Christopher Bohjalian - The Double Bind

At the time, Laurel knew enough not to make any of the women or children who passed through the family shelter a personal reclamation project, both because she was still a student herself and because she was a volunteer who really didn’t have the slightest idea what she was doing. She had experience, but no formal training as a social worker. Nevertheless, it was almost too tempting not to want to play God with a girl-and that’s what she was, it was delusional feminism to call this starving sprite a woman-like Serena. She told herself that she could buy Serena some clothes that didn’t make her look like a slut. She could help her find a job. Then an apartment. Isn’t that what the BEDS professionals did?

It was, of course, never that easy. Even if Laurel had been able to wave a wand and whisk Serena behind the counter of the McDonald’s within walking distance on Cherry Street, the girl wouldn’t have been paid nearly enough to afford an apartment in Burlington. At least not without subsidies. Or the help of one of the landlords in the city who worked with BEDS. Or, perhaps, a Rotarian father who was wealthy and generous and all too happy to foot her rent, as well as make sure she had extra money for groceries.

Three days after Laurel took Serena’s pictures, she returned to the shelter with a half-dozen prints that she thought the girl would like. It was a gloriously warm Indian summer afternoon, and she had imagined that she would share the photos with Serena and then walk with her west to the lake. There they’d find a bench by the boathouse with a view of the Adirondacks across the water, and they would discuss life’s possibilities. Laurel would tell her about her family since Serena had volunteered so much about hers, and she would try to describe for her a world where normal people had normal relationships. She’d learn whether Serena was looking for a job, and she would give her plenty of encouragement. She might even tell Serena of her own brush with death, of the men in the masks who had attacked her, a topic she broached with almost no one.

The conversation never occurred because by the time Laurel returned to the shelter with the photographs, the apparition called Serena was gone. She spent a week and three days there, and then disappeared.

And that, Laurel figured, was that. She didn’t expect she would ever see Serena again.

She was wrong. It was BEDS alumna Serena Sargent who brought Bobbie Crocker-literally leading him by the hand-to the shelter. Just about four years later, when Laurel had been working at the shelter as an actual paid employee for close to three years, Serena appeared out of the blue one August evening with a hungry old man who was insisting that he had once been very successful. He was homeless, Serena was not. Laurel wasn’t there at the time, but later both Serena and a BEDS night manager named Sam Russo told her the story.

Serena was living in Waterbury, a town twenty-five miles southeast of Burlington known for being the home to both Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and the Vermont State Hospital for the severely mentally ill. She was living with an aunt who had returned to Vermont two years earlier from Arizona-precisely the sort of good luck that most of the young and homeless needed in order to find their way in off the street-and working at a diner in Burlington.

Apparently, the fellow had spent some time in the state hospital, though whether this was months or years before he had made his way north to Burlington and Serena’s diner was unclear to the waitress. Into whose custody he had been released remained a mystery as well. Bobbie himself no longer seemed to know. He wasn’t violent, but he was delusional. He insisted that Dwight Eisenhower owed him money, and he was fairly certain that if his father knew where he was the man would write him a big fat check and all would be well. Serena guessed that his father, whoever that was, had to be at least a hundred by then and was very likely very long gone. Bobbie had been living on the streets of Burlington for weeks-in ATM cubicles, in the kiosks where the attendants would sit in parking garages, in a boiler room at a hotel near the waterfront-and he couldn’t seem to care for himself. He wandered into her diner and paid for a cup of coffee and a couple of eggs with money he boasted proudly he’d raised Dumpster-diving for recyclable bottles and cans. He told her that once, a long time ago, he had been from a wealthy family on Long Island and that he had seen more of the world than she’d believe: He had met, he said, people she’d read about in books and magazines and encyclopedias.

Serena presumed that most of his babble had only the most tenuous connection to reality. But she remembered her week and a half at BEDS, and how the people there had been very nice to her. She didn’t know whether Laurel might still be there, but she figured that even if that other woman wasn’t it would be a reasonable place for her new friend to get help. And so Serena brought him to the shelter, where Sam Russo got him a bed in the men’s section. In conjunction with a doctor at the state hospital, a chemical cocktail was found that stabilized his behavior and again synchronized his personal reality with the rest of the world. Bobbie didn’t see the planet precisely the way most people did, but he was no longer a danger to himself. Then, once the shelter had established that he was capable of living independently-he was even using a food stamp debit card to buy groceries-BEDS found him a room at the Hotel New England. Two-hundred and forty-five square feet, a single bed, a closet. A hot plate and a dorm-room-size refrigerator. He would share a bathroom with the other tenants on the floor and a kitchen with the other residents of the building. It wasn’t glamorous. But it was a room with a roof and plenty of heat in the winter and excellent ventilation in the summer. It beat the street, and with federal subsidies it cost him almost nothing.

LAUREL ’S BOYFRIEND that autumn was nearing forty-four. This meant that although he was eighteen years older than she was, he was considerably closer to her age than her previous boyfriend, a fellow who had insisted he was a mere fifty-one but Laurel was quite sure was lying. He used a face cream for wrinkles (though he called it a hydrating lotion), and he seemed to be popping Viagra-and then Levitra and Cialis-like M &M’s. This made the bedroom a frequent location for petty squabbles, because while he was on Viagra (needlessly, in her opinion, given that his unenhanced libido would have been impressive on a nineteen-year-old fraternity letch) she was still taking an antidepressant. It was a small dose and she had been tapering off it as she gained both distance and perspective on the attack. But while she was chemically slowing her sex drive, her boyfriend was souping up his with every drug he saw advertised on Monday Night Football.

Still, that isn’t why they broke up. They broke up because he wanted Laurel to move into the meadow mansion he had built on a parcel of what had once been a dairy farm ten miles south of Burlington-he was a senior executive with a group that had pioneered some kind of hospital software-and she didn’t want to live in the suburbs. She didn’t want to live with him. And so they parted.

Her current boyfriend, David Fuller, was an executive as well, but he was profoundly commitment-phobic-which she considered at the time an endearing and helpful part of his nature, and thus far it had actually given their relationship considerably more longevity than most of her romantic liaisons. Laurel still had moments when she needed to be around people, especially nights, hence the importance of her friendship with Talia. But as her therapist had observed, she was still, apparently, unprepared for an adult commitment herself.