Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  Ellie got her some small loans. The welfare office chipped in with a $50 voucher, which Laura could use to buy groceries. You couldn’t get change when you used a voucher as you could with food stamps, so Laura had to buy exactly $50 worth of food. She went down the aisles of the supermarket, trying to keep a running tally, something she found difficult to do. She was always losing track of money, getting a haircut when her car was almost out of gas. The risk with a voucher was that you might end up with more than $50 worth of groceries and have to take things back to their shelves, while people in the line behind you waited, watching, making noises.

  The weeks dragged on. The money ran out. Finally, in desperation, Laura drove out Prospect Street to the Northampton Survival Center, a private charity. It wasn’t far. She had enough gas to get there and back. You could get free food there only once a month, she’d heard. Laura told her story to the woman at the door, a small Hispanic woman, a volunteer and very friendly. Laura was about to burst into tears, but the woman said that she could get food weekly.

  She handed Laura a plastic token with a number on it, and Laura joined the line, which was fairly long. In front of her was a couple she’d seen occasionally, staggering together through downtown. She thought you could get drunk on fumes just from standing near them. Not that Laura minded. The woman had a ravaged face that still looked like a girl’s. She was telling a joke about a duck, slurring all the words. Most of the people in line looked destitute, but Laura also saw a woman who was better dressed than most and clearly sober, with children encircling her legs. “What’s that person doing here?” Laura thought. “She looks like me.”

  The routine wasn’t really dreary. Everyone who worked at the center was polite and respectful. Posted on the wall behind the counter were lists of what a needy family could obtain. Laura studied the one for a family of two—spaghetti and canned sauce and peanut butter and also fresh vegetables from a local farm and day-old bread donated by bakeries and grocery stores. A volunteer worker would also open a cupboard behind the counter, saying, “Is there anything you want in there?” The cupboard contained treats, such as pie filling. Laura looked forward to the moment of the cupboard. Then one day, waiting her turn at the counter, she saw a very familiar face standing behind it: the face of one of her English professors, one of her favorites. He volunteered here, obviously. She wanted to leave before he saw her, but her own cupboards had almost nothing left in them. “I’m an English major and my English professor is about to hand me my food,” she thought. “Here I am. It’s not a question where I stand on the social hierarchy. This is my life.” As she waited for the confrontation, she said to herself, “Pride goeth before a fall. But why can’t he be a biology teacher?” She was afraid he might say, “How’s the paper going?” He didn’t. If he felt uncomfortable, he didn’t let it show. He just smiled and said, “Hi,” and filled a grocery bag for her.

  Boston reinstated her before that year’s first snowfall. But then one day she opened up an official-looking letter and read, “You are being investigated for welfare fraud.” Her hands began to shake. This had to do with her summer job, the one that had netted her the loss of a dollar. “You may be subject to criminal penalties,” she read.

  When she went to his office, the welfare fraud investigator immediately closed the door, then held up his badge, and began reciting. “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney.…”

  She was going to jail! What would happen to Benjamin?

  She told the man everything, pleading with her voice.

  He asked if she was willing to pay back the $200 extra she’d received. As if she hadn’t tried to do that long ago.

  “Yes, of course!”

  Well, he said, in that case, he wouldn’t recommend that she be charged. He made it sound as if he were giving her a break. How was she to know that any self-respecting district attorney would have laughed at the thought of prosecuting a case like this?

  “Oh, thank you, thank you,” she thought. She got up to leave, and she offered him her hand.

  He took it. Then he said sarcastically, “Nice to meet you. I was looking forward to it. You’re our little TV star.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Yeah, we watched you on TV. We had a good laugh over you.” He added, “I’m not with the welfare department.”

  She guessed he meant that she had made the welfare department look bad, and he enjoyed that. Laura went home to Bedford Terrace. Sitting on her couch, the rooftops of Northampton behind her, she put her face in her hands and wept.

  For a long time, Laura didn’t know who she should worry about more, herself or Benjamin. She felt wretched the day she took him, for no good reason, to the welfare office. Driving home, he was unusually silent. Then he mentioned that he recognized one of the men who had sat in the lobby with them. Benjamin said he often saw that man sitting in Pulaski Park, and he wondered where he went to sleep and eat. She told him about Grove Street and the Survival Center, and what a fine public service they performed, as if she were a solid burgher of Northampton. She couldn’t bear to tell Benjamin that some of the food he had been eating came from the same source, that they were not so very far from the condition of that man. Later, for a writing class, she reconstructed that day: “After Benjamin and I came home from the welfare office, he had a snack and then went out to play basketball. It was springtime in New England and the days were getting longer and brighter. I had a paper to write and some reading to do; if I sat down and did some work while he was playing we could spend the evening together.” She had the fixings of a cake from the treats cupboard at the Survival Center. “We could bake a Bisquick coffee cake. He likes to sift the Bisquick mix and stir it into the egg while I butter the pan. Then he uses a fork to carefully blend the brown sugar with butter into tiny crumbs for the topping. When he was little, he liked to watch it metamorphose into the final product. Occasionally he’d look one time too often, open the door to ‘check,’ and it would fall. It tasted the same, though. Perhaps we would do that tonight. Sometimes he would ask me if I would make it for him, especially if he’d had a bad day, and I thought that today was a good day for coffee cake.”

  Living at Bedford Terrace wasn’t exactly like being a college student in a dorm, an experience that she had missed and wondered about wistfully. But the building was full of friends, some of them single mothers, some of them lesbians, and they would get together for their own kinds of bull sessions and help each other through their special difficulties. The time, for instance, when Benjamin had to wear a necktie to a dance. Laura had no idea how to tie one. But her friend Mildred across the hall, who ate dinner with them almost every night, arrived just in time. Mildred had learned the art of tying neckties from her brother. Benjamin had friends now, too, which was a great relief.

  He would set off in the evening from their apartment dressed in army fatigues, a canteen on his belt. He’d tell Laura he was going out to hang around with friends. She tried to question him, but got only a vague idea of what hanging around meant. Occasionally, she got hints. One night the phone rang and a Smith security cop said, “Mrs. Baumeister, we’ve just been chasing your son and some of his friends around the campus, and we can’t seem to catch them.”

  Benjamin and his friends went sledding on Hospital Hill. They rode their bikes around downtown. But the campus and its vicinity were their main playground: the Smith playing fields across the Mill River, the vast state hospital grounds beyond, where they played army games, the dirt path they called the Smith Walk, which runs along the pond and then the river, for them a long, backyard trail, like a secret passage from one part of town to another.

  They called themselves the Outsiders. They’d meet around nightfall, all dressed in army clothes, and head up for the campus, sometimes on their bikes, more often on foot. One would usually have a box of eggs, another their gang’s posters. They’d pass between the Smith museum and art library, pausing to spin the sculpture that was like
an airplane propeller and to make disparaging remarks at the Rodin. They’d yell, because that courtyard had a wonderful echo. On winter evenings, they’d sneak into McConnell Hall to get warm, and, before they left, set the Foucault pendulum swinging. They always kept a lookout for the uniformed figures of Smith security appearing out of the shadows, especially the Hulk Guys. One was black, the other white; both were huge.

  One night they peeked through the windows of the boathouse, Tom Sawyers who hadn’t met their Beckys yet, and they saw a party going on, college men and women dancing. They egged the building, then retreated. Another night they crept down the passageway beside Neilsen Library and then, when all was ready, pulled open the door of the security office and yelled inside. And then they ran, hearing boots behind them. They’d scramble behind the Dumpsters in back of McConnell Hall and hold their breath as Smith cruisers passed slowly by—like commandos, just out of reach of the beams of the searchlights, slapping high fives afterward, saying “Yeah!”

  One time Benjamin got caught. Laura bawled him out: “Don’t do that! The campus security police are not there for chasing kids.”

  Benjamin didn’t say so, but she didn’t know what she was talking about. What else did they have to do?

  Benjamin never did wear the hiking boots that Laura bought for him their first year in New England. As for the flannel shirts that were supposed to help him look like he belonged, she wore them herself now. But she didn’t have to make him go to school, not after the first few months. From time to time she was called to the principal’s office, but the kind of trouble Benjamin got into was never very serious, though she always acted as if it were. He liked to say that he was friends with every clique at the high school. She wished he were less friendly with some, like the ones who got in trouble with the Northampton cops. But he never got arrested himself. He had a sensible girlfriend now.

  He loved Northampton, too. He loved the bricks, he said. He couldn’t explain. He just liked the place. He had long ago outgrown his army uniform and traded it for baggy pants three sizes too big. “I just like them loose,” he said. He wore a Cleveland Indians baseball cap, discolored, its bill molded to an oval and frayed around the edges. “Yeah, it’s been slept on, run over, swum in.” He looked back across the vast distance of five years in Northampton, almost a third of his life, after all, and said, of his gang’s war with Smith security, “The thing is, it was fun. This was how we got, like, high. Messing with them, running from them, and we didn’t have any parties to go to. I think we were the first ones who did that stuff.”

  What Laura would have been wary of in a place like Los Angeles had come as a surprise in Northampton, in a town where no one seemed to worry much about walking alone at night. Northampton could be dangerous in that way, she thought, especially for a very young woman on her own. It had seemed dangerous enough to her. That man who called thirty times in one day alone, for instance. He had said to her, “You’re gonna end up dead, just like your mother.” The pair of Northampton cops who came to her apartment to fill out the restraining order were very polite. She’d forgotten their names as soon as they left, and soon managed to forget the obligatory trip she’d made to District Court, which she hoped she never saw again. The questions the magistrate asked seemed too personal, but in the end she felt protected in this town. There were other little incidents. Not long ago, she thought, they would have consumed her.

  She’d always found it hard to tell the difference between a thing done to her and a thing she’d helped to bring upon herself. For most of her life, therapists had told her she had good reasons to be troubled. “But half the time,” she thought, looking back, “I couldn’t find my damn boots!” Welfare hadn’t treated her very well, she thought. For a long time, she felt jumpy when she went to her mailbox on the first and fifteenth days of the month, and she still didn’t like to open official-looking envelopes. But she resolved not to feel sorry for herself anymore. And it was easier not to, because she had less to feel sorry about.

  Her first year, at a formal function, she’d met a fellow Ada, a woman dressed in a blue blazer. How the buttons gleamed! “What’s your major?” Laura had asked. That had seemed like the way to get acquainted here.

  “Economics. I’m particularly interested in international finance,” the woman said.

  “Wow!” Laura said.

  Within several months that woman was an art major. The next time Laura saw her she was wearing paint-spattered overalls. She told Laura she really ought to visit Smith’s art museum.

  Laura went alone. She wandered around the parquet floors, stopping at every picture, every piece of sculpture. “I’ve never been at a museum owned by a college,” she thought. “I mean, this is impressive.” The museum was very quiet. She didn’t feel as though she took in much, but while she was there her thoughts stopped chasing each other. She came back again and again, whenever she wanted to calm down. She always spent some time in front of the museum’s Picasso, Figures by the Sea. She thought of it as the blue Picasso. It interested her, figures that looked like survivors of Auschwitz painted in soothing colors. She liked to sit in the little room full of Greek and Roman pottery and statuary. A small figure of a satyr stood on a pedestal. It made her laugh out loud. “They were twisted little guys, those satyrs.” She had read the Odyssey at community college, and the room made her nostalgic. It reminded her of a place her mind had occupied, when she’d first read Homer in a classroom by the sea. Gazing at the bust of Silenus, then at the statue labeled The Smiling Faun, she felt as if Homer and the sculptors were there in the gallery with her. “Amazing that this stuff is, like, here. Here at all. And I’m here.”

  In the fall semester of her second year, Laura took a course from one of Smith’s most distinguished English professors: “The Reading of Poetry.” This was during the period of her worst travails with welfare, when she spent a lot of time figuring out how to get food for Benjamin and herself and fretting about jail. A portion of her mind still saw imminent catastrophe in even small things that went wrong. And the class itself was sometimes daunting. She sat there awestruck once again at the comments other students made. “In this poem, I think we see an evocation of traditionalism and impressionism.” In her own papers, she kept writing, “This poem is great!” She felt silly. “I mean, all the poems are great. It isn’t a course in how to read bad poems.” But she couldn’t help herself. The poems were wonderful to her, and they made her problems small. She left that class transported. Literature was a timeless place, she thought. Inside it, there was no welfare office, and her life had a context. Her professor gave her an A. She ran all the way to Ellie Rothman’s office with the news.

  Ellie had an eye for a person’s special talents. She’d made Laura one of the guides who gave tours to prospective Adas. At Smith, Laura usually dressed now in her going-to-the-welfare-office clothes, jeans and T-shirt. The outfit showed off her slim figure and her thin, well-muscled arms. Her nails were often painted green. She wore a gold chain around her neck, and little earrings, and the same wide glasses that protruded past the sides of her narrow face; her blond hair now came down just below her ears and then flipped up. The composition seemed calculated to look uncalculated, as if describing how feminine the tomboy guise could be. Laura was an enthusiastic tour guide. Everything at Smith and in Northampton was “the best,” she’d tell prospective Adas. She was reassuring, too. Every touree would get in, and everyone would be all right. She always took a prospect into Seelye Hall, and if the woman noticed the old banisters inside, Laura would say, “I know. Aren’t they great? They’re great to slide down, too.” Then she’d laugh, high and hoarse. “If you so wish.” Then she’d climb aboard sidesaddle and slide down. “And there’s actually a lot of cool internships and things you can do here over the summer,” she’d say at the bottom.

  She felt at home at Smith and in downtown Northampton. In the welfare office, she never would. The workers there still seemed to think she should be learning a trade. She
might have been tempted to be obliging and agree, but at the college everyone around her believed in the value of the liberal arts. Ellie Rothman had taken over the Ada Comstock program without any special training in finance or administration. Ellie thought her own college studies in the liberal arts had given her all she needed to figure out how to do the job. “For me, it proves the value of a liberal arts degree,” Ellie liked to say. “You will learn how to read, how to speak, how to write and solve problems, and how to keep on learning.” The argument wasn’t less persuasive for being familiar. But even Ellie didn’t fully understand what liberal arts meant to Laura.

  A lot of other Adas said they were sick of being poor and planned to use their Smith degrees to get the best-paying jobs they could. When Laura heard herself saying she wanted to be a high school English teacher, she thought, “That doesn’t sound very impressive.” But that had been her dream ever since she’d taken a survey course called “Great Authors” at the College of the Redwoods. The teacher had looked as if he were dancing in front of the class. She had come in merely curious. He was passionate. She wanted to be him. She had thought, “If I could be a teacher …”

  Reading had long been transportation for her. She remembered reading Hemingway’s short stories as a girl and thinking, “I am Nick Adams.” Ever since her sixth-grade teacher let her sit on the floor of that little library, reading had been her refuge from the mad portion of her mind. It had worked better than therapy. At community college she had read excerpts of Paradise Lost. At Smith the English department had a course that dealt with the entire poem. This seemed like an amazing luxury. Her professor, the same man who had waited on her at the Survival Center, said to the class, “I don’t think I’m ever so happy as a teacher as when I’m embarking on Paradise Lost.”