“That’s the biggest baby I ever saw,” said the woman’s daughter, who stood beside an older brother, just behind their mother. The brother whispered something in the girl’s ear and the two laughed.
“All right now,” their mother said, “Thas anough a that.” The woman, Arnisa Isaacs, gave Samuel a blanket and indicated that he should spread it on the grass for him and Madeleine and Sam to sit down on.
“We’ll just move around a bit,” Madeleine said. She resented Curtis for not being with her, for not protecting her from all this.
“Oh, there’s time for that,” Arnisa said. “The day is long. Sit a spell.” She pointed to the blanket in Samuel’s hand and he and Arnisa’s son opened it and spread it in front of the woman and her retarded boy.
Sam, freed from the makeshift straps of cloth that had bound him to the wheelchair and placed beside Madeleine on the blanket, began to look about for the first time. Noticing an empty carton of ice cream, Samuel asked if there was a store nearby. “Like to get my grandson somethin,” he said.
“No,” Arnisa said. “There used to be a canteen, but all that’s gone. This place is goin to hell. The closest place is that place out on the road you came in on.”
“Oh, he doesn’t need anything,” Madeleine said, tying one of the laces on Sam’s tennis shoes. “He’s probably just eaten lunch. It’s not necessary to get him anything.”
Samuel did not remember the place on the road and asked Arnisa for directions. She called to her oldest boy, who was helping the man working under the hood of the car. “He’ll show you where it is,” and before Madeleine could think of something to say, Samuel and the boy were in his car and heading back up the lane. The girl and her brother began helping the retarded brother into his wheelchair and they maneuvered the wobbly chair through the grass onto a paved, stone-littered area that had once been a playground.
“Yall be careful now,” Arnisa said. She reached across and took Sam’s chin in her hand. “And how old’s this precious thing?” she said. “Oh, oh, ain’t he just the most precious thing in the whole world!” She took Sam onto her lap. “Come here, sugar.”
Sam began to drool almost immediately. Madeleine recoiled, and Arnisa leaned around to see what Sam had done. “Oh, honey,” Arnisa said, wiping Sam’s mouth with a paper towel, “it’s only spit. It ain’t lye.” Then she began telling Madeleine about her life, sparing nothing, it seemed to Madeleine, as if the two women had known each other from day one. The man working on the car was not the children’s father, wasn’t even her legal husband. “I lucked out when I found him,” Arnisa said, looking lovingly at the man still deep in the car. “A good man is hard to find, they say, and that’s the eternal truth. And then you throw in a kid — three kids! — not countin the one out here, and you talkin bout a hello and good-bye all in the same day.”
Madeleine felt she knew this woman, knew her children, who were destined for nowhere, knew her common-law husband with his unreliable trash-heap of a car, knew this woman and her wig of “real human hair!” as the television ads proclaimed. Knew their tabloid lives. It occurred to her that they were a part of the same tribe as the nearly toothless man who had come to her door that morning, saying he was her father. The more Arnisa talked, the more she was aware of how much time was going by and kept looking up the lane for the car that would take her back to Washington. Sam leaned his back against the woman’s breasts and fell asleep.
Nearly an hour later, Samuel and the boy returned, but they were walking, with the boy trying to balance on the narrow strip of yellow-painted concrete dividing the grass from the lane.
“Where have you been?” Madeleine shouted to Samuel when he was still yards away. “What have you been doing to leave me like this?”
Samuel was surprised at the outburst, but the boy began to explain that the car had died just before they left the center. Samuel had insisted on going on to the store, and he was now holding a bag of something as his daughter raised her finger and berated him. Arnisa stood with Sam in her arms.
“Help me get Sam into the wheelchair so we can get him back,” Madeleine said to Samuel. “How in the world are we going to get back home?”
“Oh, honey, Bill can probably fix that car,” Arnisa said. “He can fix anything.”
They put Sam in his wheelchair, and as Samuel wheeled the boy up the ramp, Madeleine looked her father up and down. “Don’t you even know how to dress? Can’t you see that that tie doesn’t go with that suit — if you can call it a suit — with those shoes. Don’t you even know how to match colors?” Samuel said nothing. After they had returned Sam to the ward, Madeleine waited in the infirmary lobby while Arnisa’s husband drove Samuel to where his car was. In very little time, they returned with Samuel driving his own car.
Madeleine said nothing more to Arnisa, and she and Samuel drove silently back to Washington. At her apartment, she got out without a word and did not hear Samuel say he was sorry. She opened the building’s front door and made sure it locked behind her. When she was back in her apartment, she looked out the window and found that the car had died on him once again. The car was parked in a space near the entrance to the parking lot with its hood up and Samuel was leaning into the car, a man being swallowed up. She lived on the second floor, facing the parking lot, and she could hear him and what he was doing. White people passed and paid no attention to him.
He worked late into the afternoon, now and again stopping to try to start the car or to step back and stare at it as if some solution might rise up from the roof and announce itself. The day was completely ruined for Madeleine, and throughout the afternoon as her father worked she sat angry in the chair with its back to the window. That morning she had looked forward to going to the deli down the street where she and Curtis sometimes bought sandwiches and pastries. But she knew she could not go out with Samuel blocking the path to the deli and the deli would soon be closed. There were few cars or people passing, and most of the world was quiet. The loudest sounds were those of her father’s muttering and of his tools against the car’s metal, all of it reminding her, first before anything else, that the day was forever wearing itself away.
LOST IN THE CITY
When the telephone rang about three o’clock that morning, she sat bolt upright in her bed, as if a giant hand had reached through the ceiling and snatched her up. The man sleeping beside her did not stir until the seventh ring, and then only to ask “What? What?” of nothing in particular before returning to sleep. She first sat on the side of the bed and began to hope: a wrong number, or Gail, drunk, in from an evening of bar-hopping, calling to talk about a man. She then sat in the dark on the floor in front of the nightstand. If it was true what her mother had once told her, then nothing rang the telephone like death in the middle of the night.
On the fifteenth ring, she picked up the telephone and said nothing.
“Ms. Walsh? Ms. Lydia Walsh?” a woman said.
“Yes.”
“We are very sorry to call at such a time, but your mother died twenty minutes ago.” The woman was waiting. “Ms. Walsh?”
“Yes. I’ll be there soon as I can,” Lydia said.
“Very well. We, the entire staff here at George Washington, are very sorry. Your mother was an exemplary patient,” the woman said. “We will expect you very soon.”
“Listen,” Lydia said. “Don’t…don’t put that sheet over her face until I get there, okay? I don’t want to walk in and see that sheet over her.”
“Very well,” the woman said. “We will expect you soon. And again, we at George Washington are very sorry.”