Before and Afterlives

  “Do you have references?” She lifted her chin a little, assessing. I said that I did, and handed her a list of names, phone numbers, addresses in New York City. I made up the zip codes and phone numbers. What does a New York City zip code look like? I am no better than Sarah.

  Now I have meals with the Carrolls at noon and six o’clock in the evening. They have three children: Betsy, Peter Jr., and Bennie. Betsy is seventeen and last year’s Corn Queen. Peter Jr. is fifteen and a 4-H member. Bennie, ten, continually asks me what it’s like to be a girl. He’s curious and Betsy will not tell him.

  It is a strange dynamic, this being with other people. When Sarah and I were friends, we had no desire for contact with anyone but each other. Now I speak to twenty or thirty strangers each day, by the roadside, while I bag up a dozen ears of corn. They say hello, thank you, do I know you, how have things been going, that top is very flattering, how are the Carrolls treating you? The men call me blue eyes, sweetie pie, honeyface, miss, little miss, blondie. The women call me dear, dearie, sugar, they do not refer to my body.

  I saw Sarah’s mother two days ago, in Hoffman’s grocery store, picking through the green peppers. I was shopping for the Carrolls, but as soon as I saw Mrs. Hartford I dashed into the soup aisle. I watched her shop for an hour, following behind so she wouldn’t see me, ignoring my own shopping, so that I had to go back and finish after she’d gone. I couldn’t bear to face her. How that woman hated me, though at first she’d thought me sweet and cute, would ask if I wanted anything, a cup of tea, some Kool-aid. Then she went cold. I still don’t know what I did to deserve such treatment. Sarah used to say it’s because I didn’t come from a good family. I said, “What? How could she think that? My mother—”

  I stopped talking. I didn’t know what to say, only that I wanted to defend myself. Sarah patted my shoulder to comfort me.

  “Your mother is a sweet lady,” said Sarah. She looked up at the ceiling, and her eyes rolled up as if she were thinking deeply. Finally she said, “She works at the factory, like my father. She loves you but is not home very often. My mother believes a woman should be at home with her children. Also, your father left when you were just a baby. He was a drinker. But I think you’re better off without him.”

  “Iam better off without him,” I shouted. “And my mother works her fingers to the bones! Who does your mother think she is? Not everyone has the luxury to stay at home with her children.”

  “I know, Alice,” Sarah said. She leaned in and hugged me. “I know. She doesn’t matter. It’s just you and me, ok?”

  I’ve mailed Sarah the card I stole at Rexall’s. I realized I’d never mentioned where she could find me. Did I feel stupid? Yes, indeed, I did. So I sent the card and wrote for her to meet me in the park in two days. I will give her another chance, and if she still chooses to not see me, then maybe Iwill set out for California. Somewhere in the West, the Southwest even, where there is more space. Space enough to make a life out of nothing. I will be a pioneer of space, living off my wits and my good fortune. I will sit by the roadside and sell beaded necklaces while my skin turns tan and leathery. I will read people’s fortunes in the palms of their hands for twenty dollars. People believe in things that aren’t particularly believable. They wait all their lives for strangeness, for miracles.

  I eagerly await our reunion.

  Sarah,

  I hope this card finds you well. Saw it and thought of you immediately. I have been hopelessly sending you letters, asking you to reply, and yet I never provided an address. I am red with embarrassment. Please meet me in the park, by the fountain, you remember, at noon tomorrow. I miss you dearly.

  Always,

  Alice

  No word from Sarah. Neither did she show up at the park yesterday. Although I did see two police officers, strolling in the general area. I nodded and smiled when they looked at me, then sat on the park bench and took out a book that Betsy lent me.

  The policemen approached. They took off their caps and asked what I was doing. Reading, I told them. They nodded. “Are you waiting for anyone?” they asked. I said that I was indeed waiting for someone. “Who would that be?” asked the taller officer. I was immediately suspicious, so I told them I was waiting for Betsy, that I worked for her family. They said, “In that case, we’ll need you to wait for her outside the park, Miss.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing to concern yourself with. But you’d be doing us a favor if you read your book elsewhere.” They put their hats back on and smiled. They waited for a while, badges glinting. Finally I stood to leave.

  Why did she not meet me? My face is burning. I am so angry that I screamed at Bennie to leave me alone when I arrived back at the Carroll farm and he began pelting me with questions. I’ll apologize later. For now I can only sit on my bed and cry. I wish my mother were still alive. Where is our house though? I can’t even remember what road we lived on. Was our front door blue or green?

  Dear Sarah,

  You said, “Alice, I have something to tell you.” Do you remember? Does it hurt to be reminded? “You are not real, Alice,” you said. “You are not real. Do you hear me? I made you up, Alice. You are not a real person.”

  I hate you, Sarah Hartford. How could you be so filled with cruelty? But don’t worry. I’ve given up on you. You won’t hear from me again. I wish you only the best for the future. Give Ron my regards.

  Sincerely,

  Alice Likely

  I write this hastily, as I’m preparing to leave this town for good. It is home to me no longer. But now I wonder if it ever was. It was Sarah who I came home to in the morning, in the evening, and in the night. Now I know that she is in fact not receiving my letters. They have come between us in a way in which I never would have imagined them capable.

  Yesterday, after the incident in the park with the police officers, I was lying in bed, crying, because I couldn’t think of anything else more appropriate, when I became angry enough to write Sarah a hateful letter, a last letter. I was ready to give up, but only if I had a chance to give her a piece of my mind. This time I decided to do things differently. I planned on delivering my letter in person, and walked across town to the Hartford house on my own. I was through with dodging her mother, through with waiting. I had waited for so long in the darkness before someone called out my name, before the light came and freed me. Uncountable days, miserable, curled up in a fetal position. A fairy tale princess, like the ones in the stories Sarah used to read me. Waiting for someone to free them, their hands pressed against the lid of a glass coffin, struggling. Not again, I decided, and opened the front gate of the Hartford house and climbed the front porch steps and knocked on the door. Three sharp raps, and it opened.

  It was her that answered. Mrs. Hartford. She stood there in a floral print housecoat with an apron tied around her waist. How small she was. I looked down on her. Looked down on her gray hair, stringy and unbound, spreading over her shoulders. Gray sacs of flesh sagged under her eyes. She wore no makeup. She wore no pearls. She looked up at me, not smiling, and said, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m h-here—” I said, stuttering. As small as she was, she still frightened me. Her panty hose had rolled halfway down her legs, just below her kneecaps. I wanted to bend down, pull them up for her. Brush her hair into something respectable.

  She chuckled. “You certainly are,” said Mrs. Hartford. “What do you need, dear?”

  “I’m here for her,” I said. “I’ve come for Sarah. Where is she? Sarah!” I shouted beyond Mrs. Hartford’s head, hoping she’d hear. “Sarah, where are you?”

  “You,” Mrs. Hartford whispered. Her mouth twitched wordlessly. “You,” she said again, and then Mr. Hartford was behind her, his face a map of wrinkles, his hair salt and pepper. What had happened to that vigilante? The man who would save others who could not save themselves? Where was he now? He could not save anyone, could not save Sarah.

  “What’s going on here?” asked Mr. Hartford, his bl
ue eyes moving back and forth between us, piercing. Mrs. Hartford reached up and slapped me. My cheek burned and then she was hitting me on my shoulders, my arms, my chest, her hands lashing out randomly. I pushed out, away from her, and she followed me down the porch steps.

  Mr. Hartford grabbed hold of her shoulders and turned her around to face him. She buried her face in his chest, sobbing. Her chest heaved. He looked over her shoulder at me and shook his head as if I was his own child. As if I was his own, disappointing child. Is this how he sometimes looked at Sarah? Is this how they made her feel when she said she wanted to leave her husband?

  “Please leave,” said Mr. Hartford. “Or I’ll call the police, Miss, and have you arrested. Don’t come back, and stop writing those horrible letters. Go on, get out.” He nodded towards the front gate.

  I stepped backwards slowly. Before I turned to go, I looked up at Sarah’s old bedroom window. The lace curtains blew in the breeze. And behind them, I saw a face, the idea of a face, looking down at me.

  I closed the gate behind me and ran away from the house, away from the sobbing.

  Now I am writing this. It’s early morning. I’ve gathered my clothes and some food from Mrs. Carroll. Before I left the kitchen she paid me for picking and selling the corn. She slipped me two fifty dollar bills along with what she owed, and told me to be safe. Her hands closed around mine and they felt scratchy and worn. I kissed her cheek.

  I am off now, to space, to somewhere where there is more room for me. Somewhere in the West, or the Southwest even. I will sit in the desert below the blue bowl of sky until I become a part of that landscape. But not forever. I will move on, I will go further. I will do the things for which she never had the courage to leave.

  Dear Sarah,

  I realize now that my words will not reach you. This is a dead letter. You will never receive it.

  Still, I cannot help but write in the hopes that somewhere my words are finding you. And maybe wherever you are, you are writing me too. Long letters, beautiful letters. Letters that one day I will find and read with great pleasure. Perhaps you are having adventures elsewhere, now that you’re not here. Perhaps you’ve moved on to a place that I will only understand as being better at some later juncture in this life, this life you gave me. But still, at some intersection, my hope is for our words to cross each other, so that we will feel, if only for a moment, infinitely loved and happy. It is the least anyone deserves.

  Love,

  Alice

  Plenty

  Although I hadn’t seen my friend Gerith in years, I wasn’t surprised to receive a letter from him, asking me to come home. Gerith had been sending me these requests every year or so after I left Youngstown, most of them chronicling the misfortunes of the old neighborhood where we grew up. From his descriptions, it seemed not much had changed for the better. Each day the city disintegrated a little further. People who had once been important to us disappeared without warning. Often he’d ask about my life now that I no longer lived there.Are you okay? he wondered.Are you happy?And each time I answered:I have a secure job, I live in a great city, I have a girlfriend who loves me more than I love myself. I have plenty.

  No matter how I answered them though, Gerith’s letters filled me with a sense of guilt. Whenever one arrived in the mail, I’d put it in the pocket of my jacket for a while and forget about it. Then, after I’d get up the nerve, I’d read it and end up laughing or crying, overwhelmed with nostalgia for the old neighborhood. Even though I’d spent most of my life waiting to escape Youngstown, the place was still my home. Gerith’s letters reminded me of that.

  This time, as always, I hoped Gerith would allow me to finally make a clean escape. I wanted him to tell me that the South Side had received funding for re-beautification, that the shelter where he worked had enough food and beds, and that life in general was an eternal flame of mercy and generosity. But instead, his news left me reeling.

  “Mrs. Burroway has died, David. The funeral is this Saturday. I hope you’ll come home for it.”

  Immediately I had a vision of houses, stripped and gutted, left behind by the dead.

  I’d already made plans for the weekend, so I spent a few minutes unmaking them. There was the financiers’ dinner on Friday, and on Saturday I’d promised my girlfriend we’d stay in and do nothing together all day. I called her answering machine and canceled our Saturday, then phoned the office and explained that an old friend had died. The boss was generous, asked no questions, only said to be careful if I planned on driving back. Then I packed a bag and left Chicago for Youngstown.

  There was another reason for going home as well. I’d been keeping a secret for far too long, and now I needed to share it before it was too late. The secret involved a small amount of magic though, and these days magic is not something in which everyone can afford to believe. There is a suspicious absence of miracles. But sometimes impossible things happen when no one is looking.

  It happened in Youngstown, during my last year of college. Fall arrived early that year and spattered the few trees on our street rust red and wax yellow, cinnamon brown and orange. The leaves were a welcome relief from the sight of our crumbling surroundings: boarded-up warehouses, empty storefronts with cardboard covering the windows, and walls tattooed with strange but banal graffiti. I remember the Market Street Bridge in particular, and the words YOU HAVE CROSSED THE LINE scrawled on both sides of it in black spray paint. I passed under that banner each day, as I walked to and from school. It bothered me to no end. I wanted to know what line. And who, exactly, had power over the geography of my life?

  Gerith and I bought a house together that year. We’d finally decided to cut the umbilical cords that tied us to our parents. Both of us had grown up in that post-industrial shell of a former steel town, a place steeped in a depression that no one knew how to relieve. Most people affected indifference to the situation. No one in our town wanted to be re-educated for alternative careers, but they’d spend their unemployment checks on the lottery and whiskey. We felt the world owed us some obscure inheritance. This strange psychology had been passed down by our parents and grandparents, who actually did lose their jobs during the seventies and eighties. We were children of the dispossessed who wanted to be the dispossessed.

  The house we bought was an old Victorian on Chalmers Street, and it cost us only six thousand dollars. Houses were cheap in Youngstown because most of the city was a ghetto. The only profitable business was the university, which we thought would be our way out of town one day. Our house had two floors, a basement, an attic, and a front porch spread wide and deep as a cave. Between the turret that rose out of one corner of the roof and the newel posts on the stairwell, we felt like we’d bought our very own castle.

  After using what money we’d saved to buy the place, Gerith and I were broke. We’d both won grants and taken out loans to pay for college, which left us with a little extra cash each semester, but that money never seemed to arrive at the right times. So for the first few months in our new house we had electricity and water but no telephone or heat. And when the autumn chill grew strong and wind began to rattle our windows, we wrapped ourselves in the afghans our mothers had crocheted for us before we left.

  Whatever other luxuries we did without, the one that hurt most was food. We ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, ramen for dinner, and drank tap water that tasted of chlorine. On our kitchen table we kept a wooden fruit bowl that was always empty. After a few months of living like this, it felt like my taste buds had begun to deteriorate.

  We didn’t know much about our neighbors. Only that a black family lived on one side—a mother with two teenaged girls, one who had a son of her own—and on the other side was a Puerto Rican couple, Rosa and Manuel, who screamed at each other in Spanish until four in the morning most nights. Across the street in a Victorian like ours was Mrs. Burroway, a little, white-haired old lady who walked hunched over and carried a black cane with a silver horse head for a handle.

  She
seemed ancient to me even then, bone-thin, her skin hanging loose on her frame. She wore a pair of thick black-rimmed glasses that exaggerated her cloudy cataracts and the blue of her eyes. Almost every day she sat on her porch alone with her cane laid across her lap, watching the traffic go by at the end of the street. Sometimes when I was leaving for school, I’d see her heading to a neighbor’s house carrying brown bags, overfull with groceries, which she’d place on their porch, ring the doorbell, then scurry home again, her horse-headed cane trotting in front of her like a guide. And it was in that way, actually, while she was delivering her mysterious goods, that we finally met.

  One morning, as I gathered my schoolbooks, I heard a thump outside the front door. Then the doorbell rang repeatedly, loud and annoying, as it hadn’t been replaced since the house was first built. I pulled my backpack over my shoulder already saying, “I heard you the first time,” but when I opened the door there was no one on the porch.

  A bird perched on the porch rail, cocking its head at me as I looked down to find a bag of groceries at my feet, a stalk of celery jutting out the top, a bag of bread and soup cans visible beneath. When I looked up again, I saw Mrs. Burroway crossing the street, hunched over as if several sacks of grain were piled on her back. “Wait a second!” I shouted, then picked up the bag and ran off the porch, finally catching her on the other side of the street. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but why did you leave these groceries on my porch?”

  She turned those blue, cloud-ridden eyes on me then, and licked her lips. “You boys are looking a bit slight,” she said, uncovering her teeth with a smile.

  “But surely you can’t afford to buy us groceries.” I smiled, holding the bag out for her to take back.

  “No, no,” she said, waving her hands as if the bag were cursed. “Those are yours now. Besides, I have plenty.”