Ain’t it funny how the night moves!
They talked until almost 5 o’clock in the morning. Arlene laid it out directly. She had no money, which is why she had to drop out of the University. Her mother didn’t have medical insurance, or she actually had some but not enough to pay for what she really needed. Medicaid would cover some of the costs but certainly not all. Her father had run off. She had no brothers or sisters, she had no other family that could really help. Maybe, she told Bill, some people would refer to her as white trash.
Bill would remember that she blushed when she said this. He would remember thinking the expression trailer trash but he would also remember that he’d been taught not to classify people. He’d been taught to treat people as people, to treat them as they treated him.
Bill told her there was nothing wrong with being poor. He told her there was nothing wrong with being a hard-working person, a hard-working regular Joe. He told her how he’d given up a free education at City University of New York to come out to OSU. He told her the only reason he was able to do it was because he was able to get into a work-study program which paid most of his tuition and gave him a job to help pay for his books. He told her he beat the dorm room because his brother was there, but he only lived with his brother for the first month. He told her living with his brother was pure hell.
Arlene never asked for a foot rub. She sat with the robe drawn about her and her legs tight together. She spoke about her mother possibly dying. The prospects of it made her tear up again and almost cry. She told him she never asked anyone for anything in her life, not even her mother because she’d worked for herself from the time she was fourteen. But she was asking now. She was asking God to help her and her mother. She was asking Bill to help her get the shifts she needed. She told Bill she was also asking him to hold her when she needed holding.
“I know I’ve already said it,” she said to Bill as if it were the last thing she was going to say. “I’m so scared I don’t know what to do with the feeling. I’m too goddamn young to be an orphan and my mother is way too young to die.”
Bill just looked at her. For most of the time she talked that’s all he did. He’d wanted to get up and hold her but he kept himself in check and kept himself a gentleman. He sat, he listened and he thought.
“You know,” he said, “I haven’t really told anybody this other than the people who went through it with me, but when I got busted and I knew I was going to jail, I was so scared and so depressed that I couldn’t get out of bed. I stayed in bed, literally, for weeks and weeks. It got so bad I cut the first six weeks of the final English seminar, the last required course for all graduating seniors majoring in English. I almost blew the one chance I had to go on and graduate.”
Bill reached out for Arlene. He took her hands. He looked at the clock that was on her dresser and saw that it was almost time for him to be getting ready to go to work.
“You late girl tonight?” he asked.
