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One day in 1930, a small girl meets an older boy. She is almost twelve, she keeps telling people who ask. He is sixteen. She is fighting over a bit of bread she got for lunch with a couple of street urchins (they’re not her age, they’re older, but they probably need it more. She doesn’t care. Her stomach is grumbling and she barely remembers breakfast) and one of them aims a dirty fist at her stomach. It hits target and she doubles over, dropping the scrap on the ground. It’s dirty now, why’d they go and do that-but the kids pick it up and tear at it. Everyone is so savage now.
She says something to that effect and suddenly she’s the target again. They converge on her and she thinks maybe she’s going to die, and that she never got to cut her hair or dance in a saloon. Someone’s pulling her long dark hair, and if Mother had only let her get it cut like other girls she could maybe get out of this okay. And it’s all Father’s fault in the first place for giving her bread, and the teacher for telling her to wait until after school to finish eating because she was taking too long and the other kids couldn’t all afford things so it was rude to eat in front of them if she wasn’t going to share. She wanted to yell there isn’t enough to share, but she’s heard there isn’t enough so many times in the past year (no one stays at her home anymore, no one is invited to dinner, we don’t have money for that doll, we just don’t have money) she doesn’t want to be the one saying it back.
He saves her and it’s all so quick-when she is scooped up in unfamiliar arms, she nearly shrieks.
Looking up, she sees a boy who could be called a man if she wasn’t taught not to talk to strange men. He smiles at her and then directs something like a growl at the other kids.
“Play nice, okay? She can’t help it. She’s hungry too.”
They run off and he sets her back down on the street again. He’s really quite a bit taller than her, and she has to crane her neck to squint up at his face. It’s getting dark. She’s going to be in trouble for missing supper if she doesn’t hurry up.
He gives her a slightly-crooked-teeth grin and she can feel herself blush. She shivers a little too, watching the boy as wind sweeps through the alleyway, making her skirt billow out. She quickly holds it down, blushing harder.
“Are you cold?” he asks and she shakes her head no because she doesn’t want him to think that she’s really super fragile or anything.
He takes the red scarf off his neck and bends down to tie it around hers. She stays frozen the entire time, not sure whether she wants to smile or cry. Today was really scary.
It isn’t as scary when he gives her his hand and walks her home. He tells her all about his dream, which is to become an actor like Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, and he does the walk that has her in stitches. When he leaves her at the end of her street, he asks if she feels better.
She feels much better, and hugs him hard. He is a thin boy, but he knows how to hug properly (unlike her friend Laurie who stands there like a tree). She decides afterward that this day was a good day, and she never takes the scarf off ever again.
She has her first kiss from a little boy with a long face. She backs away and is ready to wipe her lips when she feels his gum in her mouth. She’s never had gum before. It doesn’t taste like much, but he jams his fingers into her mouth to get it back as she chews and she bites his hand involuntarily. He backs off, yowling. The gum falls out of her mouth and gets stuck on the scarf. She frantically tries to scrape it off when she gets home, and her mother tells her she has a scarf she can use. No point in buying a new scarf. (There’s not enough)
“This is my scarf.” she explains to her mother and the matter is dropped.
Her father sells apples now. He used to work on Wall Street, but she’s not exactly sure what happened that made him lose his job. He says it collapsed, but streets don’t really do that. He told her to never go down there, and so she sticks to the radius of school and home and sometimes just stands outside where the candy store used to be with her friends, waiting to see if someone will ever come unlock the door. There used to be “samples”.
She walks through Central Park one night and tries not to see the cardboard people call homes now. They’re named after the president, too. It’s scary to think that no one can even trust the president anymore. She learns at school that it’s his last year, and there are people who drink to the end of him in back rooms with the whiskey people are too poor to make but they have to anyways, because Father says no one can get through this without being done up on gin.
She doesn’t really get it because they’re drinking whiskey, not gin.
She’s not supposed to be alone right now but her friends wanted to go to the library and this was so close that she said goodbye and veered off. Besides, she’s almost fourteen now. She knows how to take care of herself.
She changes her mind when the people start coming out of their cardboard box houses and talking to her. They aren’t harassing her, not really, just asking. They want her to give them food, money, help, medicine…(there isn’t enough) but she has nothing to give them besides lots and lots of apologies that come out kind of choked and quiet, unheard over the clamor.
The man that comes out is too skinny to be handsome, but there’s a hint of what would have been. His eyebrows shoot up when he sees her, and she thinks about running, flat out dashing for home.
“That’s my scarf.” he almost laughs, and she tugs at the threadbare scrap wound tightly around her neck. It’s winter again, and the scarf doesn’t really do much more than suggest warmth. She can poke her finger through one of its holes, and that’s become a nervous tic of hers that she employs now, worrying at the fringe.
“This is my scarf.” she corrects him.
“No, I gave a-you’re that girl. From two years ago.”
Looking closer, she can almost recognize his face. It’s gaunter than it was, and those jeans are short enough on him that they might be the same ones he was wearing when they met.
“Are you cold?” she asks him. Because she may live in an apartment that has barely any heat and sleep under ten thin blankets but at least she doesn’t live outside, thanks to Mother’s job as a personal assistant to a very successful businessman, a real Ebenezer Scrooge type.
He doesn’t sugarcoat it. “Yes, I’m cold. Go tell your president.” His green eyes glitter with a cold kind of amusement not directed at her.
She thinks about that. Isn’t he your president, too?
Starting to take off her scarf, she is stopped. He doesn’t want it back, he tells her. It was a gift. She digs in her pockets, trying to find money or food or something, but all there is is a piece of cheese wrapped in a napkin. She holds it out to him, and she can tell from his face that (there isn’t enough) for all she knows he has parents and siblings, people to feed.
He pats her on the head and doesn’t even take it. She proffers it more insistently, but he tells her he’s not hungry at the moment.
He’s lying, and she hates liars. She really hates how Father pretends to have a job. She hates how Mother pretends she has her job due to hard work and not kissing her boss. She hates how at school the teacher pretends like the world isn’t crashing down around their ears. But she can’t hate the president, he’s their only hope.
She drops it on the ground deliberately when she finally musters up the courage to turn her back on him and leave. When she is halfway across the field, she turns back and it is a little painful to see the blur of him in the distance bending down to pick up a piece of cheese from the snow.
--
Three years go by that are very hard years, but there is a New Deal in place. She’s a proud sixteen and this winter has been a mild one. She finally had her second kiss, and then a third and fourth and fifth, thanks to Brian Denton who works in the supermarket and is only one year older than her. He gives her free things sometimes if she bats her eyelashes and pretends that she cares about his stamp collection.
One day she writes a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt because she hears the First Lady really cares about people. She asks her if there isn’t something she can do for all the homeless people living on the streets and in the parks.
She gets a letter back that is the same as the ones her friends get, from the secretary. Mrs. Roosevelt can’t do everything, it seems.
She hasn’t been back to the park since the day she watched a boy-man take her charity, and she can’t really explain why she does it now, why she swipes on a bit of lipstick first. Not enough to be a tart, but enough to stand out.
Much of the shantytown has been torn down, but there are people still living there. He isn’t. She asks people, giving them the butterscotch candies she’d planned on saving for him as incentive to tell the truth. Finally someone recognizes the description of pretty green eyes, tall, and crooked teeth. They direct her to…
Well maybe he works there now. Maybe he does clerical work or something. He writes down the names to be carved.
Maybe he just visits there a lot.
They give her a name too, and so she asks the man in the office up front where he is. He says no one works there by that name. So she takes a deep breath and cinches her scarf so tight she can hardly breathe, stepping out among the rows.
His name doesn’t look familiar to her. She feels like sobbing, so she does it quietly. There are no flowers for him, or cards. It’s like no one cared.
Maybe she was given the wrong name? No, but somehow it feels like he’s right there with her. She asks him again if he’s cold, and he tells her yes, yes, it’s so very cold here, I can’t stop shivering, I’m freezing, my teeth are ch-chattering can you hear it? The man in the office is staring at her through the window because she’s yelling. She’s yelling I told you so into the air, at him, but he isn’t there. She knew he was cold! He should have just taken the scarf back, he would have been okay!
She places the scarf on the grave, but it isn’t enough.