Edward Jones - Lost in the City

“Why you have me wait so long if she whatn’t here?” She did not want to say too much, appear too upset, for the Social Security people could be unforgiving. And though she was used to waiting three and four hours, she found it especially unfair to wait when there was no one for her at all behind those panels the Social Security people used for offices. “I been here since before eleven.”

“I know,” the woman behind the desk said. “I know. I saw you there, ma’am, but I really didn’t know Mrs. Brown wasn’t here.” There was a nameplate at the front of the woman’s desk and it said Vernelle Wise. The name was surrounded by little hearts, the kind a child might have drawn.

Marie said nothing more and left.

The next appointment was two weeks later, eight thirty, a good hour, and the day before a letter signed by John Smith arrived to remind her. She expected to be out at least by twelve. Three times before eleven o’clock, Marie asked Vernelle Wise if the man, Mr. Green, who was handling her case, was in that day, and each time the woman assured her that he was. At twelve, Marie ate one of the two oranges and three of the five slices of cheese she had brought. At one, she asked again if Mr. Green was indeed in that day and politely reminded Vernelle Wise that she had been waiting since about eight that morning. Vernelle was just as polite and told her the wait would soon be over.

At one fifteen, Marie began to watch the clock hands creep around the dial. She had not paid much attention to the people about her, but more and more it seemed that others were being waited on who had arrived long after she had gotten there. After asking about Mr. Green at one, she had taken a seat near the front, and as more time went by, she found herself forced to listen to the conversation that Vernelle was having with the other receptionist next to her.

“I told him…I told him…I said just get your things and leave,” said the other receptionist, who didn’t have a nameplate.

“Did he leave?” Vernelle wanted to know.

“Oh, no,” the other woman said. “Not at first. But I picked up some of his stuff, that Christian Dior jacket he worships. I picked up my cigarette lighter and that jacket, just like I was gonna do something bad to it, and he started movin then.”

Vernelle began laughing. “I wish I was there to see that.” She was filing her fingernails. Now and again she would look at her fingernails to inspect her work, and if it was satisfactory, she would blow on the nail and on the file. “He back?” Vernelle asked.

The other receptionist eyed her. “What you think?” and they both laughed.

Along about two o’clock Marie became hungry again, but she did not want to eat the rest of her food because she did not know how much longer she would be there. There was a soda machine in the corner, but all sodas gave her gas.

“You-know-who gonna call you again?” the other receptionist was asking Vernelle.

“I hope so,” Vernelle said. “He pretty fly. Seemed decent too. It kinda put me off when he said he was a car mechanic. I kinda like kept tryin to take a peek at his fingernails and everything the whole evenin. See if they was dirty or what.”

“Well, that mechanic stuff might be good when you get your car back. My cousin’s boyfriend used to do that kinda work and he made good money, girl. I mean real good money.”

“Hmmmm,” Vernelle said. “Anyway, the kids like him, and you know how peculiar they can be.”

“Tell me about it. They do the job your mother and father used to do, huh? Only on another level.”

“You can say that again,” Vernelle said.

Marie went to her and told her how long she had been waiting.

“Listen,” Vernelle said, pointing her fingernail file at Marie. “I told you you’ll be waited on as soon as possible. This is a busy day. So I think you should just go back to your seat until we call your name.” The other receptionist began to giggle.

Marie reached across the desk and slapped Vernelle Wise with all her might. Vernelle dropped the file, which made a cheap tinny sound when it hit the plastic board her chair was on. But no one heard the file because she had begun to cry right away. She looked at Marie as if, in the moment of her greatest need, Marie had denied her. “Oh, oh,” Vernelle Wise said through the tears. “Oh, my dear God…”

The other receptionist, in her chair on casters, rolled over to Vernelle and put her arm around her. “Security!” the other receptionist hollered. “We need security here!”

The guard at the front door came quickly around the corner, one hand on his holstered gun and the other pointing accusatorially at the people seated in the waiting area. Marie had sat down and was looking at the two women almost sympathetically, as if a stranger had come in, hit Vernelle Wise, and fled.

“She slapped Vernelle!” the other receptionist said.

“Who did it?” the guard said, reaching for the man sitting beside Marie. But when the other receptionist said it was the old lady in the blue coat, the guard held back for the longest time, as if to grab her would be like arresting his own grandmother. He stood blinking and he would have gone on blinking had Marie not stood up.

She was too flustered to wait for the bus and so took a cab home. With both chains, she locked herself in the apartment, refusing to answer the door or the telephone the rest of the day and most of the next. But she knew that if her family or friends received no answer at the door or on the telephone, they would think something had happened to her. So the next afternoon, she began answering the phone and spoke with the chains on, telling Wilamena and others that she had a toothache.

For days and days after the incident she ate very little, asked God to forgive her. She was haunted by the way Vernelle’s cheek had felt, by what it was like to invade and actually touch the flesh of another person. And when she thought too hard, she imagined that she was slicing through the woman’s cheek, the way she had sliced through the young man’s hand. But as time went on she began to remember the man’s curses and the purplish color of Vernelle’s fingernails, and all remorse would momentarily take flight. Finally, one morning nearly two weeks after she slapped the woman, she woke with a phrase she had not used or heard since her children were small: You whatn’t raised that way.

It was the next morning that the thin young man in the suit knocked and asked through the door chains if he could speak with her. She thought that he was a Social Security man come to tear up her card and papers and tell her that they would send her no more checks. Even when he pulled out an identification card showing that he was a Howard University student, she did not believe.

In the end, she told him she didn’t want to buy anything, not magazines, not candy, not anything.

“No, no,” he said. “I just want to talk to you for a bit. About your life and everything. It’s for a project for my folklore course. I’m talking to everyone in the building who’ll let me. Please…I won’t be a bother. Just a little bit of your time.”

“I don’t have anything worth talkin about,” she said. “And I don’t keep well these days.”

“Oh, ma’am, I’m sorry. But we all got something to say. I promise I won’t be a bother.”

After fifteen minutes of his pleas, she opened the door to him because of his suit and his tie and his tie clip with a bird in flight, and because his long dark-brown fingers reminded her of delicate twigs. But had he turned out to be death with a gun or a knife or fingers to crush her neck, she would not have been surprised. “My name’s George. George Carter. Like the president.” He had the kind of voice that old people in her young days would have called womanish. “But I was born right here in D.C. Born, bred, and buttered, my mother used to say.”