Even So

by Lauren B. Davis

  Caroline laughed, her face betraying disbelief. “I’m not buying this act of yours. You’re good with kids.”

  Eileen arched a brow. “My clever disguise is working, I see.”

  “Wow, I’m not sure I’d admit that.” Caroline didn’t look so disbelieving now.

  Eileen smiled. “I’m just not meant to be around kids. I always knew I wasn’t cut out to be a mother. Just not mother material.”

  The women walked along quietly for a moment, and then Eileen said, “So, thank God the Sisters of Saint Joseph recognized I wouldn’t make a good teacher. Administration and organization, that’s my strength. Put me up against a committee of planning department bureaucrats and I’m a tiger; put me in a room full of crying five-year-olds and I’m a panicked alley cat.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “Only that there’s no shame in recognizing what you can and cannot do.” They had arrived at the Pantry, and Eileen fished the keys out of her tote. “I’m telling you that so you understand you aren’t going to be asked to do something you’re not made for. You’ll find the right path, with God’s help.”

  She unlocked the Pantry door, stepped in, and Caroline flipped on the lights. Everything looked in order. They hung their jackets in a locker and Caroline set about straightening the tins on the shelves, while Eileen put the coffee machine on. Over it hung a small glass cabinet with some of the more unusual articles people had donated over the years. A tin of haggis. A small (empty) blue vial that purported to be for toothaches and whose ingredients included laudanum. A can of Spam from the 1960s, which Eileen thought might or might not still be edible, given the nature of Spam. People had good intentions, of course, but often donations came from those clearing out the homes of dead relatives, and they got overwhelmed and just piled everything into boxes and dropped them off. The haggis was her personal favourite. She could just imagine what Carmen would think if she suggested she try it.

  Doug, the coordinator for the food program, arrived. He was, as usual, half asleep, and looked like a great fifty-year-old bear disturbed mid-hibernation. He ambled to the coffee machine and stared at it until the gurgle indicated it was ready. He poured a cup and stood drinking it. When done, he poured another and then greeted Eileen and Caroline. Claire arrived, plump as a miller’s sparrow, a giggler in her late thirties, although she looked closer to twenty, Claire oversaw communications and fundraising. People found her optimism irresistible, as they did her assumption that everyone was generous at heart. Claire turned and said hi to Diane as she stepped in. Diane, motherly, with floury cheeks and dimpled hands, was another program coordinator, deceptively soft-spoken, but practical and efficient, who worked with clients in need of emergency funding for utilities and rent.

  Eileen checked the volunteer roster for the day. Six volunteers.

  Chuck Davis, Nancy Davis, Tristan Lewis: personal shoppers

  Angela Morrison: intake

  Karen Martin, Susan Wells: greeters

  Roxie, the volunteer coordinator, came up behind Eileen. “Hey, good group this morning.”

  Caroline looked up. Roxie was a good foot taller than she. “I didn’t see you come in. How are you?”

  Roxie made a noise with her teeth, which Caroline had learned was a staple of Jamaican conversation. “Daniel, he working early shift at Whole Foods, you know, unloading deliveries and like that, and so he leave the house around about two-thirty and you know me I don’t be getting back to sleep no way. It’s a five-cups-of-coffee morning.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s so hard not to sleep.”

  Roxie pushed her thick dreadlocks off her shoulders. “Not the worst thing, is it? Least he working. And maybe he get a promotion soon, you know he want to be a butcher, eh?” She pointed at a name on the list. “Ah, man, she better be on time today. Stand on my last nerve that one.”

  Angela Morrison. Roxie was right. Eileen liked Angela, but she did have an unfortunate habit of tardiness and Eileen was something of a stickler for punctuality. It was a courtesy thing. If people depended on you, you didn’t keep them waiting. Of course, if something urgent came up, something that couldn’t be helped, that was a different matter, and although Angela always had some excuse — traffic, something she had to do at her son’s school, her husband needing something — it annoyed Eileen, although she tried not to let it show. What could one do with volunteers? They were so much more difficult to manage than paid employees. But thank God for Roxie. Equal measures of no-nonsense and jocularity. She wrangled them.

  “I want to talk to Angela about helping with the garden,” said Eileen.

  “Got a greenhouse and all, she tell me.” Roxie waggled her head, rolling her eyes, to indicate that Lady Angela thought she was posh.

  Eileen ignored it. “I want to introduce her to the landscaper coming in today to start the garden project. I met him at a planning committee meeting with the city. He’s putting a bid in for work around city hall.”

  “And you went and nabbed him, huh?” Roxie laughed.

  “I might have mentioned that doing some volunteer work wouldn’t hurt his profile with the city.”

  “Uh-huh. Wise old owl.”

  “At any rate, we’ll need someone who knows plants and gardening and such on-site. I can count on the landscaper to get the beds in and so forth, but more day to day, you know.”

  “You think she going to want to get them pretty hands dirty?”

  “Oh, Roxie.” Eileen hugged the tall woman. “I think she’ll be great at it, if she’s interested.”

  “Well, you know best. Oops, the volunteers at the door, I think. Got to go. My money on Angela getting here last, though.”

  Later, Eileen checked her watch when she saw Angela at the door. Roxie had been right. Fifteen minutes late.

  Angela

  Princeton was mowed lawns and cocktails on the terrace and fundraisers for the library. It was, for want of a better word, pleasant, that white-bread word. Trenton had a wild beat. It had a pulse. It was hot-blooded. It mattered. It was street art and sirens and all the insistent urgency of survival on the edge of a falling knife. Philip had asked her once why she was so fascinated with Trenton. But it wasn’t the place; it was the people, the difference between Princetonians who rolled through life on golden wheels, and Trentonians who clambered up mountains, cursing sharp stones. The untamed necessity of life in Trenton, opposed to the complacent luxury of Princeton, was what drew her.

  Princeton wasn’t all bad. So many smart people from the university, not that they had much to do with people outside academia. It was beautiful, too, in the spring when the pear trees on Witherspoon were in bloom. Labyrinth was a good bookstore. The library was terrific. Nassau Street sported an independent movie theatre, and she couldn’t discount all those lectures one could attend at the university. The restaurants were fine. McCarter Theatre Center had good plays and music and dance. When she’d first moved there, it had seemed like a kind of movie set for small-town life, and in fact, movies were filmed there, like that one about Einstein starring Meg Ryan and Walter Matthau. A not-quite-true but entertaining film, just like Princeton was ersatz in some way she couldn’t define, but entertaining. Nice. She thought of it as the Brigadoon of New Jersey, from that old British movie about the magical Scottish town that rose mysteriously out of the mists once every hundred years.

  Trenton, on the other hand, had no facade at all. That had been torn down years ago. It put on no airs. It didn’t bother dressing up. Angela liked herself there. She felt that throb in her veins when she welcomed the poor and the hungry into the Pantry and filled their bags with nourishment. She was twenty-three again, scrabbling on the streets of New York, drinking ice-cold vodka shots for a dollar in a Polish basement bar. The rough men made much of her in that bar. Pretty girl. Like a hothouse flower. Their cheeks were stubbly, their hands calloused, with dark dirt moons under their nails. The Stenographer, they called her, teasing her about her business suit, her high heels. T
he few women in the place, Russian and Polish, hard, leather-skinned women with ice-pick glares, said dreadful things about her in languages she didn’t speak. She didn’t need to know what they said to catch the drift. She didn’t care. She gleamed. They glowered. She fancied she smelled only of Coco Chanel, while they smelled of cigarettes and cabbages. She liked the power she believed she had over their men.

  Now she thinks: How those women must have hated me. And they had every right.

  The Pantry doors opened at 9:30 a.m. It was closer to ten by the time she parked the car and headed for the door. The March wind blew sharp and smelled of gasoline and garbage. By then a few early people had been and gone. A small group of women stood gossiping by the door. None of their jackets looked warm enough. Inside, Roxie greeted her.

  “I’m so sorry I’m a little late. Accident on Route 1.”

  “Was there? Oh, dear,” said Roxie. “I guess the others got here before it happened. Lucky them.” She turned to greet a new shopper at the door.

  A young nun sat behind the intake desk by the door. Angela walked over and apologized again for her tardiness and explained about the accident.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here now. Can you take over?”

  Angela slipped out of her coat, hung it over the chair, and held her purse out. “Sister Caroline — it is Caroline, yes? — Can you pop this in the office for me? Thanks.”

  Three people were already shopping. Sister Eileen stood chatting with them, laughing at something. Like many nuns, judging her exact age was difficult. What was it about nuns? The fact they wore no makeup? That they seemed to smile more than they frowned? That they spent so much time in prayer and meditation? Was that what kept them ageless until suddenly they were very old indeed? Or was Angela simplifying, romanticizing? Possibly. Sister Eileen looked about Angela’s age. Well, whatever age, she was a whirlwind of energy in a pastel cardigan and comfortable shoes. Sister Eileen was stout with hair starting to turn grey, and her voice held the rhythms and nasal honk of the Jersey Shore, but she radiated a kind of calm, no matter what the circumstance. Angela often had the impression she was one of those people who might actually have experienced God somehow. She seemed to exist in two worlds at once, and always saw the bigger picture. One felt both humbled and hopeful around Sister Eileen. She smiled at Angela and gave her a little salute before turning back to the shoppers.

  The clients each represented a household. At intake, they got a card that noted how many items per food group they could take, depending on the number of people in the home. They “shopped,” complete with a small cart, for canned vegetables, pasta, rice, soup, bread, dairy, and whatever fresh fruit and vegetables were on hand. Most things were bought in bulk at reduced prices, thanks to a generous Princeton grocery store. Today the “specials” board announced bananas, apples, broccoli, onions, butternut squash, and green beans, all pre-packed in baggies.

  The room was set up to look as much as possible like a small market. Metal shelving ran against both walls and one up the middle, creating aisles. The intake desk, where Angela sat, was the first stop for clients. She took down their particulars for the database: name, address, income, number of people in the household, ages. She tried to get a sense of other needs — counselling, medical care, computer education, social services of various sorts. She preferred this task, since she liked talking to people and was curious about them: the eighty-three-year-old woman who lived on six hundred dollars a month social security and whatever her daughter could give her; the father of four who’d been laid off his job as maintenance worker at one of the pharmaceutical companies and hadn’t been able to find anything else yet; the grandmother raising three of her grandchildren.

  She patted hands and gave out hugs. She dandled kids on her knee and didn’t care about sticky fingers on her old jeans. She left her jewellery at home, even her wedding band, for it would have been unkind to flaunt those diamonds. She saw herself as the gracious girl with the soft hands, soothing, listening, saving, brightening people’s lives with her sympathy, her concern, and occasionally a little harmless flirting. She was making a difference in the lives of the marginalized. Rewarded with smiles and being known by name. Hey, Miss Angela! How you doing? She was, unironically, Lady Bountiful. If she was aware of her self-regard, her self-concern, her self-congratulation, well, she rationalized this didn’t lessen the good she was doing.

  Darryl was twenty-two. Tall and gangly, he wore low-slung jeans, a white T-shirt, and a track-suit jacket with black stripes up the sleeves. Angela was filling out the usual information. His clothes included no colour, so he wasn’t identifying with a gang. She checked colours and tattoos out of habit. Bloods wore red. Crips blue. Latin Kings were black and gold. Netas were red, white, and blue.

  “How many in the family, Darryl?”

  “I’m here for my grandmother, right? You know her, Leonetta West? She said you know her.”

  “Yes, sure. Miss West. Is she all right?” Miss West cared for a few children. Four, five, sometimes six.

  “Her diabetes kicking up. Legs all swollen, so she can’t walk good.”

  “It’s nice of you to help. Are you living with her now?”

  “For a little while. Until I get my own place.”

  Reading between the lines, it was probable Darryl had been recently released from a halfway house or from prison. The percentage of young men from Trenton who had done time was obscene, but Angela had long ago learned that simply because someone had been to jail didn’t make them a bad person. In fact, most of the time, almost all the time, their moral centre was no different than hers, or anyone else’s she knew. It was just that the rules were different here. Kids grew up with a set of street rules foreign to her experience, but a code of conduct, nonetheless. Living up to that code made moral sense for the people who grew up with it. There were all kinds of criminals, and she’d met some supposedly up-standing members of financial society who had committed crimes with considerably more far-reaching effects than those committed on these streets.

  “I’m sure Miss West is grateful to have you with her. She can certainly use the help.”

  Darryl pushed up the sleeves on his jacket, revealing a homemade tattoo on his forearm that read $ BEFORE BITCHES. She couldn’t help but laugh.

  He jerked his chin. “What?”

  She tapped his arm. “How’s your love life?”

  He looked puzzled for a second and then broke out in a sheepish grin.

  “Yeah, young and stupid, right? Got that when I was, like, fourteen and thought I knew everything. I’m saving up. Gonna have it lasered off.”

  “Forgive me, but I know a dermatologist who removes gang tats for free.”

  Darryl dropped his eyes. “Nope.”

  “Wrong of me to ask. But I just thought —”

  “Sure.” He shuffled in his seat, put his hands on his knees, about to stand. “We good?”

  “Absolutely.” The flush rose in Angela’s cheeks. She handed him his shopping card.

  Darryl smirked and strolled off, wrapped in his eloquent silence.

  Angela’s impulse was to run after him, to tell him he was wrong about her, to persuade him she was without judgment. But Darryl’s insight pricked her. It was a flashbulb, revealing all sorts of flaws.

  The next client was waiting, a haggard, grey, overweight woman in a jacket with HOLLYWOOD emblazoned across her ample bosom in gold. She plunked down in the seat. Angela’s smile widened and she willed it up to her eyes.

  “Hey, Sophia, how you doing today?” She would charm Sophia. She would make her day better.

  Sophia told Angela how her seven-year-old had taken the scissors to her own hair. “I caught her in the bathroom doing it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Filmed that thing and stuck it up on YouTube. Bet it goes viral.”

  She pulled out her phone to show Angela. There was the child, scissors in hand, snipping great chunks out of her shoulder-length brown curls. The tiny
bathroom was a riot of plastic bottles and makeup. One of the drawers was missing and the mirror over the sink was cracked. Most of the front of the little girl’s hair was gone. She looked like a tiny tonsured Druid.

  “Whatcha doing, sweetie?” Sophia’s voice came from off-camera.

  “I’m at the hairdresser.” A handful of hair from the side drifted to the bathroom floor.

  “How come?”

  “I want my hair like Miley.”

  “Miley Cyrus?”

  “Uh-huh. Snip, snip, snip.”

  “Good job, Cassie.”

  Angela laughed. Sophia said since most of the hair was already gone, there wasn’t much point in getting angry.

  “You gotta love that kid,” she said.

  “You’re a good mother.”

  “Excuse me, Angela.” Sister Caroline’s hand on her shoulder. “When you’re done, Sister Eileen wants to introduce you to someone. Come outside, okay?”

  “Be right there.”

  She finished up with Sophia. Another client stepped up. A woman with two children. “Can you wait a sec? I’ll be right back.”

  The woman sighed and rolled her eyes. “I guess.”

  “Sister Caroline? Can you take over for a second while I see Sister Eileen?” Angela slipped on her jacket and made her way into the street, wondering what was up and why outside?

  The day had warmed up a little and in the sun against the wall it was almost spring-like. Roland, the security man, was talking to a couple of guys in front of Sammy’s Liquors and Bar next door. He towered over the other men. His Trenton Thunder jacket with the blue storm cloud throwing a lightning bolt strained across his back. He had pitched with the Thunder team for a couple of seasons, but a rotator cuff injury had ended his hopes for a chance at the big leagues, and then came a stint of trouble with drugs and an assault charge.