Джоан Силбер - Improvement

“You might change your mind about staying with us,” I called back, before we went out into the dark hallway.

I had an extra reason for wanting her to stay. Not to be one of those mothers who was always desperate for babysitting, but I needed a babysitter.

My boyfriend was spending three months at Rikers Island. For all of October I’d gone to see him once a week. He was there for selling five ounces of weed (who thinks that should even be a crime?) and it made a big difference to him to have someone visit. I planned to go there again this week, once the subways were back on and buses were going over the bridge again. But it was hard bringing Oliver, who wasn’t his kid and who needed a lot of attention during those toyless visits.

I loved Boyd but I wouldn’t have said I loved him more than the others I’d been with. Fortunately no one asked. Not even Boyd. There was no need for people to keep mouthing off about how much they felt, in his view. Some degree of real interest, some persistence in showing up, was enough. Every week I watched him waiting in that visitors’ room, another young African American in a stupid jumpsuit. The sight of him—heavy-faced, wary, waiting to smile slightly—always got to me, and when I hugged him (light hugs were permitted), I’d think, It’s still Boyd, it’s Boyd here .

Oliver could be a nuisance. Sometimes he was very, very whiney from standing in too many different lines, or he was incensed that he couldn’t bring in his giant plastic dinosaur. Or he got overstimulated and had to nestle up to Boyd and complain at length about some kid who threw sand in the park. “You having adventures, right?” Boyd said. Meanwhile, I was trying to ask Boyd if he’d had an okay week and why not. I had an hour to give him the joys of my conversation. Dealing with those two at once was not the easiest.

I got a phone call from Aunt Kiki on the second day after the hurricane. “How would you feel about my coming over after work to take a hot shower?” she said. “I can bring a towel, I’ve got piles of towels.”

“Our shower is dying to see you,” I said. “And Oliver will lend you his ducky.”

“Kiki Kiki Kiki Kiki Kiki!” Oliver yelled, when she came through the door. Maybe I’d worked him up too much in advance. We’d gotten the place very clean.

When my aunt came out of the bathroom, dressed again in her slacks and sweater and with a steamed-pink face under the turban of her towel, I handed her a glass of red wine. “A person without heat or water needs alcohol,” I said. And we sat down to meat loaf, which I was good at, and mashed potatoes, which Oliver had learned to eat with garlic.

“This is a feast,” she said. “Did you know the sultans had feasts that went on for two weeks?”

Oliver was impressed. “This one could go on longer,” I said. “You should stay over. Or come back tomorrow. I mean it.”

Tomorrow was what I needed—it was the visiting night for inmates with last names from M to Z .

“Maybe the power will be back by then,” Kiki said. “Maybe maybe.”

At Rikers, Boyd and the others had spent the hurricane under lockdown, no wandering off into the torrent. Rikers had its own generator, and the buildings were in the center of the island, too high to wash away. It was never meant to be a place you might swim from.

“You know I have this boyfriend, Boyd,” I said.

Kiki was looking at her plate while I gave her the situation, about the weekly visits, as much as I could tell in front of Oliver. “Oh, shit,” she said. She had to finish chewing to say, “Okay, sure, okay, I’ll come right from work.”

When I leaned over to embrace her, she seemed embarrassed. “Oh, please,” she said. “No big deal.”

What an interesting person Kiki was. What could I ever say to her that would throw her for a loop? Best not to push it, of course. No need to warn her not to tell my parents either. Not Kiki. And maybe she had a boyfriend of her own that I didn’t even know about. She wasn’t someone who told you everything. She wasn’t showering with him, wherever he was. Maybe he was married. A man that age. Oh, where was I going with this?

When Kiki turned up the next night, she was forty-five minutes later than she’d said, and I had given up on her several times over. She bustled through the door saying, “Don’t ask me how the subways are running. Go, go. Get out of here, go.”

She looked younger, all flushed like that. What a babe she must’ve once been. Or at least a hippie sweetheart. Oliver clambered all over her. “Will you hurry up and get out of here?” she said to me.

The subway (which had only started running that day) was indeed slow to arrive and very crowded, but the bus near Queens Plaza that went to Rikers was the same as ever. After the first few stops, all the white people emptied out except for me. I read People magazine while we inched our way toward the bridge to the island; love was making a mess of the lives of any number of celebrities. And look at that teenage girl across the aisle in the bus, combing her hair, checking it in a mirror, pulling the strands across her face to make it hang right. Girl , I wanted to say, he fucked up bad enough to get himself where he is, and you’re still worried he won’t like your hair?

Of course, I was all moussed and lipsticked myself. I had standards. But you couldn’t wear anything too revealing—no rips or see-through—they had rules. Visitors must wear undergarments .

Poor Boyd. After I stood in a line and put my coat and purse in a locker and showed my ID to the guards and got searched and stood in a line for one of Rikers’s own buses and got searched again, I sat in the room to wait for him. It was odd being there without Oliver. The wait went on too long. It wasn’t like you could bring a book to occupy you. And then I heard Boyd’s familiar name, read from the list.

Those jumpsuits didn’t flatter anyone. But when we hugged, he smelled of soap and Boyd, and I was sorry for myself to have him away so long. “Hey, there,” he said.

“Didn’t mean to get here so late,” I said.

Boyd wanted to hear about the hurricane and who got hit the worst. Aunt Kiki became my material. “Oh, she had her candles and her pots of water and her cans of soup and her bags of rice, she couldn’t see why everybody was so upset.”

“Can’t keep ’em down, old people like that,” he said. “Good for her. That’s the best thing I’ve heard all week.”

I went on about the gameness of Kiki. The way she’d taught me the right way to climb trees when I was young, when my mother was only worried I’d fall on my head.

“I didn’t know you were a climber. Have to tell Claude.”

His friend Claude, much more of an athlete than Boyd was, had recently discovered the climbing wall at some gym. Boyd himself was a couch potato, but a lean and lanky one. Was he getting puffy now? A little.

“Claude’s a monster on that wall. Got Lynnette doing it too.” Lynnette was Claude’s sister. And Boyd’s last girlfriend before me. “Girls can do that stuff fine, he says.”

“When did he say that?”

“They came by last week. The whole gang.”

What gang? Only three visitors allowed. “Lynnette was here?”

“And Maxwell. They came to show support. I appreciated it, you know?”

I’ll bet you did , I thought. I was trying not to leap to any conclusions. It wasn’t as if she could’ve crept into the corner with him for a quickie, though you heard rumors of such things. Urban myths.

“Does Claude still have that stringy haircut?”

“He does. Looks like a root vegetable. Man should go to my barber.” The Rikers barber had given Boyd an onion look, if you were citing vegetables.