by Dana Spiotta
“Is there a shelter you can go to?” Sam had seen the Rescue Mission downtown, not far from here. What happens to a woman who sleeps there? Or who sleeps on the street? Are they raped and prodded and beaten?
“Yeah, I’m good. Thank you,” she said. She sniffed, wiped her eyes. She moved away from the door so Sam could pass. Now that Sam was closer to her, it was clear that she was younger than Sam, also clear that she was fuzzy with something, out of it. She was probably an addict, looking for a place to nod out. So dangerous it must be, how desperate you have to be, to get that way with nothing to protect you.
The smell of the hot soup was impossible to miss. Sam held the bag out to the woman.
“Do you want this soup?” Sam said. She should give her the groceries too, and the cake. That’s stupid—what would she do with groceries without a kitchen? With coffee grounds and eggs?
“Thanks,” the woman said. She took the bag with the soup, then hurried off the steps and down the rainy street. Sam could have let her stay on the porch to eat the soup. She even could have invited her into the house until the rain stopped. Why didn’t she do that? Because she didn’t know her and she was scared of her. Sam stepped inside, flipped on the overhead light and the porch light. Why scared? That she would attack her? It would be different if she were a man, of course, but she was a tiny woman. So scared of what? Sam unpacked the groceries, put them into the fridge. Gave her the soup, and she probably didn’t even want it. Just took it because. Because Sam had given her money and it was what Sam wanted, for her to take the warm soup. Maybe she did eat it, at the shelter. Sam scrambled three eggs with chopped onions and garlic. It smelled delicious, made her ravenous. She ate it with the wine, by herself, at the kitchen table.
She hadn’t invited the woman into her house, despite the awful weather, because she was scared the woman would want things from her, would need things, that the interaction would extend out into forever, that this person and her problems would become Sam’s responsibility: what had gone wrong, where she slept, what she needed. Responsibility, that’s what Sam didn’t want.
Then Sam spotted a white flyer that had been tucked under the front door. She stooped and picked it up. Another rectangle of impressive card stock with letterpress words in blue:
beware the coming “smart” city; beware the syracuse surge.
smart for whom? surging where?
Oh for Pete’s sake. A grammar stickler giving urgent cryptic warnings. But she couldn’t throw it away. She placed it in a drawer with the other one about the NTE, whatever that was.
Sam made a fire. The flames brightened, and she could see the ceramic glow of the pink tiles. So old, so beautiful. She began to feel the warmth of the fire on her body. She pulled off her socks and felt her bare toes get warm, then hot. Sam flexed them and did not move, like a cat hypnotized by the heat and the flickering light. She could see and hear the city outside her windows. Rain and wind beat down, and she was inside, in this beautiful old inglenook, warm. After some time by the fire, she went into the kitchen, opened the white cardboard box with the pink string. She put the wedge of tiramisu on a plate and went back to the hearth bench. The cake smelled eggy and sweet. She sank her fork into it. It gave with a little pull, the layers of marscapone and espresso and ladyfingers. She put it in her mouth and felt a melting back, a dissolving of sweet flavors and different textures, her body almost gathering to a point in her mouth. The swallow, the next bite, and the street and the rain fading back. She was warm and full.
She texted Ally.
10
Sam was walking to Schiller Park (built in 1901 and named after the German poet Friedrich Schiller back when it was a neighborhood of German immigrants). It was late May and warm weather had not quite arrived, but it was spring nevertheless. She walked past the boarded-up house next to her house and then past the quiet, ugly apartment miniplex on the corner. She crossed the street and looked ahead toward a green one-story bungalow. An elderly woman named Tammy lived there with her dog, Lucy. They often sat out on the porch, even in the cold weather. Sam had begun smiling whenever she passed them, then waving hello, and eventually stopping to pet Lucy and discuss the weather. But they weren’t on the porch today.
In the next block, she saw a man standing on a street corner. He was wearing a hand-lettered sandwich board that said, “OGs Against Gun Violence.” Sam had read about a teenager getting shot by another teenager two nights earlier—she hadn’t recognized the street names or realized how close the crime site was to her street. The neighborhood had a high rate of burglaries and petty crime, but being shot on the street was starting to happen more and more. The paper blamed gangs that had expanded from the Near Westside into the Northside.
He stood with his signboard and handed a leaflet to her as she passed him.
KEEP GUNS OFF THE STREETS.
KEEP OUR KIDS SAFE.
“Right, yes,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
She looked at the concrete sidewalk where the teen had fallen and the houses that stood near the corner. Lots of peeling paint. Older homes subdivided into multiple apartments. One had waterlogged furniture and stacks of magazines on the porch. But another house had recently prepped and tended flower beds, a bird feeder, and a kid’s Big Wheel bike. No one was around. No police tape. Nothing but quiet now. She walked to the park and then back home. What you could see and what you couldn’t. Who lived in the houses next door to her? One was boarded up with particle board, but that didn’t mean no one lived there. The other side was a once-lovely Victorian split into two apartments. Despite the insult of vinyl siding and replacement windows, it retained an impressive profile against the evening sky. A young man lived in the upstairs apartment, but Sam hardly saw him. Two women, three toddlers, and several cats lived on the first floor. The children waved when they saw Sam, and she would smile and wave back.
Sam ate an early dinner, then poured her one drink. She took it to her side porch and smoked her one cigarette. She wanted to see her neighborhood, her neighbors, but no one was out. She made sure she was done with the drink and the cigarette before calling her mother. Her mother would be listening for sounds and clues, things to mention to her.
“How are you feeling?” Sam asked. She wanted to say, When will you tell me what your doctors say? But she should not push her mother.
“Nothing to report here. But are you okay in that house? Is it safe to stay there?”
“I told you I got carbon monoxide and fire detectors upstairs and down.”
“That’s not what I mean. I saw on the news there was another shooting. Isn’t that close to where you live?”
How did her mother know that the shooting was so close by? Did her mother have a map of Syracuse?
“It’s fine here,” Sam said. “When are you going to come here and see it?”
“Maybe I’ll come for Ally’s concert—that’s in a couple of weeks.” Ally’s viola concert. Would Sam be welcome or a distraction? Just showing up probably was a terrible idea.
“Good. I’ll come get you. And you can stay with me here,” Sam said. It was a bluff. She had only the one bed. But she would get another one. For her mom, for Ally. There was a pause.
“If I come, I think I’ll stay in a hotel I found. It’s very close to you, but also close to Ally and Matt. But I can’t wait to see your house.”
“Okay,” Sam said. “I want you to be comfortable.” Which was true. She almost started to cry, but she stopped herself. Just the idea of seeing her mother soon was making Sam miss her. Her mother sensed it somehow.
“You’re welcome to come here, darling, if you need a visit.”
“That would be good, Ma. I might do that.” She liked to be called “darling.” After the call, she wrote a text to Ally. She wanted Ally to know she was darling.
Sweet dreams, my darling child.
Sweet dreams, Ally-oop.
Send. The send sound.
No reply, of course, but at least Ally knew she was thinking of her dreams and wished them to be good.
* * *
—
The next day was Sunday. As she had done many times before, she drove past the beautiful Lutheran church on James Street (built in 1911 and designed by Archimedes Russell, one of the top architects working in Syracuse). She had read in the paper that it was closing at the end of the month because the congregation had shrunk so much in the past ten years. People objected because it was used so heavily by the neighborhood as a meeting space: food bank, thrift store, activist groups, AA, NA. But the building’s overhead was too much to sustain without an infusion of city and community money.
As always, she admired its sandstone bell tower with cast-iron cutouts at the top. As always, she wondered what it was like inside. But this time she went around the block and pulled into the parking lot in the back. Maybe there was a late afternoon Mass—there were a number of cars in the lot. She wanted to see the beautiful church from the inside, and this might be her last chance. She wanted to sit in its pews and look up at the stained-glass windows. She stepped inside, and the sound evaporated from busy street sharpness to the hushed reverberations of a tall-ceilinged space. Church sounds. Not a Mass, but the church was half-full with a community meeting. Sam sat in the back. She loved pews: the polished dark wood, the smooth hardness of the seat, the red leather cushion on the pull-out kneeler. She could smell lingering incense as she listened to the speaker at the podium. She gathered that the meeting was for Syracuse Streets, an activist group that tried to hold the local police accountable for targeting people of color. This particular meeting was to plan a response to the arrest of an unarmed man who’d ended up mysteriously bruised and beaten. As she listened, Sam sank down a little in her pew, her age and whiteness everywhere on her. She waited for someone to point to her and say what the girls had said at the white liberal party: You have a lot to answer for. There was a break while someone fixed a microphone issue, and while she waited, she looked up.
The inside of the church was striking but austere, just white molding against yellow plaster. The vaulted ceilings had very little decoration. But the stained-glass windows! They were lush, ornate. She had read about them. They were made in Rochester by the Haskins Art Glass company. The afternoon light made them glow. The depictions were more art nouveau modernist than church-glass traditional, with big abstract horizontal waves of cobalt-blue sky in the upper windows. Thick leaded divider lines between panels. The figures in the lower half were done in stylized bold outlines. Lots of voluptuous curves and deep colors. They were the perfect contrast to the plainness of the yellow vault.
The meeting resumed and grew more emotional. One by one, incidents were recounted. Being stopped and warrant-checked for no cause. Being searched. And those were the easy outcomes. The cops looking for reasons to stop people of color and the inevitable escalations that often followed. Lawsuits were discussed. The problem wasn’t the mayor or even the police chief. The problem was the police culture. The problem was the district attorney. The police union. Recourse was what? The Citizen Review Board, and its toothless frustrations. Worthless Office of Professional Standards investigations. The only successes were increased visibility to the issue, more transparency, and a couple of civil suits. The possibility of requiring body cams because of community pressure.
Sam noticed the OG sitting a few rows from her. And some other people in her age range. She worked up the nerve to go to the basement, where the subcommittees met after the big meeting finished. No coffee or other refreshments: all business, which impressed and intimidated her.
“Where do you work? I mean, do you have a job?” a young woman asked her after she had been assigned to a group. Sam had written “unaffiliated” by her name on the sign-up sheet.
“Of course,” Sam said. She must still have a housewife aura, a cosseted vibe, despite her newly hacked-off hair and her old jeans. The woman shrugged and handed her the pen. Everyone had to come clean here, admit origins and affiliations. Everyone had to trust that other people were not infiltrators. They all even had to remove their mobile phones and put them in a microwave.
“What if someone accidentally turns on the microwave?” Sam said, half-joking. No one responded. She threw her phone onto the spit-stained, finger-smeared pile of smart devices. But Sam should be here, she should be supportive if she wanted to live in this neighborhood. Be a good citizen and clearly show her loyalties. It seemed important, and it felt very different than Facebook posting or talking to MH and Laci about resistance.
She wrote “Clara Loomis House” by her name, which was where she worked three days a week. The girl read as Sam wrote, and then she snorted.
“That place?”
“You know it?” Sam asked.
“She’s a problem. She is problematic,” the girl said. Sam nodded. Yeah. It was true. She was.
11
“Welcome to Clara Loomis House,” Sam said with a smile. It was unusual to have anyone come into the house, but especially once the weather got nice and more outdoor activities were favored. Loomis House was a large, boxy square with a Greek Revival–style portico complete with four oversized white pillars. Doric, maybe? Sam always confused those names, which was another reason why she suspected she could never have made it as an architect. She nevertheless felt very affected by the building where she worked, because honestly, she did not like this house. The pretentiousness of the portico seemed provincial to her, like they blew the big bucks on the front of the house even if it was ill-proportioned to the rest of the house. Greek Revival in general was a bit kitschy, one of those styles, like Tudor Revival or Gothic Revival, that we admire now because they are old, but at the time must have seemed as ersatz and corny as the fake colonials that are built today in housing developments. This was not quite fair—unlike those houses, the nineteenth-century houses were well built, full of crafted, hand-finished details. They had no choice. They would have used cheap shit, like hollow doors and drywall, but all they had was plaster and wood. So Sam didn’t entirely mind being in the old, ridiculous house. At least it was intact. Many people worked under dropped ceilings and corkboard. She was lucky. She knew that. But still, when she gazed around, it felt soulless and unimaginative compared to some other houses. Compared to her own soulful house, for instance.
Today would be busy. A high school group was coming in—overachievers who attended the summer precollege courses at SU. This was a women’s studies course. Sam ushered them in and began to give her set spiel on Clara Loomis. She was used to kids and retired folks. It felt good to have some young adults to talk to. Sam began to improvise, pushing hard on the most radical telling of the Loomis story. She wanted to impress them.
“Clara Loomis, in her middle years—after menopause, when having children and rearing children were no longer considerations—started what she called her true life.” Sam emphasized the word “menopause.” She didn’t know why, but she felt the urge to scream it at young women sometimes. She imagined herself shrieking “Menopause! Menopause! Menopause!” but settled for merely enunciating it, because she wasn’t a total psycho, not yet. “Loomis wrote, ‘We women are not oppressed by distant men in congressional chambers, but by our own physiology as child bearers. God makes us not only give birth and suckle, but he makes our hearts weak in devotion to our children. We spend our youth keeping our children whole and happy. Yet in the few quiet moments between nursing, washing, and tending, we secretly yearn for a bigger, deeper world. We must hide how we grow weary of childish games, books, songs. Then our children grow up and leave, but only if you are very fortunate, because, occasionally but not
rarely, a child will die. In either case, our bodies grow older and uglier, until we are finally liberated.’ ” Sam paused and walked to a wall of framed formal portraits. “Here you can see photographs of her children. Loomis had four, two of whom died. One, little Amelia May Loomis, was born with a genetic disease. She was, by Loomis’s own account, her favorite, and when Amelia died, Loomis fell into a profound depression, which at the time was called excessive grief or melancholia. Grieving in Victorian times was already a mannered, endless performance for women, but even among Victorians, Loomis took her grief to extremes. She was treated with laudanum, an opiate often prescribed to women. She eventually renounced laudanum and all ‘mind and soul distorting substances.’ Instead she treated her depression, which she called ‘her depthless burden,’ by pursuing spiritualism, which was quite prevalent in this part of New York.” Sam noticed that the students’ attention pricked up when she mentioned death and opiates. “Loomis had several séances performed here, in this room, so she could talk to her daughter.” Now she had really piqued the students’ attention. “At this big table, in fact.”
The young people looked at the table. Sam could feel their imaginations moving back in time. “Some people say this house is haunted.” A few of the students smiled and laughed. Two girls grimaced comically at each other, bug-eyed, like scared emojis, and grabbed each other’s arms. Sam wasn’t supposed to talk about the ghost crap, but she was drawn to the attention the subject aroused in visitors, especially teenagers. Sam needed their interest. She wanted them to like Clara, really, and not being boring was part of that. “Sometimes, when the caretaker is here at night, footsteps are heard upstairs. And a girl’s cries can be heard coming from the area at the top of the stairs. Here, let me show you.” Sam gleefully led them upstairs to the little landing, where there was a small sewing table and a rocking chair. “The sound seems to come from the nursing chair and sewing area. This little room connects to the children’s room via this cubby passage.” She opened a cabinet that was, in fact, a passageway between the rooms. “But when the cubby is opened, the cries stop. Little Amelia was so often sick that she spent many afternoons home from school, reading by her mother’s side as her mother sat here sewing.”
