Benefit, page 14
Scared? My mother is looking at me. Half of her face is ready to dissolve into open worry. The other half is trying to figure out the way that this will be okay. This is an exaggeration of her most common expression. You’ve done so well, she says.
I don’t bother to deny this. I have more to say. Anything you do is part of something, some institution, system, way of operating, and all of these ways are founded on cruelty or heading for a crash or they have no use for you. Or all three. Have no use for me. I mean me when I say you. I’m sorry for dragging you into this. I don’t know what I was thinking.
Are you going to be okay? my mother asks.
It feels like I’m trapped in something I don’t want to be part of, and that something has also rejected me, and also I can’t escape it.
Do you mean being a professor?
I’m not a professor.
Oh.
I don’t have a career.
It’s all right, my mother says. You can stay here at home as long as you need.
I know, I say miserably. I’m very lucky.
Maybe get a little rest, my mother says.
I turned fifteen hundred words in to the Weatherfield Foundation yesterday.
I do not expect the website for Welcome House to be as complicated as it is. I stare at links for guests and volunteers and donors and press and public. The link for volunteers opens an application. I type into white squares. I feel better, typing into these white squares. Name, phone, email address, postal address. Gender and age. Religious affiliation. “None.” Place of employment. “None.” “Does your employer have a volunteer matching program?” “N/A.” “Can you drive a car?” “Can you lift a weight of forty pounds or less?” “Can you stand for up to an hour?” “Yes,” I tick. “Yes.” “Yes.” I feel better.
I haven’t volunteered at anything in a long time. Of course I did in college. Everyone volunteered in college. In college, it was called “service.” Service was a section of your résumé. I was suspicious of that section. I didn’t trust those who took pleasure in the soul-deepening profundity of their service. Also I didn’t trust those who manufactured a pose of generosity from what was really an extension of their own leisure. The Ultimate Frisbee league for troubled youth and the Makeover Night for housebound seniors. Or maybe I was wrong; maybe it was all genuinely caring; maybe troubled youth really got into the spirit of the game; maybe housebound seniors really wanted to learn contouring; what did I know. Back when I did good things I was very cynical. Now that I’ve stopped doing them I’m not, not so much.
I don’t want to be. I want to get as close as possible to the provision of basic needs—food and shelter—in ways that consider my own personality and preferences not at all. I do not want to bring anything of me to the work except for my ability to stand for an hour or more and lift up to forty pounds. I am almost at the end of the questions. “Why do you wish to volunteer at Welcome House?” There is no drop-down. I look for a dropdown. I want an “N/A.” I write, “I wish to help the homeless.” Is that self-aggrandizing? Self-deceiving? “I wish to feel less useless.” That is definitely self-aggrandizing, self-aggrandizement through self-abasement, the worst kind. “I wish to understand what it’s like to do something both effective and uncomplicatedly good, so I might know what I am supposed to look for in other areas of my life.” I delete that last sentence. Blank, again. “I wish to help the homeless.” I click “Submit.”
“Next Steps,” the web page reads. There are several. I have to complete a Saturday-morning orientation. After that I can sign up for a shift. I will then receive a confirmation of my shift from a volunteer coordinator. And then complete my shift and log my hours. And then sign up for more shifts. Perhaps there is a different shelter with fewer steps. At the same time, the steps are comforting.
I decide on Welcome House because the Royce kitchens donate leftovers there every Tuesday and Friday. You can ride with the driver, my mother says, when he comes to get the food. Though the driver comes very early, she adds. My mother seems more careful than usual these days. Why would I care about early? I ask. I don’t know, she says; I thought you might. I take her car to the orientation; I drive clenching the steering wheel with two hands, glancing down at directions. The weather gets colder every day now, temperatures dropping steadily, not even the pretense of subtlety in their decline anymore. No. After daylight saving time ends the whole world gives in.
I enter New Haven on the cracked asphalt of an access road bordered by chain-link fences and rail tracks, pass a downtown district of what look like warehouses, a few shops eyelidded with roll-up metal gates, and keep following my directions into an area where trash drifts and subsides in the gutters and most structures seem abandoned. A block from the address, I see a small crowd of people waiting, some with shopping carts and some with large bags. I already feel the squeeze of hypocrisy in my stomach. I am only, technically, nonhomeless because of my mother. The building is yellow-brown stone and brown aluminum. It looks like a school. A fabric banner, frayed at one corner, hangs over the door. WELCOME. I park.
The first floor is warm, miasmed with the smell of old soup and laundry and disinfectant. There are a few chairs in the entrance hallway—folding chairs, placed there it seems temporarily, holding people who sleep sitting up. Around them others move purposefully in several directions, one in a wheelchair, one crutching along. The space is loud and close. My guilt has curdled, typically, into nausea. This is an old problem. I like to think I am tough about things like bad smells and tastes but I am not. I am squeamish; then—overcompen sating—severe. My mother’s house has always been clean and quiet. An attendant at the front desk slumps on a high stool behind a pane of smeared plastic and eyes me suspiciously. Through a horizontal security slot he passes me a binder to sign in. I follow the direction of his finger to the right, to the Gathering Space. The Gathering Space is filled with long benches of wood and turquoise vinyl scuffed and in a few places cracked open, showing white filling. A dozen people, more or less, are already there. I sit in the back. A few minutes after I arrive, a group of teenagers comes in, laughing. They wear matching T-shirts. Older than teenagers. College students. I can’t see what the shirts say.
Two women at the front clear their throats and tap clipboards, about to talk. People, the older one begins. She is tall, with wavy hair and square blue glasses on a chain. She puts on her glasses and claps her hands. People. The room quiets. She is waiting for us to settle down. PEOPLE.
The first thing you’ve got to know, she says once it’s calm enough to be heard, is Thanksgiving is done. She raises one finger in warning. So if you want Thanksgiving, you can leave now. A pause and a silence. Her glance is almost threatening. I do not know what she means. It is November 12. No one says anything. The teenagers look around also. I feel implicated in their obvious lack of knowledge, their slapdash approach to this orientation, their disregard for its requirements and commitments. I am not like them. I should have sat farther forward. But if I move now I will seem fastidious. I focus on the front of the room.
Now the older woman smiles. Apparently she is glad no one left at her invitation to leave. I don’t know what it is about Thanksgiving! she tells us, almost jovial suddenly. Folks think if you volunteer on Thanksgiving you have a guaranteed ticket to heaven, or something. I mean. She laughs at this idiocy and invites us to share in her laughter. At the dais where she is standing are several banners. The left one reads WELCOME and the right HOUSE. In the middle, COME TO ME, ALL YOU WHO ARE WEARY AND BURDENED, AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST. MATTHEW 11:28. It is constructed from felt cut-out letters, roundish, fluffy, and messily stitched. Beneath the letters are hands in many colors reaching up. Red, yellow, blue, green, orange. The older woman says, Not even Christmas is as bad as Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is bad. Then she pats the younger woman on the arm and turns to go. That was all she needed to say. Now she has more important places to be. That was Anne Stevens, says the younger woman; she’s our director of services.
The younger woman, now in charge, is Paige. Paige has fair hair and skin and wears a plain gold cross on a chain. She has a slight southern accent. Or perhaps that is simply training, since something about the way she uses “y’all” and “folks” suggests such language is policy. The way she uses “friends and neighbors” is definitely policy. Right now we’re serving breakfast to our friends and neighbors who have stayed the night. Paige is going to run through a few things real quick, she tells us, and then we’ll have a tour. She is real grateful to us all for coming out. As Paige talks, I look up on my phone the remainder of the chapter, Matthew 11. The verse that follows “I will give you rest” runs this way: “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” This does not seem to follow. In my view the whole chapter is hard to follow. Rest or a yoke? “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” This is the end of the chapter. I have missed some of the brief monologue in which Paige outlined the different volunteer opportunities.
She is explaining different levels of commitment. For example, maybe you want to volunteer from your own home. In that case, you can call and thank donors. This sounds like a useless job. Paige stresses how important this job is. There’s also admin work, or work in the kitchen, or work in the day care, or work with the reading group. The important thing is to remember there is something for everyone. Paige has said these things many times before. Now I’m going to run through a few rules real quick. These rules are for your safety and for the safety of our friends and neighbors. Be punctual for your volunteer shift. Always sign in. Always report injuries if injuries occur. And we ask that you dress modestly, so that means no shorts, no tank tops, no sweats, no open-toed shoes, no tight clothing, no saggy clothing, no holes, no skirts above the knee. Paige rattles this off. I am impressed at her memory. I look down at my jeans, which have a hole and might be too saggy in some parts and too tight in others. It is hard to tell. Paige continues. It’s real important that you don’t offer any advice or counseling to our friends and neighbors. This can disturb their progress. It is also important to have supportive conversations. So no foul language or negative talk. Above all, don’t exchange personal information or socialize off-site. This is a safety precaution.
Paige smiles at us. Paige is much younger than I and she has a good job in which she is helping people.
The tour begins. We lurk together, waiting to be directed. I look at the teenagers’ T-shirts. They are a service group from a local community college. None of them is wearing open-toed shoes or baggy or tight clothing or jeans with holes. I see now that they are purposeful and focused. They understand why they are here. I have misread them. I fall back so they can lead the way as the tour begins. Paige takes us upstairs. So here’s a dorm, she says. The bunk beds are close enough to one another that sleepers would be barely arm’s length apart. Each bed is made up with a gray-green blanket and white sheets. The ceiling is so low, the top sleeper wouldn’t be able to sit up. Could you request a bottom bunk, I wonder, so you could read in bed? I would want to read in bed. I catch myself. I am not here to imagine myself in this homeless shelter. Or am I? Is this empathy or paranoia or narcissism? Perhaps empathy is always a kind of narcissism. Paranoia, too. Fourteen days, Paige tells us brightly, is the longest any one person can stay. Fourteen days in, seven days out. We don’t want anyone to grow dependent on us.
We move from the dormitory to the admission area. Paige doesn’t stop; she walks backward, moving us through. This is where we check for bugs and drugs. And then we provide a clean set of pajamas. The pajamas are stacked on metal shelves. Paige shakes out a pair for us to see. Pale green, something like hospital scrubs but more faded, less ready for hard use. Paige is moving. Then our friends and neighbors can get a shower, here. Moving again. We see the laundry, the gym, the rec area. We end in the kitchen, all clean steel tables and ranges and refrigerators, with a tiled floor that slopes down to a drain. Paige wraps up the tour, handing around sheets on which we are meant to put our names down for shifts. I sign up for Tuesday and Friday breakfast.
We file back into the Gathering Space to hear from the head of the Board of Directors of Welcome House, a balding man in baggy khakis and a button-down shirt. The head of the Board of Directors tells us how glad he is that we are here, each of us. He wants to tell us what he knows we already know, which is that Welcome House is a very special place. We already know because we have already volunteered. But you won’t really know, he says, you won’t really know how special, until you let it change you. You should not be afraid of being changed. Then Welcome House can help us as we help Welcome House. He wants to tell us a little bit about how Welcome House helped him. He started in the army, he says, and then went to college and business school on the GI Bill, and then worked as a consultant, but after a long career in the financial sector he realized it was time to give back, so he retired and began to think about what mattered. It wasn’t just money he wanted to give, he realized; he wanted to give something more meaningful. Time. Himself. And every one of us is also making that gift. We, too, are giving ourselves.
Next we hear from a former friend and neighbor of Welcome House, a skinny, smiling man in dark jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. This person also tells us how glad he is that each of us is here. Also how much a place like this can mean to people; he should know, because he was one of them. He did two tours in Iraq, got a metal pin put in his leg (he points to his hip), and when he came back his life fell apart; they took his kids away from him, he got into the booze, into the dope (he uses these words—booze, dope—as if he is trapped in a public-safety message from fifty years ago), and he just kept going into that downward spiral, you know, that downward spiral (his hands move in graceful circles from shoulder to waist). And blaming everything, he adds, cussing this, cussing that, cussing the other thing (he uses the word cussing)—but not facing it, you know, facing himself. And that’s what the program is all about; that’s what the program can do for you—he should know; he did it three times (here he laughs, the sound bubbling up, ingenuous)—it gets you to face yourself. So that’s what y’all are a part of now; it’s saving lives. He should know.
There’s one more person to speak. She comes from the audience; she steps forward from the benches where all of us are sitting. She has been leading the group of teenagers I noticed, and she has on a T-shirt like theirs, but she’s older, maybe sixty, and gray-haired, wearing on her lower half a long chambray skirt and cowboy boots. Her palms press together in front of her as if she is praying or nervous, and what she says seems smooth enough to be scripted, if it were not so earnest and plain. She’s been working for justice a long time. When she was younger, she lived and worked for ten years on a cooperative farm in the South, helping people there learn to grow food to feed themselves, until it was wrecked by an eminent domain claim for a chemical plant, and after that she got a degree in social work, and spent ten years in Washington, D.C., working at a nonprofit that tried to influence national policy on hunger, during which time she lived in a halfway house for women and children, but then her nonprofit folded, so she went abroad for about fifteen years, living in different countries, working with a Christian mission. But now she lives in the city here, because she is married again—her first marriage, she says by way of a calm digression, ended in divorce—and her husband is here, so she is living with him and waiting to see what the Lord has in store for her next. She has been asked to lead us all in an ecumenical prayer, she says, to conclude our orientation, but more important than anything any of us can say is what we all can hear, in our heart of hearts, and what we speak there, what we promise there, so instead of any prayer, she would like to pause for thirty seconds in silence together.
During the silence I look down at my phone, at the website where I looked up the Bible verse, and switch versions in the drop-down menu at the top, selecting the King James Version, which I was accustomed to using in college and grad school for no good reason, really, other than it sounds better. “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
On Tuesday morning, the driver arrives at six, pulling in behind the wide cafeteria door near the Dumpsters. I am ready. I will load, unload, pack, whatever has to happen. But the driver only gets out wordlessly with a lighter and a pack of Camels. So I stand, also wordless, while he pinches a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, inhaling, exhaling, not speaking, his face down. Our separate clouds of breath are soft white in the darkness. The thermometer by my mother’s back door read twenty-eight degrees this morning. The driver digs his other hand into his jacket pocket and jiggles his feet a few times.
I cross my hands into my armpits. No words have been spoken and he does not offer me a cigarette. I watch the etching of frost on the pavement and count the empty cans of cooking oil stacked nearby. When he tosses away his butt he looks at me with aggression, as if I am about to accuse him of violating a rule, as if he is about to defy my accusation. In fact I think smoking is illegal on school grounds. He opens the back door of his van and pulls out five large silver trays and as many large metal spoons, along with a box of gloves. The van is painted on both sides with the name of an electrical business, perhaps his, perhaps his boss’s—he has the general demeanor of a man who often thinks he’s being cheated, but the thought could be directed against his customers as readily as his employers. It could be directed at both. He moves inside. I have not been addressed. I follow. In the kitchens he pulls on a pair of gloves and hands two to me, grunting. Last night’s leftovers are waiting for us, a few big cauldrons of baked ziti and a few of vegetarian rice pilaf. We spoon each into the dented trays, which are very clean, then cover them with huge clattering lids. I lift two back to the truck. Food is surprisingly heavy. The driver arranges these metal rectangles on the floor of his van and secures them with bungee cords. The rest of the space remains cluttered with metal tool caddies, spools of cord and wire, white plastic buckets, the contents of which I can’t identify, and two folded stepladders. He nods at me. You can sit up in the front, he says. He makes this concession seem magnanimous. Up in the front is the only seat.
