“Relieving Ramona” is based on Elizabeth Rose Campbell’s experience as a part-time housemother in a group home for disadvantaged girls in upstate New York. All names have been changed.
— Ed.
I get there early, but even so Ramona says, “Thank the Lord,” when she sees me come in and plop down my bag, as if I’m late. She has her back to me, is on the phone talking to Bobby who is down the hill at a pay phone claiming she can stay out all night if she wants to, she’s had it, and Ramona says, “Well, I’ve had it, too. What do you think it’s like working this job?” Then she hangs up and turns to me, her eyes round saucers in a long, slender face, her black, stiff hair standing straight up on her head where she’s pulled it and pulled it on her Friday night/Saturday morning shift and she says, “It’s been a bitch.”
And then she kicks the door to our office shut, ignores the fist that pounds on it twice as soon as she locks it, pulls her chair close to me and in a barely audible whisper says, “I gotta tell you what happened last night but I don’t want them to know you know, OK?” I can’t hear well so we move to the floor, sit crouched together like two small children playing hide-and-go-seek, and Ramona breathes softly into my ear, “We’re gonna nail their asses. They think they got over but they didn’t get over. Last night Polly and Laura come down here and say, ‘Aren’t you gonna get that boy out of Sabina’s room?’ and I say, ‘What boy?’ and they say, ‘Go see,’ so I do but Pearl won’t let me in the room. I go in anyway and there’s nobody in there except for some clothes stuffed up in the bed to make it look like there’s somebody there. There are some men’s sneakers in the window, so then I go in Pearl’s room and there’s Sabina dressed up in a lacy see-through outfit and a man in underwear sittin’ on the bed and I call Sabina out and say, ‘Girl, you’re in trouble. Get that man outta that room.’ ”
And the story goes on, how the girls are trying to blackmail Ramona into not telling, claiming she’ll lose her job if anybody finds out she didn’t call the police as she was supposed to as soon as she saw a Strange Man in the facility.
“Them girls are vindictive, and I’m gonna nail their asses, but not until Tuesday when I got a back-up.
“So don’t you let on you know a thing but you watch that backdoor like a hawk on your shift, and if you see the door between the kitchen and the hallway close for any reason, you go open it up and do a room check upstairs. Hear? I gotta take a shower and get ready for my other job. I’m gonna be late as it is.”
While she’s in the shower, I read the logbook for the past week, since I was here last, all about who skipped school, and who said what to whom, who’s pregnant now, and the pepper steaks that have been taken out for dinner on my shift.
Every time I walk into this house there’s another drama, not to mention the ones on the television, which blares night and day in the dark living room, blinds closed, and the one out in front of the house where a strip of narrow pavement called a street separates two rows of houses facing each other, jammed side by side, overflowing with people on this hot day, pimp Cadillac gliding slowly by, sleazy male at the wheel, little boy playing in the street, retirees sitting on porches, radio blaring the same beat behind the rap music, the Black Man talking his way into the Black Woman’s yes. The girls upstairs have their ghetto blaster on full volume and I run upstairs, stand at the door, my hands over my ears, and mouth the words turn it down. Sabina gives me a cool once-over, ignores me, and I walk away, hide outside the door, then stomp my feet like I’m coming back and the volume goes down. A little.
Ramona’s out of the shower, got the hot comb plugged in to do her hair, which is standing out like she stuck her finger in a socket, and she says, “I’ll be glad when I ain’t working two jobs anymore.”
“Why are you working two jobs?” I want to know. This is the first real conversation Ramona and I have ever had. Usually she just gives me the keys and leaves.
“ ’Cause I keep my boy with a babysitter all the time. We’re living in a one-room attic apartment and the rent ain’t bad but the babysitter costs almost as much as the rent and my brother ain’t speaking to me ’cause I don’t have the thousand bucks I owe him for the loan I got to buy my car. But I ain’t taking no welfare. I got myself into this fix and I’ll get myself out. My mama complains I don’t spend enough time with my baby, but I got no choice, ya know?” she says and sucks on a Salem.
“You get any money from the baby’s daddy?” I ask.
Ramona sneers, laughs out loud. “Lord, no. I don’t trust men no more, I’ve had it with men for awhile. This baby’s daddy comes to see the boy but he don’t give me a dime. And when I wanted to get an abortion, he didn’t want me to do that neither.
“Then the next man I was with, Nathan, he was married but his wife told me as long as he paid the rent and the bills he could do as he pleased. He had a cocaine problem and I was trying to help him, but the son-of-a-bitch took my Visa card and ran up over a thousand dollars’ worth of bills on it because I was stupid enough to put his name on the account, too, and then he wouldn’t pay the bill and here I am, can hardly pay the rent what with my debts and bills and now I gotta pay that stupid bastard’s bill. He’s a bum parading around like class. Had a job at IBM and lost it. Cocaine’s got him good.”
“What kind of man are you looking for?” I ask.
“I know what kind, but I don’t think he exists, least not in this town. I want a man that likes me and my baby and good living. Now I ask you, is that too much?” cries Ramona into the mirror, her forehead crinkling as she takes a thick comb and tugs at the rolls she’s put in her hair.
“I gotta be careful,” she adds, “ ’cause it ain’t fair to that baby for me to be hanging out with somebody that’s gonna disappear on us. My baby was calling Nathan Daddy, ’cause Nathan would buy him presents and take us out together like we was a regular family, and then all of a sudden Nathan is gone, and my baby says over and over, ‘Where’s Daddy?’ Now how in hell can I explain to him that first of all that ain’t your daddy and second of all it’s good he’s gone?”
I’m sitting speechless on the lumpy staff couch, trying to think of something helpful to say, trying to dredge up a memory of some comparable situation and its solution, but I have none.
Ramona is a whirlwind repacking toiletries, hairdryer, clothes. She says, “I gotta go. Did Connie tell you there’s a new girl coming in around dinner time from the City? Don’t worry about it, just put her in Laura’s room on the empty side, help her unpack and write down everything she takes out of her suitcase on these sheets here.” Ramona grabs her bag, pauses to deeply inhale her cigarette before putting it out, pats my arm before she dodges out the door, and says, “Don’t worry about the shift, it may be real quiet. Just keep your EYES OPEN.”
She thrusts the big heavy ring of keys at me, passing the torch, and she’s gone, feet flying down the steps, the sidewalk, to her car, looking like a feisty fifteen rather than a woman of twenty-five and I yell after her, “HANG IN THERE,” but don’t yell, “HAVE HOPE,” the way I want to, lest I sound like a condescending white. I like Ramona. I want to win the lottery, pay her brother back for the car, bounce her and the baby out of the attic apartment. But I’m not going to win the lottery. I cannot save Ramona from her life anymore than I can save the sulking girls upstairs from their potential punishment on Tuesday.
The first day I met the girls, the counselor I was relieving said, “This is Elizabeth, the new counselor,” and the three girls in the kitchen barely turned from making the peanut butter and jelly on white bread, though Pearl did turn and look first at my feet: my Nike sneakers, leg warmers, then at my long, purple skirt, my pink sweatshirt, my white face and plain ponytail and she shrieked, “Good God ain’t she country? Look at her!” and the other two girls turned around and stared. This was my favorite outfit I was wearing, my idea of personal style, but I giggled nervously, and they stared harder, then I laughed too loudly, pretending to share their joke. My big, booming cackle scared all three of them and they stepped back. One said to the other, “She’s a strange cracker but she’s sorta cute. Got eyebrows like Mariel Hemingway.” And they went upstairs licking jelly off their fingers in loud smacks.
“That was Sabina,” said the counselor, as if we’d encountered only one girl rather than three. “She can be nice and she can be nasty. She’s going to try to intimidate you when you least expect it.”
The second shift I worked, Sabina came up behind me where I stood in the kitchen making dinner and she put her chin on my shoulder cozily, and whispered in my ear, “You know what we do to new counselors, don’t you? Until they quit? We lock them in the closet, but first we tie them up. You like being tied up?”
She didn’t move, held me in a vise grip. Her earrings bounced against my cheek. She always wore long plastic skeletons dangling from her ears.
Her words registered like dim lights across a sea but her voice came through like a clear bell, hypnotic, with a rich resonance. She had the actress’s asset; she could play any part.
“Have you thought of taking up drama?” I said, and her arms dropped, she shuffled down the hall, humming. I yelled after her, “Hey, I’m sincere,” but she walked on as if she couldn’t hear me.
That same shift they all disappeared on me while I cooked dinner, showed up around curfew time, and wouldn’t come in when I spotted them under the streetlight laughing, talking to shadowy male figures.
“GET YOUR ASS IN THIS HOUSE NOW,” I howled out the door after a half-hour of this, and they ran inside like startled sheep, rushed to sit on the office sofa together in a huddle.
“I don’t like to play games,” I hissed and sputtered at them four or five times, trembling, eyes burning with unexpected rage.
I collapsed in the desk chair after the last wave of anger rolled by, took a deep breath and repeated quietly, “I don’t like to play games.”
Pearl exhaled first, laughed weakly, and the laughter caught like a whispy brush fire until everybody was rolling around with relief. Sabina said coolly, as she breezed out the door, “I seen the look in your eye and I know you’ve murdered somebody before.”
After that they rarely tested me.
Polly and Pearl have made dinner tonight: pepper steaks dripping in greasy gravy. Hot pink Kool-Aid leaves a sticky sugar ring on my lips. Overcooked frozen string beans are an electric green in the serving dish, a soft, senseless mass in my mouth as I chew.
“Why you eatin’ that?” cries Pearl to me. “Didn’t you bring your own food?”
I shake my head, keep eating.
“Elizabeth used to bring her own food,” Pearl informs Bobby as if this betrays a truth about me. “It was always strange-looking, like she threw up in the pan.”
“Ugh,” says Bobby, making a face. “What was it?” Her soft, brown, deer eyes dodge between me and Pearl.
“Just brown rice and split pea soup,” I say.
Bobby turns her lips out like a horse that has bitten into a bad apple. Bobby is a small, stocky Hispanic girl of nineteen who can barely read and write, is gay and looks like a gorilla. Bobby cannot find a job. She talks about sex at every opportunity, tries to persuade the others of her competency as a bed partner whenever possible.
“You going out to get some dick tonight?” she asks Sabina boyishly.
Sabina’s dark eyes slide sulkily over to Bobby and she purses her lips as if she is about to mirror her hunger in a wounding way, but instead she motions the conversation away, lights a cigarette, inhales the smoke and all of our attention as she stares out the window at the house next door, only six feet away.
There is a knock at the front door. Pearl squeals, “It’s the new girl, it’s the new girl,” and dashes out of the dining room toward the door, and before I can get out of my chair and wipe my mouth, Pearl has returned to the dining room with an enormous cat grin, dragging by the elbow a younger, smaller white girl who says softly, “I’m Nicole.” Pearl puts her arm around Nicole and beams with maternal pride, “Ain’t she purty?” Nicole visibly relaxes.
A short, elderly Italian couple shuffle into the room out of nowhere and I quickly jump up, introduce myself, say, “Sorry I couldn’t greet you at the door, Pearl beat me to it and she forgot to. . . .” My voice dies out as I spot a tiny little girl, a miniature image of Nicole, perhaps two years old, hiding behind the legs of yet another woman, in her fifties, who appears to be Nicole’s mother.
The second shift I worked, Sabina came up behind me where I stood in the kitchen making dinner and she put her chin on my shoulder cozily, and whispered in my ear, “You know what we do to new counselors, don’t you? Until they quit? We lock them in the closet, but first we tie them up. You like being tied up?”
“That’s my sister, Cindy,” says Nicole as all the girls coo over the baby, try to lure the toddler to the table with food.
I try to offer Nicole’s family dinner but they decline, with the grandfather as spokesman, shaking his head and backing toward the door. I show them what will be Nicole’s room and they all stare silently at the empty side of Laura’s room, the ceiling, the graffiti on the closet door. Satisfied that Nicole will be warm and sheltered, at least, the family turns and heads back downstairs in silent single file. None of them have uttered a word since entering the house. I give them distance to say farewells.
Back at the dining room table, Sabina is peering around the corner of the hall giving a play-by-play. “Now they’re all saying goodbye. Ever notice how the family shows up when you’re leaving? You never see ’em and then you’re shipped upstate to a correctional facility and BOOM, there’s a mother, a brother, grandparents, everybody standing there waving goodbye like they been there all along.”
I help Nicole unpack after her family leaves and the other girls have done their evening chores and settled into watching television. She identifies each item as she takes it out of her suitcase and I write it down. One pair black corduroys, black leather jacket, six pair underpants, three bras, blowdryer.
“Do you want the jewelry listed, too?” she asks.
“I guess,” I say. I am embarrassed by this procedure, attempt to humanize her entry into institutionalized living with jokes that fall flat. I think up reassurances but don’t speak them because I will not be around enough to back them up. So finally I say, “How are you doing? Is it a little strange for you, coming into a place like this? Have you ever lived away from home before?”
She shakes her head no and her eyes dart away and I don’t know if she’s saying no, it’s not strange or no, I’ve never lived away from home. She grabs a framed photo from her suitcase and says, “Write this down: picture of John. He’s my boyfriend.” She takes a coquettish pose, her weight shifting to a sensual stand and she glances in the mirror at her china doll features, long, curly black hair and slender, pubescent body.
Bobby appears at the door and smiles broadly at Nicole who is now sucked into the mirror, tinkering with some small facial imperfection. Bobby’s eyes are on Nicole’s ass.
“Let’s go downstairs, Bobby,” I say, “and let Nicole get settled.”
We make popcorn and watch Sylvester Stallone in his first Rambo movie. The girls go wild, cheering him on as he kicks the cops, takes revenge beyond fulfillment, rectifies every wrong the Authorities have ever subjected him to, and the girls lean back satisfied at the end, puffed up like successful rebels who just won the revolution.
There is a knock at the door; it’s Pearl coming home from a date. She is always the good girl, covering her image carefully, going to church once a month, kissing the counselors when they leave their shifts. She is in on the dot of her curfew time, 9:00. She plops down on the couch, kicks off her shoes.
“Did he have a big one?” asks Bobby.
“Shut up, trash mouth,” Pearl snaps back.
None of the girls, with the exception of Pearl, are virgins. Pearl is the youngest, at fourteen; the others range in age from fifteen to nineteen, and most of them have been pregnant at least once, and had abortions.
They almost always want to keep the baby in the beginning, to fill up the self with the new life, the new hope. Even after their first pregnancies, birth control is practiced like Russian roulette. The bulk of their care, their capacity to be concerned about anything, is directed at appearance — grooming, dressing well, being sexually attractive. Sex is not only the forbidden high, the relief in a life lacking in love; it is also a power — the power of attracting a man who will “take them away,” a man with money, who can be both daddy and lover, but who disappears when faced with the problem pregnancy.
Sabina is pregnant now, I know from reading the logbook. So I listen carefully when she invites Nicole to sit beside her on the sofa, says, “That little girl with your mama, is she your sister or your child?”
Nicole looks embarrassed, but then quickly stiffens into pride, answers, “She’s my baby.”
“Then why don’ you take care of her?” blurts pious Pearl.
Nicole closes her eyes as if someone slapped her, then she coughs, squirms, and Sabina answers for her, “Why d’ya think, you can’t bring no babies to a group home.”
“Why are you wearing all those bracelets?” I ask Pearl, in an effort to change the subject, to turn the tables on her rudeness. She is wearing dozens of ugly plastic bracelets on each arm.
“To be like Madonna,” she snaps back.
I look blank and she says, “You know, Madonna.” I nod, still looking blank, and Pearl shrieks, “You don’t know who Madonna is???”
She leaps from her seat, points at me and says, with ripe disgust, “You’re just an old hippie.” The other girls whoop with surprise and watch my face for a reaction but I just smile.
Bobby says, “You’ve seen Madonna before, you just forgot. Somebody go get a picture of Madonna.”
I look at the picture, say, “Wears a lotta lipstick,” and Pearl jumps to her feet like a preacher and says, “But that girl was nobody, and she believed in herself, and look at her now.”
“She made it big,” agrees Sabina.
Pearl adds, “She’s fresh.”
To say she’s fresh is to say she’s the ultimate cool, the individual worth watching.
We all sit there caught in the spell of the sacred Madonna reinvented for the 1980s, until Bobby burps loudly and Pearl whirls around and says, “You’re so gross.”
Bobby makes a face back and Pearl says, “Well, one thing for sure. You ain’t never gonna make it big or make your own money ’cause nobody will hire you when they see your ugly face. You ain’t nuthin’.”
Bobby is on her feet moving menacingly toward Pearl, fists clenched like a boxer, only Pearl knows Bobby won’t strike. Bobby says, “Yeah, and what you think you got other than that empty box between your legs? Long as you don’t let no dick in there you think you got something but you ain’ got nuthin’ but a big mouth.”
They don’t hit each other but stand a half-inch away and scream obscenities into each other’s faces while I stand outside their circle yelling, “WHOA WHOA WHOA.”
They stop when I start screaming, “IT ISN’T WORTH IT” at them, and Pearl says, “What you talking about, ’Lizabeth??” and Bobby says, “I feel sick. Look what she’s done to me. Now my stomach is going crazy.”
Pearl starts to scream, “You’re a fake,” but I grab her arm and say shut up, get in your room. She does, and Bobby goes into hers, slamming the door after her.
I go back downstairs, exhausted, glad the shift is nearly over, collapse on the living room sofa, sit with Sabina, who is still watching television. I turn out the overhead light and she still doesn’t move so I decide to sit with her rather than push.
She looks beautiful in the glow of the television lights, her snarl gone, her young woman body looking as vulnerable and ripe as a young shoot of asparagus in spring.
“You keeping your eye on the back hall door?” she barks at me out of the blue.
“Why should I?” I bluff, remembering Ramona’s caution (don’t let on you know a thing).
“Didn’t Ramona tell you about last night?”
“Not much.”
“You’re lying. It’s all in the logbook anyway. I saw it.”
“Not on my shift you didn’t.”
“Why do you write so much when you write in the logbook? You tell it all like it’s a story.”
She gets up to go to bed, and I turn out the lights, say good night.
I can’t sleep on the greasy-smelling sofa in the counselor’s office (the bed in the staff bedroom is too hard). I lie there listening to the street noise, imagining I am in the most abrasive of lands, devoid of green earth, where hustlers people the street, eager to devour you. I get up and make sure the window is locked, fumble for the wall so I can find the bathroom.
“What am I doing here?” I say out loud when I bump my head on the bathroom door.
“Are you lookin’ for my medicine to give to me?” a soft voice pipes up from the darkness outside the office door.
“Who is that?” I snap, clicking on the bathroom light, blinking into the darkness.
No one answers but Bobby steps into the circle of light cast by the bathroom overheads.
“What’s wrong, Bobby?”
“I can’t sleep. My stomach hurts real bad. I think I need to go to the emergency room. And you forgot to give me my medication.”
She sits down on the couch and rocks herself back and forth as if she’s in labor. I give her the medication, ask, “What is this stuff, anyway?”
“Uppers for the day and downs for night,” says Bobby. “And you gotta give ’em to me or I go crazy.”
“How long have you had a prescription for these?”
“Coupla years.” She grabs her stomach and wheezes, but relaxes when I call the emergency room for advice. “I think she’s really in pain,” I tell the E.R. technician, after giving him a little background. He gets calls like this all the time.
“Is she acting out?” he asks, and I say, “Could be.”
“What did he say?” Bobby wants to know.
“He said you’re gonna be fine. He said you just won a million dollars, so you don’t need to get a job. He said everything’s gonna be all right.”
Bobby is laughing so hard, I worry that she is having convulsions. Then she relaxes, and smiles. I wonder how I could ever have thought she was ugly.
“You’re fresh,” is all she’ll say about it, smiling and pointing her finger at me.
“You are, too,” I answer.
She gets shy again, we say good night, and she goes back to bed.
I lock myself into the office, exhale, and get out the logbook to write the latest chapter. I don’t know if I helped Bobby or Sabina or Pearl or Polly. At least I relieved Ramona.
Postscript
When Sy Safransky and I discussed this essay, he asked me to reconsider the ending, to venture an observation about whether or not I did help the girls.
Of course I did, to the extent that I treated them as human beings rather than statistics. But my job description was literally “relief worker,” and when I quit after only six months, the primary reason I cited was that it was too frustrating to apply bandaids to such deep wounds. And I was unprepared to start a new career as full-time social worker.
Still, I had considerable guilt leaving these girls behind, because my departure cast me into the pattern of everyone they had ever become attached to: the disappearing parent, the semblance of stability destroyed again.
Even the counselors who remained in the facility felt guilty when the girl in the story I call Bobby was murdered on New Year’s Day 1986 by a pimp/cocaine dealer/“boyfriend” whose influence drew her out of the home and into the streets in late 1985. She was officially discharged from the home for legitimate reasons (at nineteen, she was ready for release, and she had been flagrantly disregarding house rules), but this did not absolve our consciences when we heard she was shot at close range in the welfare hotel room where she lived with this man. The death was ruled an accidental shooting. There was no one to protest; Bobby had no family. (She spent her life under institutional care.) The house supervisor pressed police for weeks to investigate her death further but they were apathetic.
It was easy to take a fatalistic view of Bobby’s death. She had given up on getting a job long before she left the house, despite job counseling. She was convinced her boyfriend, the first man she’d ever been involved with, was “rich,” and would take care of her.
But the rage within the grief we all felt when she died was bound up with the thought that she was just a baby. For all of her nineteen years, she was still an abandoned child.
It is to Bobby that I dedicate this story, and to other children like her who cannot survive in our society.
This story originally appeared in The Rose Reader, an essay series published by Elizabeth. Sample issues are available for $3 from P.O. Box 149, Tivoli, New York 12583.
