Bushwick

There were six of us in three bedrooms on Halsey Street and we had a system for the bathroom that was more organized than the hospital.

Pearlie and Marva took the front room because they came first and paid the deposit. Blossom and Icilda had the middle. Dawn and I had the back, which was the coldest and which had the window that looked at a wall, and which we did not complain about because Dawn worked nights and I worked days and we were almost never in it at the same time anyway.

Nobody’s family knew it was six. In the letters it was always my place or the apartment, and if a photograph had to be taken it was taken in the front room, one person at a time, sitting in the good chair by the lamp, and you would swear looking at those photographs that six different women in Brooklyn each had a nice apartment with the same lamp in it.

· · ·

This was 1976 and into 1977.

Pearlie was a licensed practical nurse and the only one of us who was what she said she was. Marva and Blossom and I were aides at the same hospital on different floors, which pays what it pays. Dawn was at a nursing home in Queens doing nights. Icilda told her mother she was at the hospital with the rest of us, and Icilda cleaned offices downtown from six in the evening until two in the morning, and had done for three years, and every one of us knew and not one of us ever said it in front of her.

That is the part people who have not lived it do not understand. It was not that we lied to our families. It is that we all told the same size of lie, and we knew each other’s, and we held them for each other, and the holding was a kind of love.

Every fortnight we walked down to the place on Broadway and sent it home. A money order, and the number on it, and a letter, and every Christmas a barrel.

· · ·

Christmas of 1977 was the first year that none of us could go.

Airfare had gone up. Pearlie had been saving and then her brother needed something and the saving went. Marva’s daughter had started school at home and the school wanted money. My mother’s roof needed sheets of zinc, and I had sent the zinc instead of coming, and had spent the week telling myself that a roof lasts longer than a visit.

So it was the six of us in the apartment on Christmas Eve with a chicken and a ham and a bottle of sorrel and a bottle of something stronger, and we had done all the talking about home that we could stand, and at about ten o’clock Pearlie, who never cried, put her glass down and said:

“I don’t have it.”

Nobody said what.

“I send my mother forty last fortnight and I don’t have it,” she said. “I borrow it from the Cuban woman on the second floor and I owe her fifty for the forty, and I been doing it since August, and I cannot stop, because if I stop them will know something wrong, and if them know something wrong my mother will worry, and my mother have pressure.”

She looked around at us.

“So that is me,” she said. “What about the rest of you.”

· · ·

It came out of us like something lanced.

Marva said her husband at home had a woman in Spanish Town and everybody in the district knew and nobody had told her; she had found out from her own sister by accident in a letter, in one line, in the middle of a paragraph about a funeral. She had known for five months and had gone on sending him money every fortnight because the money was for the child.

Blossom said she had failed the licensing examination twice.

Dawn said she had not slept more than four hours in one piece since 1975 and did not know anymore whether she was tired or sick, and did not have insurance to find out which.

I said my mother had written that she was proud of me because I was a nurse, and that I had never once in three years used the word nurse in a letter, not one time, I had been very careful, and that she had decided it on her own out of the things I did not say, and that I had let her.

And Icilda, who had been quiet, and who was the only one of us who nobody had to guess about, said, “I clean offices.”

“We know,” Pearlie said.

“I know you know.” Icilda’s face did something complicated. “But I never say it before. In this country I never once say it out of my own mouth.”

· · ·

We sat with it. The heat came up in the pipes and made the noise it made.

Then Marva, who was the practical one, got the biscuit tin off the shelf and put it on the table and said we were going to sort out Pearlie first, because a Cuban woman on the second floor charging fifty for forty was going to end badly for all of us, and that was the closest thing to an emergency in the room.

We put in what we had. It was not enough to clear it but it was enough to stop it, and Blossom said she would take Pearlie’s Sunday at the hospital in January, and I said I would take two, and Dawn said she could not take anything because of the nights but she could cook for the house for a month so nobody had to buy lunch, and that was worth more than the Sundays.

Then Icilda said the thing that changed the shape of the room.

“From now,” she said, “when we send home, we send what we have. Not what we say we have.”

“And if it is less?”

“Then it is less.”

“Icilda, my mother—”

“Your mother would rather get thirty for ten years than forty for two years and then you drop down dead in Brooklyn,” Icilda said. “We not going to be the generation that kill weself to keep up a story.”

Nobody agreed to that out loud. Five of us did it anyway, in the end, in our own time. Pearlie never quite managed it.

· · ·

At about one in the morning Blossom brought out the cassette recorder.

That was the other way we sent things home: a tape, thirty minutes a side, passed hand to hand with whoever was flying, and played in a front room in Jamaica with the whole district in it.

We set it on the table and pressed the two buttons down and the six of us leaned in toward it, and here is what we said.

We said Merry Christmas. We said the snow was not as bad as they think. We said the apartment was warm. We said Pearlie was doing well at the hospital, which was true, and that I was doing well at the hospital, which was true in a way that would be heard as a different thing. We sang a verse and a half of a carol and Marva went off the note badly and we all laughed and left the laughing on the tape because the laughing was the realest part of it.

We told them not to worry about us. Every one of us said some version of that sentence.

Then Blossom pressed stop, and the room went back to what it had been at ten o’clock, and Dawn got up to start washing the pots because she had to leave for Queens at five.

We had told them nothing true and everything true, and we knew exactly which was which, and for the first time in three years, so did each other. That was what changed. Not what we sent home. What we could say in that kitchen after the tape stopped.

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