We Are Taking Only What We Need

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  “NATIONAL KENNEL CLUB, may I help you?”

  “I guess so. Hey, what’s your name?”

  “Shelia.”

  “Shelia? I’m Todd. You don’t hear Shelia much anymore. You sound young for a name like that,” Todd yawned dramatically into the phone, “Sorry, you don’t care.” Todd cleared his throat. “Hey, I need papers for my dog.”

  Shelia hadn’t thought about her name being particularly old-fashioned, but she couldn’t think of another woman within twenty years of her age who shared it. “You need papers? Really?” Shelia laughed.

  “Yeah. I guess you probably hear that a lot. I just woke up. Is that obvious?”

  “No, you’re fine. I was just joking.”

  “You want me to call you back? I can call back.”

  Shelia paused not sure if the man were serious or not. “No, no, I’m sorry, just tired today. I can help you.” Shelia picked up the National Kennel Club brochure about upcoming shows and events, the only thing close to a magazine the telephone operators were allowed to have at their desks. On the cover of the puppy guide was a small blonde child and her rottweiler pup; the dog looked to be covered in down, staring into the girl’s round chubby face, love or need, a human emotion on his canine face. Maybe it was the fading light meant to dull any harsh lines or angles in the photo or maybe there was so much youth and innocence in the scene that the only conclusion was that both would soon and forever be past, but the photo made her stomach, no—a deeper place than that inside her—flutter with nervousness.

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” Shelia said. “Where did you get your dog from?”

  “Why are you so tired?”

  Shelia occasionally got calls from lonely people with nothing else to do but talk to anybody foolish enough to listen. Only a few of those phone calls lasted long. In the middle of the second or third confession or anecdote, the callers heard their own silly selves and hurried the conversation, not willing to admit any longer how pathetic they had become. “I can’t sleep. It’s nothing.”

  “I hear you, but it’s not nothing. I didn’t sleep for eight years. Swear to God. I lost the best part of the ’80s like that.”

  Shelia couldn’t tell if the caller wanted sympathy or laughter.

  “I survived pretty much okay,” Todd laughed.

  “What’s your name again?”

  “It’s Todd. You don’t believe it, but I didn’t sleep more than forty-five minutes a day for eight years. I almost forgot about that. I was pretty messed up then. If I wasn’t waiting for a check from one of my customers, I wouldn’t be up right now. He was supposed to be getting paid today. I’d like to know how much of my life I’ve spent waiting on a check.”

  “You must work nights?”

  “Yeah, mostly. I sell drugs. None of that hard shit. I won’t sell anything I wouldn’t use myself.”

  On the road leading to Shelia’s Aunt Lou’s, boys and young men lined the sides, five or six of them a night and waited for stopped cars they could run up to and hand through the window a packet of your usual. The whole process took a minute or less. Aunt Lou was a tall woman, big boned, wide hips and chest. Shelia hated that tough old Aunt Lou was afraid of the boys, afraid to come outside on her porch on the road where she’d lived her whole life. “Somebody’s going to get killed up here, mark my words,” Aunt Lou had said, and of course she was right, but it didn’t take a crystal ball to see that vision. Shelia wanted to hate the dealers, but since she had known most of them when they were children together, hating them didn’t come easy.

  “Any money in it?”

  “Drugs? No, no, not the way I do it.”

  “I’ve never met anybody who makes money. They talk about money all the time, but as far as I can tell it’s talk.”

  “You can make some money, but you have to really hustle. The nuns called it years ago, I don’t apply myself.”

  “It’s never too late, Todd.” Shelia tried to imagine what the man on the other end of the line looked like. He sounded young, but the voice could deceive. He sounded white, but her callers always thought she was white and were sometimes annoyed if they learned she wasn’t. “Do you have a pit bull?”

  “A pit bull? You got the wrong idea. I don’t like to get shot at. Look, I didn’t always sell. I’ve done lots of real things in my life. Last year I did some substitute teaching. Elementary.”

  “I thought about doing that.”

  “Don’t do it. It’s hell. Fifth grade is hell. They need to give teachers a house, a car, a train, a pond or something, if they stay for twenty years. Listen to this, the day I left I was in front of the class teaching, really into it, you know, and I put my foot on a chair and heard my pants split.”

  “Oh no.”

  “The kids are laughing. That’s natural, right? They’re eleven years old. But there’s this one little kid, the little geek in the bunch who chimes up and says, ‘Mr. Kessel that’s okay, we all have bad days.’ You should have heard the other kids. They unloaded everything they were giving to me all on him. So I said, ‘Listen you pieces of shit, I go home and talk to my girlfriend about every one of you illiterates every day. Me and my girlfriend laugh our asses off about what little nothings you are.’ You know what happened? All the little turds heard was girlfriend. ‘Mr. Kessel, Mr. Kessel, you’ve got a girlfriend, tell us about your girlfriend.’”

  “Oh my God, you didn’t really cuss out a room full of fifth-graders?”

  “That’s not even the worst part. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got a girlfriend,’ and I reached in my pocket and opened my hand and said, ‘here she is,’ like I was getting ready to do a trick and puffed my cheeks up and blew her away. That’s when I walked out.”

  “Why did you do that? The blowing part?”

  “I don’t know,” Todd chuckled. “It was the first thing that came to me. It seemed right at the time.”

  “That’s stupid. Why did you screw yourself up like that?”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “Yes, it is!” Shelia insisted. “You didn’t accomplish anything, and you lost your job.”

  “That’s one way to look at it. I didn’t see it like that,” Todd paused, and the line was silent. Shelia considered apologizing, but she was right, she was sure of that. You shouldn’t lose everything for nothing. That had to be law of nature.

  “My daddy’s been at the same job at a furniture factory for twenty-five years, and I don’t think it would ever even enter his mind to piss everybody off.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean why? He’s got bills!” Shelia sputtered. “He’s got to live.”

  “Hey, I admire that. Swear to God I do. But, I always come out okay. Easy come, easy go.”

  Shelia thought about telling Todd about her father’s long shifts in air thick with dust too fine to see, but settled on you like a second skin, or the loud machines that sounded less angry than unsatisfied, covering over every other sound on the work floor. “Anyway, my dog’s a hot dog. You couldn’t pay me to take a pit bull. They’ll turn on you.”

  “You mean a dachshund?”

  “Yeah. She wags her tail, and the whole back half of her wags like a windshield wiper.”

  “Yeah,” Shelia said, still annoyed at Todd’s story, though she knew she had no right to care.

  “I know, it’s cute. That’s the problem. She couldn’t shit, and I had to squeeze her stomach like a tube of toothpaste to get it out. You think I’d do that for a dog that wasn’t cute?”

  Shelia laughed in a burst she was sure they must have heard in the next row of operators. She looked around for Angie. “You lie,” she whispered.

  “I’m serious. I’m the only drug dealer in the state of Illinois squeezing shit out of a weiner dog.”

  Shelia tried to draw on her desk blotter a man squeezing the long expanse of a dog’s belly. She tried to capture the dog’s relief, the man’s sincere desire to help on his face, but her cartoon turned out looking sad and por
nographic. “Okay, I should try to help you. Did you get any papers with her?”

  “For Samuel? I thought that’s what I was calling you for.”

  “Is Samuel your dog’s name?”

  “Yeah, you like it? I was saving it for my kid, but she came first. At least it’s better than Bathsheba.”

  “Like the Bible, Bathsheba?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is when I got her she was Bathsheba.”

  “Bible names.”

  “What?”

  “Those are Bible names,” Shelia tried to remember the stories. Samuel and Bathsheba’s stories seemed connected but that could be wrong. Bathsheba had something to do with sex or rape, what else? Shelia was irked that she could call no details to mind.

  “You know your Bible,” Todd laughed.

  Shelia snorted, “Not really. Okay, tell me exactly what you got with Samuel? Any paperwork at all?”

  “I got her from a friend of my brother’s,” Todd said, like that explained everything. “She was my brother’s friend, his girlfriend.”

  “Why didn’t your brother take the dog?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Todd sang into the phone. Shelia thought with a little prodding she could hear the story, but she’d heard it before, no need to worry with all the cheap little details. “Why doesn’t my brother do a lot of things? Most of the time me and him are working on who is going to fuck up his life first. But anybody who knows me will tell you, I wouldn’t let a dog starve to death.”

  “Maybe it’s a cry for help,” Shelia laughed.

  “That’s not funny,” Todd said, but he didn’t sound offended.

  “I know it’s not,” Shelia pinched her lips to hold in the giggle. “You didn’t know you were going to get counseling and dog papers on this call, did you?”

  “You do sex, too?”

  “Ha. Not for seven dollars an hour.”

  “I hear you. Would you do sex? Not now, necessarily, but ever?”

  “No. Are you crazy?” Shelia said, but she had often thought that phone sex wasn’t that far from what she already did. The constant stroking and consoling, sucking up and flattery she did to keep the conversation moving.

  “I used to think there were things I wouldn’t do.”

  “There are things I won’t do,” Shelia said, but she wasn’t sure what they were. “Did the friend give you any papers at all?”

  “Did I hit a nerve?”

  “No. God no. I’m perfectly fine.”

  “I bet you weren’t expecting this conversation today. Did I surprise you? I like to surprise people.”

  “I sort of did it one time.”

  “What.”

  “A guy called doing a survey for Dr. Scholls, but I knew he wasn’t. I could hear his television in the background,” Shelia paused not sure why she was telling this secret to a stranger. “I told him I was wearing yellow pumps and lace ankle socks.”

  Shelia didn’t see Wendy come up behind her and jumped when she left a note on her blotter, pee thirty. Shelia nodded okay and Wendy gave Shelia a thumbs up, no evidence on her face that she had heard what Shelia just said.

  “I bet he shit a brick.”

  “What?”

  “When you said that to that guy, I said I bet he shit a brick.”

  “It was stupid, wasting time on that guy.”

  “You did a public service.”

  “No I didn’t,” but Todd’s assessment made Shelia feel better. “You’re just saying that.”

  “I know what I’m talking about. I know people. You made this guy’s day. He probably acted like a model citizen for the rest of the week.”

  Shelia pushed her chair to the aisle, on the lookout for Angie. Shelia hadn’t considered that part of her job might be to keep some pervert normal for a few hours. Granted it was a more important duty than registering dogs, but the slimy outside of it made it impossible for her to pick up and embrace. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Just because I told you something about yourself?”

  “I’m not mad. There’s no reason for me to get mad,” but Shelia couldn’t keep the strain from her voice.

  “Wait, wait, what about the papers?”

  “I can’t get you papers, Todd; you have to get them from the former owner.”

  “She said the dog was purebred.”

  “I know it seems like it should be enough, but it’s not.”

  “Like I give a shit about papers. I just thought if she had filed with you somewhere, I’d get them for her. She deserves it.”

  “She’s a dog. She doesn’t deserve anything.”

  “Hey, don’t get mad. People get wrapped up in their animals. You should know that. Everybody needs somebody to love. You know that song?”

  “I better go, then.”

  “Hey, don’t go.”

  “I better. I’ll get in trouble.”

  “I’ll call you back tomorrow.”

  “Oh, you can’t. The way they’ve got it set up is there’s a whole room full of us taking calls, and we can’t transfer a call on these phones. There’s no guarantee you’d get me.”

  “That means you have to call me. Take down my number.”

  Shelia wrote Todd’s number under her crude sketch.

  “Don’t leave just yet. Okay? I’ve got to answer the door.”

  Shelia listened to Todd and a man with a deeper voice. Shelia couldn’t make out most of the conversation, but she heard enough to know the man’s paycheck was late and he couldn’t give Todd what he owed him. Shelia heard the man, then Todd laugh, like they both smelled the bullshit all over the story. She heard the shuffling and movement of bodies from one room to another. “Go get Samuel,” Todd told the man, right before she heard voices from the television blare on. Shelia knew that you couldn’t be choosy about people, that you might find a friend in an unlikely place, that many things can separate people, that it was wrong to judge. Still she couldn’t shake the idea that calling long distance to an unmotivated drug dealer felt like a leap of good will or desperation that she couldn’t justify.

  “Sorry about that. You still there?” Todd said.

  “I’m here.”

  “Did you hear he doesn’t have my money?”

  “Yeah, I heard. Listen, I better go. My manager’s crazy. I might give you a call one day.”

  “You won’t. I tell you I know people. That’s okay.” Todd covered the mouthpiece on his phone and said something to his visitor. Shelia thought she heard her name, but the word might have been she. “Did you say something?” Todd said to Shelia.

  “No, I’m just waiting.”

  “Hey, I hope you’ll call me, but if you can’t, have a good life, okay?”

  Shelia paused on the line, not sure she wanted the call to end. “You too,” Shelia said.

  Shelia took a couple more calls as she blotted Todd’s number out with her pen. The original digits became unrecognizable in a nest of squiggles and circles.

  BY THE TIME SHELIA GOT TO THE BATHROOM, Wendy was already there, combing and smoothing down her hair into a bob.

  “One second,” Shelia dashed into the nearest stall. She hated for anyone to hear her pee, but only so many times you can flush the toilet and not seem obsessive.

  Wendy wore her pancake makeup thick as icing on her face and neck, long-sleeved dresses or turtlenecks and tea-length skirts every day, though she wasn’t in the least bit religious like the girls Shelia knew from home, with only their shins exposed, their flat feet in unfashionable shoes, faces young looking and unadorned. Wendy never mentioned God, didn’t pray over her homemade sandwich, never said the first word of conversion to a single soul. But once they all noticed the bruises on her arms and legs, there was no need at all to ask why about the dresses. Still Shelia was annoyed by Wendy. You’d think that someone in her difficult and embarrassing situation would try to blend in, but not Wendy. At every turn, she’d be laughing too loud or telling some story where she was always right. A lot of people noticed, i
f the hard looks and rolled eyes at Wendy were any indication. But once they saw the bruises, nobody said a thing to her. The beatings she was taking from somebody, probably her boyfriend, were enough for her to deal with in one lifetime.

  The other two women in their training class were old enough to be mothers to Wendy and Shelia. Jenny was fifty-five if she was a day and had eliminated herself from the friend race when she told them all how she once had the best sex of her life on the hood of a stranger’s pickup. Dot, the black woman in her late forties, had never married, had no children, and still lived with her mother but was ruled out because she couldn’t forget that day at the TWA counter, a suited bigwig handed her and all her friends pink slips declaring, “The airline’s bankrupt, forget your pension and don’t come back.” Shelia thought that some things you got to let scurry under the rock where you found them. But Dot believed she had let go, cut with bolt cutters the last ties that kept her to that biggest rejection and heartbreak. The problem was the rejection stuck to her like a Siamese twin. After a half-dozen times of the same pitiful story with the same pitiful pauses, people learned to see Dot and walk the other way.