Ruined

These days, my tears are opportunists. They sit just behind my eyes and wait for any apt moment at all to spill. I am starting to resent them. I look like a sap at the end of my summer residency, when even the funny jokes make me misty.

I have just left the manicured lawns of Goucher College, with its luxuriant green space spliced by gently winding roads. It’s rumored that the families of deer who munch the campus grass were imported from somewhere one would naturally find deer, certainly not adjacent to a mall and a highway.

The summer MFA residency is itself luxurious. Our time is filled thinking and writing and listening. Our senses are acute at the start, though by the last day they dim. After twelve full days with a few dozen students—some from as far as Malawi and Antartica, some as close as right here in Towson, Maryland—and nine mentors, we are mostly frazzled. We are stimulated and sleep deprived and anxious about our projects. We are all writing books. Three percent of my 2007 graduating class (which has about 35 students) might get lucky.

We have said our goodbyes following a tag-team Q&A session by Mary Karr, a poet and memoirist, and Kathryn Harrison, a memoirist and fiction writer. I am driving home. “Home again, Home again, Jiggity Jig,” I say to myself, recalling not the Mother Goose rhyme but a line spoken by a robotic toy in Bladerunner.

On the corner where I will turn left is a homeless man. I can tell he is homeless because he holds a cardboard sign that says so. I can tell he is homeless because he is ruined; his teeth are crooked and missing, and his clothes are dirty. The sign is scrawled. I don’t read it but instead look away, as I always do with the homeless. I am talking on my cell phone. I tell my husband that I am on my way home.

It is four o’clock on a beautiful sunny day following one of the hottest two-week periods of my life. My arm is out the window, but the air conditioner is on. I am driving an SUV.

About twelve cars sit at the traffic light. Maybe there are more. Who would count the cars at a traffic light? The homeless man with the cardboard sign and the missing teeth owns this corner at Dulaney Valley Road and Fairmount Avenue. It’s his beat. While I make evening plans with my husband, a car turns right. As it heads in the opposite direction, I hear an occupant yell out the window a comment that ends with, “you fucking slob.” I think it was, “Outta here, you fucking slob” or “Go home, you fucking slob.”

The man, who holds a container I have not looked at, turns toward the sound. I am crying. “...So sad,” I sob to my husband. “Have to go,” I say, and flip the phone closed.

Next to me, the driver of a car that has been sitting at the light for just as long as mine hands the man some money. In my rear view mirror, I see two young women behind me, driver and shotgun passenger, rooting in their purses. All around me, people root in their purses and pockets and change compartments. Windows are sliding down. The shotgun girl gets out and crosses two lanes of traffic to hand this man her money.

I have been rooting, too, but come up empty: a pair of pearl earrings that belong to my mother, two pennies and a dime, a paper clip, a tube of tooth pain gel. I am frantic for what I can give him and ashamed, even embarrassed, when the light changes, and I still have nothing. I don’t even turn off the air conditioner.

I turn left and head home with the start of this semester’s sixty-five-hundred-dollar education under my belt. I pass Super Fresh and Target, a bagel place, Burger King. I drive through a mostly poor neighborhood, past a new white Lexus with temporary tags. I pass a university, Rite Aid, a liquor store.

Near the light by my street, a house-shaped bird feeder with a green roof swings, seedless. A dozen wrens and starlings land there, find it empty, cluck some brief disappointment, and move on.

I move on, too.