Authors: Liz Murray
Breaking Night (37 page)
The thought of a clean slate was thrilling, especially after looking at the mess I had created. With all the things that had been difficult, it was one blessing to count on, the knowledge that what I did from this moment on didn’t have to depend on what I had done before. Back on Nineteenth Street, I asked April to give me a copy of my blank Prep transcripts, which was a simple printout of my name on Prep stationery and rows of blank columns waiting to be filled by my future grades. The JFK ones I handed in to April and never looked at again. The blank ones I kept with me at all times. They were a reminder that I was, day by day, writing my future. Sleeping in a hallway around Bedford Park later that week, I took out my blank transcripts and filled in the grades I wanted, making neat little columns of A’s. If I could picture it—if I could take out these transcripts and look at them—then it was almost as if the A’s had already happened. Day by day, I was just catching up with what was already real. My future A’s, in my heart, had already occurred. Now I just had to get to them.
A memory of Ma helped me decide this. The only papers I’d ever seen that were as “official” looking as transcripts were Ma’s short stack of documents to verify qualification for welfare. Ma’s caseworkers were always so difficult, so technical with us. And the walls of those depressing welfare offices, for some reason, were always painted puke green, a color made uglier by the harsh fluorescent lights and the iron bars on the large windows. There were so many people waiting in those offices—dozens, hundreds. When the hard little seats filled up, people sat on windowsills or on the floor; they stood or they paced.
Ma, Lisa, and I would wait for hours, too, one of dozens of other families all nervously checking and rechecking their own short stack of vital documents. When it was finally our turn, what I can remember most about being hoisted onto Ma’s lap is the bizarre interaction between Ma and her caseworker. It did not matter what Ma was saying. All that the caseworker focused on were Ma’s documents. Birth certificates, notarized letters, doctors’ notes to verify mental illness, our lease. Ma’s actual words, and particularly Ma herself, were invisible to this woman, a woman who had the power to give or take away our food, rent, and safety. All that it boiled down to was this: either we had the exact documents required for approval, or we did not. There was no in between. And even if we were missing only something small, like a second set of copies or one of Ma’s doctors’ notes, a single error could make all of our effort—the document gathering, the travel, and the hours of waiting—irrelevant. One missing or invalid document and our file was shut, tossed. They called “next,” and we had to come back another day to start from scratch. All because the documents were either correct or they weren’t, period.
How was this different from my high school transcripts? It wasn’t. I thought, if one day, maybe just maybe I wanted to go to college, some person in a suit in a very different kind of office would open
my
file, read my documents, and either I would have the qualifications, or I wouldn’t. Yes or no, and nothing in between. And if I didn’t, my file would be shut and they would call “next.” I would be out of luck. Some things in life, I’d learned, were nonnegotiable. Documents as official as these transcripts were big, they were my yes or no, they were my options. They were my ticket. Now I was going to think of everything I did at Prep inside the framework of my transcripts—and that turned out to mean everything.
Later, there would be times when I did not want to go to school. I wanted to sleep on Fief’s floor and not get up. Bobby and Jamie were hanging out, walking around the Village. People were cutting school, and I was missing all the fun. There would be times I did not want to sit in a chair all day long while the fresh air was outside and I was missing out. But all I had to do was think of my transcripts, and I would go to school, on time, every day, for the first time in my life. Either I would have the qualifications or I wouldn’t—and besides, my friends weren’t going to pay my rent.
WAITRESS-MIDTOWN
Part-time server wanted for busy midtown coffee & sandwich shop, “can-do attitude” a must, long hours required.
BABYSITTER & HOUSEKEEPER
Upper East Side family seeking female-only applicants, good with house chores and patient with children, must be flexible, and
must
speak English!
PEN IN HAND, I COMBED THROUGH THE CLASSIFIED ADS AS I SAT IN
the health clinic waiting room of a local youth organization called The Door. I’d been thumbing through
The Village Voice
for days. My focus was on finding food, work, health services, and tutoring. My limits were being underage (I wouldn’t turn seventeen until September), with the status of runaway. My fear was that I’d attract the attention of Child Welfare and get sent back to the group home, so I did everything I could
not
to call attention to myself, as I mined the city for resources. Through word of mouth, mostly, I found some good leads. The Door was one of the best things that could have happened to me.
On Broome Street in lower Manhattan, The Door is in a three-story building and is dedicated completely to meeting young people’s needs. You just had to be under twenty-one, which was perfect—no questions asked. Frequently, I left The Door with pantry packs bursting with food: Cheerios, peanut butter, raisins, and bread. I’d slip these supplies into my backpack and walk around Manhattan collecting applications for employment in convenience stores, gas stations, and retail outlets. Five days a week at 5:30 p.m., The Door served free hot meals on the second floor. After long tiresome days spent in search of work, I made it a regular thing to stop by The Door for dinner. This way I didn’t have to steal from C-Town as much. Instead, I’d sit down, anonymous in the crowd of young people at the cafeteria-style tables, eat my chicken and mashed potatoes, and review my job options.
On a weekday afternoon, I sat in The Door’s waiting area, thumbing through the classifieds. The paper offered all kinds of positions, but mostly ones for people with experience and education—I had neither. So I searched for ads that emphasized words like
ambitious
,
hard-working
, and
flexible
. The ad for a non-profit environmental agency called New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) stood out:
“Do you care about the environment? Do you like working with people? Are you passionate about making a difference? Then NYPIRG may be the right place for you. Call to schedule your interview to canvass for a cause today. . . . Remember, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem!”
Earn from $350-$500* a week making the world a better place!
No prior experience required.
*salary commission-based.
I didn’t know what the word
commission
meant, but I could really use $350 to $500 a week. I ripped the ad from
The Village Voice
and shoved it into my back pocket.
NYPIRG became my summer job, and the job of dozens of students on summer break from college. As the youngest and worst-dressed person in the room, I was worried that I wouldn’t get hired, but everyone got hired. Apparently your organization can do that if the only pay that employees receive is a percentage of the money they raise. So I learned the meaning of
commission.
Your salary was a percentage of what you earned. If you didn’t raise anything, you didn’t make anything. If you raised a lot, you made a lot. I had to wonder, how hard was it to raise money?
It
was
possible to make a living at this job, a woman named Nicole, a veteran of NYPIRG, assured us during orientation. The small downtown conference room was packed with college students who looked like they were making identical hobo-chic fashion statements: white people experimenting with dreadlocks, hemp jewelry, and T-shirts emblazoned with a variety of social causes. Bleeding-heart private school students dressed like casual slobs, with holes in their expensive clothing—their efforts to look hobo-poor were painfully obvious to me. That worked out fine on my end, being that I was probably the closest thing in the room to a real hobo. Most of them had money; I could tell by their Urban Outfitters bags, expensive jewelry, and high-end mountain shoes and Birkenstocks. But if they liked to project their interpretation of poverty in their personal style, that was okay with me.
Nicole explained how the job would work. Five days a week, following an afternoon briefing on their latest environmental campaign progress, NYPIRG would pack all of us canvassers (as we were called) eight at a time into vans, and drive us to key fund-raising areas in New York State. Our job was to knock on doors and engage everyday citizens in NYPIRG’s fight against cancer, which was linked to indiscriminate spraying of pesticides in residential neighborhoods, according to a research study that Nicole waved around throughout her spiel. NYPIRG was busy lobbying to pass something called the Neighborhood Notification Bill. As canvassers, we would stand on people’s doorsteps and hold their attention while we repeated what we’d learned at each afternoon briefing. Then we’d invite them to join us in the fight against cancer with “membership,” which meant we asked them for money. Our paycheck was a percentage of what we raised. We were given copies of the key research study on our way out the door, along with individual clipboards and temporary IDs.
In the van, northbound on the Henry Hudson Parkway, I was sure I’d made a mistake in being there. We each practiced what was called our “rap”; I was by far the worst.
“Hi, um, my name is Liz, um . . . I’m from the New York Public Institute of Research. I mean, Research of Public Interest . . . I’m here to fight cancer with you . . . um?”
The others were so much better than me. The girl next to me, Anna from Scarsdale, was polished on her very first run: “I want to invite you to join our campaign to combat the effects of these toxic chemicals. Together, we have to stand up as a community.”
I was struck by how perfect and put-together she looked with her expensive pearl earrings and canvas bag, and by the way she strung words together, compared to my fumbling speech. It was intimidating. And what was that word?
Combat?
Wasn’t that the brand name of the stuff we used to kill roaches on University? Obviously, from the way she used it, it must have another meaning. I took out my journal and began keeping a list of words I overheard from my coworkers.
Each of them spoke eloquently, expressing themselves using confident body language and rich vocabulary. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them, especially this one guy named Ken.
I both liked and felt incredibly uncomfortable around Ken. He was nothing like the guys from my neighborhood, and he made me nervous. Ken was clean-cut and wholesome. He was also gorgeous. He had shaggy, sandy-blond hair and mint-colored eyes, like green ice with flecks of gold in them. He was tall, and his skin was a golden olive that contrasted with the bright white Human Equality T-shirt he wore. On summer break from Brown University, Ken was recently single, out of a long-term relationship, I’d overheard him telling Anna.
Somehow, we ended up seated next to each other in the van and were told by our field manager, Shen, to practice our “rap” together. Underneath my black Korn T-shirt and thick black jeans, I was sweating heavily, pulling my hair back into a ponytail so I had something to do with my hands. Ken went right after I did, and he stumbled on his words, too, but managed to be compelling anyway. “Good job,” I said with more enthusiasm than I had intended. My face flushed red with embarrassment. “Thanks,” Ken said, smiling sincerely. He also blushed a bit when he fumbled his words, and laughed at himself. I tried, but could not stop looking his way.
Shen “cut turf” (assigned us designated areas), depending on his assessment of our earning potential. Less skilled canvassers spent their evenings on “dry” blocks, those areas with dilapidated houses and sparse amounts of annual renewals. Those more skilled were given larger houses that looked like castles, whose fat lawns were golf-course green, punctuated by things like fountains and lawn jockey statues. It took no less than five minutes to walk from driveway to doorbell in those places.
That very first day, I was slated for dry turf, my earning potential apparently assessed as low. They gave me a street that was falling to pieces, with chain-link fences rusting around ratty front yards. The quota was $120 for the day—good luck! But to Shen’s surprise, when the van came back to pick me up at nine p.m., I had collected $240; a neat little row of checks were pinched to the top of my clipboard, their watermark background making a rainbow of pastel along the chrome clip.
“Is this good enough?” I asked Shen, holding my clipboard up to the orange glow of the van’s brake lights, the summer sky falling dark blue as we stood, canopied under heavy treetops. He read my total once, then twice, and said, “Yeah, it’s great.” After that day, I was assigned to the wealthier houses, where my daily amounts continued to rise, often topping several hundred dollars for the night.
I was pegged as highly unlikely for this kind of success at NYPIRG, since even the most polished and gregarious types faltered after one too many doors slammed in their faces. No one said the job was easy. Interpretations of my success flew around the office: “Liz is passionate about the environment.” “She had the most training.” “She probably had experience before coming here.”
None of that was true, nor did my success have much to do with skill. The reason behind my success was simple. I was hungry, and for me, this was no summer vacation. Unlike my coworkers, who looked forward to weekend outings and happy hour, I was stocking up on supplies before the winter, saving every penny, sink or swim, packing for the long haul. I needed this. My intention was to save every dollar so that I could get through the months ahead of me when my school schedule might prohibit me from working. For the first time, I was making my daily life fit into a bigger purpose: climbing out of the place I’d been born into. That was my edge.
There was also another kind of hunger I felt, one that was harder to put my finger on. It had something to do with the newness of all of this, the rush I got from experiencing these new places. Never before had I seen big houses with cars parked in endless gravel driveways, children looping bikes down tree-lined streets in the sun. The way housewives would open their front doors to me, all put-together looking, their children clinging waist-high, steadying themselves on the sturdiness of their mothers’ hips. I relished the
whoosh
of air-conditioning seeping from their homes, cooling my cheeks and forearms as I held the clipboard, book bag on my back with all my belongings inside, as I stole glimpses into their lives. It was thrilling, to see how people built a life so different from what I’d known. It filled me with a longing to build the same; it was inspiring to me. There was a sense of adventure in it, an exhilaration in every door opened, every conversation, each new encounter. I went up and down the sidewalks of those suburban neighborhoods captivated, curious to see what could possibly be next.
But the best days, by far, were the ones when Ken and I had our turf right near each other. I lived for those days. As soon as Shen pulled the van away, Ken and I would secretly catch up with each other to share turf, sometimes hitting doors together as a team. We did not plan who would do the talking; instead, a sense of partnership just flowed. We were good together. Fund-raising, that is. We could knock out a day’s quota, and then some. If we finished early enough, we’d go find someplace just to hang out, to sit in the shade and talk—though I was deeply unsure of what I could possibly talk to Ken about. Would I tell him about Ma? University Avenue? How I left the motel just in time to save myself from Carlos? That I’d slept on the D train that week? All of that didn’t seem to have a place in our conversations. Not when the sun was shining and you could smell fresh soil from the park and hear the cicadas buzzing in the treetops. Not when Ken was smiling like that. If talking about my life would be a downer, then why talk about it? So I let Ken do the talking—about his family, his ex-girlfriend, and lots about Brown University. I soaked it all in, took in his joy and his kindness. We’d do impersonations of Nicole or Shen and crack each other up, laugh at the job, laugh at life—just laugh until we couldn’t laugh anymore.
It was easy to laugh around Ken. Easy to believe that a life surrounded by these storybook houses, perfect lawns, and sunny days was just as possible as the life I’d already known.
One day in August, I was taking the A train to fill out some paperwork at Prep and I saw Sam. She was on the C; we spotted each other the very moment the subway doors closed; our cars were directly across the platform that separated us. Like two horses running side by side on a racetrack, the subway cars pulled out and began to run parallel through the dark tunnels, dipping in and out of sync. I planted my open hands flat on the glass window of the door, and Sam did the same. The ridiculousness of the encounter made us both laugh. Sam smiled and stuck her middle finger up at me; her hair was green, tied up in two buns on top of her head, and she was wearing a long skirt and a lacy maroon camisole. She looked well groomed and was a much healthier weight than when I’d last seen her. I motioned with my hands for her to get out at the next stop, but the pillars in the subway tunnels kept blocking our view. We got out at Fourteenth Street and ran to hug each other, tight. She smelled of soap and baby powder. I was shaking.
“Where you been?” she yelled, smacking my shoulder. Back at the motel, our friendship had been strained by the stress of Carlos. But in the subway on a cool August afternoon months later, our friendship was new again. I loved her like she was my sister.
“Around,” I told her. “I’m getting myself together, actually, that’s where. I got a job and all. Wanna take a walk with me somewhere?”
We walked through Chelsea, toting our book bags. I was taken aback when she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and began smoking, but I didn’t say anything about it. With all the time that had passed since I’d seen her, I couldn’t gauge if we were still close enough to give our opinions about anything too personal. We walked and she caught me up on her life. Group home living wasn’t all that bad; the girls had become her family. She was going to marry Oscar for sure. Not that they had official plans just yet, but she could just feel it. Lilah, a group home girl from Staten Island, would be maid of honor, after all they had been through together.