The Moth (40 page)

So I went to this place called Health Skills, and it was a temp agency. They gave me my first assignment, and one of the things that they did not tell me was that when you’re the new kid on the block you get all the worst assignments. So, as a sitter, for the first few assignments that I had, I would have only terminally ill patients—people that were dying.

I take this job. On the first day, I walk up to this door. It’s a frame house on cinder blocks with a little front porch in a working-class, all-white neighborhood. So I knock on the door, and the door has a window in it, and I see this woman peer out, and she’s this thin, skinny, Sissy Spacek–looking woman. And she looks at me and she says, “Go away!”

And so I say, “Hi, ma’am. I’m here from Health Skills. I’m here because you needed a sitter.” I think that will help, but she says, “Go away! I don’t want you here!” And so I try to explain this to her again, and she says, “Fine!” So what she does is she goes to the phone, and she calls the company. I’m standing outside. It’s hot. It’s July, and it’s kind of sticky, and I’m waiting on her to get through this phone call, and finally she just slams down the phone, comes to the door, and she opens it and lets me in.

So I am walking through this house, which is a lot like a
railroad apartment in New York. You have to walk through the living room and kitchen to get to the bedroom, and the bathroom is off to the side, so you can see all the way through the house. We make our way to the back of the house, and I get to the bedroom, and I am hit with this horrible stench, and I had to immediately stop my own gag reflex. The air is filled with the smell of bile, and I look on the bed, and there’s this man lying on a hospital bed in an otherwise normal-looking bedroom, and he has breathing tubes and IVs and that kind of stuff in him, and he’s completely unconscious. And the breathing machine is working, and it’s pumping up this brown mousse. It kind of looks like styling foam. It’s coming out of his mouth and nose. And what I discover is that this man is dying of cirrhosis of the liver, and in the final stages the liver and the bile are breaking down. It’s building up as fluid in the lungs, and the body is trying desperately to get rid of that so that he can breathe. So that’s what’s coming up out of his mouth and nose. And so every fifteen minutes this process goes through, and I have to stand there and clean it up. So me being an overachiever and wanting this job and wanting to do well, I throw myself into the job, and I’m helping. This woman who let me in is very aggressive. She doesn’t say anything, but she’s not very kind to me.

So we clean up this man, and there’s nothing for me to do but to just wait. So I say, “Maybe I should just sit down.” And I look at this woman, and she’s staring at me with hate pouring from her eyes. I don’t know what the hell I’ve done. I’ve just done my job, and I’ve done it pretty well. So I look at her, and I say, “Look, I can get this, I’m fine now.”

She just turns around, doesn’t say a word to me, and walks right back down that hallway and goes and sits on the couch. And even though she’s sitting across from the TV, she’s sitting
in profile so she can see down the hallway, and she’s staring at me—she’s got her eye on me. I try to take all this in.

I sit down, and I’m looking around the room, and it’s filled with this nice Shaker furniture, and it’s got a floor-to-ceiling Confederate flag behind the man’s bed.

And the thing that I have to tell you is that when you are depressed, it takes a little while for the gears to kick in, and that’s what happened to me at this moment. So I’m taking in the furniture—there’s a lovely armoire, and I’m so Martha Stewart, I’m into decorating and everything—so I’m actually kind of impressed because it’s very sparse, but very nice. And they have a little coat tree, and I notice that on the coat tree there’s this beautiful robe. Kind of like a church robe except it’s white, and it has a round circle with a white cross on it and a hood. But I’m still not grasping what’s happening because I am totally amazed by this hood and the buttonhole stitching that is going around the eyes of the hood. So I’m not paying attention. I was like,
You know, maybe I should take up sewing…

And then I looked down the hallway, and the woman is still looking at me. And the way we deal with things socially in Indiana is that we try to normalize things. So that’s what I did, I thought,
OK. I’m just going to sit here. And oh! There’s a table and there’s a book on it. Hooray! I have something to do now.

So I pick up this book, I’m flipping through the book, and it looks like a Bible because it’s got gilt lettering on the outside, and I thought,
Oh great! It’s a Bible! I know that! You know, Genesis, Corinthians, Ephesians; Proverbs for wisdom, Psalms if you’re sad.
So I open up the book, and I’m trying to look for something peaceful and happy to read, and instead I come across this horrible-looking manifesto that talks about the superiority
of the white race and how we need to annihilate everyone but them for their own safety. And I shut the book.

And it finally hits me that I am in the home of an honest-to-god Klansman, and I am a black woman.

And I look down the hallway at this woman, and she’s looking back at me like,
Do you get this now?
And I’m like,
Oh shit!

And then right at this moment, the mousse starts coming up out of this man’s mouth and nose again, and I think,
Thank God, thank God! I’ve got something to do, I’ve got something to do!

So I run over to this man, and my brain is racing because I’m wigging out. And I’m cleaning him up, and the stench is awful, and I’m looking at this man, I’m looking very calm and professional—cleaning, cleaning!

But inside my mind, I’m like,
Oh my God! I hope he doesn’t wake up. Holy shit! I’m so glad he’s not conscious, I am helping to clean him up and he probably hates me and, you know, I don’t hate him personally, but my people hate him.
And I’m feeling all of this anxiety, and then I think,
Dude, you cannot do this right now because you need a job, OK? Because you have got to get out of the garage, and you are so depressed you can’t do anything else. You do not have time for a Rosa Parks moment. You have to get through with this. OK?

I think to myself,
You know, I’m an overachiever. I can totally do this. I am not going to let a little racism stand in my way. I am going to get this done, I am going to do it well, I am going to get an A
+,
I am going to get a check, and I am going to get the fuck up out of here, OK!?!

And that is exactly what I did. I did that every fifteen minutes for four hours that day. For
four
hours. And I sat there, and I watched him, and after a while the woman went to go get
something to eat, and she did get distracted by the TV, and I came back the next day.

I came back, and she opened the door, and we went through the ritual again, and she wasn’t quite as unfriendly. I guess she recognized that I was not going to kill the man. So we kept on with this routine, and she did take a little bit of rest. And I came back again a third day, and the third day she was even more tired, and I realized that this woman was not getting any rest unless I was there to take care of him; that nobody would come to save her, or to help her, which I thought was really sad.

And by the fourth day, she just came to the door and immediately lay down, and I did the job, and I had to wake her up at the end of that four hours.

And then on the fifth day, the temp agency called me, and they said, “Steph, we don’t need you anymore.” The man had passed away. But the lady had called to leave me a message.

She wanted me to know that I’d given him the best care that he’d had since he left the hospital, and the most peace and rest that she got was when I was there, and she wanted to thank me personally.

And I thought,
Man, that is amazing.
And she left me a tip, which the temp agency would not let me keep.

But a few months later, I realized I really did get a tip and it was this: the knowledge that we had come together, she and I, these two incredibly desperate people in a highly charged, highly provocative situation. And it could have been a train wreck; it could have been a mess. But instead, we came together, and our lives touched, and in that touching we changed the trajectory of our lives just a little bit.

I’d like to think that I changed the way that she thought about people of color—that we weren’t whatever it was that
those people were teaching her, and that she might reconsider the prejudices that she had. And for myself, I got a job that gave me something to do every day, which I desperately needed. I had left Indiana to change the world. And I didn’t; I couldn’t. But I realized that even if I couldn’t change
the
world, I could change a little piece of the world that I was in, and that was enough for me.

Stephanie Summerville
is a musical theatre performer living in New York. She is a singer with the Secret City, an Obie Award–winning art salon held monthly at Dixon Place. She is also a proud graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and an alum of the New York Shakespeare Festival Lab at the Joseph Papp Public Theater.

JENIFER HIXSON

I
reached over and secretly undid my seat belt. And when his foot hit the brake at the red light, I flung open the door, and I ran. I had no shoes on. I was crying. I had no wallet. But I was okay because I had my cigarettes. And I didn’t want any part of freedom if I didn’t have my cigarettes.

When you live with someone who has a temper—a very bad temper—a very, very bad temper—you learn to play around that. You learn,
This time, I’ll play possum, and next time I’ll just be real nice, or I’ll say yes to everything.

Or you make yourself scarce, or you run. And this was one of the times when you just run.

And as I was running, I thought,
This was a great place to jump out
, because there were big lawns and cul-de-sacs.

Sometimes he would come after me and drive and yell at me to “get back in, get back in!”

And I was like,
No, I’m outta here. This is great.
And I went and hid behind a cabana, and he left.

And I had my cigarettes.

I started to walk around this beautiful neighborhood. It was
ten-thirty at night, and it was silent and lovely. There was no sound, except for sprinklers. And I was enjoying myself. Enjoying the absence of anger, and enjoying these few hours I knew I’d have of freedom.

Just to perfect it, I thought,
I’ll have a smoke.
And then it occurred to me, with horrifying speed,
I don’t have a light!

Just then, as if in answer, I see a figure up ahead.
Who is that? It’s not him. Okay. They don’t have a dog. What are they doing out on this suburban street?

And the person comes closer, and I can see it’s a woman. Then I can see she has her face in her hands. Oh, she’s crying. And then she sees me, and she composes herself. And she gets closer, and I see she has no shoes on. She has no shoes on, and she’s crying, and she’s out on the street.

I recognize her, though I’ve never met her.

And just as she passes me, she says, “You got a cigarette?”

And I say, “You got a light?”

And she says, “Damn, I hope so.”

And then she digs into her cutoffs in the front. Nothing. Then digs in the back. And then she has this vest on that has fifty million little pockets on it, and she’s checking and checking, and it’s looking bad. It’s looking very bad. She digs back in the front again, deep, deep, and she pulls out a pack of matches that have been laundered at least once.

We open it up, and there is
one match
inside.

Oh my God, it’s like NASA now.
How we gonna do it?
And we hunker down. We crouch on the ground.
Where’s the wind coming from?
We’re stopping. I take out my cigarettes.
Let’s get the cigarettes ready.

“Oh, my brand,” she says. Not surprising.

We both have our cigarettes at the ready. She strikes once. Nothing. She strikes again.
Yes!
Fire. Puff. Inhale. Mmmm. The sweet kiss of that cigarette.

And we sit there, and we’re loving the nicotine, and we both need this right now, I can tell. The night’s been tough.

Immediately we start to reminisce about our thirty-second relationship:

“I didn’t think that was gonna happen.”

“Me neither.”

“Oh, man, that was close.”

“I’m so lucky I saw you.”

“Yeah.”

Then she surprises me by saying, “What was the fight about?”

And I say, “What are they all about?”

And she says, “I know what you mean. Was it a bad one?”

And I say, “You know like, medium.”

“Oh.”

And we start to trade stories about our lives. We’re both from up north. We’re both kind of newish to the neighborhood (this is in Florida). We both went to college—not great colleges, but, man, we graduated.

And I’m actually finding myself a little jealous of her because she has this really cool job washing dogs. She had horses back home, and she really loves animals, and she wants to be a vet.

And I’m like, “Man, you’re halfway there!”

I’m a waitress at an ice cream parlor. I don’t know where I want to be, but I know it’s not that.

And then it gets a little deeper, and we share some other stuff about what our lives are like. Things that I can’t ever tell people at home. This girl, I can tell her the really ugly stuff,
and she understands how it can still be pretty. She understands how nice he’s gonna be when I get home, and how sweet that’ll be.

We are chain-smoking off each other. “Oh, that’s almost out. Come on…”

We go through the entire pack until it’s gone.

Then I say, “You know what? This is a little funny, but you’re gonna have to show me the way to get home.” Because although I’m twenty-three years old, I don’t have my driver’s license, and I just jumped out right when I needed to.

And she says, “Well, why don’t you come back to my house, and I’ll give you a ride?”