pair of rubber boots for the trek to work.
She wears the same torn jeans, the same army-green jacket, the same lace-up boots. The vintage suitcase rests beside her feet. She shivers in the raw air, the baby writhing and upset. She bounces the baby up and down, up and down, and I read her lips—shh. I hear women beside me, drinking their piping-hot coffee beneath oversize golf umbrellas: she shouldn’t have that baby outside. On a day like today? they sneer. What’s wrong with that girl? Where is the baby’s hat?
The purple line express soars past; the brown line rolls in and stops and the do-nothings file their way in like the moving products of an assembly line.
I linger, again, wanting to do something, but not wanting to seem intrusive or offensive. There’s a fine line between helpful and disrespectful, one which I don’t want to cross. There could be a million reasons why she’s standing with the suitcase, holding the baby in the rain, a million reasons other than the one nagging thought that dawdles at the back of my brain: she’s homeless.
I work with people who are often poverty stricken, mostly immigrants. Literacy statistics in Chicago are bleak. About a third of adults have a low level of literacy, which means they can’t fill out job applications. They can’t read directions or know which stop along the “L” track is theirs. They can’t help their children with their homework.
The faces of poverty are grim: elderly women curled into balls on benches in the city’s parks, their life’s worth pushed around in a shopping cart as they scavenge the garbage for food; men pressed against high-rise buildings on the coldest of January days, sound asleep, a cardboard sign leaned against their inert body: Please Help. Hungry. God Bless. The victims of poverty live in substandard housing, in dangerous neighborhoods; their food supply is inadequate at best; they often go hungry. They have little or no access to health care, to proper immunization; their children go to underfunded schools, develop behavioral problems, witness violence. They have a greater risk of engaging in sexual activity, among other things, at a young age and thus, the cycle repeats itself. Teenage girls give birth to infants with low birth weights, they have little access to health care, they cannot be properly immunized, the children get sick. They go hungry.
Poverty, in Chicago, is highest among blacks and Hispanics, but that doesn’t negate the fact that a white girl can be poor.
All this scuttles through my mind in the split second I wonder what to do. Help the girl. Get on the train. Help the girl. Get on the train. Help the girl.
But then, to my surprise, the girl boards the train. She slips through the doors seconds before the automated announcement—bing, bong, doors closing—and I follow along, wondering where it is that we’re going, the girl, her baby and me.
The car is crowded. A man rises from his seat, which he graciously offers to the girl; without a word, she accepts, scooting into the metal pew beside a wheeler-dealer in a long black coat, a man who looks at the baby as if it might just be from Mars. Passengers lose themselves in the morning commute—they’re on their cell phones, on their laptops and other technological gadgets, they’re reading novels, the newspaper, the morning’s briefing; they sip their coffee and stare out the window at the city skyline, lost in the gloomy day. The girl carefully removes the baby from her kangaroo pouch. She unfolds the pink fleece blanket, and miraculously, beneath that blanket, the baby appears dry. The train lurches toward the Armitage Station, soaring behind brick buildings and three and four flats, so close to people’s homes I imagine the way they shake as the “L” passes by, glasses rattling in cabinets, TVs silenced by the reverberation of the train, every few minutes of the livelong day and long into the night. We leave Lincoln Park, and head into Old Town, and somewhere along the way the baby settles down, her wailing reduced to a quiet whimper to the obvious relief of those on the train.
I’m forced to stand farther away from the girl than I’d like to be. Bracing myself for the unpredictability of the train’s movements, I peer past bodies and briefcases for the occasional glimpse—flawless ivory skin, patchy red from crying—the mother’s hollow cheeks—a white Onesies jumpsuit—the desperate, hungry suction on a pacifier—vacant eyes. A woman walks by and says, “Cute baby.” The girl forces a smile.
Smiling does not come naturally to the girl. I imagine her beside Zoe and know that she is older: the hopelessness in her eyes, for one, the lack of Zoe’s raw vulnerability, another. And of course, there is the baby (I have myself convinced that Zoe still believes babies are delivered by storks), though beside the businessman the girl is diminutive, like a child. Her hair is disproportional: cut blunt on one side, shoulder length the other. It’s drab, like an old sepia photograph, yellowing with time. There are streaks of red, not her natural hue. She wears dark, heavy eye makeup, smeared from the rain, hidden behind a screen of long, protective bangs.
The train slows its way into the Loop, careening around twists and turns. I watch as the baby is swaddled once again in the pink fleece and stuffed into the nylon coat and prepare myself for their departure. She gets off before I do, at State/Van Buren, and I watch through the window, trying not to lose her in the heavy congestion that fills the city streets at this time of day.
But I do anyway, and just like that, she’s gone.
“How was your day?” Heidi asks when I walk in the front door. I’m greeted by the funky scent of cumin, the sound of cable news from the living room TV, Zoe’s stereo blasting down the hall. On the news: record rainfall clobbering the Midwest. An accumulated collection of wet things resides by the front door: coats and umbrellas and shoes. I add to the collection and shake my head dry, like a wet dog. Moving into the kitchen I plant a kiss on Heidi’s cheek, more a force of habit than something sweet.
Heidi has changed into her pajamas already: red, flannel and plaid, her hair with its natural auburn waves deflated from the rain. Contacts out, glasses on. “Zoe!” she yells. “Dinner’s ready,” though down the hall, between the closed door of our daughter’s bedroom and the deafening sound of boy band music, there’s no chance she heard.
“What’s for dinner?” I ask.
“Chili. Zoe!”
I love chili, but these days Heidi’s chili is a vegetarian chili, loaded with not only black beans and kidney beans and garbanzo beans (and, apparently, cumin), but also what she calls vegetarian meat crumbles, to give the impression of meat without the cow. She snatches bowls from the cabinet, and begins ladling the chili. Heidi is not a vegetarian. But since Zoe began ranting about the fat in meat two weeks ago, Heidi made the family decision to go meat-free for a while. In that time we’ve had vegetarian meat loaf and spaghetti with vegetarian meatballs and vegetarian sloppy joes. But no meat.
“I’ll get her,” I say and head down the narrow hall of our condo. I knock on the pulsating door and, with Zoe’s blessing, poke my head inside to tell her about dinner and she says okay. She’s lying on her canopy bed, a yellow notebook—the one with all the teenybopper celebs she’s torn from magazines taped to the front—on her lap. She slams it shut the minute I enter, gropes for social studies flash cards, which lie beside her, ignored.
I don’t mention the crumbles. I trip over the cat on the way to Heidi’s and my bedroom, loosening my tie as I do.
Moments later, we sit at the kitchen table, and again Heidi asks me about my day.
“Good,” I say. “You?”
“I hate beans,” Zoe declares as she scoops up
