Good Rich People(15)

A single tear plucks my eye and I swish it away. “Do you know of any charities that house people?”

She shifts on her chair. She gets the look people get. Are you asking me for something? Are you bothering me?

The truth is, I don’t need to ask her. I already know the answer. I have never had a house of my own. As soon as I turned eighteen, I moved in with my first boyfriend in his trailer in Altadena. I stayed for a year until we broke up. I went back to Dad until I met another guy, moved to his place, broke up. Moved home. Then out again, like a calf that just wouldn’t sell. Failure is just like success: It doesn’t happen overnight.

I always helped with rent, but I never had a name on any lease. And I worked. God, I worked. Minimum-wage jobs that didn’t pay overtime, didn’t have lunches or breaks. I worked hard but I didn’t have a car. I wanted to move up, but I kept being passed over, pushed aside, ignored. They always knew I was needy. I didn’t have to tell them. At an elemental level, I repulsed them. So I jumped to another job. I even did night school and got a degree in web design. I worked tirelessly but I never moved up. I kept my head above water, but that never felt like victory. I kept going, but that never felt like success. I stayed alive, and that always felt like losing.

I used to dream that one day my life would change. I played MASH as a kid: You got the mansion! With the husband! Three kids! Seven dogs! But after a while, I stopped playing those games. I realized it was impossible. That the real world, like a seventy-five-dollar jacket or a new pair of shoes, would always be out of my reach.

And all of that led me here, but it doesn’t feel like a genesis, a journey, a natural conclusion. It feels like a shock. It feels like denial. It feels impossible: that when I leave this room, I will have nowhere to go.

Her head bobs as the lights go out in the hallway. “We’re closing. Thank you for coming. I’m sorry if I couldn’t give you what you need.” She slides a brightly colored pamphlet toward me. It shows two women shaking hands, a child laughing hysterically. “Helping Hands” and the logo, two enormous green hands reaching out. Where are those hands? Attached to the Wizard of Oz? “I just want to emphasize how important it is for us to spread a message of hope. We find that when people feel down about the situation here, they’re less inclined to get involved.” She’s not wrong.

I nod. I keep my mouth shut. I don’t say what I want to say, which is this: I would do anything for a house. I would give you my hands. I would give you my heart, my courage, my brain, just to go home. I would do anything, but my tragedy is: There is nothing I can do.

“If you do your research,” she chides, “I think you’ll see there have been some positive steps toward resolving the crisis. I think it’s important, you know. Stay positive. Things are getting better all the time.”

A tear escapes my eye, slides down my face. She is both polite and cruel enough to ignore it. “Thank you for meeting with me.”

The pain in my feet starts as soon as I stand. She stays seated, so I know she doesn’t want to shake my hand, doesn’t want to touch me. Her eyes glaze over; she doesn’t want to see me either. I suddenly want to thank her again, am desperate to, am desperate to do anything that will keep me in this room.

But instead I leave her office. I walk down the unlit hall to the door.

The biggest way I trick myself, despite knowing better, is by hoping. I tell myself I don’t. I tell myself I’m too smart for that. And I never feel it. I never feel hope, the good part of it, swelling through me. I only feel it going, like I feel it now as I walk out of that brightly colored office, leave the pamphlet on the counter, not even able to put it in the trash like I should, in case someone else wants it, in case it helps someone else. In case someone out there still believes in disembodied helping hands.





DEMI



My childhood was not idyllic, not in the traditional sense, but it was mine. My mother died in childbirth, so my dad raised me. Some fathers wouldn’t have, and I always felt special for that. I remember trips to the grocery store where my dad used to steal, usually steaks or salmon, always bottles of wine. I didn’t see it as a crime. I saw it as a game and proof that he loved me. Our whole life was a game, a kind of dare: Can you survive? Without a washing machine! With too-small shoes! You’ve got eleven dollars in your bank account and seven days to wait for food stamps: GO!

All of our furniture was sourced from the side of the road, so we had two huge executive desks with rolling office chairs, a brass bed, a piss-stained sofa we covered with scarves and caftans. We collected furniture we didn’t need, because anything free was too good to pass up. By the time I was a teenager, our studio was filled with armoires and dressers and dining room chairs stacked to the ceiling. The dressers were filled with electrical cords, old radios, headphones, drills and saws and tools we didn’t know how to use. Anything that worked or could be fixed or figured out, my dad had to take. He wasn’t a hoarder; he was a survivor.

I never knew we were poor. I thought everyone lived like this. Until one New Year’s Eve when I was six or seven. I found out the way everyone does: by meeting a rich person. My dad went out to a local club called the Globe and brought two people back with him. The first was John and I knew him. He was a Rastafarian who looked like a Rastafarian, so people would acquire him like a piece of clothing, and that night a rich woman hung off his arm. She was high. Her eyes were swollen blue and her lips were so juiced, they were crooked on her face. She was wearing a silver gown, like snakeskin that slithered down her sculpted form. I watched her through the break in the drapes—our apartment was all one long room, the bedroom separated by a scratchy blanket hung to make a curtain.