From somewhere in another part of the house I hear the familiar sounds of “Sesame Street.” I pause to listen, knowing by heart what pictures go with the words and songs. I want to live somewhere like Sesame Street, where Cheyenne can be safe and happy, and where people love each other, and no one ever hits anyone else. Living with Rudy was a long way from Sesame Street, but Desert Dunes doesn’t seem much closer. Right now, I feel all lonely, and empty, and I’m not even sure I should have come here.
I pick Cheyenne up and hold her close.
“Love you,” I whisper.
“Yuv you,” she says, snuggling down, nestling her sweet face against my neck.
I feel tears starting again, but I take a deep breath and stop them. No matter what’s ahead, I’ll stay strong for Cheyenne. I put her back down on the floor and pick up the top to give it a spin.
“No! Baby help!” she says, taking the top from my hand and trying to spin it.
I laugh.
“Finished?” Carla says.
I take the forms to her desk. She checks to be sure everything is complete.
“I’ll fax your address change to Social Services tomorrow—Did you read this agreement carefully before signing it?” she asks, turning to the last page on the clipboard.
“Yes,” I say.
“So you understand that most of your welfare check covers food and housing for you and Cheyenne. There won’t be much left over for luxuries.”
I laugh. “There never is.”
“And do you also understand that we’re very serious about zero tolerance for drugs and alcohol here?”
Bam! I feel a sharp jab at my ankle and look down to see Cheyenne raising the top to hit me with it again.
“Cheyenne! No!” I tell her, grabbing the top and prying it from her hands.
“Mine!” she screams.
“Not to hit with!”
I pick her up. She struggles to get down.
“Mine. Mine. Mine,” she chants, leaning toward the floor where the top sits.
I turn her face toward me. “Look at me, Cheyenne. No hitting. Remember?”
“Okay,” she says, moving toward the top.
“Okay what?”
“No hit.”
I let her slide back down on the floor. She lifts the top, as if she might hit me again. Then she smiles at me, puts it back on the floor, and works to make it spin.
“You’re good with her,” Carla says.
“It’s so hard sometimes,” I say.
“I know—once you’re a mom there’s no let up from responsibilities.”
We both watch Cheyenne for a moment, then Carla says, “Let’s get back to our zero tolerance talk. Drugs, alcohol—one slip and you’re out. The same with doing anything to reveal where you’re staying. These things jeopardize the whole group, and that’s where we part company.”
“No problem,” I say.
“Good,” Carla smiles. She rises from her chair and stretches her long, muscular arms toward the ceiling, revealing the slogan on her T-shirt, “What about ‘No’ don’t you understand?” She bends, legs straight, and touches her palms to the floor, then straightens.
“Getting the kinks out,” she says. “Come on, I’ll introduce you around. We’re a quirky group here, and we’re all working through some heavy stuff, but I think you’ll feel at home in no time.”
“Home,” I think, wondering if I’ve ever really felt at home anywhere, wondering what the word even means.
CHAPTER
5
I’m in the recreation room, sorting through used baby clothes, taking out the size twos that I think will work for Cheyenne. Six of the other “survivors” are also in the room. There’s Lori, built like a football player, sprawled out on the couch, half asleep. She sleeps a lot, so I haven’t really talked with her much, yet.
Alice, Trish and Sandra are playing cards. Alice and Trish are both black, but the similarity stops there. Alice is big and sort of tough talking. Trish is slim and stylish looking, and soft spoken.
In the comer, away from the card game, Carla is talking seriously with someone whose name I’ve forgotten. A couple of the older kids are playing quietly on the floor.
Right now, Cheyenne’s in the play yard with Kevin and his mother, Daphne. Of the twelve other girls, women I guess I should say, who are living here, I like Daphne best. She’s nearest my age, nineteen, and she’s serious about being a good mother to Kevin.
Cheyenne and Kevin are already friends, even though they’ve only known each other for two days. He’s almost three, but Cheyenne keeps up with him pretty well.
I find a yellow playsuit, a white T-shirt, sandals, and jeans. That’s a good start. Maybe bleach will get the stains out of the T-shirt.
I’d like to sneak back into Irma’s house and get the rest of our clothes and Cheyenne’s toys, but I have no way to get there. Besides, the shelter has a rule against going anywhere near the abuser’s territory. There are a lot of rules here. I can’t leave this place, even to walk to the store, for another day. And no phone calls yet, either.
The way Carla explained things to me, the first seventy-two hours are a very important break from my old life. After the seventy-two hour transition period, there’s more freedom, but we’re not supposed to have any contact at all with “the abuser” for the whole time we’re here. It’s weird thinking of Rudy as “the abuser,” even if he was.
My thoughts are abruptly interrupted when the peaceful buzz in the rec room is shattered by Alice yelling at her daughter.
“Get your butt over here when I call you!”
Kamille sits on the floor in front of the TV, dressing a one-armed Barbie doll, as if she’s not even heard her mother’s demand.
“If I have to get up out of this chair and come for you I’ll kick your fat ass . . .”
“Alice, remember . . .” Carla starts.
“Oh, Christ!” Alice says, rising heavily from her chair, stomping out of the room, and slamming the back door so hard the kitchen windows rattle.
Carla follows Alice, closing the door softly.
Kamille sits, not turning her head, stuffing tiny pieces of rolled up paper into Barbie’s empty sleeve, trying to make it look as if Barbie has both arms.
“C’mere, honey,” Trish says, motioning to Kamille.
Kamille continues to be absorbed in her play, not looking up.
“I think I can help you with your doll,” Trish says. “I’m sort of a doll doctor.”
Kamille picks up the doll and goes to stand beside Trish.
“Ummm. We’ll have to make a prosthesis,” she says.
Kamille looks at her questioningly.
“Big word, huh, Kamille,” I say, folding the baby clothes we can’t use and putting them back in the plastic container.
Kamille watches me, smiling shyly. She has coffee colored skin and big black eyes that, when they meet mine, make me want to shield her somehow from her mother’s cutting words.
I go outside to check on Cheyenne, leaving Trish and Kamille at work on a pipe cleaner prosthesis for Barbie.
“Mommy! Watch this!” Cheyenne yells when she sees me standing next to Daphne in the play yard.
“Watch ’Yenne,” Kevin echoes Cheyenne’s demand.
“I’m watching. I’m watching!” I say, laughing.
Cheyenne climbs to the top of the slide, balancing precariously at the top. I hold my breath, fearing a fall. She turns and smiles at me, then climbs onto the slide and whizzes down, screaming in delight.
She lands in the soft sand, rolls, jumps up and says, “See?”
I clap my hands. “What a big girl you are!”
“And brave,” Daphne says.
Carla is talking earnestly to Alice at a picnic table on the other side of the yard. I can’t hear what Carla is saying, but Alice, crying, keeps saying over and over, “I know, I know.”
Daphne and I sit under a tree, watching the kids, telling each other our stories.
Kevin comes running over, crying, “Yenne, Yenne.”
“What, Kevin?” Daphne asks.
“Yenne won’t let me go down the slide,” he whimpers.
I see Cheyenne, standing on the top step of the slide, gripping the sides, blocking the way to anyone else who might want to use it.
“Come on, Kevin,” I say.
He takes my hand and I walk him over to the slide.
“Go on down, Chey-Chey, so Kevin can have a turn, too,” I tell her.
“No! My slide.”
“No, it’s not your slide. It’s everybody’s slide and you have to take turns.”
Kevin starts crying again.
“Cheyenne!”
“No!”
“Do you want time out?”
“No!” she screams, louder.
“Let Kevin have his turn then!”
“No!”
I let go of Kevin’s hand, pry Cheyenne’s hands loose from the slide and carry her into the house. Putting her in the crib in our room, I walk out and shut the door.
“Mommy! Sorry!” she cries, as if her heart is breaking.
I can hardly stand it, but I know I have to leave her in there for at least three minutes to get her mind off of being the boss of the slide. The second hand on my watch drags slowly, thirty seconds, one minute, to the point at the bottom of the bright red heart, then around to the top. Rudy bought the watch for me at the County Fair, back when I was first pregnant. It’s a reminder of better times.
Three minutes. I open the door and hold my arms out to Cheyenne.
“Up?”
I lower the crib side and let my “baby help” daughter climb out by herself. Then I squat down beside her.
“Are you ready to take turns on the slide now?”
“Yes,” she says, all serious.
I grab a tissue and wipe her tear-stained cheeks and runny nose, then we go out to the play yard to try again. Kevin and Daphne are sitting on one of the little benches. Kevin is carefully picking small pieces off a banana and placing them in Daphne’s mouth.
“I feel so strong,” she laughs. “Now, your turn.”
She breaks a piece off a banana and puts it into Kevin’s open mouth.
“Ever since I told him bananas are good for you, he insists on sharing his bananas with me . . . What a sweetie,” she says, kissing the back of Kevin’s neck.
Later, when both our kids are down for naps and we’ve finished the kitchen clean-up, Daphne and I get sodas from the machine and go back outside. The sky is bright blue, with billowy clouds floating slowly from north to south. The air is dry and warm.
Back in Hamilton Heights the air is probably heavy with smog and the sky is probably gray. I like seeing a blue sky, but Desert Dunes still seems like a foreign land to me.
“I’ll be leaving here in two weeks,” Daphne says.
“To where?”
“Probably one of the halfway houses, but I’m scared I’ll want to go home. I know that would be stupid, but I miss my mom, and my dog,” she laughs a tiny little laugh and looks away.
“Do you miss home?” she asks me.
“I miss something,” I tell her. “I’m not even sure what it is, though. It’s not like I really have a home.”
Daphne gets up and goes into the house. She comes back with pictures.
“Here’s all of us,” she says.
Her mom is wearing a dress and smiling sweetly. Her dad’s in a suit and tie and so is her husband, Dean. Daphne’s dressed up, too, holding a much younger Kevin, who’s squinting his eyes against the sun.
“This was just after church, the day Kevin was christened.”
“Everybody looks so nice,” I say.
She nods, then shows me another picture of her dog, Cinnamon, and her cat, Nutmeg. Fanning out the next three pictures, like a hand of cards, she holds them in front of me. At first I don’t even recognize her.
“My god.”
The pictures are in color, two front shots, one showing more of her left side and the other showing more of her right. The third picture is taken from the back. She’s naked. The front shots show her face, swollen and bruised, and an ugly grapefruit sized bruise on her upper arm. Her left breast has a purple bruise the size of a silver dollar, and her upper thighs are bruised and swollen looking.
The back view shows both sides of her butt, bright red, bloody in places, where her husband kicked her repeatedly with his work boots. The pictures make anything Rudy did to me seem like love pats.
“I keep these to remind me of what follows the family church day scene,” she whispers. “They took these pictures at the hospital.”
“Was that just before you came here?” I ask.
“No. These pictures were from about six months ago.”
“You went back to Dean after that?”
She nods her head yes and gives that funny little laugh of hers.
“My father thought I should. He said if I would learn to submit to my husband, like the Bible says, everything would be fine.”
Then Daphne shows me the last picture. It is of a high school swim team, with her in the middle, smiling broadly, wearing a first place medal around her neck.
“Before and after,” she says, putting the smiling image next to the front shot picture of her horribly bruised self.
“You were a swimmer?”
“A high school champion, until I got pregnant. That changed everything . . . I was so stupid,” she says. “Dean was a youth director at a church camp. All the girls had crushes on him, but he chose me. I felt so important. And I thought anything he wanted to do must be all right, because he was almost like a minister. Stupid, stupid, stupid me,” she says.
“Me, too,” I sigh.
“I wish I could step back into that picture and start over again from there,” Daphne tells me.
“I don’t even know where I’d want to start over again from,” I say. “Sometimes I wish I’d never met Rudy, but I don’t want to wish Cheyenne away, and without him, she wouldn’t be here.”
“Sometimes I wish I’d gone to one of those homes for pregnant girls where they arrange adoptions. I mean, I love Kevin with all my heart, but what chance do I have to give him a good life? And what chance do I have?”
We sit quietly for a while, each with our own questions about our lives.
“I’d better check on Cheyenne,” I say.
“Listen for Kevin, too, would you?”
Everything is quiet in Kevin’s room, but I hear Cheyenne singing the Barney song. “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family . . .”
Most of the time I’m fine. But sometimes, like now, things feel all shaky inside me, like my whole insides are shifting and maybe something’s going to break, or get disconnected.
When it’s time to start dinner preparations, Daphne and I take our kids to the rec room where Trish has child care duty. I’m glad it’s Trish and not Alice. I wouldn’t want to leave my dog with Alice, much less my daughter. Not that I have a dog, but that’s just how I feel about Alice. She’s got a mean streak that I don’t want Cheyenne to be around without me to protect her.
I’ve never lived with so many people before, but I guess I’ll get used to it. The house we’re in has the main kitchen and office and play yard, with only three bedrooms. Cheyenne and I have a room to ourselves and so do Daphne and Kevin. The other bedroom, the biggest one, has four beds in it. That’s where Trish, Lonni, Sandra, and the other one whose name I’ve forgotten all sleep.
Next door is where the others stay. Everything but the kitchen over there has been converted to bedrooms, so there are beds in the living room and dining room, besid
es in the regular bedrooms. Six women and three kids stay next door. Everyone eats here, though. Carla seems to be around almost all the time, but she doesn’t live here like the rest of us do.
I’m glad Daphne and I have kitchen duty together. She’s easy to work with. Not like some of the others.
Preparing food for twelve adults and five children is a big task. We get out the notebook with the recipes in it and find the one for Thursday, which is spaghetti night. Cheyenne will like that, but she’s a good eater, anyway. So far, except for peas, she’s liked everything I’ve tried feeding her.
I’m frying a huge batch of hamburger while Daphne’s dumping stuff for the sauce into a pan.
“Hand me the oregano,” Daphne says.
I find it on the seasoning shelf next to the stove and hand it to her. Back at Irma’s we have a small container of oregano, but here all of the seasonings are in extra large sizes.
Carla comes into the kitchen and checks the recipe.
“Use more garlic,” she says to Daphne.
“The recipe doesn’t even say garlic, just garlic salt,” Daphne says.
“Ay, what’s an Italian girl to do? Spaghetti without garlic?” Carla is rummaging through the cupboards, in search of garlic I guess, when there is a stream of cussing coming at us from the office in the next room.
“My ass! If I wanted to know what you thought, bitch, I’d have asked! Don’t be giving me none of your shit!”
“And don’t you be spouting off your foulmouthed talk to me . . .”
Carla turns and rushes into the office, where Alice stands in the doorway, hands on hips, facing someone I can’t see from where I’m standing.
“Okay. Alice, take a seat. Trish, you, too.” Carla says, pointing in the direction of the living room.
“We won’t be watching ‘Friends’ tonight,” Daphne says with a sigh. “That’s the one program I care about and this is three weeks in a row that Alice has messed things up.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, puzzled by what Alice has to do with Daphne watching “Friends.”
“Group meeting after dinner tonight. We’ll have to deal with tensions,” she says with a touch of sarcasm.
“We aren’t tense,” I say. “Why can’t we watch ‘Friends’?”
Baby Help Page 5
