I was heading down
to the bus stop on Chapel Street to wait for my ride to work. It was unusually
balmy for an October morning, and the city dwellers seemed restless. On the way
over a lone cockroach had caused a hilarious uproar on the bus, to the scorn of
a pair of New Yorkers. From the time I stepped onto the bus until leaving the
Green, I had been called Strawberry Shortcake and Carrot Top. I’d been
approached by separate strangers suggesting I take their business cards, get
tattoo sleeves, become a Jehovah’s Witness, and smoke weed with one of them in
the bathroom (apparently in that order). They had a lot of strong opinions
about what I should do with my day. It could get a little overwhelming, but I
loved the energy of downtown New Haven. I always came home bursting with
stories.
Passing Foot Locker, I noticed there
were a number of people lounging on the benches at the bus stop. There was one
open space next to a woman, so I sat beside her. A bald, middle-aged man spoke
up.
“Miss, you got a husband?”
They used to ask if I had a
boyfriend. Maybe I was getting old.
“Yeah. Sorry, man.”
“Oh.” He paused. “You got fifty
cents?”
The woman seated next to me laughed.
“Gary, are you trying to pick up white girls again?” She turned my way. “Is he
bothering you?”
I shook my head and smiled at her.
The woman was dressed in baggy black
clothes. Her skin was dark and she had long dreads pulled back in a bandana.
Her face was very kind, and strikingly ageless. She could have been anywhere
from thirty to fifty. There was a beer bottle in her lap, wrapped in a crinkled
brown bag. She sipped from it periodically.
“What’s your name?” she asked,
holding out her hand.
“Emily.” I shook it.
“I’m Stacey. You going somewhere?”
“Yeah, taking the bus to work. It
won’t be here for a while.”
“Where do you work?” she asked.
“New Haven Register.”
I was about to ask her the same
question but caught myself.
Stacey craned her neck to peer at
someone behind me.
“Quick, let’s switch seats,” she
said.
I complied, letting her sit closest
to the sidewalk.
“There were some men I know over
there and I didn’t want them to see you,” she explained in a hushed voice.
“They bother girls over here. Not me, though. They leave me alone.”
“Thank you.”
She winked and took another swig of
her 40. “Us ladies, we gotta look out for each other.”
We chatted for a few minutes before
she said, “Are they paying you enough at your job? You make sure they are. Go
to the higher-ups if they’re not.”
“I’m doing all right,” I said.
“Well, that’s good. Me, I’m not
working right now.”
I fumbled for a reassuring reply.
“Yeah, the economy’s been doing a number on everyone…”
“It’s not the economy. It’s me. I
have a real problem,” she said, gesturing toward her beer. “I made some bad
choices.”
“We all have,” I told her.
“They don’t land everyone here,
though. Hey, you don’t have a dollar, do you?”
The way she asked, it didn’t sound
like the discussion had been leading up to that request. It seemed like a
peripheral thought.
“I’m sorry. I only have enough for
bus fare,” I said. It was true.
“It’s okay, hon. You keep your bus
money.”
I rummaged around in my bag and
pulled out a cake pop from Starbucks. “You can have this if you want.”
Stacey’s eyes lit up as she took the
pastry. “Is that chocolate? I haven’t had chocolate forever! I have to make
this last. Before I eat it, I’ll watch it melt a little in the sun. It’ll look
real pretty.”
A pang of sadness struck me, but I
thought maybe I shouldn’t be sad. She was appreciating something I wouldn’t
have even noticed.
A mother and daughter stood in front
of us on the sidewalk. The girl must have been about four. She bounded around
her mother in circles, chattering excitedly.
Stacey hadn’t touched her 40 in a
while. She looked thoughtfully at the cake pop.
“I think I’m gonna give this to
her,” she said. “I have a daughter, too. I’d give her the candy if she was
here. But my daughter…she had to get taken away.” Her voice caught in the air
and she was quiet for a moment. “Have to do it when the mama’s not looking,
though. Don’t want her to think I’m trying to poison her kid.”
There was a lump in my throat that
hadn’t been there before.
“That’s really considerate,” I said.
Before it could fully sink in, a wiry
old man ambled up to our bench, struggling to hold his pants up. He was
laughing and babbling exuberantly, much like the four-year-old child. His two
front teeth were missing.
“Harvey, get your skinny ass over
here!” Stacey reached over to re-buckle his belt, tutting in disapproval. “I gave you this belt. At least wear it
right, not like some fool kid with his pants around his ankles! How’s anyone
gonna want to help you, looking like that? How’s anyone gonna give you a job?”
She tucked in his shirt and he
lowered himself onto the bench opposite from ours, swaying slightly.
“You’re like a mom to them,” I said.
“Well, somebody has to be.”
As she chided and joked with her
friends, I was ashamed to realize that I’d never thought homeless people would
have such comradery. Wouldn’t they be fighting for the same resources? But here
they were, laughing and teasing one another and fixing each other’s clothes.
How could I have been such an ignorant snob? How could I have ever assumed that
people wouldn’t need each other, especially
if they had nothing else?
Stacey glanced back at the girl and
her mother.
“Not everyone here looks after their
kids,” she sighed. “Some of these kids—twelve, thirteen years old—they run
around the Green at night. Run wild. Sometimes they kick us in our sleep. And
we can’t tell nobody, cause then they’ll come after us even worse.”
A chill spread over me. “That’s
horrible! Is there anything I can do?”
Stacey shook her head sadly. “I’m
not worried about me. It’s just awful no one raised them right. You’d never do
that. I wouldn’t, either. I was raised to treat everyone with dignity, no
matter who they are.”
I was ready to burst with the
insistence that something had to be done, that there was no way a just or even
marginally decent society could sleep at night knowing that homeless people
couldn’t. But Stacey continued.
“Let me tell you something,” she
said, gazing at me intently. “This is important. Not everybody has parents, so
cherish yours. Treasure and honor them. I wish I still had mine. I lost my mama
a long time ago, and it fucked me up in a lot of ways.” She cast her eyes down
and took a deep swig.
It seemed that as brutal irony had decided,
Stacey started drinking when she lost her mother and then lost her own daughter
because of it. They might have been trapped in bottles generationally; living
in glass houses, floating out with desperate messages inside. I thought of baby
bottles evolving into the other kind. She could no longer be a mom to her
daughter, but she could be one to everyone else.
“If
you want to help me, there is one thing you can do,” Stacey went on.
I waited.
“You work for the newspaper, so look
for my friend Carton’s obituary. He was a good man. He…had an accident. You
don’t have to bring me the obituary. Just find it. People don’t remember our
names, Emily. I just want his name in the paper. And even if I never see you
again, remember my name, too.”
My bus was approaching but I was
rooted to the spot. I couldn’t look away and didn’t want to.
As the bus shuddered to a halt in
front of us, Stacey fell against me. She dropped her head on my shoulder and
clutched my arm with icicle fingers. I couldn’t breathe.
I tried to jerk away, but she only
wanted a hug. I held her.
Her eyes glazed over for a moment.
She drew my face close, speaking in the most intense whisper I’d ever heard.
“God told me to tell you something,”
she said. “He said you’re special. If you help somebody else, God is gonna help
you.”
We broke apart in time for me to
catch my bus. She waved goodbye. I waved back and told her I’d look for
Carton’s obituary.
I never did find it, but I remember.
I haven’t seen Stacey since.
For the rest of the day I felt
heavier, but not in a burdened way. More like I’d been entrusted to carry
something invaluable and find somewhere safe to keep it. So I’m putting it here
on this page, and trusting you with it, too. We can all look after it together.
I don’t think Stacey’s message came
from a god. It breached to the surface from somewhere inside her, outside of
the bottle and straight from her core. She thought I was special just for
listening and caring, but I’m not special. I’m a hypocrite.
I still don’t give her friends
money, but I try to carry food around to have something to offer. I promised to
make sure she won’t be forgotten, but put off writing this for a year because
of my own discomfort. I lost sleep thinking about her, but she doesn’t even
have a bed.
I’ll never forget Stacey’s story,
and I hope you remember it, too. Remember that there are friends who become
family and take care of each other when no one else will. Remember the children
who roam the Green at night, kicking homeless people while they sleep because
their parents never taught them not to. Remember there are people who give each
other everything they have, and everything they don’t, no matter what it costs
them. And remember there’s an ageless woman in New Haven who sees beauty in
chocolate melting in the sun.
Her name is Stacey. Remember her
name.
