“Well,” he began, his eyes taking a full sweep of the room, over the filthy, partially intact Venetian blinds, the busted garbage bags spilling out over the floor with dozens of roaches darting in and out. He tugged the collar of his shirt and cleared his throat.
“I . . . I’ve been asked to come here today to share with you some exciting opportunities offered—ahem—from Encyclopedia Britannica.”
All the tension in my body loosened, but only for a moment. Before I could draw any relief from realizing this man was no social worker, I caught sight of Daddy and tensed right back up.
“Excuse me,” Daddy said, raising his eyebrows, leaning in way too close to the man. “Where did you say you were from?” Daddy’s arms were folded over his chest, his chin dropped, his eyes suspicious.
A moment from three weeks earlier struck me. It was late at night. Lisa and I had been watching a Honeymooners rerun when a commercial for Encyclopedia Britannica filled the screen. A girl and a boy struggled with their homework and repeatedly turned to their parents, two neatly dressed professional types, for help. “Look it up, dear,” was all the parents would answer to each of their children’s questions. The children did look it up, with the trusty help of Encyclopedia Britannica. And when they received A’s on their papers, the family gathered to celebrate in the living room, beside a crackling fireplace with a coffee table much newer and cleaner than ours.
Lisa’s attention had been fixed on the screen. Then, when the narrator invited us to have a free home presentation, which would include two free volumes—I remembered now with a certain degree of helplessness—Lisa had grabbed a pen and jotted down the number. It never occurred to me that she would actually call.
“These are our brochures,” Matt said, pulling glossy materials from his briefcase. “You can all have a look.”
Every other moment, he ran his finger through his neat, gelled hair and licked his lips before speaking.
“Would you like a glass of water?” I asked. I wanted so badly to communicate that at least I was normal.
“No. No thank you,” he responded right away, without even looking at me. I could feel my cheeks flush hot. “This is for all of you,” he said as he distributed to us, counterclockwise, one pamphlet each. Before it was her turn, Ma snatched Lisa’s copy straight out of his hand. The man jumped, only a little, and quickly continued passing the pamphlets out, reaching a wide space around Ma to get to Lisa. I could feel myself start to sweat.
He was sweating, too, obviously so. I could tell from how he cleared his throat between almost every word that he was also choking on the rancid smell from the bathtub. Lisa got out her glasses to look over the brochure. If she felt awkward, I couldn’t tell at all.
“The benefits to owning your very, ahem, a-hem, very own set of Encyclopedia Britannica are, a-hem truly beyond measure. Education-wise—”
Daddy clenched his pamphlet tight in his fist, his knuckles whitening, and interrupted, “Yeah, okay, okay, yeah,” every second or so, as though to speed him up.
As the man spoke, a couple of flies from the garbage buzzed past his face. He pretended to open a pamphlet, swatting at the flies with its pages. I thought I would die right there when Ma spoke.
“You think you can just come here and get away with that?” she said, sneering at him.
“Ex-excuse me, ma’am?” he stammered.
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Nothing, please finish. I mean, go ahead, please.”
Ma’s eyes were too wide open to look sane, and she was nodding her head at something unapparent to anyone but herself.
“Ma!” Lisa said, looking up from her reading. “I told Matt to come, that’s why he’s here.” Ma continued to stare at him without flinching.
Regardless of Ma’s state of mind, Lisa always addressed her as though things were perfectly normal. Then, when Ma’s actions conflicted with whatever logical outcome Lisa expected, she became livid. I found the pattern just as frustrating as it was irrational. Not only was Ma obviously insane, but it seemed as if Lisa was detached from reality as well. So much so that her behavior could, at times, make me feel like I didn’t have an older, but instead a younger sister.
“How much is everything?” Lisa continued, looking up at the man, who was shifting uncomfortably under Ma’s unrelenting glare.
“Well, luckily, Britannica offers a variety of payment options—”
Daddy crossed his arms again and smiled smugly, interrupting.
“So tell me, sir, would this be the exact same set available in the public library, down the block?” Daddy had a way of engaging people as though they were attempting to take advantage of him, but he wasn’t going to let them get away with it.
“Well, uh, really the luxury of owning your own set cannot be, ahem, underestimated. To answer your question, ma’am,” he addressed Lisa, “there are several payment plans, ahem, packages that make it possible for nearly anyone . . .”
Forgetting Matt, Ma absentmindedly dug her pointer finger up her nose. He pretended not to notice, but gave himself away with a frown when she wiped it across the arm of the couch. I might have been the only other one to notice. I wished then that I could somehow explain to him—I knew what this must look like; I got it. I kept offering the man my gaze, so that he could see that I understood, but he would only glance my way for brief moments before looking away again.
“Well, what if we want only certain volumes?” Lisa asked. “Like your special editions on the presidents, or the wars?”
What was my sister thinking? What apartment had she woken up in every morning? If we went days without a solid meal, why would it matter if we wanted to look up the Peloponnesian War, or what year Abe Lincoln was born? Watching her nod at the man’s proposals of payment plans that I knew we could never afford, just as he was probably aware we would never accept, while Ma ate her boogers and Daddy shifted every five seconds, I needed for Lisa to realize the extent of this foolishness, to see it clearly, the way I did.
I’m not sure who was more relieved when the whole ordeal finally ended, Matt or me. During the following three and a half months Ma spent in her next hospital stay, whenever a Britannica commercial came on, Daddy folded his arms, privately indicating Lisa to me with his eyes. Each time, I relived the humiliation of our first-ever house guest all over again.
To Lisa’s great disappointment, our two free volumes never came.
Five days after Ma was again committed, the next month’s check had yet to arrive. I searched our cabinets to find them totally barren, not a scrap to eat. I was starving. When my stomachache turned to something more like stomach-fire, and I felt shaky all over, I decided to head out to see what I could do about my situation. I had in mind an acquaintance of Rick and Danny’s, a boy named Kevin, who, even though he was not much older than me, always had money in his pocket and talked endlessly about some job that he had.
Because it was already ten in the morning, and Kevin was never seen hanging around the block during the daytime, the guys and I rushed over to Fordham Road and University Avenue, where we might be able to catch him on his way out to work. We found Kevin at the number 12 bus stop, in front of a part of Aqueduct Park that everyone called Dead Cat Alley. Guys from Grand Avenue used that area to set their pit bulls loose on rounded-up stray cats, whose bloody and disfigured corpses could be found scattered across the cement most Sunday mornings. I went near the alley only when I had to; the sight of one limp cat body, a patch of blood wetting its fur, gave me nightmares.
When we crossed from University Avenue onto Fordham, Kevin had just exited from the front of a bus and the driver had yelled something I couldn’t hear before pulling the doors shut and driving away. Kevin ignored the driver, and when he saw us coming, he did not seem at all surprised. From the casual look on his face as we approached—drooping eyelids and a bored, steady face—you’d think he’d been expecting us. I let Rick do the introduction.
“Yo, uh, Kevin, man . . . this is my friend Elizabe
th. Yo, uh, bust it, we wanted to find out about that job you got.”
“You guys wanna make some money?” he asked, a smile spreading across his face. Rick and Danny half shrugged, half nodded.
“Yeah,” I responded immediately, stepping forward. “I do. Will you show me where?” I felt as if acid were eating away at my stomach. “I’ll work anywhere,” I told him. “Can we go now?”
Kevin taught us how to hop the bus. We waited, standing off to the side, a few feet away from the back door, so as not to get the driver suspicious. Then we rushed in the back door as exiting passengers clustered, blocking us from sight. Our destination, Kevin informed us, was the self-service gas station just beside the Bronx Zoo, where Fordham Road split into the highway. There, we could run up on customers and offer to pump their gas, hoping for a tip.
Kevin prepped us the whole bus ride there. I nodded and listened quietly, hoping to mask my hesitation. When I realized that Kevin’s “job” was more hustle than legitimate work, the hunger in my gut made room for anxiety. But I kept a straight face, sucked up my worry, and listened to Kevin’s advice while the bus chugged down Fordham Road.
“Just stand there and look at ’em like you’re dumb, like you don’t get that they’d even think about not tipping. Make ’em feel cheap. They’ll give ya somethin’, especially a white girl. You guys’ll get somethin’, too, we all will. Just grab the pump and don’t let them tell you no.”
It actually worked. In the beginning, it took me a while to get the hang of hooking the nozzle into the tank’s opening without spilling gas all over the ground. But in a few hours, I was a pro. By dark, I’d made more than thirty dollars, more money than I’d ever had at one time in my life. It wasn’t easy at first; the station’s legitimate workers occasionally took a break from their post behind Plexiglas to chase us away. They said we were trespassing, and they were going to call the police. But the four of us were too quick for the two of them; to our advantage, only one was allowed to leave the booth at a time. And with our system of serving as lookout for one another and our agreement to scramble in separate directions in order to cause confusion, they couldn’t catch us. It was never more than five minutes before we returned to our spots. Kevin, I noticed, gave them the finger the moment he caught their glares from the booth again.
The drivers’ initial reactions to me were off-putting, and my confidence suffered with each rejection. My voice became a shy quiver and I had to repeat my request a couple times before they understood it. “You want to what?” they’d say. “What about my gas?” Or, worse, they just silently looked confused until I got up the nerve to say, loud and clear, “Can I pump your gas for you?” I’d been turned down more than a few times during those hesitations. Eventually, I realized that I had to act confident, and this made courage easier to summon. Before long, I was reaching for the pump and, with a polite smile, saying, “Let me get that for you.” This worked almost every time.
Enlivened by the rush of earning my own money, I stayed behind far into the afternoon, long after Kevin, Rick, and Danny left for home, allowing myself only one break to buy a Happy Meal from the neighboring McDonald’s. I’d almost drooled on myself waiting in line for that cheeseburger; I ate it in a few bites on my way back to the pump, licking my fingers clean. It was one of the most delicious meals I’d ever had. My stomach pains eventually subsided and I went back to work, staying at the station for hours longer, until the sky turned sapphire and the night breeze ran goose bumps down my arms and legs. Finally, I walked back to the bus and headed home. During the whole free ride back, my mind raced, replaying the day and thinking about all the new possibilities I’d just discovered by making my own money. The experience was exhilarating.
It occurred to me that Kevin might have brought us along to solve the only obstacle he could not overcome alone—the issue of the gas attendants chasing after him. Since he’d had us to look out, Kevin was able to spend the day making all the money he could, with hardly any interruption. We worked with Kevin for that one day, and after that, I never spoke to him again. But something about my brief encounter with him gave me a sense that I could do something to change my situation. Though he wasn’t my friend, I admired how Kevin had found a way to do things on his own, how he looked at not having money—a situation that most people would see as fixed—as something he could overcome. What else wasn’t set in stone? I wondered what other opportunities were out there for me.
Along Fordham Road, stores glowed against the night. Through the bus window, I saw shoppers streaming in and out of them, clutching bags filled with newly bought merchandise. I considered how often I’d gone by that gas station on the bus with Ma, never thinking there was a chance for me to do something about my hunger. Now, as I rode past these businesses, I wondered what else I hadn’t seen. Surely there must be managers inside of each store who were able to employ whomever they chose. Though I knew that at nine, I was not old enough to be officially employed, maybe with a little convincing, some bosses wouldn’t mind having me sweep their floors or clean in back for tips. Maybe we didn’t need to be out of food all the time, even when the check ran out. Of all the businesses, I thought there must be at least one place for me, somewhere.
Riding up Fordham Road, I rested heavily against the bus seat, soothed by my exhaustion. Change weighted my pockets, rolling over my thighs in my shorts—more than enough to buy Chinese food for Lisa, Daddy, and me. I began to work out the next day in my mind. Leaning my head against the window, I drifted into a light, easy nap made sweet by the new idea that I could have some say in what happened to us, after all.
The next morning, with twenty dollars’ worth of leftover earnings tucked away in my room, I walked up and down Fordham in search of work. With station attendants chasing me at the gas station, it could never be a real job; I wanted something I could count on, something consistent. I entered each store and requested a conversation with an employee, trying to look as serious and responsible as I could. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get one person to take me seriously.
“You want a job? You asking for someone else, or you want a job?” Though I made every effort to be clear—yes, I was hoping you might have something; doesn’t have to be a real job or anything, maybe you need someone to sweep up here—the responses at Alexander’s, Tony’s Pizza, and Woolworth were the same. No one seemed to want to bother with me. Some even laughed outright.
“You have to be at least fourteen, kid. How old are you—ten?” One woman leaned over the counter to pat my head and smile, a thick gold chain resting between her coffee-colored breasts. Laughter from the entire cashier’s section followed. I stomped away, embarrassed, deeply frustrated. I was sure of my ability to work, if they would just allow me to; though the more I was rejected, the more self-conscious I became. I began noticing my tangled hair, my dirty, cracked sneakers, and the dirt caked under my fingernails. Yesterday’s exhilaration was beginning to seem foolish.
I walked so far down Fordham—from rejection to rejection—that I ended up at the end of the shopping area, well on my way back to the gas station. I hadn’t originally intended on going to the station, given the problem of dodging the workers. Rick and Danny had let me know yesterday that one day’s work had been more than enough for them. At least, I thought as I walked toward the pumps, I probably wouldn’t have to come home empty-handed if I took a shot at it.
I decided to work into the early afternoon, pumping gas until just after lunchtime. Then I would make my way back uphill until I reached the Grand Concourse, where there was a whole strip of stores I could try my luck at.
Apart from constantly looking over my shoulder to check for the station attendants, the first two hours of pumping gas went by smoothly. I learned that early-morning traffic from the Bronx Zoo brought a rush of families to the station. I jumped from van to car to station wagon, each packed with its own family. There were babies screaming, adults counting money, children my age fighting in backseats who looked at me
with curiosity, the smell of ripe diapers and fast food rising toward me from their open windows.
Change from my tips crashed against my thighs as I ran, weaving between gas pumps to rush up to people. Missing a customer meant missing profit, so I wasted no time. Soon I delighted at how I could afford anything from the McDonald’s. I thought, as I saw a bus pass, that I could even go far away, if I felt like it. As long as I was able to work, I was beginning to feel as if I didn’t have to be stuck anywhere. I had options. Yesterday’s excitement returned to me, and I raced back and forth from one customer to the next, fattening my pockets, oblivious to the passing hours and the station workers.
By one o’clock, I had made almost as much money as it had taken me the whole day before to gather, but I’d been chased out of the station three times. The final time I had decided not to come back, when a station worker grabbed the back of my T-shirt, screaming at me, threatening to have me arrested. He tried to drag me back into the booth with him, but I thrashed around, shook loose from his grip, and escaped, pumping my skinny legs as fast as I could, letting his insults fade as I gathered distance.
I rested to catch my breath on a bench at the foot of the hill, where I counted twenty-six dollars in tips. My skin had turned dark pink and sensitive from hours of standing in the sun. Stuffing the money back into my pockets, I resumed my search along the Grand Concourse, pushing my way through crowds of people whose elbows and heavy shopping bags brushed painfully against my sunburned arms. Warm sweat spots dampened my T-shirt beneath my armpits and the top of my back, then turned freezing cold each time I entered another air-conditioned store to ask the same question over and over again.
As the afternoon wound down, my luck at finding a job on the Concourse turned out to be no better. I couldn’t locate one person to take me seriously. Finally, I started on my way home. As I walked, I tried to come up with another possible location to search for work, maybe on nearby Kingsbridge Avenue, or over the bridge on Dyckman, but doubt began sinking in.