Poor Children

It was a little divot of a backyard, with an apartment building on one side, and a parking lot to the back, but it was mine, so I planted herbs and lay out in the weak Michigan sun when the weather allowed.

 Image courtesy of newleaf01
Wikimedia Commons

The first time I saw the kids, I had set up for the morning with a blanket, a pitcher of lemonade, a little radio, the New York Times Sunday Crossword, and Merriam-Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. They stood on the little hill in front of the apartment building, looking down at me. This complex mostly housed college students; there were no other kids, no playground equipment, no place to play. There was literally nothing else going on besides me pecking away at the crossword, listening to the classic rock station on a cheap plastic radio.

They stared. My heart melted: no one had ever taught these poor children to entertain themselves.

I beckoned. They tumbled to me.

They were four siblings: Omarion, Sweetie, J’neena, and Buddy. The biggest was about eleven, the little one perhaps five. They were dark of skin, dark of hair, in faded, baggy clothes and falling-apart sneakers, and moved with all the energy of popping corn, their dissatisfaction rippling out through slender limbs in perpetual motion.

“We stuck at Grandma’s,” said Sweetie.

“She got no toys, no video games,” said J’neena.

“No cable,” Omarion added.

They didn’t know what to do with themselves. They had never seen a dictionary, and examined mine with care. They had, apparently, never talked to a white woman, and examined my hair and my accent. “Honey,” they mocked, when I asked J’neena to please not sit on my dictionary. “She say, ‘honey’.”

Lemonade, they were familiar with, and made short work of.

The garden attracted them. “What this?” Buddy asked about the Miracle Gro.

“Plant food,” I said, “but don’t touch. It’s poison to people.”

“It look like candy,” said J’neena.

“That’s why you shouldn’t touch it.”

I let them dig the soil with my trowel. Their grandmother called them up for lunch, and sent them back out twenty minutes later with a little potted tree, a gift for me. “Thank you,” she called out the window.

“She say ‘thank you’ for watching us,” Sweetie explained. “’cause she ain’t got nothing to do in there. She don’t walk too good neither.”

Grandma lived in a third-story walk-up. I cared for the little tree with extravagance.

The next day, I found my trowel halfway up the hill, next to a hole deep enough to break a man’s ankle. The day after that, they rang my doorbell, bored. I loaned Sweetie a jump rope, which I later found in a puddle in the parking lot. They started ringing my doorbell and running away, peeking in my window and later commenting on my bed sheets.

They never knew what they were talking about. “Your neighbor gay,” Omarion said, without having any clue what he meant. When Buddy knocked on my back door and reported, “Sweetie say you make sex with her,” I guided him back to his grandmother’s.

“It’s not true,” I told him. “When your sister says things like that, you can tell her you know it’s a lie.”

I worried, but only a little. They had never been inside my house, had never done anything with me their grandmother couldn’t see from her window. Even if they had could describe my bed sheets, they were not credible witnesses. And anyway, I was leaving for study abroad.

Three days after I left, someone tore up my garden, uprooting all the herbs, pulling plants from their pots, and leaving my trowel and my watering can in a hole halfway up the hill. The girl taking care of my house didn’t work up the courage to tell me for three weeks, by which time she had killed my fish.

The vandals didn’t touch the Miracle Gro. Or the potted tree.

When I got back, Omarion waved to me from his stoop, his face hopeful. I nodded and left him alone.

I never saw Omarion or Buddy again, but I saw the girls, once. They knocked at my back door the week before school started.

“Our daddy taking us away from our mommy,” Sweetie told me, like a challenge.

Keeping my tone blank, I responded, “And how do you feel about that?”

“Good,” she said, the word exploding from her mouth like a cannonball.

“Nah-ah,” J’neena said, jutting her hip into her sister’s. “I going back to Mommy’s after. We going to Disneyland.”

“Who care?” said Sweetie. “Who care anyway?”

The Wicked Stepmother

On the surface, it’s the simplest job in the world. Maybe I make a couple extra sandwiches. Maybe I drive across town twice a month to pick up the carpool. I am the purveyor of periodic bedtime stories and fresh Band-aids, the recipient of dutiful hugs and the occasional handmade card. From a historic standpoint, I am successful in my job if I merely refrain from slaughtering, roasting, and devouring them in a red sauce.

Some days, I really enjoy the trips to the zoo, walks in the park, raucous birthday celebrations. Some days I feel like they keep me young.

Some days I look at them and think, “Man, I’m really hungry.”

Woods Lake Magnet School for the Arts, Kalamazoo, 2004

The kids decided that Ph.D. stood for “Player Hater Degree” and it seemed plausible to them that Daisy would pursue one. Funny how kids’ minds work. I was the heavy in that room, the disciplinarian, the one reminding them about appropriate behavior. Daisy was the one they walked all over. I got their respect. She got the “Player Hater Degree.”

Plus, she’d lived in this city for years. She’d grown up in their circumstances: a gifted kid in an impoverished district struggling to provide her a degree of enrichment, a world alien to me.

On the first day, I didn’t know what to say to the kid—eight years old, in third grade—who wrote a story he called “Pimp World.”

“Is that something you’d show to your mother?” our supervisor asked him.

Got it. I filed that response away, and pulled it out pretty often. It never stopped the stories about stolen boyfriends, promiscuous teenagers, or cussing children, but it helped. “You’re in third grade. How much do you really know about this?”

Parents, monitor what your kids watch on TV. Monitor what you say in front of them. Keep their world age appropriate, because they hear everything you say and see everything you do. If it’s not pretty in an adult, it’s really unattractive in a kid. But what do I know? Certain concepts, I was just never exposed to in elementary school. When we tried to teach dialog and conflict, we ended up with three sketches that involved girls arguing over which boys slept in which girls’ beds the night before.

The next week, I explained that “conflict” need not necessarily involve an actual argument, and reiterated the concept of appropriate material. “We’re going to try this one again, without any stories about girls fighting about where boys sleep.”

From the back of the room, the annoying performance mom, who’d argued that her barely literate second grader should join our group, except that she had to arrive late every class, because she had a voice lesson, and leave early, to attend her modeling class, became agitated. “I do not believe that material is acceptable for children.” No one had asked her to sit in on the class, either. No one else’s mom was in the room. Daisy and I bristled whenever she spoke.

“Yes,” I nodded my solidarity with adult sensibilities, even as I wished, once again, that Hollywood would discover her supremely untalented daughter and whisk them both off to California. “Some people did not understand last class. That’s why we’re doing this again.” Somehow, it was usually me at the front of the room, modulating my voice to maintain their attention. If Daisy took charge, I had to stalk around the back, directing their attention when it strayed.

The regular teachers told us our methods worked.

“They used to write a sentence or two,” one told us. “Now they’re writing paragraphs, pages, sometimes.”

Daisy and I were just another link in a long chain of graduate students to teach this class, and we winked at each other. We were better than Elaine and Reba, who’d been in charge last semester.

The group changed. Some older girls started attending once basketball season ended. They’d been in Elaine and Reba’s group, and grew surly when we expected them to do the work.

“Whatever,” these big girls, already adults in their own minds, told us, snapping their gum, rolling their eyes, and tossing their heads so their dangly earrings jingled. “Elaine and Reba let us work together.”

“Work together, yes,” I said. “You’re not working.”

“We’re brainstorming!”

“You’re gossiping.” I tapped their blank paper. “You haven’t done anything.” I tapped the third graders’ papers. “And these guys, who are three years younger than you, have already written a whole page. Get to it, or get out.”

Daisy hovered over them, her arms crossed over her chest, and glared when their conversation turned to boys, music, dancing.

“Player hater,” they whispered.

“Get to it, or get out,” I said. “Some of the people in this room are interesting in learning about writing, and you’re ruining it for them.”

The big girls refused to leave that day, but they never came back. They were so big, as big as I was.

Even the little kids existed more in the world than I ever would. They had crushes on boys, and hip hop stars. Until Daisy’s hipper, younger sister sat in with us, we had no idea what musicians they were writing about, which videos had germinated their thoughts. “You’re not really sisters,” they told Rosie, even thought Daisy and Rosie looked as much alike as two people can without actually being monozygotic twins. Rosie sat with them and helped them write their longest story yet: four little girls, and four members of their favorite boy band. A mansion. A magic fountain. Super powers. Fireworks.

We were in graduate school, eating, sleeping, drinking, breathing, and living creative writing. Teaching elementary kids acted as a release valve. They could be a trial, but they allowed us to reach back to that childish joy in writing. Daisy and I took turns sitting down and modeling behavior: scratching with number two pencils on wide-ruled sheets of paper, working through our own issues.

I still have one of my favorite stories, in which my pet dragon, Toothsome, unceremoniously devours all the irritating people in my apartment complex. We encouraged the kids to illustrate their work, and I enjoyed doing the same.

The kids stood around me, admiring my prolific output and my art, which accurately depicted the fantasy.

“Dang,” one of the kids murmured. “That dragon’s just stuffing the guy right in there.”

Quite satisfactory.

But when I found myself involved in writing, Daisy was in charge of behavioral management. The noise level rose. Kids got up out of their seats and started to run. The deeper into my story I fell, the louder the noise in the room, until, snapped from my reverie, I identified the culprits.

“Hey, Mario, what are doing on the radiator?” I snapped.

“Oh, I didn’t know you were in here.” He hopped down and scurried back to his seat.

“It shouldn’t matter whether I’m in here or not. The rules don’t change if I leave the room.” But they did change. I was not of their world, and my influence only spread so far.

The Gold Dress

Issa found a beautiful gold dress, with pearl beads and silver thread, on the rack at Salvation Army. Twenty dollars was much too much for a dress, she knew, and it wasn’t in the budget, but she fingered its silky sleeve for so long that her mother added it to the cart when she wasn’t looking, and went without new hose and some other necessities, because Issa had been such a help, never asking for anything, and she deserved nice things. Hannah and Dore had had so many nice things in their childhood, and Issa relatively few.

She wore her dress to school, because, as her mother pointed out, where else would she wear it? They didn’t go to church, or parties. They didn’t have extended family gatherings. She didn’t wear it to impress anyone. She just liked to feel pretty once in a while. Even poor girls from broken families living in tiny apartments could feel pretty, some days.

“Did Jenny’s mom give you that?” Susan had asked first thing, even before the bell rang.

Issa didn’t understand. Jenny was the most popular girl in the fifth grade, and Issa was only a regular third-grader. She shrugged, and kept shrugging at the whispers all morning.

“Oh, my god!” someone screamed in the lunch line. “You really are wearing my dress! That is too funny.”

Jenny stood right behind her, glamorous in skinny jeans and a sequined T-shirt.

“My mom bought me this dress,” Issa said, her mouth small and quiet.

“Yeah, after my mom gave it to charity!” There was laughter, sharp and cutting. "It cost two hundred dollars new. What did you pay? Twenty-five cents?"

“There’s nothing wrong with being poor,” a fourth grade boy said. Issa smiled up at him. He looked strong.

“Nothing at all,” said Jenny. “Especially when people deserve to be poor. Like, say someone’s dad was a liar and a thief and stole everyone’s money. Then a person deserves to be poor. There’s nothing wrong with Issa wearing my old dress after her dad took practically everyone’s retirement fun and ran away to the Bahamas. I think someone who takes an old lady’s whole savings probably should wear second-hand clothes, especially when that old lady lost her house and everything and had to move in with her son.”

Issa gulped. Her father had done something wrong. Hannah and Dore had made that clear, but her father was long gone. Issa and her mom had moved on. She smoothed the beautiful gold dress over her hips and picked up her tray.

“You get free lunch, don’t you?” Jenny said. “I guess my family bought that for you, too. ‘Cause we pay taxes. Unlike your dad.”

“Maybe we should take her dress back,” a girl said. “To repay you.”

Jenny laughed. “Who wants it now?”

Issa was already halfway to the door, blinking through the wet curtain over her eyes. The fourth grade boy stopped her. “It’s a pretty dress, Issa,” he said. “It looks way prettier on you than it did on Jenny. I once saw her punch a first-grader when she was wearing that dress.”

“I don’t even know my father,” Issa wailed.

VIII

He counted the money late at night, with the bed sheet tented over his head and a tiny flashlight to help him see the denominations on the bills. The pile was almost getting too big for the secret place in his dresser. Tonight, he counted three hundred eleven dollars, all of it stolen. Once, he’d had a reason for the thieving, something he had wanted to buy, but he couldn’t remember now what that thing had been, except that he didn’t want it anymore. He liked the part of taking the money best, and after that he liked the part of having the money. And the part of having a secret he liked too.

They had fired Rita for that first stack of twenties, so he guessed they would just fire the new maid if they ever noticed, but he was so much smarter than he’d been a year ago. Now he only stole dollars from his mom’s purse, or maybe sometimes a five from his dad’s wallet. He never took a ten or a twenty, except sometimes from his grandmother’s bag, because she always carried a lot, and never knew how much.

He liked the part where he was stealing, a funny Ferris wheel feel in his tummy and head, a scary and delicious upside-down feeling about being sneaky and smart. And he liked the counting part. That was a big feeling, like how it must be to be a grown-up and tell children things like whether or not they could have another Coke or stay up past bedtime to watch the end of the movie.

The bad part was after the counting, the part of not sleeping. He would cocoon himself up in the comforter, very cozy, starting with the delicious idea of the hidden pile of dollars, but something else would shove the nice feeling. There was a picture in his mind, which was the picture of his church, and the place out front where they had the Ten Commandments and it said VIII Thou Shalt Not Steal, and it was a very big picture that always had to crawl in and make him a little bit sick. It was like the game of not thinking about a pink elephant: the more you didn’t want to think about the picture the more the picture filled up the corners in your brain.

Sometimes he saw that picture in the daytime, too, but it didn’t have a sick feeling with it when he was doing the stealing, or if it did, that feeling was not as strong and proud as the amusement park part of taking the money. At night he would wonder if the bad feeling was worth the good one, and sometimes he could even go two whole weeks without stealing, but he never gave the money back and the bad part was always there, and he always got to wanting the first feeling again.

If he was going to feel bad about it anyway, he might as well do the interesting part first.

Pierced

Her little sister possessed something that she lacked. The girl couldn’t say, quite, what that thing was, but obviously, her sister was more acceptable. Her sister didn’t mind wearing dresses. Her sister didn’t prefer playing with boys.

Her sister did the things their parents expected her to do.

The girl didn’t do certain things because she didn’t like them. She hated how dresses looked, she hated how they felt compared to jeans, and more to the point, she hated being told to act like a lady. Wearing dresses meant you weren’t to run, jump, shout, fidget, or climb trees. Why would anyone choose to wear a dress, given the attendant restrictions? The little girl accepted the limitation of being a girl; that didn’t mean she must become a lady. It didn’t indicate any compulsory girliness. She was a case in point. If she had been meant to be a certain way—for instance, feminine—wouldn’t she just naturally feel, behave, embrace that label? And not being feminine, didn’t that mean that she wasn’t all the other things they thought she should be, and shouldn’t try to fake it?

Why would they force her to pretend to be something she so clearly wasn’t? They told her lying was wrong, and then they told her to lie to them.

When her sister came home from first grade insisting that she needed pierced ears, the girl wasn’t surprised. Of course her sister would want pierced ears. They were ladylike.

Her little sister got her ears pierced and proclaimed herself pleased with the results. Their parents asked the girl several times if she didn’t want her ears pierced too. The girl was emphatic that she didn’t. It didn’t even have anything to do with not feeling like a girl. Primarily, she despised needles in any form. So she really couldn’t see the point of having instruments of torture applied to her head in order to become more of something she wasn’t in the first place.

Her little sister had her pierced ears for a few months, long enough that she could take out the gold piercing earrings and wear whatever kind of earrings that she wanted. Their parents kept asking the girl if she didn’t really want pierced ears. The girl kept telling her parents she really didn’t want pierced ears. She didn’t care for jewelry, and she didn’t need one more thing to clean. She was, overall, scared of the process. She was not interested in suffering for beauty.

Her parents decided she would get her ears pierced.

She resisted, argued, complained, screamed. She tried logic and she tried volume. They took her to the mall anyway. She fought them all the way to the booth where they pierced ears. She cried.

Her parents said, “Don’t be a baby.” They compared her, unfavorably, to her little sister. They said even a first-grader could do it; there was nothing for her to fear. The girl repeated her objections: she didn’t want pierced ears, she didn’t like needles. Her parents reiterated their argument: she was a big girl and she needed to act like one.

They pierced her ears.

Coda: When the girl got to be a teenager, she horrified her parents by adding six more piercings, five on the left ear and one on the right, using the post of the piercing earring that had inflicted the original insult. She spaced them out over a period of years, snickering to herself as their horror mounted with each new hole.

Blood

The moment the little sister says, “Know what? Mom broke a plate there this morning,” I realize that I have just embedded a ceramic wedge into my heel.

I cry out and hop on one foot, grabbing my ankle and plucking the chunk of dinner plate from my muscle. There is a wince of pain and then a flow of blood poxing up the floor.

The big sister, who was once so small I had to help her up onto the toilet, catches me as I fall against the medicine cabinet. I’ve taken care of these children for fourteen years, but she got big when I wasn’t looking.

“Careful there,” she says, balancing me in one arm while extracting a Band-Aid from the cabinet with the other. She is now ten inches taller than I am, so it is easier for her to reach.

She pulls my foot up onto the counter and smoothes the Band-Aid over my heel. Then she grabs at some paper towels and erases my signature from the floor.