Edward Jones - Lost in the City

She did another line of cocaine. Her town house was in an enclosed area in Southwest protected by a guard in his tiny house at the entrance. Generally, the guard would call to tell her that a cab was coming to her door, but she felt she might want to go out to the entrance and meet the cab. But then, as the coke flowed through her, she relaxed and thought it best for him to come and get her. “Ten dollar tip,” she said to the marble tray and raised her eyebrows up and down several times. Before closing the crystal canister that contained the drug, she put some in a plastic packet with the small gold spoon she kept in the canister. “Who knows what evil lurks in a hospital,” she said, laughing.

On that sixth morning in Israel, Georgia had gone back to her bed after breakfast and seemed unable to move, but she had insisted that Lydia and her mother go on without her. When mother and daughter returned from floating on the Dead Sea, they found Georgia in a lounge chair at the swimming pool, descending into drunkenness, not quite certain who they were or where she was. When Lydia’s mother told her that she was in the Holy Land, the land of Jesus, Georgia said, “Yes. Yes. I been to that place.” Then, after Lydia’s mother slapped her, Georgia asked her friend for forgiveness.

Back in the room the two older women shared, Lydia had tried to reassure a sobbing Georgia. Her mother refused to say anything more to Georgia. “It’s all right,” Lydia said to Georgia as she put her to bed. The old woman kept saying that she was going to die in the Holy Land and Lydia kept telling her that she wouldn’t. They left her and had dinner in the hotel dining room, but her mother only picked at her food.

Georgia was contrite throughout the last six days, and though it was clear to Lydia that the woman’s legs and feet could not manage it, Georgia, uncomplaining, went out each day for the rest of the tour. Each place along the way, in Jericho, in Bethany, in Nazareth, she stayed close to Lydia’s mother, but Cornelia paid her no mind, and it showed on Georgia’s face.

On the living-room wall in Lydia’s town house, among the photographs of places she had visited around the world, between the pictures of her standing before the Kremlin on a winter day and of her in a cavernous room in a Danish castle the guide said was haunted, there was the picture of Lydia and Cornelia and Georgia standing where the tourist bureau said Joseph’s carpentry shop had been, Georgia in her hideous wig standing on one side and her mother in the middle. It was the tenth day of the trip.

She did two more lines of cocaine. “Just a shorty shorty this time, girl,” she said as she spread out the drug. All of this and more I offer to you if you would but bow down and worship me….

She did not know how long the cab driver had been standing in the doorway when he said, “Lady, you call for a cab?” He was an old man who had probably done nothing but work all his life. Father, may I?…What would that old man have said to see her perfect breasts adorning the beach at Antibes? Have you seen the Egyptian pyramids? the naked Texan asked, fingering the pages of Ayn Rand.

“Yes,” she said to the old man, sounding as if there had been a death in the family. “It’s for me. My mother has died.” Immediately, he took off his hat and made the sign of the cross. She stood and put her things, including the packet of cocaine, into the Fendi bag.

“My heart goes out to you, lady,” the cab driver said. “It really does. I know what it’s like to lose a mother. And a father too.” Through the screen door, he looked about the room as if there might be others to whom he should express condolences.

At the door, she could see that he was not just an old man, but an extremely old man. Her father, had he lived, would have been such a man. She closed the door and locked it. The sounds of birds were louder, and she knew the sun was not far off. The old man helped her down the three brick stairs and held the cab door for her. She had wanted to buy a second town house in the area as another investment and have her mother and Georgia live there, but her mother told her that she did not know if she could live among so many white people. “I’m not used to their ways and such like you are, Lydia,” and Lydia had been offended.

The old man drove out of the compound and turned right on G Street. He was looking at her in the rearview mirror. She smelled dead fish from the wharf. At 7th the man turned right again. “I knew folks who lived in Southwest before they threw the colored out and made it for the wealthy,” her mother had said when Lydia told her she had bought a town house there.

“Ma’am, maybe you should tell me where you goin?” the cab driver said.

“Just get me lost in the city,” she said.

“What, ma’am?”

“Just keep on driving and get us lost in the city. I’ll pay you. I have the money.”

“No, ma’am, it ain’t a matter of money. I just thought…. You know, your mother…. And besides, ma’am, I’m a Capitol cabdriver and I ain’t allowed to get lost.”

“Try,” she said. “Try ever so hard.” She took two twenty-dollar bills from her bag, leaned forward and placed them on the seat beside him. “And the more lost you get us, the more you get paid. Or is it, the more loster, or the most lost? There are, you know, Mr. Cab Driver, so many grammatical rules that the grammar people say we must not break.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know. I’ve heard it said.”

He did not know what else to do, so he continued driving. He passed the federal buildings along 7th, then the mall and its museums. In one of the museums white men had allowed her father to make a living pushing a broom, and now she was paid in one year more than her parents had earned in both their lifetimes. Soon, she would pass a point in her life where she would have earned more than all her ancestors put together, all of them, all the way back to Eve.

At New York Avenue, he turned right, then left on 5th Street. He thought that maybe she had been born elsewhere, that she did not know Washington, would not know the streets beyond what the white people called the federal enclave. But in fact, the farther north he went, the more she knew about where they were going. My name is Lydia…. Say it loud….

“You gettin us lost?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m tryin.”

“All right. Try very hard.” She placed another twenty beside the other two.

They passed where the K Street market once had been. Two pounds of chicken wings for twenty cents. Had she remembered to finally write down her mother’s recipe for that wondrous beef stew somewhere in one of the appointment books? They continued on up 5th Street. Her father had died at 1122 5th Street in a back room on the top floor where they had lived when she was four. It occurred to Lydia that in the world there was now no one from whom she could get that full medical history she had always planned to get. Who now could tell her if there was a history of breast cancer among the women in her family?

“I’m sorry for all this,” her father had said on his death bed to her mother. “I’m very sorry for all this, Cornelia.” They had not known that she was standing in the doorway watching them.

“For what?” her mother said to her father. “What’s there to be sorry about? You do know that I love you. You do know that, don’t you? If you go away with nothin else, go away with that.”

At 5th and Ridge streets, she asked the cab driver, “Hi you doin up there, buddy? You doin okay?”

“Yes, ma’am, just fine, thank you.”

While living at 457 Ridge Street, in the downstairs apartment, they had come to know Georgia, who lived in the upstairs apartment. Georgia would never have children of her own and, except for Lydia, was uncomfortable around other people’s children. Until Lydia, was fourteen, she gave her a doll every Christmas. “Now see, if you pull the string Chatty Cathy will talk to you, honey. Tell Chatty Cathy your name, honey.” “My name is Lydia Walsh and I live in Washington.”