Lost in the City

MARIE

Every now and again, as if on a whim, the federal government people would write to Marie Delaveaux Wilson in one of those white, stampless envelopes and tell her to come in to their place so they could take another look at her. They, the Social Security people, wrote to her in a foreign language that she had learned to translate over the years, and for all the years she had been receiving the letters the same man had been signing them. Once, because she had something important to tell him, Marie called the number the man always put at the top of the letters, but a woman answered Mr. Smith’s telephone and told Marie he was in an all-day meeting. Another time she called and a man said Mr. Smith was on vacation. And finally one day a woman answered and told Marie that Mr. Smith was deceased. The woman told her to wait and she would get someone new to talk to her about her case, but Marie thought it bad luck to have telephoned a dead man and she hung up.

Now, years after the woman had told her Mr. Smith was no more, the letters were still being signed by John Smith. Come into our office at 21st and M streets, Northwest, the letters said in that foreign language. Come in so we can see if you are still blind in one eye, come in so we can see if you are still old and getting older. Come in so we can see if you still deserve to get Supplemental Security Income payments.

She always obeyed the letters, even if the order now came from a dead man, for she knew people who had been temporarily cut off from SSI for not showing up or even for being late. And once cut off, you had to move heaven and earth to get back on.

So on a not unpleasant day in March, she rose in the dark in the morning, even before the day had any sort of character, to give herself plenty of time to bathe, eat, lay out money for the bus, dress, listen to the spirituals on the radio. She was eighty-six years old, and had learned that life was all chaos and painful uncertainty and that the only way to get through it was to expect chaos even in the most innocent of moments. Offer a crust of bread to a sick bird and you often drew back a bloody finger.

John Smith’s letter had told her to come in at eleven o’clock, his favorite time, and by nine that morning she had had her bath and had eaten. Dressed by nine thirty. The walk from Claridge Towers at 12th and M down to the bus stop at 14th and K took her about ten minutes, more or less. There was a bus at about ten thirty, her schedule told her, but she preferred the one that came a half hour earlier, lest there be trouble with the ten thirty bus. After she dressed, she sat at her dining room table and went over still again what papers and all else she needed to take. Given the nature of life — particularly the questions asked by the Social Security people — she always took more than they might ask for — her birth certificate, her husband’s death certificate, doctor’s letters.

One of the last things she put in her pocketbook was a seven-inch or so knife that she had, with the use of a small saw borrowed from a neighbor, serrated on both edges. The knife, she was convinced now, had saved her life about two weeks before. Before then she had often been careless about when she took the knife out with her, and she had never taken it out in daylight, but now she never left her apartment without it, even when going down the hall to the trash drop.

She had gone out to buy a simple box of oatmeal, no more, no less. It was about seven in the evening, the streets with enough commuters driving up 13th Street to make her feel safe. Several yards before she reached the store, the young man came from behind her and tried to rip off her coat pocket where he thought she kept her money, for she carried no purse or pocketbook after five o’clock. The money was in the other pocket with the knife, and his hand caught in the empty pocket long enough for her to reach around with the knife and cut his hand as it came out of her pocket.

He screamed and called her an old bitch. He took a few steps up 13th Street and stood in front of Emerson’s Market, examining the hand and shaking off blood. Except for the cars passing up and down 13th Street, they were alone, and she began to pray.

“You cut me,” he said, as if he had only been minding his own business when she cut him. “Just look what you done to my hand,” he said and looked around as if for some witness to her crime. There was not a great amount of blood, but there was enough for her to see it dripping to the pavement. He seemed to be about twenty, no more than twenty-five, dressed the way they were all dressed nowadays, as if a blind man had matched up all their colors. It occurred to her to say that she had seven grandchildren his age, that by telling him this he would leave her alone. But the more filth he spoke, the more she wanted him only to come toward her again.

“You done crippled me, you old bitch.”

“I sure did,” she said, without malice, without triumph, but simply the way she would have told him the time of day had he asked and had she known. She gripped the knife tighter, and as she did, she turned her body ever so slightly so that her good eye lined up with him. Her heart was making an awful racket, wanting to be away from him, wanting to be safe at home. I will not be moved, some organ in the neighborhood of the heart told the heart. “And I got plenty more where that come from.”

The last words seemed to bring him down some and, still shaking the blood from his hand, he took a step or two back, which disappointed her. I will not be moved, that other organ kept telling the heart. “You just crazy, thas all,” he said. “Just a crazy old hag.” Then he turned and lumbered up toward Logan Circle, and several times he looked back over his shoulder as if afraid she might be following. A man came out of Emerson’s, then a woman with two little boys. She wanted to grab each of them by the arm and tell them she had come close to losing her life. “I saved myself with this here thing,” she would have said. She forgot about the oatmeal and took her raging heart back to the apartment. She told herself that she should, but she never washed the fellow’s blood off the knife, and over the next few days it dried and then it began to flake off.

Toward ten o’clock that morning Wilamena Mason knocked and let herself in with a key Marie had given her.

“I see you all ready,” Wilamena said.

“With the help of the Lord,” Marie said. “Want a spot a coffee?”

“No thanks,” Wilamena said, and dropped into a chair at the table. “Been drinkin so much coffee lately, I’m gonna turn into coffee. Was up all night with Calhoun.”

“How he doin?”

Wilamena told her Calhoun was better that morning, his first good morning in over a week. Calhoun Lambeth was Wilamena’s boyfriend, a seventy-five-year-old man she had taken up with six or so months before, not long after he moved in. He was the best-dressed old man Marie had ever known, but he had always appeared to be sickly, even while strutting about with his gold-tipped cane. And seeing that she could count his days on the fingers of her hands, Marie had avoided getting to know him. She could not understand why Wilamena, who could have had any man in Claridge Towers or any other senior citizen building for that matter, would take such a man into her bed. “True love,” Wilamena had explained. “Avoid heartache,” Marie had said, trying to be kind.

They left the apartment. Marie sought help from no one, lest she come to depend on a person too much. But since the encounter with the young man, Wilamena had insisted on escorting Marie. Marie, to avoid arguments, allowed Wilamena to walk with her from time to time to the bus stop, but no farther.

Nothing fit Marie’s theory about life like the weather in Washington. Two days before the temperature had been in the forties, and yesterday it had dropped to the low twenties then warmed up a bit, with the afternoon bringing snow flurries. Today the weather people on the radio had said it would warm enough to wear just a sweater, but Marie was wearing her coat. And tomorrow, the weather people said, it would be in the thirties, with maybe an inch or so of snow.

Appointments near twelve o’clock were always risky, because the Social Security people often took off for lunch long before noon and returned sometime after one. And except for a few employees who seemed to work through their lunch hours, the place shut down. Marie had never been interviewed by someone willing to work through the lunch hour. Today, though the appointment was for eleven, she waited until one thirty before the woman at the front of the waiting room told her she would have to come back another day, because the woman who handled her case was not in.

“You put my name down when I came in like everything was all right,” Marie said after she had been called up to the woman’s desk.

“I know,” the woman said, “but I thought that Mrs. Brown was in. They told me she was in. I’m sorry.” The woman began writing in a log book that rested between her telephone and a triptych of photographs. She handed Marie a slip and told her again she was sorry.

“Why you have me wait so long if she whatn’t here?” She did not want to say too much, appear too upset, for the Social Security people could be unforgiving. And though she was used to waiting three and four hours, she found it especially unfair to wait when there was no one for her at all behind those panels the Social Security people used for offices. “I been here since before eleven.”

“I know,” the woman behind the desk said. “I know. I saw you there, ma’am, but I really didn’t know Mrs. Brown wasn’t here.” There was a nameplate at the front of the woman’s desk and it said Vernelle Wise. The name was surrounded by little hearts, the kind a child might have drawn.

Marie said nothing more and left.

The next appointment was two weeks later, eight thirty, a good hour, and the day before a letter signed by John Smith arrived to remind her. She expected to be out at least by twelve. Three times before eleven o’clock, Marie asked Vernelle Wise if the man, Mr. Green, who was handling her case, was in that day, and each time the woman assured her that he was. At twelve, Marie ate one of the two oranges and three of the five slices of cheese she had brought. At one, she asked again if Mr. Green was indeed in that day and politely reminded Vernelle Wise that she had been waiting since about eight that morning. Vernelle was just as polite and told her the wait would soon be over.

At one fifteen, Marie began to watch the clock hands creep around the dial. She had not paid much attention to the people about her, but more and more it seemed that others were being waited on who had arrived long after she had gotten there. After asking about Mr. Green at one, she had taken a seat near the front, and as more time went by, she found herself forced to listen to the conversation that Vernelle was having with the other receptionist next to her.

“I told him…I told him…I said just get your things and leave,” said the other receptionist, who didn’t have a nameplate.

“Did he leave?” Vernelle wanted to know.

“Oh, no,” the other woman said. “Not at first. But I picked up some of his stuff, that Christian Dior jacket he worships. I picked up my cigarette lighter and that jacket, just like I was gonna do something bad to it, and he started movin then.”

Vernelle began laughing. “I wish I was there to see that.” She was filing her fingernails. Now and again she would look at her fingernails to inspect her work, and if it was satisfactory, she would blow on the nail and on the file. “He back?” Vernelle asked.

The other receptionist eyed her. “What you think?” and they both laughed.

Along about two o’clock Marie became hungry again, but she did not want to eat the rest of her food because she did not know how much longer she would be there. There was a soda machine in the corner, but all sodas gave her gas.

“You-know-who gonna call you again?” the other receptionist was asking Vernelle.

“I hope so,” Vernelle said. “He pretty fly. Seemed decent too. It kinda put me off when he said he was a car mechanic. I kinda like kept tryin to take a peek at his fingernails and everything the whole evenin. See if they was dirty or what.”

“Well, that mechanic stuff might be good when you get your car back. My cousin’s boyfriend used to do that kinda work and he made good money, girl. I mean real good money.”

“Hmmmm,” Vernelle said. “Anyway, the kids like him, and you know how peculiar they can be.”

“Tell me about it. They do the job your mother and father used to do, huh? Only on another level.”

“You can say that again,” Vernelle said.

Marie went to her and told her how long she had been waiting.

“Listen,” Vernelle said, pointing her fingernail file at Marie. “I told you you’ll be waited on as soon as possible. This is a busy day. So I think you should just go back to your seat until we call your name.” The other receptionist began to giggle.

Marie reached across the desk and slapped Vernelle Wise with all her might. Vernelle dropped the file, which made a cheap tinny sound when it hit the plastic board her chair was on. But no one heard the file because she had begun to cry right away. She looked at Marie as if, in the moment of her greatest need, Marie had denied her. “Oh, oh,” Vernelle Wise said through the tears. “Oh, my dear God…”

The other receptionist, in her chair on casters, rolled over to Vernelle and put her arm around her. “Security!” the other receptionist hollered. “We need security here!”

The guard at the front door came quickly around the corner, one hand on his holstered gun and the other pointing accusatorially at the people seated in the waiting area. Marie had sat down and was looking at the two women almost sympathetically, as if a stranger had come in, hit Vernelle Wise, and fled.

“She slapped Vernelle!” the other receptionist said.

“Who did it?” the guard said, reaching for the man sitting beside Marie. But when the other receptionist said it was the old lady in the blue coat, the guard held back for the longest time, as if to grab her would be like arresting his own grandmother. He stood blinking and he would have gone on blinking had Marie not stood up.

She was too flustered to wait for the bus and so took a cab home. With both chains, she locked herself in the apartment, refusing to answer the door or the telephone the rest of the day and most of the next. But she knew that if her family or friends received no answer at the door or on the telephone, they would think something had happened to her. So the next afternoon, she began answering the phone and spoke with the chains on, telling Wilamena and others that she had a toothache.

For days and days after the incident she ate very little, asked God to forgive her. She was haunted by the way Vernelle’s cheek had felt, by what it was like to invade and actually touch the flesh of another person. And when she thought too hard, she imagined that she was slicing through the woman’s cheek, the way she had sliced through the young man’s hand. But as time went on she began to remember the man’s curses and the purplish color of Vernelle’s fingernails, and all remorse would momentarily take flight. Finally, one morning nearly two weeks after she slapped the woman, she woke with a phrase she had not used or heard since her children were small: You whatn’t raised that way.

It was the next morning that the thin young man in the suit knocked and asked through the door chains if he could speak with her. She thought that he was a Social Security man come to tear up her card and papers and tell her that they would send her no more checks. Even when he pulled out an identification card showing that he was a Howard University student, she did not believe.

In the end, she told him she didn’t want to buy anything, not magazines, not candy, not anything.

“No, no,” he said. “I just want to talk to you for a bit. About your life and everything. It’s for a project for my folklore course. I’m talking to everyone in the building who’ll let me. Please…I won’t be a bother. Just a little bit of your time.”

“I don’t have anything worth talkin about,” she said. “And I don’t keep well these days.”

“Oh, ma’am, I’m sorry. But we all got something to say. I promise I won’t be a bother.”

After fifteen minutes of his pleas, she opened the door to him because of his suit and his tie and his tie clip with a bird in flight, and because his long dark-brown fingers reminded her of delicate twigs. But had he turned out to be death with a gun or a knife or fingers to crush her neck, she would not have been surprised. “My name’s George. George Carter. Like the president.” He had the kind of voice that old people in her young days would have called womanish. “But I was born right here in D.C. Born, bred, and buttered, my mother used to say.”

He stayed the rest of the day and she fixed him dinner. It scared her to be able to talk so freely with him, and at first she thought that at long last, as she had always feared, senility had taken hold of her. A few hours after he left, she looked his name up in the telephone book, and when a man who sounded like him answered, she hung up immediately. And the next day she did the same thing. He came back at least twice a week for many weeks and would set his cassette recorder on her coffee table. “He’s takin down my whole life,” she told Wilamena, almost the way a woman might speak in awe of a new boyfriend.

One day he played back for the first time some of what she told the recorder:

…My father would be sittin there readin the paper. He’d say whenever they put in a new president, “Look like be got the chair for four years.” And it got so that’s what I saw — this poor man sittin in that chair for four long years while the rest of the world went on about its business. I don’t know if I thought he ever did anything, the president. I just knew that he had to sit in that chair for four years. Maybe I thought that by his sittin in that chair and doin nothin else for four years he made the country what it was and that without him sittin there the country wouldn’t be what it was. Maybe thas what I got from listenin to my father readin and to my mother askin him questions bout what he was readin. They was like that, you see….

George stopped the tape and was about to put the other side in when she touched his hand.

“No more, George,” she said. “I can’t listen to no more. Please…please, no more.” She had never in her whole life heard her own voice. Nothing had been so stunning in a long, long while, and for a few moments before she found herself, her world turned upside down. There, rising from a machine no bigger than her Bible, was a voice frighteningly familiar and yet unfamiliar, talking about a man whom she knew as well as her husbands and her sons, a man dead and buried sixty years. She reached across to George and he handed her the tape. She turned it over and over, as if the mystery of everything could be discerned if she turned it enough times. She began to cry, and with her other hand she lightly touched the buttons of the machine.

Between the time Marie slapped the woman in the Social Security office and the day she heard her voice for the first time, Calhoun Lambeth, Wilamena’s boyfriend, had been in and out the hospital three times. Most evenings when Calhoun’s son stayed the night with him, Wilamena would come up to Marie’s and spend most of the evening, sitting on the couch that was catty-corner to the easy chair facing the big window. She said very little, which was unlike her, a woman with more friends than hairs on her head and who, at sixty-eight, loved a good party. The most attractive woman Marie knew would only curl her legs up under herself and sip whatever Marie put in her hand. She looked out at the city until she took herself to her apartment or went back down to Calhoun’s place. In the beginning, after he returned from the hospital the first time, there was the desire in Marie to remind her friend that she wasn’t married to Calhoun, that she should just get up and walk away, something Marie had seen her do with other men she had grown tired of.

Late one night, Wilamena called and asked her to come down to the man’s apartment, for the man’s son had had to work that night and she was there alone with him and she did not want to be alone with him. “Sit with me a spell,” Wilamena said. Marie did not protest, even though she had not said more than ten words to the man in all the time she knew him. She threw on her bathrobe, picked up her keys and serrated knife, and went down to the second floor.

He was propped up on the bed, and he was surprisingly alert and spoke to Marie with an unforced friendliness. She had seen this in other dying people — a kindness and gentleness came over them that was often embarrassing for those around them. Wilamena sat on the side of the bed. Calhoun asked Marie to sit in a chair beside the bed and then he took her hand and held it for the rest of the night. He talked on throughout the night, not always understandable. Wilamena, exhausted, eventually lay across the foot of the bed. Almost everything the man had to say was about a time when he was young and was married for a year or so to a woman in Nicodemus, Kansas, a town where there were only black people. Whether the woman had died or whether he had left her, Marie could not make out. She only knew that the woman and Nicodemus seemed to have marked him for life.

“You should go to Nicodemus,” he said at one point, as if the town was only around the corner. “I stumbled into the place by accident. But you should go on purpose. There ain’t much to see, but you should go there and spend some time there.”

Toward four o’clock that morning, he stopped talking and moments later he went home to his God. Marie continued holding the dead man’s hand and she said the Lord’s prayer over and over until it no longer made sense to her. She did not wake Wilamena. Eventually, the sun came through the man’s venetian blinds and she heard the croaking of the pigeons congregating on the window ledge. When she finally placed his hand on his chest, the dead man expelled a burst of air that sounded to Marie like a sigh. It occurred to her that she, a complete stranger, was the last thing he had known in the world and that now that he was no longer in the world all she knew of him was that Nicodemus place and a lovesick woman asleep at the foot of his bed. She thought that she was hungry and thirsty, but the more she looked at the dead man and the sleeping woman, the more she realized that what she felt was a sense of loss.

Two days later, the Social Security people sent her a letter, again signed by John Smith, telling her to come to them one week hence. There was nothing in the letter about the slap, no threat to cut off her SSI payments because of what she had done. Indeed, it was the same sort of letter John Smith usually sent. She called the number at the top of the letter, and the woman who handled her case told her that Mrs. White would be expecting her on the day and time stated in the letter. Still, she suspected the Social Security people were planning something for her, something at the very least that would be humiliating. And, right up until the day before the appointment, she continued calling to confirm that it was okay to come in. Often, the person she spoke to after the switchboard woman and before the woman handling her case was Vernelle. “Social Security Administration. This is Vernelle Wise. May I help you?” And each time Marie heard the receptionist identify herself she wanted to apologize. “I whatn’t raised that way,” she wanted to tell the woman.

George Carter came the day she got the letter to present her with a cassette machine and copies of the tapes she had made about her life. It took quite some time for him to teach her how to use the machine, and after he was gone, she was certain it took so long because she really did not want to know how to use it. That evening, after her dinner, she steeled herself and put a tape marked “Parents; Early Childhood” in the machine.

…My mother had this idea that everything could be done in Washington, that a human bein could take all they troubles to Washington and things would be set right. I think that was all wrapped up with her notion of the govment, the Supreme Court and the president and the like. “Up there,” she would say, “things can be made right.” “Up there” was her only words for Washington. All them other cities had names, but Washington didn’t need a name. It was just called “up there.” I was real small and didn’t know any better, so somehow I got to thinkin since things were on the perfect side in Washington, that maybe God lived there. God and his people…. When I went back home to visit that first time and told my mother all about my livin in Washington, she fell into such a cry, like maybe I had managed to make it to heaven without dyin. Thas how people was back in those days….

The next morning she looked for Vernelle Wise’s name in the telephone book. And for several evenings she would call the number and hang up before the phone had rung three times. Finally, on a Sunday, two days before the appointment, she let it ring and what may have been a little boy answered. She could tell he was very young because he said “Hello” in a too-loud voice, as if he was not used to talking on the telephone.

“Hello,” he said. “Hello, who this? Granddaddy, that you? Hello. Hello. I can see you.”

Marie heard Vernelle tell him to put down the telephone, then another child, perhaps a girl somewhat older than the boy, came on the line. “Hello. Hello. Who is this?” she said with authority. The boy began to cry, apparently because he did not want the girl to talk if he couldn’t. “Don’t touch it,” the girl said. “Leave it alone.” The boy cried louder and only stopped when Vernelle came to the telephone.

“Yes?” Vernelle said. “Yes.” Then she went off the line to calm the boy who had again begun to cry. “Loretta,” she said, “go get his bottle…. Well, look for it. What you got eyes for?”

There seemed to be a second boy, because Vernelle told him to help Loretta look for the bottle. “He always losin things,” Marie heard the second boy say. “You should tie everything to his arms.” “Don’t tell me what to do,” Vernelle said. “Just look for that damn bottle.”

“I don’t lose nofin. I don’t,” the first boy said. “You got snot in your nose.”

“Don’t say that,” Vernelle said before she came back on the line. “I’m sorry,” she said to Marie. “Who is this?…Don’t you dare touch it if you know what’s good for you!” she said. “I wanna talk to Granddaddy,” the first boy said. “Loretta, get me that bottle!”

Marie hung up. She washed her dinner dishes. She called Wilamena because she had not seen her all day, and Wilamena told her that she would be up later. The cassette tapes were on the coffee table beside the machine, and she began picking them up, one by one. She read the labels. “Husband No. 1.” “Working.” “Husband No. 2.” “Children.” “Race Relations.” “Early D. C. Experiences.” “Husband No. 3.” She had not played another tape since the one about her mother’s idea of what Washington was like, but she could still hear the voice, her voice. Without reading its label, she put a tape in the machine.

…I never planned to live in Washington, had no idea I would ever even step one foot in this city. This white family my mother worked for, they had a son married and gone to live in Baltimore. He wanted a maid, somebody to take care of his children. So he wrote to his mother and she asked my mother and my mother asked me about goin to live in Baltimore. Well, I was young. I guess I wanted to see the world, and Baltimore was as good a place to start as anywhere. This man sent me a train ticket and I went off to Baltimore. Hadn’t ever been kissed, hadn’t ever been anything, but here I was goin farther from home than my mother and father put together…. Well, sir, the train stopped in Washington, and I thought I heard the conductor say we would be stoppin a bit there, so I got off. I knew I probably wouldn’t see no more than that Union Station, but I wanted to be able to say I’d done that, that I step foot in the capital of the United States. I walked down to the end of the platform and looked around, then I peeked into the station. Then I went in. And when I got back, the train and my suitcase was gone. Everything I had in the world on the way to Baltimore….

…I couldn’t calm myself anough to listen to when the redcap said another train would be leavin for Baltimore, I was just that upset. I had a buncha addresses of people we knew all the way from home up to Boston, and I used one precious nickel to call a woman I hadn’t seen in years, cause I didn’t have the white people in Baltimore number. This woman come and got me, took me to her place. I member like it was yesterday, that we got on this streetcar marked 13th and D NE. The more I rode, the more brighter things got. You ain’t lived till you been on a streetcar. The further we went on that streetcar — dead down in the middle of the street — the more I knowed I could never go live in Baltimore. I knowed I could never live in a place that didn’t have that streetcar and them clackety-clack tracks….

She wrapped the tapes in two plastic bags and put them in the dresser drawer that contained all that was valuable to her — birth and death certificates, silver dollars, life insurance policies, pictures of her husbands and the children they had given each other, and the grandchildren those children had given her and the great-grands whose names she had trouble remembering. She set the tapes in a back corner of the drawer, away from the things she needed to get her hands on regularly. She knew that however long she lived, she would not ever again listen to them, for in the end, despite all that was on the tapes, she could not stand the sound of her own voice.