Fresh Start
When the car broke down, Doug said it was the fan belt. It wasn’t a bad place to be, if it had to happen, close to a plasma center and a Union Gospel Mission.
We’ll give plasma now, he said, then we’ll go to the Mission.
Dakota asked why, if we’re getting money, we couldn’t go to a motel instead. That got Doug fired up. “So it’s your money now?”
“It won’t be enough for a motel and food both,” I told Dakota. “At the Mission they’ll help us find work and a place to live. We need the money to get the car fixed.”
Doug asked me what made me think Dakota was entitled to an explanation, and then Brittany said she wanted to stay in the car while we were in the plasma center. “We could watch something on the cell phone.”
“Why don’t you just tell the cops to put you in foster care?” Sometimes I think Doug doesn’t like any of us. “You’d fry in the car. The phone’s dead anyway. You can play in that park over there.” It wasn’t a real park, just a playground behind a boarded up school. No swings on the swing set frame. No drinking fountain, no bathroom.
Doug says the kids know about stranger danger. We went places on our own when we were younger than they are. They’ll be okay.
We got the car to the empty parking lot, me steering, Doug and Dakota pushing, then locked our stuff in the trunk. You do that because if someone notices the car, they maybe won’t think it’s abandoned and get it towed.
The first thing they do at a plasma center is poke your index finger and squeeze out a couple of drops of blood. If there isn’t enough iron in your blood you can’t donate. All we’d been eating was from giveaways: bread, doughnuts, cookies.
A sign our luck is going to improve, I told Doug, when the woman at the desk said we were eligible to donate.
She said she couldn’t put us next to each other just yet. Was that all right or did we want to wait?
We don’t need to be together, Doug told her.
They put you on tables covered with a paper sheet, like in a doctor’s office. You aren’t supposed to sleep.
It’s a big needle but it slides right into the hole in the crook of my elbow. “Done this before, I see,” the nurse said. This place, like the others, was bright, smelled of antiseptic. Nice.
When you fill up one bag of blood they take it away, leave the needle in your arm, put the bag in a machine that freezes and spins out the plasma. They mix the dark blood with saline, put it back into you through the same hole. It’s cold. The nurses ask if you want a blanket.
You tell them your name and birthdate before they give your blood back. The first time you donate you sign something that says you know you could die if they give you someone else’s blood cells.
The nurse who puts the needle in my arm, a slender African American girl, was pretty. The teal scrubs she wore made her skin glow.
I knew I smelled bad. You can’t get clean, sponging off in bathrooms, and there’s the car stink too, from dirty clothes and stale food.
“That’s a good color on you,” I told her.
“Thank you,” she said, serious, as if my opinion was worth having.
It seemed as if she’d just put the needle in when I filled my first bag. She clamped the tubing, stopping the blood. “Well, look at you, hon.”
When you’re done they wrap a stretch bandage a couple of times around your elbow and tell you to hold it straight for a while so you don’t start bleeding. Same as if you’d donated blood to the Red Cross.
I got three new ten dollar bills and a bag of Skittles. The Skittles were a present because it was my first time donating there.
Doug was still waiting to get his first bag of red blood cells back so I went to the kids. They were thirsty but they ate the Skittles, liked having something in their mouths besides the taste of rotting food.
When he came Doug was feeling better. “Mission’s only two blocks away. Time for lunch!” He didn’t say anything about getting Skittles. Maybe he was saving them for a treat for later.
We pulled our sleeves over the bandages. Doug thought they might ask for the money at the Mission if they knew we’d donated.
There was a line outside the Mission for lunch. “Not enough chairs,” the man in charge of the line says. “Plenty of food, though.”
We waited on the sidewalk, under the wood statue of Jesus with upraised arms, bare feet, This do in remembrance of me written at the base. The girls found a plastic tub of dirty chalk and drew hearts and butterflies on the sidewalk. Two other little girls came over, stood in front of us. They didn’t look at the girls but they seemed interested, maybe wanted to make friends. I gave them the tub. “I’ll bet you’ll draw something pretty.”
Their mother told them to write Bible verses. “For God so loved the world, that he gave His only begotten son. Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of these, the least of my brethren, ye have done it to me.” She was a big woman, tall as Doug. Her girls, in their worn party dresses, were skinny, twitchy.
They had a hard time with the letters and she was sharp with them.
“Jesus wept,” Dakota said. He knows better than to make fun of someone’s religion.
Doug laughed.
Brittany’s birthday is in April. Three years ago, on her fourth birthday, after the pink cake, we went outside, had an art contest with new chalk in Easter Egg colors. Doug told them they’d all won, stooped down beside every child and her picture, listened while she told him about it, found something special to praise about each one. When he passed out the cartons of Play-Doh I’d gotten for prizes he said it was to encourage them in their future artistic endeavors.
The cafeteria floor was spongy. Anissa started jumping, holding her tray under her arm. The man ladling soup turned to her. “Stop that, little girl.” She whimpered, hugged my legs.
He said he was sorry he’d scared her. “This used to be a dance floor. That’s why it does that. All the kids want to jump but it makes people nervous.”
He’s a client, Doug told me, the same as us. “He’s got no business talking to someone else’s kid that way.”
Chicken noodle soup, carrot sticks, potato chips, fruit cocktail. Brittany said it was like school, standing in line to get the sections of your tray filled.
There was a playroom where the kids could go while we talked to the social worker. The girls were excited when they saw the toys. The housekeeping corner we called it at the day care where I used to work. Dolls, dress-ups, a play kitchen. Nothing for Dakota. The playroom lady said he could be her helper.
“Jeez! No.”
Doug grabbed his arm. “You’re asking for it, buddy.”
The playroom lady looked at Dakota’s arm, looked at me.
“We’ll take him with us,” I told her.
The social worker did most of the talking, didn’t ask much about how we’d ended up here. Your sob story, she called it.
“We’ll give you a fresh start,” she said. “What you make of it is up to you.”
No cussing, no drinking, no drugs, no smoking or vaping inside or within 25 feet of the building, complete your assigned chores, no fighting, follow all posted rules, attend chapel every day at 4:00 p.m. or 6:00 a.m. and behave in a respectful and reverential manner, she said. No members of the opposite sex in the sleeping quarters. No physical punishment. Christ Centered Parenting classes are offered on Tuesday evenings.
“We’re not free to discipline our children as we see fit?” Doug says, staring at her.
She shrugged. “These are the terms for receiving services. You can get Section Eight as soon as you’ve saved the first month’s rent and the security and cleaning deposit. You’re welcome here as long as you follow the rules and are actively seeking employment. Tomorrow morning be on the van for Job Search at 7:50.”
In her flat voice she talked about day care for the girls, bus passes, free clothes. She said Dakota could stay in the Women’s Shelter with the girls and me. “Our cutoff is twelve. You and your daughters can share the double bed. He can have the single.” Was either of us a veteran because it would help with housing, did we have resumes, were we felons, were we sex offenders, did our children have special needs?
“We’re not retards,” Dakota says. He’d been quiet till then, sitting between us.
“Nobody said you were. What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Whatever.”
“You can go to summer school then. The bus comes to the main entrance at 8:55. There’s lunch and snacks and special emphasis on math and science. On Fridays they take you swimming.”
“That’s great, Dakota. You’ll make friends.”
“How do we know this school is any good?” Doug wanted to know.
“You don’t. If you find another place for him to go during the day just let us know.”
After she gave us a pass for the laundry room and we left I told Doug we should be grateful. Dakota didn’t finish fifth grade because we had to move. He’s smart, could get caught up. The girls would be safe during the day. If even one of us found work, and we kept giving plasma, we’d have enough. Plenty.
“You just don’t get it, do you?”
“Great,” Dakota said. “It’s all great.”
“Look at all these empty washers,” I said. “I can get our laundry done before chapel.”
The Women’s Shelter used to be a nursing home. Green tiled floors, bars on the windows, iron bed frames painted chocolate brown. Clean. They gave us shampoo, soap, floss, toothpaste, toothbrushes, deodorant for Dakota and me. We had our own room. Doug slept on a mat in the chapel because the bunks in the Men’s Shelter were full.
That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, Dakota said school was okay. “You just do stuff on the computer.”
The girls looked pretty in their clean clothes, their freshly washed hair soft and shiny.
Thursday, after I had an interview at a daycare downtown, Doug and I donated plasma together. “I think it went well,” I told him. “I hope so.” We each got $40.00. They always pay more for your second donation of the week, so you’ll come back.
We spent $50.00 to get the car towed to the garage. We opened a bank account with the left over $90.00. When we had $300.00 they’d fix the fan belt.
The daycare offered me the job on Friday, after they’d done the criminal background check. $19.00 an hour, medical and dental, I could bring Anissa, and it was on the bus line. Doug said it wasn’t much money.
Dinner that night was good: meat loaf, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, pie. Donated from stores but just about any kind you could think of. Doug told the kids we’d get our own place soon, making them happy. Afterwards he and I were on cleanup. I never minded that, wearing the white apron and disposable hair net. Like working in the lunchroom in high school, I told Doug, trying to make it fun for him.
I rinsed trays. The hose attached to the nozzle was heavy and I lost control, spraying Doug, who was loading the dishwasher, a little. I smiled at him, pretending I’d done it on purpose, to flirt. When he turned away from me I saw the back of his neck was red.
When there was a lull with the trays, I told him I was sorry.
“You’re getting on my last nerve.”
The guys on pots and pans talked music, “What bothers me is how little recognition Roy Clark got. Nobody ever played the guitar better. But he just made it look too easy, smiling all the time like ‘nothing to it.’”
I’d like being called “teacher” again, riding the bus with Anissa to work, me with a tote bag full of projects for my little pupils. Doug would find a job. Brittany and Dakota would make friends at school. At dinner we’d talk about how our day went.
There was no reason for me to be sad.
But I knew it could happen anytime. No matter how good things were, we could be back in the car, going nowhere.
“Or Steve Goodman,” a big guy with a mustache said. “A seriously underrated songwriter. Everyone thinks Arlo Guthrie wrote ‘City of New Orleans,’ which wasn’t even one of Goodman’s best songs.”
I guess it takes time to shake it. I kissed Doug, right on the mouth, in front of them all.
They whooped and hollered. “Get a room,” one of them called.
“As soon as we can,” I told them. “With a bed,” I whispered to Doug, wishing he’d smile.
Mini-interview with Jane Snyder
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
JS: August 25, 1984, Truman Capote’s death.
I was working nights as a psychiatric attendant in a hospital. My boss, Marion, the charge nurse, was a hoot. When I took specimens to the lab she’d suggest stopping off in the hospital entrance to place cigarettes in the mouths of the holy statues. The Nordstrom’s sale, her beautiful blonde grandbabies, the fancy drinks she enjoyed poolside during a recent trip to the Bahamas, that’s what Marion liked to talk about, but that night she talked about when her Air Force officer husband was stationed at McConnell Air Force Base and she’d worked nights at a hospital in Wichita. She was the medications nurse, took a cart with prescribed medications to every patient’s room. When the Clutter family was killed in their farmhouse outside Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959 it was all over the news. The hospital staff was shocked. Mrs. Clutter had been hospitalized there many times for depression. You passed her pills every night, the nurses told her, but Marion couldn’t remember Mrs. Clutter. No wonder, the others said, she just blended right into the woodwork.
Yes, but who was she, Marion wanted to know. That’s why she read the book, the best one she ever read. “He was a wonderful writer.”
“A wise career move,” Gore Vidal said, when he learned Capote had died.
I don’t know if Marion knew much of In Cold Blood was made up, or that Capote was a drunk and a druggie, but I know she wouldn’t have cared. I’ve wanted to write something that transcends my own faulty self ever since, take pleasure from the effort.
HFR: What are you reading?
JS: Gentlemen, I Address You Privately by Kay Boyle. It’s a 1990s rewrite of a novel she first wrote in 1931. I don’t think any living person could remember the vanished world she’s describing but you drop into it immediately.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Fresh Start”?
JS: Just about every homeless shelter I’ve ever seen started as something else: a motel, hospital, a nursing home, a rich man’s big house. In a town near where I used to live there’s one that was put up on the quick as a dance hall during WWII for the young G.I.s posted nearby and the local girls. Thinking of that helped me imagine the family in the story.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
JS: A long time ago I wrote a novel about a teenage girl who told lies. I liked her and I’m thinking of revisiting it but I’m not sure. I’ve been reading my (third) novel and it’s even worse than I remember.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
JS: Don’t encourage her, as my kids say. But thanks!
Jane Snyder’s stories have appeared in Frigg, Atlas & Alice, Writer’s Foundry, Pithead Chapel, Umbrella Factory, StoneCoast Review, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and other publications. She lives in Spokane.
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Heavy Feather Review 