Edward Jones - Lost in the City

“I see,” my mother says, looking about the room. Then: “Would you help me with this form? That is, if you don’t mind.”

The woman asks my mother what she means.

“This form. Would you mind helpin me fill it out?”

The woman still seems not to understand.

“I can’t read it. I don’t know how to read or write, and I’m askin you to help me.” My mother looks at me, then looks away. I know almost all of her looks, but this one is brand new to me. “Would you help me, then?”

The woman says Why sure, and suddenly she appears happier, so much more satisfied with everything. She finishes the form for her daughter and my mother and I step aside to wait for her. We find two chairs nearby and sit. My mother is now diseased, according to the girl’s eyes, and until the moment her mother takes her and the form to the front of the auditorium, the girl never stops looking at my mother. I stare back at her. “Don’t stare,” my mother says to me. “You know better than that.”

Another woman out of the Ebony ads takes the woman’s child away. Now, the woman says upon returning, let’s see what we can do for you two.

My mother answers the questions the woman reads off the form. They start with my last name, and then on to the first and middle names. This is school, I think. This is going to school. My mother slowly enunciates each word of my name. This is my mother: As the questions go on, she takes from her pocketbook document after document, as if they will support my right to attend school, as if she has been saving them up for just this moment. Indeed, she takes out more papers than I have ever seen her do in other places: my birth certificate, my baptismal record, a doctor’s letter concerning my bout with chicken pox, rent receipts, records of immunization, a letter about our public assistance payments, even her marriage license — every single paper that has anything even remotely to do with my five-year-old life. Few of the papers are needed here, but it does not matter and my mother continues to pull out the documents with the purposefulness of a magician pulling out a long string of scarves. She has learned that money is the beginning and end of everything in this world, and when the woman finishes, my mother offers her fifty cents, and the woman accepts it without hesitation. My mother and I are just about the last parent and child in the room.

My mother presents the form to a woman sitting in front of the stage, and the woman looks at it and writes something on a white card, which she gives to my mother. Before long, the woman who has taken the girl with the drooping curls appears from behind us, speaks to the sitting woman, and introduces herself to my mother and me. She’s to be my teacher, she tells my mother. My mother stares.

We go into the hall, where my mother kneels down to me. Her lips are quivering. “I’ll be back to pick you up at twelve o’clock. I don’t want you to go nowhere. You just wait right here. And listen to every word she say.” I touch her lips and press them together. It is an old, old game between us. She puts my hand down at my side, which is not part of the game. She stands and looks a second at the teacher, then she turns and walks away. I see where she has darned one of her socks the night before. Her shoes make loud sounds in the hall. She passes through the doors and I can still hear the loud sounds of her shoes. And even when the teacher turns me toward the classrooms and I hear what must be the singing and talking of all the children in the world, I can still hear my mother’s footsteps above it all.

Cassandra G. Lewis, the girl the boys called Tank and Mack Truck behind her back, sat on that low brick wall outside Cardozo High School, eating two-year-old Christmas candy when she wasn’t smoking Chesterfields. She’d been there since after her lunch period, and now it was nearing the end of the seventh period and the girl was getting bored because the teacher hadn’t come out to get popped. At Cassandra’s feet on the sidewalk was a small pile of cigarette butts and match stems, and behind her, on the grass on the other side of the wall, was a pile of candy wrappers a wind coming up 13th Street was now blowing here and there.

She had been waiting for her homeroom teacher to look out the window on the second floor and see her wasting her life away on the wall. She’d been hoping the teacher would come out and, as the woman had done that morning in the second-period English class Cassandra had with her, bark more shit in her face. Potential, Cassandra had thought all the time she had been eating and smoking on the wall, I’ll show her all the goddamn potential in the world! She had walked out before the end of the second period and come straight down to the wall, itching for the chance to knock the teacher on her bony ass. But now all the candy and cigarettes were beginning to turn her stomach and she wanted only to be somewhere else.

Parked across Clifton Street in front of her was a green 1957 Hollywood Hudson, a piece of shit that belonged to her brother-in-law, who, in his drunken moments, often called the car “my old mule.” She had spent last night — and the six nights before that — in her sister and brother-in-law’s apartment on Kenyon Street, the first time in a month or so she had slept a week straight in the same place. But that morning her brother-in-law had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed and picked a fight with her because she had eaten five eggs and four biscuits. After he’d gone to work and after her sister had taken the kids to the baby-sitter’s before going to work herself, Cassandra had stolen the old mule to get even. She would have popped her brother-in-law before he left, as she had done a year ago, but she thought it would hurt her sister and nieces too much to see Daddy laid out cold again on the kitchen floor.

She stood up now and brushed ashes from her blouse and pants. The school bell rang, announcing the end of the seventh period. She gave one final look to the corner window on the second floor. She knew the bitch had seen her out there on the wall, but just didn’t have the heart to come out. She’d made the death mistake of thinking she and Miss Bartlett were getting along fine, the way the teacher had always seemed to get along with the other girls. Miss Bartlett had even begun to include her in that small group of girls she invited to her apartment some evenings for meals and girl talk. It was there, over several weeks beginning in September, among twelve or so girls Cassandra wouldn’t have given a shit about before, that she had begun to share, sitting on that brown carpet that was thicker than some beds she’d known. Among all those books and pictures of the teacher’s smiling relatives, she’d said things only her sister and Rhonda Ferguson knew about.

But lately, for no reason at all, the teacher seemed to be in her face all the time, and that morning the teacher had made the death mistake of bringing up Cassandra’s father and mother. Had said that her parents must be turning over in their graves to know the way their child was living, going from pillar to post with no real home. Had said all that and more in front of the dick people who couldn’t stand Cassandra and were just waiting to hear some real personal shit about her life so they could talk behind her back. Then, like putting her personal business in the street wasn’t enough, the teacher had gone into all that other stuff about potential and blah-blah-blah and then, after that, some more blah-blah-blah.

She had made up her mind to get in the car and take off for God knew where when someone honked and she saw Rhonda Ferguson and Rhonda’s father, waiting at the light at 13th and Clifton. The car turned when the light changed and pulled up in front of her. Rhonda, in the passenger seat, waved her over. Students were coming out of school and they passed behind Cassandra leaning in the car window.