The Gold Coast

18

After a morning’s work at the church, Lucy McPherson tracks under the Newport Freeway and into the depths of Santa Ana. Poor city. More than half of it is under the upper level of the freeway triangle, and the ground level, under a sky of concrete, has inevitably gone to slums. Lucy looks nervously through the windshield at the shadowy, paper-filled streets; she doesn’t much trust the people who live down here.

She certainly doesn’t approve of the woman she’s been called to help. Her name is Anastasia, she’s about twenty years old, Mexican-American, and she has two small children, although she’s never been married. She lives in a run-down old applex under the upper mall at Tustin and 4th.

There’s a sidewalk that crosses a dirty astroturf lawn to the front door of the beige stucco building; some fierce and unkempt young men are sitting on the lawn on both sides of the sidewalk. Lucy grits her teeth, leaves her car and walks past them, enters the smelly, olive-green hallway of the complex. Walking down it she can barely see a thing. Knock on the battered door.

“Hello, Anastasia!” Lucy’s social mask is solid, and she projects all the sympathetic friendliness she can muster, which is a very considerable amount indeed. Although she can’t help but note the dirty dishes stacked in the sink, the heaps of soiled laundry on the bed filling the bedroom nook. Anastasia’s hair is oily and uncombed, and apparently the babe has scratched her cheek.

“Lucy, thank God you’re here. I gotta go out and get some groceries or we’ll starve! Baby’s asleep and Ralph’s watching TV. I’ll just be a few minutes.”

“Okay,” Lucy says, but adds firmly, “I absolutely have to leave before eleven, I’ve got business I can’t miss.”

“Okay, sure. That won’t be a problem.” Out the door flies Anastasia, without brushing her hair.

Lucy hopes she’ll come back on time; once she was stuck here for an entire day, and it’s made her distrustful. In fact she didn’t mention that her crucial business was a meeting with Reverend Strong, for fear that Anastasia wouldn’t consider it important enough to return. She heaves a deep sigh. Some of these good works are really a pain.

Dishes washed, some of the laundry washed in the sink and hung up over the shower curtain rod to dry—not a laundromat within two miles, Anastasia has said—and Lucy sits down with Ralph, a passive six-year-old. She tries to teach him to read, using the only book in the house, a Reader’s Digest Condensed Books for Children. Ralph stumbles over the first sentence and turns the page to the scratch-’n’-sniff pads that illustrate, or enscentify, the story. As usual, she ends up reading to him. How do you teach someone to read? She points to each word as she reads it. They go through the alphabet letter by letter. Ralph gets bored and cries to have the video wall put back on. Lucy, irritated, resists. Ralph screams.

Lucy thinks, I’m too old for this. Is this really the Lord’s work? Baby-sitting? Does Anastasia regard it as such? Quite a few of Lucy’s friends feel that they’re being taken advantage of in this program of theirs, aiding young women who appear to be joining the church only to get free help. Well, if it’s true, Lucy thinks, it still represents a chance to change people’s minds, over time, perhaps. And if not… well…

She can talk to Anastasia about coming to Bible class when she returns. Speaking of which—it’s 11:30. Lucy begins to get annoyed. By noon she’s really angry.

Anastasia returns at 12:20, just as Lucy has settled down for an all-day rip-off. Stiffly Lucy reminds Anastasia that she had an appointment at eleven. Anastasia, already upset at something else, begins to cry. They put the meager supply of groceries into the filthy refrigerator: tortillas, soy hamburger, beans, Coke. Pampers into the bathroom. Anastasia has no money left, the utilities bill is overdue, Ralph has outgrown his shoes… Lucy gives her fifty dollars, they end up both in tears as she leaves.

Tracking away she can barely see. She just isn’t a social worker, she hasn’t got the mentality, the ability to distance herself. The people she helps become like family, and it’s painful and frightening to see what sordid lives some people lead in this day and age. And so few of them Christian. No help for them from anywhere, not even faith in God. Reverend Strong has clipped a newspaper article that says that only 2 percent of Orange County residents are churchgoing Christians anymore, and he’s stuck it to the office bulletin board as a sort of challenge; but Lucy has to sit at her desk and look at it all day as she works, and given everything else she has to face, she finds it depressing indeed.

Reverend Strong is finishing lunch at the vicarage when she arrives, and he understands about her missing the meeting. “I figured it was Anastasia,” he says with a cynical laugh. Lucy isn’t yet to the point where she finds it funny. They go into the office and discuss the various works at hand.

Reverend Strong is a nice enough man, but sadly—tragically—his wife was killed in a bomb explosion while they were on a mission to Panama, and Lucy feels that the experience gave him a secret dislike for the poor. He tries to control it, but he can’t, not really. And so he is surprisingly, almost shockingly, cynical about most of their good works programs, and he is prone to oblique and confused outbursts in his sermons, against sloth, ambition, political struggle. It leaves most of the congregation confused, but Lucy is sure she understands what is going on. It’s the explanation for his frequent return to the parable of the talents. Some people are given only one talent, and instead of working with it they try to steal from the man given the ten talents.… Really, the more he harps on it, the more Lucy begins to wonder if the parable of the talents wasn’t a bit of a mistake on God’s part. In any case, she has the constant problem of getting the reverend’s approval for the works that the church obviously has to undertake, in the poorer parts of the community.…

These days Reverend Strong says he is worrying intensely about the theological issues raised in the doctrinal negotiations with the Roman Catholics that have been going on for a year at the Vatican. He doesn’t want to be bothered with practical problems concerning community work; he has to think about abstract theology, it takes up all his mental energy. This is what he tells Lucy over their late lunch.

Lucy ends up suggesting solutions to their most pressing problem—fund-raising—and absentmindedly he agrees to them. So, she thinks angrily: time for another futile, pathetic garage sale… because who cares if we don’t have enough money to help out our poor neighbors? They don’t deserve it anyway! They were only given their one talent.…

The afternoon goes to helping Helena, and to calling all the local newsheets to announce the garage sale, and to visiting four families in El Modena with care packages, and to teaching Lillian Keilbacher how to assist in the office, keeping the records. That last part is actually fun. Lillian, her friend Emma’s daughter, is now being paid as a part-time assistant, which means she goes at it harder than most of the young people. Lucy really enjoys her company, especially after Anastasia, who must be just a year or two older.

“Lucy, I just hit the command key to get the mailing list and everything disappeared!”

“Uh-oh.” They sit down looking at the computer screen, which stays stubbornly blank no matter what they try. “You sure you only hit the command key?”

“Well that’s what I thought, but I must be wrong.” Lillian is cross-eyed with consternation. Then the screen beeps for their attention and starts displaying a brightly colored sequence of graphs and figures.

“Wow!” They laugh at the extravagance of it. “Do you think this disk is damaged?” Lillian asks.

“I hope so. It’s either that or the computer is haunted.”

Lillian laughs. “Maybe we can get the reverend to, you know, cure it.”

“Exorcise it, sure.”

It’s fun. A nice girl, Lucy says to herself after Lillian leaves; and that’s her highest praise.

Office in order and closed, home to start dinner. Lucy chats on the phone with her friend Valerie while she chops up potatoes for a new casserole she’s trying. Into the microwave.

Then Jim comes by. He looks messy, tired.

“You aren’t going to teach looking like that, are you?”

He looks affronted. “Looking like what?”

“Those clothes, Jim. You look like you came out of lower Santa Ana.”

“Now, Mom, don’t be prejudiced.”

“I am not being prejudiced.” As if she were some bigoted recluse! When was the last time he was in lower Santa Ana? It’s too much. But he doesn’t understand, he’s giving her the what-did-I-say-now look that she also gets from Dennis. They look surprisingly alike sometimes. Usually the wrong times. Lucy sniffs hard and collects herself while tending the microwave. “Anyway, you should try to look better. It would make you a better teacher.”

“I look like what I look like, Mom.”

“Nonsense. It’s all under your control. And it sends out signals about what you think of the people you’re with. And of yourself, of course.”

“Semiotics of clothing, eh Mom?”

“I don’t know. Semiotics?”

“What you were saying about signals.”

“Well, yes then. Go look in the mirror.”

“In a bit.”

“Are you staying for dinner?”

“No. Just dropped by to see if any mail’s come for me.”

Great. “No, nothing’s here.” And off he goes, hurrying a bit to make sure he’s gone by the time Dennis gets home.

This worries Lucy greatly, this growing rift between Dennis and Jim. She knows very well that it’s bad for both of them. Both of them need to have each other’s respect to be fully happy, that’s only natural. And when there are so many other forces in action to make them unhappy, it becomes more important than ever. It’s support, mutual support, in a crucial area… Thinking these thoughts Lucy picks up the phone and calls Jim as he tracks east on the Garden Grove Freeway. “Listen, Jim, can you come to dinner tomorrow night? We haven’t been seeing you often enough recently.” Not at all, in fact, since he and Dennis had that fight out in the driveway. They haven’t seen each other even once since then, and it’s been over a week, and Lucy can feel the resentment and anger growing on both sides.

Jim says, “I don’t know, Mom.”

Annoyance and concern clash in her. “You don’t just come by here and check for mail,” she snaps. “We’re more than a post office box. You come by and eat a meal with your father soon, do you understand me?”

“All right,” he says, voice sharp. “But not tomorrow. Besides, I don’t see what good it’ll do—he’ll just think it’s another way that he’s supporting me.” And he hangs up.

Only minutes later Dennis stalks in, in a foul mood indeed. Lucy decides that he needs distraction from work thoughts, and she risks rebuff to tell him about Anastasia and Lillian. Dennis grunts his way through dinner. She tries another tack. Get him to talk it out, not bottle things up. “What did you do today?”

“Talked with Lemon.”

Ah. That explains it. Really, this Lemon must be quite unpleasant, though Lucy has a hard time imagining it, given the charming man she has met at LSR parties. “What about?”

But Dennis doesn’t want to go into it, and he retires to the video room table to get out the briefcase and pore over papers. Lucy cleans up, sits down to rest her feet. She’s teaching the Bible class tomorrow morning and they’re doing a chapter of Galatians that is problematic indeed. Paul is an ambiguous writer, when you read him closely; conflicting desires in him, some selfless and some not, make for a somewhat incoherent output. She reads over the teacher’s manual again and worries about the class. She finds herself nodding off. Time for bed already; the evenings always disappear. Dennis is out there staring at nothing, head tilted at an angle. Probably thinking of their plot of land up near Eureka, dreaming of an escape. Lucy shudders at the thought; she didn’t like that desolate coastline, its immense distance from her friends, family, work, the world. In fact she has wondered guiltily if the fire that burned the land was somehow an unwanted response to prayer, God granting her least worthy desire as a peculiar kind of lesson or warning to her.…

They retire. Another day done. Sleepy prayers. She’s got to get Jim back up here. Work on that some more tomorrow. Important. After class. Or the session with Lillian. Or…