Song of Solomon, Chapter Seven, Verse Three:
Her mouth with its too-thin red-red lips looks cut open with a knife. She says, 'Hi. I'm Fertility.'
She hands the flower up and holds it in the air as if I'm not impossibly out of her reach, and she asks, 'So, how did you know my brother, Trevor?'
Her name was Fertility Hollis. That's her full name, no kidding, and she's what I really want to share about the next day with my caseworker.
It's part of my terms of observation, I have to meet with my caseworker for one hour, once a week. In exchange, I keep getting housing vouchers. The program makes me eligible for subsidized housing. Free government cheese, powdered milk, honey, and butter. Free job placement. These are just a few of the perks you get in the Federal Survivor Retention Program. My dodgy little apartment and surplus cheese. My dodgy little job with all the veal I can smuggle home on the bus. You get just enough to make ends meet.
You don't get anything really choice, you don't get handicapped parking, but once a week for one hour, you get a caseworker. Every Tuesday, mine drives up to the house where I'm working in her plain-colored government pool car with her professional compassion and case history folders and her mileage log for keeping track of the miles between each client visit. This week, she has twenty-four clients. Last week, she had twenty-six.
Every Tuesday she comes to listen.
Every week, I ask her how many survivors are left, nationwide.
She's in the kitchen scarfing daiquiris and tortilla chips. Her shoes are kicked off and her canvas tote bag full of client files is on the kitchen table between us while she takes out a clipboard and flips through the client weekly status forms to put mine on top. She wipes her fingertip down a column of numbers, and says, 'One hundred and fifty-seven survivors. Nationwide.'
She starts filling in the date and checks her watch for the time to write on my weekly check-in form. She turns her clipboard around for me to read and hands it over for my signature at the bottom. This is to prove she was here. That we talked. We shared. She handed me a pen. We opened our hearts. Hear me, heal me, save me, believe me. It's not her fault if after she leaves I cut my throat.
While I'm signing the form she asks, 'Did you know the woman down the street who worked in the big gray-and-tan house?'
No. Yeah. Okay, I know who she's talking about.
'Big woman. Long blond hair in a braid. A real Brunhilde***,' the caseworker says. 'Well, she checked out two nights ago. She hung herself with an extension cord.' The caseworker looks at her fingernails, first with her fingers curled into her palms, then with her fingers spread wide. She goes back into her big tote bag and gets a bottle of bright red fingernail polish. 'Well,' she says. 'Good riddance. I never liked her.'
I hand the clipboard back and ask, Anybody else?
'A gardener,' she says. She starts shaking the little bottle of bright red with a long white top next to her ear. With her other hand, she flips through the forms to find one. She holds the clipboard up for me to see this week's check-in form for Client Number 134, stamped with the big red word RELEASED. Then the date.
The stamp is something left over from an inpatient hospital program. In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a stamp that said DEAD. The caseworker told me this a few years ago when the suicides started back up again. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. This is how things get recycled.
'This guy drank some kind of herbicide,' she says. Her hands twist the bottle between them. They twist. They twist until her knuckles look white. She says, 'These people will do anything to make me look incompetent.'
She knocks the bottle on the edge of the table and tries to twist it open again. 'Here,' she says and hands it across the table to me. 'Open this for me, will you?'
I open the bottle, no problem, and hand it back.
'So did you know these two?' she says.
Well, no. I didn't know them. I knew who they were, but I don't remember them from before. I didn't know them from growing up, but over the past few years I'd seen them around the neighborhood. They still wore the old regulation church clothes. The man wore the suspenders, the baggy pants, the long-sleeved shirt with the collar buttoned on even the hottest day of summer. The woman wore the blah-colored smock of a dress I remember church women had to wear. On her head, she still wore the bonnet. The man always wore the wide-brimmed hat, straw in summer, black felt in winter.
Yeah. Okay. I saw them around. They were hard to miss.
'When you saw them,' the caseworker says as she's sliding the little paintbrush, red on red, down the length of each nail, 'were you upset? Did seeing people from your old church ever make you sad? Did you cry? Seeing people the way they used to dress when you were part of the church, did it maybe make you angry?'
The speakerphone rings.
'Does it make you remember your parents?'
The speakerphone rings.
'Does it make you angry about what happened to your family?'
The speakerphone rings.
'Do you ever remember what it was like before the suicides?'
The speakerphone rings.
The caseworker says, 'Are you going to answer that?'
In a minute. First I have to check my daily planner. I hold the fat book up for her to see the list of everything I'm supposed to get done today. The people I work for try to call and trip me up. God forbid I should be inside to answer the phone if right this minute I'm supposed to be outside cleaning the pool.
The speakerphone rings.
According to my daily planner book, I'm supposed to be steaming the drapes in the blue guest room. Whatever that means.
The caseworker's crunching tortilla chips so I wave at her to quiet down.
The speakerphone rings, and I answer it.
The speakerphone yells, 'What can you tell us about tonight's banquet?'
Relax, I say. It's a no-brainer. Salmon with no bones. Some kind of bite-sized carrots. Braised endive.
'What's that?'
It's a burned leaf, I say. You eat it with the little fork farthest to the left. Tines down. You already know braised endive. I know you know braised endive. You had it last year at a Christmas party. You love braised endive. Eat just three bites, I tell the speakerphone. I promise you'll love it.
The speakerphone asks, 'Could you get the stains out of the fireplace mantel?'
According to my daily planner book, I'm not supposed to do that task until tomorrow.
'Oh,' the speakerphone says. 'We forgot.'
Yeah. Right. You forgot.
Sleazes.
You could call me a gentleman's gentleman but you'd be wrong on both counts.
'Anything else we should know about?'
It's Mother's Day.
'Oh, shit. Fuck. Damn!' the speakerphone says. 'Have you gone ahead and sent something? Are we covered?'
Of course. I sent each of their mothers a beautiful flower arrangement, and the florist will bill their account.
'What did you say in the card?'
I said:
To My Dearest Mother Whom I Cherish and Always Remember. A Loving Son/Daughter Has Never Had a Mother Who Loved Him/Her More. With My Deepest Love. Then the applicable signature.
Then P.S.: a dried flower is just as lovely as a fresh one.
'Sounds good. That should hold them for another year,' the speakerphone says. 'Remember to water all the plants in the sun-porch. It's written in the planner book.'
