musicians were taught to tune pianos. If she erred in directing our careers, she erred on the side of caution. Sure, the arts were waiting for poor black kids who were encouraged to dream big, and so was death row.

  Looking back, I can see how easy it would have been for her to let us just sit there and reach the right age to get out. It only takes time for a man to grow older, but how many of them grow up? And I couldn’t have grown up if I had wasted my time crying about a family I wasn’t given or believing in a future that I didn’t have. When I left Wallace P. Andrews I had what I could see: my head and my two hands, and I had each day to do something with them. Each day, that’s how I took it—each moment, sometimes, when the going got really rough. I may have knocked my head against the walls, figuring out how to buy food, supplies, and books, but I never knocked on wood. No rabbit’s foot, no crucifixes—not even a lottery ticket. I couldn’t afford the dollar or the dreams while I was working my way through Columbia. So until you walked into my office, everything I was—all the odds I had beat—was owed to my living fully in the now. How was I to reconcile the fact of seeing you the second time that day with the feeling I had had the first time? Not the feeling I told myself I had, but the one I really had.

  You see, there was no way for me to deny that you were there in front of me and I couldn’t deny any longer that I knew it would happen—you would be in my future. What had been captured—and dismissed—in a space too quickly for recorded time was now like a bizarre photograph that was developing in front of my face. I am passing you in the coffee shop, your head is bent over your folded newspaper, and small strands of your reddish-brown hair have come undone from the bobby pins and lie against the curve of your neck. The feeling is so strong, it almost physically stops me: I will see that neck again. Not her, not the woman but the skin that’s tinted from amber to cream as it stretches over the lean bone underneath. That is the feeling I actually had, while the feeling I quickly exchanged it with was: I’ve seen this woman before. That can be recorded; it took a split second. But a glance at the side of your high cheekbones, pointed chin, slender profile, and I knew I was mistaken. I hadn’t even seen you sitting those three tables away during lunch. But I remembered your waitress well. The dark brown arms, full breasts threatening to tear open the front of her uniform, the crease of her apron strings around a nonexistent waist that swung against a hip line that could only be called a promise of heaven on earth—her I had seen. And you had to have been there when she took your order and brought you whatever you were eating, and the fact is I never saw you. Not when I stood up, reached into my pocket for change, passed the two tables between us, and didn’t see you then—until the neck bent over the newspaper. And it all could have been such a wonderful coincidence when you first walked into my office, a natural ice-breaker for the interview, which I always hated, being forced to judge someone else. I could have brought up the final image of the weary slump, the open classifieds, and the shoes pulled off beneath the table. A woman l
ooking for a job; we were looking for an office manager five blocks away. Afternoon interviews began at one o’clock and it was twelve-forty-five. And just imagine, Miss Day, when I passed you I said to myself, Wouldn’t it be funny if I saw her again? Except that it was terrifying when you sat down, and then ran your hand up the curve of your neck in a nervous mannerism, pushing up a few loose hairs and pushing me smack into a confrontation with fate. When you unconsciously did that, I must have looked as if someone had stuck a knife into my gut, because that’s the way it felt.