Slices of Life: Pictures, Portraits, and Profiles

by Katherine Cooper

The school for kids with special needs was two or three miles east off the main route in town. It was on a long stretch of grass surrounded by the county TB clinic and the juvenile detention center for girls. It sort of felt as though the town’s bleakest figures had been shooed away, only to converge later, in the corner of some abandoned field. The buildings were nearly identical from the outside—low masses of grey concrete—indistinguishable intuitions.

But inside, the school was different. It was lovely and colorful, brimming with a kind of warmth and energy that one would never suspect from its desolate surroundings. The walls were cluttered with collages and photographs, enormous signs with doilies and glitter and thick bold lettering. Students were awarded for everything, all the time: Most Helpful, Most Friendly, Most Smiley. Their faces taped onto glossy laminated frames.

Their disabilities ranged from mild to severe and affected all the different realms—emotional, physical, and cognitive. There were kids in wheelchairs with twisted limbs and tangles of tubes linking different parts of their bodies, but also those who ran freely in the yard with the ease and recklessness of most five year olds. I worked in Daniel’s classroom for a few semesters over the course of two years.

Daniel, by this point ten years old, had borne a diagnosis of autism for many years. Daniel was a big kid, heavy and ungainly, with a gentle face and a thick head of dark, curly hair. He wore baggy corduroy paints and white sneakers with Velcro straps. He had no verbal skills but used a range of different sounds and noises to articulate his needs and frustrations; I could never tell how he really felt about me—sometimes he’d smirk at me in this way that made me think that he loved fucking with me, that he was capable of so much more than he was letting on but wanted to see me fight for his attention. Other times he’d give me a look that indicated something like complicity, like we were working for the same team.

The other five or six kids in the class fit in at various place along the autism spectrum, some a lot more high-functioning than Daniel. The teacher was this amazing reservoir of patience and energy, though I don’t know what kind of progress they made—or even really how to measure such a thing. But they sang songs and learned how to hold pencils and trace letters and cut shapes from cardboard. She spoke in short, choppy phrases, telling the kids everything they would do as they did it. She guided them carefully through the routine of the day, always eased them slowly into change.

Daniel seemed to have a constant swell of energy trapped in his body. He was always tapping his feet and playing with this plastic, spongy lizard—shaking it violently between two of his fingers. Sometimes we held hands and jumped on the trampoline together, his legs flinging wildly behind him. Other times he’d purposely knock paint onto the floor or groan and clench his fingers when we’d try to write his name or make a mother’s day card.

Toward the end of our time together, Daniel was going through puberty. It was a really tough time, and seemed almost impossible for the teacher or her aids to help navigate him through it. The teacher was constantly reminding him to stop touching himself—there was a familiar chorus that rang throughout the semester: “Hands out of pants, Daniel. Hands out of pants.” She used the same sing-songy voice as always.

In May, the teacher told Daniel that I would be leaving, that I was moving away and wouldn’t be coming back to class. I hoped that in some small way, Daniel had appreciated our time together. I wasn’t sure it had amounted to much but he had enriched my life in some elusive way that I couldn’t quite understand. Maybe it was that we were connecting on some really basic, human level, one uncluttered by conventional language. Daniel looked at me blankly for a moment and then he stuck his hands down his pants. I turned away, but even from the corner of my eye I saw it—his hands moving around, in front and then in back. Then he took one hand out and he slapped me, a quick and ugly sting across my lips. He smiled, grunted twice, and then skipped away.

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by Katherine Cooper

I saw Lindsay everyday for a while. She’d always sit, hunched over, beside a stained yellow wall at the L stop at Union Square. She had pale skin, watery green eyes and a spray of freckles across her face.

I didn’t ever hear her ask people for money, or even really see her look up. But she held onto one
of those cardboard signs, generic in its pleading: desperate for cash, homeless and alone, please help. In the midst of their frenzied, hurried commutes, I watched people stop and stare, frozen for a moment in their tracks. Two seconds, or maybe three. She was just so young, undoubtedly still a teenager. I think we all stopped, struck by the same thing—this girl, so sad but also salvageable.

I never stopped to talk to her, but sometimes she’d linger in my thoughts throughout the day. So many of the folks I see and work with everyday are hardened veterans of the streets—they’ve been outside for so long that they can’t even pinpoint when or how they got there. But Lindsay, it seemed, was still right in the very thick and heart of that moment.

Maybe it could be a minor blip, just a tiny part of her story. I imagined her having fled from a drunken, abusive father in a cold, Midwestern town. Or maybe she’d been shooting up heroin for years and her mother, weak and exasperated, just couldn’t take it any longer. A couple of Greyhound buses through the night and here she was.

After several days of passing Lindsay during my morning commute, I saw her downtown by my office. She was sitting cross-legged against some big stone building just off Wall Street. My coworker and I crouched down and did our usual spiel. How long had she been staying outside? Did she need any services? Did she want a list of places in the area to shower or get a warm meal? It was the first time we’d made eye contact. She told us—softly and patiently—that no, she didn’t need or want anything. She said she was okay, but she looked so weak. It seemed as though it’d taken so much effort—all her strength—to utter the simplest phrase. I started to walk away but then asked her name.

Lindsay was back by the L train the next day. I had left work sort of late and missed the flurry of rush hour commuters. Her head was down and her hair, thin and blond, hung limply by her face.

“Lindsay?”

She looked up and said hey. I realized I had absolutely nothing to say. I just felt so compelled to call her name—to somehow make use of the information she’d been willing to offer me. We were quiet for a moment and then a guy approached us. He was tan and heavy, his hair fragrant and slicked back. He stared at her and then turned to me.

“Is this for real?” he asked, as though we were watching those men who, covered entirely in gold or silver paint, pose as statues.

“Excuse me?”

“Is this kid for real? Or is she faking?”

I told him no, I didn’t think she was faking. He dropped a five dollar bill by her feet and then headed down toward the track.

On the train back to Brooklyn, he sat down next to me. “You know, it’s impossible to tell, she could’ve been pretending. You never know what someone will do for a sociology degree.”

I said I hoped she was faking, but it seemed unlikely. He told me he could probably help her out a bit, and that he was so rich he basically owned the Giants. He pressed the back of his hands against his cheeks, blotting the sweat that had accumulated on his thick, leathery skin.

I haven’t seen Lindsay since that day. I wonder if maybe, she made it home—if she too felt what the commuters sensed that morning by the train: that tiny flicker of hope.

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by Katherine Cooper

We lived in a one-bedroom for the first few years of my life—my parents, brother, and I. It was in one of those white-brick buildings from the seventies, with a taut green awning and a doorman in a gold-trimmed suit lingering nearby. It was a generous one bedroom, for sure, but still there were four of us living together in that small, tight space. My parents graciously slept on a paisley pull-out couch in the living room, while Sam and I had two red-framed beds in the master bedroom. I was young, but a few distinct images come to me: a plush grey rug on the living room floor, eating squares of cinnamon toast on my knees beside a boxy television, shelves lined with rows of books and big, square records.

My mom is a writer—a novelist—who was miraculously able to take care of two children and have seven books published by the time they were grown. She spent hours in her room, filling up notebooks with tiny prose, but was also impossibly attentive, coming out to check on us constantly. Did we need anything? An orange peeled and sectioned? Some pretzels? Did we want her to make us some milkshakes?

I had a lot of trouble separating from her when I was little. In kindergarten I’d sit, encircled in a ring of damp, shredded tissues. I could concentrate on nothing except the absence of my mother—that raw, vast space between us. Even as a seven- or eight-year-old kid, I’d throw tantrums each time she left the house. A quick trip to the grocery store or post office would leave me in tears—sweaty and breathless.

But until I was old enough to go to school, I had a babysitter, Corrine, who took care of me during the day. In the morning we’d take the elevator downstairs with my mom, who was heading somewhere to write, to be alone with her thoughts and away from the cluttered space we all shared. Corrine held me as I kissed my mother goodbye, and tried to ease that fresh panic in my chest. We’d go the laundry room and sort through different colored socks—tiny and studded with flowers or fake jewels. Sometimes we’d take walks or go a toy store on Madison Avenue, where she’d lift me up beside a golden stuffed bear who, with a tiny red wand, blew perfect circles in the air. We spent days in the park or playing games on the living room floor, all the while eagerly awaiting my mom’s return.

Years later, I am leafing through a binder that my dad has put together—a collection of articles and book reviews, little clips from magazines about my mom’s work. I pause at a review from the Times—examine the faded text beneath a glossy sheath. The reviewer praises the book, calls the work “wry and insightful,” and then explains how the author (with the help of a babysitter) is able to seamlessly convince her young daughter that she is leaving for work each morning, heading downtown to an imaginary office building.

When Corrine and I headed to the laundry room or took walks in the park, my mom crept back upstairs into the apartment. She’d sit on my bed, her small body propped up by an enormous turquoise pillow, and write for hours each day. And for a moment, I can imagine the hot sting of betrayal, the utter disbelief if I had simply opened up the door.

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by Katherine Cooper

I went to New Orleans about four years ago with a group of kids from college. It was the January after the storm, but winter there is often warm and humid, the sun bright and persistent. We slept in sleeping bags on the floor of a beautiful wooden church. Next door were big houses with white columns and glistening lawns, sidewalks dotted with palm trees.

We’d drive this bulky white van into the devastated areas and gut entire houses. We carried it all out onto the sidewalk: oak dressers and glass tables, couches still swollen and damp, cardboard boxes filled with Christmas ornaments and full sets of wine-colored encyclopedias. Nail polish and splintered hockey sticks. We’d knock down walls, slamming our hammers and crowbars from dining room to kitchen, bedroom to bathroom. We dug tiles up from the mud—turquoise and coral—slippery with sewage.

Whole lives were emptied out onto their front porches and lawns. Sometimes people watched as we hauled out their belongings. Be careful with that antique frame and those ceramic mugs. But they quieted as we knocked down their houses, crowbars smashing through ceilings, fiberglass falling like pale, pink snow.

In a suburb west of the city, we found a sailboat tilted and positioned through the front door of a home and cars piled on top of each other. Mattresses still wrapped in floral bedding.

And now it’s four-and-a-half years later, and I’m here visiting Sarah, and all the furniture and clutter is gone. Most of the houses are still there—vacant and boarded up with pieces of wood across the windows. Sarah asks me what’s changed. When we were here before it was like an entire city had been taken away in the midst of a disaster, and now the evidence of that chaos is mostly gone. Though the orange spray paint on the doors is still lingering—a big X to say the houses had been checked for people. 9/4, 9/5, 9/6. One cat left and two dogs. Everyone else gone.

It is ninety degrees and we climb up onto the levees. The water looks so calm and harmless, like a drowsy monster waiting to rear its head. I keep thinking of this one place we saw that winter: a one-story brick house whose front door and windows had been blown in. There were a handful of branches sticking out through the empty door frame, and white numbers dangling beside it. In blue paint someone had written across the front: You Won, Katrina. I wonder where they are now. If they’ve come back, renounced that surrender. Or if they’ve abandoned this place entirely, their anger and frustration having ebbed away, drowned by the need to go on.

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by Katherine Cooper

It’s Mother’s Day and we’re eating Japanese food at a Chinese restaurant on the south shore of Long Island. The restaurant is the centerpiece of a quiet stretch of stores—a nail salon, a bank, a bagel place. They’re all closed and dim on Sunday evening. The restaurant is elaborately decorated—even the outside with its tilted Asian-styled roofs and red paper lanterns dangling beside the doors. A long, multicolored dragon is painted on the wall and spans the entire length of the place.

My family and I are sitting at a big circular table and passing around bowls of those greasy, fried noodles and trying not to eat them. My brother is drinking a magenta-colored drink with a fluffy paper umbrella and we’re talking politely about Israel—about an op-ed in the Times the other day. But then someone starts telling a story they heard about a dog who accidentally ate his owner’s psychedelic drugs and it’s so sad because it seems like he never really recovered. I ask what it was—mushrooms? Acid? Something else? My dad wants to know what difference it makes, is there even a difference? He doesn’t know. I’m distracted by the ten-day-old infant who’s at the next table to us—her parents and grandparents blowing delicate streams of air into her face, watching as the tiny brush of hair on her forehead flies up. We order way too many dishes and try to convince my grandma to taste some sushi but she won’t budge.

And then, out of nowhere, a man, situated right in the center of the restaurant, starts screaming. Not yelling, but crying out in this primitive way as though he’s being tortured. I’m in agony, I’m in agony! He looks like he’s in his forties, but he’s thin and frail and holding onto a gleaming metal walker, clenching his fists around the handlebars.

His mother, probably in her seventies, is standing beside him. She has choppy red hair and a navy leather clutch at her side. She seems infinitely younger, healthier, more composed. She hurries to a waitress who then presumably calls 911. Her son keeps crying, It’s my hips, they’re killing me! She tries to soothe him, It’s okay, it’s okay, but he seems exasperated, urging her away.

Outside the streets are mostly empty—there are a handful of cars parked in the lot, and a teenage couple leaning against a mailbox, examining each other’s fingers. The sky is bare, an easy backdrop for the chaotic flashing lights of the ambulance. It seems to arrive impossibly fast, but the paramedics walk in slowly. They hold wide stances and look like cowboys as they stand and appraise the scene. The man is still crying out and trying to catch his breath, he’s saying something about his hips popping out. He has replacement hips and they’ve popped out and he just can’t move. Just settle down, they tell him, it’ll be okay.

A few tables away, a party of about ten or twelve is singing happy birthday loudly and exuberantly. As if they have no idea a man fifteen feet away is howling in pain and being lifted away on a stretcher. His mother standing by his side, promising him it’ll be alright. Like nothing has changed since he was a small boy. Maybe it hasn’t. The song seems to go on and on, as the birthday girl squeals with pleasure, her face aglow in red and orange light.

One of the paramedics—a guy with thick shoulders and a silver mustache—heads over to the hostess. He laughs and elbows her in a flirtatious sort of way. Hey, you guys gonna charge extra for all this entertainment?

She shakes her head and stares at him blankly. I’m sorry. I don’t understand. Can you say again?

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by Katherine Cooper

When I meet Roosevelt, he is seventy-seven and just recently retired. He’d been assembling parts at the nearby Ford factory in Lorain, Ohio, for about fifty years. In addition to health insurance and a steady pension, Ford is now paying for Roosevelt to enroll in some classes.
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by Katherine Cooper

My grandmother had fallen several times, her dry and brittle bones snapping easily, and so she spent the last year or so of her life in a nursing home in Queens. It was low and flat, a slab of muted green concrete in the midst of a lively Korean neighborhood. The facility was surrounded by a couple of community centers and lots of Korean grocery stores displaying varieties of pickled vegetables in flimsy plastic containers.

The last few months of her life were mostly spent in bed. She was weak and passive, her cheeks sunken and her skin gray and waxy. Yet she was still very much attuned to the activity going on around her, concerned about women arguing over poker-keno games or men yelling at their aides, vehemently refusing to get their toenails clipped. My grandma’s next-door neighbor suffered from some sort of paranoid psychosis and each night he’d line his floor and window frames with silver duct tape. Often he’d insist that his furniture and belongings had been replaced with nearly identical replicas, like his flat-screen TV that was the same except for the size of the red metallic power button on the side. He would come and talk to my grandma several times a day—she was the only resident with unconditional patience for his worries and who always seemed to be brimming with warmth.

She had been like this my whole life—effusive with her affection, extremely talkative and often verging on sentimental. At grocery stores she’d stop and talk to cashiers, raw chicken rapidly defrosting as she asked questions about their lives and boasted about her own children and grandchildren. She was also dutiful about correspondence and would send holiday cards to dozens of people—couples she’d met once on a cruise to the Caribbean in 1976 or a particularly kind usher who’d helped her at the theater.

My grandmother and I saw each other infrequently throughout my childhood, but she was insistent on intimacy when we did. Hold my hand, she would say, as she told me stories about her youth or the myriad of students she had taught over the years. She often told me she loved me and wanted to hear the same, always urging that I call and write her more.

But of course, as she grew sicker she was quieter and sometimes delusional—speaking of her daughter (who had died nearly twenty years earlier) or even her mother and father in the present tense. I came home from college one damp and windy weekend in October to say goodbye, though my dad had warned me she was mostly already gone. She was mumbling every so often, but had not really spoken or been alert in days. I worried that I would be stiff and awkward at a time so tense and plainly sad, but when I got to her room, I was flooded with some innate and simple loss, both hers and mine. She was slipping in and out of consciousness but was mostly asleep as I talked to her and held her hand. Before I left, I pressed my lips against her soft and clammy forehead and I told her I loved her. I hoped she felt the subtle pressure of my hand against her own or perhaps she could intuitively sense my presence. As I was walking out the door, I heard her mumble something and then call my name. I turned around, my face stinging and wet.

Yes?

All of the sudden she seemed so oriented and alert—a momentary breath of clarity.

Well, she said, adios!
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by Katherine Cooper

Most of the stores were closed as May and I walked south on Kingston Avenue last Saturday afternoon. The dry cleaners, the handful of delis, the supermarkets and liquor stores, all with their metal grates pulled tight to the sidewalk.

Crown Heights is notable for a diverse population—specifically the juxtaposition of Carribean and African-American residents with Hasidic Jews. And on this particular afternoon, religion seemed to govern the quieted streets. Handfuls of men, tall and pale, in black suits and black hats, strolled the sidewalks. They mostly surrounded the synagogue and brand-new Chabbad center. The shops were mostly closed for Shabbat—their windows dim and grey. Families sat, crowded on the porches of ornate and old-fashioned brick homes; the girls in long skirts that hung by their ankles and the little boys in vests and navy trousers.

May and I kept walking south and then stopped momentarily at a playground. It was maybe the first real spring weekend, the air cool and fresh, the sky a perfect sheet of blue. There were plenty of people around, mostly teenagers playing basketball, and a handful of kids on red metal jungle gym. We watched as a Hasidic man guided a trio of boys (who appeared to be his children) along the monkey bars, the strings of his tallis swaying by his sides. Two black boys, four or five years old, stood and watched as the grown man seamlessly wove his way through the course. One of the boys watching squealed in delight or jealousy, I couldn’t be sure. After he helped his sons through the bars, the man jumped down and eased the other boys onto the bars. And afterward, for a moment, the five boys all played together, climbing through a tangled plastic dome.

We walked toward the train and the houses became sparse and the storefronts lit up. We passed a unisex salon and one of those take-out Chinese restaurants with bright photographs of pork dumplings and chicken thick with sauce. We saw a couple of Baptist churches, pale yellow and blue, and one tiny, square synagogue. A cop car idled in front of the 2 train and an officer poked his through the window. You girls lost? I shook my head, told him we were just walking to the train. You better, he said, You look like you’re on the wrong side of town. Get out quick.

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by Katherine Cooper

I tutored Ashtin on Wednesday afternoons during my junior and senior year of college. She was eight when I first met her—a third-grader at the local elementary school. She was feisty and energetic, with a maze of tightly braided hair and long skinny legs. She wore brightly colored outfits and stretchy pants that had words like “sassy” and “spoiled” embroidered on the back. Mostly I’d help Ashtin with reading, which was always a challenge—her tongue slipped up on complicated words and she’d get exceedingly frustrated lumbering through a cluster of syllables. She would try to distract me by telling stories of her classmates and her sisters, or the trio of terriers she had at home. She’d ask lots of questions about me and my boyfriend at the time—did we love each other? Did we kiss? How often? And also, was I the shortest girl at college? To bring the focus back to work I’d bribe her with snacks—bargaining a couple of paragraphs for a handful of Goldfish or a mini-pack of Oreos.

Ashtin struggled with reading but loved math—converting percentages and fractions in a quick, seamless way. Once she told me that eleven boys like-liked her, and did I know that meant almost 34 percent of the class? She was also dramatic and generous with affection—always proclaiming her love for me. If I showed up a few minutes late she would throw her arms around me, Where were you? I was worried sick!

But beneath her charisma and charm lurked something dark. Her childhood had already been peppered with heartbreak—I could see it, every so often, seeping out through her vigor. She would relay these facts in passing: she lived with her grandmother because her mom wasn’t allowed to be near her, her dad came over to visit sometimes but was always smelly from beer, sometimes her baby sister made on the floor and nobody cared.

In April, a few weeks before I would graduate from college and move back to New York, Ashtin’s class began studying art. One of the last Wednesdays I saw her, she was sitting cross-legged on a feathery purple rug. Most of the other students were gone. She flipped through a book and didn’t look up at me, but patted the space beside her.

“Today in school we were learning about art, and do you want to know what the prettiest painting I’ve ever seen is?” She turned to the back, finding Van Gogh’s Starry Night. “Do you know it?”

I nodded.

“It’s so beautiful.” She dragged her finger across the swirls of color—blue and green and yellow. “And since it’s just a sky, it can be anywhere. You can live anywhere you want, in any kind of house, and it can be as beautiful as that. Don’t tell anyone, but when I look at it, sometimes it makes me want to cry.”

Ashtin was silent for a moment and put the book down. She stretched her legs out onto the carpet and began to double-knot her shoelaces. They were grey and frayed and she knotted them over and over, until it seemed impossible they would ever get loose.

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by Katherine Cooper

Last month, the city was caught in a thick, gray storm—the sky a furious and swollen mess. A coworker and I walked for a while through the quiet white flurry, the pavement completely bare save for a blanket of snow. We were walking by the George Washington Bridge when we saw Elizabeth. With two pieces of plywood and a royal blue tarp, she’d constructed a hut of sorts, but she was missing some crucial sides and was exposed just enough that snow was fluttering all around her. When we approached, she was sitting up, leaning against some duffel bags. She wore a pair of enormous yellow rain boots, two jackets (one fleece, the other down) and polyester snow pants. She was smiling in this sweet and dazed way, a serene look in her eyes. Elizabeth couldn’t have been more than thirty. She held a carton of ice cream between her legs, a spoon in one hand and, in the other, a container of marshmallow Fluff. Every so often, she’d methodically dip the spoon into the Fluff and then back into the tub of chocolate ice cream. There were literally dozens of containers of ice cream scattered around her—some in yellow plastic bags, mostly draped in snow.

We asked her a series of questions. Are you okay? Do you know where you are? Do you know what day it is? Who is the president? Do you want to go inside? Do you need a doctor? Elizabeth was silent, but appeared content, if hungry. I asked what kind of ice cream she liked and she let out a joyous shriek, holding up her container like a prized, golden trophy and smiling, gesturing. I asked her what else she liked, and she paused for a moment. Carefully, she moved the ice cream and Fluff to the side and crawled to the back of her space to gather some other belongings. She turned around and then presented me with a handful of DVDs and a portable DVD player. She held them tight against her chest and just kept smiling.

Later, when the police and paramedics came to take her away, they were, at first, surprisingly gentle. They tried for a while to coax her out—they didn’t want to force her, they said, they didn’t want to take her away involuntarily, but they would. They would if they had to. One cop, a young and blonde guy, lifted off a piece of wood—the roof to Elizabeth’s home. She began to cry. No, no, no, no, and she raised her hands to her head, please no! The cop delicately put it back. Sorry, man, he said, but come on. You gotta get out here.

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