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from
Central Square
by George Packer
On the street
it was already twilight. Headlights appeared dull yellow in the
storm, utility vehicles clambered along with wheels and blades rattling
in a spray of snow and sand. There was no distinction between streets
and sidewalks, and Paula walked in a lane of slow traffic past half-buried
parked cars, crossing over without intersections or lights, climbing
mounds of plowed snow. Watching where her boots stepped, she only
noticed other people when they were right alongside her. Once she
broke into a half-jog, squeaking and slipping on the compacted snow.
She was hatless, and her eyelashes fused and glittered. She heard
her own quick breathing.
Paula had rarely been through Gladys's neighborhood. You never heard
about it. It didn't seem like part of the city, didn't even have
a name--it was just called Area 4 in the crime reports. Columbia
Street was a notorious drug bazaar, with at least a couple of shootings
and a child killed in traffic every year. No one she knew lived
here or went here, except clients. This afternoon Area 4 was almost
empty. A man clutching a package came out of a groceria.
A mother trudged up the deep sidewalk and screamed at a child she
was pulling by its little mittened hand. In the middle of Columbia
Street, two men were working under the hood of a truck. Street numbers
were missing, or hidden, or impossible to make out in the snow.
The address Paula wanted wasn't materializing where it should be;
between a badly leaning triple-decker and a boarded-up cottage with
no front steps there was just a hole, a narrow, empty space.
The foolishness of her mission began to burn on her frozen cheeks.
She was a meddling white woman with no business coming here. She
imagined someone in a tenement window laughing at her jerky movements
back and forth in the snow.
The hole turned out to be an alley. She followed it down and came
out into an asphalted courtyard where cars were parked in front
of row houses that had been concealed behind the triple-decker.
There were two dozen of them, all the doors were brown, and their
numbers were in the single and double digits--not at all what she
was looking for. She had entered some kind of separate development,
a housing project with its own system of numbers. How was she going
to find Gladys in here? She would have to knock on every door and
humiliate herself in the face of angry project dwellers.
There was a squat outbuilding in the near corner of the yard, hardly
more than a trailer. "Office" it said over the door. The word gave
her heart. She approached and brushed the snow from her hair.
No one answered her knock. She let herself in.
The room was tropical, a steambath. Imitation-wood panels seemed
to be melting off the walls, wafers of tile drooped from the ceiling.
Somewhere a heat source was blasting away. Everything looked makeshift
and flimsy, including the skinny white woman in sweatpants and T-shirt
who stood with her back turned.
"I was five days late last month--so what. Do your job, Cooper,
I've got water all over my floor."
She was making odd stiff-armed gestures at a crewcut, sour-faced
young man in shirt sleeves, who was rocking back in his chair behind
a metal desk buried under papers.
"You are a sliver up my ass, Sheila."
"I hope it hurts like hell."
"Your toilet is not a priority one. There's a storm outside, or
have you been unconscious all day? What'd you throw down, leftovers?"
Laughing, Cooper glanced at Paula. He sat forward. His face rearranged
itself. "May I help you?"
Sheila turned around to look.
"I'm trying--"
"Cooper," Sheila said, "I'm standing right here making you miserable
until somebody fixes my toilet."
"Sheila, as soon as Luis becomes available I will send him over."
Sheila glanced savagely at Paula on her way out.
Cooper shook his head and chuckled, in the manner of a long-suffering
public servant confronted with the folly of his clientele. "A normal
day at Columbia Gardens." Sweat bubbled above his lip, heat was
pounding out of an electric space heater. Paula's arrival had occasioned
delight. "Please sit down, if I'd known a visitor was coming-"
"I'm looking for a tenant named Gladys Dill. Is this where she lives?"
Cooper's smile faded. "Gladys Dill." He made a show of searching
his memory, then nodded slowly. "A Gladys Dill lives here. May I
ask who is looking for her?"
She read him at a glance: somebody's nephew, unfit for anything
except presiding over a toilet. Naturally he wanted to detain this
interesting visitor. Paula introduced herself vaguely as a social
worker.
"So you serve the poor like me. And you saw for yourself the thanks
we get. Dave Cooper, project manager."
"Which apartment does Gladys live in?"
"Gladys Dill." With self-important fussiness, the project manager
retrieved a sheet from his desk drawer and ran his finger over it.
"Gladys Dill lives in Number 7. May I ask what you'd like to see
her about?"
Paula was beginning to sweat under her coat. "I'm just checking
in. She's sick today. Have you seen her?" Cooper shook his head.
On the verge of leaving, she decided to press him. "Do you know
of any recent problems with the man she lives with?"
Cooper leaned back and threw up his hands. Dark stains circled his
armpits. "Anything humans do to each other, it goes on at Columbia
Gardens. These people have no sense of responsibility or community.
When you give people everything, they don't take care of it. They
leave trash around, they block up the toilets with rice, anything.
These days no one cares about anyone else, everyone's out for themselves.
It starts to lower you to their level, then you think: Hey, I'm
the professional here. But it's hard to maintain your ideals."
Her appearance had embarrassed Cooper, for he was in the shit now
himself. He tried to delay her but she escaped from the heat back
into snow. Someone was coming up the office steps--a Hispanic woman,
short-cropped hair, a face of bone-deep fatigue bracing for another
round of war.
Number 7 shared a flight of steps with Number 5: It was the upper-story
unit. All the blinds in both units were drawn, but there was light
in a small upstairs window. Without letting herself think, Paula
pushed the buzzer. From within she heard no sound. In the gathering
dark the building's asphalt shingles looked like the loose scales
of a disease. There wasn't any porch roof and the snow was falling
on her head and coat. She buzzed again and then wondered if the
buzzer was broken. She knocked, softly at first, not wanting to
sound rude, but the silence drove her to stronger knocking, until
the hollow-core door rattled on its hinges. Suddenly, from high
up within, she heard a door open.
There were footsteps inside. They took minutes to descend. Anything
humans did to each other they did here. How could she stop them?
Paula stood blindly behind the windowless front door. Then it opened.
"James?"
He was a big man and his shrunken long johns made him look bigger.
One hand on the doorknob, he blinked with glazed eyes into the storm.
"James? Is Gladys here?"
James's face betrayed no expression. Drunk.
"I'm her--I'm a friend of hers, James. Is she home?"
She didn't know if he heard a word she said--beyond drunk, as if
he were coming out of a dream. But he made an effort to gather himself,
straightening up.
"Gladys ain't here."
"Do you know where she is?"
His eyes had focused enough to avoid Paula's. Why didn't he slam
the door in her face? "At her therapist."
"Really?" She had to be careful, because now she knew that Gladys
was upstairs and something was wrong. She became very calm, willing
her entire being into gaining entry. "There must be some mistake,
because I'm her therapist. James, is Gladys in trouble? Was there
an accident?"
"She's asleep."
"But there's been an accident, hasn't there? I'd like to see her.
Can I?"
His body had once been muscular, now thickened in the belly and
thighs. Paula remembered that he had been a minor-league baseball
player, begun to drink, worked at a garage. This wasn't the cruel
face she had visualized while Gladys recited the litany of wrongs.
He looked puzzled and resentful and a little scared, as if trying
to answer an unfounded accusation. And still he didn't shut the
door. The initiative was hers, in his front door.
"We can still help her, James. But if she's had an accident and
we don't help her then you might lose her."
She took a step forward and put her foot on the threshold. Instead
of pushing her out, he backed into the hall and the door opened
wider.
"You can't come in," James said feebly.
"We both care about Gladys, don't we? I do, and I know you do."
She was talking without thought, riding an instinct, fearless. "And
if she needs help--neither of us wants something bad to happen to
her." James looked at the floor. "So let's make sure nothing does."
Paula stepped inside. She began to climb the high leaning stairs.
At the top, there was dull light where the apartment door stood
open. She waited to be ordered back down. Behind and below her she
heard the front door close.
The living room was small and carpeted. On the TV set there were
family portraits, and sports trophies on a shelf. She had been braced
for stench, cockroaches, a toilet overflowing filth--and yet the
tidy ordinariness of the place made her heart sink. The family pictures,
the shut-in smell of deodorizer, the matching lace curtains that
had begun to yellow, all told her that Gladys's life was being lived
here, that there was nothing temporary or fixable about it. Gladys
would not get out, nothing would change. All Paula's calculations
had been wrong.
James appeared in the room. Paula went deeper into the apartment,
down a narrow linoleum hallway, past an open door with a glimpse
of unwashed dishes in a kitchen sink, then another open door, an
unmade bed.
The room smelled of rubbing alcohol. Gladys lay with her eyes closed
and the covers drawn up to her neck. What Paula first took for the
pillow case or sheet turned out to be a piece of white gauze, raggedly
cut and Scotch-taped across her right cheek. Blood had soaked through
the gauze and more blood had run under the bandage and dried on
her jaw. A chair was pulled up to the bedside. Next to it was a
table on which stood a glass and an open bottle of vodka, surrounded
by a litter of bloodied cotton balls.
James had been drinking and cleaning the wound from the same bottle.
Got drunk, beat her up, nursed her, got drunk. In some order.
Gladys seemed to be sleeping, although for an instant Paula thought
she was dead. But approaching the bed she saw that Gladys was watching
her out of her left eye; the right eye was swollen shut in a pocket
of gleaming skin. The open eye was void of expression. Somewhere
in the room an old R&B song was playing on a badly tuned radio.
"What happened, Gladys, my God, are you all right?"
Paula sat in the chair. The eye followed her, watching. The rest
of Gladys's face was lifeless as meat, but the one-eyed stare suggested
harsh skepticism. When Paula reached to touch Gladys's shoulder,
a crust of snow fell from her sleeve onto the covers.
Fresh blood was welling under the bandage, and a trickle rolled
toward Gladys's ear. The gauze was soaked through with bright new
blood.
James was standing in the doorway, fingers playing with the button
of his thermal undershirt. He was unwilling to enter his own bedroom.
"I need to look under the bandage." Paula took his silence for permission
to undo his work. The Scotch tape peeled away easily, but when she
held the corner of gauze between her thumb and finger and began
delicately to pull back, the wound came with it. Gladys opened her
mouth and uttered a wild shout of pain, and Paula withdrew so fast
she nearly fell backward in the chair. "Sorry, sorry." Gladys's
one eye filled and rolled upward to appeal to heaven or the ceiling
for mercy. "I just need to look," Paula pleaded, more and more aware
of her own recklessness. Gladys lay rigid as she peeled back the
other piece of tape. On this side there wasn't so much dried blood
and the gauze gaped open from Gladys's cheek.
The flesh was torn in a cut that ran diagonally under the swollen
eye. Not a long cut, but Paula saw at once that it went very deep.
It was still bleeding.
"I'm going to help you," she whispered. "Don't worry." Gladys stared
back.
Paula replaced the bloody, useless swatch of gauze with James's
tape. Then she walked over and touched his arm lightly for him to
follow her into the hall. He obeyed, keeping a distance.
She didn't look at James, because what she wanted to feel was pure
hatred and she was afraid that his face would talk her out of it.
For once she wanted nothing more complicated than a villain, she
craved evil. But even his posture, leaning away from her like a
sullen boy waiting for his punishment, seemed pathetic. To her chagrin,
the hatred wouldn't flow.
"She needs to go to the hospital," she told him severely. "Did you
cut her with a knife?"
Her first mistake. James stiffened in outrage. "You think I'd cut
Gladys?"
"Then what happened?" She braced for him to throw her down the stairs.
What made her think he owed her an explanation?
"We had a fight. She provoked me."
"What did she say?" Paula made herself ask.
"I didn't mean to catch her with my ring. It was an accident. I
just meant to slap her."
"What did she say, James?" Paula pressed him. "How did she provoke
you?"
"Threatening me, saying she was leaving. That she was going to leave
me if. . . ."
Paula cringed, as if the fist were coming at her. "If you hit her
again?"
"Something like that," he murmured. From Paula's chest a groan was
wrenched free. James seemed to take it as an expression of disdain.
"She shouldn't of." He became indignant. "What is that, leave me?
I can't make it without Gladys, she knows that. Why did she say
a thing like that?"
So hit my face, cut me. I'm the one you want.
Help Gladys, she told herself.
"Where's Michael?"
"At her sister."
"I'm going to call an ambulance, James. She needs to go to the hospital."
"I fixed it, I'm taking care of her. She don't need a hospital."
"That wound is still bleeding. She could go into shock, it could
get infected. She needs to be sewn up, and her bones need to be
checked for fractures." She knew the power was hers. James or Gladys
would never dream of going into someone else's house like this.
The arrogance of education, profession, skin. "I know you tried
to fix her. Because you didn't want to hurt her like that, did you?
You don't want to lose her."
In the dark hallway she couldn't tell the effect of her words.
"I love Gladys." His voice was thick with self-pity and shame.
"You love her and you don't want to lose her."
"I don't want no police involvement."
"I'm calling an ambulance. She might die, James. She might leave
you by dying."
She knew by his breathing that he wouldn't stop her.
There was a phone on the floor in the bedroom. Paula informed 911
of a domestic violence case that required emergency assistance at
Number 7, Columbia Gardens.
"Do you need police assistance?"
James was back in the doorway.
"Yes, please."
The police arrived first, big and jangling, heedless. When they
twisted James's arms back to cuff him, Gladys rose in the bed.
"James!"
James bowed his head and slumped under the cops' control. Once he
was cuffed, they handled him with rough contempt. "Guess what, bitch?"
one of them told him. "You're going to jail."
As James was led away, Paula and a woman officer had to restrain
Gladys. Her cries became howls. "Why did you do that? It wasn't
none of your business. Why did you do that?"
"What he did to you wasn't right," Paula answered lamely.
When the EMTs bustled into the apartment they were trailed by Cooper,
the project manager. He had put on an air of responsible authority,
but Paula knew that he was enjoying the crisis. As the EMTs struggled
under the heavy load of Gladys on their stretcher, Cooper's eyes
met Paula's and his lips flickered: See? You're in the shit just
as deep as me.
Paula rode in back with the EMT. Once she tried to take Gladys's
hand and Gladys yanked it away.
In triage at Cambridge Hospital, a woman in street clothes inspected
the wound and immediately declared Gladys a Grade 2, which meant
that she had to be seen within fifteen minutes. A nurse walked her
into the E.R. Paula was sent back through the sliding doors into
the lounge, where she sat with a pair of Hispanic parents, whose
little son was sniffling between them, and a pretty young black
woman who sat by herself. In the corner of the room a television
was on, a local news reporter was shouting over the noise of a snowplow.
Once, when Paula was knocked off her bicycle and fractured her wrist,
she was taken to Mt. Auburn Hospital, down on the river. She never
told the EMT; it was where people like her went. The public hospital
was for Area 4, Columbia Gardens, for Gladys. This wasn't remarkable,
everyone knew it. Her expedition was coming to an end. Soon she
would be returned to herself.
"Would you come, please?"
The nurse, a big-boned, harassed-looking woman with blond hair,
was addressing Paula.
"She won't say anything," she told Paula on their way through the
brightness of the emergency room. "They come in looking like that
and they forget how to talk. We need some basic information."
Outside the suture room Paula gave Gladys's name, address, and approximate
age, while the nurse scribbled on a chart. All she knew of Gladys's
medical history was depression, addiction, and high blood pressure.
She had probably violated confidentiality, but she was desperate
to seem competent, to be of use.
"What's your relation to her?" the nurse asked suddenly.
"I'm Gladys's therapist."
Pen poised over her chart, the nurse nodded in some private confirmation
of Paula's role in the foolishness.
"Did you expect something like this to happen?"
"I-" Paula dropped her head. "He's been abusive before."
The suture room was empty at 6:00 on a Thursday evening, except
for Gladys and the policewoman, who was squatting by her bed when
the nurse pulled back the curtain.
"We can't get a restraining order if you won't talk to us." Seeing
the nurse and Paula, she stood up. "I told her about the Victims
of Violence program here at the hospital, but . . ."
"It's up to them," the nurse said. "They have to want to help themselves."
They stood around the bed: nurse, cop, and therapist, three white
women in social services, two in uniform, trying to help a black
woman, who gazed mutely at the curtain beyond them. The wound was
exposed, a red angry gash, staring like another eye.
"The doctor will be here very soon," the nurse told Gladys, "and
he'll sew you up."
The nurse went about her business with swabs and ice pack and chart.
Her job was Gladys's face. Paula and the policewoman went out into
the hall.
"Talk to me about her situation."
Paula recounted the varieties of abuse. She tried to describe the
particular quality of Gladys's courage and fear, the trap she was
caught in. The officer was nodding, growing impatient. It was impossible
to convey the nature of their sessions, the hints and shadows, the
starts and stops, the love and the infinitesimally slow progress,
so that it would fit on a police report.
She didn't mention their last session, the breakthrough session,
the plan for Gladys to change her life.
"Are they going to charge him?" she asked.
"Don't you think they should?"
Paula started to weigh the problem of James's anger, its relation
to his shame--but with a woman like this you had to know your mind.
"In the long run, it would be better for her."
"In the short run, he ought to be locked up," the cop said. "But
it's going to be tough to press charges if she doesn't cooperate."
"What about a restraining order?"
"She has to file a complaint. You're her therapist, maybe you can
work on it with her."
The cop looked to be Paula's age, dark and stout and ponytailed.
By her accent she was a native of the city, a daughter of the working
class, and for Paula's occupation she seemed to hold a reserve of
irony, maybe even contempt. The radio on her hip was crackling.
Like the nurse, she had other business. Sew up a wound, lock up
a boyfriend. If they don't talk, move on to the next one. The mind,
Paula's business, exasperated these women, its mysteries only got
in the way of their work. Paula had taken pride in being able to
unlock Gladys's secrets. She had seen her through moods in the face
of which these women would be helpless. Most people would rather
deal with the criminal or with dying than the mental states that
were Paula's daily work. But just now she wanted to trade in the
session room for the E.R., her progress notes for a chart and swab,
her Kleenex box for a police report and a pair of cuffs.
"We'll call if we need more information." The policewoman's wide
blue hips, adorned with radio, baton, cuffs, and gun, pivoted and
swung out of the emergency room.
Paula returned to the
lounge. But she wasn't ready for it to be over, to be confronted
with herself. She went back into triage and won permission to
wait outside the suture room. She stood by the door the way James
had stood in his own bedroom door, guilty, superfluous. Nurses
and doctors passed in the hall. A doctor came out of the suture
room; his nametag said Holtzman and he wore a Garfield button
on the front of his white coat. Paula moved toward him, but she
was at a loss for something to say.
"Yes?"
"Is she . . ."
"I've sewn her up. We'll keep her overnight and watch that eye."
He was bearded, kind, busy. She would have served gladly as his
nurse. Fine should have been this man. She wanted the doctor to
linger. He must have something wise to tell her. That she had
done all she could, hadn't caused it, couldn't have stopped it.
That she might have saved Gladys's life today. What she wanted
was for him to reach over and touch her face.
"Is there a fracture?" she asked.
"X rays came out negative." He was slipping away down the hall.
"Could you tell me about Victims of Violence?"
"A little legal advice," he said, "and a lot of therapy."
Dr. Holtzman disappeared around the corner. By the nurses' station,
a resident and a woman in scrubs were looking at Paula with vague
curiosity. The big-boned nurse came out of suture. "Go home, honey,
there's nothing you can do here. She's going to be OK. Go do something
fun. I've gotta work till three in the morning."
Then Paula remembered. It was 6:30. She was already half an hour
late, he was waiting in the snow--but the stab of guilt had nothing
to do with that. It was the frivolity of having a date with a
man, a married man, while Gladys lay in there. She walked out
of the hospital into the cold night and her face was blazing.
Her tears filled her with shame. It was shameful to be human with
these useless feelings, to feel these things and do nothing, to
charge in and smash things up. She started walking without knowing
where she was going, wanting the snow to cover her, hide her,
make her cold and hard and pure.
George
Packer was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He
graduated from Yale and has worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in
Togo, West Africa, a carpenter in Boston, and a writing instructor
at Harvard, Bennington, and Emerson. He is the author of The
Village of Waiting, a memoir about his Peace Corps years, and
The Half Man, a novel.
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