Liz's Sister Part I

One of our relatively new clients, Kimberly, has a lot to say. Apparently, she also makes cakes in a cast iron skillet. I'm supposed to get a peach cake one of these days. I'll let you know if I ever do. Anyway, those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know about Liz, one of our sicker, more troubled, and, in many ways, more endearing clients. Liz lives with a sister named Samantha. None of us have ever seen Samantha, but we hear a great deal about her. Samantha steals from Liz. Samantha spends all her money on drugs, then takes to her bed, demanding care from beleaguered, overwhelmed Liz. Samantha takes Liz's money, then throws her out of the house, not even giving her time to get her heart medication. Samantha has been married to a bipolar man in the suburbs for decades, taking his money and living with a series of boyfriends in the city while pretending to be faithful.

These damaged, complex relationships aren't unusual for our clients, but the stories Liz tells about Samantha can't possibly all be true. Years ago, Samantha kidnapped somebody, and Liz rode in the car afterward with her sister and the victim. Liz was sentenced to more time than Samantha, the judge having explained that being an unknowing accessory after the fact was worse than committing the underlying crime. Samantha also gave Liz syphilis by taking a bath in the same tub that Liz later used. Apparently, the 13 years of stripping and the 17 arrests for prostitution had nothing at all to do with Liz's catching a venereal disease.

I believe that Liz is a reasonably honest person. I don't think she has either the inclination or the self discipline needed to concoct elaborate stories or to prevent herself from blurting out pretty much every single thing she has ever done or thought. Still, the Samantha stories got so over the top that I sometimes flirted with the notion that Samantha didn't even exist. She seemed to be taking on the mythical qualities of an evil twin in the ongoing Gothic horror movie that was pretty much Liz's life.

Then we learned that Kimberly lives right next door to Liz and Samantha. In a cheap Baltimore row house, right next door is really right next door. Kimberly seemed to know everything about the two sisters and to have no compunction at all about sharing. According to Kimberly, Samantha exists all right. She exists, and, if anything, she's even more horrible than Liz ever told us. In Liz's presence, Kimberly reported the continual bedlam Samantha and her array of strange men produced. She repeated language so vulgar that even in Jr. High I wouldn't have wanted to hear it (at least, not all that often in the middle of the night). She emphatically stated that Samantha regularly took Liz's money and then threw her out of the house. She even told us that Samantha had thrown Liz out naked once, and that Kimberly had brought her in and given her clothes. Liz didn't seem to like being reminded of that particular incident, but she nodded grimly when Kimberly looked to her for confirmation.

"And Liz is sweet as gold," Kimberly told us several times. "Nothing at all like her sister. Sweet as gold." At YANA Liz is, well, something of a pain in the ass. But then, YANA is the place for abused people to strut their stuff a bit, act entitled, burst into tears and then luxuriate a bit in all the hugs and kisses that follow. Liz outside of YANA, is just a dying 48 year old woman, still prostituting, still getting fall-down drunk nearly every day, still under the power of a sister she loves.

New Clients and a New Year

Probably because the Christmas dinner served as such a good advertisement, we began 2010 with a number of new clients. As is typical for our new clients, most of the women were from the recovery house next door. That means that they all have histories of serious drug abuse, but that they are sober now or at least making the effort to be. For many, that sobriety is one very fragile and precious thing. A woman named Didi announced that she had thirty days clean time, and we all applauded. She was almost giddy with her accomplishment, with finding a new place to receive care, with being listened to. When I asked if the women wanted to talk about themselves a bit, she told us that she had been sexually abused as a child and that she was still trying to cope with the guilt she felt for not having taken care of her mother. Didi's mother had been an alcoholic.

"And you feel guilty about that?" I asked. "You think you could have rescued her from her alcoholism?"

"I couldn't have rescued her," Didi said. "But I could have treated her better. I manipulated her. I lied to her. I got into her bank accounts, and I stole from her." In the space of about ten seconds I went from picturing a seriously abused and neglected child blaming herself for her parents' failures to picturing a relentless adult addict, exploiting and stealing from her sick mother. I imagine that both mental images were reasonably accurate. Didi, at any rate, was glad to have spoken, and surprised to hear that quite a few YANA clients have mother issues.

Another new woman, Glenda, quickly spoke up to tell us that her mother didn't like little girls and turned her head to make a spitting gesture whenever Glenda tried to hug or kiss her. Glenda, too, had been raped by family members, and Glenda, unsurprisingly, had been called a slut when she tried to report the abuse. Glenda loved her mother. It actually sounded to me like her mother loved her. When I asked if her mother had a bad past of her own, Glenda said emphatically that she knew she had been abused as a child and that she saw her continue to be abused as an adult. Glenda is over 50, and she was more than a little exasperated by the fact that she was still trying to forgive her mother, to accept her own anger about the past, that she was still trying to fight her way free of the things that happened to her when she was five and ten years old.

I asked another woman if there was anything she would like to talk about, and she looked at us all as if we were mildly crazy. "No, I don't need to talk," she said. "I liked my mother." The room laughed. The women seemed energized by the things they had told. "Women's rap!" Glenda said more than once. "I like that even better than the clothes!" So far, so good for the new year.

Christmas Dinner

Denene cooked it. She had set her alarm for the middle of the night so she could take one turkey out of the oven and put the next one in, but she managed a flawless holiday dinner for 50. Anne's woman's group contributed 50 beautiful gift bags. And the day was wonderful. Every bit as wonderful as the previous week had been bad. More so.

I'm not sure why. It may have been the food. Or the experience of celebrating Christmas together. It may have been Sid's presence. When she wants, she can cause people to feel loved and loving towards each other. It may be because, under Sid's guidance, the women took turns telling the room what was in their hearts, and the room responded with warm enthusiasm. It may be because, again under Sid's guidance, the women gave thanks, not to God, but to the individuals present who had helped them.

Whatever it was, the women talked about the good things in their lives. Lilian's exhusband had sent her gift cards so that she could give Christmas presents. She gave me a beautifully wrapped book with a card calling me her angel. Other women celebrated clean time, the gift of being able to talk about their lives with other women, friendship, renewed relationships with their children.

Maybe a good round of "what are we happy about" will work the next time things get rough at YANA. I'll give it a try.

Leading up to the Christmas Season (post from 3 weeks ago)

When I walked into the office area of Hezekiah House, Sister Catherine looked up from her conversation with Father Joe and said encouragingly, "I see you have a lot of people here today!"

"A lot of pain in the ass people," I blurted out. In the half second it took for me to realize how inappropriate I was, the old nun and old priest had already burst into merry laughter. I muttered something about donations. They seemed to understand perfectly.

The week leading up to Christmas was not good. We got more donations than usual, and, with them, more anxiety about missing out on the largess while other people got too much. The loudest complainers were -- I imagine a number of you have guessed it -- the ones who regularly swipe the most stuff. Clients wielded religion like a truncheon against one another, loudly trumpeted their own altruism, and pulled me aside, repeatedly, to tell on the other women. They didn't always wait for actual facts, either. Suspicions, dark, dark suspicions were far too important not to be shared.

"Greed!" Jennifer exclaimed. "The deadliest of the seven sins."

Right.

One woman who usually takes a great deal was reported by several women to have made off with bags full of our highly coveted "toiletries." Unfortunately for her, the largest of her bags broke open in front of several other clients as she was leaving the building. Apparently, the woman refused the offers to get her sturdy new bags for her loot, confirming for everyone that she didn't have permission to take that much stuff in the first place. The growing, collective rage found its focus on this one client as woman after woman identified her and told me the story again. The little mean woman didn't know the client's name, but described her, venomously, as the "one with those ugly marks on her face." I ended up promising that this woman would not get anything the next day because she had already taken too much. It was a promise I didn't mind making, given how obnoxious she'd been in cadging (and demanding) extras from me.

So, the next day she was back, and relatively acquiescent when I told her she wasn't receiving donations that day. She left a little while later, then returned, calling out across the room to me that she needed something warm to wear because it was cold out. She was wearing a coat, but it didn't look all that heavy. The day was bitterly cold. I didn't know whether she had any place warm to go. Whether she even had any place to live. Every woman in the room was listening. I turned her down. The woman was simply astounded. "But it's so cold out!" I told her she could get something the next week.

When I told Sid about it, she said she thought she'd read something like that in the bible. "I was cold. I asked for clothes. You turned me down. Isn't that how it goes?" Sid murmured. I had no apologies. That client was -- probably -- relatively forgiven by the group once they saw her being publicly rebuffed. The overall anger level at least didn't get worse. She really had been stealing from YANA.

It was still an exhausting, and depressing, week. The next time we get that bad I will be more directive with the women. I will lock the cabinets, and we will have a vigorous, and not-at-all free flowing discussion about we behave at YANA. How we react when others are not quite as advanced in their behavior as we are. How we worry about our own conduct rather than anyone else's. If that fails, I'm closing YANA early.

Another Thief (post from four weeks ago)

We limit our clients to taking four items of clothing per visit, and we're not too particular as to whether the women sorting through through the donations are actually clients or whether they are simply impoverished women from the neighborhood. They don't come regularly unless they have the YANA background anyway, and some people might need the encouragement of clothes and coffee first before they're ready to acknowledge prostitution. There's good reason to let impoverished women take the things they need -- or, at least, I think so. Some of the time.

The "regulars," the "real" YANA clients, can get pretty worked up over outsiders coming in and taking their stuff. The other day, so did I. A woman I didn't know came on a quiet day and began moving about the room with the kind of wordless determination that my dogs (sorry) will get when they're after food left out on the coffee table. The few YANA women present rose in alarm as they saw her obvious attempts to take far, far more than the allotted amounts. Either so desperate or so socially oblivious that she didn't notice that the only other three people present were intent on every move, the woman careened from one part of the room to another, pulling huge amounts of clothing out of the cabinets, trying to stuff it in her bag, and angrily taking it back out again when reminded of the four item limit.

Finally, when she was literally backed into a corner, trying to shove multiple pairs of shoes on top of a small wardrobe's worth of clothing, the woman melted down to a brief, but dramatic, temper tantrum. "This place is a trip!" she screamed when I blocked her from taking her stash. "This is a trip!" Shoes went across the room. She threw a shirt back at me. "Call the police," one woman said. Both the other clients were standing right at my shoulders. There was no violence. It only occurred to me later that there probably would have been if I'd been alone with her and hadn't let her take what she wanted. After the woman stormed out, the other clients had quite a bit to say about her.

One of the clients who'd been there, Jennifer, knew the woman from the neighborhood. Predictably enough, Jennifer's stories centered on drug use, violence, and theft astounding even for Jennifer's street. According to Jennifer, this woman had been put out of an abandominium. "Put out of an abandiminium!" Jennifer crowed. In other words, she was so low, so incapable of even faking basic, civilized behavior that she was forcibly ejected from an abandoned building by the other squatters. Jennifer is a good story teller. The women laughed. I laughed. I probably should have done something very different.

AIDS

For those of you who recall the "Whatever Happened to the Little Girl?" post, the client who saved the little girl -- while prostituting her own daughters -- still comes to YANA once in a while. I'll call her Annie, but I think of her as Typhoid Mary, after the woman who went from town to town nursing the sick and unknowingly infecting them with her disease. Our own Annie is, well, she's a pleasure to be around. I always enjoy her company. She is interested in the little world around her. She has energy. She tells her stories passionately, and she genuinely cares about the people she tries to help. She also has immense system of denial that allows her to move through the world completely ignorant of the harm she inflicts and the many illnesses, physical and psychological, she carries within.

Annie lives in one of these bizarre arrangements that exist in our part of Baltimore. It sounds like sort of rooming house, sort of a charity, mostly just one guy's weird idea of something he'd like to do. Annie's son pays $350 per month for her to share a room in a house full of recovering female addicts. There's the usual set of mind bogglingly elaborate restrictions, swiftly enforced with punishments for the disobedient. A pair of squabbling, fifty year old roommates may each find themselves standing in the corner when the manager on shift gets irritated enough with them. And after listening to Annie recount the actual squabbles, it's sometimes hard to find all that much fault with the manager. Anyway, while most of Annie's energy has gone towards protecting her stuff from her thieving roommate, she is sometimes very moved by the suffering of the other women. She tries to help them. Her latest cause is a woman with AIDS.

The AIDS victim has been thrown out of the house because she has AIDS, but has slipped back in and is hiding in the basement. Annie seems to be leading the small band of women bringing her food and helping to hide her. Recently, they've discovered that the landlord's wife knows the woman is in the basement and is yet another secret sympathizer. All the women know that they will eventually be caught and disciplined.

Meanwhile, the landlord is requiring everyone to submit proof that they are HIV free, and an argument appears to be raging throughout the house as to how the disease is transmitted. Annie seems to be telling the truth when she says that she has been going to the library for information on the subject. She doesn't seem to have her landlord convinced yet that the virus isn't airborne. Annie herself is wondering how to show proof that she is virus-free. She knows she is, but she doesn't want to open up all her medical records to this man. I'm a civil rights lawyer, and I'm making her no offers whatsoever to intervene. I'm not sure whether meeting the requirements of civil litigation would be too much for these women or whether meeting the realities of this house and its occupants would be too much for any court, but I just don't see a good outcome in juxtaposing the two.

What I'm left with is Annie, sympathizing with anyone who has such a disease, trying to help her, comfortable in her own good health, entirely forgetting the day a few years ago when she wept and told me her own HIV test had come back positive. Frankly, I wish some of her psychological shortcomings were as manageable as the virus.

A Note on Tina and Liz

They're cousins. I'd had no idea, but I probably should have guessed there was some family relationship. They have the same small builds, light brown hair, and regular, even features. They have the same intense love/hate relationship with their sisters, with whom they both live and by whom they both claim to be abused on a regular basis. One day they come in distraught, telling us that they have no clothes, no medicine, no place to live because their sister put them out on the street after collecting the rent money. The next day they are borrowing a cell phone to check in with their sisters and say they love them. They have much of the same illness and the same sweetness.

Tina and Liz are two of our sickest clients, the ones we watch striding the brink of death, strangely undaunted, grasping at small victories and slender attachments. They are both still ready to throw their little, semi-invalid bodies into the mix, Liz still prostituting, Tina still up for a street fight. (Liz has occasional flashes of self awareness, though. She once told the room that cars slow down for her, get a good look, and then speed off. "They're thinking, oh no, grandma's out tricking!" Liz told us. Then she roared with laughter. Tina, on the other hand, narrates a fight with another woman at the homeless shelter with no sense at all that there's anything futile and strange in a brawl between two sickly women exhausted by their own diseases. "We had to stop," she tells me. I assume she meant someone broke up the fight. "No," she says. "We couldn't breath.")

They were probably both once beauties. They are needy, and mannerly, and small. They are mentally ill. They make me think of two little old men -- leathery old cowboys, maybe -- who never retired. They keep riding the bucking bull, getting thrown until their bones are crushed almost to dust, imagining that the few sad blocks of South West Baltimore are the glorious, wide, open plains. Never guessing a world could exist beyond their horizon.