Chapter 12
The home in New Jersey was called Shaded Acres, a name that didn’t match the property.
I doubt it covered even one full acre, and though I imagine the trees in front of the house gave shade in warmer weather, when I arrived, most branches were bare.
In any case, Shaded Acres was what it said on the stationery, and it’s how they answered the phone.
The house itself was a big Victorian with a turret and a curved front porch, and it was one of several similar houses sharing the same street.
There wasn’t a sign out front, and if you were to put me on that same street today, I probably wouldn’t be able to pick out the house where I lived for ten weeks.
I’d recognize it from the back, though, as I remember that an extension of low-ceilinged offices had been built on to the back of the house.
I remember more about the home’s interior.
The common room was on the second floor, with a stained-glass window that made drifting dust motes turn gold in the afternoons.
The living room had a brick fireplace, and so did many of the bedrooms, but above each was a framed sign that read No Chimney Access!
No Burning!! Do Not Remove This Sign!! As if one of us girls might waddle outside with a tree saw, wave to the neighbors, and try to bring in kindling.
The furnace was always running, pushing out dry heat that made my cuticles crack and my nose itch.
You couldn’t open the windows because they’d been sealed for the winter.
The other girls regularly complained that they were too hot, especially at night.
Not me. Even under a blanket, even wearing a wool sweater stretched over the porcupine, that whole winter, I was cold.
They had sixteen of us staying there at a time.
Around once a week, someone would leave for the hospital, and the next day, a new girl would arrive to take the empty bed.
The youngest girl that I saw there was thirteen.
The oldest, who came in just as I was leaving, looked at least thirty.
We slept in twin beds, two or three to a room.
The night I arrived, the admitting nurse, after checking my head for lice, told me my room was on the second floor, and that I’d have just one roommate, Lucy.
“She’s a colored girl,” the nurse added. “Is that a problem for you? I see you came in from Florida.”
“No ma’am,” I said. This admitting nurse and I had already gotten off to a bad start. When she first introduced herself, she said nurse like noyce, or that’s how it sounded to me. I’d asked her what a noyce was, and she thought I was making fun of her.
“No ma’am what?” she asked. “No you’re not from Florida, or no you don’t have a problem?”
“It’s not a problem,” I said. It wasn’t.
I understood the North was, in some ways, a different country, and that as a visitor, I would need to adjust to its customs. But I don’t want to pretend that I was able to simply rise above my upbringing.
It was more the state of mind I was in. On the long train ride up from Florida, when I’d been trying to sleep and also trying not to cry in front of the other passengers, I thought about a story Leonard had told me he’d read about a regular man waking up one morning to find he’d turned into a giant insect.
The man-turned-bug was still himself, Leonard had said, wanting love from his family, but the family was horrified by the scurrying, antennaed sight of him; and because this new form of him could ruin them all, financially and otherwise, his own family locked him away until he died.
Now I know this story is Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” and I’ve read it myself, but when Leonard was telling me about it, I only thought it was a strange story that could never really happen.
And yet on the train to New Jersey, that story was very much in my head.
I was humbled in spirit, is what I mean.
—
Lucy was never rude to me, but she wasn’t particularly friendly.
At first, I worried that she somehow sensed I was from a Jim Crow state, and that I’d never before shared close quarters—or really, anything—with someone who wasn’t white.
But after a few days, I understood she likely hadn’t given me that much thought.
Her bed was just a few feet from mine, and I guessed she was around my age because she had the same Modern Calculus textbook that I did.
But she seemed mostly unaware of, or unconcerned with, my presence.
If I asked her a question about the chore list, or what day we could do laundry, she would look at me and blink slowly before answering, as if first needing to come all the way out of a dream.
Once that happened, she’d answer in as few words as possible, then go right back to being quiet.
She did her schoolwork sitting up in her bed.
If she finished before lights out, she’d scooch down under the covers and just lie there, belly up, staring at the ceiling.
It wasn’t just Lucy who stayed quiet. We ate meals in shifts, eight girls at a time, and if the nurse charged with making sure we ate our vegetables tried to get a conversation going, she eventually gave up.
I myself spoke only when spoken to. If you would have seen me up there that winter, pale and teary and blowing on my hands, hardly talking to anyone, you wouldn’t have known that my whole life, I’d always been one to strike up conversations with people, and the first to smile and say hello.
But the best way I can describe the feeling of that place is that it felt as if we girls were naked, and everyone else was fully dressed—the social workers especially; but also the nurses; the neighbors we could see from our windows as they shoveled snow and sometimes looked up and saw us watching; the doctors who came to examine us in the offices at the back; and even the loved ones writing to us, or not writing to us, from home.
It was that humiliating, being there. I didn’t really look at the other girls, partly to spare their embarrassment, and more because I didn’t want any of them, or anyone, looking back at me.
Mae wrote to tell me my English teacher from home had assigned Voltaire’s Candide, and one of the nurses lent me her copy.
I had no trouble appreciating that the story on the whole was satire, and Pangloss’s cheerful interpretations were not to be trusted unless your goal was to roll your eyes.
But the nurse had underlined “Let us work without reasoning,” said Martin; “it is the only way to make life endurable,” and I think she and I agreed that here, Martin had a point.
I took the advice and stayed busy. A chalkboard in the kitchen listed our assigned chores for the week: cleaning the bathrooms, emptying garbage pails, sweeping and mopping, that kind of thing.
If I heard a girl say she was too tired or nauseated to do her chores, I went ahead and did hers as well as mine—not to be nice, but to keep myself occupied, and to try to wear myself out.
In the evenings, after I finished my schoolwork, I wrote letters home via Arkansas, cheerfully reporting to Janet and Bobby, and to Irene and Roberta, that Mae’s mother was slowly getting better, and that this part of Arkansas was quite pretty.
I napped a lot. That was another reason, besides staying warm, that I followed Lucy’s example, doing my schoolwork and writing letters in bed.
Sometimes, I’d nod off while still holding my pen.
And yet at night, as soon as my head hit the pillow, I would suddenly feel wide awake, my thoughts inevitably turning to Leonard.
I’d imagine him bursting in the home’s front door, still in uniform and full of apologies, desperate to explain, begging my forgiveness.
Maybe even happy about the porcupine. He’d bring my hand up to his lips the way he used to, looking at me like I’d hung the moon.
Everything would make sense again. I’d tell him there was no need for forgiveness, if it was just a misunderstanding.
My case manager at the home, Mrs. Kilgore, said my having these imaginings made it clear that I was still living in fantasy land, which is what had landed me in the home in the first place.
I’ve previously referred to the sessions with the home’s social worker as interrogations, which was indeed how my appointments with her felt.
Twice a week, I had to walk down the hallway of the first floor’s extension and knock on her office door.
Mrs. Kilgore was a vital-looking woman who let me know, in the first meeting, that she’d already brought up four children within the sanctity of marriage before she went back to school to get her degree.
She wore heavy wool cardigans buttoned to her throat.
On my first visit, she explained that she had to keep her office window at least a little open because if we girls got too warm and comfortable, we invariably got so sleepy we didn’t hear a word she said.
I could certainly believe that. Her office had a big, soft chair for me to sit in, and a needlepoint pillow that said Seek to Improve Each Day that I had to either squash behind me or keep in my lap.
The view from her office window was mostly blocked by the branches of a pine tree, so while the air coming in the window was freezing, it at least smelled nice.
Still, halfway through my second session, I pointed out that I could actually see my breath.
She took mercy on me and closed the window.
Within twenty minutes, my eyelids turned heavy. She didn’t like that at all.
“Nora, wake up!” She clapped her hands in my face, then stood to crack open the window. “We have work to do, you and I.”