The Truly Needy And Other Stories

By Lucy Honig

Winner of the 1999 Drue Heinz Literature PrizeSelected by Charles JohnsonThese nine stories are teeming with people on the margins, where destitute New Yorkers and determined immigrants are as much at the mercy of social services, media attention, opportunistic politicians, and "quality-of-life" campaigns as they are prey to grinding poverty, dangerous streets, and their own haunting memories. Delving into Lucy Honig's fiction, one is willingly drawn into an intimacy with these resilient, but flawed characters—among them, a woman who cleans a beauty salon, a high school kid who's lost a parent, a runaway Cambodian bride, an actress, and a homeless woman. Crossing paths, these difficult characters often misunderstand and sometimes demean each other, yet they also redeem and rescue one other in odd and unexpected ways. In The Truly Needy, Lucy Honig has created a heartbreaking, imaginative world that is the American urban landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9780822978794

Book preview

No Friends, All Strangers

I don't know. Sometimes I wish they'd all shut up. At work Ronnie has the radio on every minute, and the customers are always yapping, the radio doesn't even drown them out.

When I say customers, Ronnie tells me to say clients. You'd think he was a lawyer or a shrink or something.

A lot of the clients act as if he was a shrink, sometimes as if I was, too. I give shampoos and sweep up, they don't know me from Adam, they don't tip me, most of them probably could never tell you what I look like. Still: yap, yap, yap. Life stories. Cheating husbands, lousy investments, condo prices going out of sight.

Ronnie's pretty nice to me. He shares the tips. A lot of times I open up my mouth when all those hotsy-totsy people get on my nerves. "When's the last time she had to notice the price of tomatoes?" I say when some woman with a dozen face-lifts gets under the dryer.

Ronnie laughs. He turns the radio up higher. Shut up and sweep, he says. He says it to be funny.

Sometimes Ronnie is funny, sometimes he just thinks he is. He calls the shop Hair and Now. Once he had a luggage shop with his brother next to Penn Station. They called it The Terminal Case.

That's not funny, I told Ronnie.

Shut up and sweep, he said. Then he started dancing around the empty chair, dancing to the music. It's nonstop rock-and-roll. Ronnie's nearly bald, he wears wire-rimmed glasses and pin-striped suits and looks like he could be a stockbroker. Only he's always dancing in circles around the chair, even when the fat cat businessmen are sitting there—and he's got a reputation all the way down to Wall Street, let me tell you. But there he is jiving to the rock-and-roll.

The kids play ball in the street, they're yelling and screaming when I get home from work. Mrs. Ryan, the big fat woman next door, she holds court on the sidewalk, standing with her hands on her gigantic hips and giving everyone the once-over; she doesn't miss a thing. And when she wants her kid who's hanging out at the other end of the block, she hauls off and hollers, Hey Mikey, c'mon in for supper! For SUPPER, I said! Her voice is like a big, heavy mirror shattering down the street.

The mousy woman on the fourth floor with the baby comes down with the stroller hitting hard on every step, co-lomp, co-lomp, co-lomp. The baby cries. The woman stands outside my door yelling at the kid to calm down, but he screams louder, then she screams, they may as well be standing in my kitchen. If I had a kitchen. I live in the smallest apartment in Brooklyn, ground floor front. I hear everything from here—garbage trucks whining at five in the morning, car alarms going off. I hear dogs pissing on the hydrants. I hear kids writing their graffiti. KILL TO SURVIVE, says the mailbox on the corner.

Next to my apartment lives a guy who thinks he's a singer, a folk singer. He howls for hours on end, like a wolf baying at the moon. And his voice never gives out: if he's not howling then he's humming through his nose. Just to put the garbage out he hums. When he walks past my door humming, I cover my ears.

In a city so big, people live under each other's skin. They have to. Like you have to breathe the air.

I get my quiet on the subway. Some people wear earplugs because of the screeching and the clanging, but that's the kind of noise I don't even bother to hear. I like that people almost never talk. Sometimes the lights go out, we're stuck in a tunnel, people are packed in tight, standing and sitting, it's like we have this agreement not to touch or kill each other in the dark. It's hush quiet. You hear books and newspapers closing, or somebody sighing because he's late for work again. You feel some stranger's quiet breath on your own neck.

On the train if I concentrate on a person I can feel what he feels. Not that I read his mind, just that I get in somewhere on the wavelength of what's got him in its grip. Like a guy who's reading the racing pages, his whole self is in it, I can feel his gambling greed like it was in my own bones. Or if there's a woman nervous about the sick kid sprawled in her lap, I get her knot in my own stomach. The loneliness of some little old men grabs me in my throat. And the muddle for foreigners, like some Asian refugees, they get so confused when they first land, it's like a big noise in their heads that I can hear. After a while I have to look away.

——————

Once Ronnie bandaged up my finger when I sliced it on the shears. He said, My parents always wanted me to be a doctor. He made the bandage neat and tight. Then he went right back to dancing along to Springsteen.

"Did you ever want to?" I asked him.

Want to what? Ronnie doesn't have a great attention span.

Want to be a doctor.

Naah. He shrugged. I like luggage. I like hair. Who needs all the troubles doctors have? Then he did a fancy little step around the fat cat on the chair.

Ronnie's running a class act, he's got old wood antiques for cabinets, a fancy Oriental carpet up on the wall, he wears these three-piece suits. But Ronnie doesn't want more than he's got. The suits, they're like a joke. These guys come up from Wall Street, they dig it that their hairdresser looks just like they do. Ronnie's not into the rat race. He could hire a couple more cutters, squeeze in more chairs, make a lot more money. But he doesn't want to oversee a lot of other people. He's satisfied with what he's got, and so am I. We're probably the only two around.

Miguel sells umbrellas from a folding table on the sidewalk in front. Umbrellas, sunglasses, and batteries, something for all seasons. Every day he's out there, freezing in winter or roasting in summer. But every six weeks to the day he comes in for a cut.

Hey man, I got my image to keep! he shouts to Ronnie when Ronnie makes some joke about giving him a new style. Miguel gets real serious. Bad for business, man, he says, adjusting a couple of hairs to show Ronnie what he wants. You change me too much around, it's bad for business. Ronnie gives him the same old cut, a little punk but not too crazy, that's how Miguel describes it. My image, man, he says. Ronnie cuts it for him free, won't take a cent. We've got umbrellas here to last a flood.

The day goes pretty fast. Sometimes it feels like I spend more of it on the train than at the shop. When I get on the train, first I case the car to see if there are any real crazies. Then I look for a person I could talk to in case we got stuck for a long time. Actually I've gotten stuck plenty but I've never talked to anyone. It's not easy for me to start up a conversation with a stranger, and even a track fire only takes an hour or two. I don't know what I'm waiting for, maybe for the end of the world, a nuclear attack, another great big blackout, I don't know, maybe then I'd talk to the person I'd picked out. Still, I get these fantasies. If we were good and stuck, waiting for the end, I dream that I'd arrange the people. I'd get the ones who had seats to change with the ones who were standing. I'd get them to rotate and clear spaces on the floor. I'd get everyone to pool their food and cigarettes and divvy it all up. Maybe I'd get us all to sing for a little while, Home on the Range or I've been Working on the Railroad or something else easy that everybody knows. That's what I dream of doing if we were stuck forever. But I don't know.

One day last week, a big handsome powerful-looking black guy got on with a crowd at DeKalb Avenue. If you caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of your eye you would think he was someone important, that's the way he carried himself, erect and strong, but he was lugging shopping bags filled with rags and crumpled papers, and he was dressed like a bum. Then a young white guy got on behind him, an art student carrying a big leather portfolio. He had curly blond hair and a look on his face like he was on a beach on Mars and counting all the grains of sand. He was a billion miles away. The bag man sat on a seat at the end of the car. The kid stood against the door kitty-corner from him. The bag man took out a cigarette, which you're not supposed to smoke on the subway. He was just about to strike a match when he looked over at the kid. I watched the bag man. He got such a mean and persecuted look on him. I saw it happen. The bag man was spooked by the kid. The kid must have been his boogeyman.

The bag man kept bringing his match to the matchbook to strike it, and every time it was as if some big invisible hand reached out and stopped him, and he glared at the kid, who was off on the beach on Mars. I saw this happen again and again, all through the slow crawl across the bridge.

The bag man got madder and madder.

The lady sitting across from the bag man got off at Grand Street, and the kid from Mars went to sit in her seat. And the bag man was furious. His cheeks puffed up with the fury, his eyes got wide and glassy. He couldn't sit across from his boogeyman. It was a personal insult, the kid sitting there. It was evil. The bag man got up, hoisted his bags in both big hands, stood directly over the kid, swaying, and let loose with a stream of obscenities. You could see his spit fly. The kid came back to earth just enough to hear the bag man cursing him and be shocked. Hurt, even. He didn't see the spooking going on. A few people smiled sympathetically at the kid. Most of them pretended they didn't hear or see a thing.

I felt bad for the bag man. He went swinging his bags down the car, muttering nasty curses to himself.

Once, in a car that wasn't very full, I realized a guy kept looking at me, but not like someone would look you over to attack or rob you. This guy was stealing looks, as if he didn't really want to but had to keep an eye on me. And then it hit me like a brick: I was his boogeyman. At the next stop, I changed cars. This boogeyman business is the worst.

The opposite of boogeyman, that's the woman, the beautiful black woman I see sometimes, mainly on the ride home, and when I say beautiful I mean the beautiful you can't stop looking at, it's in her eyes and her skin and her clothes and her soul. I don't know where she gets on or gets off, but every so often she's just there, making me feel in my bones that nothing bad could ever happen on this train. There's something deep and knowing about her, she's sad and happy at the same time, like she has seen the world from top to bottom, she's been face to face with the worst there is and still came back looking like a million bucks. She's got round eyes that shine and never hide, set in a face with the most perfect smooth dark brown skin. In a million years a white woman could never be this beautiful. This woman wears red—sometimes a whole red dress, sometimes red shoes, a red bag, or just red lipstick, but the red is vivid. She's a vivid woman, she stands out. She wears a little bit of very good make-up, maybe some exotic scarf draped over her shoulder, or a hat at an angle no one else would ever think of. Little children in the car can't take their eyes off her, men neither, of course, but women love her too. At the end of a deathly hard day of work you rest your eyes on her and you rest. Angry people stop being angry, the crazy ones stop being crazy when they see this woman. If you're cold you warm up and if you're hot you cool down. This woman turns the subway car into a state of grace.

Once she had long, perfectly painted red fingernails on her long, slender fingers, which all through the trip from Manhattan to Brooklyn went in and out of a red handbag picking pieces of candy from a box in there, and these fingers slid pieces of red candy into a full, broad red mouth, slowly, one by one, I never saw such delicate motions before. It was like the whole car was hypnotized by those hands for a couple of minutes, even the old guy in the yarmulke next to her watched her hands, the two Puerto Rican kids whose earphones were on so loud you could hear them half a car away, they stopped shuffling around for a minute, watching her, two fussy little gray ladies stopped reading, the little Chinese twins who were itching for mischief stood at her knees. The only person who didn't seem to notice was a little black boy who sat right next to her. His eyes were half closed and he looked so tired. Whose was he? You couldn't tell. Maybe a parent of his had a seat somewhere else, or maybe he was with the woman next to him on the other side, a big-breasted woman in sturdy gray-laced walking shoes, she could have been a social worker taking him somewhere. I mean, she didn't touch him or talk to him, but they could have been together. He looked so sad, this boy, he was only about nine or ten, but he watched the manic little Chinese twins as if kids’ games were some real far-back memory, and then when the beautiful woman offered candy to the twins, he stared blankly in front of him. He paid no attention to the baby who was sitting and screaming on his father's shoulders, or to all the grown-ups oohing and aahing about the other kids. The beautiful woman tapped him on the shoulder and offered him a red candy. He shook his head to say no. And then the two of them looked so separate and so sad, the boy and the beautiful woman, you couldn't believe there could be so much sadness even in the same world as the giggling Chinese twins, let alone the same subway car. And then when the train stopped at Prospect Park, the sad little boy got up and left the train all by himself, he just stood up and went out the door. There was no parent, no social worker. The beautiful woman stopped chewing candy, her fingers stopped, the red nails froze beside the red handbag, and her bright wide eyes followed the boy out the door and down the platform until the doors closed and then oh! Her eyes came back inside. And her fingers lay beside the bag, perfectly still, right up until I got off at my stop.

——————

There are days when a big arrow in the sky must be pointing down at me. Yesterday it happened. On the way to the subway there was a woman with a chain of four tiny pale children nearly all the same size holding hands, like old-fashioned cut-out paper dolls. A man was jabbering away at her in some weird language. She stopped me and said in the highest-pitched voice in the world, like a mouse shrieking in a foreign accent, "But where is the bus stop?" She said it like we'd started the conversation a long time ago, like I already knew exactly why her life had happened to her the way it had and why it made her so frantic. She stood by a sign with the parking hours, and the sign for the bus stop was more than a block away. The husband growled at her with the low-throated grunty noises, and she turned to him and squeaked, Nyet! Nyet! The bus came down the street. I grabbed two of the kids and she grabbed the others. The husband growled along behind us. Nyet! Nyet! she screeched. She had one foot on the bus and just before she hoisted herself up she clasped her jaws in both her hands, shook her head, and shrieked to me, My husband, I am sick and tired for him. She touched my arm and disappeared onto the bus.

On the subway I found a seat and at the next stop the most pregnant woman in New York got on at the other end of the car, walked the whole way down dodging all the standing people, like she knew just where she was going, and stopped right in front of me. What could I do? There went my seat. When I changed for the local, two different men asked me the time and another one asked me directions when I got out on the street. A Japanese couple stopped me to take a picture of them with their camera, in just a particular way so you could see a skyscraper in the background, and when I had it and snapped it, the guy moved. I had to do it again. I got to the shop fifteen minutes late. The day hadn't started but I felt all used up. Miguel with the umbrellas yelled to me, Hey! You gotta see the new shades! I waved to him and ran inside.

Ronnie had three women waiting and one guy in the chair almost finished. Gloria, the girl who cuts on Tuesdays and Fridays, hadn't shown up. Stevie Wonder was on the radio. I started to tell Ronnie why I was late; he said, Shut up and shampoo, and pointed to Roberta. She works at Bloomingdale's. I put the towel around her shoulders and she leaned back into the sink. Careful near my ears, she snapped, I just got rid of an infection. Her hair was dyed red, I knew Ronnie didn't do it, the roots were never right from day one.

Julia Child came and did a demonstration, she said. "And last week I met Pierre Cardin. I got his autograph. Like on my jeans. But do you think Andrew even cares who I see at work? Do you think he even listens? Do you think he'd even notice if I left him?"

Nyet, nyet, I said to myself.

After Roberta I swept up from the guy Ronnie cut, then I washed an old woman who went on and on about how the