Always Happy Hour: Stories(15)
“Use the comb,” I say, “and be gentle. I have a sensitive head.”
She thinks this is funny, a sensitive head. She runs the comb through to the tips and twists it into a tight bun, announcing it Chinese style before letting go. After she’s gotten all the knots out, I tell her we have to check on the baby.
The baby room has five cribs, four of them empty.
The baby is asleep, snoring lightly because her nose is stopped up. Her scalp is loaded with what appears to be dandruff only the Indian doctor said it was fungus. He said in children it’s always fungus. Her diaper is so wet I can feel it breaking apart so I pick her up and place her on the changing table. Then I go across the hall to restock the diapers and wet wipes, knowing she won’t fall off. She isn’t like other babies, who fidget and need to be entertained.
“Don’t worry, this fungus thing’ll clear up and you’ll be good as new. It’s probably just psychosomatic.” She blinks. She understands me completely. She could be the child savior, the one come to save us all.
When she first got here the back of her head was flat because her fourteen-year-old mother never picked her up. I’ve been teaching her to roll over; I’ve been teaching her colors and shapes and the parts of her body.
I shove her dirty diaper into the Genie, which a rich volunteer brought over last week. The woman donated two of them along with a crib, though the extra crib only made the room crowded. The shelter hasn’t been at capacity in months. I don’t know why. We live in the poorest state in the country; we have an abundance of unemployed people and more illegitimate babies than we know what to do with. There’s something going on that I don’t know about but no one tells me anything because I established myself early as someone who can’t keep a secret.
I place her back in the crib and push a ratty little doll next to her so she won’t feel alone, and then Diamond and I go outside to gather pecans in our shirts. We eat the good ones and chuck the bad ones into the street where a funeral procession is in progress, the cars passing slowly with their headlights on. The cars going in the opposite direction stop out of respect and I wonder if people do this in other towns. I wouldn’t want to live in a town where people didn’t do this.
“Maybe we could go to the pool later,” I say.
Diamond screams and tells the other girls and they all scream and I tell them they’ll have to ask Miss Monique and be extra nice for the rest of the day.
In the kitchen, Monique is flouring pork chops, an open number 10 can of black-eyed peas next to the stove. Because I have a college degree and I’m not obese, I’m in charge of nutrition, but she insists on frying everything. Even the vegetables have hunks of fat floating in them.
“The food bank didn’t come again,” she says.
“Oh?” I say. I’m relieved that the food bank didn’t come because I’m responsible for going down there and collecting it, piling the boxes onto a cart and pushing the cart up a hill that doesn’t usually seem like a hill but becomes a great challenge on food bank days. Sometimes Bruce helps me. Bruce is a young guy they’ve hired to help Octavio with maintenance but half the time he’s leaning against a truck, smoking. The older girls slip him notes. They ask him directly for the things they want: cigarettes, money, sex. It doesn’t seem like a strategy that would work but it frequently does.
The girls ask Monique if they can go to the pool and she tells me she can’t find the cornmeal. I know it’s because there isn’t any but I unlock the pantry anyway, the girls trailing behind me, and look around. It’s the end of the month and there’s hardly more than powdered milk and white-labeled cans of soup. Diamond plucks a half-sucked sucker out of a jar of party toothpicks and sticks it in her mouth. Angel finds an old peanut butter egg and I find a jumbo bag of marshmallows. I squeeze one and it’s still soft so I tuck it behind a big box of Bisquick.
“We’re out,” I say. “Put it on the list and I’ll get some next time I’m at Walmart.”
Monique curses under her breath, loud enough for me to make out the particulars but not loud enough for me to call her out on it, which I learned the hard way.
We leave her in the kitchen and go from room to room, rummaging through drawers and closets. I find swimsuits for Diamond and Tasia and Brie, but I can’t find one for Angel so I sort through bags of donated socks and nightshirts until I locate a stretched-out bikini.
“Rainbow print is really hot right now,” I say, tossing it to her.
She takes off her clothes and puts the bottoms on, turns around so I can tie the triangle top. Then she walks up and down the hall with her hard little stomach bulging, modeling it for us.
Right now we only have young girls—Tasia is the oldest at eleven—and they don’t hate me like the older ones do. The older girls threaten to beat me up, call the cops, leave this place and never come back. Our policy is to let them go; we watch as they run down the street with whatever they’ve managed to strap to their backs and then call the police and their social workers. We never see them again. Their names are erased from the whiteboards, their files shelved. It seems incredible, how easily they are forgotten, but this is also our policy: don’t talk about the girls who leave; it upsets the others, or encourages them.
I keep waiting for them to return, one by one, dirty and beat-up, or all together, like a group of alien abductees emerging from the fog as if nothing happened.