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.We felt the world owed us some obscure inheritance.This strange psychology had been passed down by our parents and grandparents, who actually did lose their jobs during the seventies and eighties.We were children of the dispossessed who wanted to be the dispossessed.The house we bought was an old Victorian on Chalmers Street, and it cost us only six thousand dollars.Houses were cheap in Youngstown because most of the city was a ghetto.The only profitable business was the university, which we thought would be our way out of town one day.Our house had two floors, a basement, an attic, and a front porch spread wide and deep as a cave.Between the turret that rose out of one corner of the roof and the newel posts on the stairwell, we felt like we’d bought our very own castle.After using what money we’d saved to buy the place, Gerith and I were broke.We’d both won grants and taken out loans to pay for college, which left us with a little extra cash each semester, but that money never seemed to arrive at the right times.So for the first few months in our new house we had electricity and water but no telephone or heat.And when the autumn chill grew strong and wind began to rattle our windows, we wrapped ourselves in the afghans our mothers had crocheted for us before we left.Whatever other luxuries we did without, the one that hurt most was food.We ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, ramen for dinner, and drank tap water that tasted of chlorine.On our kitchen table we kept a wooden fruit bowl that was always empty.After a few months of living like this, it felt like my taste buds had begun to deteriorate.We didn’t know much about our neighbors.Only that a black family lived on one side—a mother with two teenaged girls, one who had a son of her own—and on the other side was a Puerto Rican couple, Rosa and Manuel, who screamed at each other in Spanish until four in the morning most nights.Across the street in a Victorian like ours was Mrs.Burroway, a little, white-haired old lady who walked hunched over and carried a black cane with a silver horse head for a handle.She seemed ancient to me even then, bone-thin, her skin hanging loose on her frame.She wore a pair of thick black-rimmed glasses that exaggerated her cloudy cataracts and the blue of her eyes.Almost every day she sat on her porch alone with her cane laid across her lap, watching the traffic go by at the end of the street.Sometimes when I was leaving for school, I’d see her heading to a neighbor’s house carrying brown bags, overfull with groceries, which she’d place on their porch, ring the doorbell, then scurry home again, her horse-headed cane trotting in front of her like a guide.And it was in that way, actually, while she was delivering her mysterious goods, that we finally met.One morning, as I gathered my schoolbooks, I heard a thump outside the front door.Then the doorbell rang repeatedly, loud and annoying, as it hadn’t been replaced since the house was first built.I pulled my backpack over my shoulder already saying, “I heard you the first time,” but when I opened the door there was no one on the porch.A bird perched on the porch rail, cocking its head at me as I looked down to find a bag of groceries at my feet, a stalk of celery jutting out the top, a bag of bread and soup cans visible beneath.When I looked up again, I saw Mrs.Burroway crossing the street, hunched over as if several sacks of grain were piled on her back.“Wait a second!” I shouted, then picked up the bag and ran off the porch, finally catching her on the other side of the street.“I’m sorry,” I said, “but why did you leave these groceries on my porch?”She turned those blue, cloud-ridden eyes on me then, and licked her lips.“You boys are looking a bit slight,” she said, uncovering her teeth with a smile.“But surely you can’t afford to buy us groceries.” I smiled, holding the bag out for her to take back.“No, no,” she said, waving her hands as if the bag were cursed.“Those are yours now.Besides, I have plenty.”“Well,” I said, and stood there for a moment, not knowing what else to say.“Well, thank you.”“My pleasure,” she said.Then she turned around and continued on to her house.Gerith and I spent that day at home instead of school.We opened cans of soup, stripped bananas out of their skins, ate stalks of celery with cream cheese spread in the grooves.We drank a six-pack of grape soda I found at the bottom of the bag, and smoked marijuana, which Gerith supplied, wondering aloud at what we’d missed in our classes.By evening, most of the food was gone.One banana lay curled on its side in the fruit bowl and two cans of clam chowder stocked our pantry shelves.“So,” said Gerith, as we sat cross-legged on the braided rug in the living room.“Do you think Mrs.Burroway is crazy, or just very generous?”I took a hit off the pipe and passed it back, holding the smoke inside until my lungs began to hurt.“Very generous,” I said, exhaling the smoke.“Though that doesn’t exclude the possibility of a mental disorder.”“Wow.” Gerith shook his head.“That’s pretty amazing.”I nodded, chuckling a little at Gerith’s astonishment.“What?” he said.“Did I say something stupid?”I told him it was nothing though, and waved away his question with a crazy, expansive gesture that made us both laugh until we’d forgotten what we’d been talking about.Winter in Ohio that year filled the streets with snow and ice.The city became a stage for the weather to play on—ice-slicked streets, temperatures far below zero, and snowdrifts so big children cut tunnels through them.Winter that semester, I had International Finance, Human Impacts on the Environment, and Ballroom Dancing.By the end I still couldn’t write an essay on acid rain that made any sense, but I’d learned how to waltz.It didn’t matter.The finance course was my priority.Doing the work for that class drained me, but I kept reminding myself it would all be worth it one day.Gerith, on the other hand, dropped his courses midway through the semester.He said he could finish them in summer, started to volunteer at the shelter, and soon everything he did and everyone he knew revolved around that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]