I stood but hesitated. “What about dinner?”
She turned on her patent leather heel, and laughed. “Maybe tomorrow.”
I lay on my bed in the beautiful bedroom smelling of cedar, my stomach clawing inside me like a cat in a sack. During the day, all I wanted to do was sleep, but at night, images of my days returned like a slide show. Did I really smell? Was I garbage, hideous?
I heard Silvana come in, settle on her bed. “You thought you were something special, eh? Some hot shit. Now you see, you’re no better than us. You better shut up, or you’ll end up at Mac.” She tossed a dinner roll onto my blanket.
I ate it in two bites. It was so good, I almost cried. “What’s Mac?” I asked.
I heard her exasperated sigh. “Mac’s where they put you when you got no place to go. You won’t last a day. They’ll eat you for breakfast, white girl.”
“Least they get breakfast,” I said.
Silvana chuckled in the dark.
A car went by outside, its headlights painting the ceiling in moving shadows. “Were you ever there?” I asked.
“Nidia,” she said. “Even she said it was tough, and she’s a loca. Better shut up and take it like everybody else. Remember, eighteen and out.”
But I was only fifteen.
NOW KIKI TORREZ was the pet, the one who sat on Amelia’s right and ate scraps off her plate like a dog. I was both envious and disgusted. It was Kiki who turned the pages of the Argentine scrapbooks and ate butter cookies, while I washed Amelia’s dirty underwear by hand in the sink, scrubbed her bathtub, ironed her clothes and her lace-edged linens, and if I got any idea to ruin anything out of spite, then no dinner.
She played us off one another. I stole a can of yams one night, and she made Kiki tell her who did it. I lost more weight, my ribs stuck out like the staves of a boat. I was beginning to understand how one human being could kill another.
“You should take in girls,” I heard her tell her friend Constanza one day while I was polishing the silver. “It’s easy money. You can remodel. I’m remodeling the bathroom next.”
I polished the intricate coils of the fork handle with a toothbrush. I’d done it yesterday, but she didn’t like that there was still tarnish in the crevices, so I had to redo them. I would have liked to plant it in her gut. I could have eaten her flesh raw.
Finally in the darkness of March, after weeks of near-daily phone calls, Ms. Cardoza dumped me and I got a new caseworker, an angel of the Lord called Joan Peeler. She was young, wore black, and had long hair dyed rock’n’roll red. She had four silver rings on each hand. She looked more like a poet than a government drone. When it was time to go for our visit, I asked if she knew any coffeehouses.
She took me to one on Vermont. We ducked in past a few outside tables occupied by shivering smokers trying to stay dry, and into the warm, humid interior. Immediately, I was overcome by memories, the black walls and fragrance of hippie soup, the table by the cash register cluttered with handbills and flyers and free newspapers. Even the laughably ugly paintings in thick pigments seemed familiar—green women with long breasts and vampire teeth, men with baroque erections. And I could remember my mother’s voice, her irritation when the roar of the cappuccino machine interrupted her reading, her books stacked on the table where I drew and took the money when someone bought one.
I wanted her back. I was overwhelmed with a need to hear her low, expressive voice. I wanted her to say something funny and cruel about the art, or tell a story about one of the other poets. I wanted to feel her hand on my hair, stroking me while she spoke.
Joan Peeler ordered peach tea. I took strong coffee with cream and sugar and the biggest pastry, a blueberry scone shaped like a heart. We sat at a table where we could see the street, the funereal umbrellas, hear the soft hiss of cars through puddles. She opened my case file on the sticky tabletop. I tried to eat slowly, to enjoy the buttery biscuit and the whole blueberries, but I was too hungry. I finished half of it before she even looked up.
“Ms. Cardoza recommended you not be moved,” my new caseworker said. “She says the home is perfectly adequate. She says you have an attitude problem.”
I could picture her writing it, Ms. Cardoza, her skin muddy with makeup applied like cake frosting. She never once took me out for a visit, always spent the whole time talking to Amelia in Spanish over plates of butter cookies and yerbabuena tea in matching flowered cups and saucers. She was so impressed by Amelia and the big house, the sparkling silver. All that remodeling. She never wondered where the money came from. Six girls bought a lot of remodeling, even antiques, especially if you didn’t feed them.
I glanced up at a drippy, heavy painting of a woman lying on a bed, her legs spread, snakes crawling out of her vagina. Joan Peeler craned her neck around to see what I was looking at.
“Did she say why I asked to be moved?” I licked powdered sugar off my fingers.
“She said you complained about the food. And that Mrs. Ramos restricts use of the telephone. She found you bright but spoiled.”
I laughed out loud, pulled up my sweater to show her my ribs. The men across the aisle looked too, a writer with a portable computer, a student making notes on a legal pad. Seeing if I’d pull it up any higher. Not that it mattered, I didn’t have much on top anymore. “We’re starving,” I said, covering myself again.
Joan Peeler frowned, pouring tea through a wicker strainer into a chipped cup. “Why don’t the other girls complain?”
“They’re afraid of a worse placement. She says if we complain she’ll send us to Mac.”
Joan put her strainer down. “If what you say is true and we can prove it, she can have her license revoked.”
I imagined how it would really play. Joan started her investigation, got transferred to the San Gabriel Valley, and I lost my chance to have a young caseworker who still got excited about her clients. “That could take a long time. I need out now.”
“But what about the other children? Don’t you care what happens to them?” Joan Peeler’s eyes were large and disappointed in me, ringed in dark liner outside the lids.
I thought of the other girls, quiet Micaela, Lina, little Kiki Torrez. They were as hungry as I was. And the girls who came after us, girls who right now didn’t even know the word foster, what about them? I should want to close Amelia down. But it was hard for me to picture those girls. All I knew was, I was starving and I had to get myself out of there. I felt terrible that I would want to save myself and not them. It wasn’t how I wanted to think of myself. But at bottom, I knew they’d do the same. No one was going to worry about me if they had a chance to get out. I’d feel the wind as they hit the door. “I’ve stopped having my period,” I said. “I eat out of the trash. Don’t ask me to wait.” Reverend Thomas said that in hell, the sinners were indifferent to the suffering of others, it was part of damnation. I hadn’t understood that until now.
She bought me another pastry, and I made a sketch of her on the back of one of her papers, drew her hair a little less stringy, overlooked the zit on her chin, spaced her gray eyes a bit better. I dated it and gave it to her. A year ago I would have felt a panic at being thought heartless. Now I just wanted to eat regularly.
JOAN PEELER said she had never come across a kid like me, she wanted to have me tested. I spent a couple of days filling out forms with a fat black pencil. Sheep is to horse as ostrich is to what. I’d been through this before, when we came back from Europe and they thought I was retarded. I wasn’t tempted to draw pictures on the computer cards this time. Joan said the results were significant. I should be going to a special school, I should be challenged, I was beyond tenth grade, I should be in college already.