Authors: Claire Cook
Best Staged Plans (21 page)
Made you look
, we used to say as kids when we tried to trick each other into turning to find something—a bird, a plane, a cute boy—that wasn’t really there. Her comment took me by surprise and made me look at her for the first time—full on, instead of just over her head or off to the side of her face.
Given that she’d just crawled out from between two Dumpsters, she wasn’t even that dirty. She looked about my age, with dry skin that could use a good moisturizer and gray springing from her once dark hair like the threads of a Brillo pad. Even without mascara, her eyes were her best feature: round and wide spaced, a lovely shade of green flecked with brown, undeniably clear and lucid.
“Thanks,” she said when I handed her a latte.
I noticed she held one hand in front of her mouth when she spoke, the way I sometimes did when I’d eaten onions or garlic for lunch. I wondered if dropping off some toothpaste and a toothbrush for her would be a nice thing to do, or if it would be insulting.
I had to ask. “How do you manage to stay so clean?”
“There’s an emergency shelter that lets me in to shower.” She spoke in a crackly voice that sounded like it hadn’t been used for a while. “I was sleeping there, but you can only stay for seven nights. So now I’m on a waiting list for a transitional shelter.”
“Eat,” I said. “You haven’t even touched that.” I sipped my latte and watched the people walking by while she ate the chicken and pasta. I guess I thought she might gobble, but she ate slowly and thoroughly, savoring each bite. Then she wiped the inside of the plastic container with the last piece of the breadstick bow tie and popped it into her mouth.
“Thank you,” she said. “Did you make it?”
“I don’t really cook anymore. I assemble. But I’ll give you the recipe if you want.”
Instead of answering, she put the top back on the plastic container and handed it to me.
“Sorry,” I said. “That was stupid.”
She shrugged.
We sipped our lattes in silence. It felt odd to be standing there hovering over her, but sitting next to her on the sidewalk didn’t seem like quite the right thing to do either.
“Can I get you anything else?” I finally asked, as if I were a waiter at a sidewalk café.
She shook her head.
I took another sip of my latte. “Okay, well, I guess I’d better get to work.”
She didn’t say anything.
I turned to walk away. “Have a nice day” slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it.
H
AVE A NICE DAY?
Have a nice day?
I meet a homeless woman who has just crawled out from between two dumpsters, and I tell her to have a nice day?
I flashed back to a long-forgotten day I’d spent with Denise and a bunch of other high school friends. We’d piled into somebody’s old station wagon to drive the half hour from our suburban town to the nearest MBTA stop and take the subway to Boston.
The plan was to wander around Boston Common and then go shopping at Filene’s Basement. It was a beautiful spring day, and we were all wearing bell-bottom dungarees and halter tops, as if they were uniforms. Fringed square-cut embroidered bags looped over our shoulders and bounced against our hips as we walked.
We flipped our hair and giggled whenever we passed boys who were even remotely cute.
“Yeah, so,” one of us said.
“Buttons on ice cream, they don’t stick,” another one said.
Everybody else burst out laughing.
“Huh?” I said.
“
So
is really
sew
,” Denise whispered as we walked. “Buttons don’t stick to ice cream, so you have to sew them on. Get it?”
“Not really,” I said.
Denise rolled her eyes. “It’s just something you say so it looks like you’re talking, so guys don’t think you’re paying attention to them.”
We followed the winding paths of the Common, dodging Frisbees as they sliced through the air. A couple of girls a few years older than us were blowing bubbles while a group of college guys made heroic leaps to pop them.
“Bubbles,” Denise said. “Next time we have to remember to bring bubbles.”
A man was sitting on the grass at the edge of the path. Street musicians were everywhere, but this was a different thing entirely. He had a cheap plastic guitar with two loose strings flapping in the breeze, and instead of an open guitar case for collecting money, he’d flipped over a ripped straw hat. His long hair was greasy and so were his jeans, and you could see the sole of one bare foot through a hole in his boot.
He was belting out a tuneless “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” at the top of his lungs as he pounded the guitar. There was something so desperate about the sound of his voice that I stopped. I reached for my wallet, but I was afraid to move any closer to him, so I just stood there.
Up ahead, Denise turned around. “Come on,” she yelled.
We went to Bailey’s Ice Cream Parlor and sat in wire-backed chairs at button-topped tables. We all ordered identical hot fudge sundaes made with chocolate ribbon ice cream, Bailey’s version of chocolate chip made with long thin slivers of dark chocolate.
And the whole time we ate I couldn’t stop thinking about how I should have been brave enough to try to help that guy, even just a little.
JOSH WAS
NOWHERE
to be found, so I wandered around the hotel, looking at the paint samples that covered the walls like big chocolate stains. Then I made some to-do lists and wandered around some more. Finally I headed out to hit the flea markets and antique stores.
Bailey’s Ice Cream Parlor had been closed for decades, but it was as if they’d shipped all their tables and chairs from Boston to Atlanta just this week. Everywhere I stopped I found another round glass-topped metal table or a pair of cute little chairs with heart-shaped twisted-wire backs.
I’d been thinking about something a bit more dramatic and Old World for the hotel patio. Bar-height tables and chairs that would be more comfortable to sit on and also more noticeable from the street. Elegantly curved steel legs. Maybe dark wood tabletops and distressed leather seats.
But the thing about staging is that you have to stay open to surprises, because they often turned out to be better than the things you planned. And you have to listen to the connections some mysterious part of your brain makes when you’re not paying attention. Of course ice cream parlor tables and chairs made sense if we were going to name the hotel Hot Chocolate. How could I have missed it?
When all was said and done, this would be the thing people remembered.
Hot Chocolate
, they’d say,
you know that adorable boutique hotel in midtown with the patio that looks like an old ice cream parlor?
I drove to Home Depot and rented a truck, then I retraced my route. By the time I got back to the hotel, I had eight slightly different glass-topped round tables and twenty-four mismatched chairs. I’d spray paint the table frames and chairs a rainbow of ice cream colors from mint green to orange sherbet.
I’d look for round wire Victorian plant stands, at least three feet high with lots of curlicues. And I’d keep the whole thing from getting too cutesy by placing tall square modern planters on either side of the door. Ooh, maybe I’d even splurge on some illuminated planters and tuck them into the corners. If you haven’t seen them yet, they are amazing—tiny energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs make the whole pot glow from within, and the pots have reinforced fiberglass inner liners to handle the soil and water so nobody gets electrocuted.
I was glad I hadn’t ordered the awning yet. I’d have to go back and look at the Sunbrella fabric samples again before I made a final decision about either the awning fabric or the paint colors for the tables and chairs.
I circled the block three times, trying to find an empty loading zone space in front of the hotel. I was careful not to look over at the spot where I’d last left the homeless woman. I had enough on my plate.
Fortunately the tables were small enough for me to carry by myself, but by the time I got everything onto the patio, my back and shoulders were screaming from the exertion.
Just as I was unloading the last chair from the truck, Josh pushed the front door of the hotel open.
“Your timing is impeccable,” I said.
He reached for the chair I was carrying. I ignored him and kept walking.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “You could have called me.”
I put the chair down. “Called you what?”
If he got it, he pretended he didn’t. He scanned the jumble of tables and chairs. “Are those going to be safe out here overnight?”
“Probably not,” I said. “We’ll have to find a way to chain the tables to the patio, and the chairs will have to be stacked and brought in at night.”
He reached for the door. “Let me prop this open, and I’ll give you a hand.”
“Knock yourself out,” I said. And then I left it all to him and climbed into the truck.
After I returned the truck, I swung by Mellow Mushroom and picked up a pizza so I didn’t have to get into another whose-turn-is-it-to-cook standoff. A note from Chance saying he had a meeting after work and would be home late was waiting for me on the kitchen counter.
I put two slices of pizza on a paper plate, poured a glass of milk, and carried them into the guest room.
When I woke up, fully clothed, I reached for my reading glasses and squinted at the bedside clock: 3:13
A.M.
I peeled off my clothes and pulled on a long T-shirt in the dark. I rolled back into bed and stared up at the ceiling. Finally I snapped on the light and fired up my laptop. I pulled out a paint brochure and my big fan deck of paint colors, too, since you never knew what kind of tricks your computer screen might play. While I loved all the bells and whistles of the paint company Web sites—the Benjamin Moore Personal Color Viewer even lets you upload a photo of a room and virtually change its colors with the click of a mouse—sometimes I just needed to make sure I was seeing accurate color representation.
The combination of a front door in Benjamin Moore’s Million Dollar Red and tall chocolate ceramic pots would anchor the entrance. I’d pull the colors for the tables and chairs from the Gaston Seaglass–striped awning. I’d give everything a coat of Rust-Oleum rusty metal primer, and then start right in on the paint, spraying on two to three light coats a few minutes apart. Rust-Oleum had some great colors, too—Spa Blue would work for sure, as would Herbal Green, and maybe Grape and Teal. I’d buy only one can each of Candy Pink and Key Lime, just in case they veered past fun and into too much. As soon as I saw the colors on the chairs, I’d know.
The trick to using pops of a variety of accent colors is that each one needs to repeat in at least three different locations so it draws your eye around the space. So even though the arrangement of tables and chairs would look random, there would be a method to the cheerful madness.
Maybe I’d get the painters to do the spraying, or maybe I’d just borrow some drop cloths from them and do it myself out in the parking lot behind the hotel.
As soon as I thought of the parking lot, I remembered the Dumpsters. I closed my eyes, but I could still see the homeless woman crawling out from between them.
How could I have let her go back there?
But what could I have done? Dragged her to the transitional shelter and tried to talk them into letting her cut the line to get a bed? Taken her with me to a house that wasn’t even mine and let her split the guest room with me? Shipped her back to Boston so that I’d have yet another person I couldn’t get out of my house?
I crawled under the covers and turned off the light. I tossed and turned, trying to imagine what it would be like to try to sleep on a cardboard mattress between two rusty metal boxes. Would I be more afraid to go to sleep or to wake up and face the next day?
How had the homeless woman ended up homeless? Who had she been before that?
I stared at the nothingness of a pitch-black ceiling in a pitch-black room. Who was
I
? What did I want my life to be? What was my postmom mission?
H
ER NAME WAS NAOMI
. it seemed like the wrong name for a homeless woman, but maybe any name at all would have felt that way to me. Once she had a name, I couldn’t look away.
I handed her a breakfast sandwich and a whole milk latte. I sipped my nonfat latte and watched the people passing by while she ate.
“WTF,” I said finally. “How the hell did a nice woman like you end up in a place like this?”
She didn’t say anything.
“What I meant is that I’d like to help you.”
She seemed startlingly normal. But there was still a part of me that wondered if she might be bipolar, or psychotic, or even just plain old crazy. I mean, how else could she have ended up like this?
We found a vacant bench in a little park down the street. I wondered if anyone had ever spent the night sleeping on it. Maybe there was a waiting list for park benches, too.
I threw my empty latte cup into a trash barrel and then sat down on one side of the bench. Naomi sat on the other side. She squeezed her garbage bag firmly between her feet.
“So what happened?” I asked.
One thin, ring-less hand fluttered up to cover her mouth again. “My husband got sick. We were self-employed and our insurance company dropped him.”
Her voice was so soft I had to strain to hear it over the sounds of the traffic and the birds.
“So we refinanced our bed-and-breakfast. And he didn’t get better. The mortgage rate readjusted, and our payment tripled. The economy tanked, and suddenly I was running a sickroom instead of a business. We couldn’t afford hospice. He died. Then the car died. The bank foreclosed a few months later. And I lived happily ever after.”
“I am so, so sorry.”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
We sat some more. I don’t know what she was thinking about, but I was racking my brain for a plan. I mean, what the hell was I going to do with her?