“If you do your research,” she chides, “I think you’ll see there have been some positive steps toward resolving the crisis. I think it’s important, you know. Stay positive. Things are getting better all the time.”
A tear escapes my eye, slides down my face. She is both polite and cruel enough to ignore it. “Thank you for meeting with me.”
The pain in my feet starts as soon as I stand. She stays seated, so I know she doesn’t want to shake my hand, doesn’t want to touch me. Her eyes glaze over; she doesn’t want to see me either. I suddenly want to thank her again, am desperate to, am desperate to do anything that will keep me in this room.
But instead I leave her office. I walk down the unlit hall to the door.
The biggest way I trick myself, despite knowing better, is by hoping. I tell myself I don’t. I tell myself I’m too smart for that. And I never feel it. I never feel hope, the good part of it, swelling through me. I only feel it going, like I feel it now as I walk out of that brightly colored office, leave the pamphlet on the counter, not even able to put it in the trash like I should, in case someone else wants it, in case it helps someone else. In case someone out there still believes in disembodied helping hands.
DEMI
My childhood was not idyllic, not in the traditional sense, but it was mine. My mother died in childbirth, so my dad raised me. Some fathers wouldn’t have, and I always felt special for that. I remember trips to the grocery store where my dad used to steal, usually steaks or salmon, always bottles of wine. I didn’t see it as a crime. I saw it as a game and proof that he loved me. Our whole life was a game, a kind of dare: Can you survive? Without a washing machine! With too-small shoes! You’ve got eleven dollars in your bank account and seven days to wait for food stamps: GO!
All of our furniture was sourced from the side of the road, so we had two huge executive desks with rolling office chairs, a brass bed, a piss-stained sofa we covered with scarves and caftans. We collected furniture we didn’t need, because anything free was too good to pass up. By the time I was a teenager, our studio was filled with armoires and dressers and dining room chairs stacked to the ceiling. The dressers were filled with electrical cords, old radios, headphones, drills and saws and tools we didn’t know how to use. Anything that worked or could be fixed or figured out, my dad had to take. He wasn’t a hoarder; he was a survivor.
I never knew we were poor. I thought everyone lived like this. Until one New Year’s Eve when I was six or seven. I found out the way everyone does: by meeting a rich person. My dad went out to a local club called the Globe and brought two people back with him. The first was John and I knew him. He was a Rastafarian who looked like a Rastafarian, so people would acquire him like a piece of clothing, and that night a rich woman hung off his arm. She was high. Her eyes were swollen blue and her lips were so juiced, they were crooked on her face. She was wearing a silver gown, like snakeskin that slithered down her sculpted form. I watched her through the break in the drapes—our apartment was all one long room, the bedroom separated by a scratchy blanket hung to make a curtain.
It was late and I was trying to sleep. That is the most consistent memory I have from childhood: how much I wanted to sleep all the time but never could. And the woman was high and she stumbled past the curtain, threw up in our closet all over our clothes, then looked at me, said, “There’s a kid in here,” laughed and walked out.
Dad didn’t hear, and if he had, he wouldn’t have cared. He was always ridiculously accommodating to other people, especially guests, offering them things we couldn’t afford to lose, like it was a game he was playing with himself. “Take this jacket. It looks good on you! Do you need a Walkman? We have three!”
So I just cried quietly. It stank of vomit and I wanted to leave. I wanted to go for a walk, which was what I did whenever I got overwhelmed by everything. I walked to trick myself into thinking I was going somewhere else.
But it was too late to go for a walk, so I lay there listening to them through the curtain. She went to the bathroom and snorted drugs off our toilet, and then she took a shit, but the toilet wouldn’t flush because sometimes it got stuck. She fought it loudly for a minute and then I heard a crash. And she walked out of the bathroom and said, “Your toilet’s broken,” and a few minutes later, she called a car and dragged John out.
The next morning, I discovered that she had broken the toilet. She had dropped the tank cover into the bowl and left an enormous gaping hole. If we flushed the toilet, water would rush out through the hole, flooding the bathroom.