I dressed the table for two as best I could, with knives and forks on either side of the plates, and glasses on the top right-hand corner. Playing house was the last thing I would have done as a child — my mother did that for the two of us — but now that it was my turn I was surprised how much pleasure it brought me. If I had built a small wooden home in the middle of a forest, I’m sure I would have felt a similar sense of victory. However temporary it may have been, that table and those eggs brought life to the apartment. If I could do it once, I was certain that when Isaac came back, and the time was right, I’d be able to do it again.
I began to think of my work differently after that night. I was a social worker, but I hadn’t really thought of myself as one for years. If I was honest in describing what I did, I would have said I was a caretaker: I dispensed bandages to bleeding souls and broken hearts. Lives that had fallen apart or never really begun were sent to me, and I treated them as quickly as I could. I searched for the cheapest nursing homes for the elderly and requested food stamps and sometimes housing subsidies for any woman who could convince me that she and her children had no food and nowhere to go. Recently returned veterans were supposed to have been assigned to David, since he was the man in the office, but after two soldiers mocked him (for what he never said), he claimed he no longer had the time or energy for such hard cases, so I took on most of them as well, arranging trips to the hospital and sometimes to the movies for those who couldn’t walk. I knew everyone who came to me had suffered some form of ruin. Whether it was poverty, age, or war didn’t matter; they all suffered the same. My first day at the job, David gave me a passionate and I believe genuinely heartfelt speech about the shattered lives I’d be working with. “We are here to change people’s lives,” he said. “I firmly believe that, after everything we went through in the last decade, we are on the verge of making a great society.”
I remember that my eyes brimmed with tears when he said that last part.
Disappointments, I knew, were to be expected. A client cried for an hour after I told her the housing subsidy had run out, and my eyes never fluttered. Others lied to me about their poverty. My black clients accused me of being racist, and my white clients said I’d treat them better if they were niggers. I bore that easily. It weighed on me, but not in the corners that counted. It wasn’t until an entire year had passed and I was asked to make a list of all my successes that my faith began to give. I only had vague memories of the 154 people who had been assigned to me. After a year, most of the clients were wiped off our list to clear the slate for the hundreds more waiting.
I gradually gave up trying to change anyone’s life. I was twenty-six at the end of my first year, but felt much older. When fall came, I suddenly found myself crippled with nostalgia. I wanted to be a child again, or, at the very least, crawl my way back in time a few years. I canceled my plans to move out of my mother’s house. When I told her I wasn’t ready to leave home yet, she made an awkward gesture toward me with me her hands. They fluttered, or flapped; I don’t think either description alone is accurate. Whether her hands were fishes or birds, they were trying to speak for her. When they were close enough, they latched on to my elbows, and squeezed hard, as if trying to break through the flesh.
I began to spend more time with her in the kitchen and in the living room. She had an empty home that she tried her best to care for, and I had the lives of strangers that I was hopelessly trying to clean up after. I thought I would be fine as long as that was all we had in common.
The only thing that had changed between that time and Isaac’s arrival four years later was that I no longer missed the restless anticipation I’d experienced during my childhood and the surges of joy and sadness that came with it. I didn’t feel troubled when the seasons changed. My heart beat the same in winter as it did in spring, because I knew what was around the corner. If I saw a group of students from my old high school walking home at the end of the day, I felt something close to pity for them: no one had told them yet how ordinary and predictable their lives were going to be. I had, in other words, accepted the measured composure of adulthood. I saved money. I bought a used car from a friend of my father’s. I slept with several men, just to see if I could. Isaac was the first break I’d had from that routine. Our relationship had upended my private life while leaving the bulk of my days relatively the same. It wasn’t until I left his apartment with the table set and the eggs tossed into the trash that the rest began to change.
As I drove back home, I had the idea that when I went to work the next day I was going to do everything differently. I’m going to start making homes, is what I told myself in the car, though I wasn’t sure what I meant.
The morning after leaving Isaac’s apartment, I planned to stop by the homes of four of my clients. The only one I visited was Rose. Her real name was Agnes, but after her husband died five years before, she decided she wanted to be called Rose. She was eighty-one. She lived on far too little and made up the difference with jars of spare change, a table overflowing with coupons, and church-donated canned food. She lived in a one-bedroom home I helped her find after she could no longer afford the property tax on the house she and her husband had owned. She had been on my list for eight months, and this was only the third time I came to see her. I showed up with a dozen plastic yellow and red roses tied together with a bit of rope. The loneliness of old age had taught her to be excessively grateful for any human presence, however fleeting.
“Flowers,” she said. “How lovely.”
She didn’t take the bouquet from me. She had me place it in her hands, as if the flowers were real and fragile, and then she embraced them against her chest as if they had come to her seeking comfort and she was the only person in the world who could provide it. I helped Rose arrange the flowers on her coffee table. She didn’t have any vases, so I used the tallest glass I could find and filled the bottom third with water. I looked around the house for signs of emptiness.
“Would you like to have some pictures on your wall?” I asked her.
“I used to have so many pictures in my house,” she said. “There were pictures of every place my husband and I had been to: New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit.”
For the next three hours, I sat with her as she told me about staying at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Chicago at the same time as Al Capone, and then the Warwick in New York, which was a disappointment after all the glamorous stories she had heard. I only half listened. As she spoke, I was also trying to see if her stories filled that apartment in any meaningful way, if they could take up space, like a trinket picked up in an airport that sat on a mantelpiece, yet somehow more substantial than that. If listening to her talk for ten more hours would have answered this question, I would have stayed; there was so much emptiness in life that had to be filled, and I was just seeing it. Rose, however, was getting tired. She was starting to fall asleep as she talked, which was fine. She was happy and maybe at peace, and I felt certain that, even if I didn’t understand how to fill all those holes, I was finally on to something.
Despite the crowd and smoke, I noticed immediately how well Isaac had healed. He had one scar above his right eye, but even if his face had been covered in bruises, he would have looked better than ever. His clothes were new, his hair had been recently cut, and he had the vague glow of someone who had easy access to running water.
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