Well, you wouldn’t be lying in bed half the day with the radio stuck to your ear listening to every half-witted show they have.
I listen to Malachy on the radio and what’s wrong with that?
You listen to everything. You do nothing.
Her face would grow pale, her nose pointed, she’d pick at crumbs no longer there and there might be a hint of watery eyes. Then I’d be pricked with guilt and invite her to stay for the night so that she wouldn’t have to take that long subway ride to Manhattan.
No, thank you, I’d rather be in my own bed, if you don’t mind.
Oh, I suppose you’re afraid of the sheets, all those diseases from foreigners in the Laundromat?
And she’d say, I think now ’tis the drink talking. Where’s my coat?
Alberta would try to soften the moment with another invitation to stay, that we had new sheets and Mam needn’t be nervous.
’Tisn’t the sheets at all. I just want to go home, and when she saw me put on my coat she’d say, I don’t need anyone to walk me to the subway. I can find my own way.
You’re not going to walk these streets by yourself.
I walk the streets by myself all the time.
It was a long silent walk up Court Street to the subway at Borough Hall. I wanted to say something to her. I wanted to get past my irritation and my anger and ask her that simple question, How are you, Mam?
I couldn’t.
When we reached the station she said I didn’t have to pay a fare to get through the turnstiles. She’d be all right on the platform. There were people there and she’d be safe. She was used to it.
I went in with her thinking we might say something to each other but when the train arrived I let her go without even an attempt at a kiss and watched her stumble toward a seat as the train pulled from the station.
Down near Court Street and Atlantic Avenue I remembered something she had told me months ago while we sat waiting for Thanksgiving dinner. Isn’t it remarkable, she said, the way things turn out in people’s lives?
What do you mean?
Well, I was sitting in my apartment and I was feeling lonesome so I went up and sat on one of those benches they have in the grassy island in the middle of Broadway and this woman came along, a shopping bag woman, one of the homeless ones, all tattered and greasy, rootin’ around in the garbage can till she found a newspaper and sat beside me reading it till she asked me if she could borrow my glasses because she could only read the headlines with the sight she had and when she talked I noticed she had an Irish accent so I asked her where she came from and she told me Donegal a long time ago and wasn’t it lovely to be sitting on a bench in the middle of Broadway with people noticing things and asking where you came from. She asked if I could spare a few pennies for soup and I said instead she could come with me to the Associated supermarket and we’d get some groceries and have a proper meal. Oh, she couldn’t do that, she said, but I told her that’s what I was going to do anyway. She wouldn’t come inside the store. She said they wouldn’t want the likes of her. I got bread and butter and rashers and eggs and when we got home I told her she could go in and have a nice shower and she was delighted with herself though there wasn’t much I could do about her clothes or the bags she carried. We had our dinner and watched television till she started falling asleep on me and I told her lie down there on the bed but she wouldn’t. God knows the bed is big enough for four but she laid down on the floor with a shopping bag under her head and when I woke up in the morning she was gone and I missed her.
I know it wasn’t the dinner wine that had me against the wall in a fit of remorse. It was the thought of my mother being so lonesome she had to sit on a street bench, so lonesome she missed the company of a homeless shopping bag woman. Even in the bad days in Limerick she always had an open hand and an open door and why couldn’t I be like that to her?
49
Teaching nine hours a week at New York Technical College in Brooklyn was easier than twenty-five hours a week at McKee Vocational and Technical High School. Classes were smaller, students older, and there were none of the problems a high school teacher has to deal with, the lavatory pass, the moaning over assignments, the mass of paperwork created by bureaucrats who have nothing to do but create new forms. I could supplement my reduced salary by teaching at Washington Irving Evening High School or substituting at Seward Park High School and Stuyvesant High School.
The chairman of the English Department at the community college asked me if I’d like to teach a class of paraprofessionals. I said yes though I had no notion of what a paraprofessional was.
That first class I found out. Here were thirty-six women, African-American with a sprinkling of Hispanics, ranging in age from early twenties to late fifties, teacher aides in elementary schools and in college now with government help. They’d get two-year associate degrees and, perhaps, continue their education so that someday they might become fully qualified teachers.
That night there was little time for teaching. After I had asked the women to write a short autobiographical essay for the next class they gathered up their books and filed out, apprehensive, still unsure of themselves, of each other, of me. I had the whitest skin in the room.
When we met again the mood was the same except for one woman who sat with her head on the desk, sobbing. I asked what was the matter. She raised her head, tears on her cheeks.
I lost my books.
Oh, well, I said, you’ll get another set of books. Just go to the English Department and tell them what happened.
You mean I won’t get throwed out of college?
No, you won’t be throwed, thrown out of college.
I felt like patting her head but I didn’t know how to pat the head of a middle-aged woman who has lost her books. She smiled, we all smiled. Now we could begin. I asked for their compositions and told them I’d read some aloud though I wouldn’t use their real names.
The essays were stiff, self-conscious. As I read I wrote some of the more common misspelled words on the chalkboard, suggested changes in structure, pointed out grammatical errors. It was all dry and tedious till I suggested the ladies write simply and clearly. For their next assignment they could write on anything they liked. They looked surprised. Anything? But we don’t have anything to write about. We don’t have no adventures.
They had nothing to write about, nothing but the tensions of their lives, summer riots erupting around them, assassinations, husbands who so often disappeared, children destroyed by drugs, their own daily grind of housework, jobs, school, raising children.
They loved the strange ways of words. During a discussion on juvenile delinquency Mrs. Williams sang out, No kid o’ mine gonna be no yoot.
Yoot?
Yeah, you know. Yoot. She held up a newspaper where the headline howled, Youth Slays Mom.
Oh, I said, and Mrs. Williams went on, These yoots, y’know, runnin’ around slayin’ people. Killin’ ’em, too. Any kid o’ mine come home actin’ like a yoot an’ out he go on his you-know-what.