I shove her dirty diaper into the Genie, which a rich volunteer brought over last week. The woman donated two of them along with a crib, though the extra crib only made the room crowded. The shelter hasn’t been at capacity in months. I don’t know why. We live in the poorest state in the country; we have an abundance of unemployed people and more illegitimate babies than we know what to do with. There’s something going on that I don’t know about but no one tells me anything because I established myself early as someone who can’t keep a secret.
I place her back in the crib and push a ratty little doll next to her so she won’t feel alone, and then Diamond and I go outside to gather pecans in our shirts. We eat the good ones and chuck the bad ones into the street where a funeral procession is in progress, the cars passing slowly with their headlights on. The cars going in the opposite direction stop out of respect and I wonder if people do this in other towns. I wouldn’t want to live in a town where people didn’t do this.
“Maybe we could go to the pool later,” I say.
Diamond screams and tells the other girls and they all scream and I tell them they’ll have to ask Miss Monique and be extra nice for the rest of the day.
In the kitchen, Monique is flouring pork chops, an open number 10 can of black-eyed peas next to the stove. Because I have a college degree and I’m not obese, I’m in charge of nutrition, but she insists on frying everything. Even the vegetables have hunks of fat floating in them.
“The food bank didn’t come again,” she says.
“Oh?” I say. I’m relieved that the food bank didn’t come because I’m responsible for going down there and collecting it, piling the boxes onto a cart and pushing the cart up a hill that doesn’t usually seem like a hill but becomes a great challenge on food bank days. Sometimes Bruce helps me. Bruce is a young guy they’ve hired to help Octavio with maintenance but half the time he’s leaning against a truck, smoking. The older girls slip him notes. They ask him directly for the things they want: cigarettes, money, sex. It doesn’t seem like a strategy that would work but it frequently does.
The girls ask Monique if they can go to the pool and she tells me she can’t find the cornmeal. I know it’s because there isn’t any but I unlock the pantry anyway, the girls trailing behind me, and look around. It’s the end of the month and there’s hardly more than powdered milk and white-labeled cans of soup. Diamond plucks a half-sucked sucker out of a jar of party toothpicks and sticks it in her mouth. Angel finds an old peanut butter egg and I find a jumbo bag of marshmallows. I squeeze one and it’s still soft so I tuck it behind a big box of Bisquick.
“We’re out,” I say. “Put it on the list and I’ll get some next time I’m at Walmart.”
Monique curses under her breath, loud enough for me to make out the particulars but not loud enough for me to call her out on it, which I learned the hard way.
We leave her in the kitchen and go from room to room, rummaging through drawers and closets. I find swimsuits for Diamond and Tasia and Brie, but I can’t find one for Angel so I sort through bags of donated socks and nightshirts until I locate a stretched-out bikini.
“Rainbow print is really hot right now,” I say, tossing it to her.
She takes off her clothes and puts the bottoms on, turns around so I can tie the triangle top. Then she walks up and down the hall with her hard little stomach bulging, modeling it for us.
Right now we only have young girls—Tasia is the oldest at eleven—and they don’t hate me like the older ones do. The older girls threaten to beat me up, call the cops, leave this place and never come back. Our policy is to let them go; we watch as they run down the street with whatever they’ve managed to strap to their backs and then call the police and their social workers. We never see them again. Their names are erased from the whiteboards, their files shelved. It seems incredible, how easily they are forgotten, but this is also our policy: don’t talk about the girls who leave; it upsets the others, or encourages them.
I keep waiting for them to return, one by one, dirty and beat-up, or all together, like a group of alien abductees emerging from the fog as if nothing happened.
I sit on the edge and dangle my legs in the water. It’s a public pool in a park full of concrete. There are empty flowerpots and bathrooms with metal mirrors like they have at rest stops. The baby is in my arms, making me sweat. I lift her above my head and she laughs so I pretend like I’m eating her hand and she pulls the sunglasses off my face and drops them in the water.
Diamond paddles over with her Dora the Explorer floaties to fetch them. She hands them to me and I wipe the lenses on my shirt while she moves up and down on my foot.
“It’s impolite to hump someone’s foot,” I say, and she shows me her ear as if I misspoke.
In the shallow end, Angel holds Tasia’s head under water. They call each other motherfucker and then they’re calling each other baldhead and cross-eye and scarface, making motherfucker seem generous. Monique and I look at each other and look away. Sometimes she’ll pull them aside and explain hell—how hot it is there, how all the ice cream melts before you can get your lips on it—but today we don’t care. I want to lie in the grass under a tree and take a nap but there’s only a rectangle of concrete surrounded by basketball courts and parking lots, Monique sitting under the single umbrella reading a romance novel.
“I’m gone take these off,” Diamond says, yanking at her floaties.
“You’ll have to get out if you take them off.”
“I know how to swim.”
“I know you do,” I say, “I know,” though she doesn’t know how. They imagine all sorts of lives for themselves other than the ones they’re living and I try to let them have them.
When we get back to the cottage, I adjust the temperature control with a butter knife. I put soap and toilet paper in all of the bathrooms and then sit on the couch with the girls to watch The Little Mermaid. They are despondent, listless. I ask Tasia what she wants to be when she grows up and she tells me a secretary or a waitress at Outback Steakhouse and I don’t give her the speech I usually give them, where I tell them they can be doctors and lawyers and astronauts, where I tell them success has no bounds. I should try to mix it up a bit, anyhow—it’s not as if I could be a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut, either. I took the LSAT but I did it out of a sense of duty, to prove I wouldn’t do well on it. There are other things besides doctors and lawyers and astronauts. And how many astronauts even exist in the world? A hundred? Five hundred? Perhaps there are thousands upon thousands of them, all waiting to go up into space.
“Who wants a snack?” I ask, and they perk up.
They follow me into the kitchen. Tasia opens the refrigerator and takes out a brick of government cheese.