“It picks me up when I get down where you are.”
“When you get to be thirty-six and you’re alone the way I am, Peter, I think you need more than Valium.”
“I’m alone.”
“But you’re alone in your way. I’m alone in my way.”
“What’s the difference?”
Suddenly she was tired of him and tired of herself, too. “Oh, I don’t know. No difference, I suppose. I was being silly I guess.”
“You look tired.”
“Haven’t been sleeping well.”
“That doctor from the medical examiner’s office been keeping you out late?”
“Doctor?”
“Oh, come on,” Peter said. Sometimes he got possessive in a strange way. Testy. “I know you’ve been seeing him.”
“Doctor Connery, you mean?”
Peter smiled, the egg yolk still on his mustache. “The one with the blue blue eyes, yes.”
“It was strictly business. He just wanted to find out about those infants.”
“The ones who smothered last year?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the big deal? Crib death happens all the time.”
“Yes, but it still needs to be studied.”
Peter smiled his superior smile. “I suppose but—”
“Crib death means that the pathologist couldn’t find anything. No reason that the infant should have stopped breathing — no malfunction or anything, I mean. They just die mysteriously. Doctors want to know why.”
“So what did your new boyfriend have to say about these deaths? I mean, what’s his theory?”
“I’m not going to let you sneak that in there,” she said, laughing despite herself. “He’s not my boyfriend.”
“All right. Then why would he be interested in two deaths that happened a year ago?”
She shrugged and sipped the last of her coffee. “He’s exchanging information with other medical data banks. Seeing if they can’t find a trend in these deaths.”
“Sounds like an excuse to me.”
“An excuse for what?” Alison said.
“To take beautiful blondes out to dinner and have them fall under his sway.” He bared yellow teeth a dentist could work on for hours. He made claws of his hands. “Dracula; Dracula. That’s who Connery really is.”
Alison got pregnant her junior year of college. She got an abortion of course but only after spending a month in the elegant home of her rich parents, “moping” as her father characterized that particular period of time. She did not go back to finish school. She went to California. This was in the late seventies just as discos were dying and AIDS was rising. She spent two celibate years working as a secretary in a record company. James Taylor, who’d stopped in to see a friend of his, asked Alison to go have coffee. She was quite silly during their half hour together, juvenile and giggly, and even years later her face would burn when she thought of how foolish she’d been that day. When she returned home, she lived with her parents, a fact that seemed to embarrass all her high school friends. They were busy and noisy with growing families of their own and here was beautiful quiet Alison inexplicably alone and, worse, celebrating her thirty-first birthday while still living at home.
There was so much sorrow in the world and she could tell no one about it. That’s why so many handsome and eligible men floated in and out of her life. Because they didn’t understand. They weren’t worth knowing, let alone giving herself to in any respect.
She worked for a year and a half in an art gallery. It was what passed for sophisticated in a Midwestern city of this size. Very rich but dull people crowded it constantly, and men both with and without wedding rings pressed her for an hour or two alone.
She would never have known about the income maintenance job if she hadn’t been watching a local talk show one day. Here sat two earnest women about her own age, one white, one black, talking about how they acted as liaisons between poor people and the social services agency. Alison knew immediately that she would like a job like this. She’d spent her whole life so spoiled and pampered and useless. And the art gallery — minor traveling art shows and local ad agency artists puffing themselves up as artistes — was simply an extension of this life.
These women, Alison could tell, knew well the sorrow of the world and the sorrow in her heart.
She went down the next morning to the social services agency and applied. The black woman who took her application weighed at least three hundred and fifty pounds which she’d packed into lime green stretch pants and a flowered polyester blouse with white sweat rings under the arms. She smoked Kool filters at a rate Alison hated to see. Hadn’t this woman heard of lung cancer?
Four people interviewed Alison that day. The last was a prim but handsome white man in a shabby three-piece suit who had on the wall behind him a photo of himself and his wife and a small child who was in some obvious but undefined way retarded. Alison recognized two things about this man immediately: that here was a man who knew the same sorrow as she; and that here was a man painfully smitten with her already. It took him five and a half months but the man eventually found her a job at the agency.
Not until her third week did she realize that maintenance workers were the lowest of the low in social work, looked down upon by bosses and clients alike. What you did was this: you went out to people — usually women — who received various kinds of assistance from various government agencies and you attempted to prove that they were liars and cheats and scoundrels. The more benefits you could deny the people who made up your caseload, the more your bosses liked you. The people in the state house and the people in Washington, D.C., wanted you to allow your people as little as possible. That was the one and only way to keep taxpayers happy. Of course, your clients had a different version of all this. They needed help. And if you wouldn’t give them help, or you tried to take away help you were already giving them, they became vocal. Income maintenance workers were frequently threatened and sometimes punched, stabbed, and shot, men and women alike. The curious thing was that not many of them quit. The pay was slightly better than you got in a factory and the job didn’t require a college degree and you could pretty much set your own hours if you wanted to. So, even given the occasional violence, it was still a pretty good job.
Alison had been an income maintenance worker for nearly three years now.
She sincerely wanted to help.
An hour after leaving Peter in the restaurant, Alison pulled her gray Honda Civic up to the small house where earlier this morning she’d snapped photos of the black man. Her father kept trying to buy her a nicer car but she argued that her clients would just resent her nicer car and that she wouldn’t blame them.
The name of this particular client was Doreen Hayden. Alison had been trying to do a profile of her but Doreen hadn’t exactly cooperated. This was Alison’s second appointment with the woman. She hoped it went better than the first.
After getting out of her car, Alison stood for a time in the middle of the cold, slushy street. Snow sometimes had a way of making even rundown things look beautiful. But somehow it only made this block of tiny, aged houses look worse. Brown frozen dog feces covered the sidewalk. Smashed front windows bore masking tape. Rusted-out cars squatted on small front lawns like obscene animals. And factory soot touched everything, everything. It was nineteen days before Christmas — Alison had just heard this on the radio this morning — but this was a neighborhood where Christmas never came.
Doreen answered the door. Through the screen drifted the oppressive odors of breakfast and cigarettes and dirty diapers. In her stained white sweater and tight red skirt, Doreen still showed signs of the attractive woman she’d been a few years ago until bad food and lack of exercise had added thirty pounds to her fine-boned frame.